Caesar and Cleopatra Paperback - 1950

From the book:An October night on the Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of the XXXIII Dynasty, in the year 706 by Roman computation, afterwards reckoned by Christian computation as 48 B.C. A great radiance of silver fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising in the east. The stars and the cloudless sky are our own contemporaries, nineteen and a half centuries younger than we know them; but you would not guess that from their appearance. Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace, and soldiers. The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of whitened mud, is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in the courtyard are more highly civilized than modern English officers: for example, they do not dig up the corpses of their dead enemies and mutilate them, as we dug up Cromwell and the Mahdi. They are in two groups: one intent on the gambling of their captain Belzanor, a warrior of fifty, who, with his spear on the ground beside his knee, is stooping to throw dice with a sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other gathered about a guardsman who has just finished telling a naughty story (still current in English barracks) at which they are laughing uproariously. They are about a dozen in number, all highly aristocratic young Egyptian guardsmen, handsomely equipped with weapons and armor, very unEnglish in point of not being ashamed of and uncomfortable in their profess-sional dress; on the contrary, rather ostentatiously and arrogantly warlike, as valuing themselves on their military caste.

Details

• Title Caesar and Cleopatra
• Author George Bernard Shaw
• Binding Paperback
• Edition Reprint
• Pages 144
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Penguin Group, New York, New York, U.S.A.
• Date June 30, 1950
• ISBN 9780140450361 / 014045036X
• Weight 0.26 lbs (0.12 kg)
• Dimensions 7.74 x 5.18 x 0.4 in (19.66 x 13.16 x 1.02 cm)
• Dewey Decimal Code 822.912