‘Cleopatra’ Review: Ancient Egypt’s Mysterious Queen

The tendency to view history “through the lens of our own era” has become more pronounced in recent years. To measure this unfortunate tilt, one could do worse than compare Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life” (2010) with Francine Prose’s “Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth.” Ms. Schiff’s Cleopatra pulses with life. Vivid, nuanced and steeped in—while healthily skeptical of—ancient sources, “A Life” is biography of the first order.

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Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth

By Francine Prose

Yale University Press

208 pages

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As its subtitle suggests, Ms. Prose’s ”Cleopatra” is less straight biography than an appraisal of the queen’s historical reception. The core of her thesis is sound: Cleopatra’s reputation has suffered from tired misogynist readings that say more about their authors than their subject. Alas, Ms. Prose trades the myopic conjecture of the past for the one-note fixations of the present.

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Cleopatra’s contemporary legend stems, to varying degrees, from Plutarch’s lives of Caesar and Mark Antony, Shakespeare (cribbing Plutarch) and Hollywood. She was born around 69 B.C. into the Ptolemaic dynasty, which traced itself to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt, and the regional succession of Ptolemy I in 323 B.C. When she was 18, her father Ptolemy XII Auletes died, setting in motion the “deceptively smooth” transfer of power—which Ms. Prose prefaces with an aside on the 2020 election—to Cleopatra and her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII.