The famous, or infamous, Cleopatra was actually the seventh Egyptian queen to bear that name. The woman described in this book was not the kind of woman often depicted on stage and screen, or in novels. Michael Gran’ts Cleopatra was a stateswoman, sure of herself and what she wanted from life. She was not promiscuous. She had two lovers, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and she regarded both as being her husbands. She was not decadent, or no more than was commonplace in her time.
Cleopatra isn’t the easiest of reads. It’s a fairly scholarly work with plenty of endnotes and references to both ancient works and more recent books. It also seems to give as much time to the men in Cleopatra’s life, her enemies as well as her lovers, as to the woman herself. In a way, this isn’t surprising. Little was written about women in those times, even about the most powerful women. Much that was written about Cleopatra was written by her enemies or by men who had a low opinion of her. Michael Grant does a good job of picking through such biased accounts and drawing out a real woman instead of a stereotype.
Cleopatra taught me a lot I didn’t know about the Egyptian queen, from her youth at the time she became queen to the way she died. (It possibly wasn’t by snake bite.) The book pointed out what was myth and what was propaganda. Over all, I found it worth reading and would recommend it to anybody with an interest in that period of history.
