She excavates historical knowledge, sifting though the accounts of Plutarch, Appian, Dio and Josephus, and mining material histories of Ptolemaic Egypt in order to take warrant for her own Cleopatra. For Schiff, the biographer’s task is not far from the archeologist’s. This, Schiff would rectify - the “most famously” part, not the “mistress” part: “She was a Greek woman,” Schiff notes, “whose history fell to men whose futures lay with Rome.” And with this new biography, which has garnered a great deal of admiration this Fall, she does so impressively, imagining Cleopatra first as competent and effective ruler and only secondly as lover. Most famously, of course, she was mistress to both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. She sailed to Tarsus in such splendor, Plutarch reports, that the market emptied out and word began to spread that Venus had come “to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.” In Stacy Schiff’s telling, however, Cleopatra makes herself into far more than a goddess of love she was a calculating self-fashioner, able to be any manner of thing in order to achieve all manner of thing for her country. She was, as we know, an expert at pageantry.
Schiff makes sense of it: after Caesar's murder, he was simply the least worst risk to back, though only just.
I've long wondered how this clever, indefatigable monarch, the richest ruler in the Mediterranean in her time, took on rather than up with Mark Antony, who was always a disaster waiting to happen (and who eventually did "happen" at Actium).
That legend was likely printed or promulgated by Cleo's enemy, Octavian. Schiff balances Ptolemaic forensics and Roman politics to conclude that Charmion's death, like that of Cleo and Iras – who did the pharaoh's hair and makeup for her sensational deathbed appearance – didn't depend on the unreliable nip of an asp. In addition, she has a tartness to match the standards of Cleo's handmaiden, Charmion (that's her exact name – Shakespeare bent it a bit, as he did everything else in the story), who stuck it to the Romans with her last breath.
L uscious and scrupulous is a difficult combination to pull off, but Stacy Schiff does so in her life of Cleopatra.
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