For much of its history, Rome depended upon Egypt for grain. While the Romans considered themselves an agricultural nation, and paid great homage to farming in literature, poetry, and art, the simple truth was that they couldn’t feed themselves.

By the time Cleopatra rolled herself out of a carpet at Julius Caesar’s feet, Egyptian exports accounted for fully a third of the 16.8 million bushels of grain brought to Rome. In short, whoever controlled Egypt could starve the world, which is why it was so important to warring Roman Generals.

However, by the time Augustus Caesar conquered Egypt, the needs of the Roman empire had far outstripped even the grain that Egypt could produce. (And some might argue that with a conquered Queen Cleopatra having committed suicide, there wasn’t anyone competent enough at the helm to turn Egypt into the bigger bread-basket it needed to be.)

That meant that Rome’s first emperor had to find a new way to feed his people, and he had to find it fast. He found a partial solution in Cleopatra’s daughter.

Though she’d been captured as a prisoner of war at the age of nine and marched through the streets in chains, the orphaned Cleopatra Selene was taken in by the emperor’s sister, Octavia, and became one of the favorites in the emperor’s household. At the age of fourteen, she was too dangerous to be married off to a fellow Roman who might take up the mantle of the Antonians. She was also far too dangerous to send back to Egypt where she might be immediately hailed as queen the moment her foot touched the shore.

The wily emperor had other plans for her.

He married her off to Juba II, an orphaned Numidian princeling and sent the couple to North Africa to rule over the Kingdom of Mauretania (modern day Morocco, Tunisia & Algeria).

It made good sense to send Cleopatra Selene to the western frontier of the empire. For one, it got her out of Rome, where her father’s old partisans might use her to stir up trouble. Mauretania was also far away from Selene’s native Egypt, where she might be tempted by her mother’s old allies into rebellion against the emperor.

But beyond political reasons, it made good sense to send Cleopatra Selene to Mauretania because the country was thought to be an untapped resource. Though the kingdom was considered still wild and barbarous, the emperor believed it could be turned into a sea of grain-fields that would help sustain his empire–if only the right people were put in charge of it.

This is where Cleopatra Selene was instrumental. As the last Ptolemaic queen anywhere in the world, her name carried with it a certain prestige. Though Hellenistic rulers were monarchs, they aimed to rule through a concept of harmonia–an idea adopted by Alexander the Great that the conquered and the conquering peoples should mingle and show respect for one another’s ways.

It may have been believed that Selene would soften the blow to the natives in having to be ruled by a thoroughly Romanized king like Juba II.

Moreover, Cleopatra Selene was closely linked with the goddess Isis and appears to have been a proponent of her faith even when it wasn’t politically expedient to do so. Isis was the great mother goddess, linked inextricably with the production of grain. Selene adopted Isis as her patron goddess, promoted her on the coins of the realm, and built a giant Iseum in Mauretania.

Pastures were divided up, distributed to Roman veterans and other land owners, and put to the plow. But the task of turning her new kingdom into a grain factory wasn’t easy. Unlike the Egypt of her birth, Mauretania had no central river like the Nile to flood the farm lands with fertile black soil. Farming in ancient Mauretania, then as now, depended on the rain.

First, the autumn rains were necessary to soften the soil for farming. Crops weren’t harvested in the autumn but sown then. Next, a spectacular springtime rainy season was necessary to help the sprouted plants grow big and verdant in time for a summer harvest. (Of course, the climate of this area was probably a little different in the ancient world then than it is now, and the Julian calendar was relatively recently adopted in ancient Mauretania, so it’s impossible to say exactly when the growing seasons were. However, in modern times, wheat is harvested there from May to August.)

Once the summer harvest was in, it was a race to get the grain loaded onto ships to Rome. The winter seas were a perilous crossing to attempt, so the bulk of grain transport ships would want to set sail before November. (See: The Grain Market in the Roman Empire, by Paul Erdkamp.) This was problematic for Cleopatra Selene and her husband Juba, because the harbor they inherited needed to be improved.

In addition to logistical difficulties were the human conflicts. Rome was a colonial power and the new order Cleopatra Selene and Juba II were sent to impose disrupted the normal way of life for the native Berbers who lived in their kingdom. Roman landowners insisted on fencing in their plantations, refusing summer grazing rights to the Berbers who had used the plateaus of Africa to feed their flocks. This loss drove shepherds and other nomadic Berbers farther to the south, towards the desert, and impoverished their lives.

While Selene was alive, the tensions seemed to be balanced and under control. Perhaps she fostered that sense of Hellenized harmonia, because though the Romans in Africa Nova provoked a war with the native Garamante tribes, the Berbers in Mauretania seem to have been largely pacified.

All of this changed, of course, after Selene’s death. Facing ever more encroachment from farmers, Berber tribesmen eventually banded together in rebellion against both Rome and against the King of Mauretania. Their leader was Tacfarinas, and the war would go on for ten years.

Ultimately, the need for grain won out. And in conjunction with the province of Africa Nova, Mauretania would help provide enough food to feed Rome for eight months of the year–Egypt accounting for the other four.

She is a timeless icon of femininity and feminism. She is the most famous woman in the history of the world–perhaps because she was, and remains, the most powerful woman in the history of the world. No subsequent queen or prime minister or secretary of state has ever had the geographic dominion, relative wealth, and unfettered authority that was enjoyed by Cleopatra VII of Egypt.

Almost everything we know about her has been filtered through the propaganda of her enemies. What remains are the scant facts and what we can deduce from them. She was a woman of extraordinary charm who shared a bed with not one, but two of the most powerful men in the ancient world–Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. She would become mortal enemies with a third–Octavian, otherwise known as Augustus Caesar–who did more to immortalize her than her lovers.

But she comes down to us through the ages without a face. Her coins–many of which depict her in quite severe and haggish ways–are stylized portraits, meant to impart terror rather than admiration. The few busts that we believe portray the Egyptian queen cannot be verified. There are no extant portraits nor textual descriptions of her. Because of this, artists have a blank canvass upon which they can imagine this cunning political queen in any way they like. That is a siren’s call to Hollywood who has made several attempts at bringing Cleopatra to life.

First, there was the silent film starring Theda Bara which was destroyed because it was too racy!

In 1934, Claudette Colbert starred in a Cecil B. DeMille production about the Queen of the Nile. The production is old-fashioned, in black and white, but the dialog is often fun. This is an Egyptianized version of the queen, which is not necessarily entirely inaccurate, but there is little visual reference to her cultural heritage as a Hellene. I especially like the invention of Herod making trouble between Cleopatra and Antony–which is unlikely to have happened the way it plays out on screen, but hints at the genuine trouble between the two client monarchs! There’s a certain jaded maturity that Claudette Colbert brings to the role, but the entire picture seems too small to incorporate such a big historical figure.

Another version was made with Vivian Leigh, but I’ve yet to see it (shame on me!), so I’ll just skip ahead!

Almost thirty years after the Claudette Colbert version, Hollywood had another go at it, this time creating a budget-busting visual extravaganza that would give the world its most iconic images of Cleopatra in the person of violet-eyed actress, Liz Taylor. The movie is a huge, splashy, melodrama that bankrupted the studio, launched careers and destroyed the marriages of its co-stars because its the film on which Richard Burton and Liz Taylor fell in love. Their sexual chemistry burns up the screen, their personal lives echoing those of the characters they played. One cannot watch without feeling the tiniest bit voyeuristic, and the authenticity of their connection make what might otherwise be a schmaltzy production into something emotionally gripping.

 

This is not to say that the film is all eye-candy and soap-opera. The costuming and set-decor is an interesting mix of Egyptian, Roman and Greek–all of this in keeping with accounts we have of Alexandria where cultural fusion was the norm. Though the film never mentions Cleopatra’s children by Antony–including the heroine of my own debut novel, Cleopatra Selene–it’s fairly historically accurate; viewers will learn from this film as well as be entertained. Not much better can be said for Hollywood than that!

Perhaps with an eye to how difficult it would be to top the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor version, Cleopatra has appeared primarily on the small screen ever since. The 1999 Television Mini-Series starring Billy Zane, Timothy Dalton and Leonor Varela was based on Margaret George’s excellent novel, Memoirs of Cleopatra. Unfortunately, the series bears little resemblance to the book. In this version, Cleopatra is a foot-stomping, whining, little brat who never brings any gravitas to the screen. Alexandria is rendered similarly unimpressive. While Varela’s looks may be more in line with the historical Cleopatra–her profile looks like the coins–her acting is fairly atrocious. It’s actually Billy Zane’s boyish rendition of Marcus Antonius that is the most convincing.

Which brings us to the latest incarnation of Cleopatra, Lyndsey Marshal’s version on HBO’s Rome. While I can find nothing bad to say about the series as a whole, which was masterfully written, funny, absorbing and dramatic–our Egyptian queen got the short end of the stick. Here she’s portrayed as a drug-addled slut who deceives Caesar about the parentage of her son. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest this, other than Augustus’ accusations against her, but not every portrayal can resuscitate the queen’s image. Marshal brings a little bit of cunning to the role and never lets us forget that Cleopatra is without moral scruple–in that, she may be the closest portrayal to the historical woman.

It’s impossible to tire of Cleopatra and Hollywood seems poised to make another attempt. Given the run-away success of Stacy Schiff’s recent biography, a new movie is being planned starring Angelina Jolie. Reportedly, this film will focus more on Cleopatra as a mother and strategist. It remains to be seen what sort of images will leave their mark in popular culture this time!

I recently co-authored a piece about bad girls in the ancient world with Jeannie Lin, author of historical fiction set in Tang Dynasty China. Together, Jeannie and I discussed how women who have been vilified in history share a few common traits whether they hail from western or eastern culture. These women were usually warriors, seductresses, or sorceresses. Sometimes, all three.

 

Today I’m taking on this subject solo to introduce you to the ancient bad girls of Western Civilization–those women who defied social convention and sometimes changed the world as a result. These women are fascinating and in the context of my forthcoming novel, Lily of the Nile, they also served to inspire my heroine, Cleopatra Selene.

The historic Selene was born into a dangerous political world, a civilization on the brink of change, and one that may have embraced a more egalitarian view of women if her parents had won their struggle with Octavian. Instead, the independence and power of Selene’s mother as a ruler became a pretext for war, and the misogyny of the Augustan Age took root.

It’s taken us more than two-thousand years to move away from the attitudes towards women that were fostered in Selene’s time, so let’s talk about those bad girls who inspire us and serve as everlasting examples of how ancient attitudes about women still influence us today.*

Dido — Queen of the Carthaginians

Though some have argued that Dido is only a mythological figure, it seems more likely that she was a real historical figure–a Princess of Tyre, granted the right to rule jointly with her brother.  However, her brother wasn’t keen on sharing power so he murdered Dido’s wealthy husband with the intention of taking over the palace.  What Dido did next set her apart from most other women of known history–she didn’t seek out shelter in another kingdom as a wealthy exile, nor did she try to re-marry a powerful king to help her recover the rulership of Tyre. Instead, Queen Dido led a group of settlers and government officials who remained loyal to her and founded the city of Carthage in North Africa.

She not only shaped her own fate but created a new civilization. She was also, apparently, highly religious. And when she faced political domination by a neighboring country that wanted to force her into marriage, Dido stabbed herself to death and threw herself upon a funeral pyre in dedication to her goddess.

So why did she come to be thought of as a bad girl in the ancient world?

Because the Romans and the Carthaginians would go on to battle each other for supremacy in the ancient world, the Roman hostility towards a civilization founded by a powerful woman helped forge the Roman character and its attitude towards women. Virgil’s Aeneid, the quintessential propaganda epic of the Augustan Age, immortalizes Dido as a temptress who quite nearly dissuaded the upright Aeneas from his duty to found Rome. (Historically, it’s unlikely that Dido and Aeneas could have ever crossed paths, but a Roman historical fiction writer like Virgil couldn’t resist the temptation to imagine their failed love affair, and who could blame him?)

For the Romans, Dido was a woman who should have submitted to her brother’s rule and never taken it upon herself to build a new city or refuse marriage to another man. And because the Romans defeated the Carthaginians, it’s their attitudes that we have inherited through history.

Sophonisba — Carthaginian Princess and Patriot

There are a number of stories about proud Carthaginian women who chose death as an alternative to being ruled by men, or by Rome. Sophonisba is another of them. The legend surrounding her is that she was a fiercely patriotic princess who was betrothed to Massinissa of Numidia. But when her intended groom allied with Rome, she decided to marry the Numidian leader Syphax instead.

But Sophonisba’s jilted groom didn’t forget her. Perhaps as much from injured pride as for political reasons, Massinissa defeated Syphax and claimed Sophonisba as his bride. She married him, but tried to use his love for her to turn him against the Romans. (Or at least, this is what they feared she might do.)

Sophonisba never took up arms against the Romans; she wasn’t a political enemy in the conventional sense. However, the Romans were threatened by women who used their sexuality for political gain. Marking her for an enemy, the Romans demanded that she be handed over and marched in a triumph through Rome as a captured slave. Sophonisba drank a cup of poison instead.

As a young North African queen and wife of Juba II who was himself a descendant of Massinissa, Cleopatra Selene must have heard this story; it’s difficult to imagine that it didn’t remind her of her own mother.

Olympias — Mother of Alexander the Great

This Greek princess and supposed descendant of Achilles met her husband, Phillip II of Macedonia, while being initiated into the mysteries of an ancient cult. She was always suspected, ever after, of sorcery and congress with serpents. Though she was the fourth of Phillip’s wives, he claimed it was a love match, and she appears to have believed him until he started marrying other women. When Phillip married a seventh time and drunkenly accused Olympias of infidelity, she packed up her things and left Macedon.

Fortuitously–and perhaps not coincidentally–her husband was assassinated shortly thereafter. Olympias was able to install her son Alexander on the throne and he would go on to become ruler of the known world. But Olympias didn’t simply fade into the woodwork; she was an active participant in Alexander’s political regime. After her son’s death, though she was in her fifties, Olympias commanded an army in the field to preserve the throne for her baby grandson. What’s more, she won. For a short time, she was the mistress of Macedonia, at the zenith of her power. Eventually, she was defeated by Cassander and executed, thought to be far too dangerous to leave alive, but she leaves behind the archetype of a fiercely protective mother.

As a descendant of Alexander’s Macedonian general, Ptolemy, Selene was a kinswoman to Olympias and probably learned about her exploits.

Cleopatra — The Most Powerful Woman in the History of the World

As the consort of not one, but two Roman generals, Cleopatra earned a reputation as a seductress. Though she was a Hellenistic Queen, the Romans thought of her as foreign and exotic. Because she respected older Egyptian traditions, the Romans disdained her for worshipping all manner of strange gods. What’s more, her enemies believed she was capable of wielding magic. And if that weren’t bad enough, Cleopatra was also a warrior queen, capable of commanding her own warships.

She’s come down to us as a familiar and iconic image. Everyone has heard about the infamous Queen of the Nile, and there’s a good reason for it. She was, and remains, the most powerful woman in the history of the world. Though we’ve since had powerful queens, the geographic scope of their authority has been smaller. We’ve also had women serve as prime ministers of important countries, but their powers have been limited and sharply circumscribed. Cleopatra was not only the queen of Egypt in her own right, but in concert with her Roman husband, the biddable Marcus Antonius, she wielded unprecedented power. Until the Battle of Actium, she was poised to rule the entire world. But for some bad weather and a wildly successful propaganda campaign against her, the world might be a much different place today.

It’s difficult to wonder what lessons Cleopatra’s daughter Selene must have taken from her rise and fall. Selene herself was born in Ptolemaic Egypt, the best possible place to be born a woman in the ancient world. Raised in Alexandria, she would never have lacked for strong female role models.

Nonetheless, Cleopatra Selene was not a bad girl of history; she managed, somehow, to wield great political power and religious influence without ever falling afoul of the patriarchy. This may be because no sexual scandal touched her during her twenty-year marriage to Juba II or because she never took up arms on a battlefield.

Even so, she never forgot the important women in her life or in her legacy and neither should we.

* This post is meant as a salacious general discussion of notorious bad girls in the ancient world and lacks the precision of a more scholarly article.