The Egyptian practice of incest among royals was adoptedīy her Macedonian forebears, who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. Probably her parents were also full siblings.

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. Visited a hopped-up ancient Las Vegas, with a busy harbor and a really good library. Schiff’s rendering of the city is so juicy and cinematic it leaves one with the sense of having 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 withįlickering eyes, Egypt’s capital made Rome look like the “provincial backwater” it was. 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 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 livesīeginning when they first influenced history. The woman left no primary sources.īorn in 69 B.C., Cleopatra ascended the throne of Egypt at 18. 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,Ī 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” (translatedĪs “Let it be done,” with which she or her scribe signed off on a decree). 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.Īnd 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 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 Although it’s not Schiff’s purpose to present us withĪ 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 “Mostly,” Schiff says of “Cleopatra: A Life,” “I have restored context.” The claim stops sounding humble when we understand what it entails.

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