'Cleopatra: A Life' by Stacy Schiff delves into the life of the enigmatic Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII. The narrative reconstructs Cleopatra's struggles for survival amidst family intrigues and her famous relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. The author, Stacy Schiff, blends historical facts with speculation to unravel the truth behind Cleopatra's life, while acknowledging the challenges of interpreting a figure whose history has been shaped by conquerors and myths.
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From The Publisher:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.
Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.
Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and - after his murder - three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
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2 comment(s)
About 3.5 stars. I did find this non fiction very interesting as Cleopatra is an very intriguing historical figure. It seemed very well researched but in some places I had wanted more but I'm sure that finding info about her life itself is rather hard to do as it was such a long time ago.
The book starts off by declaring itself an oxy-moron: there are almost no reliable sources on Cleopatra's life. Here's a book about Cleopatra's life! However, Schiff does a great job of telling the story about stories about Cleopatra. She examines possible motives of the people who wrote about her (who were mostly Roman, i.e. her enemies) and is careful to point out inconsistencies and possibilities.
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Cleopatra: A Life?
About the Author:
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and The Witches: Salem, 1692.
Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government, she lives in New York City.
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