Day 195: Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff

Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash

One of my favorite writers of historical fiction, Mary Doria Russell, wrote that Stacy Schiff’s biography Cleopatra (2010) left Russell “limp with envy and admiration.”

I hardly needed more prompting. Happily, I could get Schiff’s book through my local library on LIBBY (my favorite app this year, BTW). Despite starting a new semester this week, I’ve found myself voraciously listening to Cleopatra at every opportunity — on the exercise bike, in the kitchen, even taking the PRT to steal extra reading time.

More than envy or admiration, my predominant emotion as I delve into the book is gratitude. Though “women’s lib” has been around at least as long as I have, women haven’t come a long way (baby) in making up ground in the biography canon. This matters some when reconsidering the lives of Great Men, but far more when reconsidering the lives of Great Women.

Cleopatra, arguably the Greatest Woman who ever lived, badly needed a female friend in the twenty-first century. She found a fierce one in Schiff.

Working with the same thin historical record as past biographers, Schiff — like the best biographers of every generation — looks at those sources through a new lens, asking the questions a feminist wants to know today: Did a twenty-one-year-old, probably sexually naive queen really “seduce” the 52-year-old Julius Caesar after surprising him in the palace to plead for her survival, or might he have done some of the seducing? If the contemporary sources neglect plenty of opportunities to praise Cleopatra’s beauty, what actually made her so memorable? And, more darkly, what standard should we use to judge a woman from a long, long tradition of familicide who kills her relatives only when other options fail?

It’s refreshing that western culture’s view of contemporary women has changed so dramatically in the past century. It’s time our view of historical figures (of any gender) got a similarly feminist reinspection.