Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff | Book Club

Book was suggested by: Lily

Pages to read: 284
ISBN: 9780316121804 (Originally listed and edition I am Using)

While reading the book, consider the below questions:
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•Who was Cleopatra?
•Who normally told Cleopatra’s history?
•Where did Cleopatra’s power come from?
•How did Cleopatra get educated?
•Who are Cleopatra’s predecessors?
•How were Cleopatra’s family affairs handled?
•What role did Rome have in Egypt?
•For what purpose did Egypt need Rome?
•For what purpose did Rome need Egypt?
•How did Roman politics impact Egypt?
•How did Cleopatra control the economy?
•Why was there a lot of corruption in the Egyptian bureaucracy?
•Why did Caesar choose to favor Cleopatra?
•Why did Mark Anthony support Cleopatra?
•Why had many people, Roman or Egyptian, not support Cleopatra?
•Why was Cleopatra willing and able to travel to Rome?
•How did Egyptian knowledge influence Rome?

Your questions are important and will take priority. If you have questions about the book's content or related ideas, either let me know what your questions are or raise them during the discussion.

My review:
https://www.inquiryreviews.com/2022/06/review-of-cleopatra-life-by-stacy-schiff.html

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Summary from Goodreads:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.

Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.