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Cleopatra
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ARCHIVE - CLEOPATRA - INTRODUCTION - Spoiler Thread
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Stacy SchiffSynopsis:
Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first and poisoned the second; incest and assassination were family specialties. She had children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two of the most prominent Romans of the day. With Antony she would attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled both their ends. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Her supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.
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Starred Review. From its opening strains of music, this audiobook of Schiff's stellar biography of the Egyptian queen rewards the intellect and the senses. As Schiff dusts away history's spider webs, romance's distortions, and sexism's corruptions to reveal the true (or at least the truest possible) portrait of Cleopatra, Robin Miles's voice is deep, confiding, the perfect instrument to introduce a history that has been variously forgotten, misunderstood, or suppressed. Her enunciation is crisp, her pacing pure charm: she wrings every sentence for meaning, irony, and wit, taking us through pages of description or analysis with a stately pace. A Little, Brown hardcover.
From Booklist
For those who think they know enough about Cleopatra or have the enigmatic Egyptian queen all figured out, think again. Schiff, demonstrating the same narrative flair that captivated readers of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999), provides a new interpretation of the life of one of history’s most enduringly intriguing women. Rather than a devastatingly beautiful femme fatale, Cleopatra, according to Schiff, was a shrewd power broker who knew how to use her manifold gifts—wealth, power, and intelligence—to negotiate advantageous political deals and military alliances. Though long on facts and short on myth, this stellar biography is still a page-turner; in fact, because this portrait is grounded so thoroughly in historical context, it is even more extraordinary than the more fanciful legend. Cleopatra emerges as a groundbreaking female leader, relying on her wits, determination, and political acumen rather than sex appeal to astutely wield her power in order to get the job done. Ancient Egypt never goes out of style, and Cleopatra continues to captivate successive generations. --Margaret Flanagan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
"Stacy Schiff has managed to create a masterpiece."—Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
"[Schiff] writes against the fabulous grain...There are countless books about Cleopatra, but this one, I suspect, would have been one of her favorites."—Laura Miller, Salon.com
"Captivating...Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A swift, sympathetic life of one of history's most maligned and legendary women."—Kirkus
"[A] dazzling, meticulous biography."—Caryn James, More
"Schiff excavates truth from myth with vivid eloquence, taking us back to a life in a time and place that was both 'an orgy of pillage and murder' and 'the Paris of the ancient world.'"—Natasha Clark, Elle
"Hugely compelling...Schiff sifts through gauzy mythology to uncover a brilliant young woman."—Vogue
"[An] excellent, myth-busting biography....No one will think of Cleopatra in quite the same way after reading this vivid, provocative book."—Washington Examiner
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Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York City.
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This biography of Cleopatra goes well beyond the details of her life, of which little is known beyond what has been passed down from classical writers, painting a picture of life in Egypt at the end of the Hellenistic period. Robin Miles gives an expressive yet understated delivery of Cleopatra's story--one that is far more complex than the more infamous incidents she is best remembered for. Miles reads the copious footnotes in their proper place in the text, increasing her pace and softening her tone, which clearly delineates the additional information from the main text. Her measured reading, with long pauses that separate ideas, gives listeners time to take in all the details as well as draw their own conclusions about Schiff's biographical hypotheses. E.N. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
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Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Mar 12, 2015 06:20PM)
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Femme Fatale
By KATHRYN HARRISON
CLEOPATRA
A Life
By Stacy Schiff
Illustrated. 368 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $29.99
Papyri crumble away. What remains of her home is 20 feet underwater. She died before Jesus was born. Her first biographers never met her, and she deliberately hid her real self behind vulgar display. A cautious writer would never consider her as a subject. Stacy Schiff, however, has risen to the bait, with deserved confidence. “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography” and “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)” demonstrated her mastery of the form. “The Great Improvisation,” Schiff’s analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s years in Paris, revealed a different genius: the intellectual stamina required to untangle the endlessly tricky snarls created by the intersection of human personalities and international relations.
“Mostly,” Schiff says of “Cleopatra: A Life,” “I have restored context.” The claim stops sounding humble when we understand what it entails. Although it’s not Schiff’s purpose to present us with a feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to “restore” Cleopatra — to see her at all — one must strip away an “encrusted myth” created by those for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Lucan, Appian, Josephus, Dio, Suetonius, Plutarch — the poets, historians and biographers who initially depicted Cleopatra were mostly Roman and all male, writing, for the most part, a century or more after her death with the intent to portray her reign as little more than a sustained striptease.
And although Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the known world and Egypt an ancient pioneer of gender equality, the country had “no fine historian” to counter the agendas of those for whom “impugning independent-minded women was a subspecialty.” As Schiff observes, Cleopatra may boast “one of the busiest afterlives in history,” including incarnations as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor,” but the single piece of documentary evidence that might be traced to her own hand is “perhaps and at most, one written word” (translated as “Let it be done,” with which she or her scribe signed off on a decree). The woman left no primary sources.
Born in 69 B.C., Cleopatra ascended the throne of Egypt at 18. As childhood was not a subject of great interest to the ancients, Schiff explains, “players tended to emerge fully formed” into the public consciousness, their recorded lives beginning when they first influenced history. To distract the present-day reader from the absence of her subject’s early years, Schiff neatly draws our attention to a different, albeit geographic, femme fatale — Alexandria. Balanced on the sparkling Mediterranean coast, with a parade-ready colonnade running the length of the city and mechanical marvels like hydraulic lifts, coin-operated machines and statues with flickering eyes, Egypt’s capital made Rome look like the “provincial backwater” it was. Schiff’s rendering of the city is so juicy and cinematic it leaves one with the sense of having visited a hopped-up ancient Las Vegas, with a busy harbor and a really good library.
When Cleopatra came to power it was, in accordance with her father’s will, as co-ruler with her 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy, to whom she was wed. Probably her parents were also full siblings. The Egyptian practice of incest among royals was adopted by her Macedonian forebears, who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. But Cleopatra had no more intention of consummating a pro forma marriage than she did of sharing power with a little boy. Educated rigorously with an eye to her future rule, she’d paid careful attention to her father’s missteps as well as his triumphs. To keep her crown required Rome’s allegiance, which she captured in 48 B.C., swiftly and with the flair and ingenuity for which she would be remembered.
Goaded into exile as a result of a failed attempt to oust Ptolemy and his advisers, Cleopatra, 21, had herself stuffed into a sturdy sack, smuggled back into her own palace, and presented thus to Julius Caesar, who, taking advantage of Egypt’s political upheaval, had installed himself in the capital. While even her detractors agree, grudgingly, that Cleopatra was blessed with megawatt charisma as well as a formidable intelligence — she spoke nine languages — there is no record of how she persuaded Caesar to support her hegemony rather than making Egypt a province of Rome, and “no convincing political explanation” for his remaining with her in Alexandria for months while his own empire languished. We do know that when he left, Cleopatra was pregnant. Clearly a seduction had been accomplished, and she had far the most to gain from it.
To discover what truths remain after two millenniums, Schiff must consider her limited and inconsistent sources through the lenses of anthropology, archaeology and psychology, revealing a ruler who, centuries before those disciplines had been invented, used a similar set of tools to consolidate and maximize the power she inherited. What Schiff describes as Cleopatra’s ability “to slide effortlessly from one idiom to another” depended on what was in fact an astute and arduous campaign to secure the allegiance of a people whose religion and culture she borrowed to suit her own ends. Detractors misrepresented her use of jaw-droppingly over-the-top spectacle as proof of decadence rather than the art of a political visionary. From the beginning of her reign, the young queen had manipulated her largely illiterate populace by staging elaborate productions that underscored and cemented the idea of her divinity and her therefore incontestable rule.
Gliding up the Nile, having styled herself as Isis, Cleopatra presented Caesar to “cheering crowds” agog at the gigantic royal barge embedded with gold and ivory and bearing colonnades and 18-foot gilded statues. For as long as nine weeks Cleopatra displayed herself and her alpha mate as “the earthly visitation of two living gods.” And her auspiciously timed pregnancy allowed her to advertise the fertility of their union. When her child was born, she named him Caesarion and, in a further reworking of the myth she inherited, installed “little Caesar” as her co-ruler after his father’s assassination in 44 B.C. Caesar fit neatly into the role of Isis’s partner, Osiris. The supreme male divinity was murdered by enemies who spared his “young male heir and a devoted quick-thinking consort.” As Schiff dryly observes, “the Ides of March handily buttressed the tale.”
Egypt had the wealth to underwrite Roman wars; Cleopatra needed Roman clout to keep her throne; it had long been Rome’s intent to annex Egypt. In 41 B.C., Mark Antony, intending to learn where Cleopatra’s post-Caesar loyalties lay, summoned her to Tarsus. Fluent in pantheons other than Egypt’s, Cleopatra there descended as Venus, with an entourage befitting the goddess of love. Her silver-oared barge had purple sails and an orchestra of lyres, flutes and pipes, everything perfumed by “countless incense offerings.” Fair maidens dressed as nymphs and graces worked the ropes while beautiful cupids fanned the queen under her golden canopy. The “blinding explosion of color, sound and smell” captivated another gaping multitude, and the equally astonished Mark Antony followed Cleopatra back to Alexandria. Again using biology to shape destiny, she promptly bore him a son and a daughter, and then another son; she and her lover remained together for the better part of a decade. Death didn’t part so much as bind them together indefinitely, with tandem suicides concluding their biographies on a note of high drama and guaranteeing the staying power of a romance that had held their contemporaries in thrall.
Cleopatra mythologized herself before anyone else had the chance. Roman contemporaries misread the pageants she acted out; early biographers were biased, xenophobic, politically motivated and sometimes sensationalistic, writing for an audience that expected to be dazzled by intrigues reflecting its assumptions. It’s dizzying to contemplate the thicket of prejudices, personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrated to reconstruct a woman whose style, ambition and audacity make her a subject worthy of her latest biographer. After all, Stacy Schiff’s writing is distinguished by those very same virtues.
Kathryn Harrison writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her new novel, “Enchantments,” will be published next year.
Source; The New York Times
Illustration by Noma Bar
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"A work of literature." — Judith Thurman, The New Yorker
"Enthralling" — Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
"Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. Cleopatra is impossible to put down." — Rick Riordan
"The most compelling biography of the year." — Liz Smith, Wowowow.com
"Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor....In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a panoramic picture of her world....Schiff seems to have inhaled everything there is to know about Cleopatra and her times, and she uses her authoritative knowledge of the era — and her instinctive understanding of her central players—to assess shrewdly probable and possible motives and outcomes." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"[S]o well-written that it's almost like a novel in its juicy literary flair...." — Tina Brown of The Daily Beast on NPR
"Schiff....is a skillful storyteller who knows how to spin the threads of history into a compelling narrative. Here, she clears away the tall tales to get at the truth about Egypt's elusive queen." — BookPage
"Schiff rises to this challenge and creates an engaging biography by relentlessly stitching together the pieces of her subject's broader life and making connections between them....In the course of Cleopatra: A Life, the reader comes to understand the complexities of the world Cleopatra lived in through the details Schiff includes in her narrative....Schiff does not try to portray Cleopatra as a feminist icon or as a victim of the men in her life. What she does do is reveal the complexities of why Cleopatra went down in history as "the snare, the delusion, the seductress." Throughout this biography, Schiff reveals through colorful details and clearly written prose why exaggerating Cleopatra's sexual prowess was less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts." — W. Ralph Eubanks, NPR
"It is a beautiful pairing—the most alluring and elusive woman in recorded history, and one of the most gifted biographers of our time. Style, like leadership, is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. We see it here on every page." — Joseph J. Ellis
"Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence. Here she trains her satirical eye and sterling erudition on Cleopatra, rescuing her from the many shopworn myths that have encrusted her story from Plutarch to Shakespeare to Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Schiff's luminous prose evokes the ancient world with vivid splendor, whether it be the cosmopolitan charms of Alexandria or the murderous feuds of Rome. Her portraits of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony are fresh and provocative. Best of all, Cleopatra emerges as much more than the voluptuous seductress of legend and comes across as a shrewd, cunning, and highly competent monarch who knew how to thrive in a Mediterranean world of savage politics." — Ron Chernow
"What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves." — Azar Nafisi
"Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatra&mdasdh;a much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all." — Evan Thomas
"An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure." — Jon Meacham
"This is an astonishing, scrupulously researched, meticulously assembled retelling of one of the world's most famous lives—and it will become a classic." — Simon Winchester
"I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence—because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again." — Tracy Kidder
"Stacy Schiff's meticulous research, the depth and deftness of her portrayal, have given us a Cleopatra far richer and more satisfying than the myths and fantasies that we have mistaken for true nourishment. This CLEOPATRA is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the history and lives of women." — Mary Gordon
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Bernard Shaw's Cleopatra 1945 - Caesar and Cleopatra Full Movie
Just for enjoyment
https://youtu.be/kgvOn7bFy7I
Source: You Tube
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https://youtu.be/SbLLhZTg-zs
Source: The Library of Congress
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On Saturday, June 1, biographer Stacy Schiff '82 gave the Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2013 during Commencement Weekend.
Source: You Tube
message 16:
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Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Mar 12, 2015 07:46PM)
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https://youtu.be/5fGrR48c5es
Stacy Schiff - Cleopatra - Part 2
https://youtu.be/nhkG480mtE8
Noe: Not the best interviewer but I am posting this anyway because Schiff does reveal important details.
Throughly enjoyed reading this book and loved the richness of the words on the page.
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Thank you for your comments about this book, Christine. It has been on my list for some time. Thank you for bringing to my attention once again.
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Stacy SchiffLorna,
Assisting Moderator (T) - Civil Rights and Supreme Court
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Lorna, thank you so much for your assistance and for responding to Christine so promptly.
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Cleopatra: A Life (other topics)Cleopatra: A Life (other topics)
Cleopatra: A Life (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Stacy Schiff (other topics)Stacy Schiff (other topics)
Stacy Schiff (other topics)
This is a spoiler thread.
Let me preface this discussion - Cleopatra: A Life is touted as a biography by an historian - however Stacy Schiff would be the first person to state that there were not a preponderance of primary sources. However, this is probably an excellent account based upon the sources out there. So keep this in mind.