Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra

Luca Stromann

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, "but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them."

One son signed an agreement with his mother: he was to supply her with specific quantities of wheat, oil, and salt unless the river fell beneath a certain level, at which point she was to do his housekeeping.

Caesar and Cleopatra represented not a romance but a sort of magical apparition from another world, the earthly visitation of two living gods.

This was a tough read and hard to get through for me. I did not like the author’s writing style, which at times comes across as snarky and pretentious. I did not always like her supposed characterization of Cleopatra, either; she made some harsh and contradictory assumptions. And her love of the em dash (and even the semi colon), something as I writer I enjoy, seemed to be too much. Just use more commas! (Though I noticed on many accounts there were places where commas should have been used). The author, too, seems more enamored with Rome and especially Cicero than Cleopatra herself. I learned some new things, but maybe should have steered clear of this book because I already know a lot about Cleopatra. Not a great or overly accessible nonfiction read. For a better understanding, I’d recommend Cleopatra’s Daughter by Jane Draycott. Cleopatra’s famously loyal handmaidens aren’t even mentioned until the end of the book; so much of the Egyptian world and culture of Cleopatra’s day was glossed over in favor of including more Roman context.

Amanda

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.

A Life

Briar's Reviews

I've been staring at this book on my shelf for MANY years. I bought it at a local bookstore and one of the workers there told me it was a great fictional tale about Cleopatra. Well, they were wrong and it's actually a non-fiction retelling of her entire life. It's like a giant textbook full of archived information. It includes actual information and then commentary about fictional tales, rumours and gossip (but told in a very honest way). This book will give you all the ins and outs of Cleopatra's life. She's not Elizabeth Taylor by any means. This was a young woman who was charismatic, very beautiful and had one interesting life. 

You're going to want to love history and facts to get into this book. It's all non-fiction. It's not written in a "fun" tone, it's all educational. I was honestly surprised but really loved it. It took me back to my school days and I didn't mind one bit. It was interesting seeing the footnotes, endnotes and references throughout the book. One-fourth of this book was just the references! It blew my mind but also made me respect Stacy Schiff. This book was well planned out and well researched, you can tell.

We won't ever truly know Cleopatra and her life 100%, that's for sure, but Stacy Schiff gives us a wonderful insight into this woman's insane world.

Four out of five stars.

Lacy W

I really had high hopes with this book. I don't know a lot of Cleopatra but she is one of my favorite Egyptians to read and learn about. I just find everything about her so incredibly fascinating. But this book....I don't know. I just felt indifferent to Cleopatra and what was going on in her world. I wasn't completely absorbed in it. I even contemplated not finishing it. 

Now I am aware that it is a biography and biographies can be tricky to read for pleasure. I think I held Stacy Schiff in standards with Robert K. Massie (who wrote  Catherine the Great and who I think is a brilliant biographist). Going in, I thought that this biography was going to be written in a somewhat similar style. Written like a narrative with perhaps documents or other such things included. 

I was wrong but yet right. Let me explain. This book was written with the expectation that you had knowledge of Egyptian monarchs. I have very little knowledge. I know only a few pharaohs like King Tut and Nefertiti. Even then, I know little of what they actually did or accomplished during their reign. 

This book constantly jumped from past to present. It seemed to talk more about what was going on around Cleopatra than about the woman herself. Which I understand is totally important but we are talking almost entire chapters with very little mention of her. 

I think part of my frustration with this book is the lack of information we actually have about this queen. A lot of documents and such were lost to time or destroyed due to her reputation as whore. Papyrus doesn't survive well in Egyptian weather. I'm not blaming the author for that. For as little information as we have, Stacy Schiff wove an interesting tale of this formidable queen. 

I will say, in the book's benefit, that I learned quite a bit. If you learn even one small thing in a biography, then I consider the book a success. Cleopatra was a champion for women's rights, essentially. Living in Egypt during her time, as a woman, had to be a great feeling. Women were allowed to divorce their husbands, own land, get a fabulous education (Cleopatra was fluent in quite a few languages) and so much more. It makes me feel a little better with what we are going through now as a nation. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Maybe we will get lucky and ancient Egypt will be repeated over here in the USA. 

To wrap this up before I get on my political soapbox again, I think that this book is for certain individuals. If you are fascinated with ancient Egypt and know quite a bit about it, this is the book for you. If you know very little, like I do, I suggest brushing up on the Ptolemies first (Cleopatra's family) and even brushing up on your history of the gods and goddesses before attempting this book.

Liz Carpenter

This cannot have been an easy book to write - the amount of research that must have been necessary to complete the manuscript must have been absolutely staggering. Add to that the fact that there really remain so few concrete facts about Cleopatra herself, it would be difficult to fashion a three-dimensional character and personality. Schiff discounts as much as possible the prevailing myths, and relies heavily on historical context to present without sentimentality Cleopatra as a shrewd, intelligent ruler who managed to prevail in impossible circumstances (until she and Marc Antony brought each other to their ultimate ends, at any rate) in a world that didn't know what to make of her.

This is not a lightweight narrative, and it accomplished what few books do: a natural speed reader, I really had to slow down to absorb it all. There are historical facts, anecdotes, and side notes galore, and miraculously, there is enough flow so as to not become boring or overwhelming (i.e., I didn't need a flowchart to keep track of everyone). If I never read another book about Cleopatra, I'm not sure I'd be missing much.

Cleopatra's palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff's is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Melody Izard

I began listening to this audio book assuming this was going to be a historical fiction work based loosely on Cleopatra's life. Let's just say I was wrong. Not only was I wrong - but I made a quip about poisonous asps only to discover that the popular account of the Queen of the Nile offing herself with a hissing snake, was most probably false, according to the author. 

This is a work of non-fiction written to set straight that very type of historical information that would lead someone to write a vapid semi-erotic, breathy romance about the Egyptian leader (who was Greek, by the way), and would cause a reader to jump to the conclusion that what she was about to read was empty chick-lit.

Enjoyed it and glad I persevered.

Erin Noel

I found this book incredibly difficult to read because there is no intuitive story structure or through-line. It reads as if sitting across from a friend, who's recounting the previous night's events, sharing random bits and pieces of names, places, and drama in a rapid fire non-linear sequence. While I give Stacy credit for trying to make this biography read less conventionally, it was simply too confusing to follow and therefore unenjoyable.

Chris Aldrich

Overall an intriguing work. I was hoping for a slightly more scholarly work, but considering the current book market and sales/marketing pressures, this was not a wholly bad attempt balancing the need for sales in the mass market versus providing an interesting take on the historical background without being an overly academic unread monograph on the subject.

There were many sections which were a bit too flowery for my taste, but which certainly added reasonable color to the narrative. One must keep in mind what is verifiable history versus simply plausible storytelling for the time period. 

I appreciated the specific references and comparing/contrasting of the previous historical accounts vis-a-vis the provided speculation about Cleopatra's personal motives which gives a much more expanded account of what may have actually taken place. Cleopatra's story is certainly one which shows that history is written by the victors.

If nothing Schiff does an excellent job of helping to "right" centuries of skewed viewpoints on a woman who was most certainly a significant and incomparable head of state. The likely truths of the matter are that the actual events were far more interesting than what popular culture might have us otherwise believe.

Elizabeth Raines

"Cleopatra: A Life", tells the story of one of the most seductive and powerful women in our history. It goes deeper into who she really was and shows that she was a powerful leader and ruled one of the largest areas in her time and not just some queen who was sleeping around. Cleopatra is a character in history that we do not know much about, she is a mystery and we can only find out about her from writers who were on the side opposite than she was. In this book, Schiff tries to show who this queen of Egypt really was.
 Going into this book, I did not really know much of Cleopatra or Egyptian history for that matter. All I knew was she had affairs with two of the most powerful men at her time and later ending up killing herself. I learned so much from this book, about Roman and Alexandrian society and about the politics of this time. Most times Cleopatra is seen as a drama queen who knew nothing of politics but that is not true. She was seen as a goddess to her people. Cleopatra got involved with Rome for the benefit of her citizens, she later up ending her own life not wanting to submit her country to the foreign empire. That lead us into our modern era of history. 
 The reason that I gave this book a four out of five is because I felt like this book did somewhat jump around from one subject to the other, but it was an easy read, flowed like a story and was hard to put now. I very much enjoyed this book and recommend to anyone who wants to know more about this time in history, the birth of our modern times.

Cleopatra

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