He seems more taken with her than with him. Q) Which writer in antiquity portrayed Cleopatra in her best light?Ī) Plutarch, who goes out of his way to write Cleopatra’s story when he means to be writing a portrait of Marc Antony. Q) Which relationship did you find more compelling, Cleopatra’s with Caesar or with Marc Antony?Ī) The latter, if only because it is longer lived and we have greater material. And too, Herod’s chroniclers allow a glimpse of how Cleopatra would be remembered Josephus was among the first to write Cleopatra off as a shameless seductress. They dealt very differently with that predicament. He served here as a counterweight to Cleopatra both faced the same situation vis-à-vis Rome. Would you agree with that, and is there anything new you learned about Herod that surprised you?Ī) Everything about Herod surprised me, if only because I too knew him only from Biblical accounts. He seems to have understood Octavian better than Cleopatra. Your portrait of Herod is of a man who killed his wife’s brother, mother and the wife herself, a ruthless tactician who enjoyed remarkable longevity. Q) Most people know Herod only because of the New Testament. In order to make any kind of peace with Octavian she would have needed to eliminate her own son. In any event, as the mother of Caesar’s biological child, Cleopatra really had no chance of making peace with the man who passed himself off as Caesar’s rightful heir. Q) Was it the passage of years (her age) that explains Cleopatra’s failure to charm Octavian, as she had charmed Caesar and Marc Anthony? Or was it Octavian’s discernment?Ī) I don’t know that Cleopatra ever attempted to charm Octavian ― at least until it was too late, which is to say, after her military defeat. Egypt had neither the hunger for conquest, nor a commensurate army. Q) With her wealth and status, why didn’t Cleopatra try to finance a war of resistance against Rome?Ī) Rome was the military power.
So did the very fine scholarship of the last few decades, on women, education and family life in the Hellenistic world. So did the idea that you could pose new questions in a biography without necessarily having to answer them. The overload of Franklin materials probably had something to do with the attraction to a little-documented subject in the end.
The question was how to write a straight narrative account without the usual sources, or, worse, without a single glimpse of the subject’s interior life. Q) Why a Cleopatra biography now? Was it in your mind to do it for a long time?Ī) It had been on my mind ― and on my list of ideal subjects ― for a very long time, well before Ben Franklin, in fact. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.
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