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In particular, Schiff brings Cleopatra’s Alexandria, now almost totally lost to us, to brilliant life. Still, what is there is fascinating stuff. I would have adored a biography written wholly from that Egyptian perspective. It is easy to forget he was Cleopatra’s undoing every bit as much as she was his” (311). In the last pages of the biography, Schiff reminds us that while “Cleopatra is said to have brought down the curtain on an age… from the Egyptian perspective Antony too could be said to have done so. It’s necessary ground to cover, especially if you’re putting Cleopatra firmly in her historical context, but it’s still disappointing.

Since I’ve recently been acquainted with the territory Schiff is covering, even Egyptian bureaucracy is more fascinating. My own interest in Egyptology probably informs that, though. And yet, I still felt odd when I read large passages where Cleopatra, whom Schiff has a fierce, broad admiration for, is quietly in the background, tending to Egypt. Rome’s intentions were a constant source of concern for the queen, from her need for Caesar in order to claim her throne to her major role in the Roman Civil War. Obviously, Cleopatra’s life is centered around her relationship with the Roman Empire, both politically and personally. Schiff can speculate and ponder based on contemporary accounts of other people, but, at the end of the day, Cleopatra, a Life is still from a startlingly Roman perspective. From these pieces, she can sketch the broad outline of Cleopatra’s life, but her perspective is forcibly skewed. Coming off of her George Washington Book Prize-winning The Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff steps down from an over-abundance of documentation on her subject to a handful of thin and contradictory pieces. They are not the kindest to powerful, intelligent, rich, or mixed race ladies in general, these generalized gentlemen, so when one woman is all of those things… Well, that’s when we get Liz Taylor.īecause of those missing documents, any biographer of Cleopatra attempting to correct this image has their work cut out for them. This means that the record on Cleopatra has been written by that most pernicious kind of historian-crotchety old white dudes. Contrasted against the surviving documents of Roman history, we have precious few from her own hand or her own land. While my circumstances are unusual, I think that most people lack context for Cleopatra.

For me, learning about history is the process of filling in the spotty list inside my head known as “the sequence of human events.” Context, as I’ve said before, is the one thing that I absolutely crave.