We finally see the Queen of Nile as not only seductive, but world-historically significant
Cleopatra: A Life, is the culmination of a decades-long obsession for Pulitzer-prize winning author Stacy Schiff. She first became infatuated as a child when she saw the ancient queen portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film. Countless biographies and historical accounts have been produced on the subject over the centuries, and though Schiff works with no new material here, she does recontextualize Cleopatra, who is usually depicted as a charismatic and oversexed manipulator of powerful men. Schiff doesn’t exactly reject this caricature, but she does force us to consider some of Cleopatra’s less-well-documented attributes: her innate understanding of political strategy; her rhetorical skills; her sophisticated education, which rivaled that of any of her male contemporaries (she could recite long passages from The Iliad, and she was familiar with Greek drama — Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles.) Of course we get a telling of Cleopatra’s life: the waging of a civil war, her affair with Julius Caesar, the new empire she forged with lover Marc Antony, but more important is Schiff’s new, more respectful perspective. She goes so far as to challenge the long-held belief that Cleopatra died by the fangs of a venomous snake, concluding the biography instead with the assertion that Cleopatra committed suicide by drinking poison. But the seriousness with which Schiff constructs this biography in no way diminishes Cleopatra’s alluring beauty or the lavishness of her life (her palace was reportedly studded with onyx, garnets, and gold.) We finally see the Queen of Nile as not only seductive, but world-historically significant.