★★☆☆☆ Just the facts, Ma'am...

Cleopatra: A Life

Stacy Schiff

I picked up this book after reading Gibbs's Charlie Thorne and the Curse of Cleopatra. In his acknowledgements, Gibbs writes, "Then I read Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff, which is certainly one of the best biographies ever written." I can't agree. Schiff has an agenda. She wants us to know that Cleopatra was a remarkable and admirable woman whose history has been written by her enemies, most of them men eager to sexualize her. Consequently she is unfairly represented in history and popular culture. Schiff's mission is to set the record straight. As polemic, Cleopatra: A Life is effective. I am completely convinced by Schiff's arguments. As biography, it is not so great.

When I finished Cleopatra I gave it a three-star rating based on how I felt at the end. I was glad to get there. Cleopatra is long and tedious, but informative. But then I asked myself the fatal question, "What do I *know* about Cleopatra now that I didn't know before reading this?" The answer was "very little". Thus I revised the "informative" part of my opinion and revised my rating down to two stars. The problem, which is the problem with all ancient history (see my review of SPQR) is that we know much less about what actually happened 2000 years ago than most people realize. When you impugn the reliability of most of the available sources, as Schiff convincingly does, the amount you know drops to almost nothing. This results in a lot of tedious filler, where Schiff basically just makes stuff up to replace the parts of the story she can't possible know. Mostly she is open about this. For instance, she describes the splendor of Cleopatra's palace in tedious detail, using the "would have" construction throughout. (There "would have" been this and that, and Cleopatra "would have" worn such and such.) In the source notes, we find the following remark, "Josephus provides descriptions of Herod’s temple and palace in JW, V.173–225; C’s could only have been more opulent."

Early in the book there is a wonderful story of how Cleopatra was smuggled in a sack on the back of her retainer Apollodorus into Julius Caesar's presence in the palace of her brother. (Her mortal enemy -- you haven't seen sibling rivalry until you've seen ancient Egyptian monarchies!) As I read this, my first thought was "How do we know this happened? What is your source? Given that you don't trust any of your sources, why would we believe this suspiciously theatrical tale?" By the end of the book, I still did not have an answer.

By the end of the book, I was wishing for a "Just the facts, Ma'am" Cleopatra biography. Given how little we know for sure about Cleopatra, this might be a short book, but I can't see that as a bad thing. In fact, I know now almost exactly what it would look like: the Wikipedia page on Cleopatra. (Yes, of course I am aware that Wikipedia is not considered a reliable scholarly source, but they are far more scrupulous about naming sources than Schiff is.) I understand why Schiff doesn't want to publish a biography that reads like a Wikipedia page. But honestly, although it is dry, the Wikipedia page is far less tedious than Schiff's biography.

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