Cleopatra: A Life — In the end, we must ask ourselves if Stacy Schiff, one of the most gifted American biographers currently writing, has successfully peeled away two millennia of myth and propaganda or, rather, given us a new myth, a Cleopatra who fits modern, Western feminist thinking. In the Pursuit of Happiness — To call Maria Kalman's work idiosyncratic isn’t nearly powerful enough to describe what she has produced. It is an explosion of such brilliance that one scarcely knows where to start
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In the fourth century AD Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, was largely destroyed by the combined forces of earthquakes and tsunami. Nature’s fury took the material culture of the city down to Neptune’s kingdom. Tragic for the people of Alexandria, the devastation also ended any hope that the events and achievements of Cleopatra’s twenty-two year reign (51 BC — 30 BC) could, in the future, be reported with accuracy. Whatever writing might be ascribed to her, and those of her advisers and supporters, was lost. Historians were left with the accounts and opinions of distant savants and naysayers. In life, and following her famous suicide, Cleopatra VII, the last of the Ptolemy rulers, suffered a fate most unkind to a public figure, the inability to create a lasting record, much less set it straight. For all that she reputedly knew nine languages, she entered history with no authentic voice.
Stacy Schiff is one of the most gifted American biographers currently writing. She has previously produced three well-received, prize winning biographies: Saint Exupéry: A Biography (1994); Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov: Portrait of a Marriage (1999); and Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005). Her choice of subjects demonstrates intellectual curiosity and a willingness to do the arduous work of researching the lives of people who come from very different times and circumstances. With her most recent book, Cleopatra: A Life, Schiff skillfully jumps from her earlier exploration of Franklin’s diplomatic role in France to the first century BC Queen of the Nile.
The fundamental question chasing Schiff’s decision to write about Cleopatra, given the problematic nature of evidence and sources, is why? What would prod a gifted, serious biographer to tackle so elusive a subject, one that forces her to clothe her tale in speculation and resort often to "purportedly," "we have no idea how or if … "or "we may assume."
Certainly one explanation is that readers are intrigued by accounts of monarchy, and this monarch is iconic. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, William Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Taylor have made Cleopatra a household name, one that has become shorthand, in Schiff’s words, for "wanton temptress."
We may also speculate that rehabilitation figures in Schiff’s choice of projects. Woven through the pages of Cleopatra is Schiff’s conclusion that even as she was presiding over the twilight of Ptolemaic rule, this queen was no brainless sex-kitten but rather a smart, cunning, and competent political strategist. Schiff contends that the queen was "[A] capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine." As her biographer Schiff seeks to rescue Cleopatra from the conflated accounts of the Romans, who "saddled Cleopatra with the vices of other miscreants." Yet, with limited exceptions — for example, Caesar’s Civil War or Cicero’s caustic text — she must draw upon the writings of men who never met Cleopatra. Plutarch wrote a hundred years after the queen died, as did Appian. Dio Cassius parsed his information even later — all of them gathering accounts and analyzing events in a world without newspapers, telephones, the Internet, or, yes, even Twitter.
