00:00:00.000hello and welcome to vulgar history of feminist women's history comedy podcast and today it's a
00:00:17.540super special and this is an interview i was so excited to book and i was really excited to talk
00:00:22.940to this author it's jane dracott who has just written a new book that is called cleopatra's
00:00:28.860daughter from Roman prisoner to African queen. And so this is the story of Cleopatra Cellini,
00:00:33.920who is the daughter of Cleopatra, who you know, the famous Cleopatra, who I talked about in a
00:00:39.780years ago on a previous episode of Vulgar History. And this is such a good introduction to Cleopatra
00:00:46.520Cellini. And it really helps expand. It helped to understand my understanding of just this time
00:00:51.660period and how everybody knew each other. There's so many cameos in it of people who we've talked
00:00:56.440about in this podcast before who i've read about before like caligula shows up julius caesar is
00:01:01.680there obviously margantini obviously cleopatra herself because those are the parents of cleopatra
00:01:05.780selene but also amon arenas of cush makes a cameo appearance like it's really it's such an
00:01:12.280interesting story and you know i'm going to stop introducing it now because jane draycott is here
00:01:17.740to explain it all to you okay so i'm joined today by jane draycott welcome jane thank you for having
00:01:26.180me i'm really excited to talk to you about your book which is called cleopatra's daughter and it
00:01:32.720is a biography of literally cleopatra's daughter cleopatra selene can you explain this is the first
00:01:39.860at least recent biography of this woman is it the first ever biography of this woman i think it
00:01:46.540depends on how you look at it to be perfectly honest because she has been included in academic
00:01:55.380monographs alongside her husband Juba in one case alongside a selection of other royal women
00:02:05.540client queens in the Augustan Principate but as far as her on her own as the the main feature of
00:02:17.600the biography I believe mine is the first and it's it's the first sort of popular history biography as well that
00:02:25.380The first one, I think that you'd walk into a sort of high street bookshop and you'd find it there rather than having to order it from an academic press or something.
00:02:34.160So yes, I think not the first time that anyone has ever written about her, but I hope the first readily accessible, entirely concentrated on her time.
00:02:47.340Yeah. Well, I think that's important for people to know that this is like it's a popular history book.
00:02:52.360It's not written for as a textbook or anything.
00:03:20.620And then once I'd written the initial draft, my agent and then my editors were saying, OK, you need to explain this, you need to explain this, you need to explain this, because that's one of the funny things about when you're used to writing for an academic audience, who you assume if anyone bothers to read your academic book or your academic article, it's because they already know about the actual topic and they have a specific sort of issue with what you're saying.
00:03:46.300and switching out of that mode and into okay this is something that maybe people will know
00:03:53.580a bit about it because and they're interested and they want to know more or maybe people will
00:03:58.100just pick it up because they like the cover and they will they will not know anything and so you
00:04:02.980have to sort of try and strike that balance of explaining enough that you're giving people the
00:04:08.560information that they need to understand what it is you're talking about who you're talking about
00:04:12.440but also not explaining so much that you're being incredibly patronizing and that that can be quite
00:04:19.120difficult to sort of try and judge where that line is and and obviously I wanted everyone who reads
00:04:24.440my book to to sort of read it and and really immerse themselves in it and enjoy it and not
00:04:30.980come away feeling like they I've been talking a different language or something that they they
00:04:37.640just could not could not access like in the book you go through and I appreciate it as well because
00:04:42.640recap is always useful of the whole Cleopatra and Mark Antony saga but your your book is telling it
00:04:49.160from the point of view of their daughter can you explain who Cleopatra Selene was like at the time
00:04:53.760she was born her childhood what was that like because her life was sort of in various different
00:04:59.060eras so the beginning how right so cleopatra the seventh queen of egypt she is a sole ruler
00:05:09.280technically she's she's ruling with with her infant son but in reality she's the sole ruler
00:05:14.740of egypt she is uh an allied queen to the roman republic at this point so she's she's ruling her
00:05:22.780kingdom independently but she's sort of interacting a lot with rome and first she has an alliance with
00:05:28.160Julius Caesar then Julius Caesar is assassinated and she she moves her attention to Mark Antony
00:05:34.840who is one of the three most powerful men in Rome at that time there's Mark Antony there's Octavian
00:05:42.100who is Julius Caesar's adopted son and there's a third guy called Lepidus that no one cares about
00:05:46.480because he was inconsequential then he's inconsequential now so she and he Cleopatra and
00:05:54.400Mark Antony, they decide to align themselves with each other professionally as a sort of
00:06:01.440business relationship because she is an allied queen in the East and he is the member of the
00:06:07.520Second Triumvirate who is given responsibility for the East. And he needs her because he wants
00:06:13.580to go to war with Parthia, also in the East. He needs her money. He needs her resources. He needs
00:06:19.160her navy etc and she needs his support to to shore up her her alliance with rome so the pair can come
00:06:28.340to a professional business working agreement and they also come to a personal more more sort of
00:06:37.140leisure and pleasure kind of agreement between themselves after their official meeting at tarsus
00:06:44.060she invites Anthony to come back to Egypt with her, Alexandria, the capital city, and spend the
00:06:50.860winter there. And because he's had a rough few years fighting a civil war against the assassins
00:06:57.300of Caesar, he thinks, yeah, you know, I could do with a bit of downtime, I could do with a bit of
00:07:02.380fun. So he goes to Alexandria, at this point, probably one of the finest, most cosmopolitan,
00:07:09.900most luxurious cities in the entire ancient Mediterranean and he spends the winter with her
00:07:15.460and at some point maybe immediately maybe after a while the pair of them get together. Now it's
00:07:22.880worth noting that at this point he was actually married to somebody else a Roman woman for the
00:07:29.020back in Rome but that wasn't really something that seemed to bother him and it wasn't really
00:07:34.440something that bothered a lot of Romans they were they were perfectly happy to have extramarital
00:07:39.320the roman men anyway were perfectly happy to have extramarital relationships so he spent the winter
00:07:45.680with her and then left got on with his roman duties but when he left he left cleopatra pregnant
00:07:54.740with uh what would turn out to be fraternal twins a boy alexander helios and a girl cleopatra
00:08:01.920and they're born in around uh 40 BCE and then they are raised in Egypt by Cleopatra they don't
00:08:13.360really have very much to do with Anthony in the initial few years of their lives because he's
00:08:17.420he's still not really spending a lot of time in Egypt he's spending his time in Rome he's spending
00:08:23.500his time in the east he's trying to go to war with with Parthia so they are raised in Egypt
00:08:31.360as Egyptian royalty. And it's not until after Antony and Cleopatra's death that they leave
00:08:38.000Egypt and are taken to Rome. And then that's the whole other section of Cleopatra Selene's life
00:08:43.620and her story. So you explain this really well in the book about the sense of, for lack of a
00:08:52.220better term, like the ethnicity of everybody and what does it mean? And what you explain,
00:08:57.600and I'm hoping you can explain the podcast as well, is less about skin tone and more about
00:09:02.900nationality. So the fact that she was half Roman, half Egyptian, but she was raised in Egypt. And
00:09:08.740I think you see, as you describe in the book, throughout her life, she was very connected to
00:09:13.300her Egyptian roots. Yes. I mean, in the ancient world, there really isn't so much preoccupation
00:09:23.720with race or ethnicity you can have simultaneously many different identities particularly if you're
00:09:32.440roman if you're roman you could be roman a roman citizen born in rome and you're roman born in
00:09:40.400italy you're roman born anywhere else in the roman empire you're still roman and you could be
00:09:47.180any religion really uh you could worship any god or combination of gods monotheism so so judaism
00:09:55.540and christianity is a little bit tricky but if you're a roman citizen you're still a roman and
00:10:02.580so for cleopatra cellini being born a member of the ptolemaic royal family in egypt she can
00:10:11.480claim to be Macedonian because the Ptolemies originally come from Macedonia with with
00:10:17.320Alexander the Great but they've been in Egypt for over 300 years by the time that she's born it's
00:10:24.700sort of roughly akin to the British royal family I think who originally the Hanoverians come over
00:10:30.340from Germany but beyond the sort of occasional snide comment these days nobody really thinks
00:10:38.160the british royal family is really german and nobody sort of goes on about how you know they
00:10:43.740they have maintained their germanic identity etc there are a few things like christmas trees and
00:10:48.980christmas eve that you know they have they have those sorts of things but you know no one's going
00:10:54.640to argue that queen elizabeth ii or king charles iii now are german they're they're british they're
00:11:01.340the British royal family and so for Cleopatra Selene she's she has a Macedonian ancestry and
00:11:08.260and certainly she speaks Greek she writes in Greek so she has that sort of Greek cultural heritage
00:11:15.320but she's also she's she's born and raised in Egypt she clearly considers herself to be Egyptian
00:11:22.180she is very throughout her once she has agency and autonomy in her adult life she is very
00:11:29.920quick to promote both her Ptolemaic heritage using Greek language, but more specifically her
00:11:41.380Egyptian heritage using Egyptian iconography, motifs, religion, etc. And in addition to that,
00:11:50.300her father is Roman. She is a Roman. She is related by blood to the imperial family. Her0.62
00:11:58.680half-sisters, Antony's daughters with Octavia, who was Octavian's sister, they go on to be the
00:12:08.060mothers and grandmothers of all the Julio-Claudian emperors after Tiberius, so Caligula, Claudius,
00:12:16.260Nero. She's related to all of them. So she simultaneously is Macedonian, she's Egyptian,
00:12:50.560and how they wind up married to each other?
00:12:51.940So Juba, his name is Gaius Julius Juba, technically, because he is too a Roman citizen, but he wasn't born one. He was born as, well, a child of King Juba, King of Numidia, which was a North African independent kingdom, although it was heavily associated with Rome during the late Republic.
00:13:20.880And we don't really know anything about King Juba's family.
00:13:24.880We don't know who his wife was or who his wives were, how many children he had.
00:13:31.500We just know that after he was defeated in the Roman civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey,
00:13:40.940because he took Pompey's side of things, after he was defeated, he took his own life and his kingdom was seized.
00:13:50.140Everything, his wealth, all of his goods and treasure was seized by Rome.
00:14:00.400And this son, who was a baby at the time, is taken to Rome and raised in Rome as a Roman citizen.
00:14:08.800Hence, he's given the name Gaius Julius Juba.
00:14:12.120And he's raised to speak and read and write Greek and Latin.
00:14:16.960he's given an amazing education into all manner of subjects and he he becomes quite a scholar
00:14:25.240he writes a lot a lot of books about various different subjects and at one point in ancient
00:14:32.260history he's referred to as more of a scholar than a king or someone whose whose scholarship
00:14:38.720was was more memorable than his kingship which is not to say he was a bad king he wasn't he was a
00:14:43.040very good king but his scholarship was what people tended to associate with him and so he grows up
00:14:48.780in Rome removed from Africa because his kingdom becomes a province and so there's no more kingdom
00:14:54.660he grows up in Rome in the household of Octavian and Octavia after Caesar's assassination and he
00:15:03.660goes through all of the sort of education and training and military service and everything else
00:15:08.360the standard Roman boy man goes through. And when the time comes for Cleopatra Cellini to be,
00:15:17.540she's brought to Rome after her parents' death, and she's inserted into a Roman family, and she's
00:15:23.500from the ages of 10 to 15, she's living as a Roman girl in a Roman household doing Roman things.
00:15:30.840And when the time comes to work out what to do with her more long term, it seems that Octavia, so who would have been her stepmother, sort of foster mother, really, at this point, Octavia apparently matchmates between Juba and Cleopatra Salini.
00:15:48.840He's a little bit older than her. He's a few years older than her.
00:15:52.720But they've basically had the same trajectory.
00:15:55.120They were both the children of defeated and disgraced parents.
00:16:00.120They were both the sort of sole survivors, the last scions of their dynasties.
00:16:05.920They had their kingdoms taken away from them.
00:16:08.020They were brought to Rome and they were sort of repurposed to be useful to Rome.
00:16:13.180And so it's not surprising that they were put together as a way of, well, it makes sense.
00:16:20.840They're sort of their mirror images, really.
00:16:23.280But it's also a way of sort of neutralizing both of them.
00:16:26.040Cleopatra Selene more so than Juba because by the time Juba is marrying Cleopatra Selene he has been0.57
00:16:31.880in Rome for more than 20 years his kingdom has been a province for more than 20 years there's
00:16:36.200not really any chance of him ever going back there whereas Cleopatra Selene's kingdom has
00:16:40.440literally just just been taken and turned into a province and she's very much um a reminder of
00:16:48.740Antony and Cleopatra as well in Rome and she's she's very close to the center of imperial power0.89
00:16:55.220So she's the one really that is more in need of control than Juba.0.97
00:17:01.600And so the marriage quite neatly puts them together.0.96
00:17:04.240And it means that they can then be sent off to North Africa to rule a new kingdom that neither one of them has got any real tie to or claim to.
00:17:13.500Mauritania is roughly where Algeria and Morocco are today.
00:17:18.240And it was two kingdoms that were amalgamated because their two kings had died.
00:17:23.300sort of a useful way of taking care of that particular territory but it's also i think these
00:17:29.000these similarities between the two of them and added to the fact that because juba grew up in
00:17:35.180octavia's household he probably knew anthony he probably spent quite a lot of time with anthony
00:17:41.400so he would he would have been able to give her sort of a perspective on her father that she
00:17:46.940hadn't necessarily had. And it's things like that, I think, suggest that perhaps their relationship
00:17:54.800was not just a sort of political arranged marriage, but there might have been more to it than that,
00:18:01.180because the pair of them would have been uniquely positioned to sort of understand and empathize
00:18:07.120with each other over their situations. This brings us very beautifully to something I wanted to bring
00:18:12.840up because I think the listeners are going to be very excited to know that there is numerous coin
00:18:17.480minting moments in your book. It's become, I haven't had one of these in an episode in a while,
00:18:23.740but I do always get excited when a woman sort of like really declares herself in charge by
00:18:29.860minting coins with her face on them. And what was interesting and you've, and I love how many
00:18:33.560pictures there are in your book too, to show exactly what you're describing, but there's
00:18:37.140the coins with Juba on one side and Cleopatra on the other side. And can you explain kind of what
00:18:41.140that suggests about her role as the queen and now we're just going to take a break for a word from
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00:19:15.040Search realms of peril and glory to find out more.
00:21:19.340And I will say I was very keen to have pictures in my book because I think there are so many beautiful ancient works of art that people don't know about.
00:21:28.860and when it comes to Cleopatra Stellini you really do need to have a look at the at the
00:21:34.720material culture because it's so interesting and so unusual and so cool frankly uh but but
00:21:43.520and it tells a huge amount of the story that you don't get from just the literary sources that
00:21:48.660tend to be fairly matter-of-fact about it so yes uh when Juba and Cleopatra Stellini are sent off
00:21:54.500to mauritania one of the things they do is they issue coinage and at this point in in in time
00:22:03.020in in the sort of roman sphere of influence everybody issues coinage you know of course
00:22:08.660they do but a lot of the coinage tends to be very boring and very repetitive um cleopatra
00:22:14.900queen of egypt's coinage for example very boring by and large she used exactly the same motifs
00:22:21.160that the Ptolemaic dynasty had been using for centuries so you know a few individual things
00:22:29.980here and there she issued a coin of her and her son Caesarian as a referencing them as as
00:22:36.320the goddess Isis and her son Horus she and Antony issued coins together in the sort of Roman style
00:22:43.440but but by and large the coinage was fairly boring whereas Jupiter and Cleopatra Scolini's coinage
00:22:49.280juba's coinage is pretty boring to be fair um juba tends to issue the standard portrait
00:22:55.300latin legend saying rex juba so king juba uh a few sort of motifs on the reverse face
00:23:03.800but cleopatra sellini's coinage and she issues her own coinage they they issue coinage together
00:23:09.180which is fairly standard husband wife king queen him on the obverse her on the reverse
00:23:14.400But she issues her own coinage as well. And this is at a time when in the Roman world anyway, Roman women were only just being put on coins.
00:23:26.860And it was actually Mark Antony that innovated and put his wives first Fulvia and then Cleopatra and then Octavia on coins.
00:23:38.020so it's it's still very unusual to see women on roman coins and cleopatra selene's coinage is
00:23:46.380just fantastic because she shows i'm gonna i'm gonna do her the the courtesy of assuming it's
00:23:54.460her frankly i mean you you could argue with any ancient coin well who exactly is responsible for
00:23:59.740the design of this did the ancient king or queen or dictator or consul did did they did they sit
00:24:06.160down and design their own coinage well I'm gonna say I think in this case yes she was very much
00:24:12.720involved because the coinage is so unusual and so interesting and thought-provoking she issues
00:24:20.460a whole series of coins some of them have got her portrait on and and her her name Cleopatra
00:24:28.040that's what she calls herself on her coinage but she uses a lot of other designs as well
00:24:35.200So she uses her reverse faces to make very pointed references back to herself.
00:24:42.800So she has crescent moons, for example, references to her second name, Selene, the goddess of the moon.0.75
00:24:51.160But she also uses this space to make references to Egypt.
00:24:57.060And so this is how we know that she didn't give up on her claim to Egypt.
00:25:03.940She didn't become completely Romanized. She includes things like crocodiles, very specifically Egyptian in this period, the ibis, a very distinctive Egyptian bird, the goddess Isis that her mother, Cleopatra, had been very keen to sort of align herself with, all sorts of other things, Egyptian royal paraphernalia, different crowns, things like that.
00:25:31.100so the fact that these coins are so specific so they're very knowledgeable about about these
00:25:40.440Egyptian references and these these Egyptian accoutrements and that to me says that she was
00:25:45.540involved in them she was using her coinage which was circulating in her kingdom to make claims about
00:25:52.680her ancestry her heritage and as a sort of result of that her power and her prestige because of the
00:25:59.840two of them she and juba had these parallel lives but at the same time she was much much more
00:26:06.080powerful and prestigious than he was she was not only um the the she was a child of royalty like
00:26:14.220him but nobody in ancient rome really cared about juba of numidia's royal line people in rome cared
00:26:23.800very much about the Ptolemies going all the way back to Macedonia and Philip and Alexander the
00:26:30.320Great. There were stories about the Ptolemies being the original Ptolemy, Ptolemy I, being an
00:26:36.380illegitimate son of Philip, which would have made him a half-brother to Alexander, which gave them
00:26:41.740an extra amount of power and prestige at that point. So her royal line is better. And the other
00:26:52.900side of her parentage, Antony, his family is an ancient Roman family. They claim descent from
00:26:58.940the god Hercules through one of his sons. And she's even related to Julius Caesar via Antony's
00:27:07.820mother, who is a Julia, a member of the Julian family. And of course, she is directly related
00:27:14.980to the imperial family because her half sisters, Octavia's daughters, they are married in to the
00:27:22.120imperial family they become you know mothers of emperors grandmothers of emperors so she every
00:27:31.040single aspect of her genealogy is gold-plated basically and she is able to bring all of this
00:27:40.300with her to mauritania and when she and juba get to mauritania which remember is this sort of two
00:27:46.260kingdoms mashed together to make one kingdom. They undertake a sort of full-scale refurbishment
00:27:54.040of the city that is on the Mediterranean coast, Isle, which they rename Caesarea in honor of
00:28:01.080Augustus, which is Octavian. He's started calling himself Augustus. And so they redesign and
00:28:08.360renovate this entire city to make it a showcase of their new kingdom. And they model it on
00:28:12.940Alexandria. And again, did Juba ever go to Alexandria? Well, not as far as we know at
00:28:20.780this point in his life. So which of the two of them had been to Alexandria? Who was the person
00:28:25.220who could say, well, this is what Alexandria looks like. This is how we do it in Alexandria.
00:28:29.540And so she is able to bring all of this to her new kingdom and use it to empower herself and
00:28:40.460this new dynasty that she and Juba are creating, because of course they have children. And the aim
00:28:45.600is to then pass the kingdom down through their line. This quote struck me so much that I took
00:28:54.900a picture of it to save it so I could bring it up with you. Because towards the end of the book,
00:28:58.860you're comparing Cleopatra Cellini with roughly her contemporaries, people like Boudica, who we've
00:29:05.660talked about on this podcast. She was also around the same time as Amanorinus from the Kingdom of
00:29:10.700Kush, who we know less about them, but they're written about more, especially Boudicca. And then
00:29:16.940you said, so Cleophan and Cellini, because she succeeded quietly rather than failed loudly,
00:29:22.980she did not catch the imagination of later writers and artists in quite the same way.
00:29:27.300So everything you've talked about is like her, the situation that she found herself in.
00:29:31.580We're all really interesting. But then once she and Juba get married and they go to Mauritania,
00:29:35.300it's kind of like and then everything's okay like there's kind of there's not big drama there but
00:29:40.300that's significant in itself because there very much could have been I think yes we're at a bit
00:29:45.580of a disadvantage really because in the period that all of this is happening the eyes of the
00:29:53.320contemporary commentators are on Rome because as far as that they're they're Roman commentators
00:30:00.180living under the roman empire so they are interested in rome and the center of power
00:30:06.100and the person of augustus so uh he's he's in rome a lot of the time but when he goes to other
00:30:13.980places you know he sort of takes rome with him essentially so that's what they're writing about
00:30:18.820and we don't hear a huge amount about what is happening elsewhere in the empire on the periphery
00:30:25.540unless something goes horribly wrong, unless there's some kind of revolt, or some kind of
00:30:31.720military disaster, or some kind of political scandal. And the fact that we don't hear anything
00:30:39.980about Mauritania and about what Juba and Cleopatra Salini, who is, remember, the daughter of the
00:30:45.720infamous Cleopatra and Mark Antony, were doing there, implies that they were getting on with
00:30:51.000job they were doing what they had been raised to do which was rule and they were ruling competently
00:30:58.780and they were not being controversial outside of their kingdom they they were they were not
00:31:05.400causing problems you know so so whatever they were doing that was interesting and innovative
00:31:09.800within their kingdom it was not threatening anybody outside of it so yeah it would be so
00:31:17.460great if we had a a court source from mauritania the way that we have from uh the the the contemporary
00:31:26.740client kingdom of judea uh we have josephus later who who is writing a sort of history of judea and
00:31:35.440the the jewish uh royal families and he gives us information that about what's going on in this
00:31:41.260period with with the royal family cleopatra was quite involved in in their affairs funnily enough
00:31:46.400But we don't have something like that for Mauritania. And I think it's a real shame because it would be fascinating to know what is going on in North Africa in this period.
00:31:55.140You've got this amazing kingdom where you have Greek and Roman settlements within an African kingdom where you have African tribes from the south on the border.
00:32:15.680And there are lots of incursions and there is military activity later.
00:32:18.560and it's this it's right on the sort of the the the ancient mediterranean coast and it's very
00:32:26.340well connected to spain um hispania the sort of provinces there and there would be so much
00:32:33.880happening in this in this kingdom at this time and it was becoming this center for the culture
00:32:38.480and scholarship and art and everything else but we've only got very fragmentary references to
00:32:45.120any of this and you have to sort of collect them all and put them together and it would be it would
00:32:48.500be so great to have a more comprehensive set of information about everything that was going on
00:32:53.460here because i bet it was an amazing place to be well and that's so interesting that like you said
00:32:58.220like the lack of kind of scandal information like the fact that there is no information implies that
00:33:04.240there was no scandal which implies things were kind of going okay which in this era is remarkable
00:33:09.580because everybody was assassinating everybody everywhere exactly so so if there was assassination
00:33:16.260going on i think we'd have heard about it because you know it would be irresistible to to ancient
00:33:22.320writers to say things like oh cleopatra selenie assassinated this person that person the other
00:33:27.020person she's just like her mother but but you know they they don't so so clearly she she was uh
00:33:35.000she was behaving herself or sort of comporting herself within the sort of agreed parameters
00:33:42.460I mean that's that's the thing to bear in mind of course is is that all of this
00:33:48.100the Romans have a very specific idea of what they want women to do what they want them to say
00:33:55.380where everything and when women are going along with this we don't hear about them it's when they0.94
00:34:07.640are transgressing in some way both good and bad mainly bad but but sometimes good that's when we0.99
00:34:16.140hear about them because that's when the ancient authors think it's interesting or relevant or
00:34:21.260pertinent to include them. I think that this says that Cleopatra Slini looked around, she looked
00:34:30.280at the women that were in a position to be her role model. So she looked at her mother and what0.64
00:34:36.500had worked for her mother and what had not worked. She looked at Ameniranas, a neighbouring queen who0.98
00:34:42.820her mother would have had diplomatic relations with, and who in turn was actually victorious
00:34:51.420over the Romans and booted them out of her kingdom, unlike Cleopatra. And she would have looked at
00:34:57.700the women of the imperial family as well. So you have Livia Drusilla, who is Octavian,0.56
00:35:04.580later Augustus' wife, and the mother of his successor Tiberius. You have Octavia, who is
00:35:11.620sister her father's ex-wife and you have the other female members of the imperial family and she
00:35:17.860would have looked at them and looked at how they operated within this system because both Olivia
00:35:23.240and Octavia had a significant amount of power and influence but they wielded it in very subtle ways
00:35:29.240very quietly so there were buildings all over Rome with their names on and they were patrons
00:35:35.020to poets and artists and all manner of influential people like that and they were in the public eye
00:35:44.200they were held up as paragons of virtue and great examples for women to follow so i think she she
00:35:51.340would have looked at all of those and thought okay what what can i use here what's a good example
00:35:59.080What is an example of what to do? What is an example of what not to do? And so she does that. And she therefore succeeds for, well, many years as a queen.
00:36:15.180Related to that, and just a sort of a final question, and you touched on this in your book, I think, especially in the introduction, but the connections that you see between her story and just contemporary, the role of women today, of women in the public eye.
00:36:29.620Yes, absolutely. I think it's something that I wanted to talk in the book more about than I eventually did, because when you're talking about contemporary women, there is this question of, can you do it without being crass, basically?
00:36:47.760Can you do it without looking like you're clout chasing or sort of trying to kind of jump on the bandwagon or whatever?
00:36:56.220But I do think that there are some very clear contemporary parallels about the role of women in the public eye,
00:37:07.040the role of women in royal families, the role of women in politics, and the way that women get
00:37:17.380praised or criticized for what they do or they don't do. It's both interesting and somewhat sad
00:37:23.820that in 2,000 years, women are still being judged by exactly the same sets of standards about
00:37:32.900what do they say or what do they not say do they say too much and do they do they play the game
00:37:41.660by conforming and and uh doing doing what is expected of them and and no matter how much
00:37:51.380um criticism may come their way or do they change the game and sort of get criticized for that too
00:38:01.020but also potentially make things better for the people that come after them and I think this is a
00:38:07.000position that Cleopatra Cellini would have been in I think for most of her well for her life from
00:38:16.440from the age of 10 years old she would have been very much aware of the fact that her parents
00:38:22.360were both disgraced in the society in which she was living in in Rome under the Augustan
00:38:28.660her father had suffered essentially damnatio memoriae it was never to be mentioned nobody
00:38:36.400in their family could ever be given his name again it was it was banned her mother everything
00:38:44.440was blamed on her mother she she'd stolen him away from rome she had tempted him to the dark1.00
00:38:51.340side etc her mother you know was was a witch was a whore was a murderer and she comes from a kingdom1.00
00:38:59.060from a from a culture that is seen as being very strange and perverse and worshipping animals and1.00
00:39:05.980they're they're shifty and they're dishonest and they're weak and they're spineless and so she's0.93
00:39:10.720growing up spending her sort of formative teenage years in a society where everything that she has
00:39:17.680come from and everything she is representing is constantly being criticized all the time whereas
00:39:23.360the other side of of her identity her father's identity this is something that she's supposed to
00:39:29.380to want to be part of she's supposed to want to be a traditional roman girl woman so i think when
00:39:37.040she goes to mauritania and she finally has you know some some space and some some independence
00:39:42.280and some agency that's when she can choose what to do and how to present herself and she can find0.74
00:39:48.680uh a way of of i think charting a course somewhere down the middle she she uses some of her her1.00
00:39:56.680mothers and and other ancient queens ways of doing things and she also uses some of the1.00
00:40:02.960traditional roman female way of doing things and so she's able to do something0.70
00:40:07.500quite different, quite unique because of who she is, that other people can't necessarily do that0.97
00:40:15.340because they don't have the sort of intersecting identities and the same history and heritage
00:40:21.220that she's got. I just think it's so fascinating just to imagine her situation. It's in such
00:40:27.000recent memory what happened with her parents and the fact that she has her mother's same name,
00:40:32.380but then she goes on to still, like what you were describing in the coins and the way that
00:40:37.040they built the city, to still embrace that Egyptian side of her. She doesn't change her
00:40:40.600name. She doesn't start being like, oh, I'm totally just Roman. Don't worry about it.
00:40:44.360I think that in the absence of other records, just the actions and the evidence that we have
00:40:51.520really speaks to what kind of person she was. Yes. And I think as well that the fact that she
00:40:58.080is in africa and this is this is often egypt historically isn't really considered to be part
00:41:06.880of africa it seemed to be this separate um sort of adjacent place but as as far as uh antiquity
00:41:15.960is concerned you know cleopatra selene is a north african princess queen she she would have she was
00:41:23.920princess of egypt she would have been queen of egypt had the kingdom not fallen to the romans
00:41:29.500and so when she's being queen of mauritania another north african kingdom clearly the
00:41:37.700mauritanian people roman african they're responding positively to egypt the fact that
00:41:44.780that she is using her egyptian identity shows that this is something that that worked for her
00:41:52.080in mauritania i guess because of of the the african connection she could you know there
00:41:58.240were other aspects of her identity she could have chosen to promote if she'd wanted to and
00:42:02.460and in fact her her son uh ptolemy says because she and juba her they seem to have one one son
00:42:09.420who survives to adulthood and his name is ptolemy so they they take the name of cleopatra selene's
00:42:14.060family and they put it on onto their son. In his coins, he often references Hercules. And so
00:42:22.620Cleopatra Selene, the Ptolemae dynasty claimed to be descended from Hercules. Antony's family
00:42:28.920claimed to be descended from Hercules. And Juba himself also claimed to be descended from Hercules.
00:42:34.440So Ptolemy uses this. And he uses particularly the club of Hercules as his sort of personal
00:42:41.300symbol and I always find that quite amusing because it's it's sort of you get the kind of
00:42:47.040smiting sense of the club is a big strong weapon that you whack people with you know you enforce
00:42:53.360your will with with the club but Cleopatra Cellini is she could have used Hercules related imagery
00:43:00.700but she chooses to use other imagery Egyptian imagery etc and and so again we get this this
00:43:08.560Why did she choose that? She must have had a reason to choose that. And so, yeah, she's using what's working for her. And within the context of Africa, this is what's working for her. And she is subsequently depicted with the attributes of Africa, the elephant scalp and other things. So I think she sees herself as Egyptian. She sees herself as African as well.
00:43:34.500it's and again I just want to emphasize there's so many pictures in this book so everything you're
00:43:38.560describing I love being able to to see exactly what what you were talking about thank you so
00:43:43.620much for joining me today to talk about this book so it's available everywhere and at the time that
00:43:49.120this episode is released it's available in North America as well so everybody should read it it's
00:43:53.780such a good book thank you so much for talking with me today I agree everyone should read it
00:43:58.360thank you very much for having me it's been lovely
00:44:05.420So again, the book is called Cleopatra's Daughter from Roman Prisoner to African Queen by Jane
00:44:10.160Draycott. It's available now in the UK, and I think it should be available now in the United
00:44:14.640States as well. There was like, it had a publication date announced and then it was
00:44:18.560delayed. I think because there's so many good images, there was something they had to figure
00:44:21.680with the images Jane had said. So anyway, by the time this podcast comes out, you should be able
00:44:25.880to buy it or at least pre-order it. And I recommend it very highly. And just as a reminder of
00:44:33.940everything. If you're new to this podcast, or you like being reminded of things, you can follow
00:44:40.700this podcast at more on Instagram at vulgar history pod. I'm also on tick tock at vulgar
00:44:47.000history. And if you have a suggestion of somebody who you think would be good to talk about this
00:44:51.520podcast, or honestly, a book you think I'd like to read or interview the author of, if you go to
00:44:55.980vulgar history.com, there's a form there to contact me, or you can also email me directly
00:45:00.060at Vulgar History Pod at gmail.com. I also have a Patreon, which is patreon.com slash Anne Foster
00:45:05.720Writer. So for $1 a month, you get early ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History. And for
00:45:11.720$5 or more a month, you get access to bonus episodes as well. And I'll talk to you all
00:45:17.660next time. And until then, keep your pants on and your tits out.1.00
00:45:21.080Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Anne Foster0.99