Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Stacy Schiff has crafted, somehow, a new angle on one of the world's oldest great stories. By focusing on the first degree sources we have from the period (mostly from Roman scholars & historians, since Alexandria was destroyed by earthquakes), Schiff establishes expertise in a context that is accessible to a broader audience. At times her explanation of the source narratives and the author's possible motivations feels plodding, but the framing of these sources is essential to Schiff's project. Some classicists (most significantly Mary Beard in the New York Review of Books) have been catty about the book, passing it off as lightweight or finding nits in the text. This makes me love it more.
Even with thin sourcing and scrubbed of the orientalism and oversexualized mythologies, Cleopatra's life story is incredible. The last quarter of the book dedicated to Rome's war on Egypt and Cleopatra's eventual suicide is taut storytelling, not just "classicism for amateurs."
Here's one of my favorite passages from the book, about a fishing trip that Cleopatra and Antony took during a time of relative peace and prosperity in their lives:
Appian has Antony exclusively in the company of Cleopatra, “to whom his sojourn in Alexandria was wholly devoted.” He sees in her a poor influence. Antony “was often disarmed by Cleopatra, subdued by her spells, and persuaded to drop from his hands great undertakings and necessary campaigns, only to roam about and play with her on the sea-shores.” More likely the opposite was true. And while Cleopatra focused exclusively and intently on her guest, she did so without sacrificing her competitive spirit, her sense of humor, or her agenda. Here are the two on an Alexandrian afternoon, relaxing on the river or on Lake Mareotis in a fishing boat, surrounded by attendants. Mark Antony is frustrated. He commands whole armies but on this occasion somehow cannot coax a single fish from the teeming, famously fertile Egyptian waters. He is all the more mortified as Cleopatra stands beside him. Romance or no, to prove so incompetent in her presence is a torture. Antony does what any self-respecting angler would: Secretly he orders his servants to dive into the water and fasten a series of precaught fish to his hook. One after another he reels these catches in, a little too triumphantly, a little too regularly; he is an impulsive man with something to prove, never particularly good at limits. Cleopatra rarely misses a trick and does not miss this one. She feigns admiration. Her lover is a most dexterous man! Later that afternoon she sings his praises to her friends, whom she invites to witness his prowess for themselves.
A great fleet accordingly heads out the following day. At its outset Cleopatra issues a few furtive orders of her own. Antony puts out his line, to instantaneous results. He senses a great weight and reels in his catch, to peals of laughter: From the Nile he extracts a salted, imported Black Sea herring.
...
She is no scold, having instead mastered that formula for which every parent, coach, and chief executive searches: She has ambition, and no trouble encouraging the same in others. “Leave the fishing rod, General, to us,” Cleopatra admonishes, before the assembled company. “Your prey,” she reminds Antony, “are cities, kingdoms, and continents.”
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Hello, TypePad readers get an extra "blogger's cut" paragraph, omitted from the original Goodreads review! Here it is:
Despite the deafening buzz of critics & blogs around Schiff's "new" approach to history (which was simply: "don't include lies or fiction in your narrative") the book still managed to exceed the expectations of everyone I know who has read it. The book is dense, but it's not a book that an armchair thinker like me would be afraid to talk about with a real intellectual; it reads like an engaging conversation. If you read the fishing story superficially, it's funny, the kind of fishing hi-jinx that could just as well happen today as in first century BC. In fact, Antony's actions are those of "any self-respecting angler," no time period necessary. Schiff uses this story to remind us of the identity of our source (the historian Appian, whose surviving narratives are basically anti-Egyptian tabloids), and our setting, Lake Mareotis. The story also reminds us of Cleopatra's royal stature and lineage. She summons a "great fleet" for a day of fishing and outflanks one of the great generals in history — not to embarrass him, but to remind him of his place in the world (and of course, of hers). Schiff also finishes the joke deftly, as Antony "extracts a salted, imported Black Sea herring" from the lake, the surrounding crowd must have been able to recognize the fish (and the joke) immediately. Today, most people couldn't identify on sight the fish that ends up on their plate.
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