The Woman Who Had the World Enthralled
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CLEOPATRA
A Life
By Stacy Schiff
Illustrated. 368 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $29.99.
From the start Cleopatra’s 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, Cleopatra’s 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 country’s 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 sexuality” and unlawful love.
In “Cleopatra: A Life,” Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor.
In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world.
Though this volume obviously retraces some familiar ground — covered in earlier books like Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s “Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions” — Ms. Schiff deftly sifts legend from fact, reminding the reader that the first drafts of Cleopatra’s life were written by followers of her enemy Octavian (who vanquished her and Antony, and went on to become Caesar Augustus) and that the great poets of Latin literature were “happy to expound on her shame.”
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.”
Because of the gaps and contradictory testimony in the historical record, portions of Ms. Schiff’s narrative are necessarily based on guesses and hypotheses. But Ms. Schiff seems to have inhaled everything there is to know about Cleopatra and her times, and she uses her authoritative knowledge of the era — and her instinctive understanding of her central players — to assess shrewdly probable and possible motives and outcomes.
As she did in “Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Ms. Schiff also demonstrates a magician’s ability to conjure the worlds her subject inhabited with fluent sleight of hand. In this case she waves onto the stage Cleopatra’s Alexandria in all its splendor and beauty: its gleaming marble edifices, the oversize sphinxes and falcons that lined the paths to the city’s Greek temples, the Doric tombs decorated with crocodile gods in Roman dress. She enables the reader to see Cleopatra’s court — her elaborate retinue of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers and pearl sorters — and to picture her fleet of royal barges, equipped with gyms, libraries, shrines to Dionysus and Aphrodite, gardens, grottos, lecture halls, spiral staircases, copper baths, stables and aquariums.
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 Cleopatra’s 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 Cleopatra’s 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 Egypt’s sophisticated locks and dikes.
As for Antony, Ms. Schiff writes, he had “immediate, practical needs” — Egypt’s wealth could help underwrite his military ambitions — that dovetailed with Cleopatra’s “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 people’s wives.’ ”
Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra’s 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 Antony’s painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra’s 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.”
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CLEOPATRA
A Life
By Stacy Schiff
Illustrated. 368 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $29.99.
From the start Cleopatra’s 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, Cleopatra’s 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 country’s 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 sexuality” and unlawful love.
In “Cleopatra: A Life,” Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor.
In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world.
Though this volume obviously retraces some familiar ground — covered in earlier books like Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s “Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions” — Ms. Schiff deftly sifts legend from fact, reminding the reader that the first drafts of Cleopatra’s life were written by followers of her enemy Octavian (who vanquished her and Antony, and went on to become Caesar Augustus) and that the great poets of Latin literature were “happy to expound on her shame.”
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.”
Because of the gaps and contradictory testimony in the historical record, portions of Ms. Schiff’s narrative are necessarily based on guesses and hypotheses. But Ms. Schiff seems to have inhaled everything there is to know about Cleopatra and her times, and she uses her authoritative knowledge of the era — and her instinctive understanding of her central players — to assess shrewdly probable and possible motives and outcomes.
As she did in “Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Ms. Schiff also demonstrates a magician’s ability to conjure the worlds her subject inhabited with fluent sleight of hand. In this case she waves onto the stage Cleopatra’s Alexandria in all its splendor and beauty: its gleaming marble edifices, the oversize sphinxes and falcons that lined the paths to the city’s Greek temples, the Doric tombs decorated with crocodile gods in Roman dress. She enables the reader to see Cleopatra’s court — her elaborate retinue of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers and pearl sorters — and to picture her fleet of royal barges, equipped with gyms, libraries, shrines to Dionysus and Aphrodite, gardens, grottos, lecture halls, spiral staircases, copper baths, stables and aquariums.
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 Cleopatra’s 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 Cleopatra’s 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 Egypt’s sophisticated locks and dikes.
As for Antony, Ms. Schiff writes, he had “immediate, practical needs” — Egypt’s wealth could help underwrite his military ambitions — that dovetailed with Cleopatra’s “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 people’s wives.’ ”
Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra’s 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 Antony’s painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra’s 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.”
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