Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. She tells us just what can be known–and trust me, that’s more than enough to hold our attention! This book is a great read for anyone interested in learning about the real world of Ptolemaic Egypt. Joyce is an excellent storyteller herself, but she takes no poetic license. They did like a good story, so they embellished, as any good storyteller will.
She is currently a lecturer in Egyptology at the KNH Centre. Actually, many of the “primary sources” about her are full of invention because they were written long after the events they describe by Roman authors who just didn’t like her very much. Joyce Tyldesleyholds a first class honors degree in archaeology from Liverpool University, and a doctorate from Oxford University. Stripping away preconceptions as old as her Roman enemies, Joyce Tyldesley uses all her skills as an Egyptologist to give us this magnificent biography. That means, of course, that every dramatist from Shakespeare on has been, well, making stuff up about Cleopatra. We don’t know who her mother was, when she was born, what she looked like, whom she married, and a host of other details about her life. As Joyce Tyldesley points out in her terrific Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (Basic Books, 2008), Cleopatra is a mystery and necessarily so. These movies are so rich in detail–both narrative and physical–that you feel like you are “there.” But the fact is that we don’t and really can’t know much about “there” (wherever “there” happens to be in the Ancient World) because the sources are very, very thin. Tyldesley does a good job constructing a picture of Cleopatra while also being honest about the shortcomings of getting a real accurate story. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Spartacus,” “Ben-Hur,” “Gladiator,” and the rest. Cleopatra was no lightweight, but in terms of impact on history, she was a minor player who happened to be associated with major ones. “Swords and Sandals” movies always amaze me.
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