![]() ![]() ![]() Cleopatra manipulated the love of powerful men for her own and her kingdom’s advantage, earning the savage hostility of contemporary Romans and classical historians, who depicted her as a capricious seductress. Her fascination has endured through the centuries, inspiring Shakespeare’s greatest female role and Hollywood’s most notorious big-budget disaster with Elizabeth Taylor wearing too much eye makeup, but posterity has been more interested in her fabled affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony than her able rule over Egypt, whose declining fortunes she defended for two decades. She nurtured her public image with sumptuous displays that didn’t always convey precisely the message she intended. Who needed movie stars, when the gargantuan appetites of the rich and famous shaped empires, not Hollywood budgets, and their out-of-wedlock offspring were displayed in triumphal parades, not tabloid magazine photos?Ĭleopatra, the most famous woman in the ancient world, got lurid coverage Angelina Jolie might find familiar - which should be helpful as Jolie prepares for her possible role in the big-budget movie based on Stacy Schiff’s superb new biography, “Cleopatra: A Life.” Indeed, as Schiff retells it, Cleopatra’s story serves as a cautionary case study in the perils of celebrity. You think 21st century culture is celebrity-obsessed? Try Mediterranean society at the dawn of the first millennium, when politics were entirely personal, and rulers’ romantic entanglements could be as important as the battles they won. ![]()
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