As promised I am taking a break from dead white European males to write about an author who is 1) living, 2)a woman and 3) Doesn't even write fiction,. but there is nothing in the MFA bylaws that says I have to confine my attentions exclusively to fiction and so we are going to take a little journey back in time, before there was a Europe, really. But there was an empire, and rivalries and one of the most effective rulers of her time, and she was a woman, the kind who could make Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sit up and take notice, and who was so great and larger than life, that the current Republican leadership would have to stand on each others shoulders, just so they could kiss her ass. I refer of course to Cleopatra the VII, Otherwise known simply as Cleopatra. Sometimes real history is really just as dramatic as in the movies.
And who do we have to thank for this? Why Stacy Schiff, that's who, a writer of masterful biographies, whose biography of Antoine Saint-Exupery was a pulitzer prize finalist and in every way superb, and who has won a pulitzer for her biography of Mrs Vladimir Nabokov and many other well-deserved awards. She is also This Weeks favorite author of mine.
Let us now descend below the Great Orange Glyph and revisit Ptolomaic Egypt, Rome just before it became an Empire, and the world of a civilization so great it would arguably never be surpassed until the 18th century.
The book opens with an interesting introduction by the author explaining just what it is about the story of Cleopatra that fascinates us - and why so much of it is likely to be untrue. Like most stories that come to us out of antiquity, it has been encrusted over time with legends and propaganda, that in Cleopatra's case at least was started soon after she died. Much of it was written by her triumphant enemies. And of course the story became grist for a popular mill of plays, novels and movies, from Plutarch, down through Shakespeare (I often think that 'Antony and Cleopatra' is one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, even though he cribbed Plutarch for much of the story), and through George Bernard Shaw and to a movie starring the young and very voluptuous Elizabeth Taylor.
Stacy Schiff herself is eloquent on this point:
We then start the biography in the Syrian Desert where Cleopatra (actually the sixth of that line, who called herself Cleopatra VII, but very little is known about the others) is in exile facing a hostile army led by her brother, Ptolemy XIII, who is doing what all good Ptolemys at the time were doing, which is trying to murder their sibling. That line had started with Alexander the Great's arguably best general, who had intercepted Alexander's body when he died, claimed the already ancient kingdom of Egypt, and set himself upon the throne as Ptolemy the first. And to cement his line, distinguish himself from other middle eastern kings and reinforce the legend of descendant from the Gods, his line practiced sibling marriages (not just in name either), which led to an endless succession of plots, murders, double crosses and forced reconciliations. I'm surprised HBO hasn't done a series on them yet.
Also, most scholars know that there was nothing indigenously Egyptian about Cleopatra, whose name, in Greek, means 'glory of her father'; she was Macedonian, descended from a line of scrappy Macedonians who had learned to survive. Her father had been Ptolemy XI 'Auletes' and had also perfected the idea of surviving by becoming a client-king of the sort Rome would like. For indeed, the first century BC was not a good time to be the disputed monarch of a fading dynasty; Rome was rising and no kingdom save Parthia in the east could long stand up to her. Furthermore, there was civil war in Rome, nominally a republic, but in reality controlled by a grasping oligarchy that cared very little about the common people or indeed how the nascent empire was being run (sound familiar?) Survival often meant forming the correct alliance at the right time, and not to get to purple about it, but to a large extent the successful non-Roman rulers were people who did just that; including one who could say to have done it best of all: Cleopatra.
Oh, and one more bit of trivia about the Egyptian Ptolemaic rulers that is not in the book, but which I cannot resist passing on anyway: It was Ptolemy II that gathered the seventy-two scholars in Alexandria, his capital city (the Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great was still to be found there) and there translated an obscure religious text, written mostly in Hebrew for use of the city's Jews, that became the Septuagint (greek for 'seventy') and the foundation for the old testament. Without this introduction to the Greek speaking world, I am not sure there would have been a Christianity. But I digress..
Anyhow, here we have the supremely intelligent and very well educated Cleopatra, exiled from her main city, with her brother plotting her death. It would seem that things would be very bleak for this girl-ruler, just turned twenty-one, exiled from her court. But then, two Romans turn up in Egypt for the purpose of staging the denuemont of their prolonged battle: Pompey (technically Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) and Julius Caesar. The two had first been allies, linked by a joint rule of Rome; later however they quarreled and the forces of Caesar proved victorius. Pompey fled to Egypt, thinking that the Egyptians owed him a favor and would support him against Caesar. Unfortunately for him, he was murdered just as he was going ashore by the assassins of the boy-king Ptolemy XIII, leaving Caesar in Alexandria and providing Cleopatra an opportunity.
And there Cleopatra takes it: She has herself smuggled into Caesar's quarters in a burlap sack (Schiff expertly deconstructs the subsequent legend that she stepped out nude) and proposes an alliance. Caesar accepts, meddles in Alexandrine politics, finally leaves after establishing Cleopatra securely on the throne (and after Cleopatra gives birth to his son, Ceasarion) and goes off first to Spain, and then to consolidate his power in Rome. Cleopatra soon follows; she really did visit Rome, although much more in the capacity of a ruler visiting another on a business trip, rather then a mistress following her lover; that would be the provence of the Propaganda in the centuries after her death.
Schiff is a generous author: She has complete, almost purple descriptions of the glories of Alexandria and Rome:
"From east to west the city measured nearly four miles, a wonderland of baths, theaters, gymnasiums, courts, temples, shrines and synagogues. A limestone wall surrounded its perimeter, punctuated by towers, patrolled at both ends of the Canopic way by prostitutes. During the day Alexandria echoed with the sounds of horses hooves, the cries of the porridge sellers or chickpea vendors, street performers, soothsayers, moneylenders. Its spice stands released exotic aromas, carried through the streets by a thick salty sea breeze. Long legged white and black ibises assembled at every intersection, foraging for crumbs. Until well into the evening, when the vermillion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos and color. Altogether it was a mood altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world; superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go and spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade"
And Rome:
By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, and Oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-squeking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer. . .[Cleopatra] was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and the squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly.To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: "You have to be a very rich man to get to sleep in Room" asserted Juvenal, who cursed the evening stampede and felt he risked his life each time he stepped outside
Well, we all know what happens next: Caesar is assassinated; Cleopatra escapes from Rome and returns to Alexandra, now secure on her throne and married to an equally disloyal brother, Ptolemy XIV, whom she soon has poisoned and chooses her son Caesarion as her consort, thus freeing her from the need to be married to any more treacherous relatives (she had run out of brothers, anyway). She begins truly restoring Ptolemaic greatness in Egypt; an undoubtedly incredibly intelligent polymath (according to accounts fluent in nine languages) she gathers scholars and poets and restores the library in Alexandria. She playes, according to Schiff, an adroit game of politics with both Caesar's murderers and his avengers, including the dour but capable Octavain and the dashing Marc Antony.
Antony at that time had headed east, in search of funds for his army, Eastern conquests, and I would imagine some Eastern pleasures. He summoned Cleopatra, who strategically delayed him and then, in perfect timing, met him at Tarsus, in what is now Southern Turkey, in all her royal regalia. This scene has been celebrated so many times and here it would seem, justly so; Schiff herself says that the first meeting with Antony, on the river Cydnus: "Often with Cleopatra there is but slim convergence between the life and the legend. Tarsus is one of the rare points when the two fuly overlap"
At this point, I bring in the bard, William Shakespeare who, enlarging on Plutarch, penned the description that will live for the ages - and for even better effect, places it in the mouth of the rough soldier Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus who is literally stunned into sheer lyricism:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made
The water which they beat to follow faster
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O'erpicturing that of Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colored fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
Throughout the book Schiff makes clear that everything Cleopatra, and to an extent Antony did was a matter of strategy and statecraft - losing the world for love was a much later invention. But aside from the wish to denigrate a strong leader who happened to be female, can anyone with any romance in their heart not understand why? Because that is what happens: Antony and Cleopatra form an alliance, even though Antony is already married to Octavian's sister, whom he soon abandons, and he has children by Cleopatra. They make a decent power couple; it is hard not to think that they had aspirations of jointly ruling the known world, and had Octavian not been as capable a politician and schemer as he was, they may very well have succeeded.
In this context, I then have to mention Cleopatra's appearance, over which she undoubtedly took great care - she was a ruler after all - but which nothing authentic except images of old coins shows us. Such as
Young Cleopatra from Judea
and
Bronze coin in Alexandria
And, with Caesarion
OK, so she may not have looked like Elizabeth Taylor. But with the riches of Egypt at her disposal, like that really mattered?
Anyway, Stacy Schiff follows her life, right up to the end, through the defeat at Actium and finally where, surrounded by hostile forces, she ends her own life (as usual, the real story isn't clear. Octavian may have engineered it, or at least deliberately failed to prevent it) The story of the asp is likely complete fiction; Cleopatra would have planned better than that, and there were potions like hemlock and morphine that were quite effective. Her two most devoted servants killed themselves with their mistress; one of whom gave the most immortal parting shot to Octavian's man, who, when he exclaimed "A fine deed this, Charmion", replied "It is indeed most fine, and befitting the descendant of so many kings" before falling down dead herself. A fitting end one could say to a most fine life.
So why is this important, and what does this tell us progressives, particularly us men who strongly believe in the nobility of women, and the notion that excellence is to be found across genders? I think that in these 'modern' times where women form the very reduced minority of political leaders, fortune 500 CEOs and still earn maybe 70% of the male salary, it is salutary to be reminded that like Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Eva Peron and other strong minded leaders, that we are a dyadic species, that brilliance and ability are to be rewarded and that leadership effectiveness doesn't always depend on the shape of one's. . . 46th chromosome. As Stacy Schiff - herself a woman of obvious brilliance concludes:
From our first glimpse of her to the last, she dazzles for her ability to set the scene. To the end she was mistress of herself, astute, spirited, inconceivably rich, pampered yet ambitious. . . In her adult life, Cleopatra would have met few people she considered her equal. To the Romans she was a stubborn, supreme exception to every rule. She remains largely incomparable: She had plenty of predecessors, few successors. With her the age of empresses largely came to an end.
Next week we shift gears and I will try to scare you all, just a little.