The Rome to which Cleopatra came was nothing of the kind. Non-scholars of the period tend to imagine ancient Rome looking as it does in many a sword-and-sandal epic: a fascist's paradise, all bronzed gladiators and sun-bleached marble. We all know what was about to happen: Schiff's artful shifts of time and location hold familiarity effectively at bay.Ĭomparisons between Rome (the city into which Cleopatra rode as Caesar's consort, while her rebel sister travelled, in golden shackles, among the throng of common prisoners), and Alexandria (to which Cleopatra prudently withdrew, following Caesar's assassination in 44BC) offer a surprise to anyone unacquainted with that remote era. Cutting away, just short of the grand scene – Confident Invader disarmed by Audacious Intruder – Schiff turns the clock back.

Thus, she opens in 48BC with the banished Cleopatra, aged 21, camped out on the far side of the Nile delta, near Port Said, as she prepares for her long journey huddled within a soldier's shoulder-sack (she must have been both light and tiny, Schiff sensibly concludes) into Caesar's presence in her own Alexandrian palace. Zooming in on a dramatic event, she then pulls back to reveal the larger picture the back story the setting. Schiff uses a method that borrows much from the cinema. (Not always, mind ''Descent from Hercules is good enough for me,' huffed Antony', is the kind of trashy writing that does a fine book no credit.) No previous image, visual or verbal, matches up to the inspiring, frightening, ruthless woman conjured by Schiff from an inspired combination of carefully parsed texts, new research, and pulse-quickening descriptive writing. It brings hope that Angelina Jolie may finally override the image of poor Elizabeth Taylor struggling to look imperial in inch-thick slap and a Folies Bergère head-dress. That Schiff's book is the basis of a new Paul Greengrass film, due for 2013, seems like a good omen.

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff