Conversations: Cleopatra Selene... A Queen her Mother Would Be Proud Of w/ Dr Jane Draycott

Liv speaks with Jane Draycott https://www.instagram.com/jane.draycott/?hl=en again this week about her book Cleopatra's Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen. Jane Draycott is an amazing scholar who has done phenomenal work on Roman women who often are left without a voice or are given a much lesser reputation than they deserve. Cleopatra Selene is a delightful character to give to the world, and to share her life with the rest of the world. Plus, Jane has a magnificent Norwegian Forest cat who makes himself known! Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:44Liv Albert?

  Hello all and welcome back to this episode of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, where Liv is talking with the lovely Jane Draycott. You've heard from her before when she came to talk about Fulvia, her new novel on that, but this time she's here to talk about Cleopatra Salini and her book that she did on her.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Cleopatra Selene is a very interesting character. I know nothing about her. I do have the book Cleopatra's Daughter, but I I haven't read it yet because I am tired. So I haven't gotten around to it. That being said, you know, it's interesting to think about how these dynasties continued on. If any of you guys were listening to Tuesday's episode, you'll remember that we talked a little bit about Alexander's sister Cleopatra in that and how she was, um, you know, a hot topic to be wedded to because of her sort of full argued bloodline. And that would allow anyone who married her to continue that bloodline. But, you know, there's the the OG

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Cleopatra. And here we have another one. Not the one we always think about Cleopatra VII. But this is actually, this is her daughter. So this episode was really interesting, super fun to listen to, super fun to edit, and really excited to share it all with you guys. So I'll let Liv and Jane take it away. Bye.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Cleopatra Selene, a queen her mother would be proud of with Jane Drakehart.

• 3:30Liv Albert?

  We had such a fun time talking about Thalia, I guess. And then you have a book about another ancient woman. So I thought I would like, I would like to hear about her too. And once again, nowhere near ancient Greece. So my knowledge, well, I mean, not from a geographical standpoint.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  From a cultural standpoint, I suppose you could argue that it's sort of.

• 3:54Liv Albert?

  My version of ancient Greece, I should say, too. It's it's my phrasing. It's like, basically, anything that's outside of the classical period or like after, then I'm like, well, I just don't know enough. Um, which is, but I really said, it's definitely still ancient Greece broadly. But I'm just so curious about, we were talking about Cleopatra's daughter, Cleopatra Selene. So what? I mean, but Cleopatra was the seventh. So is she that she's the eighth?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  I suppose so, yes.

• 4:24Liv Albert?

  Because, but she's also got the additional name, like.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, she's, she's technically Cleopatra Selene the second.

• 4:31Liv Albert?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  There is an early one, but, but again, I think because the people who work on the Ptolemaic dynasty tend to be quite separate from the people who work on the Roman Empire. Because she, she falls into the Roman Empire and because it's generally seen that Cleopatra the seventh is the last Cleopatra and she's the last Ptolemy, even though she's not.

• 4:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  So, so Cleopatra Selene doesn't, it doesn't get a number. She just kind of gets shunted off.

• 4:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  And, and it's funny, really. I mean, this is, this is something that, that does just in a nutshell demonstrate the sort of very patriarchal, phalicentric bias of, of classics and ancient history scholarship over many sort of centuries. Because if you think about Cleopatra the seventh, she had four children, she had three sons, she had one daughter. The ancient sources only really pay attention to Caesarion because he's the eldest, he's the son of Caesar, he's the nominal king and pharaoh of Egypt. But he dies at the age of sixteen and doesn't really do anything historically significant.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Then there are the two boys, fathered by Marcus Antonius, they are Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus. They again sort of disappear from the historical record quite young. The last time we hear about Alexander Helios is at Octavian's Triple Triumph in twenty nine. He's mentioned as having participated in that with Cleopatra Selene, so they're around about eleven or so at that time. And Ptolemy Philadelphus doesn't even get mentioned in connection with that. So the last time he really gets mentioned is when with, with the sort of the, the fall of, of Egypt and the end of dynasty. So he seems to have died sometime between thirty and twenty nine, so at the age of six. So these three boys, all of whom die young.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  They're very important during their lives, but historically with hindsight, we, we could dismiss them as completely unimportant because they all die in childhood. Cleopatra Selene is a completely separate issue because she doesn't die. She she survives as as a child. She is an Egyptian princess. She is a Roman prisoner. Um. And then she is uh declared an African queen. She's made queen of Mauritania and she goes off to Mauritania and she rules there. For around fifteen years or so.

• 6:55Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Um. And yet she's she's not mentioned. And the scholars who talk about Mauritania, they talk about Juba, her husband. Juba second, and they talk about her son Ptolemy. And they just don't talk about her at all. And it's it's really, it's really funny because when you, in the in the in the literary sources, you you have references to her. She's she's mentioned in the in the context of Cleopatra's children, Antonius's children, along with her her brothers and half brothers and sisters. And she's mentioned in the in the sort of the the larger context of being a Roman client queen. But there's lots of archaeological evidence for her, like her specifically as an individual rather than simply you know, a a an extended member of the family or something. And so

• 7:39Speaker 03

  it's it's just funny to me that she just gets completely ignored. And any any discussion of Mauritania is all about Juba and Ptolemy. Even though she's there and she's we've got from the archaeological evidence, she's doing things and and where did Ptolemy even get his name from, you know? He's he's like, it's he's named after his mother's like royal line. And yeah, it's just like, oh, no, we we don't. We don't need to think about her at all, despite the fact she was the only one that lived to adulthood or did anything interesting. Or that we have any actual evidence for after um the the conquest of Egypt in in thirty.

• 8:19Liv Albert?

  There oh, there's so much going on here. I mean, there's I I wish I was surprised that no one

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:24Liv Albert?

  pays attention. Like, I I wish that was surprising, but it is not. Um. But, okay, so, I mean, obviously, there was going to be lots to say about her. You have an entire book, but I I'm thrilled to know this because also it allows me to like pull us back a little bit. So to to remind the listeners too, because I've I've not covered all that much about ancient Rome, honestly, I have a running joke that I just like other people to come on and tell me about these things from ancient Rome because I want to hear about them, but I I live in my pre-classical realm of ancient Greece.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  You, you can't, you can't know everything and it, it does, it does annoy me a huge amount when you get people who, whether it's on the radio or a podcast or TV, they are so far out of their area of expertise. And it's like, just because you have a huge amount of expertise on this particular period or this particular topic, that doesn't mean that you have this expertise everywhere, but it's because obviously the, the, the TV channel, production companies, whatever, they, they think that audiences can only cope with like one face or one voice. And, and if, you know, therefore they'll, they'll watch, you know, a program on literally anything if it's presented by this particular person.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  And it's the same thing with, with films, the, the historian character or the archaeologist's character is somehow an expert on literally every historical period, every civilization. They, they can look at any inscription.

• 9:56Liv Albert?

  I was just gonna say.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  And translate it and give you a potted history of the country. You're just like,

• 10:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, they can just glance at a, at a big block of ancient Greek and immediately know exactly what it says. No, that's so true. And I, yeah, it's especially when it comes to Greece and Rome, right? Like there is this historic idea that these two places are somehow so intertwined that to know one is to know the other. And it's like nonsensical in so many ways, but it's, yeah, I, well, I'm, that's why I love having other people come on. I'm not going to pretend to know about Rome. Now I'll just make it into a joke that I really don't care about Rome, except for when other people come on to tell me interesting things, particularly about women.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  It's fun to be an eternal student in a lot of ways. I, I do, I do think that the, the academic life appeals to people who just enjoyed learning and want to keep learning. And, and so it's like, hey, you're, you're, you, you know stuff. Tell me about it. Like, like, give me, give me this information. I want, I want to know about it, you know?

• 10:57Liv Albert?

  Well, and I don't like learning with the structure.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  To learn everything I want. So I'll, I'll hear from you.

• 11:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, exactly. I like learning without the structure and without having to pick like something so specific as like be, you know, a, a post grad. So I'm like, this is great. This is why I have everybody else on. Um, but, and so, you know, when it comes to, to Rome, like we've, I've. Talk to the partial historians about Cleopatra VII. And so I'm trying to think back to that. That was ages ago, too. But, you know, I want to sort of situate the listeners in that Cleopatra was, you know, we love, people love to call her the last pharaoh because after her, Egypt became part of the Roman Empire. Of course, there's so much going on there because under her, it was part of the Potomac Empire, and that's not really Egypt in the same way.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  And all the Roman emperors are pharaohs, you know, they're

• 11:43Liv Albert?

  Right, it's like it's the word for king.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  They're called sort of Sebastas or whatever in the Egyptian inscriptions. But, but they basically jump into that vacated space. It's not like Egypt ceases to be a kingdom or ceases to have pharaohs. They, they just, you know, in, within the kingdom, that's how they view them. That's how they're depicted in art. There's a huge amount of continuity.

• 12:08Liv Albert?

  Oh, we got a cat. You guys can't see him, but I love the cat.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  He's gonna be, he's gonna be as awkward as possible. He's gonna, he's gonna sort of try and walk on the keyboard. He's gonna stand on my lap for 10 minutes before he decides to settle down. And then he's gonna just like run off.

• 12:22Liv Albert?

  Well, I'm here for it. We had comments actually. You know, we might not need to. I, we had comments on your last episode because I think there's one moment where I mentioned that the cat was on screen, even if he didn't get like a full shout out and people have been talking about it. So if we hear a cat, everyone's just gonna love to see this Norwegian forest cat. Just know that he's big and majestic.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Well, he's on Instagram if people wanna, wanna put a face to the, to the description of the name. And since we're talking about Egypt, it's not completely inappropriate to talk about or to have a cat involved in our conversation about Egypt.

• 12:58Liv Albert?

  Recently, we, I've become obsessed with, with his heritage. I brought a cat back from Naxos last year. Yeah, about this time last year, actually. And he, I, I like met the, the mother cat when she was pregnant, ended up going back for, for this baby. And it's, I mean, a precious story generally. He is adorable. His name is Anchovy, but he looks like an Egyptian cat straight out of a, a piece of Like Egyptian, ancient Egyptian statuary in this really bizarre way. So yeah, we just now have started jokingly referring to him as a god, even though he's also like the simultaneously smartest and dumbest cat in the world. So I'm not sure how divine he is.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Aren't they always? They, they have this fiendish criminal sort of feathers McGraw type intelligence. And then they're so dope. They just like, they try and jump on the side and they do a complete fail and just go splat on the floor and it's embarrassing for everyone.

• 13:52Liv Albert?

  This one uses his hands to touch everything for no good reason. Like he's just always, he's always involved, but he's apparently an Egyptian god. Um, but yeah, so I mean, I would, I could talk about cats forever, unfortunately, but, um, so that, you know, this, this is such an awe, a sort of unique period of time that we're talking about when it comes to Egypt. Because you know, even as you're saying where the Roman Empire has kind of stepped into the role of pharaoh, like that's what the Potomies did too. So it's sort of, you know, just like a continuation, but Cleopatra was, I guess, the last. I wouldn't even say free. I don't know. It's, it's an odd phrasing. I guess we won't try to go too deep into it, but, but Cleopatra being this very, you know, important historical figure who has these children by both Caesar and Mark Antony is

• 14:38Liv Albert?

  always going to be interesting. But then, so, you know, we were talking about the other kids that all die when they're young, except for Cleopatra Selene and so what, what was the situation there for the family? Because obviously Cleopatra was at odds. That's putting it nicely with Octavian as he is kind of taking over Egypt and, and all of this. So you were saying she was first a prisoner. Like, can you tell us a little bit like that timeline of, because it's messy.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Really interesting period and so much happens in such a, a short space of time. And so much of it is so emotional or it must, it must have been so emotional, but we, we don't have those sorts of sources, but, but to have Cleopatra the seventh's diary for this period or to have Cleopatra Selene's diary for this period and to, to get their perspectives on what is happening, because the sources that we do have, who are Plutarch, his life of Antony and, um, Cassius Dio's Roman history and stuff, they, they focus very much on the sort of political, military angles of it, you know, the invasion of the kingdom and the, the conquest and, and the, the

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Extension of Roman influence through through the kingdom and the ways in which that's done. And what we actually need to think about, or an alternative way of seeing it, is if we go back a little bit. Because I think as well, there's this context that you need to understand this. So you you mentioned earlier, was was Cleopatra independent or not?

• 16:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  You you can look at it two ways. You can you can look at basically, there is there is Egypt is the is the very last one of Alexander's successors kingdoms. Rome has has gradually swallowed them up, or they they fought each other into oblivion and things like that. And Egypt is the last one. And so for the whole of Cleopatra's life, Cleopatra the Seventh, that is. Her her family, her her father and and sort of other other sort of relations have been working quite hard to try and keep Egypt independent. They recognise that Rome is important, and they are trying to keep Rome at arm's length in such a way that

• 17:00Speaker 03

  they maintain their sovereignty over over the kingdom and over over the people of Egypt. But at the same time, they have Roman support to to maintain their power. But of course, if you need someone else to keep you in place, there is that question of, well, do you have that much power? And certainly, her father, Ptolemy the Twelfth, he he he seems to have been successful in the sense of he mostly was able to retain his his position for sort of thirty years. It was a brief three-year period where his eldest daughter deposes him and rules in his stead. But but he manages to sort of juggle a whole lot of competing interests.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  But the the kind of the cost of this is that the Egyptian people hate him, because they see him as as a as a sellout. You know, he's he's got into huge debt with the Roman Senate, bribing them to support his his kingship and to declare him, you know, a friend and ally of the Roman people. And he's done this by draining the Egyptian treasury and raising taxes on the Egyptians. And so it has a cost. You can keep Rome on side, but you alienate your own people. His daughter Berenike IV, his eldest daughter, she goes in the other direction. When she opposes him, she tries to very much have nothing to do with Rome, keep Rome at a

• 18:26Speaker 03

  distance, and it doesn't work. And so when Cleopatra becomes queen, she has her father's example, she has her older sister's example, and she has the very real politic issues of the civil war, the Roman civil war between Pompey and Caesar comes to Egypt and the end of it plays out in Egypt because her brother and his advisors killed Pompey. And then Caesar is there and gets involved with the kingdom, with the power struggle between the siblings. So Cleopatra, for her whole life, has seen this, has had to visualize Egypt's future. It can't not have Rome in it somewhere.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  And at the same time, she's got this problem of who is she going to marry and have children with? Who is going to father the next generation of the Ptolemaic dynasty? Because previously, it would have been brother sister marriage between siblings who were close enough in age to potentially have children together. She and her two brothers are not, really.

• 19:32Liv Albert?

  I was gonna ask about that, because I was gonna make a joke that typically the Ptolemy line would be continued on by just sibling relations with other Ptolemies. So it's interesting. But it's also that she didn't have siblings at the right age.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's sort of seven years older than one and like nine years older than the other. And so it's not impossible, but it means waiting a really, really long time for anything to potentially happen. And you need an heir, you need to sort of solidify your position. And what previous generations had done, they had married into aristocratic Macedonian families. Married into the royal families of the neighboring dynasties. And there aren't any neighboring dynasties anymore, that Rome has has ended the the last um. You know, the Seleucid dynasty next door in Syria, that that finishes in in the sort of sixties. Uh so when when Cleopatra was was very, very young, her sister Berenike.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Had the last few dregs of the of the royal family who. Were potentially not even royals, they were just pretending to be and. And so there there are no royals really that are appropriate for her to marry at that time and and have children with so. She looks to Caesar and then she looks to Antony and these are great ideas because obviously Caesar and Antony are. Are the most powerful men in the ancient world or in the in the ancient Mediterranean where where she's part of. And so. This is really fundamental for the way that she visualizes herself and her queenship.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  And her her children and the future of her dynasty. And I think we have to look at, from the Roman perspective. All of the negative propaganda against Antony and against Cleopatra is is very interested in. Promoting them both as as sort of slaves to their their sort of base desires. It's all. It's all food and drink and drugs and sex and money and and sort of, you know. Crassness and and sort of just gaucheness and and very, very anti-Roman sort of stoicism and and. Mastery of the self and whatever. And of course, that that's what a great way to depict your enemies, you know, as as utterly awful.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Um people who are completely lacking in any kind of self-control or anything like that. But the way that we have to really look at it from Cleopatra's perspective. Is she's trying to ensure the survival of her kingdom as an independent kingdom with her potentially. Or her children as as the the king, the queen, the pharaoh of it. And she's trying to ensure the survival of her dynasty, her individual children and their their future prospects. And so if we come all the way back to the sort of start of this like long, long sort of contextual digression. This, this is where, when we, we pick up with Cleopatra Selene, we sort of have to think about this because she, within a matter of, of course, two weeks.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Uh, she loses her kingdom because the, the Roman army invade it and, and um, sort of set up shop in Alexandria. Um, she loses her father because he takes his own life at the start of August. She loses her mother because Cleopatra does likewise a week and a half later. She loses her eldest brother because he goes off on the run. He's trying to, Cleopatra sends him away with treasure to sort of try and go abroad to, to potentially India or somewhere else that, that he can be safe. But he's intercepted, he's murdered. She loses her half brother, Marcus Antonius Antillus, who, who is um, Antony's oldest son.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  He is captured by Roman soldiers in Alexandria. He's beheaded. Um, quite, quite brutal. She even loses someone who is potentially her cousin. There, there are potentially the familial relations between the Ptolemaic royal family and the, uh, the family that hold the hereditary priesthood of Tar. And even if they're not blood relations, two families are very close. The, the, her father, uh, her grandfather, um, Ptolemy the twelfth was very close to um, the, the previous incumbent of this position um, during their reign. And Cleopatra was very close um, to him and his wife. And then their son, who is the last of the line of the hereditary priesthood.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  He is, uh, dies mysteriously at this exact time. And the priesthood remains empty for sort of another, another sort of seven years. His body remains unburied for years because well, we, we, we're not quite sure what was going on here, but it does seem quite suspicious that you've got this very powerful indigenous Egyptian priesthood close to the Ptolemaic dynasty. And basically Octavian uh, gets to decide what happens to it and he keeps it in reserve until a few years later when it suits him. To to name someone else. So she's lost her kingdom, she's lost her family, uh she's seen um two of her brothers and her potential cousin.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Die um violently, uh she then gets taken away from all of this with her with her two surviving brothers. One of whom then additionally seems to die, um poss- we don't know why or how, but he's a young child, so potentially diseased, but she gets taken away from. Alexandria, which is one of the most beautiful, finest cities in the ancient world. And she gets dragged off to Rome, which is none of those things at this point in time, it it's it's this sort of cultural. Architectural backwater that everybody's a bit embarrassed by, and that's that's why Octavian then. Proceeds to spend the forty so years of his reign, basically like um.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  You know, pimping it to try to make it the equivalent of of the uh the the sort of the cities that he's seen in the east. And so she's lost everything and she's been put into a completely different sort of. Cultural environment, religious environment, political environment, she's moved in with her father's ex-wife. Who he was sort of married to whilst having um a not a long-term relationship with. Her mother, she's got two sisters, half-sisters, the two, you know, Antonia Major, Antonia Minor. Antonia Major is about the same age as her and her twin brother, Alexander Pelios. Antonia Minor is about the same age as her younger brother, Tommy Philadelphia. So so Anthony was, you know.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  A kind of sort of running between these two women for sort of three to four years and and. And then she's got another half-brother, um Yulas Antonius, from Anthony's marriage to Phobia, who is. The full brother of of Antillus, who was murdered in Egypt, but she's never met him. And and so she now she now meets him and she meets her half-sisters and she has to live with them. And it's it's really, it's really funny, it's like the, we we see today, it's it's fairly common for people to have. Step-siblings and half-siblings and blended families from, you know, marriages and and remarriages and and relationships and things.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  And that's not something we tend to think about too much in relation to antiquity and the ancient world and the people that we deal with. But Roman families were screwed up. There were so many marriages and it was generally the husbands that kept control of the children. Because the patrimilia, you know, has has legal rights of the children. And so depending on your father's sort of marital proclivities. And Pompey was married, you know, a bunch of times. Antony was married a bunch of times. Caesar was married a bunch of times. You would end up with so many, you'd have your mother, then you'd have your stepmother, you'd have another stepmother and then potentially another stepmother. And you'd have all these, these sort of step siblings, half siblings, et cetera.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  And you might be very close to them or you might never see them. Like if your mother remarried and had children with somebody else. If your father didn't let you see your mother, you'd never see her and you'd never see your half siblings. So Cleopatra Silvia is put into this situation where she's living with all of these, these sort of half siblings she's never met. She's sort of nominally under the control of the man who, while he didn't murder her parents, because, you know, they, they took their own lives. He absolutely did murder at least one of her brothers and is is directly responsible for, you know, the deaths of several others. And he's the one that gets to decide what happens to her. Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  And I don't know what her experience would have been like in, in that she spends five years living in Rome from when she's sort of ten to when she's about fifteen. Wow. And this is a time when in Rome, Egypt is really fashionable. It's everywhere, you know, they're, they're bringing in obelisks and Egyptian statues. But constantly and putting them all around the city and you can still see many of the obelisks and things like that today. And they're decorating their houses with all these frescoes, all these Egyptian motifs, the temple of Isis and the cult of Isis is very big. In Egypt amongst, you know, all, all different levels of society. And at the same time, all the literature talks about how the Egyptians are basically scum.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  You know, they they are, they are these like shifty Easterners who have no positive qualities, you know, they. They they are sort of lazy and dissolute and luxurious and incestuous and inbred. And specifically, her mother is is is a whore, is a witch, is a disgrace to her line, you know, all these. And so you're sort of like, what kind of cognitive dissonance is going on here, you know, and what is that like to, I mean. I suppose we we probably don't have to think too hard about what that's like, because with the sort of. The geopolitical situation at the moment, you have countries who on the one hand are are very much, um, you know, in in. In in desperate need of of immigrants uh to to do various things within their countries.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  And they want to pick it there, they'll have the music, they'll have the food, they'll have the fashion, you know. But the actual immigrants themselves, that you're just, you know, can be treated horribly. By just ordinary people in the street. And so so we can kind of get a sense of of how this would be going on.

• 30:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  And so she has to live like that for five years, but at the same time, it works out really well for her because. She ends up married to a young man called Juba. And he is basically in the exact same situation that she is, only he's about sort of. Uh, ten to fifteen years ahead of her in all of this. So his uh father, Juba, the king of Numidia. He was on the wrong side of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, he was on Pompey's side. And so when he is defeated, uh and he he takes his own life and his kingdom and everything in it is seized by Caesar.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  And Juba, baby, he was a baby at this time, um in their sort of uh mid forties, is taken um. Off to back to Rome, and he's raised in Rome as a Roman, given a a brilliant Roman education, becomes a sort of intellectual. But also, he's um, he's given the kingdom of Mauritania, the the this this kingdom, this north. North African kingdom, which is roughly equivalent to um Morocco and Algeria today. It's sort of, it's two kingdoms in antiquity, but both of the kings. Of these kingdoms seem to die in this period. And in the in the general cleanup after the end of the civil war, after the death of Caesar. It's amalgamated into one big kingdom called Mauritania and um.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Juva is is made king of it by Octavian, um who is again has has sort of been his sort of foster father um uh since the since the death of Caesar. And so

• 31:39Liv Albert?

  In such a messy way.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have this very similar life trajectory. They've lost their families, they've lost their kingdoms, they've lost their cultures. They've been brought to Rome, they've been expected to sort of just suck it up and and e- enjoy the experience and the the the the the opportunity to be Roman. And then they're seen as a perfect match. Apparently Octavia match makes between them. Uh and so they they are married and they are sent off by Octavian to Augustus, as he is at this point, to Mauritania to rule it together. And of course, the ancient sources are much more interested in Juva. Juva is king of Mauritania. And he was given Cleopatra Selene as his wife.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  And it's like, or they're king and queen and they're sent there together because we know from our other sort of uh Hellenistic uh and Roman client kingdoms that the women are are are often quite powerful. And they, you know, the men and the women rule together. Sometimes the women in the eastern client kingdoms, that sometimes the women actually rule independently if there are no no men. Because, you know, it's a client kingdom. Who even cares? It's it's not, it's not Rome, it's not, you know, the centre of Rome where women are sort of marginalised. So client queens can potentially have significantly more power than the wives or daughters of emperors.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  And so what you get then is Juva and Cleopatra Selene ruling Mauritania together until Cleopatra Selene's death, and then Juva continues to rule it after her death. And then it jointly rules it with their son. And then their son is executed by Caligula later on in in the sort of thirties, late thirties, early forties. And So you have this sixty five year period where Mauritania is an independent kingdom. And I wish we knew more about it. I wish we had a Josephus style um chronicler of the dynasty and of the kingdom and what was going on in the kingdom at this time, because all we can really rely on

• 33:42Speaker 03

  are a few literary references to campaigns against the indigenous African tribes who kept sort of intruding into Mauritania and and and Duba and Ptolemy had to keep um fighting them. But we have archaeology and we get a sense of how the kingdom was transformed, basically to turn it into uh the same kind of showcase city client kingdom that we see in Judea in the east. And a lot of that is very heavily influenced by Egypt. Both in the sort of topography of of the capital city. Um it has it has its lighthouses like the Pharos, it has its harbour, it has all of its, you know, Roman, Greco-Roman style buildings.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  But it also imports a load of Egyptian religion and religious art. It imports a load of of of other sort of cultural um stuff that is very sort of Greco-Roman Egyptian. And you sort of have to ask yourself, well, why is that? Who is doing that? Is Octavian from Rome saying, oh, send all this Egyptian stuff to Mauritania? That's a good idea. Probably not. Is Duba, who as far as we know, has never been to Egypt, saying, I want my kingdom to look just like Egypt. I don't know anything about it. I've not been there, but I think it would be a great idea.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Or is it more likely that the Egyptian woman who grew up in Alexandria and and was once destined to be the queen of Egypt?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Is it more likely that she has got herself a new kingdom? And she's seeking to establish herself and her family, her husband, her son, new dynasty, new Ptolemaic dynasty in Mauritania and is doing her best to connect it to her lost patrimony? And I tend to fall down there. I'm like, that, that is the side of, of the argument that I think makes sense. That she has a huge amount of influence in this situation. And we see it. She has her own coinage. She issues her own coinage in her own name with her own Egyptian designs on it. And this is at a point in time where the Roman women can't do that. Like Livia doesn't get to issue her own coinage.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  You know, I don't think even Agrippina later on, when she's Claudius's wife, Nero's mother, technically gets to do that, you know? Um, so it's, it's, yeah, the fact that she gets completely ignored in all the, the sort of older discussions of this kingdom, I find perplexing.

• 36:27Liv Albert?

  I mean, surely it was just a coincidence that it became so Egyptianized, surely? I mean, the men would have to be the ones to do it.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Fashionable, as I said, Egypt's really trendy at this point and it's clearly just.

• 36:39Liv Albert?

  There, they're only making babies. Yeah, they really, there's not really much else for them to do.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Indeed, indeed.

• 36:47Liv Albert?

  God, it's, no, that's, I mean, that's one of those things where it's like, I mean, I have so many conversations like this all the time because the second I hear somebody's researching an ancient woman or ancient women broadly, I'm like, great. Please come tell me everything, but it's just hilarious the way like, it's been treated over the last, the centuries of scholarship.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  We even have, we have like epigraphic evidence that she brings a load of Antonius's slaves and freedmen and free women with her. So she's got a whole household. She's inherited a whole household.

• 37:22Liv Albert?

  And just to clarify for, this is my being like not great with Rome, but and I'm pretty, but Antonius would be Mark Antony more closely known.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I suppose I should. For sake of these, I could use.

• 37:33Liv Albert?

  I mean, you're you're right. I just want to make sure that I and then therefore the listeners too know him by the fancier name.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  She's she's still retains her family ties. I mean, she's got she's got her relationship to the the Antoni. She's got her relationship to the Julie because Anthony's mother is a Julia and is related to Caesar. And so her two half sisters, Antonia major and minor, they marry into the imperial family. And so she is, I mean, Juve is, you know, great and all, you know, I will I will respect his intellectual prowess and his scholarship. And he's even he's a he's a good general as well. He he gets a triumphal regalia because of his victories against the African tribes. So he seems to be, you know, a very smart guy, very competent guy.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  But he is absolutely punching above his weight when it comes to her. As as far as the prestige of the Ptolemaic dynasty is concerned. Um, the prestige of the Antonian games, the Julian games. The fact that they're all, they all claim to be descended from actual gods. Uh, the connection with Alexander the Great, you know, and and Macedonia. So she's she is bringing the kind of the blue blood and and the pedigree to his dynasty. And I think this is this is part of the reason why their son is called Ptolemy. You know, this is a name that people know and.

• 39:06Liv Albert?

  It's been around the block.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And and so he he recognizes that it's it's like that whole thing that. Um, well, since I I don't know when this is going to air, but but we're we're recording this on the day that that Taylor Swift's new album was released. And part of the current sort of discourse surrounding that is that Taylor Swift has managed to find a partner who is happy to be second fiddle and is happy to acknowledge that that she is the star of the relationship, much like um Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, you know, and these these guys are not intimidated by the fact that their girlfriends, fiancés, wives.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Are basically better than they are.

• 39:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  They they don't feel insecure about it.

• 39:52Liv Albert?

  Richer, more famous.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's like, this is helping me too, you know, this is elevating me too. I'm happy about this. And so I think Juba falls into this kind of category, really, that he, being a smart man, an educated man, can recognize that this is a good thing for him, you know. What was the alternative? He was going to be married off to some random Roman senator's daughter and was just going to be, you know, writing books in Rome for the rest of his life, not really doing very much. No, he gets given a princess and then she was actually queen of Crete and the Cyrenaica in her own right under the donations of Alexandria. So so he he gets a very high status lady as as his life partner.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  And seemingly the pair of them work together to sort of transform this this sort of higgledy piggledy hodgepodge of several kingdoms into one functioning client kingdom. That is the largest client kingdom of all of them. It's the only one in the West. It's the only one in North Africa. And they have this this in with the imperial family. Because she's part of the imperial family. And they they do seem to sort of go back and forth between Mauritania and Rome, because we have sort of evidence of of their presence epigraphically in Rome as well. There's even the suggestion that she and one of their children are in the processional freezes on the Areopagus.

• 41:19Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  So they're they're very much part of things.

• 41:36Liv Albert?

  This episode is brought to you by Quince. You know the drill. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. I have been speaking into a microphone about Quince for a while now, and I have no complaints. I have a bunch of their stuff. I've got a couple cute sweaters that, I mean, it's nearing sweater season, so those will be back in the rotation anytime now. And I have this leather bag that I absolutely love. It's like this braided leather, and I use it like basically every day. Because that's the thing, they have really great basics. Like, they have really great things

• 42:21Liv Albert?

  that you can wear with so many other things. Just the options are endless. And as the weather gets colder, like all the sweaters in my closet, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets, and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves, to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. And of course, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And if we haven't learned anything in the last 10 years, isn't it just getting rid of the middlemen, you know? Making things more affordable. So

• 43:02Liv Albert?

  find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was me. Let's talk about myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Running a training business is hard enough. Managing the platform it runs on shouldn't be. Thinkific gives training companies and corporate teams everything they need to sell, deliver, and scale learning. Flexible course builder, automated enrollments, integrated payments, and analytics that connect learning to real business outcomes. No dev dependency, no manual admin. Just a platform that grows with you. Visit thinkific.com. That's thinkific.com.

• 44:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's interesting to me, I guess, that they're allowed to be such a big part of things, given the civil war of it all, the Cleopatra and Mark Antony of it all. Like, I mean, yeah, it's just interesting. I don't, I don't know if I have a question attached to that, but like, is it because she was a woman that probably didn't see the need to like, get rid of her in the same way they did the boys?

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I think, I think part of it is that as soon as the civil war is over and the dust settles, Octavian goes into sort of overdrive as far as like rebranding is concerned. He wants to just draw a line under all the horrific stuff that he did, he specifically did himself in the civil war. You know, he wants to blame it on everybody else who's dead. So he'll blame it on Antony, he'll blame it on Cleopatra, he'll even blame it on Antony's previous wife, Fulvia, you know, blames it on the fact that he was young and he was getting bad advice from like older statesmen. And that he was, he was

• 45:20Speaker 03

  forced to do various, you know, horrible things like prescribe Cicero and whatever. And he also seeks to rewrite history as far as his own contributions to victories are concerned, like successful battles that he wasn't really involved in, you know, the Antony one or Agrippa one, suddenly the, the his victories. And he wants to sort of stop people thinking of him as the young thug who was gouging people's eyes out and was having elaborate parties while Rome was starving and who was sleeping with all these senators' wives during the senators' own banquets and things like that. He wants to turn himself into this, this respectable sort of

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Part of Melias, part of Patria, sort of elder statesman. And we know that this was not an easy process because we we have these references to there being conspiracies against him during this time. We don't have huge amounts of details, but there were people who were not really on board with it, but just gradually they they got steamrolled. And so part of this is that he gets to present himself as this sort of loving foster slash adoptive father to Antony's children, not just Cleopatra Selene and her two brothers, but also um Yellus Antonius and Antonia Major and Antonia Minor.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  So Yellus gets, you know, the full um cursus honorum. You know, he get he gets the university education, the political education. He gets to be consul at one point. He's never allowed to command an army. He he uh he has a purely sort of political administrative career. But but he he is part of the family up until he makes the mistake of having an affair with Julia when he's sort of uh a bit older and then he's he has to um take his own life a as a result of that. Um and the two, the two Antonias, they are, they are married, they are very important. Um their descendants make up the Julio Claudian dynasty really. In in and um so he he's sort of, he's looking after Antony's children.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  But he's also using them. And the thing with with Cleopatra Selene and her brothers, as long as Octavian has control of them, nobody can really argue with his possession of Egypt. So when when he he conquers Egypt in thirty and he presents it very much as his personal victory, that the coinage he issues, the triumph that he has for it. And. He forbids anyone else from going to Egypt. Senators are not allowed to go to Egypt. The Egyptian prefects and the people commanding the armies in Egypt can only be equestrians. So he won't have any, any sort of competition in that respect.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Members of the imperial family are not allowed to go to Egypt. And this, this continues to be a factor for many years. So Germanicus goes there during the reign of Tiberius. And Tiberius is really angry about the fact that Germanicus has gone to Egypt. Because Egypt is important. It's strategically important. It provides the grain supply. A significant amount of the grain supply for Rome. Vespasian, during the year of the four emperors' civil war. He, one of the reasons that he is ultimately successful is because he invades Egypt and sets up camp in Egypt. So while there are sort of three other contenders fighting it out in Italy.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  He's sitting on top of the Roman food supply and biding his time until it makes sense to sort of swoop in. And so Octavian retains control of the three children. Keeps them in his own household, so no one else can take them and, and lay any claim to Egypt. And then there is the possibility that he kills the boys. I mean, it's, it's not really know what, what happens to them. But we, we know, we're pretty sure that they don't grow up. Because if they'd grown up, we'd have heard about them doing things. Whether that was having political careers or attempting to have military careers. Or even just being incredibly dissolute. And, you know, it would, it would be a funny story that Antony's Egyptian sons are even worse than Antony or whatever.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  Like you'd hear something about.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. You'd hear something. And you don't hear anything. So, so the, the sort of idea is that they probably just died as children. Because Rome is an absolute sewer. It's infested with malaria. Children are particularly vulnerable to the climates and, and the mosquitoes and, yeah, all that kind of thing.

• 49:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  And the same is true of Cleopatra Selene, actually, I I think we we can infer that she kept her head down and did what was required of her, because if she hadn't, we'd have heard about it, you know, she's a she's a massive whore, just like her mother. Because if you think about all the all the stories that circulate about Julia, both Julia the elder and Julia the younger, and and how, you know, Julia, as as um Augustus's daughter was was sort of running around Rome, having all sorts of love affairs on the monuments that her father had built and the disgracing the the imperial family and and all the rest of it. We'd absolutely hear about that if Cleopatra Selene was doing that, and we don't hear anything about that, so.

• 50:41Liv Albert?

  Any time a woman has independence or power, somebody is disturbed by it in some way, yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Exactly, so she must have been playing the game very carefully and cleverly. And I suppose looking at the examples that she had before her, so she had her mother's example, but she also had Olivia's example and Octavia's example of of how to be a Roman woman and how to operate within the Roman political system and the Roman sort of social system as well.

• 51:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah. How old was she when Cleopatra the Seventh died? Do you do you say around ten? Ten, okay, yeah.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  So I mean, and this is this is the other thing, because we don't hear a huge amount about children in our ancient sources, because the ancient authors aren't really interested in them. But it's not like a ten year old is a blob, you know.

• 51:29Liv Albert?

  No, that's that's why I was curious, yeah, like ten is old enough and like with a mother like that, and you know, I don't, I'm always keen to learn more about Cleopatra, but so much is based in, you know, the the more like general pop culture idea of her. But what I do know is that if that woman was anything, she was a survivor in that world. And like, she would have taught her ten year old daughter enough, I would think.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, you have you have plenty of Ptolemies, um, including her Cleopatra the Seventh's brother, both of her brothers, in fact, were um kings at the age of ten or eleven. And while they while they were, um, they had, they they weren't able to rule in their own right, they had tutors. But there were many Ptolemies that came to power during minorities. And so they would certainly have been involved in in court politics and they would have known how how it all worked. And so I think it's fair to say that ten year old Cleopatra Selene, she was destined to be her sixteen year old brother Caesarion's queen. Who was here, so there was this six years between them. Right.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Um roughly, but but she is the only daughter of the family. So following the precedent for brother sister marriage, she was presumably going to be his queen. Right. So she would have been learning how to be an Egyptian queen. She would have been watching her mother, she'd have been learning from her mother. They were all very highly educated with the um the great library and the museum and the intellectuals. And one of one of the things that Cleopatra and her father actually took a lot of time to do was rebuild the intellectual life of Alexandria.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Because um a previous king, um Ptolemy the Eighth had had sort of purged the city basically of of intellectuals. Uh and so there's and because then after that, there's a whole lot of instability and different um competing Ptolemaic interests. Once Ptolemy the Twelfth was on the throne securely and Cleopatra herself too. We know that there was uh an attempt to get all of the intellectuals who had been driven out of Athens by Sulla. You have all the people who had been at the court of Mithra Datis of Pontus and and that court is is sort of destroyed by by um Pompey.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  So Alexandria is is a sort of somewhere that all of these philosophers and scientists and thinkers can go and they can get imperial patronage. And so we know that that was going on during um Cleopatra's reign. And so the children, all all four of the children would have had this education in in this in this capital city. Um with with a view to them being prepared for being rulers, because all the boys or Caesarion was going to be king of Egypt, was king of Egypt. But Alexander Helios and Tony Philadelphus were going to be kings too. The plan was that they were going to be sent further east and they were going to rule um territories that Antony was planning to conquer, having yet managed it. But the idea was that

• 54:38Liv Albert?

  Always good to plan that far ahead.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely. All of the children were going to have their own kingdoms. And they clearly needed to be equipped to manage those kingdoms.

• 54:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that's really interesting. And I just feel like it's so common and easy for the girls in these situations to be overlooked. And I mean, in, in some ways, I think in a good way, where they're kind of allowed to continue on in a way that would otherwise be seen as like threatening. But yeah, it's very interesting to think about what, what kind of thing a woman like Cleopatra would teach her ten year old daughter, because if, I mean, yeah, I, I've always found it so interesting just to imagine her as somebody who was like constantly thinking two steps ahead of

• 55:32Liv Albert?

  the other men around her, because that's kind of what it seemed like, right? You know, she knew who to align herself with, I mean, up to a point and, and you know, how to maintain her power. And I just feel like she would have been talking to that ten year old an awful lot, especially the way things were going by the time, you know, she was ten. It's, that's interesting.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And, and I think it's, we, we don't, just like we don't really know a huge amount about children and childhood and antiquity, we, we don't get a sense of parenting really either. Um, the, the stories we get about parenthood tend to focus on sort of fatherhood. Or they, they focus on sort of negative aspects like mothers and stepmothers and sort of family strife. Because they're showing what happens when families go wrong. Um, whereas like, what does a functional family look like where, you know, the, the, the father and the mother

• 56:34Speaker 03

  are both present and the siblings are, they, they get on and they work together for the, for the common good. Because this is one of the things about Roman families is that they, they do, there is a, there is a lot of sort of the family as a group. Um, the family concilium, like the family council, making decisions about who marries who, what do you do with this property?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Which side are we going to be on, you know, who are we going to vote for, et cetera? And you've got fathers marrying their children to their political allies because that creates a sort of a strong alliance, strong links. And, and so, yeah, when, when a family is, is functioning with everybody playing their part, rather than everybody fighting. I mean, this is one of the problems of the Ptolemaic dynasty, is that in the earlier years of the Ptolemaic dynasty, it was a, it was a functional dynasty. People were doing what they were supposed to do. They were, they were following the paths that had been laid out for them by their, their parents.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  But as the individual members of the family, siblings particularly, start to fight over who gets to be king? Who gets to be king of Egypt versus who gets to be the secondary king of Cyprus? And who gets to marry the sister and have the, have the brother sister marriage, which marks them out as the heir? Uh, versus, you know, who, who marries someone from outside and who is expected to move to a different kingdom versus who gets to stay in Egypt? And so you see a lot of strife between siblings in the dynasty over these sorts of issues. And so I think one of the things I, I think we, we don't know for certain, but I think it's an interesting idea

• 58:18Speaker 03

  is that Cleopatra, part of the reason that, that she and, and Antony um, do the donations of Alexandria and a lot, each of the siblings, their own separate kingdom, is an attempt to avoid the kind of full of sibling rivalry fratricide that had dominated the previous generations. I mean, Cleopatra herself, her, her oldest sister Berenike the fourth uh, deposes their father. And then when her father comes back, he has her executed. And then Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy the thirteenth are made joint rulers, but they, they fight over who gets to be the dominant ruler and eventually Ptolemy the thirteenth outs her.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  And then her younger sister Arsinoe the fourth sees her moment while Cleopatra is is sort of on the outs with Tommy the thirteenth and she's like, well, I can be queen instead, you know. I mean, she she and Tommy the fourteenth, Caesar says to them, oh, you you can have Cyprus, you know, Tommy the thirteenth and and Cleopatra will have Egypt and you two will have Cyprus. And Arsinoe is like, I don't want Cyprus. I want Egypt, thanks. And and so, you know, you you have all of these competing siblings, competing interests.

• 59:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  And so Cleopatra having and ultimately, um, her, yeah, her father kills her eldest sister. Um, her, her two brothers, well, one of them dies in battle against her and Caesar. The other one, she apparently murders because she uh she wants um Caesarion to sort of step up and be her co-ruler. And then she has Antony murder Arsinoe. So she she is responsible for the death of three of her four siblings.

• 1:00:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  You can't really blame her based based on the kind of the prevailing circumstances, but you can understand why as a mother, she potentially does not want that outcome for her children.

• 1:00:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  It would it would screw up her plans for world domination as much as anything else.

• 1:00:23Liv Albert?

  Well, that's the thing. And it's so, it's so evident that she had that type of planning, whatever it, you know, looked like in the long run, but just that she was a person who was aware of those things and preparing for like all of these potential eventualities.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, after the after the Battle of Actium in in thirty one. She is trying to get rid of Antony. She she has realised at that point that no matter how much she she might have loved him in previous years and no matter how well they might have worked together, he's now a liability.

• 1:00:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  And so she is she is sort of opening diplomatic channels with Octavian, separate from Antony. And her her approach is, look, if I get rid of Antony, can I remain queen of Egypt or can my children, I can abdicate and my children can rule instead of me? So that is her priority. Antony's not her priority anymore. He's uh taken himself off to have a have a nervous breakdown in a sort of special hut that he's built himself and he calls his Timeneum after um time in of Athens. And so he's

• 1:01:35Liv Albert?

  I didn't know. That's so dweeby. These men, like, get a grip.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he just, he just can't cope with the fact that that things have got a bit wrong for him. And so he just, he's just like, well, that's it. I I need to go off to my man cave and and and just, you know, wallow in in sort of self pity. And she's like, I've got far more important things to do than wallow. Thank you very much. I have got a kingdom and a dynasty and a family to save. So I'll continue doing my job while you just sit over there and cry, you know, I mean. And and yeah, so so she she is still planning. And even when Octavian comes to Egypt, she tricks Antony into into suicide. She she she had a plan. She she sends a message to him

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  saying that she has taken her own life to try and get him to take his, which he then he then, you know, does. Because she's she's really just got to get him out of the way. He's he is, he is just a hindrance at this point. And then she does try and sort of um make um overtures to Octavian and and uh tries and and sort of retains her her hold on the kingdom, but but realizes that it's not going to work, that he is going to take her back to Rome, he's going to put her in triumph. She's potentially going to end up under some kind of house arrest forever.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Um, a best case scenario, she ends up under house arrest forever. Worst case scenario is perhaps a horrible public spectacle of a death. And so, you know, it's it is clear that she is trying everything she can think of to get a a good outcome uh of of this sort of rather desperate situation.

• 1:03:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I think all the listeners should know that that anytime your voice ever gets a kind of like slightly more muffled sound, it's because this majestic cat is involved and I'm completely here for it, but I just think everyone should know that he's in the picture.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  It's a strange vibrating noise on the sound. It's a purr.

• 1:03:46Liv Albert?

  It's the

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  It's a very loud purr.

• 1:03:48Liv Albert?

  An enormous purr. I'm obsessed. No, I just, yeah, it's so, it's, oh, this is also interesting. I'm so glad how much of, you know, Cleopatra VII ended up in this chat too, because I think

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Well, you can't separate the two.

• 1:04:01Liv Albert?

  No, and the comparison is

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  You can't. I mean, if Cleopatra Selene has, I mean, I don't, I don't want to turn her entire story into her mother's story, but you know, it's, it's a, she must have had an enormous impact.

• 1:04:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Both, both as a role model and as a, you know, what not to do sort of situation.

• 1:04:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Like how, how to avoid this fate, you know, how, how to, how to forge a different fate.

• 1:04:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And in a world like that, what, you know, what a skill.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from a original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:05:36Liv Albert?

  So, okay, I'm curious if we have any other kind of examples, I guess, of Cleopatra Selene. I mean, it sounds like there's, you know, a lot, there's very little of like, direct kind of sourcing on her. But, you know, aside from all of this kind of Egyptianization that took place in in Mauritania, is there, are there more examples of of things that she likely had a hand in? Or just, I don't know, anything else of what she did?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  So we have her coinage.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  So she she issues a whole lot of coinage. Well, she and Juba issue coinage together. And it's quite interesting coinage because Juba's on the one side and she's on the other. And Juba's imagery is very boring. It's it's it's just the standard profile Augustan-like figure with, you know, the the sort of the bad hairstyle that the Romans are favoring at this time.

• 1:06:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, the Zuckerberg.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Yes, well, yeah.

• 1:06:36Liv Albert?

  Sorry, but it's true.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  The wannabe, the, yeah, the.

• 1:06:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  The original of the poor imitation that is currently circulating. Um, so he he issues portraits of himself like that. His text on his coins is always in Latin. It's always Rex Juba, you know, King Juba.

• 1:06:55Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Whereas hers, on the other side, she's much more imaginative and interesting. Um, so sometimes she has a portrait of herself, a sort of Hellenistic style royal portrait, um, with the diadem and the hair and everything.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  But she also has a whole lot of Egyptian imagery. We have crocodiles, we have ibises, we have Isis, we have the accoutrements, you know, the the the horned crown, the cistram. We have the oicumene as well, you know, the the globe that represents the entire known world. And her text is always in Greek. It's always Basilis of Cleopatra, Queen Cleopatra. And so I think it, these, these are quite telling, I think, that these, these are.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  The different approaches. So they have their joint coinage, but they also, she also issues her own coinage separately. With with just herself on and her her own Egyptian designs and things like that. So the fact that she's got the power and the autonomy to do that. Yeah. I think it's quite interesting. Um. She also, well, this coinage isn't retired after her death. So she she's thought to die towards the end of the first century BCE. We're not entirely sure of her actual date of death. We know that it takes place during um or at the same time as a as a lunar eclipse. Because um Prinagoras of Mittalini writes a poem about it, which again in itself, you know, he.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  He is sort of the unofficial Augustan imperial family court poet. He writes poems about members of the family and events. Important events. And so he writes about her as well. So it sort of indicates her standing in this period. Yeah. But so he writes about this this death during this lunar eclipse. And that means that she probably died in either five BCE. Or I think it's three CE. These these are when there are there are lunar eclipses that that. Yeah. Happen. And we don't know why she died. I mean, presumably it's nothing too dramatic, otherwise, you know, we would have heard about it because. If there if there was like murder and strife going on in a in an imperial client kingdom, that tends to get mentioned.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  But possibly, I mean, I I sort of, I mean, some some sort of very routine mundane illness. Possibly childbirth or something pregnancy related, because you know, that tends to be what kills Roman women or ancient women generally. You know, it's it's something related to babies. Um. But after she dies. Her coins aren't taken out of circulation. They continue to be used through the rest of Juba's reign and through into her son's reign as well. So the men of the family are still still like clinging on to her coat tails, like riding her coat tails. For for her superior sort of power and prestige. So we have her queens in hordes. Um. So sort of surviving.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  And there are other sorts of artistic um things. So we have um her her portrait on intaglio rings. For example, we have um statuary, you know, there are several sort of marble portrait statues. And there is this, nobody can really agree for certain, is it her? Is it Cleopatra the seventh? Is it generic, you know, divine, womanly figure? But, you know, why, why is it, why, why would it not be her in this place at this time in her royal court, et cetera? Um, we know that she, she introduces um Egyptian religion and certain Egyptian aspects

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  uh to, to the kingdom. So the worship of sort of sacred crocodiles and, and stuff like that. Yeah. So I think it's, it's all the sorts of stuff that I guess you'd say is circumstantial evidence. So it's not necessarily a smoking gun, but I think if you, if you add it all up, I think you can, you can be fairly, fairly comfortable with the fact that she had an influence. I mean, I mentioned earlier that she has um enslaved people uh and freed men and women um with her in, in Mauritania from, from Antony's um household. And they're involved in the court as well. So the, the um,

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  the, the royal doctor is, is one of these, for example. Um, and he, he goes on sort of um nature quests with Jupiter. They, they investigate like the native flora and fauna of, of Mauritania. And Jupiter, Jupiter goes looking for the source of the Nile because, you know, he, he wants, he wants to connect the kingdom with, with Egypt. And I guess he also says, honey, I got you a river, you know? Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  So, so yeah, there are just all these things that, and we have, um, we know that Juba was um a correspondent of Strabo, for example. So Strabo is in this sort of late first century BCE, early first century CE. He's, he's writing his geography, which he covers the sort of the, all the different Roman provinces. And, and in his section on Egypt, he has information that is sort of directly from the court of Cleopatra. He gives us information for Cleopatra and her family that, that we don't have in any other ancient sources. It's like, where has this information come from? Hmm? Strabo, how did you get this?

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  It's like, well, he's corresponding with Juba. Where did Juba get this information from?

• 1:12:37Liv Albert?

  He, surely he made it up.

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  Who could, who could possibly have told him about the, the ins and outs of Cleopatra's family? And the kind of um tableware she liked to eat off of and, and the sort of the family dynamics between her and Berenike the fourth. And, you know, the pet monkeys and stuff like that. And it's, so, so yeah, it's, it's um, we, we sort of have to, have to be perhaps a little bit imaginative. But I think within reasonable kind of parameters, you know?

• 1:13:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and, you know, this, this show is for fun imagination too. And I think we can imagine very competently that this woman held a pretty decent amount of power for the time and the period and the place and the, especially her history. Like, it's just, I mean, overall, very interesting, but particularly in line with like, I don't know, Augustus's whole thing about propaganda. Obviously, he also, you know, among so many other things you've mentioned, but he instituted like a pretty real propaganda scheme of like kind of pulling together these different ideas and making it seem like kind of everyone was involved. And it's just really interesting to hear those connections.

• 1:13:54Liv Albert?

  It'll, I also can't stop thinking about something you said earlier, just the ways that like. Rome was so interested in like, or it, there were so many of these beautiful, objectively great cities in the East and this kind of navigation of, of like respecting that while also considering these Easterners to be, you know, all of these various xenophobic ridiculous things. It's just, I don't know, it makes me, this is so like kind of off topic, but also it just, because I mean, you obviously made the connection to today and immigration and you're so right, but it's also, it's so exhausting to, to sort of make these connections

• 1:14:35Liv Albert?

  and see the ways that humans, particularly in the West, have behaved this way like for so long and it's never made any sense and.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. It didn't work then. It, it's not gonna work now. You know, there are all these fundamental flaws in the system.

• 1:14:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, and I.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  It's very frustrating.

• 1:14:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it, it is frustrating when you, when you see the history and you see just basic logic of like, literally, what do you, like, none of it making, racism doesn't make any sense, which makes my brain infuriate all the time. Um, but it's, yeah, it's just interesting to, to kind of see that. And I'm imagining the Greeks did the same thing, you know, with the like, this feminization of the Persians and, and making them into these like over the top Easterners, but at the same time, this utter, you know, obsession with their, with the Eastern culture and it fully influenced all of Greece and Rome. And I don't know, I'm not even.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  It's like, it's, it's so, it's so nice and appealing and attractive that everybody wants it. But like possibly Cato the Elder is the only person who's like, hell no, I don't want to touch that. But it's like, well, tough Cato, everyone else does.

• 1:15:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  It's gonna just come into Rome.

• 1:15:41Liv Albert?

  I mean, it just, even makes me think of, of, at its most absurd level, the particularly it, it North American ideals about like Jesus today and just the whitening of Jesus and all of these things where I'm just like, you know where he was from, right? Like I ju, it's, it's such this reminder.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  I, I see, I see you, Jesus, and I raise you Saint George, you know, the, the, uh,

• 1:16:06Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  The, the English patron saint, Saint George, our current sort of second in line to the throne is called George. And, and you know, there's all this, this stuff about Saint George's Day and the Saint George's flag and the flag must go everywhere for patriots. And it's like. Do you, do you know who Saint George was? Do you know anything about his, his life and his background and?

• 1:16:31Liv Albert?

  Oh my god, what is it? Cause I don't know, cause I'm so Canadian for this. Who was Saint George?

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Oh, well, well, exactly. He's, he's, it's, it's, it's one of these sort of, I mean, it's all, all of the, um, the early Christian saints. I mean,

• 1:16:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  they're not British.

• 1:16:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, cer- well, certainly not British.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  For a religion that starts off in the Middle East. And, you know, it's, it's, it's very popular. Well, initially it's Jewish people that, you know, it's a splinter sect of,

• 1:17:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  deism. And then it starts appealing to people who are obviously, um, the, the more downtrodden members of society. They're the, the, um,

• 1:17:10Liv Albert?

  Cause Jesus originally seemed like a cool enough guy. And everything else, I don't know.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  And so this, this is just something that continues. So, so Saint George is, I think it's, um, I think it's originally Turkey that, that the historical person who's become Saint George is, is from. And, you know, we, and obviously in Britain, we have this whole thing with Turkey and the EU and, and, and the Turkish membership of the EU was, was one of these like really big like red lines for all the people that, that voted for Brexit. And, and it continues, like immigrants from this part of the world continue to be a really big issue for the people who, well, at, at one point they were voting conservative and then they started voting UKIP. And then UKIP became the Brexit party and now we have reform.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  And it's, it's all the fairly standard demonizing of immigrants and everything wrong in our society is, is because of immigration, not because of any other reason.

• 1:18:09Liv Albert?

  No, surely not. It's not the super rich.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and so we have, we have this, this sort of myth surrounding Saint George, Saint George and the dragon, the flag of Saint George, the red cross on the white background.

• 1:18:19Liv Albert?

  Okay, I was gonna ask if that, that, cause I know a bit more of the quote unquote, English flag. But that makes it even funnier. Cause I've also seen all those videos of the losers at the protest over there with it, wearing the English flag. As a cape while buying like shawarma and you're like.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:18:35Liv Albert?

  What planet are you living on?

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and well, all this stuff, respect the flag. It's like you are wearing it.

• 1:18:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  You know, it's probably on your underwear. It's disrespectful. And and yeah, so so we are currently having this sort of situation where it's it's ridiculous really that that oh, over the summer reform, we're driving, we're driving the whole agenda about this and and they were putting flags everywhere. And you've got on the one hand, the people who are like, what's wrong with our flag? It's our country's flag. It's patriotic. You know, if you're looking at the flag and you're seeing something wrong with it, that says more about you than it says about us. And at the same time, them like violently intimidating and assaulting any of the local council workers who took them down because of, you know, they're in inappropriate places, health and safety, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  And this complete inability to to understand that not everyone looks at that flag and sees, you know, a harmless kind of, you know, plenty of people look at that flag and they see um, the, you know, the National Front, they see football hooliganism. They see skinheads and basically at this point Nazis, we do have people

• 1:19:44Liv Albert?

  Supremacy, yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  In the, in the streets who are giving like Nazi salutes and sighiling outside of, you know, hotels where asylum seekers uh, are being housed. And yeah, so so our government, Labour government then decided that they can't have, you know, the Reform uh, party and Nigel Farage claiming the flag. So they're gonna put the flag everywhere themselves. And it's just like, you've got to be kidding me. Do you not? So you're just, you're just taking this and running with it and doubling down on this and you're still not understanding or deliberately choosing not to understand that for some people, you know, the the sort of, what is it, fifteen, twenty percent of our country that are not white. The what you know, wherever, whether they were, they were born in Britain from, from sort of

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  um, you know, British descent, or whether they are more, you know, they are newly arrived, people who have, who have got, you know, who have immigrated, who have got permanent residence, citizenship, whatever. They see that and they see something quite different.

• 1:20:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  And that's just, and, and of course then, I mean, I live in Scotland, we have a different flag up here.

• 1:20:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  And if you live in Wales.

• 1:20:49Liv Albert?

  You got your own history with.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  Or Northern Ireland, you know, we.

• 1:20:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  They all have different flags. So the, the St. George's Cross is not the flag of the United Kingdom, you know. And it's not what necessarily people in, in Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland want to see everywhere.

• 1:21:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, it's this, yeah, it's the disconnect, right? The disconnect. Also, the disconnect between, well, do you know why they're like, the British or the, the UK is like so full of people of all colors? Well, it's because the UK colonized the shit out of the world, made their places unlivable, or brought them over. Like, what do you mean? It's like, you know, it's like racism in the States where it's like, well, if your ancestors hadn't kidnapped human people from their homes and brought them to be slaves, well, then things would look a little differently, let alone the colonialism of North America broadly, but like.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  Where, where would you want to go and live if, if you, if you had to flee your home because of war, genocide, famine, whatever?

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Wouldn't you choose a country that you do at least have a connection with? Your, your country has been connected with this country for, for, for many, many sort of years, decades, centuries. You speak the language. The head of state, you know, the, the queen or now the king is your head of state too. You feel like you, you have a certain amount of understanding about this country as opposed to a completely different country with a completely different language, where you don't have any family or friends or any even vague knowledge of it. And, and so like, where, where would you want to live? You know, I mean.

• 1:22:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  But then, of course, what we, we have in this country is when, when it was still quite easy for, for British people to go and live in Spain or France or whatever.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  That there was quite a high percentage of those who did not learn the language and did not integrate. They wanted to create these like little English emblems where they could eat marmite and you know, ba- basically just.

• 1:22:52Liv Albert?

  We are North, I mean, you, the UK, North America, us, us Western whites, we love to say expat, right? We love to develop our own little expat communities instead of just being a fucking immigrant, like.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's all that the conversations are, I don't see how the conversations about, you know, they're, they're coming to our country and they're bringing Sharia law. And it's like, how is that different to British people or any other type of person? Who thinks it's okay to go to a country with a completely different legal system? And, you know, taking cannabis when cannabis is illegal or, or drink alcohol publicly. Or, you know, have sex on a beach, which is actually illegal in the UK too. But, you know, if you have sex on a beach in the UK publicly and people see you, you will get arrested for indecent exposure.

• 1:23:44Liv Albert?

  Did people do that famously?

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  But then you, well, we, we, I don't know, we, we get all these cases that we hear about in the news because it becomes this core celebra that, that some poor hapless British holiday maker has gone somewhere abroad.

• 1:23:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  And has done something that is illegal in that country. And you're just like, did you not even do the, the most cursory glance of the foreign office's recommendations? For this particular country, when you were booking your holiday, do you not do a little bit of research about? What the prevailing attitudes are, the kind of clothes you might want to wear, that, you know, what's legal, what's illegal? And, and no, of course not. And so there's this whole thing about, oh, the, how, how dare this country try and enforce their rules on our, our poor British holiday maker? They must be brought home, foreign office, make it happen. And you're sort of like, do you think that when people come to our country and they commit actual crimes? The.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  That's fine. No, you don't. It's a big sticking point in our current like discourse surrounding um immigration that that basically all immigrants are criminals and that they're just waiting for their chance to do some criminal behavior. And it's just like, oh my god, where to start? What? How do you even engage with people who? Well, not just the people, that the media that perpetuate these narratives.

• 1:25:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Because a lot of these people will never have actually met any of, you know, the immigrants or the refugees or asylum seekers. They're just reading about the demonizing of them in the in the tabloids.

• 1:25:18Liv Albert?

  Yep, the othering, the make, yeah. No, it's well, meanwhile, when like, what, ninety percent of violent crime? And that's a, I mean, a made up statistic, but I'm sure that I'm pretty close to being right, that like, most violent, like, person-on-person crime is committed by white men.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  And it's by people that you know.

• 1:25:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, usually against a woman, it's usually her partner and it's usually a white man.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  This is, this is the thing at the moment. We, we have all these like gangs of, of, of like roughy-toofy, like, white guys wearing the flag who are going on about how they want to save, you know, the, the British women and girls from, from the sort of, you know, the predatory, sort of predatory immigrants. It's like,

• 1:26:00Liv Albert?

  No, you guys are the scarier ones.

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  Are you familiar with the statistics that every time there's a football match, that like the, the, the domestic violence and, and sexual assault and all that? That goes up because, you know, these, these, these people come home from, from the pub or whatever, and they're really angry or drunk or, and they, they take it out on their wives and their kids. And, and, you know, Ga, I don't know about you, but when I'm walking down the street, what I feel really safe when I see a big gang of men who are being like loud and abusive and violent and disgusting. Outside a hotel or outside a.

• 1:26:36Liv Albert?

  And wearing a flag? Like, those are my, the, any man wearing a flag is an immediate red flag. Yeah. And then you go to take in the flag. And then you're like, okay, well, what type of flag? Because it can get redder.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and it's just that the lack of self-awareness.

• 1:26:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  If you if you want to know what, you know, women and girls and children of of of all all genders. If you wanna know what will make them feel safe, you could just ask them. And then when they tell you, maybe just just kind of go with that rather than standing on the streets screaming abuse at women and children who happen to be, you know, trying to protest. Um, you know, this this sort of behavior.

• 1:27:25Liv Albert?

  It's almost like it's not actually about protecting them. No.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  It's it's it's funny, isn't it? It does. It does seem seems to suggest that that it's about something else, but but what?

• 1:27:36Liv Albert?

  Who could say? Who could say? Who could say? Uh, well, I mean, uh, honestly, I'm happy to have conversations like that all the time. Um, I didn't mean to wrap it up with that, but I loved it anyway. Um, no, this, I mean, this has been so fascinating and so long as you're comfortable with it. I also think it's really important to let conversations about places like the Roman Empire lead into conversations about modern issues like this. So.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  Well, it so often gets used as an example. I mean, particularly when we went, you know, we mentioned the Zuckerberg haircut. Um, the person who wears that haircut and and his ilk do do like to to use certain analogies about, you know, barbarians at the gates of Rome and the Roman Empire fell because of X, Y, Z and.

• 1:28:22Liv Albert?

  Immigration. They love to say because of immigration.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  And so when you do have people in in the twenty first century who are deliberately drawing these these lines from two thousand years ago to today. Uh, you you do sort of have to think about, well, how how do we? How do we deal with this? I mean, as as as academics who have studied these periods and have, you know, we've we've devoted a huge amount of our lives to these periods and and even we don't think we understand them. Completely, you know, we we we know enough to know how much we don't know. And and to feel like at any moment with a new discovery or a new piece of research. The whole the whole prevailing opinion could change.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  And so to have the have the confidence of the mediocre white man who likes to pronounce about, you know, the Roman Empire fell because of this. So, so it is, it is interesting to kind of have these thoughts when you're looking at the ancient material and you can identify. It's a bit too simplistic to say it's exactly the same, but there are, there are echoes.

• 1:29:27Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  And when it comes to Cleopatra the Seventh, um, there are so many sort of contemporary resonances with how women in, in very sort of high positions, whether that's politics or whether it's entertainment or sport or, or anything else. There, there are sort of, sort of resonances with, with how they get talked about and how they get used by, by different competing interest groups. And I think that the same is probably true for, for Cleopatra Selene in some respects, that one of the things I, I wrote in, in my, in my book about her was that the reason that we don't know more about her, that she's not a household name

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  is because she succeeded quietly.

• 1:30:13Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Whereas if you think about the ancient figures, female figures that we do know about, Cleopatra the Seventh, Boudicca, et cetera.

• 1:30:22Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  They, they fail loudly and spectacularly. And if they had sort of kept their heads down and stayed within the expected parameters for women at that time and just got on with the job and, and not made waves, we, we would not have heard about them. Um, so I think that's, that's important to bear in mind when we look at historical women. There's this idea that the, the, the best woman, and I think it, it, it, it appears, um, first, I think in, in sort of Greek literature, you know, Pericles and the, the funeration, that sort of thing.

• 1:31:01Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  Um, and it appears later in, in Roman literature as well, that the best woman is one whose name you don't even know. Like there's, there's, you're, you're probably more familiar with, with, with that side of it than me, but the idea that Yeah. No one should know a woman's name, because if she's doing what she's meant to do, which is staying at home and running the house, she'll never see the, you know, a man who's not a member of her family and no man will ever see her. And so you'll never get a woman having a public funeration like Pericles, because, you know, she, she is not, um, she, she shouldn't, you know, she should be see, not seen and not heard, basically. She should never do anything that draws attention to her.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  And that sort of continues, I think, in the, in the Roman period, this idea that, that when we hear about women, it's because something has gone catastrophically wrong. Yeah. Either with the woman herself or with the sort of entire political system. So the fact that we do hear about women like, um, Fulvia, Civilia, Clodia, uh, Torrentia during the late Republic is because society is collapsing and these women are having to step up and grab, you know, the spotlight because their husbands or sons or whatever are in exile or dead or whatever else. And the same thing with, with Cleopatra the Seventh and with Cleopatra Selene, that, that if the women have become the story,

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  the story's wrong.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  So, you know, we've, we've got to, we've got to try. So, so, uh, we, we have to try and, and remove them from the story if possible, which is of course what Octavian eventually manages to do with Cleopatra the Seventh. He, he sort of removes her or any, any sort of positivity about her from the story. And then Cleopatra Selene

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  learning all of this, seeing all of this. Yeah. Reacts accordingly. And so we know just enough about her to know that she existed and to be able to infer things about her. But we don't have any negative descriptions or depictions or accounts of her doing anything bad.

• 1:33:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Um, so, you know, it's it's fun when we do have these accounts because uh then that that those women get a lot of attention.

• 1:33:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  Um, Claudia, for example, or Agrippina or whatever, but at the same time, there's nothing wrong with with being a good girl and and getting on with with doing the things that you, you know, you need to do. You just don't necessarily get credit for it.

• 1:33:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, survival, like that's what, yeah, that's what she did. And it's a pretty big accom- accomplishment, even if it doesn't get you into the Roman man history books.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Um, well, exactly. So if anyone who's managing to survive under these circumstances at this period of time when the life expectancy was sort of twenty five, I mean, granted, allowing for skewing for infant mortality and things like that.

• 1:33:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  But the the higher profile you were, the more dangerous it was.

• 1:33:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Anyone that manages to survive civil wars and and all the rest of it is is uh clearly uh maybe they're extremely clever or extremely lucky or both.

• 1:34:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, I mean, I you wrapped it up utterly perfectly with that, so thank you so much.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  Well, thank you.

• 1:34:19Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, no, this was so much fun. I'm so glad to know about these women. It's so interesting to like speculate on her specifically, like, I might become obsessed now, because I just, I mean, there there they she was talking to her mother and her mother was talking to her, you know, like, there's so much kind of, I think, that we won't know of that.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Yes, we we don't, we don't get the kind of female relationships. You think about mother, daughter, sisters as well. If you think about how little we know about sisters and sorority in antiquity, because no one cares enough to write about the women and what they're doing.

• 1:34:59Liv Albert?

  Actually, that's, yeah, that makes me think of, I've been really deep in the Odyssey right now. And one of the things that comes up over time of just, I mean, myth broadly, but sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra are like barely talked about as sisters, but like, they're supposed to be sisters and it should be really famous, but also like, they kind of, you know, end up with these two very different stories. And therefore I think there's like that reason why we don't talk about them as sisters. But yeah, just pointing that out. That made me, that's interesting. That's a

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  Well, if Odysseus has a sister, we barely hear anything about her. But she's presumably left at home on Ithaca with Penelope while Odysseus takes her husband off. And, and well, he doesn't come home. So

• 1:35:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. I didn't even make that connection. I'm gonna have to go back and find that. Oh, my God.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and so it's like, what, well, where was Odysseus's sister? Well, what was her relationship with Penelope like? Well, the pair of them were just on their own on Ithaca, having to deal with all of these like suitors descending on the household. And then, you know, he comes back and her husband's not there. And, you know, does she get an explanation?

• 1:36:13Liv Albert?

  No, no.

• 1:36:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's, oh, oh, it's fun being a woman, the ancient world and now.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  Always, always so much fun.

• 1:36:24Liv Albert?

  Such fun, such fun. Is there anything you want to share with the listeners about reading more from you or following you anywhere?

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  Oh, well, let me see. So you have my book, Cleopatra's Daughter, Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen. Although I think in North America, it's called Cleopatra's Daughter From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. But that is available, that is available in paperback, ebook, audiobook. My new book, Fulvia, The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome, that is also available in North America in various formats. I have a new book coming out next year, and I've gone back to the Ptolemaic dynasty. And this, since we were just talking about sisters, actually, this is about Berenike IV, Cleopatra VII, and Arsinoe IV. And it's about how the three sisters

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  Basically, all had different competing visions for the Ptolemaic dynasty. And, well, you know, obviously, we know how that story ends.

• 1:37:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  And well, for for all, any of the three of them, but especially not for the two of them not called Cleopatra. But it's about how Rome and influence over the Ptolemaic dynasty gradually increases. The three sisters all attempt to deal with this in different ways. And, well. Two, two, two, uh, sort of sad ending for them.

• 1:37:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  But, you know, great for us because we get to to read about it.

• 1:37:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Liv Albert?

  That's exciting that I'm.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Liv Albert?

  You might have to come back.

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

  So that will, that will be out, I think, in towards the end of twenty twenty six.

• 1:38:00Liv Albert?

  Nice.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  We're, we're still, we're still discussing the title and what exactly the title is going to be. Um, but I have an Instagram and that is, I think, my, my only social media account. So if you want to follow me on Instagram and and see what I'm working on and what I'm doing. I'm Jane Draycott on Instagram.

• 1:38:18Liv Albert?

  Great. I will link to things and I'm, I'm sure people will at least. Well, I hope they'll also want to go learn things from you, but I think with the mention of the cat, they will want to go find the cat.

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there is a whole, there is a whole, um, highlights reel.

• 1:38:32Liv Albert?

  Beautiful.

• 1:38:33Speaker 03

  Two, in fact, I think of Magnus on my Instagram and then he's on the grid as well, of course. So, yeah, you, you want to put a face to the foot, to the sort of the purring, the name, et cetera, you can find him.

• 1:38:45Liv Albert?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  I did, in fact, you know, for, for, for people who are fans of cats, he did recently get groomed and get a teddy cut, so.

• 1:38:52Liv Albert?

  I was kind of curious trying to make out what kind of cut he had because I could tell that his back was quite groomed.

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So you, you will be able to see him before the teddy cut in his full furry magnificence. Um, you will be able to see him after the teddy cut in his sort of, you know, just incredibly amusing form. But it, it will grow back in a few months and then the cycle will start again.

• 1:39:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and he'll be cool until then and good for him.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  Well, and, yeah, mat, mat free. I mean, we, we were having, we were having our house, uh, our house is being renovated. And so we were having our house plastered and he loves. To just find the muckiest part of the house and like roll around in the plaster and you know, you'd be stroking him and you'd just be like, oh my God, this is, this feels gross. So it was like, we've got to get him, we've got to get him groomed. This is just not okay. He can't, he can't be this way.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  No, not with fur like that. Oh, like my boy's always rolling in literally every, he is a tiny menace, but he has like very scraggly, short hair. So it's like, it doesn't stick in there. It's fine. Thank God.

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  Well, he has, he also has this kind of, I'm not sure if cats have obsessive compulsive behavior, but he likes to eat his own fur, which is not great for his digestive system. And so if we, if we keep his fur under control, we, we kind of keep him healthy.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, what a good boy. Oh, I love it.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Well, he's back. He's, he's.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  So good. Oh, I love to have cats involved. Um, well, that's truly a delight, particularly to end on a cat. Thank you so much. Once again.

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for having me.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Let's talk about myths. Baby is written and produced by Liv Albert. Michaela Pangarish is the Hermes to all your Olympians, the producer, et cetera. Select music by Luke Chaos. Thank you, Luke. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, a collection of creators that all strive to bring you accurate and reliable information on the ancient world. These include the wonderful friends at Movies We Dig, the partial historians, Sweet Bitter, and so much more. Get ad-free episodes and so much more by subscription to the Oracle Edition on Patreon at patreon.com/MythsBaby or via the link in the episode's description. We have a lot of fun on Patreon. We'd love to see you there and to chat. Did you guys know that you guys can comment

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  on Spotify now? We would absolutely love to hear from you anywhere and everywhere we can. But that's all for this week. Hope you all enjoyed it and see you whenever we see you next. Bye.

• 1:42:29Speaker 05

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, General Manager at Safford Volkswagen-Richsman. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.

• 1:42:38Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, Special Finance Manager at SaffordCredit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit SaffordCredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at GetHumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:43:30Speaker 07

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome. The much awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome... Come centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart. And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 1:44:15Speaker 07

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.