Book Review: Cleopatra and Antony

More than two millennia after it took place, the story of Cleopatra has lost none of its grip on the world's imagination. It has inspired great plays (Shakespeare, Shaw and Sardou), novels, poems, movies (Elizabeth Taylor!), works of art, musical compositions both serious (Handel and Samuel Barber) and silly ("Comin' Atcha," by Cleopatra), and of course histories and biographies. Yet for all this rich documentation and interpretation, it remains at least as much legend and mystery as historical record, which has allowed everyone who tells it to play his or her own variations on the many themes it embraces.

The latest to take it on is Diana Preston, a British writer of popular history. On the evidence of "Cleopatra and Antony," I'd say she's a thoroughgoing pro. Her research is careful and deep; her prose is lively and graceful; her sympathy for her central character is strong but wholly without sentimentality; her depiction of the worlds in which Cleopatra lived is detailed, textured and evocative. If there is a better book about Cleopatra for today's reader, I don't know what it is.

She calls her book "Cleopatra and Antony," thus reversing the order as immortalized by Shakespeare. History and legend have usually given priority to the two great men in the Egyptian queen's life, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, but Preston argues that "Cleopatra perhaps deserves first place" because "her tenacity, vision and ambition would have been remarkable in any age but in a female ruler in the ancient world they were unique." She was "a charismatic, cultured, intelligent ruler," yet thanks to the propaganda put about by Octavian -- later the Emperor Augustus but in the fourth decade B.C. Mark Antony's rival for control of the Roman Empire -- she "was transformed into a pleasure-loving houri, the very epitome of fatal beauty and monstrous depravity, bent on bringing animal gods, barbarian decadence and despotism to the sacred halls of Rome's Capitol."
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That, Preston persuasively insists, is "propaganda and myth," made all the more difficult to resolve because "the four main classical sources for Cleopatra and Antony -- Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian and Dio Cassius -- were writing respectively some 130, 140, 160 and 230 years after the lovers' death," and because as is "so often the case with ancient history in general and with so much of women's history of any but the most recent period, there are silences to be interpreted." At this task Preston is exceptionally skilled, indeed her interpretations are so subtle and nuanced that they repeatedly sound the proverbial ring of truth. When she tells us how "Cleopatra's mind must have been in turmoil" after the assassination of Caesar, because "she had lost both her main emotional bulwark and her political support," the reader believes her. When she tells us that after the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian turned back Mark Antony's forces and gained the upper hand in the fight for Rome, Antony "needed time, perhaps even a drink, to compose himself," we know she's right.