Who Is Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra

Lillie Small

Stacy Schiff. Cleopatra: A Life. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

Cleopatra has been viewed through the centuries as a cunning seductress. In Cleopatra: A Life, Pulitzer Prize-winning Stacy Schiff gives back Cleopatra her reality: She was extremely intelligent, well educated, a powerful leader and a gifted strategist. Schiff provides an unraveling of fact and fiction regarding the highly mythologized Cleopatra. Schiff discusses many elements of her life, including Cleopatra and her rise to and fall from power, as a leader, her relationships with Caesar and Antony, her role as a mother and her affiliation with the goddess Isis. (tied into Motherhood).

According to Schiff, “Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous
What is most interesting, at least according to Schiff, is that Cleopatra entered the relationship “of her will” without any outside influence (72). Caesar first appears in Cleopatra’s history right before the Alexandria War begins. The Egyptian queen and her brother Ptolemy XIII were at war with each other. Cleopatra had backed Pompey, the family patron who was opposing the famous general, Caesar. Consequently, this put her on the wrong side. After the brutal beheading of Pompey by mercenaries hired by Ptolemy XIII, the fledgling female pharaoh now had to convince Caesar that she was allying herself with him. To do this, she had herself smuggled into the palace, which Caesar had taken over. While we are ignorant about how she convinced him she wasn’t his enemy, we do know that he did not kill her and forged an alliance with her. Caesar and Cleopatra endure the Alexandrian War, which is waged by Caesar against Cleopatra’s brother to restore her to the throne. They “emerged as close allies” (19). A close political alliance was not the only result between the young queen and the Roman general. Cleopatra became pregnant during the palace siege in November of
This choice influences Cleopatra both her leadership and the role she takes as a mother after Caesarion was born. “As it happened, nothing could have better-suited twenty-two-year-old Cleopatra’s political agenda than motherhood. And no single act could have secured her future better than bearing Julius Caesar’s son” (85). While Caesarion’s birth was not an advantage for the Romans, it was for Cleopatra. She had produced a male offspring, thus ensuring royal Egyptian succession. After Caesarion’s birth, Cleopatra had coins made with her son depicting the son of Isis, further integrating the goddess into her identity. Cleopatra had three other children who were fathered by Mark Antony. Their names were: Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, who were twins followed by Ptolemy Philadelphus. Education for all the children was a task Cleopatra took seriously. Under their tutor, Nicolaus of Damascus, the children studied history, rhetoric and philosophy among other