![]() With no Egyptian sources and only Roman records written years after Cleopatra's death to work from, Schiff is forced to buttress her work with lengthy sketches of Alexandrine and Roman life in the hectic decades before the birth of Christ, as well as rely on such speculative phrases as "It may be that," "It must have been" and "We can only guess that" to make up for the lack of reliable information.īy itself, this isn't a bad thing - a careful re-creation of ancient Mediterranean society is one of the book's strengths - but it tends to throw Schiff's subject into dense shadow for at least the work's first part. A laudable attempt to peel away the layers of legend, propaganda and downright fiction surrounding this most famous of ancient queens, Schiff's tall order is to present a portrait stripped of various writers' biased agendas, including William Shakespeare's. ![]() Much of the better part gets a thorough workout in Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff's new book,Ĭleopatra: A Life. For better or worse, Egypt's last pharaoh has become a kind of gold standard for elusive biography. ![]() Since her death in 30 BC, Cleopatra has been cast variously as a queen, a vamp, a feminist symbol, a tragic heroine and sometimes everything together at once. ![]() Is there any historical figure whose name is more potent with imagery than that of Egypt's Cleopatra VII? It's unlikely. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |