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Aria nazanine hozar5/22/2023 Was a subspecialty.” As Schiff observes, Cleopatra may boast “one of the busiest afterlives in history,” including incarnations as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette,Ī slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor,” but the single piece of documentary evidence that might be traced to her own hand is “perhaps and at most, one written word” (translatedĪs “Let it be done,” with which she or her scribe signed off on a decree). Who initially depicted Cleopatra were mostly Roman and all male, writing, for the most part, a century or more after her death with the intent to portray her reign as little more than a sustained striptease.Īnd although Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the known world and Egypt an ancient pioneer of gender equality, the country had “no fine historian” to counter the agendas of those for whom “impugning independent-minded women Whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Lucan, Appian, Josephus, Dio, Suetonius, Plutarch - the poets, historians and biographers Although it’s not Schiff’s purpose to present us withĪ feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to “restore” Cleopatra - to see her at all - one must strip away an “encrusted myth” created by those for “Mostly,” Schiff says of “Cleopatra: A Life,” “I have restored context.” The claim stops sounding humble when we understand what it entails.
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