Cleopatra, a Life

 Cleopatra, a Life

Stacy Schiff

Little, Brown, 2010 

Stacy Schiff’s thoroughly documented biography of Egypt’s best-known queen throws open a window on a time and place that is mysterious and exotic; Egypt in the four decades BCE.  

Schiff is, if not outright partisan toward her subject, a voice for fairness and skepticism.  Early on she points out that very few of Cleopatra’s own words remain in the historical record and that from the writers of the day (loyal to Rome) to Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw, it’s been men putting words in her mouth. Schiff looks past the smear jobs and uses records of the time to uncover a smart ruler, an able queen and a strategist capable, had things gone differently, of ruling an empire. 

My reading about Cleopatra before this had always been about Cleopatra in the context of Rome.  Schiff contextualizes her in her own country, her own home.  She shows us Cleopatra as part of the line of Ptolemy; a line of Egyptian rules who weren’t Egyptian but Greek; a family who claimed to be related to Alexander the Great (they weren’t); a family that schemed and intrigued with the best of them.  By the time she was twenty-two, when she met Caesar, Cleopatra had seen one sister attempt a royal coup and be executed for it, was married to her nine-year-brother and was on the losing end of a civil war prosecuted by that brother’s retainers. She was about to win Caesar to her side, and about to win that war and be crowned queen. 

Schiff is scrupulous about writing what is known and correctly labeling speculation, and she speculates very little.  Despite that, the book reads almost like a novel, so vivid is the depiction of palace life, of a religious pageant or a diplomatic dinner in Tarsus.  

Schiff admires but does not sugar-coat her subject, or attribute 21^st century morals or sensibilities to her.  Cleopatra, she says, murdered her younger brother by poison.  She points out that killing off rival siblings was a family tradition.  The alternative was to leave a rival who would act as a lightning rod for any disaffected military or political group. Later in the book we meet a charming young client king of Rome, an ally turned enemy of Cleopatra’s, named Herod.  Herod manages to execute or outright murder everyone in his family who offends him, and sooner or later, everyone offends him. For her time Cleopatra was less an evil, murderous schemer than a strategic and realistic ruler. 

 Similarly, Schiff acknowledges that Cleopatra’s problems in Rome came not only from its institutional misogyny but from her own mishandling of key political players, for example, Cicero, who she offended, apparently, by not delivering a book she had promised.  Schiff does not think highly of Cicero at all, but she is willing to give Cleopatra part of the blame. 

The last third of the book focuses, understandably, less on the queen and more on the rivalry between Mark Antony and Augustus Caesar (Octavian).  Spindly, sickly, smart and manipulative, Octavian managed to get the better of Antony at almost every turn.  In a way, this is a book about three larger than life people, Cleopatra, Caesar and Antony, and one fully-life-sized person who outlasted—and bested—all of them. 

The book not only puts Cleopatra in a valuable historical context, it sheds light on the social mores and politics of the time and place.  When the book opens, with Cleopatra’s daring and desperate attempt to reach Caesar rolled up in a cloth bag, the country-folk of Egypt completely support her–and the elites in the city of Alexandria do not. Alexandrians have no trouble taking to the streets and rioting when they are unhappy.  Schiff talks about the money of the time and how Cleopatra protects her treasury and combats inflation by, for the first time ever, casting coins where the mark on the coin, not its weight, determine its value. The Egyptian government was rigidly, inescapably bureaucratic, and riddled with corruption.  At this time Rome had almost no bureaucracy–and was riddled with corruption.  Make of that what you will. 

Schiff has made a solid work of scholarship interesting and readable.  The book was a guilty pleasure—I was learning something, and it was almost too much fun.