RIGHT before we were to begin reading New York Public Library held a meeting with the author we could join.
SO MUCH FUN.
(I also took many books out of the library.)
Cleopatra’s palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff’s is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.
Cleopatra has always fascinated me. I have read books about her sporadically in the past. Reading Antony and Cleopatra renewed my interest in her. I don’t think we will ever know HER true story as men have told her story in a patriarchal manor, and painted her a seductress, a beautiful woman (She was not, instead became more beautiful in the story of her not the actual her). They did this instead of a story of a woman in power operating the same way they do. Except she was better. They knew it. Yet Cleopatra was in far more danger then the men, as a woman in power, as we all know, this is to men a huge threat. I find it interesting that she has been painted this way instead of an intelligent woman of power who was in an impossible situation of whatever way she went it wouldn’t be good, combined with the time of history this took place in, let alone trying to manage her children and her love life. I personally do think, along with the author’s writing, that she was extremely wise and used her gregarious charm. Cleopatra was a brilliant strategist, incredibly intelligent, extremely well read, spoke multiple languages, and not many people know that side of her and bonus she studied at The Library of Alexandria, a bibliophile’s DREAM. I find it interesting no one can actually agree on whom she really loved or who really loved her, historians or fiction writers, everyone has an opinion but no one knows. I intend to look up more on Cleopatra to read, and in that I will be searching for a woman who wrote it as the criteria. This book of Stacy’s reads like a history textbook and it’s really about the men in her life. However you can glean at least the surrounding dramas of the men surrounding here and the history taking place. The book is also finally a female perspective, which is refreshing. I find it interesting that to undermine Cleopatra they make her a sexual seductress, trying to diminish her, they did the same thing to Mary Magdalene, and we still see it played out today to every women who rises to power. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a diary of Cleopatra. What would it say?
AND
Why is everything
sexualized in order to dismiss a woman.
Cleopatra was in essense running the world and had knowledge that with her death left and did not resurface for over a thousand years.
Think about that.
