Cleopatra: A Life

Summary (from the publisher): The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.

 

Review: In this biography, Schiff attempts to write the life story of one of the most famous women to have ever lived - Cleopatra. Born in 69 BC, nearly a generation before Christ was born, she ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. Yet despite the distance in time, she remains a legend after two years. At a time when female rulers were rare, Cleopatra commanded prestige, was recognized for her grasp of military affairs, was known to speak multiple languages and to be a great supporter of the arts, was wealthier than anyone else in the Mediterranean, and was unafraid of doing what must be done to support her kingdom - be it bearing the children of married Roman men or murdering her own siblings.

 

At the age of 18, Cleopatra and her ten year old brother assumed the throne of Egypt after her father's death.  Although Macedonian Greek rather than Egyptian, her family had called themselves pharaohs for ten generations. Yet Cleopatra inherited a "kingdom in decline" (2). After being banished by the brother she attempted to brush to the side, she returned to the throne with the help of her Roman ally Caesar. This return to the palace, hidden within a sack, was her first victory and the first of the legendary stories surrounding her. Disregarding her marriage to her brother and Caesar's wife back home, she promptly produced a son with Caesar, whom she called Caesarian.  Cleopatra was shrewd enough to recognize that maintaining an alliance with Rome was in her best interest. Cleopatra maintained the relationship with Caesar until his death, later aligning herself with Mark Antony and bearing him three children. Their partnership again united Egypt and Rome, until they were outwitted by Octavian, Caesar's heir. In an exit just as dramatic as her entrance into the world stage, Mark Antony killed himself, followed a few days later by Cleopatra poisoning herself to death. While her son Caesarian was deemed too much a threat to Octavian's rule, her three younger children by Mark Antony were allowed to survive and were raised by Octavian's sister Octavia - who was also Mark Antony's widow. Although her death ended her family's reign, it also created a heroine who has inspired throughout the centuries.

 

Schiff does an excellent job of detailing Cleopatra's life as accurately as possible. However, considering the vast variation in the historical record in regards to this enigmatic woman, at times her narrative seemed too sharply confident. Only on the subject of Cleopatra's death does Schiff acknowledge counterarguments and a multitude of possible versions of events, while dismissing the long held belief that Cleopatra's suicide by asp bite as wildly improbable. Given how obscured by time and contrasting accounts her life is, I expected more discussion of contrasting accounts and multiple possibilities. Yet this is largely absent from the text.

 

Additionally, although Cleopatra's life itself was relatively easy to follow, the question of her family history was poorly detailed in this biography. Admittedly, the practice of incestuous marriages among her family created a complicated family history that more closely resembled a "shrub" than a family tree (21). For example, Cleopatra's parents were likely full siblings, which means she "had only one set of grandparents. That couple also happened to be uncle and niece" (21). However, I had little sense of the history of the kingdom that preceded Cleopatra's reign, even so far as her parents or grandparents' generations.

 

Schiff's writing was descriptive and colorful and at times long winded: "Until well into the evening, when the vermilion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. Altogether it was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world: superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade" (68). At times, I felt bogged down in the flowery language, which detracted from Cleopatra's story.

 

Yet in sum, I found Cleopatra's biography infinitely interesting and along the same lines as The Woman Who Would be King by Kara Cooney. Although a minor part of her tale, I particularly enjoyed the description of the vast, well organized bureaucracy over which Cleopatra had absolute power, as well as the description of the wealth and lavish lifestyle she enjoyed as head of her kingdom. Although a brilliant strategist always planning her next move, in her death Cleopatra transitioned "from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would the best to fix upon" (295). She has been labeled a seducer of men, a wanton woman, a deviant. Yet she merely entered into partnerships that every man in power at the time enjoyed. In return for sleeping with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony "she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty" (299). By entering into these partnerships by her own volition, she was seen as an unnatural woman and a cautionary tale. Although time and legend will forever shroud much of the woman behind the myth in secrecy, this historical look at Cleopatra's life story was a fascinating inside look at the woman behind the name.

 

Stars: 4