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Overview
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, garnets, 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 prot g . 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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780316001922
- ISBN-10: 0316001929
- Publisher: Little Brown and Company
- Publish Date: November 2010
- Dimensions: 9.49 x 6.31 x 1.24 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.42 pounds
- Page Count: 384
BookPage® Reviews
Cleopatra, from a different point of view
Cleopatra was queen of a large, rich, highly sophisticated country for more than 20 years, yet almost everything we know about her comes from a legend created by her most deadly enemy, the Roman emperor Augustus.
As author Stacy Schiff points out, it’s as if our only information about Napoleon came from 19th-century British historians: “She effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room.” Schiff, the much praised biographer of Vera Nabokov and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, adeptly evens the score in Cleopatra: A Life by exploring the queen’s Egyptian context and reading the Roman sources with a keen eye for Augustan propaganda.
Schiff’s Cleopatra is not the sexually voracious, treacherous poisoner who seduced Julius Caesar and destroyed Mark Antony. Rather, she is an intelligent, able ruler who did nothing that male kings didn’t do routinely. She tried to protect her own and her country’s interests in the face of Roman aggression. If Antony had been more clever than Augustus, her children with Caesar and Antony would have ruled the East.
Did she seduce Caesar and Antony? Both men were hardened lifelong womanizers. Was Antony too besotted with her to make sound decisions? It seems unlikely; he wrote a letter to Augustus at the height of his alliance with Cleopatra referring to her with ugly vulgarisms. His mistakes were his own.
Schiff persuades us that the queen’s liaisons with both men were mutually beneficial. She got expanded territory, protected by Roman legions, while her lovers got her money. And for Caesar, Antony and Augustus, it was all about Egypt’s wealth, not the color of Cleopatra’s eyes.
Certainly, even a Cleopatra seen with fairness was no George Washington, and Schiff doesn’t ignore her ruthlessness. Cleopatra lived up to her family tradition by having her siblings killed. She also executed her political opponents—and so did Antony and Augustus.
Schiff brings alive not only the personalities but the ambience of the gilded Hellenistic Middle East and still-crude Rome. Her writing beautifully evokes Cleopatra’s stupendous capital Alexandria, “a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons.” Male Roman writers may have hated Cleopatra because she wasn’t the virtuous Roman matron of their own myths, but she was consistently popular with the cultured Alexandrians.
As Schiff concludes, Cleopatra did many things right, but got the main thing wrong: She backed the less talented Roman politician. In the end, Augustus used her captured treasure to make Rome more like Alexandria.
