Femme Fatale
By KATHRYN HARRISON
Papyri crumble away. What remains of her home is 20 feet underwater. She died before Jesus was born. Her first biographers never met her, and she deliberately hid her real self behind vulgar display. A cautious writer would never consider her as a subject. Stacy Schiff, however, has risen to the bait, with deserved confidence. “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography” and “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)” demonstrated her mastery of the form. “The Great Improvisation,” Schiff’s analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s years in Paris, revealed a different genius: the intellectual stamina required to untangle the endlessly tricky snarls created by the intersection of human personalities and international relations.
CLEOPATRA
A Life
By Stacy Schiff
Illustrated. 368 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $29.99
“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.
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.
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 forebears, who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. But Cleopatra had no more intention of consummating a pro forma marriage than she did of sharing power with a little boy. Educated rigorously with an eye to her future rule, she’d paid careful attention to her father’s missteps as well as his triumphs. To keep her crown required Rome’s allegiance, which she captured in 48 B.C., swiftly and with the flair and ingenuity for which she would be remembered.
Goaded into exile as a result of a failed attempt to oust Ptolemy and his advisers, Cleopatra, 21, had herself stuffed into a sturdy sack, smuggled back into her own palace, and presented thus to Julius Caesar, who, taking advantage of Egypt’s political upheaval, had installed himself in the capital. While even her detractors agree, grudgingly, that Cleopatra was blessed with megawatt charisma as well as a formidable intelligence — she spoke nine languages — there is no record of how she persuaded Caesar to support her hegemony rather than making Egypt a province of Rome, and “no convincing political explanation” for his remaining with her in Alexandria for months while his own empire languished. We do know that when he left, Cleopatra was pregnant. Clearly a seduction had been accomplished, and she had far the most to gain from it.
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