CLEOPATRA AND THE BOOKMAKER’S VEW OF HISTORY.

CLEOPATRA AND THE BOOKMAKER’S VIEW OF HISTORY. Nonfiction has the advantage over fiction that it doesn’t have to be plausible. In fact, we tend to accept rare events as unremarkable because we know they did happen. That’s why looking at the probability of events before they happened is enlightening. From a bookmaker’s point of view, a woman—Cleopatra—having successive extended love affairs with the most powerful man in the world and after that with another man who was one of the two most powerful men in the world must have been considered a real long shot. Did it ever happen again? Perhaps Eleanor of Aquitaine?