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Cleopatra (Penguin Classic Biography)

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Ernle Bradford does for Cleopatra what did Robert Caro is doing for LBJ. The myth of the lady is immense, but Bradford goes right to primary sources and does his best to correct our misapprehensions about her by pointing out that we know so little first hand about Cleopatra. Some dispute she existed. Bradford makes no such claim, and he is in a position to know, having spent many years immersed in the lore of the Ptolemies.

Cleopatra was the daughter of Ptolemy the XIIth, and I imagine now that I have read Bradford describing their relationship, that he, Ptolemy, was rather like Emma's father in the famous novel by Jane Austen. He was a garrulous old fool in love with the sound of his own voice, rather pathetic if you looked at him the wrong way, and his daughter probably learned a lot about diplomacy just trying to stay on his good side, just like Emma 1700 years later. And like Emma, part of her problem was that the tools she had used to deal with a difficult father were not as appropriate when it came time to deal with the adult men in her life. Emma had Mr. Knightley, but Cleopatra had real rulers to deal with: first Caesar, the playboy prince of the Western world, a man so civilized that he was said to have been bisexual, and then Antony, who was more of a man's man, sort of an Ernest Borgnine type according to Ernle Bradford's clever summing up of the man. Cleopatra had children by both of them, but neither of them could totally trust her, just as her father could not bring himself to be close to her, preferring to play merrily on his flute all day while slaves fanned him with ibis feathers.

At eighteen she was already a queen, and as we know, her life was short, tragically short. Many who knew her from afar judged her harshly, but those who came close to her were enchanted by her beauty and the elegance of her speech. (Bradford reports that her verbal agility was high, and that she picked up languages with ease.) We know she had a sense of humor, for who else would have thought about rolling herself up in a carpet to be delivered to Caesar? So vividly does Bradford bring these movers and shakers to life that by book's end we forget they are not our own intimates. As Shakespeare said, "Precious friend, hid in death's dateless night." And that's where she is now, hid in death's dateless night where she gains not in age nor loses a drop of her mortal beauty.