Book Review: Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen by Jane Draycott *****

Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen by Jane Draycott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been waiting for this book ever since I first learned, probably as a teenager, that Cleopatra and Marc Antony had a daughter. Even her name, Cleopatra Selene (after the goddess of the moon), was evocative and intriguing. While it was usually mentioned that she was taken to Rome after her parents’ deaths, along with her two full brothers, who both soon disappear from the historical record, and raised in the household of Octavia, her father’s Roman wife, nothing else was mentioned of her. Finally, Jane Draycott has granted my wish.

With rare exceptions, biographies of ancient and medieval women can be disappointing, mainly due to the sheer paucity of information available about them from a world run by and written about by men, and far too often the book devolves into a “life and times” with a lot about the men in the subject’s life and mainly supposition about the subject herself. I’m happy that this was not the case with Cleopatra’s Daughter. Yes, those things were present, as is to be expected, but I never forgot that she was the focus, and it seemed that Ms. Draycott was able to extract a surprising amount of information from a scanty record. This was helped by the fact that Cleopatra Selene, if not as powerful and charismatic as her mother (a well-nigh impossible task), also seems to have been a formidable woman who inspired loyalty on her own behalf, as well as having what appears to be a compatible and equal match with one of Rome’s client kings.

The book starts with a brief history of the Ptolemaic dynasty, its center in Alexandria, and the lives of the two outsized personalities who would become the parents of Cleopatra Selene. It then traces what her life would have been like, first as a princess and nominally a queen in her own right, as her parents declared her Queen of Crete and Cyrenaica when she was only six years old, then her late childhood and adolescence in Rome, and finally her marriage to Juba II of Numidia, a fellow child hostage who had also been raised in Augustus’s circle, and their rule of the kingdom of Mauretania until what seems to have been a fairly early death. Despite this, she still exerted a large influence on the culture of their court, including Egyptian symbolism in artwork and on their coinage, as well as on Juba’s scholarly writings. Finally, Ms. Draycott speculates on whether the pair, whose son was murdered by Caligula, might also have had one or more daughters whose descendants may have ended up on the imperial throne. I also found her discussion of the fraught question of Cleopatra Selene's mother's, and by extension her own, ethnicity to be both balanced and thoughtful. All in all, I enjoyed this book very much, and it truly brought Cleopatra Selene and those around her to life for me.

I received a copy of Cleopatra’s Daughter from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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