Biographer Stacy Schiff can tell you Cleopatra wasn’t black, did not die by the bite of an asp and may or may not have loved Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. She was, however, a highly educated and intelligent ruler who definitely needed friends in Rome. “Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics not a matter of love,” said Schiff, the author of Cleopatra: A Life, during a recent visit to Toronto.
Her new biography of the Egyptian queen dispels a few myths, confirms a few others and generally enlarges our limited picture of the kohl-eyed seductress of the Nile. It paints a picture of a skilled political operator rather than a wanton temptress. Still, Schiff’s Cleopatra remains a powerful and exotic enough creature to keep Hollywood interested: Producer Scott Rudin and Sony bought movie rights to the book when Schiff first signed her publishing contract, and are developing the role for Angelina Jolie.
Jolie will have her work cut out for her, displacing Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes from the popular imagination, just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Schiff signed up for a tricky job when she chose Cleopatra as her next subject. There is very little reliable evidence on which to base any portrait; the Roman historian Plutarch, Schiff’s principal source, was writing 100 years after Cleopatra’s death.
But that was part of what attracted the American biographer to the Egyptian queen. She has previously profiled Mrs. Vladimir (Vera) Nabokov and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and spent years buried under 18th-century documents writing her last book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, about Benjamin Franklin. She was looking for a change.
“Having spent five years in an archive from which it didn’t look like I would ever emerge, a subject with limited documentation was appealing,” she said. She thinks the gaps in Cleopatra’s biography are also part of her enduring appeal. “We are eternally attracted to the story with missing pieces. ... Everyone recognizes her name but nobody knows anything about her. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to remedy that situation!”
Besides, despite the great volume of documents Franklin left behind, Schiff says we still don’t know the mother of his son or his true feelings about the French: Historical biography always has its limitations, best to acknowledge them and get to work.
“It was piecing together a mosaic of tiny pieces,” Schiff said. “We don’t know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. ... There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. ... We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.”
Schiff can conclude Cleopatra would have been well versed in poetry, astronomy, geometry, geography and especially rhetoric. Her first language was Greek – the Ptolemy family was Macedonian, and she was described as honey-skinned – but she was reputedly the first member to learn Egyptian, and spoke as many as seven other languages. At the end of the Hellenistic age, just before the rise of imperial Rome, her Egypt was largely Rome’s client state, although Rome also depended heavily on Egyptian grain. (Schiff compares the situation to a more powerful United States resentfully dependent on Canadian oil.) Cleopatra could not maintain power without courting the right Romans, hence her liaisons with Caesar and later Antony.
