Cross-posted from Unusual Historicals blog

Mark Antony comes to us through history most famously in Shakespeare as the man who fled from the naval battle at Actium to chase after his lover, Cleopatra. Even setting aside the cowardice attached to Antony in the bard’s famous play, there’s also the historical record which includes several ruthless political acts that Antony performed as a Roman leader and military commander.

As a result, he makes a most unlikely, and perhaps unwise, choice for this series about heroes of history. However, I’ve never been one to back away from a challenge.

Antony’s faults are well-documented. He was a hedonist who spent lavishly, partied hard, and may well have been a drunkard. He engaged in adulterous affairs, skipped out on debts, had children with at least four different women, and played a part in bringing down the Roman Republic. But in the course of the civil war he waged with Octavius for dominance, he was also the victim of an unprecedented propaganda campaign and his memory has been much maligned. (For example, it’s highly unlikely that Antony fled the battle of Actium in cowardice; most historians now believe that he and Cleopatra were attempting to break a naval blockade.)

If it is true that heroism and vice can co-exist in a single man, there may be no better example of that than Antony, who is seldom remembered for his genuine acts of valor, and ought to be.

In the immediate aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination, Antony gave shelter to Caesar’s widow, Calpurnia and ultimately risked the public turning against him when he made a world-changing eulogy during the dictator’s funeral. While that speech may have ultimately been self-serving, it was also an act of loyalty to his dead friend, and one taken at considerable peril.

Not long after, Antony fought a disastrous battle in Cisalpine Gaul. His legionaries were beset with every kind of calamity including famine. According to Plutarch, “Antony, on this occasion, was a most wonderful example to his soldiers. He, who had just quitted so much luxury and sumptuous living, made no difficulty now of drinking foul water and feeding on wild fruits and roots. Nay, it is related they ate the very bark of trees, and, in passing over the Alps, lived upon creatures that no one before had ever been willing to touch.”

But it wasn’t just by serving as a good example that Antony helped save his army. The plan was to meet up with friendly forces on the other side of the Alps, but when they reached the other army, Lepidus had turned against them. Again, at great risk to himself, Antony treated directly with the enemy soldiers and won them to his cause, sparing Lepidus and treating him honorably.

It seems that Antony’s heroism often showed itself in adversity. Though he fought and won many battles, it was during his disastrous defeat in Parthia that the bravery with which he mounted his retreat so impressed even his Parthian enemies that they cheered when his army crossed the river to safety.

At the end of Antony’s career, when it became clear that he might be able to save his own life by giving up Cleopatra or getting rid of her, Antony would not do it, and that also says something about his character.

Because I’m writing a trilogy about the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, I like to reflect upon the man’s more admirable qualities. These are likely the stories that young Cleopatra Selene was told about her father and I thought readers might enjoy knowing them too.

Stephanie Dray’s debut historical fiction novel, LILY OF THE NILE , will release January 2011 from Berkley Books. The sequel is expected to release at the end of 2011. Both novels are set in the Augustan Age and feature Cleopatra’s daughter.

Cross-posted from Unusual Historicals

Today we say the rich are born with silver spoons in their mouths. In the ancient world, they said the wealthy were born to the purple. This phrase alludes to the royal robes dyed with a precious shade of deep purple originally created by the Phoenicians in Tyre.

Tyrian purple was a hue worn by royals and conquerors including Alexander the Great. Romans had a great affinity for it too, and their bright white senatorial togas were bordered with a great purple band. Tyrian purple was not only a commodity, but also a status symbol. It may have even accounted for the assassination of Julius Caesar who wore the royal purple so often that his colleagues feared he intended to make himself King.

The true color cannot be accurately identified now; the best we can do is reconstruct it based on the surviving description of the ancients, but we do know that redder shades of purple were considered to be inferior. It was the darkest, richest purple that they prized, and this may have been achieved by dipping the fabric twice in two slightly different shades, one redder, one bluer.

Whatever the methodology, the purple dye itself was so expensive that it was worth its weight in silver. The salesman of a silken garment dyed properly in the stuff might be able to buy a small city with the proceeds. The reason it was so costly is because of its enduring quality, one that improved, rather than faded, with age. And also it was wildly expensive because of the process used to make it.

The source of the dye was the murex brandaris, which is a name for a spiny sea snail. While it’s possible to capture one of these little gastropods and poke it until it excretes a defensive mucus containing at least one of the ingredients required to make the precious purple, milking the murex snails was entirely too labor intensive. To meet demand, millions of murex were harvested. More than a thousand shells were needed to make even one gram of dye.

The exact process by which the dye was made has not been perfectly reproduced to date, but it was described by Pliny and involved vats of rotting shellfish. The smell was so terrible that dye factories had to be built far away from population centers. Mountains of shells attest to their presence.

The heroine of my debut novel is Cleopatra Selene, daughter of the more famous Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Together with her husband King Juba II, Selene built several purple dye factories on islands off the coast of Mauretania. Perhaps unable to replicate the exact shade of purple invented by the Tyrians, they called their own Gaetulian purple after one of the native Berber tribes. Gaetulian purple was prized almost as much as the Tyrian variety and was probably responsible for funding many of Juba and Selene’s building projects and cultural programs.

Stephanie Dray’s debut historical fiction novel, LILY OF THE NILE , will release January 2011 from Berkley Books. The sequel is expected to release at the end of 2011. Both novels are set in the Augustan Age and feature Cleopatra’s daughter.

Though no ancient sources directly link the two monarchs, it’s difficult to write a novel about the life of Cleopatra’s daughter without referencing one of her mother’s bitterest enemies.

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.