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Which Bad Girl of the Ancient World are you?
One of the favorite presentations I give is entitled Bad Girls of the Ancient World. I love to give this talk, because most of the powerful women in the ancient world have some sort of relation to the heroine of my novel, Cleopatra Selene.
Selene wasn’t, herself, a bad girl. At least, she was never vilified the way her mother before her had been. She had a nearly unblemished personal reputation, in spite of some of the provocative things she did–many of which I explore in my new novel, Song of the Nile.
But just because she doesn’t come down to us as one of the bad girls of history doesn’t mean she was a pushover. And thinking about how they may have inspired her began to inspire me to think about who I might have been like in the ancient world.
To that end, I’ve created this fun little quiz and I’d love to discuss the results with your readers. So, here you have it. WHICH BAD GIRL OF THE ANCIENT WORLD ARE YOU?
Livia Drusilla: Evil Empress or Maligned Mother of the Empire?
In ancient history powerful women got a bad rap. This was especially the case for Rome’s first empress, Livia Drusilla, the wife of Augustus Caesar. She comes down to us as a sort of wicked step-monster of the Julio-Claudian family–one who murders, manipulates and maligns everyone who gets in her way. The ancient writers didn’t much like her. Modern writers don’t like her either.
Played to perfection by Sian Phillips in the mini-series of Robert Graves’ famous I, Claudius, Livia emerges as a delicious villainess. She makes Cruella de Vil look rather civilized for merely wanting to turn spotted puppies into fur coats.
Personally, I find the lure of such extravagant evil too hard to resist.
When writing about my heroine, the orphaned daughter of Cleopatra, who was taken as a prisoner of war at the age of nine and marched through the streets in chains, there were plenty of villains for me to choose from. But my novels aren’t about the the tragedies this real life princess lived through; my novels are ultimately about Cleopatra Selene’s triumphs. Consequently, I needed an antagonist who could show the darker sides of my heroine’s ambitions.
Livia fit the bill.
It’s true that in my novels, Cleopatra Selene plays a dangerous and twisted game with the ruthless Emperor Augustus, who was obsessed with her mother and is now obsessed with her. But I wanted to show the other side of the coin–a woman who was nothing whatsoever like Cleopatra of Egypt, but almost as powerful.
That’s where Livia came in.
Unlike the seductive Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, Livia was known for chaste and modest public behavior. (At least, after she married Augustus.) She always dressed in voluminous garments that practically covered her from neck to ankle, and of course, her husband would brag that she spun the wool and wove the cloth to make those baggy clothes as well. She was a veritable goddess of domesticity, our Livia. And one who supposedly eschewed expensive jewelry, claiming that her children were the only jewels she needed.
In spite of all this puritanical posturing, Livia was, nonetheless, associated with sexual scandal. According to Suetonius, she was rumored to procure young virgin girls for her husband’s bed. That made me wonder if such girls came from within the emperor’s own household and included vulnerable orphans like Cleopatra Selene.
Livia was also rumored to be a poisoner. She’s known to have concocted tonics and elixirs that she said accounted for her extraordinarily good health and long life, but if you were supping at the imperial palace, you might be better off not drinking the wine. At various points, she’s been accused of murdering Marcellus, Drusus, Germanicus, Posthumous and even Augustus himself.
In my novel, she offers Cleopatra Selene a poisoned cup.
But was Livia really such a she-devil?
Her biographer, Anthony Barrett, paints a picture of a much maligned mother of the empire. She had a documented record of altruism against which her detractors could only conjure up rumor and innuendo. She went to the emperor on behalf of the citizens of the Isle of Samos to return them to independence. She is known to have intervened on behalf of one woman accused of witchcraft; she also saved the life of a man who accidentally appeared naked before her, saying that to chaste women such men were like looking at statues. Known to advise her husband on political matters, Livia enjoyed a marriage with him of more than fifty years. Especially tricky, considering that she never gave him a child and he rather desperately needed an heir.
I can’t point to a single documented event in which Livia did an evil deed. Her worst crime, it seems, was to have lived for so long, and exerted such power over the empire as the wife or ancestress of every Julio-Claudian emperor.
For the misogynistic Romans, the only way to explain her political success was to make her a monster.
In the end, Livia was deified and worshipped as a goddess, so maybe she’ll have the last laugh. Certainly, the one regret about my own novels is that I so enjoyed exploiting her bad reputation.
Expect lots of wickedness and depravity in Song of the Nile, but in the third and final book of the trilogy, I hope to redeem myself by giving Livia a little bit of empathy. So, what about you? Are there women in history that you love to hate?
Who Were Cleopatra’s Grandchildren?
I’ve spent the past few years writing about Cleopatra’s daughter–a fascinating young woman that most people don’t even know existed. Today I want to talk about the next generation, the children that the infamous Queen of the Nile may have bounced on her knee if she’d lived to a ripe old grandmotherly age.
As far as we know, Cleopatra Selene was the only survivor of the Ptolemaic dynasty. But she seems to have been determined not to be the last of her line.
Though Selene’s parents were two of the most famously fertile individuals in ancient history, it is only certain that Selene had one son. He was born to her late in life and may have hastened her death. The name she chose for him is both the single most telling detail about her life and the most mysterious. Breaking with ancient tradition, her son wasn’t named after her husband, King Juba II.
Instead, Selene’s son was named Ptolemy.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. It indicates that even after having been married to Selene and ruling his own country for at least a decade, Juba’s lineage was still considered to be inferior to hers. Perhaps it indicates that she was the true ruler of Mauretania. It also may have led some to question whether or not Juba II was even the father of the boy.
In a time when it would have been considered their duty to produce children, Juba and Selene appear not to have been up to the task. Perhaps Juba and Selene did not fancy sharing one another’s bed. On the other hand, child mortality rates were extremely high in the ancient world. There may well have been other children that we just don’t know about.
An inscription from ancient Athens indicated that Juba had a son and a daughter, who is unnamed. However, this daughter need not have been the child of Cleopatra Selene because King Juba actually had another wife, Princess Glaphyra of Cappadocia.
Now, historians have argued that as a Roman citizen, Juba was unlikely to have broken with Roman law and taken more than one wife at the same time. It must be pointed out, however, that like Juba, King Herod was also a Roman citizen and had more wives than he could keep track of. Juba’s father had kept many wives and it’s entirely possible that the young king may have done the same to earn the respect of his Berber peoples. It strikes me that admirers of King Juba II who insist that he couldn’t have taken a second wife because he wouldn’t have taken a second wife may be projecting onto him some virtues of modern morality. After all, even the most Roman of the Romans–Julius Caesar–is rumored to have tried to pass a law that would allow him to take more than one wife.
A more persuasive argument, to my mind, is that Archelaus the King of Cappadocia was unlikely to allow his daughter, Glaphyra, to play second-wife to Cleopatra’s daughter. Therefore, she was probably Juba’s second wife after Cleopatra Selene’s death.
So, what does that mean for Juba’s daughter? His marriage to Glaphyra was extremely short and this daughter is never mentioned in conjunction with her, so the daughter was probably Cleopatra Selene’s child. (Professor Duane Roller has suggested that Juba may have reinstated the tradition of a harem, in which case this unnamed daughter may have belonged to a concubine. But if so, it is far less likely that she would be mentioned in an inscription.)
The most probable explanation is that the girl mentioned in the inscription is Selene’s daughter. If so, the girl was likely named in the tradition of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Another Cleopatra Something or Berenice or Arsinoe. (In my own forthcoming novel, Song of the Nile, she will be named Cleopatra Isidora.)
A third child is also hinted at. Some scholars have suggested that Selene may have had two sons, both named Ptolemy, one of whom died young. This would reconcile some confusion in the historical record about Ptolemy’s age, and might also explain why Selene would have tried for another child so late in life when it was so dangerous for her to do so. If true, it would mean that Ptolemy wasn’t the only son born to Juba and Selene, but the only surviving son.
He would go on to be the King of Mauretania and he is likely the father of the girl we now believe to be Cleopatra’s great-great-granddaughter, Drusilla of Mauritania!
Does Historical Fiction Glorify Sexism, Racism and Class Discrimination?
I write books set in the early Roman empire, a time during which a lot of horrible things were accepted as commonplace. Slavery was a normal part of life. Social class was enshrined into law. Women were sexual chattel, often without a say in their own lives and without representation in government. Human beings were forced to battle to the death in an arena for the entertainment of others.
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.
Keeping it in the (Ptolemaic) Family: When Incest is Best
There are a whole slew of fantastically good reasons why incest is illegal and taboo, including the lasting psychological damage it does, and the dysfunctional family dynamics it creates. That said, there’s a good chance that the Ptolemaic Dynasty would have been filled with fratricidal thugs and harpies even if they hadn’t made it a practice to marry their siblings.
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.
