To steal a tagline from fellow author Vicky Alvear Shecter, Cleopatra was the original teen queen. The Queen of the Nile was a young woman of enormous wealth and power who was afforded the celebrity status of a goddess before she turned twenty years old. When we read about her fantastic costumes and her splashy entrances on pleasure barges, it’s hard not to imagine how she might have torn things up on a modern day red carpet.

But what about her daughter? In my debut novel, Lily of the Nile, I had the opportunity to showcase the life of Cleopatra Selene, who was, in many ways, her mother’s daughter. At the age of ten, when her parents committed suicide, she was taken prisoner and marched through Rome in chains. However, she was spared by Rome’s first emperor, taken into his sister’s household, and raised alongside the young members of the imperial family who would become the teen pop idols of their day.

Forget Justin Bieber’s dulcet songs; girls in the ancient world swooned at the naughty poetry of a handsome young Ovid. One of the young divas particularly impressed with Ovid’s poetry may have been the emperor’s own daughter, Julia Caesaris, a fashion-forward young woman with delicate, adorable features. However, having received a first-rate education, Julia wasn’t just a pretty face. She also had a rapier wit and was greatly beloved of the people. At fifteen, she was married to the emperor’s handsome young nephew, Marcellus and the two became the “it” couple of the ancient world. Marcellus was only eighteen, but had already been to war and if his statues are any indication, was the kind of guy girls liked to see with his shirt off. He was widely thought to be Augustus’ heir, next in line to rule the empire, so wherever this couple went, people flocked to see them.

But they weren’t alone; they traveled with their own entourage. Amongst their company would have been Cleopatra Selene, the last survivor of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a princess of Egypt, and a young woman who knew how to wear jewels. She caused a sensation by wearing her mother’s carved amethyst ring–or at least enough of a sensation for it to have been mentioned by a famous epigramist of the age. Selene’s romantic pairing was with Juba II, a young Prince of Numidia who was already a prodigy, having published a book before the age of twenty.

While it may have been glitz and glam for these teen celebrities in public, home life was decidedly more troubled and my novel is an exploration of Selene’s difficulties as both a hostage of the Romans and one of the most famous girls in the Roman empire.