Cleopatra A Study

Cleopatra, A Study is a historical work by Henry Houssaye, the French historian and writer who lived from 1848 to 1911 and who was elected to the Académie française in 1894. Houssaye produced substantial historical writing across a long career, with particular concentration on the Napoleonic period and on various subjects from ancient history that interested him as a writer of substantial literary as well as scholarly ambition.

Houssaye was the son of Arsène Houssaye, the prolific nineteenth century French writer who had been director of the Comédie Française, and was raised within the substantial Parisian literary world of the Second Empire and early Third Republic. He developed serious historical interests alongside the broader literary culture that his family background gave him access to, and his major historical works on the 1814 and 1815 campaigns of Napoleon became standard scholarly references on those subjects.

The Cleopatra study belongs to Houssaye’s classical historical writing rather than to his more famous Napoleonic work. The figure of Cleopatra has attracted substantial historical and literary attention across the European tradition. The last active queen of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, ruling from 51 BC to 30 BC, Cleopatra was a participant in some of the most consequential political and military events of the late Roman Republic, including her well known relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and her presence at the Battle of Actium where her fleet alongside Antony’s was defeated by Octavian’s forces in 31 BC.

Houssaye’s study takes the historical Cleopatra and the substantial literary and dramatic tradition surrounding her as its subject and presents what is essentially a French academic historical reconstruction of her actual political and personal career, set against the conventional dramatic and romantic portrayals that had accumulated around her image across the centuries. The book combines substantial use of the ancient sources, including Plutarch and Suetonius, with the kind of literary sensibility that Houssaye’s broader background as a French man of letters brought to the historical work.

The study is of interest now to readers approaching Cleopatra through the lens of late nineteenth century French historical writing, and to historians of the long European literary and historical reception of the Cleopatra figure. It pairs naturally with the various other nineteenth and twentieth century works on Cleopatra and with the broader European Egyptological tradition of the period.