Stacy Schiff, _Cleopatra: A Life_

IS STACY SCHIFF related to Sidney Schiff? I know Sidney had some American cousins.

To move to a more pertinent question: does Stacy Schiff read ancient Greek and Latin? Presumably, a biographer of Cleopatra would at least know his or her way around the tongues in which the primary sources were written, but it's hard to tell here. Schiff thanks Inger Kuin, "who untangled awkward phrasings [in the translations] and reconciled contradictory ones"--that is, Schiff consulted Kuin about the passages where translations diverged?

Schiff obviously made a deep dive in the secondary literature on Cleopatra, her world, and her times, but I found myself wondering about her access to the primary texts because she reads them mainly against the grain, as it were. The surviving accounts of Cleopatra from her own day (or from within a few centuries of her own day) take a Roman perspective--dismissive of Cleopatra's character and abilities, viewing her defeat with relief and a bit of Roman self-congratulation. A classic illustration of the old saying that the winners write the histories.

Schiff isn't buying it. Rather than the femme fatale who came within a hair of dominating Rome by seducing its rulers, Schiff's Cleopatra is well-educated, a skillful adminstrator, a shrewd strategist, a devoted mother (even while being a sister on whom one should not turn one's back).

This sounds credible--but I wish Schiff had said more about where she found this Cleopatra. By reading against the grain in the Cassius Dio, et alia? In archeological findings? In the secondary sources?

This is a biography more for a general readership than for specialists, so my questions may not matter. Schiff certainly sounds credible, even though the grounds for her conclusions are not always spelled out, and the writing is as brisk and enlivening as a spring wind.