Many books are dedicated to Cleopatra. This one, written by the outstanding Polish historian Alexander Kravchuk, is one of the best. On the one hand, it contains everything that is known about the last Egyptian queen from ancient sources, and on the other hand, it gives a broad historical background, without which it is difficult to understand the events that unfolded in the I century BC and ended with the death of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Cleopatra is depicted as an outstanding woman: smart, brave, strong-willed and ready for any action for the sake of power, dreaming of nothing less than becoming the mistress of the East. There is no answer to the question whether she loved Caesar, and then Mark Antony, in a purely feminine way, but it is clear that Cleopatra saw in her relationship with them a means to bring her closer to the desired goal. The book is dominated by a strictly scientific approach, and yet it sometimes looks like an adventure novel — the historian and the writer in the author seem to compete with each other, and the reader wins at the same time.