In spite of this, people in the early Roman empire weren’t all that different than we are. Their aims for their lives have remarkable resonance with our own. They wanted to honor their forefathers. They wanted greater security and prosperity for their children. They were patriots. They believed in some forms of social mobility. They built beautiful things that are still a wonder to our eyes. They created governmental and public programs that worked more smoothly in some cases than our own. In short, they tried to instill a sense of order into the chaos of the world around them. They survived and thrived and bequeathed to us a wealth of knowledge without which we would be much poorer as a civilization.

So how to handle their portrayal in a fictional novel? Does one make the Romans out to be fascist monsters? (Certainly, that’s how my heroine sees them at first.) Does one take a stance of moral relativism and present them without censure and perhaps with a glow of rosy admiration? (Colleen McCoullough seems to take this approach.) Does one use humor to deflect readers’ discomfort in reading about such a ruthless way of life? (John Maddox Roberts seems to have gone this route.)

Or does one simply trust the reader to know that a portrayal of history is not an endorsement of it?

Until recently, I’d have thought it was understood that just because an author writes about something horrible doesn’t mean he or she is encouraging it. We do all understand that horror and thriller writers aren’t advocating murdering people, right? But it seems as if historical fiction and fantasy writers aren’t always given the same benefit of the doubt.

I’ve seen a bizarre slew of criticism lately, ranging from one author being accused of bigotry for writing from the viewpoint of a character with a documented distaste for Jews to another author being panned for her ancient heroine being insufficiently appalled by the institution of slavery.

Now, I’m all about reading the subtext and thinking critically about what a book’s true message is. I understand that an author can inadvertently write a body of work, the underlying theme of which makes you question the author’s values. (The combination of Frank Miller’s Sin City and 300 comes to mind.)

That said, some genuine effort at giving a fair reading to the author’s motives ought to be made before announcing, say, that George R. R. Martin is creepy. (I know. Martin isn’t a historical fiction novelist, but his fantasy is loosely based on the historical War of the Roses, so the reaction to his work is still relevant here.)

So why do historical fiction writers choose to revisit the past when it was a nearly unrelenting march of injustice, sexism, racism, and just about every other bad -ism you can think of?

My own primary motivation in writing historical fiction is to use it as a mirror to hold up against contemporary society. I want my readers to look at the ancient world and compare it to the world in which we live today. I want my readers to realize how far we have come. I also want my readers to realize that the progress of women’s liberation is not a straight line. There have been setbacks in the ancient past and there will likely be setbacks in the future against which we ought to be wary. I want my readers to compare the political propaganda we hear in the news today to the kind that was spewed by Augustus.

This is my intent. And yet, I realize that sometimes my intent is not conveyed. This may be because I’m not talented enough. It may also be because every reader carries their own baggage. Every reader’s experience of my novel is going to be unique to them. They are going to tend to see in it things that conform to their own world view.

But if their world view is that writers never write about the depravity of history unless it’s out of a creepy sense of wish-fulfillment, then their world view is spectacularly ill-informed.

Oh, I’m sure there are Civil War writers who really wish that slavery had never been abolished. (Newt Gingrich comes to mind.) I’m sure there are horror writers who use the therapy of putting pen to paper to keep them from sacrificing babies to Satan. I’m sure of it because given a large enough population of people, you will always find some percentage of sociopaths and freaks. However, since it’s very clear that those people are a deviation from the norm, why don’t we just assume that writers of fiction have some other more benevolent reason for writing about evil?

(Also, isn’t it worse to air-brush over the horrors of the past as if the world was so much better back then?)

Some authors write historical fiction for the same reason I do. Others write it because they have an obsession with documenting little known facts. Still others wish to put a human face onto an obscure time period. So they write about all the awful things people did back then. They don’t generally write about it because they want their audience members to pine longingly for the day when kings ruled absolutely and could behead their wives.

I’ve heard it argued that some readers do romanticize that past and wish to return to the glory days when women, peasants and brown people knew their place. This is horrifying, but the fact that lunatics and losers might read the wrong thing into a fictional novel has never been, to my mind, any real criticism against that novel.

Today, we would rightly question the ethics of these love affairs, but given the way women were treated in the ancient world–and even until recently–her relationships with these men seems positively enlightened. Especially when you contrast them with the sexual relationships she was supposed to have as the Queen of Egypt.

To wit, she was not only expected to marry her brother, but to have children by him.

So, how did this come to pass? The Ptolemies considered themselves to be the successors to Alexander the Great–that Macedonian King who conquered the known world. Ptolemy was his general, and some said his half-brother. After Alexander the Great died and his empire was broken up, Egypt fell into the hands of Ptolemy and a dynasty was born.

His daughter, Arsinoe II, would start the tradition of incest. Married off to an old King of Thrace when she was still a teenager, she was the ultimate survivor. Her life was frequently in danger and she made many narrow escapes, including one from the Seleucid Army marching on her kingdom. At some point, Arsinoe seems to have decided that if she wanted to be safe, she couldn’t trust anyone outside her immediate family. So, she returned to Egypt and married her full brother, Ptolemy II.

Now, the Greeks didn’t have a tradition of incest in their ruling families…but the pharaohs of Egypt did. By marrying her brother, Arsinoe was able to help create a link between the new Ptolemaic dynasty and the very old traditions of the native Egyptians. It served her extremely well as she became the first female pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty, ruling not just as the wife of the king, but as a king in her own right.

After that, the tradition took hold and not simply because all the cool kids were doing it. The Ptolemies discovered that incest served some important political purposes.

For one, it kept out the riff-raff. Incestuous marriages virtually ensured that the Macedonian ruling family would never have to dilute its blood with native Egyptians, for whom they seemed to hold some disdain. Moreover, it put the kibosh on social mobility. No ambitious little Macedonian or Egyptian boys would grow up with the dream that they, too, could be pharaoh as long as they worked hard, sucked up, and poisoned the right people.

The best an ambitious man could hope for was to make his daughter a concubine to the king, which might, if the queen was infertile, allow him to one day become grandfather and vizier to the next king. Consequently, a tradition of Ptolemaic incest kept the threat of being poisoned by outsiders to a minimum.

Another advantage to keeping it in the family was that foreign powers couldn’t get a foothold in Egypt. The usual way by which empires encroached upon one another was by marriage. If I’m the king of the nearby Seleucid empire, for example, it might be a good idea to marry my daughter off to the King of Egypt. Then, when the pharaoh is old and feeble, I could claim the throne in the name of my grandson with my own army to back me. But if Ptolemaic kings only marry their sisters or daughters or nieces, I don’t have a prayer.

So, the potential for foreign invasion and manipulation was reduced by incest. But what of internal conflicts? Well, when you marry your own sisters you can maintain control over your nephews–all of whom would have a claim to your throne. It’s an easy solution to turn them into sons!

You might assume that the Ptolemaic gene pool would produce a lot of inbred drooling abominations, but aside from a tendency towards weight-gain and buggy eyes, the Ptolemies don’t appear to have suffered any genetic abnormalities. Unless you count the unflinching resolve to murder your siblings as a matter of nature rather than nurture.

Apparently, familiarity breeds contempt and the Ptolemies became a fratricidal lot. The family infighting was ruthless and deadly; there was no defense against those family dynamics.

So was it worth it?

Well, the evidence tells us that it was. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years. And if the Battle of Actium had gone the other way, Egyptian culture would have dominated western civilization.

The idea that Cleopatra was a seductress, a wicked woman who lured good Roman soldiers to their deaths, fits in with the Judeo-Christian idea of both women and serpents. The bible presents the snake to us as an object of wicked temptation, luring us to offend the divine order of the universe. But this Judaic view of the serpent is only one of the perspectives in the ancient world.

To the Egyptians, the cobra was a sacred animal that represented the ancient cobra-goddess Meretseger, who guarded the tombs of pharaohs. Another cobra-goddess was Wadjet, who was a guardian and protectress. The symbol of the cobra was so closely associated with the idea of royalty and the right to rule that it would become part of the official crown in the form of the uraeus, an icon of royalty that Cleopatra adopted herself. In fact, she chose three–one serpent to represent herself, her son Ptolemy Caesarion and the Roman man she claimed was her husband, Julius Caesar.

If Cleopatra did choose to die by the bite of a cobra, it would have been a highly symbolic political act–one that declared her the rightful ruler of Egypt, at one with the old gods of Egypt, and immortal.  (The shedding of skin helped to perpetuate the image of the snake as an immortal animal.)

Despite her mother’s association with snakes–or perhaps because of it–Cleopatra’s daughter seems to have eschewed their symbolism in favor of crocodiles. However, she was likely to have encountered snakes in the Kingdom of Mauretania, where she was sent to rule. Snake charming was a popular entertainment in the ancient world and ancient magicians were said to be able to turn staves into snakes.

Snake charming, then as now, was accomplished by way of training a serpent, then pretending as if the music has hypnotized the dangerous animal. In reality, most of these performing snakes had their mouths sewn loosely shut or their fangs removed. However, the reputation of the charmers was often strong enough that they were called upon to rid villages of dangerous snakes.

But even if the Hellenized Queen Cleopatra Selene hadn’t been impressed by the reverence of Egypt for the snake, or by the snake charmers of North Africa, she would still have had to contend with the Greek idea of serpents.

In Greek mythology, the serpentine caduceus is a staff held by Hermes, who was a messenger god, a guardian of commerce, a protector and a guide to the dead. This symbol of the caduceus is often mistaken as a symbol of healing because it is confused with the single serpent and rod of Asclepius, the Greek God of medicine and healing. The shedding of snake skin represented for the Greeks a rejuvenation of the body or spirit. The serpent itself is also a representation of the dual nature of a physician who deals with both life and death. Because of this, the serpent was a highly respected animal in ancient Greece and figured prominently in mystery cults. Even the mother of Alexander the Great was said to keep serpents as pets and was rumored to have been seduced by Zeus in the form of a snake.

With the image of the serpent so prevalent throughout culture and mythology, it’s no surprise Cleopatra Selene was depicted wearing a snake armband on the cover of Song of the Nile!