Cleopatra has generated more fame — in the form of poems, paintings, books, plays and films — per known fact than any woman in history. As Joyce Tyldesley phrases it in her fascinating and irresistible biography, “It is clearly never going to be possible to write a conventional biography of Cleopatra.”
So Tyldesley has written one.
An archaeologist, author (“Daughters of Isis”) and popular consultant for TV shows on ancient history, Tyldesley has chosen to re-create her subject by putting together the puzzle pieces of history that surround Cleopatra’s life and legend.
“With an almost complete lack of primary sources,” she writes, “we cannot hope to hear Cleopatra’s true voice, and we are forced to see her through secondary eyes. . . . Few of us would wish to be judged this way.”
True, but the queen herself, actually Cleopatra VII, would perhaps not be displeased with the impression she has made more than 2,000 thousand years after her death. Of course, she might have some trouble understanding her own story, because it has taken us so long to put it into perspective.
Neither an Egyptian by blood nor an actual Greek — she could trace her ancestry on her father’s side to the original Ptolemy, a general of Alexander the Great’s — she was a fabulous hybrid of those cultures and several others that were native to the Egypt of the first century B.C.
What she was not, Tyldesley argues, was the villainous vamp portrayed in the movies. Played by such actresses as Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor, the movie Cleopatra derived from the overheated imaginations of such Western writers as Plutarch, whose “Life of Marc Antony” influenced most later writers, including Shakespeare. (Tyldesley finds a much more even-handed source in the Roman historian Dio, who wrote a century after Plutarch.)
Where Tyldesley’s book differs from most modern accounts of Cleopatra’s life and times (particularly Michael Grant’s superb 1972 biography) is that her conclusions stem from an intimate knowledge of Egyptian culture rather than from Greek and Roman historians to whom Cleopatra was a combination of sorceress and seductress.
Not that she wasn’t seductive, though if she was ravishingly beautiful, the evidence has not survived on the face of coins supposedly cast in her likeness, nor did her appearance seem all that striking to writers of the time.
Charm and intelligence were almost certainly her most alluring traits and what first attracted Caesar to her. (Her money didn’t hurt, either; according to Tyldesley, “Cleopatra was the wealthiest monarch in the world.”) It was only in centuries after her death that stories of her great beauty became common, probably the result of chroniclers looking for an easy explanation for her extraordinary power.
Cleopatra was, Tyldesley concludes, “an intelligent and effective monarch who set realistic goals and who very nearly succeeded in creating a dynasty that would have re-established Egypt as a world superpower.” Her love affairs with Caesar and Marc Antony were about much more than passion; she was doing her best to help her country survive turbulent times.
Roman historians, though, saw only “an unnatural, immodest woman who preyed on other women’s husbands. From this developed the myth of the sexually promiscuous Cleopatra … a harsh legacy indeed for a woman who probably had no more than two, consecutive sexual relationships.”
Readers who enjoy not only history but also how it evolves into myth will find a feast in Tyldesley’s book. You may be disappointed to find out, for instance, that the queen of Egypt did not first appear to Julius Caesar unwrapped from an Oriental carpet, and that it’s unlikely that Cleopatra (and the two servants who died with her) succumbed to the bite of an asp.
But Tyldesley’s theories about what most likely did happen are at least as interesting as the folklore.
Allen Barra writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. His next book is “Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee,” due in March.
Nonfiction
Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley, $27.50
