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Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. Schiff writes, but as the consort of Caesar and later Mark Antony: a woman depicted by historians and poets as a wanton temptress symbolizing “insatiable sexuality” and unlawful love. She would go down in history, however, not as “the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs,” Ms. She was a resourceful leader: disciplined, self-assured and shrewd in her management of her country’s affairs a sovereign who “knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine.”

For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands.” Having inherited a kingdom in decline, Cleopatra would go on to lose it, regain it, nearly lose it again, amass an empire and then lose it all. Schiff writes, “she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. As Stacy Schiff describes it in a captivating new biography, Cleopatra’s meeting with Julius Caesar was “a singular, shuddering moment,” when “two civilizations, passing in different directions, unexpectedly and momentously” touched.Ĭleopatra was born a goddess, became a queen at 18 and at the height of her power, Ms. From the start Cleopatra’s story was larger than life: epic in scale, mythic in symbolism and operatically over the top in its grandeur and its spectacle.