1. Eliminate the Competition
Though they were bitter enemies, one thing Augustus Caesar and Cleopatra VII of Egypt had in common was an uncanny knack for bumping off anyone who might prove to be inconvenient. For Cleopatra, it was sometimes a matter of survival. Her sister, Arsinoe, made a play for her throne and would have had her killed if she could, so it has never struck me as particularly ruthless that Cleopatra begged her lover, Mark Antony, to get rid of her sister. On the other hand, Cleopatra’s young brother Ptolemy died under mysterious circumstances when he was still a boy under her thumb. Cleopatra didn’t want to leave any other options for the people to latch onto in case they didn’t like how she ruled Egypt and indeed, she seems to have eliminated all other rivals. At least, in Egypt.

Meanwhile, Augustus, the nephew of the inexplicably more famous Julius Caesar, was just as ruthless. Though he would castigate Cleopatra for her fratricidal ways, there’s no doubt whatsoever that he was responsible for exponentially more murders in his lifetime–including his own half-brother-by-adoption, Ptolemy Caesar, more popularly known as Caesarion. The reason? Apparently it was the boy’s name and thus we get the famous quote, “Two Caesars is one too many.”

2. If You Can’t Be A God, Say That You’re Related To One
The Romans didn’t like for their rulers to be kings, much less gods, so the effective rulers of ancient Rome had to find a different way to glorify themselves. They claimed to be the descendants of gods and goddesses. Mark Antony claimed descent from Hercules–a claim lent credence by the fact that he looked like the hulking demi-god. All the Caesars claimed descent from Venus because she was supposedly the mother of Aeneas, that Trojan hero who helped found Rome. They even built a temple to Venus Genetrix, just in case people didn’t believe they were serious about it. This was an idea borrowed, no doubt, from Alexander the Great, whose mother had been accused of infidelity. Alexander owned up to that, saying that his mother had been seduced by Zeus; being the son of a god helped him conquer the world. But all of these boys were pikers when it came to divine glorification, at least as compared to Cleopatra VII.

She didn’t bother tracing back her lineage to her goddess. She simply put out that she was the divine incarnation of Isis. And people believed it!

3. Show That You’ve Got the Common Touch
On the one hand, ancient rulers had to set themselves apart from their subjects. Claiming an affinity with the divine world was useful propaganda…until it wasn’t. How much more noble of those descendants of the gods, if they behave humbly in a crisis? The Romans loved stories about how Mark Antony suffered the same privations as his soldiers, eating bugs and bark in the woods, trying to survive a disastrous campaign. Why, he was just one of the guys!

By contrast, Augustus Caesar was never good in the field, so he couldn’t make that same appeal to the common soldier; heck, he couldn’t even stay in the mountains with them because it was too cold for his delicate sensibilities. However, he wore humble home-spun cloth that he claimed was woven for him by his own wife and sisters. And rather than admit that he was the ruler of the whole known world and could execute anybody he wanted on a whim, he made sure to call himself only the First Citizen, as if he were the first among equals.

4. Use your sex appeal if you’ve got it
We all know the story of how Cleopatra hid herself up in a carpet/sack of bed linens to be rolled out at Julius Caesar’s feet. It was a bold move; he liked her moxie. The two of them became lovers on the spot! But she probably didn’t do it because she had a fetish for balding middle-aged men. She wanted to be Queen of Egypt, and Julius Caesar was happy to reward her for her charms. Still, political seduction wasn’t just a game for women. Augustus allegedly claimed that his constant adulteries weren’t motivated by such a base motive as lust, but that he had to seduce the wives and daughters of the senators so as to better be able to spy on his enemies!

5. Never resort to open warfare when a smear campaign will do
When Julius Caesar was assassinated, his lieutenant, Mark Antony, could have sought open warfare against the Senate. But he didn’t. He bided his time until the funeral oration, waiting for the perfect opportunity to portray the Senate not as noble heroes who had saved the Republic from a dictator, but as wicked and avaricious murderers who killed a benefactor of the people. It was a stroke of genius and stoked the public’s fury into such a white hot rage that the senators had to flee for their lives.

On the other hand, turnabout is apparently fair play. It’s conventional wisdom that the Battle of Actium decided the fate of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, but that’s only true to a point. While they lost many ships in that engagement, they appear to have successfully broken a naval blockade, escaping with warships and treasure to fight another day on better ground. Indeed, Antony still had a huge army he planned to reunite with. That, however, never happened. As it turns out, Antony’s army was so dispirited by an ingenious lie that their commander fled the battle like a coward to chase after his lover, Cleopatra, that they surrendered to the other side without a fight. As the groundwork for this lie had already been set by years of propaganda in which Cleopatra was portrayed as a wanton seductress and Antony was a besotted fool, the soldiers believed that they had been abandoned, and they turned their cloaks. Antony’s enemies, the would-be Augustus and his general Agrippa, may have even rightly predicted what a blow this would be to a man who had, up until that last year, been wildly popular with his soldiers. Antony’s honor was mortally wounded and he retreated to a cabin by the sea where he ultimately sulked himself into defeat a year later.

7. Gamble
Julius Caesar is known for saying, “let the dice fly high!” This may be why he fell for a girl like Cleopatra, who staked her life on the idea that if only she could smuggle herself past enemy soldiers and roll herself out at the feet of Caesar, fortune would smile upon her. They were gamblers in that sense; both of them took outrageous political risks. But they weren’t the only ones. King Herod of Judea had chosen the wrong side in the Roman civil war; he’d been Mark Antony’s ally. When called to account by Augustus, a more timid man may have retired or even fled. But not Herod. He marched into the presence of the new emperor and declared that he had indeed been a great friend to Mark Antony. In fact, the conqueror would be hard pressed to find anyone who had been a better ally to his enemy. But, Herod pointed out, that just proved how loyal he was. And if Augustus would allow him to be the King of Judea, Herod promised to be just as loyal to him from now on. The gambit worked and Herod would go on to rule for the rest of his natural life.

Rape of the Sabine Women

The life of Cleopatra Selene is a story so unlikely that magic sometimes seems like the only explanation.

But that isn’t why I chose to include magical realism in my book. I included my heroine’s ability to commune with her goddess through bloody hieroglyphs and some dominion over the wind, because I wanted my novels to be allegorical. I wanted to say something about the faith that sustained this young woman through her parents’ suicides and the murder of her siblings. I also wanted to tap into a more authentic portrayal of the ancients, for whom magic was a real, every day phenomenon.

I had similar reasons for including a rape scene in Song of the Nile.

I could say that I did it for historical authenticity, as if there were no choice on my part and I was merely tyrannized by the facts, but that would be disingenuous. Some have argued that editorial choices need not be dictated by history and I mostly agree with that statement. For example, it’s rare to encounter an unappealing hero or heroine even though it’s historically authentic to portray our characters as having bad teeth, bad breath, and horrible hygiene. (Okay, maybe not the latter in the case of the Romans, but you get the point.)

In short, even though history does constrain and dictate, authors still make choices about what to include so as to cater to an audience’s desires. But I would also argue that in a book where historical hygiene is an important metaphor, or illustrative of some greater point, it would be criminal to leave it out. It just so happens that not much in the artistic world hinges upon whether or not a character has bad breath.

By contrast, the constant threat of sexual violence under which historical women lived–almost entirely without recourse–is not only relevant to understanding their world, but also to understanding our own.

Rape is as omnipresent today as it was in ancient times–it’s just that only recently has it become recognized or rediscovered as a crime against women. In Selene’s time, such an offense would be viewed largely through a prism of how a rape might taint the honor of her father or husband. That’s an important shift in the progress of women’s equality and our recognition as full human beings. I believe, and have always believed, that it’s important to juxtapose our current reality with where we came from.

The Romans had a complicated history with rape. On the one hand, their origin story revolves around the famous “Rape of the Sabine Women” which consisted of a bunch of kidnappings, forced marriages and rapes in the more modern sense of the word. They were quite proud of this and re-enacted it during their wedding ceremonies. (Something I found appalling and wanted to address in my novel.) On the other hand, one of the great Roman heroines was Lucretia, who told her husband about her rape–and was believed. (Of course, then she killed herself, as the Romans believed a ‘shamed’ heroine must.)

Unfortunately, the Roman ideal of how women should respond to violation has woven itself into the very fabric of modern society. And insofar as fiction is meant to educate and enlighten, these are not trivial reasons for including a rape scene.

They certainly figured into my decision.

But art isn’t only about education and enlightenment. It’s meant to explore, to communicate, to spur the imagination and to provoke. So beyond the sociological reasons, I also had artistic ones.

Selene was the daughter of the most infamous seductress in the history of western civilization. Cleopatra was a strong and capable woman who came to be known, thanks to her enemy, almost entirely for her sexuality. This same enemy–a man who defined the respectable standards of female behavior not just in his time, but also well into our own–raised Cleopatra’s daughter in his own household until she was marriageable.

This made it imperative upon me, as an artistic endeavor, to explore his character and hers in the world I created, a combination of myth and history.

What kind of man was he, this Augustus, who was said to debauch virgins that his wife procured for him? A man who seems to have been obsessed with Cleopatra, long after she was dead. How would a man like Augustus, who was incapable of using might on a battlefield except through his friend Agrippa, have wielded power over the women in his household? (This is a man who banished his own daughter to a tiny island. She eventually starved to death.)

I wanted to know his dark soul.

I also wanted to know Selene’s soul. Her coping mechanisms. Her resilience. I wanted to imagine how she navigated the treacherous waters of imperial Rome. Why she always appears so modest in her statues, veiled and covered up. Why she was never known for any scandal during her long marriage to King Juba II. And I wanted to explore her story against that of the goddess with whom she would be linked–Kore.

You may have heard of Persephone or Proserpina but in Selene’s time, the goddess of spring who was raped by the god of the underworld was called Kore. Her story is immortal. Collecting flowers with her maidens in a field, she is taken by the dark lord of Hades. Her mother, in her grief, turns the whole world fallow. It is her mother–not her father–who fights to free Kore. Hearing that he must release the girl, the god of the underworld tricks Kore into eating the pomegranate seeds to ensure she is never entirely free of him.

Selene’s life seemed very much like that to me, so I exploited her biography and the myth in equal measure to make both come alive. That’s why I wrote a rape scene into my novel and why I’d do it again, but I don’t expect everyone to love that choice.

On the surface, they don’t seem to have much in common. Where Selene is serious and careful, Julia is witty and reckless. Where Selene is thought of as a royal captive, the daughter of an Egyptian whore, Julia is known as the revered daughter of the emperor, a veritable Roman princess whose children will one day rule Rome. And yet, the two have more in common than most people know.

Selene’s mother is dead and Julia’s mother might as well be, since her father banished her mother from her life. Both girls live at the mercy of the emperor who sees them both as useful pawns in his dynastic schemes–trophies to reward the loyalty of his generals and cronies. While both girls are whip-smart and have an aptitude for politics, Augustus values only their wombs. He controls their sexuality, dictates their love lives, and tries to smother their spirits.

So how much of this is true to history? Almost all of it.

The historical Julia was taken away from her mother at birth and raised by Augustus and his wife Livia. It’s said that she lived a dreary childhood of spinning wool and weaving cloth, but once she reached her teen years, she was married off to her first cousin Marcellus, the heir apparent. Whilst Marcellus was alive, the handsome teens seemed like a romantic pairing, so when Marcellus died young of some mysterious ailment, leaving Julia a young widow, she won the people’s sympathy.

Pretty, witty, educated and fashionable, the emperor’s daughter was popular with the people.  Perhaps some of them pitied her when she was next married off to her father’s general, Agrippa, a man who was much older and had already been married twice before. Though Julia was one of the most educated women in the Roman empire, her mission was to provide sons who could be adopted by the emperor to take over after he died.

In terms of breeding, Julia seems to have taken the duty seriously and performed with grace. She gave birth to three sons and two daughters, thus ensuring that the Julio-Claudian dynasty would survive. Though she gave her body to the husband her father chose for her, it seems clear that she considered her heart to be her own to give as she pleased. It’s said that she kept a lover and when someone asked how her children all looked so much like Agrippa, she intimated that she waited to be pregnant before engaging in adultery, saying, “I never take on new passengers unless the cargo is already full.”

Julia’s story has a dramatic ending–one that I won’t reveal here lest I give spoilers that might ruin the enjoyment of my readers. Let it suffice to say, she’s one of the most interesting “bad girls” of the ancient world, and that’s probably why I love her!