Words matter. These are the best Stacy Schiff Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.
Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman’s intelligence was a man’s deception.
I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time.
When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, ‘Oh, that’s okay. That’s not a real book.’
I checked to see if there’d been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, ‘What can we know about her education?’ It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.
From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra’s irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will – really a great political genius, in that respect.
We don’t know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.
For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.
In ‘Plutarch,’ her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy.
You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year.
I don’t think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer’s view is always something to keep in mind.
Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love.
I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched.
The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you’re ‘an artist under oath’ you’re writing from a mountain of documentation.
By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.
No one sits on the stoop when she’s a kid and thinks, ‘I want to be a biographer when I grow up.’
The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we’ve all molded her to our times and our places. So there’s room for a movie for her, but I don’t think it will hew to the book.
No biographical subject is ever on hold with the orthodontist. If there’s a dry spell, it’s your job to curtail or eliminate it.
What we know about Cleopatra’s looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.
Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.
Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?
Of course, women have long exercised influence behind the scenes. A few thousand years ago this drove Aristotle to distraction: ‘What difference does it make whether women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.’
You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra’s day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with.
I wouldn’t dare to speculate as to Cleopatra’s falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that.
My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!
The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.
I can’t write a line without music – it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates.
A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which – if she wasn’t smart enough to camouflage herself – she generally paid the price.
Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.
