http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/opinion/22schiff.html?th&emc=th

New York Times April 22, 2009

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Who's Buried in Cleopatra's Tomb?

By STACY SCHIFF

WHAT becomes a legend most? If you're a woman, the formula is straightforward.
Your best bets are the three D's: delusion (Joan of Arc), disability (Helen
Keller), death (Sylvia Plath). You get extra points for the savage, sudden or
surprising demise, as Evita, Amelia or Diana attests. At the head of the list of
untimely self-destructors comes of course Cleopatra VII, for whose tomb a search
begins shortly, on an Egyptian hilltop west of Alexandria.

Cleopatra died 2,039 years ago, at the age of 39. Before she was a slot machine,
a video game, a cigarette, a condom, a caricature, a cliché or a synonym for
Elizabeth Taylor, before she was reincarnated by Shakespeare, Dryden or Shaw,
she was a nonfictional Egyptian queen. She ruled for 21 years, mostly alone,
which is to say that she was essentially a female king, an incongruity that
elicits the kind of double take once reserved for men in drag.

From her point of view there was nothing irregular about the arrangement.
Cleopatra arguably had more powerful female role models than any other woman in
history. They were not so much paragons of virtue as shrewd political operators.
Her antecedents were the rancorous, meddlesome Macedonian queens who routinely
poisoned brothers and sent armies against sons. Cleopatra's great-grandmother
waged one civil war against her parents, another against her children. These
women were raised to rule.

Cleopatra had a child with Julius Caesar. After his death, she had three more —
two sons and a daughter — with his protégé, Marc Antony. Motherhood confirmed
her hold on the throne. She was a little bit the reverse of Henry VIII; she too
needed a male heir, though she was rather more successful in securing one.
Almost certainly Marc Antony and Julius Caesar represent the extent of
Cleopatra's sexual history. She was self-reliant, ingenious and plucky, and for
her time and place remarkably well behaved. Having inherited a country in
decline, she capably steered it through drought, famine, plague and war.

What good can be said of a woman who sleeps with two of the most powerful men of
her age, however? The fathers of Cleopatra's children were men of voracious and
celebrated sexual appetites. Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton
seductress. She is the original bad girl, the Monica Lewinsky of the ancient
world. And all because she turns up at one of the most dangerous intersections
in history, that of women and power.

She presides eternally over the chasm between promiscuity and virility, the
forest of connotations that separate "adventuress" from "adventurer." Women
schemed while men strategized in the ancient world, too. And female power
asserted itself regularly, if more covertly than it had on the Greek stage. In a
first century B.C. marriage contract, a woman promises to be faithful and
attentive — and to not add love potions to her husband's food. Clever women,
Euripides had already warned, are dangerous women.

Granting that the double standard has outlived Cleopatra by at least 2,000
years, what are we doing today on that Egyptian hill, under the ruins of the
temple of Taposiris Magna? "This could be the most important discovery of the
21st century," says Egypt's antiquities director, Zahi Hawass, of the dig.
Certainly it would be a relief to cross Cleopatra off our list of objects we
have lost, or believe we have lost: Atlantis, Jamestown, an entire tribe of
Israel, good manners, Jimmy Hoffa.

If we find Cleopatra's tomb — and certainly we will find something relevant, as
Dr. Hawass seems determined to make a discovery to rival the 1922 one of King
Tut — we may well be able to solve the mystery of Cleopatra's death. Surely
there will be no asp preserved at her mummified side. It was likely retrofitted
to the tale. It's not difficult to figure out what someone is trying to say when
he pairs a lady with a snake.

We may be able to determine if Cleopatra committed suicide or was in fact
murdered, however. As a prisoner, she was an embarrassment to the Romans, unsure
how to triumph resoundingly yet sympathetically over a woman. They may have
beaten her to the punch.

To a great extent her enemies have insured our fascination with Cleopatra. It
was the Roman civil war that secured her immortality. And it was Octavian, her
nemesis and the future Augustus Caesar, who established her as a femme fatale.
He may well have offered up the Classic Comics version of the debauched,
duplicitous Egyptian queen and paved the way for Joseph L. Mankiewicz. But he
magnified Cleopatra to hyperbolic proportions in the process — so as to do the
same with his own victory. Cleopatra's story differs from most women's stories
in that the men who wrote it, for their own reasons, enlarged rather than erased
her role.

Octavian hardly needed to inflate the tale: Here is a royal woman who could be
said to have died, after all, for love. Romantic tragedies don't get any better,
which explains why Shakespeare had a difficult time improving on Plutarch. And
Cleopatra puts a vintage label on something we have always known existed:
mind-altering female sexuality. It's that love potion again.

She does not so much bump up against a glass ceiling as tumble through a
trapdoor, the one that dismisses women by sexualizing them. As Margaret Atwood
has written of Jezebel, "The amount of sexual baggage that has accumulated
around this figure is astounding, since she doesn't do anything remotely sexual
in the original story, except put on makeup." In Cleopatra's case, the sheer
absence of truth has guaranteed the legend. Where facts are few, myth rushes in,
the kudzu of history.

It would be a relief to settle once and for all the burning question of whether
or not Cleopatra was beautiful, though the answer affects next to nothing. Even
if she had every aesthetic weapon in her arsenal, we know already the ones she
so expertly deployed. "It was impossible to converse with her without being
immediately captivated by her," asserts one of our two best sources. Her voice
was velvety; her conversation stimulating; her powers of persuasion matchless;
her presence an event, reports the other. None of those commodities is likely to
be extracted from Egyptian limestone, to travel on an international tour.

Cleopatra served most effectively as a weapon with which Octavian could club
Marc Antony, in a particularly virulent civil war. It was his weakness for a
foreign seductress that debased and undid Antony. Will he turn out to have
shared a tomb with Cleopatra, as ancient accounts claim? After all it was his
request — either real or concocted by Octavian — that he be buried alongside her
that cost Antony Rome. Cleopatra is said to have buried him with her own hands,
lavishly, royally and feverishly. (She was attempting to starve herself to death
at the time.) The quest for his tomb is not the stuff of headlines however.
Antony is a bit player in someone else's story.

The search is, too, a topical one. The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard points
out that for many years archaeologists' Holy Grail was the (still undiscovered)
tomb of Alexander the Great. We find ourselves no longer in the market for an
imperialistic white male. While this dig will resolve none of the great
questions, it could, notes Professor Beard, conceivably offer clues to
Cleopatra's ethnicity. Was she pure Macedonian, or all or part African? (My
guess is Macedonian with, possibly, a bit of Persian blood.) Indeed the mixed
ancestry question appears to be the issue of the day: A month ago British
scientists suggested that they had answered it definitively, producing computer
simulations of Cleopatra's sister, based on a skull found in Turkey.

Here we engage in a familiar exercise: Cleopatra too spent her life trying to
reconcile East and West, with as little success as we do today. A Roman could
not get past the idea of a civilized, virtuous West and a decadent, opulent
East. He could not pry apart the exotic and the erotic. The East was by
definition beguiling and voluptuous — like a woman, as it happens. Think of
Coffee, that second-act marvel in Balanchine's "Nutcracker." She is a sultry,
intoxicating presence, too potent for any partner, by no means critical to the
story, really there, I have always suspected, to wake up the fathers in the
audience.

Of course we mean to resolve the unresolved. We clamor for the black box of
history. In some essential way we want confirmation too that we live on the same
planet as did the legend that inspired two millenniums of overheated prose, that
what feels like myth was really history. We thirst for exactitudes. We want to
see and fondle the myth in all its scintillating splendor, forgetting that as we
do so it turns back — the reverse Midas touch — into the dross of history. If
and when we find Cleopatra, if and when a face can be fitted to her, do we
promise to give up Elizabeth Taylor once and for all? Will we opt for the lady
or the legend? Is something lost when she is found? Octavian had his agenda, and
we have ours.

No matter what the tombs of Taposiris yield, they are unlikely to offer up an
answer to the vexed question of women and power. For that we have to dig
elsewhere. It may take a little longer.

Stacy Schiff, the author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the
Birth of America," is working on a book about Cleopatra.