Cleopatria: Stacy Schiff

Introduction

Cleopatra, the most famous woman in the ancient world, got lurid coverage Angelina Jolie might find familiar — which should be helpful as Jolie prepares for her possible role in the big-budget movie based on Stacy Schiff's superb new biography, "Cleopatra: A Life." Indeed, as Schiff retells it, Cleopatra's story serves as a cautionary case study in the perils of celebrity. “Mostly,” Schiff says of “Cleopatra: A Life,” “I have restored context.” The claim stops sounding humble when we understand what it entails. Although it's not Schiff's purpose to present us with a feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to “restore” Cleopatra — to see her at all — one must strip away an “encrusted myth” created by those for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Lucan, Appian, Josephus, Dio, Suetonius, Plutarch — the poets, historians and biographers who initially depicted Cleopatra were mostly Roman and all male, writing, for the most part, a century or more after her death with the intent to portray her reign as little more than a sustained striptease (Charveau, 65).

Discussion and Analysis

And although Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the known world and Egypt an ancient pioneer of gender equality, the country had “no fine historian” to counter the agendas of those for whom “impugning independent-minded women was a subspecialty.” As Schiff observes, Cleopatra may boast “one of the busiest afterlives in history,” including incarnations as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor,” but the single piece of documentary evidence that might be traced to her own hand is “perhaps and at most, one written word” (translated as “Let it be done,” with which she or her scribe signed off on a decree). The woman left no primary sources (Lindsay, 123).

Born in 69 B.C., Cleopatra ascended the throne of Egypt at 18. As childhood was not a subject of great interest to the ancients, Schiff explains, “players tended to emerge fully formed” into the public consciousness, their recorded lives beginning when they first influenced history. To distract the present-day reader from the absence of her subject's early years, Schiff neatly draws our attention to a different, albeit geographic, femme fatale — Alexandria. Balanced on the sparkling Mediterranean coast, with a parade-ready colonnade running the length of the city and mechanical marvels like hydraulic lifts, coin-operated machines and statues with flickering eyes, Egypt's capital made Rome look like the “provincial backwater” it was. Schiff's rendering of the city is so juicy and cinematic it leaves one with the sense of having visited a hopped-up ancient Las Vegas, with a busy harbor and a really good library.

When Cleopatra came to power it was, in accordance with her father's will, as co-ruler with her 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy, to whom she was wed. Probably her parents were also full siblings. The Egyptian practice of incest among royals was adopted by her Macedonian ...