Earlier this year I read Adrian Goldsworthy's biography of Julius Caesar (reviewed here), which on the whole I found fairly good. So when I was in an airport bookstore last month and saw he had now written a biography about Antony and Cleopatra (or to be more precise Marcus Antonius and queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt), I bought it.

Interestingly, as I just reread my own review of the Caesar biography, I found a great deal of similarities that hadn't occurred to me while reading this book. In many ways, this book might be considered a sequel or companion book to that one - though Goldsworthy has avoided some of the minor flaws that characterized Caesar.

The basic premise of this biography is the same: to dispel the legends and fancy stories about the protagonists, and make clear what we know for a fact and what not. In this book, that also means putting the protagonists in the right perspective; while Caesar might well be argued to deserve the enormous amounts of attention he has received over the centuries, Goldsworthy argues that the same cannot be said of Antony and Cleopatra. The former held enormous power for a brief - though extremely important - period of Roman history, but was no more than an arrogant and in many regards flawed Roman aristocrat without any exceptional talents; while the latter was an impressive and highly gifted woman, but never held much real power and might just as well have become a mere footnote in world history.

Neither of the protagonists of this book had much importance until a handful of years before Caesar's death, and in many ways their story is a continuation of his. But as Goldsworthy could hardly assume all readers would have recently read Caesar like I did, he starts a good bit further back - with their distant ancestors. The chapters on the history of the Ptolemies were mostly new to me, and so rather more interesting than yet another run-down of the history of the late Roman Republic, to which the particular focus on the various Antonii added only a little bit of variety. Still, as big a cliché as it is, one really cannot understand either the First or the Second Triumvirate, and the men in them, without the background of the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, the Social War and the other events of that period, so I suppose it was necessary. In these chapters - the ones about Rome, anyway - Goldsworthy has the rather irksome habit of refusing to use names for all but the biggest players, apparently with the dubious idea that he can make the rapid run-down easier to digest if he only describes people without giving their names. Fortunately (or perhaps not so fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), he quickly loses this habit in the later chapters, where names are dropped in ever increasing numbers.

The book goes on, generally switching back and forth between its two strands in alternating chapters, with the youth and early careers of Antony and Cleopatra - to the extent history can say much about those that is more than just speculation. Particularly in the case of Cleopatra, Goldsworthy does a good job in pointing out how little we know for certain - not even the identity of her mother, or whether there even was a Cleopatra VI before her. He also debunks the general idea of Antony being a soldier by trade, by pointing out how very limited Antony's military experience actually was by the time Caesar's murder put him in the spotlights - and he heavily underscores how much Antony benefited from his illustrious name.

The rest of the book is similar in style and general thrust. This does not mean that Goldsworthy fails to show sympathy for his subjects, though, on the contrary. He has plenty of sympathy for both of them, and allows his romantic side to shine through in the many references to their passion, apparently loosening his usual rigid standards of proof for that. There are good historical reasons to assume that Caesar - to some extent - and Antony - to a rather large extent - had passionate feelings for Cleopatra, but I'm not sure I can see what Goldsworthy is basing his assumption of the reverse on. The image of Cleopatra we get from the facts is certainly that of a woman who has been forced by circumstances to be governed by paranoia and distrust, most of all towards her own family - even her children. (On a not particularly relevant side note, reading about Cleopatra and Antony's children for some reason brought me to the conclusion that their family must've been rather a lot like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's - a comparison that I'm sure has occurred to other people. Apart from the paranoia thing, that is.)

With that possible romantic exception, this book is a well-balanced, informative and ruthlessly truthful account of the lives of two fascinating people in a fascinating period of world history - who have, perhaps, received rather more than their fair share of attention from posteriority. Goldsworthy shows why he deserves his solid reputation for military history, particularly in his account of the famous Battle of Actium, which is rather different from the popular version. Probably not quite so different from the academically accepted version, but then I can't claim to be very familiar with that. But he also manages - more than in Caesar - to bring his protagonists to life, with all their strengths and flaws. Roman history specialists won't find much that is really new here, but for the rest of us, this is a very good and readable book.