“Cleopatra: A Life”, by Stacy Schiff

368 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316001922

Cleopatra is an enigma: she has been vilified, glorified, magnified, and made into something that probably has little relation to reality by the historians of the past and the authors and playwrights of more current times. Untangling the web of lies and half-truths to get a true picture of the woman, ruler and goddess that she was is a herculean task not to be attempted by the faint of heart.

Enter Stacy Schiff, our undaunted historian; she tries valiantly in her book Cleopatra: A Life to sort out the mesh of facts, lies and equivocation that makes up the sum of the history that exists on the larger than life figure that we know as Cleopatra. Contemporary of Caesar and Mark Anthony, a ruler of note in a time of historic giants, we are left without a clear picture of the woman. The author presents a linear time line of Cleopatra, noting the probable truths from the unlikely facts that make up the sum of our knowledge, presenting a clearer picture. The author's writing is an easily read, though she does toss in an occasional speed bump of a word early on, betraying her academia, but overall the flow is smooth and quite enjoyable. The depth of the research is apparent, but not overwhelming through excessive footnoting. I found myself only struggling to keep up my interest at one point in the story, about midway through the relationship with Mark Anthony.

But as I immersed myself in Cleopatra’s world of gods and goddesses, her schizophrenic belief that she was the goddess Isis and Mark Anthony Dionysus whirled around in my mind. How were these people capable of living two streams of consciousness at one time? Stacy Schiff paints a very clear picture of the state of consciousness of the people living at that time. We ought to pay attention to it now because we in the Western World are still dealing with the remnants of such mentalities – this type of split way of viewing the world. Cleopatra could tax her people to death yet they adored her opulence and treasured her escapades because to them she was also Isis. She was the living goddess Isis known also as Cleopatra. It was okay for her to have her siblings murdered. It is this paradigm that the despots of the world still adhere to – this link to “divinity” – that pattern is clear enough. Difficult for us today perhaps to fathom how people living at that time so easily slipped between sacred and profane worlds. Between mortals and gods. Important for us to do so if only to understand how our own worldview, of gods and mortals, plays out against theirs. Tricky business this if we consider the wars going on now in the very territories that Cleopatra and Mark Anthony traipsed about in waging their own wars. In the end war was their downfall. With the defeat and death of Cleopatra the Ptolemy dynasty came to an end.

Above all, however, this is the first book that struggles (successfully, in my opinion) to reveal to readers Cleopatra the person rather than the myth; she was not only a brilliant ruler but (to the shock of the ancient world) also a woman. Not only was she other than the dazzlingly irresistible vamp and witch of legend, but she possessed a mind, charm, education and wit so incredible that the two greatest leaders of the Roman world were so captivated by her that they were willing, even eager, to risk their lives and their countries just to be her close companion and sometimes lover (neither of them could legally marry her under Roman law). Cleopatra bore these men children, potential heirs to the vast riches of the most powerful empire in the world at that time. As the author points out, she also ushered in a new era that changed and more often than not improved endless aspects of the rest of the world over the subsequent centuries. We cannot truly understand Cleopatra's motives or actual feelings in many instances, but Ms. Schiff has shifted through all of the most reliable (if any of them are truly reliable) authoritative works on the life and times of this most illustrious and fascinating ruler in order to present us with a far more realistic, logical and understandable (not to mention enjoyable) picture than has previously seen print. I wildly applaud her for this wonderful, highly successful and important effort.

“The Founding: A Dramatic Account of the Writing of the Constitution”, by Fred Barbash

286 pages, Linden Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-0671552565

The Founding: A Dramatic Account of the Writing of the Constitution began life as just another entry keyed to the Constitutional Convention’s bicentennial and, thus, was meant to have broad popular appeal. A journalist for the Washington Post, Barbash writes crisply and colorfully, organizes his complicated material intelligently, and breathes life into the Founding Fathers.

Most were astounded when Edmund Randolph of Virginia presented them with young James Madison’s plan for scrapping the existing Articles of Confederation and establishing a national government that would preempt many of the States’ powers. Because the former colonies had now become 13 small republics whose “ambassadors” convened at the Confederation Congress – and scarcely agreed to anything – these powers were extensive. They included the right to enter foreign treaties, print paper money (which rapidly devalued), and maintain standing armies. For four months the delegates argued, submitted alternate plans, threatened boycotts, temporized, compromised, and finally hammered out the document that was to found the nation.

Barbash leads us skillfully through the conflicts: slavery (the northerners feared an insurrection); suffrage (they all wanted a property qualification but couldn't figure what it should be); the allocation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary; settlement of the western areas; and on and on and so forth. He judiciously selects from key speeches and supplies anecdotal material garnered from news reports and the conventioneers’ notes and letters. He runs out of steam when the document is finally signed, giving short shrift to the 13 state conventions that followed and to the writing of the Bill of Rights. This is popularized history at a fairly high level. Barbash catches the atmosphere at the Convention and the qualities of the men who gathered there. He explains their diverse positions and considerations succinctly and supplies a useful road map to the tortuous maneuverings and trade-offs that were the birth pangs of the Constitution.

This is overall an excellent, popular account of the Constitutional Convention, and Barbash’s background as a reporter for the serves him well, especially in his portrayal of the delegates as politicians and the Convention as an exercise in politics. He makes effective use of James Madison’s published convention notes to construct dramatic first-person dialogue and enlivens his story by highlighting the impact of the small states and otherwise obscure characters on the deliberations. Though short on revelation of the delegates’ motivations and lacking any new perspective, Barbash’s volume is nevertheless an excellent contribution to the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution.

“Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor”, by Anthony Everitt

377 pages, Random House, ISBN13: 978-1400061280

For a man whose achievement in terms of altering Roman history, Augustus Caesar has always stood in the shadow of his magnificent great-Uncle, Julius Caesar. There's a sort of magnificence to Caesar that Augustus simply couldn't match; where Caesar was a protean talent, equally at home in rhetoric, literature, art, ambition, or military genius, Augustus’ talents were on a far more normal scale. That said, as was remarked by a grieving friend of Caesar's after the Ides of March, “If Caesar could find no way out, who can?” And it was the 18-year-old Octavius who, over a 45-year-career, found that way out.

Augustus’ achievement was to ruthlessly pursue supreme personal power in Rome for 20 years, and to spend the next 40 years turning that power into a functioning system that prolonged the Roman Empire for at least 200 years, arguably until its demise, and provided the peaceful environment for some of its greatest Roman art and literature. When he was born, Rome was, as it had been for centuries, firmly in the political grip of an incredibly small, wealthy elite of Senators who essentially ran the Republic as their own personal preserve. When he died, men from all over the Empire were now actively involved in its administration, the grip of the "old boys club" on power politics was broken forever, and he managed to harness the incredible competitiveness of Roman politics to solve most, if not all, of the old Republic's problems while taming the aristocracy. He did this through a constant, thoughtful, trial-and-error process that managed – just! – not to offend the hyposensitive reactionary elements in the Republic while accommodating them to a new world in which Roman power, and Roman talent, had to be harnessed world-wide. An extraordinary achievement.

This is simply the best biography of Augustus I have read on multiple levels (although, finally, his regime is receiving the kind of attention it has long deserved; another excellent recent book is Caesar's Legacy). Everett’s biography of Cicero was superb, and he brings the same ability to condense multiple facts and sources to his biography of Augustus. While not bowing down in worship, neither does he show the unfortunate tendency of late-20^th Century biographers to simply write off Augustus as some kind of proto-Mussolini. After a thorough sketch of the disintegrating Republic, he fairly notes the ruthlessness and power-mad qualities of Augustus’ earlier career, the vicious quality of much of the Triumvirate. Of course, after Caesar's murder, Augustus was playing a zero-sum game in which victory or destruction were his only options. More interesting to me is the quiet crawl towards a proto-empire that, if all of Octavian's dynastic plans had not suffered destruction, might have worked far better than the system did under later Julio-Claudian Emperors. In fact, nothing shows up Augustus' extraordinary qualities so much as the fact that his decades-long balancing act could not be maintained by the lesser men who came after him. However, it DID endure, and peace throughout much of Europe and Asia was the greatest goal Augustus achieved. All this was painstakingly achieved through infinite patience, the ability to take pains, coolly analyze situations, the willingness to innovate while appearing to act traditionally, but the determination that the workings of the Roman state would be inclusive, rather than exclusive. It worked. As Augustus loved to say, “Make haste slowly.”