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Stacy
Schiff’s ambitious
Cleopatra
sets out to set the record straight and in so doing gives us a
scenic view of a memorable time in history with marvelous
characters (Pompey, Cleopatra, Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian) and
fascinating places (Alexandria, Rome). Octavian, who
defeated Cleopatra, and his followers emphasized her seductiveness,
this siren from the East. Roman historians didn’t quite know
what to do with this clever Egyptian woman (in fact the Ptolemies
were Macedonian Greek in origin).
“Clever
women, Euripedes had warned hundreds of years earlier, were
dangerous.”
Almost all we know about the Egyptian queen comes from Roman
writers, including Plutarch (who became a Roman citizen), and most of it is not flattering.
Schiff notes that
“Citing
her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than
acknowledging her intellectual gifts.”
And nothing in Cleopatra's own words remain except possibly a
decree signed with a single word: ginesthoi (‘Let it be
done’).
Alexandria
was the intellectual nexus of its time, with its great library:
“Its
patron saint was Aristotle, whose school and library stood as its
model, and who had-not incidentally-taught both Alexander the
Great and his childhood friend, Ptolemy 1.”
Cleopatra was given a classical Greek education, Homer her Bible,
a particularly literary education with an emphasis on the art of
rhetoric; she also knew her Herodotus and Thucydides, the
sciences.
Plutarch
on Cleopatra:
'For
her actual beauty, it is said, was not in itself so remarkable
that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her
without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence, if
you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her
person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the
character that attended all she said or did, was something
bewitching.'
She was
brilliantly educated and beguiling; the Romans turned her into
something demonic, capable of undermining a man.
Cleopatra
before Caesar, 1866, Jean-Léon Gérôme,
oil on
canvas,
Schiff tells
us she was probably ‘honey-skinned,’ small and lithe, and
“unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and
foreign...”
and also
“richer than any man in Rome.”
Her
relationship with Caesar was of her own choosing, not something
done at the bidding of a male relative. This was uncomfortable in
a Rome where
“...for the most part Roman women were for horse trading...”
Cicero
exclaimed:
'I
detest the queen.'
And Schiff delightfully takes him on:
"Intelligent
women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three
counts."
It was also
that women reigned supreme in Egypt, whereas in Rome they were
secondary. Something to do with the cult of Isis perhaps.
Cleopatra associated herself with the goddess (the great deity who
was said to have invented both the Egyptian and the Greek
alphabet, fused the two cultures, was earth mother but also
goddess of
the
heavens and of war).
Shakespeare (Antony
and Cleopatra):
'She in th’habiliments of the goddess Isis that day appeared...'
Plutarch:
'...and
gave audience to the people under the name of the New Isis.'
Cleopatra,
1533-34, Michelangelo, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
What we do
know is that Cleopatra managed to captivate Caesar (a skilled
conversationalist, the ruler of the Roman Empire, a man
“who
turned out a text on Latin while traveling from Gaul, a long poem
en route to Spain.”)
And then ensorcell Antony (the eloquent
“war
hero, the senior statesman,"
the triumvir).
Plutarch: '...she
was to meet Antony in the time of life when women's beauty is most
splendid, and their intellects are in full maturity.'
And if
Schiff’s book attempts to remove all the accretions of myth, then
there is always Shakespeare to recapture the magic, put on the
‘tawny front'
again.
The
barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water:
the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The
winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The
water which they beat to follow faster,
As
amorous of their strokes.
Read:
Cleopatra: A
Life, Stacy Schiff
Read:
Plutarch's
Lives
Read:
Antony and
Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
Listen:
Stacy Schiff
on Charlie Rose,
discussing the book
Read
online:
Cleopatra,
the Lipstick Effect, and Shakespeare,
eCognoscente archives
Tags:
literature
theatre
egypt
cleopatra
language
history
books love
politics
shakespeare
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Gustave Moreau's Cleopatra
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