Mosaic of Minerva in the Library of Congress

Some people sniffle at sappy old movies. Other people get weepy at weddings or on their child’s first day of school. Me? I apparently cry in the Library of Congress, but this is to get ahead of my story…

First of all, let me say that I had expected today to be a good day, so I was entirely unprepared for what would follow. Mr. Dray had taken the day off from work and he chauffeured me to what I must confess is still one of my favorite cities in the world, Washington DC.

I was scheduled to do a reading of Lily of the Nile with a group of fellow speculative fiction writers in order to support Strange Horizons Magazine. The sky was bright and shiny. The weather was pleasant. We arrived at the right place at the right time in the Madison Building without hassle.

I met up with old Clarion classmates Tom Doyle and Jonathan Laden (whose lovely wife, Michele was also there). I was also quite touched when a high school friend of mine, Mark Sarney took time away from his lunch hour to listen to the readings.

Then came the readings themselves, which were fantastic, if I do say so myself. I enjoyed them all, but it’s probably my fascination with mythical re-tellings that made me fall in love with Nan Fry’s wolf story and Anne Lane Sheldon’s Rumplestiltskin rendition.

After the readings, I had the chance to talk with David J. Williams with whom I appear to have many things in common. It isn’t every day that you meet someone else who is willing to actually own a copy of Oliver Stone’s Alexander. (If you like smart, intense, geo-political science fiction, check out his Autumn Rain trilogy from Bantam Spectra.) I also had a delightful lunch with authors Craig Gidney and R. R. Angell and a bunch of other wonderful folks I won’t name only because I know what you really want to read about is the crying.

Okay, so I’ll get to it. After lunch, the Recommending Officer for Science Fiction & Fantasy at the Library of Congress, Colleen R. Cahill, gave us a tour. Not just any tour…but a super special tour, in which we navigated secret underground passages, and slipped past signs that said ‘Official Access Only.’

Now, the Library of Congress is nifty on a purely conceptual level. A gathering of knowledge for posterity; you have to love it. But the concept doesn’t do the place justice. When we walked into the Jefferson Building, I was giddy. Come on, who doesn’t love gilded ceilings and elevators with elaborately carved wooden walls and shiny brass bars? Bronze statuary gives me thrills. I may have a fetish for marble niches and mosaics. I marveled at the way thousands of visitors have worn the stairs uneven and I grinned like an imbecile at the wavy vellum of the Gutenberg Bible.

New delights awaited me around every pillar. I stumbled along on the tour in a state of book-loving delirium until it happened. I looked up to find myself in a round room–an enormous circle of old books under plexiglass. I shivered even before Colleen uttered the words, “And these were Thomas Jefferson’s books. The original collection that he sold to Library of Congress.”

Right about then is when I lost it. Heart thumping. Sweaty palms. Lower lip atremble. I blinked back startled tears as I realized I was completely surrounded by … pure awesome. I have no idea what anybody else said. I think there were plenty of wows. I was a snuffling, emotional fool! Yes, I had a little melt-down right there in public; though I took pains to cover it up!

Those who know me well probably could have predicted this. I have an embarrassing habit of tearing up whenever faced with anything having to do with my historical passions. In the past, I’ve gone weepy in the presence of ancient Egyptian artifacts, and again when allowed to actually touch the desk of Thomas Jefferson at the State Department. There was also the time that I saw pictures of ruins in Algeria and realized I was looking at the very spot that Cleopatra Selene had walked.

I’m not sure what moves me so much about such things, but it might have to do with my desire to understand the past so as to fully participate in the present. For example, people who know me well also know that I love election day. I’m the girl who wakes up early on election day and buys donuts for everybody in line. (And yes, I wear the sticker! Don’t judge me.)

This year, Maryland has early voting. That means that not only did I get to press-my-nose-against-the-plexiglass of Thomas Jefferson’s books, but I also got to vote! On the way home from DC, we went to the community center, did our civic duty, and had a great dinner at a Korean restaurant.

So, I was wrong about today being a good day. Today was a great day! Mini-meltdown and all.

Herod the Great was Cleopatra VII’s rival even before her affair with the Roman Triumvir, Antony. As a Ptolemy, Cleopatra maintained a hereditary claim on Judea, but that wasn’t the only source of her conflict with King Herod.

To say that Herod’s personal life was a study in dysfunction is to put it lightly. When he entered on a campaign to rid himself of his wife’s relatives, of the Hasmonean Dynasty that preceded him, his mother-in-law found a sympathetic ally in Cleopatra VII. The Queen of Egypt tried to intercede on behalf of her friend, and apparently won Herod’s lifelong enmity as a result.

The feeling appears to have been mutual. Cleopatra would later demand from Antony that Herod’s whole kingdom be surrendered to her, but because Herod had been a loyal friend to Antony, he only stripped Herod of date and balsam plantations in Jericho and Ein Gedi.

The rivalry reached such a fever pitch that Herod is said to have considered assassinating Cleopatra, but was dissuaded by his advisors, who assured him that Antony would never forgive him. After Antony and Cleopatra’s defeat, King Herod went over to Octavian, asserting that he had given Antony the best possible advice: Kill Cleopatra.

Did the rivalry end there, or did Herod continue to fear the Ptolemies even after the famous queen took her own life?

Three of Cleopatra’s children survived the civil war: little Ptolemy Philadelphus, Cleopatra Selene, and her twin brother, Alexander Helios. As Ptolemies, all three could exert a claim over Judea, and because they were half-Roman, it might well have been feared that their claims might be supported against Herod if the political fortunes of Octavian should change. Even dead, Cleopatra and Antony still had their partisans, in Rome and elsewhere. Alexandrian cults like those surrounding the goddess Isis still held enormous political sway. If we credit the gospel of Matthew, then we also know that Herod was particularly threatened by children born under auspices and omens, which would have led him to be doubly wary of Cleopatra’s twins.

Given the portrait of Herod that has come down to us through the ages–namely that he was so power hungry and paranoid that he had his own sons put to death as rivals–it is difficult to believe that he ever viewed Cleopatra’s daughter with dispassion. Cleopatra Selene not only survived childhood, but went on to become Queen of Mauretania. Are we to believe that King Herod was not made uneasy to see his enemy’s daughter given more territory to rule than all the other client kingdoms in the empire put together?

Cleopatra Selene and her husband Juba appear to have had the implicit trust of Augustus, and did not need to make frequent visits back to the capitol to secure his good will, but Herod was less secure. Whereas Selene and Juba founded a port city and named it after Caesar, Herod commenced building two such cities, naming them both after Augustus. Whereas Cleopatra Selene and Juba appear to have worked in easy concert with their proconsular neighbors in Africa Novo, Herod was obliged to get permission for his military exploits, and overstepped on at least one occasion, prompting an angry letter from Augustus. Given these tensions, it is hard to imagine that Herod and Selene did not wish one another ill.

However, whether or not an active rivalry between Herod and Cleopatra Selene existed, the King of Judea was a pivotal contemporary figure in her life by which she must have measured most of her accomplishments as a client queen. That Herod comes down to us through history more well-known than Cleopatra Selene is partially a function of her gender, but also because her reign was one of relative peace and prosperity, lacking the big splashy family drama that marked Herod’s rule.

This recent article argues that the Greeks can’t even catch a break in Hollywood.

I’m not sure if the failure of Alexander was as much due to our discomfort with bisexuality as it was due to the fact that Colin Farrel looks ridiculous with blond hair. And I can make no plausible argument for why 300 was a box office success beyond the fact that it appealed to graphic novel fetishists and xenophobes. But the author raises an interesting point when he says:

The majority of Roman epics employ the figure of the emperor to reduce political complexities and create a single antagonist for the hero; one that usually symbolises Rome, its corruption, vice and cruelty. Roman politics also draws the nearest parallels to America’s government, with its senators, popular and conservative politicians, and a single ruler (although not elected) who acts as a figurehead. Adhering to this creates a familiarity between the western audience and the otherwise complex or alien governments of antiquity, allowing them to engage with the films more.

I’ve been contemplating writing an article for the Romance Writers of America monthly zine about the rise of the ancient historical; I hope it has staying power.