In a case in the Altes Museum in Berlin, ten painted wooden panels are arranged across two shelves: five on the upper row, five below. They show men, women, and children. The youngest is perhaps eight or nine years old. The oldest appears to be in his fifties, though age is difficult to assess with confidence from encaustic wax portraits of the first through third centuries AD. What is not difficult to assess is the gaze. Every one of these faces looks directly out of the panel, directly at whoever is standing in front of the case, with the same frontal directness. They were painted to look at you. Eighteen centuries later they still do, and the effect has not diminished.

Alexandria was not a Roman city. It was a Greek city under Roman administration, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and designed from its inception as a world capital — a city that would connect the Mediterranean world to Egypt and, through Egypt, to the trade routes of the East. By the time Rome absorbed it as part of Egypt following Cleopatra’s death in 30 BC, Alexandria was already three centuries old, the second-largest city in the Mediterranean after Rome itself, and possessed of institutions — the Library, the Museum, the great lighthouse — that Rome had nothing to rival. The Romans did not conquer Alexandria so much as inherit it, and the inheritance was complicated.

Cleopatra VII Philopator was the most politically capable ruler the Ptolemaic dynasty produced, and she failed anyway. This is not a contradiction. She operated in a political environment — the Roman civil wars of the late first century BC — where even the most capable maneuvering could not fully compensate for the structural weakness of a client kingdom dependent on whichever Roman faction happened to be ascendant. She made the best choices available to her at each decision point. The choices were not enough. Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, the year of her death.