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Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff (view source)
Revision as of 15:57, 31 August 2020
, 15:57, 31 August 2020no edit summary
Cleopatra's political ambitions led her to bear the children of the two most important men of her era, Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. One of the great unanswerable mysteries being whether the conception of these children were as purely political acts or whether she felt genuine affection for their fathers. As Schiff points out it is perhaps these mysteries that surround Cleopatra, the fact that the images we have of her are diametrically opposed, the Roman version and the Greek version of events, that keep her a perpetual point of interest so long after her death.
The writing itself is seductive and sensuous, in particular it is the descriptions of the city of Alexandria which leap off the page to intoxicate the reader with the heady scents of the city's splendour. Schiff really captures the decadent lifestyle of the Hellenistic monarch, and has left me with a desire to read more into the period and the characters in Cleopatra's life, surely a compliment for any biographer.
This is definitely the kind of book you will want to re-read. The writing is so densely packed with rich detail that it is impossible to take it all in the first time round. There is an impressive amount of research on display here. As much as the author reiterates that in places there is little solid information to go on, the work never feels patchy, often we are presented with multiple accounts, with the acknowledgement that we will never know which, if any are true. When Schiff can find no direct source about Cleopatra herself she uses information that is generally applicable to the time to fill in the gaps, for example , although there is little information available specifically about Cleopatra's childhood Schiff surmises based on what Ptolemaic children probably would have experienced.
I did get slightly confused between the people in the book, although this was always going to be an inevitable difficulty, which Schiff does try to address at the beginning of the book by explaining what names she will be using for the main characters. History, popular media, and themselves have given the main Roman warriors in this novel many names, and those with little prior knowledge of them may get a bit lost at times.
The book manages to be both academic and accessible. There are both footnotes and endnotes, yet Schiff manages to keep the text itself clear of superscript numbers, which makes for a much easier read. The footnotes are linked in by stars in the text, and provide additional information without overloading. Included in the first few pages of the book are maps of what the area would have looked like in Cleopatra's time which I did find myself turning back to study. Also , there are two sets of pictures inside the book, including photographs and descriptions of artefacts which are perfectly placed to provide a background to the text that has gone before and also to provide visuals of the descriptions Schiff makes of them in the text.
Stacey Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize -winning author and Cleopatra lives up to her reputation. This is definitely a book that I will be picking up again, and therefore I would recommend this book as a buy. I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
Further reading suggestion: If you liked Cleopatra then you could try [[Hand of Isis by Jo Graham]], a historical fiction about Cleopatra's reign. Alternatively for a biography of another of history's most powerful queens, try [[Becoming Queen by Kate Williams]], about the life of Queen Victoria. If you'd like more fiction from Schiff, we can recommend [[The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff|The Witches: Salem 1692]].
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