History is Written by the Winners (if They’re Men)

by

Nicki Leone

She is one of the most famous women in history. The most beautiful, alluring, ambitious, nefarious, seductive, passionate, irresistible woman to walk the earth. The downfall of empires and the ruin of emperors. The ultimate femme fatale. Her name is a byword for seduction and wantonness. She is a symbol for unrestrained, destructive passion.

And yet, we do not have the slightest idea of what she looked like.

Cleopatra. As historian Stacy Schiff points out in her new biography of the last ruling queen of Egypt, “Cleopatra” is a name so weighted with connotations that one almost forgets that she was once a real woman. We see, instead, the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor, think instead of Shakespeare’s tragedy, or of florid paintings of deathbed scenes with lamenting women and asps wrapped around limp white arms. She is a woman who will forever be known primarily as the reason for the downfall of Mark Antony. Their tempestuous affair—which ended with the surrender of Egypt and their own dramatic suicides—would remain the only thing people remembered about Cleopatra for almost two millennia. And her influence upon the western world would be encapsulated in a few trite remarks about her looks:

Le nez de Cléopatre: s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait change. (Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.)
        (Blaise Pascal, Pensees #163)

Mark Antony, I suppose, had a thing for strong-featured women.

One tends to forget, among all the pageantry and melodrama, that when Cleopatra died she was not a young woman—not a fourteen-year-old Juliet stabbing herself in the heart for grief over the death of her Romeo. She was a middle-aged matriarch, pushing forty, ruler of the richest land in the Mediterranean and the most prominent superpower after Rome itself. She had at least three teen-aged children, and had been ruling queen of Egypt for over twenty years, during which time she brought political stability, economic wealth, and honest-to-goodness prosperity to her country. Egyptians worshipped her, literally.

Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life sets out to bring some semblance of balance and reality to our portrait of Egypt’s most famous queen. The author notes, with complete justification, that Cleopatra’s history has been written by her enemies and adversaries, and that their prejudices and agendas have almost completely obscured the real woman. From Cicero’s petulant animosity (founded in a perceived social slight—Cleopatra promised, but forgot to deliver, a book he wanted) to the Emperor Augustus’ pragmatic and systematic erasure of his greatest enemy’s strongest ally, Cleopatra’s legacy has been in the hands of men who had reason to fear her, despise her and even more reason to curry favor with her enemies. What gets lost in all the hyperbole, suggests Schiff, is a very simple political fact: that in the struggles of the Roman Civil Wars, Cleopatra backed the wrong horse. She endorsed Mark Antony, but it was his rival Octavian who won the throne and hence the Empire. Blaise Pascal can make jokes about the length Cleopatra’s nose, but perhaps the real issue wasn’t her beauty, but Antony’s and Octavian’s.

Cleopatra then, is Schiff’s attempt to piece together some kind of an objective biography of the woman from the various Greek and Roman sources—most of which were hostile to her, and many of which were not even written until centuries after Cleopatra’s death. Written in a casual, conversational style, Schiff understands the power of a good anecdote and uses a storyteller’s technique to bring her subject to life in vivid, immediate detail. Schiff’s account of how Cleopatra—fighting her brother for control of Alexandria, from which she had been cut off—was snuck into the city disguised as a sack of grain and was brought to the palace then held by Julius Caesar is the stuff of movies. Secret moonlit boat rides up the Nile. A young, proud, determined queen facing off against the jaded, weary Roman general. One can only imagine Caesar’s face when the sack of grain was opened and the queen of Egypt stepped out.

The meeting of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar has been heavily romanticized throughout the ages (despite his apparent profligacy, Cleopatra is the only woman known to have born the general a son), usually along the lines of a gold-digging harlot seducing an otherwise honorable and noble man. Schiff gives due credit to the romance of story of the meeting and alliance, but also casts a more sober eye on the tale. She points out, for example, that the notion—enthusiastically propagated by later writers—that Cleopatra met Caesar in full royal regalia, dripping with gold and jewels and wanton come-hither eyes, is ridiculous. Women sneaking into castles in sacks under the cover of night are not likely to be wearing a lot of jewelry. It’s heavy, and it clinks. Cleopatra was also very young—something like seventeen. Her only liaison until this time was her “consort,” her brother, currently arraying his armies against her for control of the throne. So not only was she not dripping jewels and gold, she was probably not sexually active. When she faced off against the fifty-three-year-old Caesar and proposed an alliance, she may have even been a virgin. And as for any gold digging, most of the treasure in the world at that time was in Egypt. Why else do you think Caesar was even there? He needed the money.

So Schiff asks the sober student of history to reconsider who seduced who in this first, fateful meeting. Did the teen-aged queen beguile the savvy and experienced Roman general? Or did the fifty-year-old general decide it would be easier to influence and control an isolated teenage queen than her hot-headed younger brother and his cadre of ambitious “advisors”?

Schiff’s approach to the story of how Cleopatra met Julius Caesar is illustrative of her strategy for the book as a whole. She looks at the various accounts of an event in Cleopatra’s life, and then attempts to reconstruct some happy medium between all of them. In writing about her sources, Schiff admits to relying most heavily on Plutarch, Appian and Dio. And frequently throughout the book she will quote one, then the other, and then offer up her own interpretation stripped of Plutarch’s hostility and Dio’s, well, excitability. (One other classical writer, Lucan, she dismisses completely even though he wrote a mere fifty years after the events of the book, on the grounds that he was “a poet and a sensationalist.”)

The technique serves Schiff well throughout the book, allowing her to re-imagine significant moments and events in the life of Cleopatra and to bring the image of the woman down to earth somewhat, from the strange fantastical heights it has occupied for so many centuries. Cleopatra’s life story is readable, and even plausible—no mean feat for a historian and biographer who has almost no reliable primary sources to draw upon. Underlying the book is a strong foundation of solid research into life during the Late Roman Republic and early Empire, and during the Ptolemaic reign in Egypt (Cleopatra would be the last of the dynasty). Schiff’s account of life in the city of Alexandria—at that time the cultural center of the world because of its famous library—is mesmerizing and richly detailed. Perhaps as richly dressed as Cleopatra was said to be the first time she met Caesar or Mark Antony. (There are descriptions of golden plates and goblets on the table, and floors strewn knee-deep in rose petals).

Schiff manages to follow Cleopatra’s career through two decades as she maneuvered with other eastern kings and princes for influence with the Romans, always with a view towards keeping Egypt independent and under her control. It was a delicate and precarious situation, as Rome itself was in the throes of civil war and political chaos. Alliances sprung up and evaporated over night, and an imprudent word of support for the wrong man could have disastrous results. That Cleopatra managed to hold her own throughout the most turbulent periods of civil unrest and out-and-out war speaks more to her savvy and pragmatism than it does to her feminine wiles. And although there is no doubt that she was trained to rule, and possessed of heady and irresistible charisma she knew how to exploit; the idea that Cleopatra would seduce her way in and out of Roman politics is an unlikely one. She had something better than sex to rely on to keep her kingdom intact. She had money, and food. Egypt was Rome’s breadbasket, and Cleopatra controlled the crops.

But Schiff’s approach does have some drawbacks. Her tendency to “answer” the accounts of the ancient classical writers with her own interpretations of events often gives the book a defensive tone, and the author sometimes sounds less like she is giving interpretations, and more like she is making excuses. For Cleopatra’s first meeting with Mark Antony in Tarsus, Plutarch scornfully describes her deliberate seduction of the easy-going general with lavish dinners, piles of precious gifts, perfumes, incense, gold, and apparently more sensuous entertainments. (Oh, and more rose petals. Lots and lots of those.) Schiff’s recounts the scene without the scorn, but with more descriptions of treasure, and some half-hearted comments about the importance of creating a good first impression, in the best oriental style. Cleopatra, Schiff insists, was stage-managing. She wanted Mark Antony’s support, so she dressed to impress. But she dressed for dinner as Venus, goddess of love. Ironically, Schiff’s stated goal at the beginning of the book, to find “the real Cleopatra” in all the fantasy and myth, sometimes does more to confirm our idea of Cleopatra, the seductress, rather than dispel it.

The lack of reliable primary sources also has another effect: it forces Schiff to speculate in order to “fill in the gaps” of her story. The historian Ann Wroe once wrote about role of imagination and invention for the historian:

We are dealing in fact, not fiction; so there is much we can never reconstruct, including what the characters looked like, precisely how they dressed, how most of them talked, the rooms they lived in, their private thoughts. All this must remain unknown.

Schiff is not so circumspect. She frequently speculates on the private thoughts of her subjects, freely imagines their motivations. She suggests that survival, not seduction, would have usually been first and foremost on Cleopatra’s mind in any of her ventures. She speculates that Julius Caesar’s support of the Egyptian queen was probably more expediency than actual desire, at least at the beginning. But while Schiff makes a good case for her opinions, in the end they are just that—opinions, guesses. In truth we can never know what Mark Antony thought when he first met Cleopatra dressed as the goddess Venus. What Caesar thought when she shook off her sack cloth and came before him, in supplication.

As a result, Cleopatra: A Life has the odd effect of being very vivid and convincing in the small things, but less so in larger matters. When Schiff writes, for example, that in Alexandria a common cure for a teething baby was to give the child a fried mouse to chew on—well, one can hardly dispute the fact, only be grateful that medicine and child rearing has advanced somewhat over the millennia. But when she suggests that in the beginning Caesar and Cleopatra each liked the other for their wit and conversation, or when she suggests that Cleopatra and Mark Antony, following their disastrous defeat at the battle of Actium, may have contemplated running away to Spain or India to set up a new Empire; that is less convincing. How they talked, their private thoughts—all these must remain unknown.

What is convincing is that Cleopatra, no matter what circumstances she found herself in, acted proactively, and like the divine queen of Egypt and direct descendent of Alexander the Great she knew herself to be. Where Mark Antony dithered and lost heart, fell into indecision and despair, Cleopatra acted. She maneuvered and negotiated, first for herself and then for the future of her children and the Ptolemaic dynasty. Even her death was under her own control. Conquered by Octavian, she barricaded herself (with heaps of treasure) in her own tomb and it took some serious conniving on Octavian’s part to get the doors open. He wanted her alive, to parade down the streets in Rome. Cleopatra denied him that pleasure and herself that humiliation, and managed to drink poison and die on her own terms. Octavian, Schiff reports, was furious, and somewhat impressed although that, again, is speculative.

When all is said and done, Cleopatra: A Life brings depth and dimension to “the wickedest woman in history” but it does not quite overwrite the past. She remains a seductive, beautiful, charismatic woman who did not hesitate to use the best means to hand to further her own ends, and that includes sex. Fifteen hundred years later one might almost describe her as Machiavellian, in the most politically astute sense of the word. But the backdrop to her life—the fabulous wealth of Alexandria at her disposal, the elaborate lengths she undertook to create a regal, royal, and even divine impression on her subjects and her allies, and driven ferocity with which she schemed to ensure her own seat of power and the future of her dynasty—all this still remains paramount. The “real woman” refuses to step away from the cinematic pageantry and romance she has created around her, and we are still left thinking of Elizabeth Taylor—except, of course, for her nose.

Books mentioned in this column:
Cleopatra, A Life by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown, 2010)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.