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" For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view. "
Stacy Schiff
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Me
Point Of View
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" I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship. "
Stacy Schiff
You
Ship
Good
" I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before. "
Stacy Schiff
Great
Book
Education
" The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you're 'an artist under oath' you're writing from a mountain of documentation. "
Stacy Schiff
Me
You
Writing
" When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.' "
Stacy Schiff
Book
Courage
Friend
" Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version. "
Stacy Schiff
Yourself
Imagination
Tolerance
" Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently. "
Stacy Schiff
Enough
Fly
Off
" I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change. "
Stacy Schiff
Child
Change
Library
" We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day. "
Stacy Schiff
Women
Day
Education
" In 'Plutarch,' her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy. "
Stacy Schiff
Voice
Saucy
Out
" Have you ever been married? Had that thing of someone calling you by a name not your own? It's unsettling. It's like a fictitious person. "
Stacy Schiff
Name
Someone
You
" No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did. "
Stacy Schiff
World
Wealth
Modern
" You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year. "
Stacy Schiff
Year
New York
You
" No biographical subject is ever on hold with the orthodontist. If there's a dry spell, it's your job to curtail or eliminate it. "
Stacy Schiff
Your
Dry
Hold
" By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature. "
Stacy Schiff
Time
History
Recognition
" Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots. "
Stacy Schiff
Meaning
Words
Reality
" Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love. "
Stacy Schiff
Political
Politics
Power
" No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.' "
Stacy Schiff
She
Up
Want
" A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price. "
Stacy Schiff
Rich
Woman
Smart
" We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome. "
Stacy Schiff
Life
Rise
Rome
" For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception. "
Stacy Schiff
Intelligence
Women
Woman
" From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect. "
Stacy Schiff
Great
Speak
Respect
" I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that. "
Stacy Schiff
Falling In Love
Love
Relationships
" 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. "
Stacy Schiff
Today
Power
History
" You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with. "
Stacy Schiff
Day
Dive
See
" What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority. "
Stacy Schiff
Trying
You
Looks
" I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time. "
Stacy Schiff
Time
Children
Three
" I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates. "
Stacy Schiff
Roommates
Music
Me
" I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' "
Stacy Schiff
New
Me
Said
" Of course, women have long exercised influence behind the scenes. A few thousand years ago this drove Aristotle to distraction: 'What difference does it make whether women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.' "
Stacy Schiff
Long
Behind
Influence
" Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book. "
Stacy Schiff
Reaction
Anxiety
Influence