Stacy Schiff > Quotes

“As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“[Cleopatra's] power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar's murderers had noted, 'How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!' It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife’s arm?”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“No one dances while he is sober. Unless he happens to be a lunatic. -Cicero”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered,”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age..... Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.”
― Stacy Schiff

“Women play the villains in fairy tales—what are you saying when you place the very emblem of lowly domestic duty between your legs and ride off, defying the bounds of community and laws of gravity?”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.”
― Stacy Schiff

“Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it's the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.”
― Stacy Schiff

“The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life