Daughters of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  And mingled her own darkness with her death.

  —CRINAGORAS OF MYTILENE

  MY mother died with the moon. Her poet wrote it down for the ages. We buried my mother in the Royal Mausoleum on the hill with its ankh on the door, in all the traditions she held most sacred. We visit her there often, making offerings and telling her news of her beloved Mauretania.

  Did she know she had triumphed and that her death would be followed by the most bountiful harvests we had ever known? I think she did.

  My mother’s last act was to smile at the shadowed moon. But the men who dominated her life did not meet their fate with such grace. King Herod’s last acts included the execution of another son, and an order to murder all little boys in Judea under the age of two so that in them would arise no new savior …

  As for Augustus, his empire is too small for him without my mother in it. Without her to match him, to test him, to keep him from his most despicable impulses, it all unravels. My mother once warned the emperor that if he did not repent, he would suffer the curse Isis put upon him.

  You’ll live long enough to watch your heirs fall, one after the other, until your empire rests in the hands of those who despise you.

  It is already coming to pass, just that way …

  I have seen how it will be for him at the end. How, whenever his daughter is mentioned to him, he will call her a cancer and cry, “Would that I were wifeless or had childless died!”

  His last words will be spoken beneath paintings of theater masks on his wall and he will say, “If I have played my part well, clap your hands, and dismiss me with applause from the stage.”

  The lasting legacy of Augustus will be the Golden Age my mother spent her life working to achieve. She is there, in the grain fields that feed the empire. She is there, when just laws are administered and the empire goes on without threat of civil war. She is there on his monument, the Ara Pacis, though even now they debate which of the goddesses gave Rome her glory.

  It was my mother.

  She gave them Isis too. The mother goddess with her virgin-born son in her lap will go and on, and in that way, so does Isis, and Cleopatra Selene. I feel her with me, even now. When Tacfarinas whispers love to me and begs me to run off with him. Go anywhere, be anyone, he says … but I think of how she would want me to stay and watch over my baby brother.

  I remember too that my mother wanted me to be the Queen of Mauretania. She would have gifted me her crown, if she could have, yet she gave me much greater power and dominion. She loved me and wanted love for me. She forgave me for not being her and asked only that I be my best self. She freed me to follow my own river, wherever it might lead.

  And she taught me that I am a Daughter of the Nile, as are we all …

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Ancient sources mention Cleopatra Selene only in relation to others. She was Cleopatra’s daughter, Octavian’s hostage, Juba’s wife, and Ptolemy’s mother. But the archaeological and numismatic evidence of her reign tells a tale of a self-possessed and powerful queen who wished to leave behind a legacy of her very own. In light of that desire, it has been my honor and privilege to write about her extraordinary life.

  The historical evidence suggests that Cleopatra Selene was a religious symbol for Isis worshippers and a champion of the cult. Though Isis worship was banned in Rome during her lifetime, adherents of the goddess found sanctuary in Mauretania, where Selene and Juba built an Iseum complete with a sacred crocodile. Both Augustus and his successor were notoriously hostile to the worship of Isis, but thanks in part to Selene’s efforts, Isis worship would go on to become the dominant religion of the empire until the rise of Christianity.

  That is no small accomplishment.

  It is, of course, impossible to discuss Cleopatra Selene as a religious icon without comparing her to Jesus of Nazareth, who was born shortly after her death. As a biblical and historical figure, King Herod intersected both their lives, which is why he is featured prominently in this story. More importantly, the history of Herod’s reign as told by Josephus is the only detailed chronicle of a client king in the Augustan Age that survives.

  Thus, to understand monarchy as it was experienced by Cleopatra Selene and Juba II, we must look to the reign of Herod. To measure the success of their court, we must compare it to the dysfunction of the Herodian court. And if we want to learn how the Iseum was built in Mauretania, we must look to Herod’s Temple of Jerusalem. (The time, resources, and labor required for Herod’s project served as a measuring stick for me in writing about Cleopatra Selene’s undertaking.)

  Though war and rebellion would savage her kingdom after her death, Selene’s reign was one of relative peace and prosperity. She and Juba spent their treasure building up two capital cities and providing a plentiful grain tribute to Rome. This is especially significant in light of the way slavery seems to have tapered off in Mauretania. There is little evidence of mass importation of slave labor after the initial establishment of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene’s reign, as might be expected in a grain-producing client kingdom, so I portrayed my heroine as ambivalent about the role of slavery. And yet, even without mass importation of slave labor after the initial establishment of their reign, Selene managed to transform the coastal city of Iol-Caesaria into a veritable reproduction of her native Alexandria—one of the many clues we have about both her ambitions and her poignant quest to memorialize everything she’d loved and lost.

  Selene and Juba were bound in service to Rome, but it would be wrong to dismiss them as puppet monarchs. Selene was no more deferential to Rome than her colleagues and, in some instances, much less deferential. For example, in sharp contrast to other client monarchs of her day—including her husband, whose coins always featured Latin—Selene’s numismatic iconography is decidedly provocative. Selene’s coins are always in Greek, often flouting the emperor’s official narrative. Her coins sometimes celebrate her dead mother. Her coins also elevate the goddess Isis. Moreover, Selene’s coins imply that Egypt would break free of its bonds and that Selene represented the throne of Egypt in exile. In short, Selene’s coins are so brazen, so nearly belligerent, that one would expect her to have paid some political price for them.

  Instead, Selene appears never to have fallen afoul of Rome. This and her formidable influence as Queen of Mauretania is evidence of an extraordinary relationship with Augustus. Perhaps the emperor indulged Selene because she was no threat or because she was a nominal member of his family and he was fond of her.

  In this series of novels, of course, I have imagined a much darker reason: a twisted romantic obsession.

  That Augustus was an adulterer is attested to by several sources, and my portrayal of him as a despoiler of virgins comes from Suetonius, who also mentions Livia as a possible partner in her husband’s proclivities. With this in mind, I invented the sexual relationship between Augustus and Selene as a consistent rationale for the unexplained turns in her life, and imagined that it stemmed from Augustus’s preoccupation with Cleopatra VII as explored by Diana E. E. Kleiner in Cleopatra and Rome.

  However, it was a footnote about the Ara Pacis that is to blame for the liberties I have taken. The footnote in question identified the mysterious prince on the Ara Pacis as Juba and Selene’s son, Ptolemy. (The most prominent alternative theory is that the mysterious prince is the son of Queen Dynamis of the Bosporus and that she is standing behind him, but she appears to have died the year before the processional depicted.) Assuming the prince on the Ara Pacis is Ptolemy, I had to know how such a thing came to pass. That led to my study of the famed Tellus panel with its fertile earth goddess and her accompanying winds … and my story was born.

  The ancients believed deeply in magic. This view was part of their everyday experience. And given that Cleopatra Selene was a religious figure during her own lifetime, it seemed natural to give her miraculous powers.

  *

  IN the end, however, the creative liberties taken in this novel are not half as outrageous
as the events based on actual history. The wife-swapping, melodramatic Julia-Claudian family soap opera that dominated imperial politics is well documented. Julia’s relationship with Iullus is attested to by the historical record. And in truth, I might have included many more details about the deterioration of Julia and Tiberius’s marriage if this were not, at heart, Selene’s story.

  Still, I included as many too-strange-not-to-be-true elements as I could. It really was the emperor’s habit to slip into Rome under the cover of darkness. Cleopatra Selene really is believed to have died during a lunar eclipse. Juba truly was a renowned scholar with a fascination for exploration who claimed he had discovered the source of the Nile in Mauretania. (As a matter of geography he was wrong, but if it was political poetry to woo Cleopatra Selene by tying her new kingdom to Egypt, it must have been very well received. In any case, his theory about the Nile was not definitively disproved for almost two thousand years!)

  King Archelaus did try to trick Herod out of his murderous ways, and Crinagoras of Mytilene appears to have been in Herod’s court during the time of these intrigues.

  More astonishingly, Dio tells us that Drusus retreated from his last campaign after being haunted by a phantasm, and that before he died of a fall from his horse, his men were spooked by visions of boys on horseback and the sounds of a mournful mother wailing. These things are plain in the historical record and I have tried to pepper the manuscript with mentions of actual artifacts—such as the silver platter with Selene in elephant headdress—documented quotes, and anecdotes whenever possible. In fact, the story about the Berber woman and the lion comes from Juba’s writings, as does his epigram mocking Leonteus’s play.

  Nevertheless, there were a surprising number of choices to be made where the historical record is ambiguous. For example, we know that Selene and Juba had at least one son, but his age is in dispute. Some scholars believe Ptolemy was born as late as 1 B.C. Others posit that he was born earlier, pointing to portrait evidence and mentions of his later military service in the rebellion of Tacfarinas.

  But if it is true that Ptolemy is portrayed on the Ara Pacis, then he would have to have been born before its dedication, which complicates the matter even further. To resolve these questions, it has been suggested that Cleopatra Selene and Juba II had more than one son, both named Ptolemy, and that one died before reaching adulthood. I adopted that theory because it solves the problem quite neatly. Whatever the date of his birth or however many siblings he may have had, Ptolemy of Mauretania became the King of Mauretania. His wife appears to have been Julia Urania of Emesa—one of several indications of strong ties between those two ruling families—a thing that may lend credence to the claims of Queen Zenobia, another bad girl of the ancient world, who held herself out as a descendent of Cleopatra VII of Egypt. And it may be of interest to the reader to note that the black stone worshipped in Emesa is thought to be the same one later set into the wall of the Kaaba by the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

  We know nothing about Selene’s daughter except that she existed. The evidence is an inscription, most likely dedicated during a visit with Juba to Greece, in which the girl is referred to only as the daughter of the Libyan king. Historians traditionally identify Selene’s daughter as Drusilla of Mauretania, but recent scholarship indicates Drusilla is actually Selene’s granddaughter, the future wife of the procurator Antonius Felix in Judea.

  Moreover, the single most telling historical fact that we know about Selene is that she named her son Ptolemy, reaching into her dynastic heritage rather than her husband’s. This not only bespeaks of Selene’s extraordinary power and prestige, but also tells us that her daughter would almost certainly have been given a dynastic name, and that is why I chose Cleopatra Isidora.

  As for Pythodorida of Tralles, she does not appear to be one of the children taken in by Octavia or Antonia Minor to be fostered in Rome. And yet as the granddaughter of Marcus Antonius, she was able to secure not just one, but two royal marriages that eventually made her sole ruler of Pontus. Importantly, Pythodorida adopted the titles of the Ptolemaic dynasty. That there was only one living Ptolemaic queen for Pythodorida to emulate gives a clue as to who her patroness might have been. In short, if Pythodorida was not raised in Rome, then her presence at the court of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene is the most probable alternative.

  As for Selene’s half siblings, more is known. Selene’s half brother, Iullus Antonius, appears to have held a number of elective offices, so I filled in the blanks, ensuring that he received the military training that would have qualified him for higher office. Both of Selene’s half sisters, Antonia Major and Antonia Minor, would go on to play prominent roles in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Their descendants would eventually restore Isis to great prominence in Rome and Selene’s influence is as likely an explanation for that as any.

  The fate of Alexander Helios is lost to us. For all intents and purposes, Selene’s twin brother entered the household of Augustus after the Triumph of 29 B.C. and disappeared from the history books. Some historians believe that he must have died of natural causes or been done away with by Augustus, and others theorize that he went to live with Selene in Mauretania. In any case, I decided to embrace the ambiguity surrounding his life and death and adopt it as my own.

  Though we know that Mauretania was one of the few parts of his empire in which Augustus never set foot, Rome wasn’t a far journey from Iol-Caesaria, and Selene would have assuredly visited the capital. There are several indications that she and Juba owned a house in Rome. Precedence for political visits by sitting monarchs can be found in the doings of King Herod, but Selene had more than political reasons to return to Rome; she had family there.

  Due to thousands of years of deforestation and depletion of natural resources, today’s growing seasons in North Africa may be slightly different than those enjoyed in the land Juba and Selene settled, but I adopted relatively modern climate patterns.

  Other ambiguities in the historical record were more inconvenient. We know Augustus was not able to reach Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa before his mysterious death, but the sequence of events leading to Agrippa’s death are a matter of some debate. The common wisdom holds that Agrippa set out to crush the rebellion in Pannonia but the natives settled down upon hearing of his imminent arrival, at which time he retired to Campagna and took ill. Biographer Pat Southern argues more persuasively, however, that Agrippa took ill before starting the campaign and it was, therefore, aborted. What killed Agrippa, we cannot say. Other than Agrippa’s foot ailment, which may have been gout, he was known for good health. Given that he and Lepidus were of the patrician class and in proximity at the time of their demise, it has been theorized that they died of plague.

  That Augustus immediately removed himself to Aquileia, ostensibly to take over in Pannonia, is consistent with this theory, so I adopted it.

  Similarly, the imprecise chronology of Josephus’s account of Herod’s ongoing troubles with his sons compelled me to make some educated guesses when it came to the exact dates of torture, trials, and executions.

  Then we come to the controversy surrounding Selene’s death. Due to the discovery of the mysterious El Ksar hoard of coins depicting Selene without reference to Juba as her coruler, historians have traditionally assumed that Selene was alive as late as A.D. 17. If she did live this long, she would have ruled Mauretania while Juba traveled on an expedition with Gaius Caesar. It would also mean that she was alive when Juba married Glaphyra of Cappadocia between A.D. 1 and 6.

  The nearly concurrent uprising in Mauretania with Juba’s hasty divorce from Glaphyra raises all manner of questions. Did Juba take Glaphyra as a second wife? Did a resentful Selene allow the political situation to get out of hand so that Juba would be forced to return home? Was he compelled to divorce Glaphyra to keep his throne? If so, was it because Selene wouldn’t tolerate a rival or because Augustus worried about an alliance between Juba and the Cappadocian dynasty?

  A rift in Selene’s marriage has been
posited—one that was mended after Juba’s return. In fact, Beatrice Chanler points to an inscription on a monument she credits to Selene that welcomes Juba home in A.D. 6. However, modern scholars argue that because Juba was a thoroughly Romanized king, he would not have taken a second wife, and his marriage to Glaphyra is probably the best evidence that Selene was already dead. Then they attempt to pinpoint the year of Selene’s death by correlating astronomical data with the eulogy written for Selene by Crinagoras of Mytilene. The lunar eclipse that best fits took place in 5 B.C.

  I don’t share a certainty that Juba’s Romanization or citizenship would have prevented him from taking a second wife. His father is known to have had many wives, in keeping with Numidian custom, and the practice may have been considered a way to strengthen Juba’s hand amongst his native Berbers. Moreover, although King Herod held Roman citizenship, he had more wives than he could manage. However, it does seen unlikely that the King of Cappadocia would have allowed his headstrong daughter to become a second wife in any arrangement, much less one involving Cleopatra’s daughter. Beyond the Glaphyra problem, I’m loath to ignore the numismatic evidence of the El Ksar coins. I’m also wary of taking Crinagoras too literally. After all, the epigram he wrote upon Selene’s marriage to Juba demonstrates that he felt free to take creative license.

  Nevertheless, in this matter I bowed in deference to the weight of scholarly opinions more informed than my own.

  *

  NOW we come to the things that I simply changed or made up.

  Selene and Helios were first introduced in Lily of the Nile at the age of ten when they would have actually been nine years old. I did this because I wanted older, more relatable protagonists. In the rest of the series, the children of Cleopatra are all aged accurately. Astute readers might notice that Selene’s freedwoman was erroneously called Cleopatra Antonianus in the previous novel, but because I realized my translation error, she is referred to only as Chryssa in this book.