A Wonderful Piece of Work

(cross-posted from Abigail and the Great World)

I got Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff for Christmas, and I finished it last night. Absolutely fantastic book! Highly recommended. I'm not usually much on popular histories, but I do love biographies, and as far as the writing goes this one was top notch. Very readable, lots of sumptuous detail, and a great grasp of the history, it seems (though I'm no historian of antiquity, to be sure). Seriously, I couldn't put it down. As with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, the story compelled me to keep turning the pages, and the writing brought me not only to the political but the emotional heart of things. While this one didn't make me cry (probably due to lack of any extant primary source material), it certainly fascinated me and made me question the way we understand history, politics, events, and societies of the past.

Schiff seemed to understand the limitations of her sources, but there were still a few times when I questioned her tactics. I guess that's what taking Historiography courses will do to you. There were also a few issues with punctuation which I felt like her editors should have picked up on, but what can you do?

Her main purpose was to set Cleopatra in context, to demystify her, as it were. After giving us a rundown of the legends surrounding the woman-- that Cleopatra was overly sexed, that she cast spells and enchantments on Caesar and Antony, that she brought brought two Roman men to their ruin, even that she killed herself with a snake-- Schiff makes the assertion that Cleopatra's history was written by the winners while she was the loser. Most tellingly, those winners were Roman's who didn't look kindly on genuinely powerful women.

Schiff looks at the sources-- Roman, of course-- to figure out where the chroniclers are telling the truth, where they are embellishing, where their own cultural prejudices played into their interpretations. Since we know very little about Cleopatra's upbringing, Schiff reconstructs a typical noble Egyptian/Macedonian education, which was illuminating. She brings to life ancient Alexandria in full color and glory. She sets austere Rome back to the days of the Republic, when the city was made of brick, not marble. She looks at the other societies in the East, and examines the politics among them like a master chess player, charting out the ramifications of each move, and getting into the logic behind every play. Of course, some of this must be attributed to modern historians who have recently published some new and revealing books on ancient Alexandria and even Cleopatra herself (Schiff's bibliography includes Cleopatra Reassessed by Susan Walker and Sally-Ann Ashton and Cleopatra: From History to Myth edited by Susan Walker, which, though I haven't read them, seem to have probably been rather important to Schiff's main purpose... which was to 'reassess' Cleopatra and to separate the history from the myth... hmmmm maybe that's what these professional historians have been doing lately, too).

Overall, a fun, fast, beautiful, and informative read for anyone interested in Cleopatra, or the ancient world in general.