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Cleopatra: A Life Hardcover – Illustrated, Nov. 1 2010

by Stacy Schiff (Author)

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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 protégé. 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.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown and Company
Publication date

Nov. 1 2010
Dimensions

16.51 x 3.18 x 24.13 cm
ISBN-10

0316001929
ISBN-13

978-0316001922
Lexile measure

1070L
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Product description

Review

"Stacy Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist."―Wall Street Journal

"A masterpiece."―Daily Beast

About the Author

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and The Witches: Salem, 1692.

Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government, she lives in New York City.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; Illustrated edition (Nov. 1 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316001929
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316001922
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 644 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.18 x 24.13 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #128,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #72 in History of Ancient Egypt
- #75 in Ancient Egyptian History (Books)
- #134 in History of Egyptian

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4.2 1,991 ratings

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Stacy Schiff

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A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Stacy Schiff is the author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Her previous book, Cleopatra: A Life, appeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. Cleopatra was translated into 30 languages. Schiff’s other work includes Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. Schiff is a Guggenheim and NEH Fellow and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She received the 2019 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

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Anastasia Prozorova

Mysterious & Sad

Reviewed in Canada on March 1, 2011

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I always wanted to believe that there was something more to Cleopatra than a mysterious personality that made men want to buy a night with her at the price of their lives. Stacy Schiff's book helps to see this woman in a completely different light. While still for the most part an interpretation, her book draws a portrait of Cleopatra that you've never seen before. Cleopatra's origin, her education, financial situation as well as the people she met shed light on why it was and still is so difficult to think of her as an important political figure rather than a mysterious woman...
Even if one comes to grasp the complexity of her character, the grandeur of her inventiveness and ambition, there still remains an unexplained fact: why did her projects end up so sad and tragic? Why did the whole world that she cherished so carefully turned its back on her at the end of her life? And how could she got outplayed by such a mediocre, compared to her, personality as Octavian? And what exactly, after his long reign of Rome, made Octavian come to consider Cleopatra's position, she so proudly occupied, as "dreadful" (p. 297)? It is hard or nearly impossible to understand what Cleopatra might have felt when she came to realize "she was to become the woman 'who destroyed the Egyptian monarchy'" (p. 302)...
While it's sad to be unable to understand what really happened and what drove her to commit suicide, I also want to believe that she was not only intelligent and calculating strategist. I don't think the tears she might have shed over the bodies of her children' s fathers were in anyway dramatic, in line with the tradition of Greek tragedies. I want to believe she was both the powerful queen and a vulnerable woman...
But then, if Aesop's lions were given an opportunity to believe in something (p. 298), we'd have a completely different review in here :))

23 people found this helpful

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Frances Ana

Hard to read

Reviewed in Canada on January 5, 2021

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I was so excited about this book, but had to leave it half way due to very difficult language. English is my second language but I have known it since I was 7, I have three university degrees in English, including a law degree. So I speak close to a native speaker, and have no problem drafting complicated documents. Still, this book hurt my brain and I left it. Maybe in 10 years I have improved more and can actually read it.

3 people found this helpful

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liesl

Fascinating account of Cleopatra's life

Reviewed in Canada on January 15, 2022

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Stacy Schiff dispels the myths surrounding this most intriguing woman, the last to occupy the throne of Egypt. It is well written and it takes a critical look at what the authors of Antiquity wrote about her and at the role of modern media in perpetuating those myths.
A very worthwhile reading to those who love history.

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Lisa Adams

A Fabulous Read for Those Interested in Ancient Mediterranean History

Reviewed in Canada on June 9, 2015

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Stacy Schiff mines ancient sources to find the real Cleopatra. Forget what you've heard about her being a seductress ruled by her own desires. Cleopatra was an highly intelligent, resourceful woman who received the finest education available in her day.

She lost an empire, regained it, almost lost it again, and ultimately failed to stop the encroachment of Rome. Schiff sifts through what ancient historians - all of them from enemy states - had to say about her, and accounts of events to demonstrate that Cleopatra made well reasoned decisions, and ruled successfully for a long time.

I quite enjoyed the style of the book as well. It comes across as a narrative instead of a scholarly review. For those who want to know more, there is an extensive section of notes as well.

5 people found this helpful

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David

Schiff has done her homework it seems and I learned some very cool things from Cleopatra's time

Reviewed in Canada on August 11, 2016

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I thought this was well written. Schiff has done her homework it seems and I learned some very cool things from Cleopatra's time. I actually found the book in the second-hand book bin at the local Co-op but ended up buying it after reading it. Fascinaing stuff!

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Maja Sabine

Cleopatra..,all you need to know!

Reviewed in Canada on July 30, 2021

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The book was very thorough, very easy to read and lived up to the marketing!

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Vlad Thelad

The woman that really was

Reviewed in Canada on December 5, 2011

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Disentangling fact from fiction is rarely an easy task, let alone if you are dealing with history. Yet, therein resides Stacy Schiff's greatest achievement in tackling the life of one of the most fictionalized characters of all times. From Plutarch to Shakespeare and Elizabeth Taylor contributions to the myth of Cleopatra have been overly abundant. Schiff's navigates through all the sources rescuing the woman that really was, one that fully justifies our fascination with her on her own merits. On top of the gift that this revelation is in itself, Schiff writes wonderfully. Enjoy.

2 people found this helpful

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Linda

Brilliant & Beautiful

Reviewed in Canada on March 2, 2020

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I enjoyed the biography immensely. There was a great deal about Cleopatra that I didn't know. Schiff is a clever writer who manages to bring Cleopatra to life.

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T. Graczewski

The Great Queen in Focus

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2018

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The Cleopatra most of us know is a fictional creation. The story we know comes mainly from the early first century Roman writers Plutarch and Dio. According to author Stacy Schiff, that’s like reading a history of twentieth-century America written by Chairman Mao. In short, our image of Cleopatra is “the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.” Schiff’s primary point is that “If the name is indelible, the image is blurry.”

Her real story, as told by Schiff, is every bit as fascinating as that told by Shakespeare. Cleopatra descended “from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens,” Schiff writes and would prove to be a true daughter of her ancestors. Her name, which translates to “Glory of her Fatherland,” is fitting. Born in 69 BC, the second of three daughters in a family known for eagerly liquidating siblings, she would prove to be both the strongest and shrewdest of the brood. She may not have been as traditionally beautiful as legend would have it, but she was certainly sagacious, sophisticated, and well-educated, speaking as many as seven languages fluently, including native Egyptian, the only Ptolemaic monarch to learn the local dialect.

From the Roman point of view, Egypt was a tricky subject. The richest, most agriculturally productive region in the ancient world, Egypt was, according to the classicist Ronald Syme, ”a loss if destroyed, a risk to annex, a problem to govern.” Julius Caesar arrived on Egyptian shores in 48 BC in hot pursuit of Pompey, his chief rival in the Roman Civil War, who had just been slain at Pelusium by Ptolemy XIII, a deed for which Dante would place the Egyptian king in the ninth circle of hell next to Cain and Judas. Like others who came before and after him, Caesar was entranced by the grandeur of Alexandria, “the Paris of the ancient world,” in Schiff’s romantic language, the most cultured, the most beautiful, the most refined city ever known to man. Caesar found the young Cleopatra equally intoxicating. He would make her queen – and pregnant.

Caesar brought Cleopatra back from Alexandria to Rome, which Schiff likens to “sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth century Philadelphia.” He also brought back with him other marvelous creations of Egypt, such as the 12-month calendar, the 24-hour day, and a large public library. “It was difficult for anyone to come into contact with Ptolemaic Egypt and not contract a case of extravagance.” Indeed, one might argue, as Schiff does, that “Cleopatra properly qualifies as the founder of the Roman Empire,” because, as Lucan wrote a century after Caesar’s death, “she aroused his greed.”

Cleopatra was a 26-year-old mother of Caesar’s only male child, Caesarian, living comfortably at Caesar’s villa outside of Rome when he was assassinated on the Ides of March. She was blindsided by events and would never again set foot in Rome. She would eventually fall for Mark Antony, Caesar’s most trusted lieutenant, a man “given to good living, great parties, bad women,” a brilliant cavalry officer who possessed all of Caesar’s charm but none of his self-control. Cleopatra needed Mark Antony. Octavian, the inheritor of the mantle of Caesar, was “a walking, plotting insult to her son,” Caesarian. Mark Antony’s obsession with conquering Parthia proved to be a blessing for her as only the wealth of Egypt could underwrite such an expensive campaign.

Cleopatra and Mark Antony met at Tarsus in 41 BC. Her effect on the Roman general was “immediate and electrifying,” according to Schiff. The queen engaged in “a take-no-prisoners school of seduction.” The author claims that Tarsus was a rare instance when the life and legend of Cleopatra completely overlap. She brought Mark Antony back to Alexandra where he “swallowed the whole Greek culture in one gulp.” The “barrel-chested, thick-thighed Roman” fell in love with Alexandria, “a city of raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air.” Cleopatra bore him twins in 39 BC, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene; but more importantly for the stability of the Mediterranean world, Mark Antony married Octavian’s sister, a marriage alliance not unlike Pompey’s to Caesar’s daughter, Julia, in 59 BC, a union that offered a half-decade respite to internecine strife in Rome.

Mark Antony’s long-awaited Parthian campaign was a failure; perhaps not on the scale of the disaster that befell Crassus in 53 BC, but bad enough that he lost 24,000 men (a full third of his army) and recorded no noteworthy victories in 18 modest battles. Meanwhile, Octavian had been piling up successes (e.g. he had crushed Sextus Pompey and kicked fellow triumvir Lepidus to the curb). Schiff writes that Antony was despondent, nearly suicidal. It was Cleopatra’s “blue ribbon rendition of the lovesick female” that rallied him. In the so-called “Donations of Alexandria” in 34 BC, Antony distributed the Roman Empire in the east to their children, who were part Roman and part Egyptian gods. The view from Rome, Schiff says, was that the Donations were “an empty gesture, a farcical overreaching by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes.”

In 32 BC Mark Antony divorced Octavia. The pretext for the final showdown had finally arrived. Antony was, in Octavian’s opinion, “irredeemably contaminated by the Oriental languor and the un-Roman luxuries of the East.” He relished the stories of how Antony fawned over Cleopatra like a eunuch, giving her foot rubs in public, among other embarrassing acts of servitude. With the (dubious) claim that Cleopatra was “poised to conquer [Rome] as she had conquered Antony,” the Senate declared war on Egypt in October 32 BC and then voted to deprive Antony of his consulship and relieve him of all Roman authority.

“The experience, the popularity, the numbers, were all on Antony’s side,” Schiff writes, “he was the skilled commander behind whom stood the most powerful dynasties of the East” and the vast riches of Egypt with its determined queen who could not co-exist with Octavian so long as her son, Caesarian, lived. Indeed, “Antony could not win a war without [Cleopatra]. Octavian could not wage one.” The culminating battle of Actium in early September 31 BC was as decisive as it was anticlimactic. Octavian had eroded Antony’s superior land force over the course of the summer by maintaining a close blockade. Cleopatra and Antony shamefully abandoned their army and fled to Egypt.

The two lovers were cornered. Antony’s army disintegrated. Whole legions defected, as did allied kings. The raucous “Inimitable Livers” of Alexandria, as Antony and Cleopatra once playfully called their retinue, changed their club name to “Companion’s to the Death.” Antony was 53-years-old, Cleopatra 38. Their end was so theatrically dramatic that Shakespeare hardly had to change a thing. When Cleopatra had her death falsely reported to Antony, he fell on his sword in inconsolable grief. He lived long enough to learn that the queen was actually still alive and breath his last breathe in her arms. Nine days later Cleopatra took her own life in turn, most likely by poison, Schiff says. “Cleopatra’s asp is the cherry tree of ancient history”: Schiff claims that there is no way a single snake could have killed the queen and her two faithful attendants, Iras and Charmion, so quickly and peacefully. “A fourth casualty of August 10, 30 BC may well have been the truth,” she writes. One thing was for certain: Cleopatra would never be the crown jewel in Octavian’s fabulous triumph parade back in Rome, where the enormity of the Egyptian riches quickly led to massive inflation and a tripling of interest rates.

Schiff wants us to appreciate Cleopatra for who she truly was – and for good reason. For far too long the great queen has been a caricature, completely misrepresented, unfairly maligned, and largely misinterpreted. “It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than her brains,” Schiff writes, “to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.” Clearly, Cleopatra was much more than a celebrated lover. Nevertheless, Schiff bemoans, “we will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty.” That she was “a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank.”

Like every other book by Stacy Schiff that I’ve read, this one comes highly recommended. It is that rare book that both layman and experts will find satisfying.

94 people found this helpful

Tracy

The “Real” Cleopatra

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2023

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Excellent historical research about Cleopatra and age in which she lived. Powerful insights into her relationships with Julius Caesar, Marc Antony & Octavian. Great information about the city of Alexandria and the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt. Stacy Schiff completely changed my perspective about Cleopatra. Highly recommended for those interested in the rise of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and all the political intrigue involved during that era.

Dinogirl7

Engaging and well-researched

Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2013

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This is a pretty solid introduction to the history of the period, well-researched and serious enough to appeal to any armchair historian, and lively enough to keep anyone with a passing interest in the ancient world engaged.

Schiff's point with this was that Cleopatra's myth totally obscured her reality, even in her own lifetime. There are a lot of interesting meditations on fame and power to be had there. Cleopatra died in the wake of a war with Rome, and yet we mainly know Cleopatra from contemporary Roman sources. A few people in other courts left written records of her time, but really her history was written by her enemies. That the old girl has still come off rather well is a testament to how extraordinary her reign really was.

I like a good popular history- Schiff's seems very admirable, but I didn't find her prose as lovely as some people apparently did. Still, she makes a solid effort to put a little color into her history; she paints a picture, something I appreciate. It's hard to get both academic rigor and good storytelling into an account. Two thousand years, and it's debatable that anyone has ever topped Cleopatra for either extravagance or power. Imagining her and Antony meeting in Tarsus, announcing herself as "Venus come to revel with Dionysus for the good of Asia", surrounding him and his men with an overabundance of luxury, in apartments bedecked with a king's ransom in flowers, you come to understand why Cleopatra was legend in her own time. That sort of detail and description really helps. Academic history seldom indulges such details, or at least rarely frames them so delectably. Popular history seldom touches on as many legitimate sources as Schiff cites, or points out distinctions between them so regularly.

Schiff is also a female historian telling a woman's story, yet mercifully she doesn't dwell too hard on that. We know Cleopatra from Roman writers, who were all dudes with a particular view of women and relationships, and so the expected sexual volleys were launched at a powerful foreign queen. Rome laid the foundation for the next twenty centuries of Western culture, so Cleopatra
understandably served as a reliable shorthand for every sort of debauchery in that time. And Schiff pretty much stops there with gender. Good for her. As a queen and product of Ptolemaic Egypt, Cleopatra had a very different view of her own gender than her detractors. Schiff does a smart thing; realizing that we can only view Cleopatra culturally and personally through multiple layers
of refraction, she just leaves Cleopatra the woman alone for the most part and focuses on Cleopatra in her role as queen and in her relationships to personal and political counterparts. If, like me, you don't care for histories with an overly obvious modern agenda, have no fear.

Schiff did choose to follow a particular narrative of the period. She gives us the broad spectrum of opinions on an event, but I did feel like a lot of the history that's really debatable is presented more or less as fact. We know very little about most of these events. I suppose I'm willing to make that trade-off, even as a historian, for a compelling story. That's something a lot of history people wouldn't say, but I've always thought of history as being closer to literature than science. This may be one reason why I didn't go for a PhD.

I am a little concerned, though, that Schiff's account seems so close to HBO's "Rome" Her book came out in 2011, so she would have been either thinking about it or working on it while the show was on in 2005 and 2007. The show is also very well researched in its depiction of Roman life, but takes quite a few liberties with the history. It's hard to say whether I just had HBO's "Rome" on the brain while reading the book, or if the book did seem to cleave suspiciously close to a similar version of events. Granted, there is nothing implausible about Schiff's account based on the sources we have; the actual personalities involved don't seem to warrant much exaggeration. But in honest truth we simply have very few accounts and little evidence of the events of these years. "Rome" and Schiff's "Cleopatra" are both aimed towards an erudite yet popular audience, so it's quite possible that their entertaining yet plausible versions of the story would have many elements in common. What makes for scrupulously documented history is not necessarily what makes for good reading or good television, but anyone partaking of either of either this book or the series will probably have figured that out already. The downside is that while Schiff may have set out to separate myth from truth, in the service of keeping people interested, she may have given us yet another myth. It's a modern myth, and more fair or at least better supported than most of what came before, but ultimately it might not be any more accurate than a hundred others. However, both "Rome" and "Cleopatra: A Life" are largely based the same period sources, so as far as I'm concerned you could do worse for either history or entertainment.

17 people found this helpful

T. M. Johnson

A Queen Upstaged by her own Country

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2011

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Stacy Schiff's recent biography of Egypt's greatest queen leaves her subject yet a woman of mystery, in part because the country Cleopatra VII ruled for two decades comes across as the more fascinating subject. This is merely an observation, not a criticism. I found Schiff's portrayal of 1st Century Egypt spellbinding. Its queen is overshadowed by the biographer's account of a country of Enlightenment, a center of learning (the great library of Alexandria, for example), home to the arts, and the natural sciences, a culture of antiquity in which the Sphinx was buried in desert sands a thousand years before Cleopatra's birth. There's the thriving, dynamic Alexandria: a modern city before the birth of Christ, with its broad, colonaded streets and magnificent lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, towering over her harbor. The structure of government under Ptolemaic rule made 1st Century Egypt the richest country of its time; its coffers bankrolled many an army and navy, funded a great many wars. Schiff states that Cleopatra herself was the twenty-second richest person in the history of humankind, with a personal worth in today's dollars of over 95 billion. (Remarkable how fast it adds up when slighlty over half a country's GNP flows directly into its ruler's treasury!)To govern such a land for twenty-two years required a stern hand and a strict daily regimen, one which Schiff compares to the goddess Isis, duties in which Cleopatra: "not only dispensed justice, commanded the army and navy, regulated the economy, negotiated with foreign powers, and presided over temples, but determined the prices of raw materials and supervised sowing schedules, the distribution of seed, the condition of Egypt's canals, the food supply." And all this while pleasing the men in her life and keeping them in check. A remarkable performance by a female twenty-something in a world dominated by ambitious, back-stabbing, power-seeking males.

Of course Cleopatra could not be the heroine/villain/seductress/ History's notorious "hussy" without her two accomplices, the Romans Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and Schiff tells their stories well. Both fathered Cleopatra's children: Caesar, her first child, Antony, twins, a boy and a girl, and a second son. Except being both Roman and sires of Cleopatra's children, these two prominent men in her life had little else in common. While Antony showed little interest in Egypt other than its queen, Julius Caesar, on the other hand, was quick to recognize that Egypt's superior culture, science, and government had much to offer his own country. But for the Ides of March who knows to what level he might have taken Rome using Egyptian technology!

Schiff portrays Mark Antony as a reveler who delighted in merrymaking, a man profligate in his habits, and a world-class womanizer. In her biography, Antony comes across as a burly contestant for a WWF match. And I delighted in her "beefcake" description of Cleopatra's second bedfellow. If Ms. Schiff's portrait of the man is correct, no wonder Cleopatra took such delight in her Mark Antony. Schiff describes Antony's "rolling hips," his being "barrel-chested and mighty-thighed." Of Antony's bust, the author states Antony's "...virile features confirmed his descent from Hercules." (Methinks Ms. Schiff protests too much herself!)

I do think Schiff stretches things in her effort to reveal Cleopatra's personality (perhaps it's the author's empathy at work here, but stating how a woman--and queen--two thousand years removed from Schiff's own time must have felt in given situations is a bit reaching....) But given all the mystery, myth and subjective interpretations of second and third hand information concerning history's most notorious queen, Schiff certainly has her own right to speculate; after all Plutarch and Shakespeare did, didn't they? In fact one of Schiff's salient points about Cleopatra is how all aspects of her life have made the woman "larger than life" over the centuries: even down to the details of her death purportedly by snakebite (the "cherry tree" of her suicide, states Schiff; she dismisses the asp as pure fabrication). Cleopatra is the stuff of fiction, fantasy, and misinformation. Schiff puts it aptly when she says,"Shakespeare may be as much to blame for our having lost sight of Cleopatra as the Alexandrian humidity, Roman propaganda, and Elizabeth Taylor's limpid eyes."

In her biography of the Egyptian queen, Schiff's admiration (and "empathy," dare I say) for her subject is obvious thoughout the book. One feels the author truly believes in this woman, this legendary queen, and why shouldn't she? A woman whose intellect, leadership abilities--and beauty--during her twenty-two year reign made her the most powerful woman of the richest country in the 1st Century "civilized world" is worthy of such veneration. Cleopatra shines through her brief moment in world history as brightly as that great Alexandrian lighthouse. Schiff's narrative is a "Defense of Cleopatra"; the last twenty pages of her book are elegaic in tone and substance, one woman's tribute to an historical sister: a powerful ending to a book about a powerful subject.

6 people found this helpful

JuliaC

A brilliant and dazzling woman

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2011

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To win one Pulitzer Prize is impressive enough, but to win it twice for nonfiction works on completely unrelated subjects, and to be shortlisted for a third, makes for a considerable feat. Stacy Schiff has achieved just that, and her latest winner, `Cleopatra - A Life' is testament to her extraordinary skills of getting under the skin of a subject and presenting it to the world is a completely fascinating new way.

Before I read this book my knowledge of the famous Egyptian queen was limited to the epic film with the sadly late Elizabeth Taylor in the starring role, and to Shakespeare's version of events, most recently enacted wonderfully by Kim Cattrall in Liverpool. (I hasten to add that I have never seen Amanda Barry and Sid James in the Carry On version - and absolutely do not intend to).
Here Schiff makes Cleopatra come to life in a vivid and enthralling way, reading between the lines of history, and adding her own intelligent and completely plausible take on this wonderful story. Cleopatra was born into the dynasty of the Ptolemies, where there was a tradition of inter family marriages and incest as a concept just didn't exist. She was a clever girl, who was the first in her family to even bother to learn to speak the native Egyptian language of the seven million people that they ruled under. So there were early signs there of both intelligence and political astuteness.

She managed the amazing feat of being the lover and bearing children for both Julius Caesar, and then later the dashing Mark Anthony too. At aged just twenty two, she must have realised that to have a child with Caesar would secure her county's future for a considerable time, and it surely did. Schiff argues that she was not an amazing beauty, as we have come to picture with the Taylor/Burton version of events, but rather she was a complete charmer, and used her alluring character to attract men in a way that was quite something to behold.

And not just a relatively pretty face, she is reputed to have practiced alchemy, and to have found a cure for Caesar's baldness too - although as it included burnt mice, burnt horses teeth, bear's grease, and deer marrow, it is easy to see why it didn't really catch on.

She was a rich and powerful woman in her own right, but she sought political alliances with Rome, and after Caesars's death, had her heart, or more realistically her head, set on the dashing Mark Anthony. He had a reputation for being something of a bad boy - on one occasion apparently attaching lions to his chariot for a jaunt around Rome just for a laugh. But he stood no chance against the guile and charm of Cleo - she certainly knew how to make an entrance in her golden and jewelled barge. They soon became lovers, and seem to have stayed in love with each other - admittedly through various arguments and spats - until their tragic demise.
Schiff gives brilliant detail that makes this story come alive. It is a great read, and a very well argued work. She debunks many myths, and puts so much detail into the narrative that it is baffling just how much research it must have taken to complete this work. If you want a dazzling tale of power, lust, love and tragedy - then look no further.

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