Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff’s erudite, well-researched and often witty reconstruction of the brief life of Cleopatra, now out in paperback, establishes in her opening pages the fact that much of what we know about the famous Egyptian queen was written by wags and detractors decades and even centuries after she died at the age of 39 in 69 B.C.
Using writers contemporary with Cleopatra as her primary sources, Schiff separates fact from fiction in long, sweeping paragraphs so filled with rich descriptions that the reader is often compelled to reread them to get the full impact of the luminous and vivid details.
During her 21-year reign, Cleopatra ruled over a massive swath of countries along the Mediterranean, from Cyrene (in modern Libya) to the west to Tarsus (southern Turkey) and Cyprus in the east — every coastal Mideast country save Palestine. Her armies were no competition for the Romans, whom she held off with her astute negotiations, but her naval fleet was impressive.
Cleopatra was the seventh in a line with that name, and she wasn’t even Egyptian: She was Macedonian, as was the namesake of her capital city. Following the trend of crowned heads in her time, she murdered her two younger brothers, to whom she was married, and her sister, to preserve her throne. (Contemporary King Herod killed his own children and half of his wife’s family.) One of her ancestors, Ptolemy VII, raped his niece when she was an adolescent. Following a quarrel, he killed their 14-year-old son, chopped him into bits and sent the pieces in a trunk to the boy’s mother on the eve of her birthday.
Cleopatra spoke nine languages fluently. The Egyptian language and hieroglyphics were so difficult to speak and read that Greek was the primary language of diplomacy and commerce. Cleopatra was the only member of the Ptolemy dynasty to learn her people’s language.
With the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth I, she was the most successful female ruler who ever lived, and the richest. One list estimates her worth at nearly $96 billion, making her the 22nd wealthiest person in history.
Egypt’s rich wheat fields, watered annually by the flooding of the Nile River, became the breadbasket of the Mideast and major supplier of grain to Rome.
Her famous barges were 300 feet long, powered by purple sails. “Their bows were ivory, elaborate colonnades lined the deck ... eighteen foot gilded statues decorated stern and prow.” Silver and gold-plated serving pieces weighing tons were given to diners as souvenirs, as were the tables and couches they had dined upon. A fleet of 400 supply ships followed the queen’s barge.
Cleopatra seduced often-married Julius Caesar and produced his only son, Caesarion (“little Caesar”). She felt that the son, who closely resembled his father, and his name would guarantee amnesty for them both in the event conditions with Rome ever soured. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C., she likewise seduced Mark Antony, gave him three children and, as far as Rome was concerned, turned him into an Egyptian.
Shiff makes it clear that Cleopatra was no Elizabeth Taylor. The only credible likeness of Cleopatra, on a coin, portrays her with a hooked nose and a strong chin, hardly a beauty.
Was she the harlot her Roman contemporaries and later historians claimed? Shiff found no evidence that she had sexual liaisons with any men other than Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
In Cleopatra’s suicide, Shiff makes a strong case for poison, not an asp. She had been experimenting (on servants, of course) with various concoctions that would be swift and painless. Hemlock and opium were traditional and good choices, but Shiff concludes, as Plutarch had, that “no one knows.” No record of her burial site remains.
Cleopatra’s legacy continues to fascinate and has not diminished over the millennia. Stacy Shiff’s superb and scholarly study of the “king of queens” is well worth reading and even rereading.
Doug James is an adjunct professor of communication arts at Spring Hill College.