First off, this was an amazing ALOUD lecture! Definitely my favorite so far. Stacy Schiff, a petite, stylish woman, stood at the podium and read the introduction, whetting our appetites(it worked!) and then sat down to answer some questions and talk about her new book, Cleopatra: A Life
What I thought I knew about Cleopatra I gleamed from Shakespeare or from the Epic Elizabeth Taylor movie, but Tuesday night I was educated.
Some thoughts and facts gathered entirely from the lecture:
She was made queen at 18 and died at the age of 39, a generation before the birth of Christ. She was of the Ptolemy family -- Macedonian Greek royalty descending from Alexander the Great --who took great steps to consolidate power and maintain their ethnicity. From ATG to Cleopatra there were about 13 or 14 marriages, 10 of those were full brother/sister marriages, and the others were close cousins. In fact, Cleopatra herself was married twice to a younger brother! She was 18 when she married her 10-year-old brother.
It’s interesting that the story of Cleopatra is still so popular today, considering essentially it is the story of a loser. She loses, regains and ultimately loses again.
Cleopatra was once the richest ruler in the Mediterranean world, not surprising in an economy that Schiff says was like Soviet Russia, with a sort of bureaucratic specificity. Almost everything was taxed, and those taxes were all going to these royals. In a sense, Cleopatra was a CEO of a thriving company.
What also blew me away was imagining Rome as an emerging city. When Cleopatra’s father was little, Rome was a small town with “hill people”. Alexandria was the big city. But Rome grew fast. In almost one generation, shortly after Cleopatra’s death, Rome became the great city we read about in textbooks.
Cleopatra was quite intelligent and managed to align herself with the right men, having as Schiff says, "An amazing knack to have children at precisely the right time, with the right people." She was constantly negotiating, and thinking of new ways to escape when she was boxed in. According to the author, she had plenty of negative propaganda while she lived, as did Mark Antony. In trying to make her all about sex, they undermined her and drew away from the fact that she was all about brains.
What did she look like? On this subject the author said she did wear pearls and a headdress, silks, and gold threaded fabrics. Coins show her with an angled face, and Schiff remarked “no one would have raved about her beauty,” further supporting her cunning intelligence. However, my favorite quote of the night, which is also in the introduction of the book was "The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor."
Concerning Cleopatra’s death, Stacy Schiff said she didn’t buy the story about the queen testing poisons on prisoners to find one that didn’t cause too much pain. She remarked, “Any self respecting Monarch knew his or her poisons.” And she thinks the idea of an asp killing her by biting her breast and also killing two other people was “a lot to ask of any one snake.”
I bought this book and can hardly put it down. I’m fascinated to learn about the epic battles we read about in Shakespeare and Plutarch that weren’t epic at all, and find out the truth about Cleopatra. Elizabeth Taylor’s version is visually stunning, but most of the stories are grossly inaccurate or just plain made up! The bonus - I love Schiff’s writing style!! If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it does me, pick up her book and check out her website - http://www.stacyschiff.com/
