Cleopatra : her history, her myth /

Although the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, 18 at the start of her reign, was "a city planner, military strategist, diplomat, linguist, and ruler of an enormous country with a diverse and restive population," she has been routinely portrayed as an exotic, wanton, immoral, and witchy seductress. With her signature wit, incisiveness, and command, Prose (The Vixen, 2021) traces the origin of this reductive depiction to the sexism and racism intrinsic to the dazzling array of sources she so keenly critiques, from Plutarch to creators of lascivious and chauvinistic visual art to Shakespeare and Hollywood. This dynamic analysis is paired with a deft chronicle of Egypt's Ptolemy dynasty in which sibling marriages, sibling murders, and civil wars were rampant, and the vexed geopolitics between Rome and Egypt that so violently complicated Cleopatra's legendary relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and led to her death, so brazenly eroticized, at 39. Prose elucidates historical and cultural complexities, separates facts from fantasy, shares vivid and arresting intimate details, and brings humor and "human warmth" to her corrective portrait of this extraordinarily brilliant and heroic ruler.

Plutarch, Shakespeare, and other male writers perpetuated the image of Cleopatra as an "Oriental outsider" who ruined Mark Antony and Julius Caesar's marriages and betrayed her citizens, according to this stimulating feminist history. Contending that "it is hard not to notice how profoundly her gender determined the way in which her story has been told," novelist Prose (The Vixen) reveals the racist and sexist undertones of Plutarch's The Life of Antony and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and tracks their influence on modern retellings including the 1963 movie Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ("quite simply a terrible film," Prose writes). To combat the myths, Prose focuses on Cleopatra's accomplishments, noting that she guided Egypt through serious economic hardships, fended off the Roman Empire's "territorial aggressions," expanded the country's borders, rebuilt Alexandria after a devastating civil war, and fought for the safety of her children until she died in captivity in 30 BCE. Throughout, Prose scrutinizes the reliability of historical sources, even bringing in a herpetologist to dispute the legend that Cleopatra killed herself via "poisonous asp bite." Though the history drags in places, it amounts to a lucid and persuasive reinterpretation. Readers won't see Cleopatra the same way again. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary. (Nov.)

A fresh look at the famed Egyptian queen. In a succinct biography, part of Yale's Ancient Lives series, Prose examines how Cleopatra (69 B.C.E.-30 B.C.E.) has been represented for over 2,000 years in myths, legends, literary works, histories, paintings, and films. Many chroniclers, Prose notes, believed she was a liar; some were apologists for Roman imperial expansion; others refused to allow that a woman could be a leader. The most prevalent image of Cleopatra has been that of a "witchy, seductive Egyptian," notable for her love affairs with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony rather than for her considerable prowess as a "city planner, military strategist, diplomat, linguist," and leader. A Macedonian Greek, daughter of Ptolemy XII, by the age of 18, Cleopatra ruled Egypt along with her 10-year-old brother--and husband--Ptolemy XIII. The time was rife with "strangling, poisoning, and dismembering," even among family members. The shared leadership of Cleopatra and Ptolemy incited a bloody civil war, ending with Ptolemy's murder, after which Cleopatra married Ptolemy XIV; the marriage was short-lived--Ptolemy died in 44 B.C.E. Prose mines classical sources, including Plutarch's chronicles, to trace the course of Cleopatra's affair with Caesar, which resulted in the birth of a son; and with Antony, with whom she had twins and another son. As for her suicide, it is unlikely, Prose argues, that she could have smuggled an asp into her quarters and just as unlikely that its venom could have killed her instantly. The author also explores Cleopatra's afterlife in literature. Dante and Boccaccio damned her as a "libertine and a seductress," and Shakespeare saw her as Antony's "serious mistake." In movies, Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert, Vivien Leigh, and Elizabeth Taylor all underscored the lascivious seductiveness of the doomed queen. In contrast, Prose imagines her as a wily strategist determined, above all, to protect her children. A thoughtful, sympathetic portrait of a legendary historical figure. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.