For your belletristic delectation, another in a series of excerpts.→[More:]
This one's from Peter Green's The Hellenistic Age, a contentious little volume about a period that most resembles our own, 336-30 BCE.

"The fifty years (80-30 BCE) that saw Rome's final political takeover of the Hellenistic world also witnessed the convulsive death throes of the Roman Republic and its replacement by a professedly benevolent imperial autocrat, Caesar's adopted heir, Octavian, who took the title of Augustus. In this, as in so much else, the new ruler echoed the political lessons of the post-Alexandrian world that now formed part of his empire. Augustus had also learned from his predecessors' omissions. Alexander's indifference to organizing the empire he had won astonished him: that was not a mistake he ever made himself. What emerged, paradoxically, from the protracted civil wars in which Octavian won the final victory was a larger, better-run, and ultimately less exploitative Hellenistic-style kingdom. Its center was on the Tiber rather than the Nile, and that kept Rome's traditionalists happy; but otherwise there was little about the pax Augusta -- least of all the bread and circuses -- that would have surprised Ptolemy Philadelphus or Alexander the Great.

"The internal upheavals and overseas involvements of Rome during this fraught half-century inevitably affected the Greek world. Dictator from 81 (after a bloody civil war and even bloodier proscriptions), and in possession of Ptolemy X's will bequeathing his kingdom to Rome, Sulla added to the confusion in Alexandria by playing the kingmaker. On Lathyros' death in 81/0, he sent out Ptolemy X's son as the successor. The youth (Ptolemy XI) was required to marry Lathyros' daughter Cleopatra Berenice, his stepmother or, possibly, his mother. After the honeymoon, he murdered her and was duly lynched by the Alexandrian mob. Sulla (in this typically Roman) took no further steps to implement the will but washed his hands of the whole business. The succession went to an illegitimate son of Lathyros, a debauchee and playboy known variously as the Bastard or the Piper (only modern historians label him Ptolemy XII), whose chief claim to fame was begetting, in 69, on his sister-wife, Cleopatra V Tryphaena, a daughter who grew up to be the most famous of all the Cleopatras."