Book Review

Title: Cleopatra: A Life

Author: Stacy Schiff
Year: Published in 2010
Setting: Ancient Egypt
Main Characters:
Cleopatra: The last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.
Mark Anthony: A Roman politician and general. As a military commander and
administrator, he was an important supporter and loyal friend of his mother's cousin Julius
Caesar.
Julius Caesar: A Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin
prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the
Roman Empire.
Octavian: (Gaius Julius Caesar, later called Augustus), adoptive son of Julius Caesar
Plot/Summary:
From the start Cleopatras story was larger than life: epic in scale, mythic in symbolism
and operatically over the top in its grandeur and its spectacle. As Stacy Schiff describes it in a
captivating new biography, Cleopatras meeting with Julius Caesar was a singular, shuddering
moment, when two civilizations, passing in different directions, unexpectedly and
momentously touched.
Cleopatra was born a goddess, became a queen at 18 and at the height of her power, Ms. Schiff
writes, she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of
any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands.
Having inherited a kingdom in decline, Cleopatra would go on to lose it, regain it, nearly lose it
again, amass an empire and then lose it all.
She was a resourceful leader: disciplined, self-assured and shrewd in her management of her
countrys affairs; a sovereign who knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a
currency, alleviate a famine.
She would go down in history, however, not as the sole female of the ancient world to rule
alone and to play a role in Western affairs, Ms. Schiff writes, but as the consort of Caesar and
later Mark Antony: a woman depicted by historians and poets as a wanton temptress
symbolizing insatiable sex
Reaction:
Instead of the stereotypes of the whore queen, Ms. Schiff depicts a fiery wisp of a girl who grows up to
become an enterprising politician: not so much a great beauty as a charismatic and capable woman,

smart, saucy, funny and highly competent, a ruler seen by many of her subjects as a beneficent
guardian with good intentions and a commitment to justice.

In Cleopatra, Ms. Schiff also creates a portrait of an incestuous and lethal family in which sibling
marriage and the murders of parents, children, spouses and brothers and sisters were common practice
a portrait as bloody and harrowing as anything in Titus Andronicus. And by drawing on scholarship
about social and political practices of the day, she provides us with a keen understanding of the relative
freedom and power enjoyed by women in Cleopatras day, as well as the sort of enlightened schooling the
queen-to-be would have received as a girl. Like Caesar, we learn, she would have had a traditional Greek
education that included Herodotus and Thucydides, instruction in the art of speech-making and perhaps
nine languages too.
In fact, Cleopatra and Caesar had not only complementary political agendas, Ms. Schiff observes, but
also closely matched personalities: both were congenial, charismatic, quick-tongued people with an
intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them
apart from their peers. Both were natural performers. Both had daringly crossed lines in their bids for
power; both had let the dice fly.
Both, she continues, had as great a capacity for work as for play and rarely distinguished between the
two.
Caesar was so impressed with Cleopatras kingdom that on returning to Rome he would establish a
series of reforms, inspired partly by what he had observed in Egypt: most notably, laying the foundation
for a public library, commissioning an official census and planning a series of engineering innovations
based on Egypts sophisticated locks and dikes.
As for Antony, Ms. Schiff writes, he had immediate, practical needs Egypts wealth could help
underwrite his military ambitions that dovetailed with Cleopatras long-range imperial ambitions and
her thirst for territory. Unlike most Romans, Antony had longtime experience with quick-thinking,
capable women (including his mother and his wife), while Cleopatra shared his taste for theater and the
ability to indulge it.
Whether or not anyone lost his or her head to the other, Ms. Schiff writes, it is difficult to believe sex
failed to figure in the picture early on. Antony and Cleopatra were at the height of their power, reveling
amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before
groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia. And while he was unlikely to have been a slave to his
love for Cleopatra, as various chroniclers assert, the truth was that wherever Mark Antony went, sexual
charm inevitably followed. His tunic tucked high on his rolling hips, he had slept his way across Asia at
least once: Plutarch assigns him an ill name for familiarity with other peoples wives.
Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatras lavish courting of Antony (including
one dinner in which there was a knee-deep expanse of roses and some of the attendees received not gift
baskets but furniture and horses decked out in silver-plated trappings) and his even more extravagant
offerings to her (including the library of Pergamum and a host of territories that gave her dominion over
Cyprus, portions of Crete and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast). For that matter, Ms.
Schiff even manages to make us see afresh famous scenes like Antonys painful death after his defeat at
the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatras subsequent suicide.

Her death an honorable death, a dignified death, an exemplary death, over which she presided
herself, proud and unbroken to the end even won over her detractors, Ms. Schiff observes: by the
Roman definition she had at last done something right; finally it was to her credit that she had defied the
expectations of her sex.