Interview with Stacy Schiff, author of 'Cleopatra'

Stacy Schiff knows a bit about traveling back in time to bring people to life. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for "Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)," she immersed herself in early American history for her subsequent biography, "A Great Improvisation," about Benjamin Franklin.

For her most recent book, Schiff has ventured to an even more distant era to relate the life of Cleopatra. The Egyptian queen's story is, of course, an oft-told one, but Schiff's "Cleopatra: A Life" - an engrossing and well-researched biography, full of delicious details - dispels many of the myths long propagated by Roman historians (all men, naturally), Shakespeare (well, at least the Bard stretched the truth for magnificent dramatic effect) and Hollywood (let's just say that Elizabeth Taylor, in "Cleopatra," is perhaps slightly more glamorous than the real-life monarch).

Schiff discussed her book in a recent visit to San Francisco:

Q: Francis Bacon once said it was all downhill after ancient Egyptian art. Can much the same be said about women, that it was downhill after Cleopatra?

A: Egyptian women enjoyed the right to enter into their own marriages, the right to inherit equally, the right to run a business, the right to divorce. And then somehow 2,000 years went by before that would happen again. So yes, that does seem to me rather astonishing; it was a singular moment in terms of gender equality. And it also makes one wonder: Could we go backward again? On so many fronts, Cleopatra's was a remarkably advanced civilization, lost for thousands of years.

Q: When did you realize you wanted to write about Cleopatra's life?

A: I had the idea before I wrote my Ben Franklin book, but I just couldn't see a way of doing it - there's too much we don't know. And then over the summer, this must have been 2005, I was rereading the scene in Plutarch where Cleopatra and Marc Antony are out fishing, and her voice just more or less lifted off the page. And I suddenly, wackily, thought, well, if you can set a scene like this, and you can hear her voice this clearly, if you can hear both the humor and the cunning after so long, then you could conceivably write around the holes.

Q: So what appealed to you about her story?

A: This was the most potent brew of sex and celebrity I could think of, even by modern standards. And then you have an all-star cast. You've got Caesar, you've got Marc Antony, you've got Herod, you've got Cleopatra, you've got the jealous wife and the royal girlfriend.

And I was eager to write about a woman in authority. It's an idea over which we still stumble.

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.

And with her death, the Hellenistic age ends, Egypt loses its autonomy, the Roman Empire begins. Thirty years separate her death from the birth of Christ.

Q: If it weren't for existing coins, would we have any real idea of what Cleopatra looked like?

A: No. There are a number of busts that seem likely to be Cleopatra in the sense that the features do correspond to what we know from the coins, and the subject has a diadem, the ribbon which would denote a royal, and the stone is high quality, so the subject is obviously someone of importance. But none of them can be said with 100 percent certainty to be Cleopatra.

Q: It turns out Cleopatra wasn't a ravishing "whore queen" - as she's been called - but a shrewd and not-so-pretty politician?

A: It's astonishing how tenacious a myth is. I mean, Plutarch is the first to say that her beauty was by no means as remarkable as was her charm and her intellect. And here we are 2,000 years later and we're still stressing the beauty. Part of that is the fault of Elizabeth Taylor, part of that is the fault of Shakespeare, part of that is the fault of the Roman propagandists. It's not as if Cleopatra's cunning has been a great secret. What I think is interesting is rethinking the obvious.

Q: In other ways, isn't the retelling of her story - long after her death - a bit like that of the Gospels?

A: Very much, actually. For example, for Cleopatra's final meeting with Octavian, who defeats her, we have two accounts, separated by about 100 years. One is Dio's, the other Plutarch's. They contradict each other in almost every detail.

So, you have this sense of where do you go with this, how do you use this material? And I ended up essentially giving the reader both, but gently weighing in on which I thought was the more likely.

Because it seemed to me that the over-the-top, cinematic account that was written 100 years later was somewhat less probable than Plutarch's account; he's just much more dispassionate. And better inclined toward both Cleopatra and Egypt.

Q: So, probably no snake?

A: It's a little bit too convenient, both iconographically and practically. As a Hellenistic sovereign, if she knew anything, Cleopatra knew her poisons; why would you rely on a wild beast at a moment when you needed quickly to do yourself in, and when in fact that death was among your more painful options? I'd vote for poison, but not in the form of a hissing asp.

E-mail John McMurtrie at jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com. Tweeting @McMurtrieSF.

This article appeared on page FE - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle