San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
More work, less sex in real life of Cleopatra
If you know anything about Cleopatra, it’s likely you’ve heard that she was beautiful, a scheming seductress who brought powerful men to their knees. And if you’re a certain age, you probably have in your brain the indelible image of the Egyptian ruler as portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor — all kohleyed and heaving-bosomed — in the 1963 epic film “Cleopatra.”
Little has been done to dispel this scheming, sexualized version, but with “Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth,” part of Yale University Press’ new Ancient Lives series, Francine Prose sets the record straight.
Cleopatra never had the opportunity to tell her own story. As with most figures of early history, it was written for her. But while charismatic figures typically have their accomplishments aggrandized in the historical record, Cleo
patra’s were — of course, not surprisingly for a woman — instead all but dismissed in favor of her alleged sexual exploits.
The truth? Cleopatra ruled ancient Egypt for nearly three decades as co-regent, initially with her father, Ptolemy XII, then with, in succession, two of her younger brothers and finally with her eldest son, Caesarion, fathered by Julius Caesar. Well-educated, she could speak various languages and was a powerful diplomat who maintained power through periods of religious and military conflict, and oversaw an empire that included Egypt, Cyprus and other segments of the Middle East.
But over time, writes Prose, “Cleopatra descended from what she was in life — an intelligent and competent ruler at a perilous moment in her country’s history — into the personification of everything Eastern, decadent, and female, a despot who spent and squandered a fortune and cast her blinding spell over two Roman heroes.”
This narrative only got worse over time: The 14th century poet Bocaccio accused her of keeping men “wretchedly in love with her,” while in the 17th century, a forged volume of Cleopatra porn emerged that included an account of her having sex with 106 men in a brothel.
The first few chapters are spent fixing the historical record, and they are, to be honest, a bit of a slog. A gorgeous novelist and prolific biographer who has written about the lives of figures as varied as Anne Frank and Peggy Guggenheim, Prose is here, of necessity, mostly reassembling the research of others. But it’s a short book, and we quickly get to where Prose really sparkles: her critiques of the cultural depictions of Cleopatra. Prose vividly reveals just how much more marginalized, sexualized and scandalous these representations became, no matter the artistic medium. Even in Shakespeare’s play “Antony and Cleopatra,” Prose argues, Cleopatra “seems to have only a tangential role in its historical events.”
The parts of Cleopatra’s life deemed worthy of attention are instead confined to sex and death — and exaggeration. Prose pokes holes at the story of Cleopatra’s alleged suicide by snake bite, revealing, for example, how by the late 15th century the site of the supposedly lethal wound migrates, in both literary and artistic depictions, from her arm to her breast. In one, writes Prose, “Not just one but two snakes are attached to her, one to each of her breasts.”
Cleopatra is, of course, not the only historical figure that fell victim to this sort of mythologizing. The number of important yet disregarded/ marginalized/ignored people warranting these necessary reassessments is infinite, and I, for one, am ready to read about them.