Review

General Books

According to a familiar proverb good things come in small packages. Such is the philosophy inspiring the Sutton Pocket Biographies series, which aims to provide its readers with brief biographies of famous historical figures that can be read at a single sitting. E. E. Rice's lucid biography of Cleopatra VII--last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt--is a solid addition to this popular English series.	1
Although Cleopatra VII has been a familiar icon of popular culture for centuries, would-be biographers face formidable obstacles in writing her life. No ancient account of her remarkable reign survives. Instead, the evidence for her life and reign consists largely of anecdotes and sensational accounts of a few dramatic episodes embedded in histories and biographies of her Roman conquerors. The most important of these sources are the lives of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony of the second century ce biographer Plutarch and the third century ce Roman History of Dio Cassius, works written centuries after the great queen's death and based on sources hostile to her and her plans. Rice is sure-footed in her handling of this disparate source material, teasing out the thread of Cleopatra's life story from the Roman matrix in which it is hidden. After an introduction on the sources for Cleopatra's biography and a brief survey of Ptolemaic history, she recounts in four succinct chapters the main events of the queen's life from her birth in 69 bce to her suicide in 30 ce . A final chapter considers Cleopatra's place in contemporary popular culture and cultural discourse and its relationship to her actual achievements as documented in the sources.	2
Cleopatra is a useful addition to the vast literature on its famous subject. Particularly welcome is Rice's lucid discussion of the complex evidentiary problems surrounded even the most famous episodes of Cleopatra's life such as the romantic story of her dramatic introduction to Julius Caesar or the manner of her death. These discussions, which are supported by apt quotations from the sources, make her book a useful introduction to the ancient historian's craft. No work is totally free of flaws, however, and Cleopatra is no exception. So, Rice mistakenly ascribes the origin of the controversy concerning Cleopatra's alleged "blackness" to the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena in 1987, when it has been a staple of African-American popular historiography since the appearance of J. A. Rogers' famous World's Great Men of Color in 1946. More serious is the author's failure to fully exploit the evidence for the Egyptian side of Cleopatra's reign with the result that she sometimes seems to be more a figure of Roman than of Egyptian history. Nevertheless, instructors will find in Cleopatra a brief but interesting biography of its famous subject that is accessible to students in introductory Western Civilization and World History courses.	3
California State University, Los Angeles   Stanley Burstein

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