Historian finds the woman behind Cleopatra

CLEOPATRA THE GREAT: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND, By Joann Fletcher  HarperCollins, $20.50

Cleopatra isn’t just Liz Taylor. Nor is she a simply sultry vixen with no other talents beyond her, ahem, womanly attributes. Joanne Fletcher reveals that the Egyptian pharoah, descended from a Greek and feared by Rome, was a complex woman possessed of a keen intellect and such a thorough understanding of all three cultures that she could masterfully manipulate people, generals and Caesar to her will.
Fletcher’s book sets to rest many a myth about Cleopatra VII, tearing apart a story woven about her like an ancient Roman mantle, covering, hiding and masking truths about the woman Rome so feared. For instance, she didn’t arrive before Caesar rolled in a carpet (though it did make for good cinema when Elizabeth Taylor showed up before Rex Harrison). But she may have, in fact, drunk an enormous pearl to win a bet with Mark Antony. Certainly she used her sex to her advantage, impressing the populace of both Egypt and Rome with her beauty and grandeur. It is, in fact, this ability to impress which Fletcher argues sets Cleopatra apart from other rulers,
Adept at languages and possessed of a sharp study of culture, she exploited both to secure the loyalty of the Egyptian people as she became the first Ptolemy to learn Egyptian and thus could speak “directly to them as Egyptians in their land of the Nile. Her cause was their cause, and, by actively participating as a goddess-monarch in rites which had for so long sustained their country, she secured their loyalty.”
Fletcher also places the seeds of the bad rap history leaves Cleopatra in her use of Egyptian culture. To Rome, the eventual victor in this battle of ancient empires, Egypt was “the home of everything unacceptable,” a garish and wanton land full of sensual and strange beings who worshipped animals and went about scantily clad and heavily made up.
To Caesar, however, the Egyptian princess represented an opportunity for greatness: she was seen as a descendant of Alexander the Great, Caesar’s idol. After witnessing her carefully stage-managed, quasi-religious events during a tour of her country in 47-48 B.C., Caesar took a bit of this back to Rome, orchestrating his three Triumphs in grand and lavish fashion, excesses which troubled Republicans in the Senate but won over the Roman people. Cleopatra witnessed these events, moving to Rome to be closer to Caesar. The fact that she could stay there, raising his son Caesarion, while still keeping firm hold of power in Egypt speaks volumes for her political cunning and her hold on people.
Cleopatra exercised many of the same talents that snared Caesar to ally with Antony. To Antony, a Grecophile who identified with Dionysius, Cleopatra represented an opportunity to get closer to his idols while raiding Egypt’s massive treasury for his planned campaigns on Parthia and Octavian, thus restoring Alexander the Great’s empire. For Cleopatra, Antony, as with Caesar before him, was an opportunity to strengthen Egypt and to restore the Ptolemies’ former empire. Unfortunately, Antony lacked Caesar’s power and a lot of his panache. Cleopatra’s carefully stagemanaged political events crumbled, either through true love for Antony or simply fate, and the clash with Octavian was too much to bear. Fletcher, however, shows a very different side to Cleopatra throughout the calamities that marked the end of her life.
As Octavian closed in, the pharoah turned her energy toward ensuring a future for her children, Caesarion and her three children with Antony, and to orchestrating her own death. The book makes an intriguing point about Cleopatra’s mythical final encounter with an asp — to die from a snake’s venom, a snake does not necessarily have to be present. Fletcher argues instead that Cleopatra successfully smuggled powerful venom in a hairpin, using the poison to kill herself in choreographed fashion.
Throughout her engrossing work on Cleopatra, Fletcher does a superb job of setting Cleopatra in the context of her time while also peeling away centuries of myth and mystique. At no point does the writing become dense or academic and Fletcher also avoids the boredom associated with knowing how the story ends. She carries the story past Cleopatra’s death, showing how the woman behind the story influenced rulers and empires for generations to come. It was that legacy, Fletcher shows, a culture and political method that spread over the known world, that made Cleopatra VII worthy of the name Great.