Cleopatra

Everybody's heard of Cleopatra. As Stacy Schiff points out in her biography, she is "among the most famous women to have lived." Some of us probably know a few things about her, such as that she consorted with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, was written about by Plutarch and Shakespeare, and has been the subject of more than one Hollywood film (when asked to play the part, Claudette Colbert was asked by Cecil B. DeMille, "How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?")

Schiff, in trying to get behind the legend, bristles at that kind of characterization. She is highly admiring of her subject, and lays out a case of how she has been ignored for being a great queen, and instead painted as some kind of harlot. Schiff writes, "The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: 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."

Cleopatra, of course, was the ruler of Egypt, the last person to rule as a pharaoh. But she was not Egyptian. She was a Ptolemy, descended from the first of that name, Alexander the Great's sidekick, a Macedonian who stayed behind in Egypt and started a dynasty. Schiff is to be admired for keeping Cleopatra's family tree straight, considering they had a habit of marrying siblings. Cleopatra herself married two of her brothers, though they issued no offspring (Schiff presents that they were celibate marriages). She had both of those brothers, as well as her two sisters, killed.

She was the richest person on the Mediterranean, and one modern economist estimates that she was one of the ten richest people of all time, a claim that's hard to justify. She did have a fling with Julius Caesar, and bore him a son that he acknowledged. What I didn't know is that she was in Rome when he was assassinated, and beat a hasty retreat.

Schiff covers, briefly but vividly, what happened in Rome after that. It's hard to write about Antony's funeral oration without thinking of "Friends, Romans, countrymen," but Schiff soldiers on. Antony at first was teamed with Caesar's successor, his grand-nephew Octavian, in defeating the conspirators and consolidating power. Then Antony and Cleopatra teamed up.

They would be together for more than ten years, though Antony was married for most of that time. (Even after divorcing, he couldn't marry Cleopatra because Roman law forbade him from marrying a non-Roman). There years were productive. They had three children, and he conquered lands using her navy, amassing quite an empire on the eastern Mediterranean.

Schiff, who points out that even in her own time Cleopatra was the subject of gossip, writes like a person who has grabbed your elbow at a party and tells you the wildest story. She has great fun at times. A colorful section on King Herod of Judea details some of the worst in-law problems you've ever heard, and she has great sport with Antony. In writing about Cicero, the great Roman orator, she says, "Sometimes it indeed seemed as if there were only ten women in Rome. And in Cicero's view, Mark Antony had slept with every one of them."

Things ended rather badly, though, as many of us know. Antony and Octavian eventually opposed each other, and it ended at the Battle of Actium. Cleopatra thought she might flee to India or Spain and start all over again. But it wasn't to be. Antony did himself in. Schiff again gets in a dig after telling us that he ran a sword through his midsection but didn't die right away: "It was somehow typical of Antony to leave the job half-done."

Octavian was keen to keep Cleopatra alive and keep the citizens of Alexandria happy, but she outwitted him. Schiff calls the story about the asp "the cherry tree of ancient history;" apparently she was something of a maven on poisons, and wouldn't have entrusted her fate to a wild animal.

Octavian, who went on to be Augustus Caesar, annexed Egypt, and thus Cleopatra was the last pharaoh. She has certainly lived on in the cultural landscape. Schiff can hardly resist dropping the name of Elizabeth Taylor. This passage, about her arrival in Tarsus to visit Antony, is typical: "She seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry. And she succeeded. In the annals of indelible entrances--the wooden horse into Troy; Christ into Jerusalem; Benjamin Franklin into Philadelphia; Henry IV, Charles Lindbergh, Charles de Gaulle, into Paris; Howard Carter into King Tut's tomb; the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan's stage--Cleopatra's alone lifts off the page into iridescent color, amid inexhaustible, expensive clouds of incense, a sensational, simultaneous assault on every sense."