Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt

I bought this book as an introduction to Cleopatra after watching the Rome mini-series. I wanted to get an idea if the story was accurate. This book provides a great introduction, but left me with the impression that her life is shrouded in mystery. The author often went off on tangents to fill in a complex background that most readers (including myself) are not familiar with. These tangents include Egyptian geneology, the layout of cities, and the history of Egypt. These deviations were generally interesting, but I often found myself wondering how this all fit back into Cleopatra's life, and why they were included. I found the sections of the book where the author explained the myths surrounding Cleopatra and broke down the possible origins, and debunked them the most interesting. I felt these left the best impression of what her life must have been like, and the complex world she maneuvered in.

Of the famous women in history, the one that's either at the top of the list or at least in the top five would be Cleopatra. Does she truly merit this fame, or is all image and little substance. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Joyce Tyldesley's biography of the celebrated Queen of the Nile suffers from the same problem that most Cleopatra biographers face: there is very little primary material about her life. Instead, we get descriptions of her from secondary sources, often decades or centuries after the fact, and, of course, these sources have their biases. It's like working with a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing and other pieces warped or broken: you can put a picture together, but it won't be a complete one. And in a time filled with other Cleopatras (and Ptolemys), it is sometimes hard to even figure out if you're working on the right puzzle. The basic facts of Cleopatra's life are pretty well-known. She was romantically (or at least sexually) involved with Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony. After Antony's death, she committed suicide, allegedly by having an asp bite her. She was able to use her associations with these men to consolidate her own power in Egypt, but her queenship was often threatened, both by internal threats and those of foreign powers, particularly Rome. Cleopatra is one of the great romantic figures in history, which promotes the common belief that she was one of the most beautiful, a real-life Helen. Was she really beautiful, either by the standards of the day or by today's standards? As Tyldesley points out, politics probably had more to do with her liaisons than attraction. Another controversy is Cleopatra's race: Tyldesley addresses this as well, though the true answer may never be known. Cleopatra was no lightweight, but in terms of impact on history, she was a minor player who happened to be associated with major ones. Tyldesley does a good job constructing a picture of Cleopatra while also being honest about the shortcomings of getting a real accurate story. The book itself is brief (just over 200 pages), but even that is a bit of a stretch for Cleopatra's life: many pages deal with general Egyptian history or mythology. But Tyldesley writes well, and if you want to learn more about Cleopatra, this book is a good resource.

Joyce Ann Tyldesley is a lecturer of Egyptology at Liverpool University and the author of several books on ancient Egypt. She writes that most authors have written about Cleopatra either from a Roman perspective or from a popular culture perspective. She claims that most Egyptologists consider Cleopatra part of the 300 year Ptolemaic Empire, an Empire that is something of a footnote to true Egyptian history. Of course, Cleopatra VII is best known for her role in the Roman political battles between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and later between Octavian and Mark Antony. Tyldesley is a terrific story teller and as Shakespeare and Elizabeth Taylor and a host of others have proven, Cleopatra's story is full of twists and turns and many wonders. Tyldesley fills her book with interesting Egyptian details, putting her a bit more firmly into ancient traditions. She argues against suicide by asp bite, for example, based on an ancient tradition of death by poisonous ointments. By the end of the book, though, I didn't really see a Cleopatra very different from the one I found in Cleopatra by Michael Grant, a book I greatly admire. After all, almost all we know about Cleopatra was written by Roman authors, focused on the great battles over Egyptian riches and Imperial power. Moreover, Egypt itself had been ruled from time to time over 700 years by Libyans, Nubians and Persians before the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. Finally, as Helen Brown points out in her review quoted in full in the first Comment: "After defeating the last queen of Egypt, Julius Caesar's adopted son was determined to destroy her reputation. He smashed the images made to glorify her and ensured his pocket historians cast her as a greedy, incestuous, adulterous whore who used her foreign, feminine wiles to emasculate the Roman Empire." This is a terrific story, very well told by an excellent historian. But don't look for any new and ground breaking insights into Cleopatra's fascinating life. Robert C. Ross 2008

Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley offers a new biographical treatment claiming that much of what we know about Cleopatra has been tainted by prejudice. Her studies of centuries of writings about the queen surveys myths, the sources of legends, and how Roman history and women's roles in Roman society have affected the history of Cleopatra. Hers is a lively yet scholarly survey that will appeal not only to general-interest libraries catering to history-loving patrons, but to college-level collections specializing in ancient history in general and Egypt in particular.

As a starting point for learning about Cleopatra, this is a great book. However, if you want to go beyond the basics and what was reported by historians two thousand years ago, I would buy Cleopatra: A Biography by Michael Grant. Grant's book examines Cleopatra's life on a deeper level and with more speculation as to whether this and that might have happened, whereas Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt reports speculation as fact and doesn't examine all facets of disputed events (such as her suicide). Overall, a good book, although given my vast readings on ancient Rome, I do question some of the facts, such as what became of Cleopatra's two surviving sons with Mark Antony.