'Cleopatra: A Life' by Stacy Schiff: A clearer Cleo

We think we know Cleopatra - but do we?

Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer, turns her hand to this question in her sparkling new book Cleopatra: A Life. Schiff speaks Tuesday night at the Free Library. And, yes, she has visited the Franklin Institute's exhibit "Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt," in Philadelphia's version of Cleomania.

"I wanted to take a story we have completely mangled - few as effectively as Cleopatra - and make this both a factual book and a readable book, for people who are not trained historians," Schiff said from her office in Manhattan. "I wanted to make her approachable but also strip away the incredible gossamer myth floating around her all the time." But this is no heartless, ham-fisted debunking act. Schiff's Cleopatra is even more amazing than the stories, larger than myth, more tragic than tragedy.

Myth is pretty much all Cleopatra is. The willful, spectacular Cleo of Shakespeare and Shaw. Claudette Colbert in the 1934 film. Elizabeth Taylor later. (And, rumors say, Angelina Jolie soon.) The exotic pomp, glory, and decadence. That hard Egyptian bob, the snake bracelets, the ankh traced in kohl around the eyes. A woman who seduced the most powerful men in the world - first Julius Caesar and later Marc Antony - and when disaster struck and a defeated Antony killed himself, followed suit and died for love. After Eve and Mary, Cleopatra may be the most written woman ever.

But the two issues we have to face, Schiff says, are time and sources. Cleopatra, not yet 40 years old, died in 30 B.C. That's a long time ago. Much has changed. Not even the Nile is in the same place. There are no images of her from the life - so we may not even know what this woman (whose person, according to Shakespeare's Enobarbus, "beggar'd all description") really looked like.

What we have are accounts written after the fact by men on the winning side (Rome). "I wanted to make sure my readers knew who the sources were and how they were coming at Cleopatra," Schiff says. "The best source is possibly the Roman writer Plutarch, a century after Cleopatra's death, but still possibly basing much on eyewitness reports. And much of the rest is written by military men who wouldn't have taken a woman seriously anyway."

Although she was, famously, the last pharaoh of Egypt, Cleopatra was from a long line of Greek monarchs who ruled the country. "It's very clear," Schiff says, "that in terms of culture she's Greek. She was educated and raised as Greek. There is no indication that she was anything other than Greek in her looks."

Unlike her forebears, however, Cleopatra learned Egyptian, and several other languages, giving us a sense of her accomplishments and political savvy. While she may have thought of herself as Greek, she knew how to turn on the "exotic" for effect. She knocked out Roman observers when she made her big entrance at Antony's estate at Tarsus in 41 B.C., "the one undeniable moment," Schiff said, "she lives up to her billing as an exotic, deific figure. She always uses pageantry so brilliantly."

She sometimes represented herself, in ancient Egyptian fashion, as the earthly incarnation of the goddess Isis. "Did she really believe she was Isis, as some pharaohs believed they were gods?" Schiff asked. "It's impossible to know."

Now for the romantic view of Cleopatra - the world seductress dying for love, the asp. "In her world, marriage and liaisons were about politics and power," Schiff says. "We don't know how she felt about her men - but clearly, she was a master of the realpolitik of the time." Besides, a good way to discount a woman's achievements "is to see her in sexual terms - and we're still doing it to powerful women today. The idea that a woman could succeed only through love rather than through political shrewdness - it's a way of undermining her." Seeing Cleopatra as a woman who lived and died for love lets us stay blind to the huge game of Risk she was playing on the stage of the world.

And she played it very well, saying a child born nine months after a visit by Julius Caesar was his, getting him not to annex Egypt and to back her regime. With Caesar assassinated, there was Marc Antony. Ironically, Schiff wonders aloud whether this far-famed choice "might have been a mistake." After all, the "winner" was in the wings - Octavian, the man who'd become Augustus Caesar. But nobody knew that then. "Still, in a certain mood, I wonder," Schiff mused. " 'Couldn't she have waited just a little longer to make her choice?'

"That she goes out of her way to be with Antony longer than she has to may be a hint she and he got along well," Schiff says, "but we simply don't have any trace of these people's feelings."

So Schiff, throughout all of Cleopatra, tries never to speak for her, never to speculate about what she thought.

Except for the very end of the book, when we face the terrible end of Cleopatra's life. She could not know her death was the crossroads we see: the end of the Hellenic world, the end of Egypt, the utter triumph of Rome, and Christianity a few generations away.

But she knew she was defeated, her hopes for a liaison with Rome gone, Egypt to be made a province, and, worst of all, her dynasty over. Schiff writes: "The fear and fury must have shattered Cleopatra," a shattering, fearsome statement.

We are left with a woman who "improvised wildly, then improvised afresh, for some a definition of genius," an "exhilarating presence" almost alone at the male table of power.

Stripped of myth, Schiff's Cleopatra is revealed as an even more astonishing, monumental figure - more of a woman, more of a thinker, more of a leader.