Daughters of the Nile
Page 57
Generally speaking, upper-class women in Roman society left their children in the care of a nursemaid, which minimized attachments during the dangerous early years when child mortality was so high. Tutors were often more influential in the lives of children than parents. Given Selene’s history, however, and her desperation to continue her dynasty, I chose to give her a much more modern approach to motherhood. For Selene and Juba’s court, I mixed known historical figures with those of my own creation. Leonteus of Argos and Gnaios the gem-cutter are known courtiers. Iacentus was the commander of their guard. Much of the fragmentary literary evidence for Selene’s life comes down to us from Crinagoras of Mytilene—both her wedding poem as well as one written at her death—so I adopted the theory that the ambassador was a member of her court at some time. That he seems to have maintained ties to Antonia Minor doesn’t argue against this possibility, as Selene and her half sister were almost certainly in frequent contact.
Publius Antius Amphio was the royal architect of Mauretania, but his fraudulent counterpart in the novel, Necho of Alexandria, is a figure I made up to represent the dangers of forgery and deception that Cleopatra Selene and Juba II faced away from the Roman capital.
Euphronius (or Euphronios) is an actual historical figure, referenced in ancient sources as a tutor to Cleopatra’s children. Euphorbus Musa was also a historical figure. He was brother to the more famous Antonius Musa and Juba’s court physician, after whom the plant family Euphorbia is named. With some regret and great trepidation, I combined the two men because of the similarities of their names and because they would serve essentially the same function in the series.
Lasthenia and Circe are both invented characters, archetypes of women who did exist at the time. The Berber characters of Maysar and Tala are both inventions of mine, but Mazippa is not, and he figures prominently into the later history of the Mauretanian kingdom along with Tacfarinas.
As for what I invented in the story line itself, Agrippa and Augustus painted a picture of harmony, but there is historical evidence of tension between them. First there was Agrippa’s self-imposed exile before the death of Marcellus. Then there was the advice given to the emperor that he had made his general so great that he had better marry him to his daughter or kill him. That Augustus felt compelled not only to adopt Agrippa’s sons but to secure powers for his son-in-law that made him a virtual coemperor can be explained by a strong trust and friendship between the two men. My choice to infer continued tension in their relationship is plausible, but made for dramatic purposes.
We do not know whether or not Juba was present at the final Herodian trial held in Beirut. What we do know is that Juba and his daughter almost certainly made a trip East, during which they were memorialized. The proximity of the Olympic Games, the wedding of Pythodorida, and the Herodian trial left me with 8 B.C. as a likely and convenient date for such a trip.
We also do not know the cause of Cleopatra Selene’s death, though it has been widely posited to have resulted from childbirth so late in life. To that end, I ascribed to her the symptoms of Sheehan’s syndrome, which is a complication arising out of childbirth when too much blood is lost.
Though Julia traveled extensively throughout the empire, it is not known whether or not she ever set foot in Mauretania. The trip in which she nearly drowned has no definitive date, but my choice to place it in the summer of 16 B.C. might be too early and the subsequent visit to Judea almost certainly took place in the following year. Julia’s Villa Farnesina was indeed painted with exotic Egyptian scenes, including a tribute to both Isis and the goddess Selene, but it was likely furnished upon her wedding to Agrippa in 19 B.C. instead of 13 B.C.
My wish to reproduce the exact sequence of the Secular Games was frustrated by conflicting historical accounts and a need not to overwhelm the reader in banqueting, theater, revelry, and blood sacrifice. So I presented here a condensed and slightly reordered version.
The Roman-era culture of the Berbers in general and the Mauri, Gaetulians, and Musulamii specifically are largely lost to us. Strabo, Herodotus, and other ancient geographers give us little to differentiate the tribes of Mauretania from those in Numidia and elsewhere, but what information they gave, I have incorporated. We know that Garamantes were slave traders, but the Berbers in general declare themselves free people, so it seemed reasonable, especially in light of the tapering off of slavery in the Mauretanian kingdom, to ascribe to them a distaste for slavery. Unfortunately, modern-day examples of Berber culture are of limited utility.
For example, ancient proto-Berber men are often depicted in art as wearing a great deal of jewelry, but modern Berber men largely eschew it. Moreover, because the indigenous Berber culture in modern Algeria has been suppressed, it’s difficult to reconstruct what these North African people must have been like before the spread of Islam. Indeed, it’s always dangerous to assume that the anthropology of tribes as we observe them now has anything to do with their identity in ancient times. Even so, I decided to risk extrapolating known Berber customs of the Tuaregs, including their jewelry and indigo dye, back through time, though in more modern times, it is the Tuareg men who wear blue veils, not the women.
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BEYOND these matters, I have made every attempt to hew to the facts when portraying this fascinating and turbulent time in history. Readers familiar with the Julio-Claudian dynasty know that if Selene died in 5 B.C., then she was mercifully spared from witnessing the escalating tensions between Julia and Tiberius in Rome and the tragic conclusion of their conflict. It would also mean that Selene did not live long enough to see the spectacle of Livia’s corpse rotting on its bier when Tiberius refused to attend his mother’s funeral.
In life, Cleopatra Selene was a nominal member of the imperial family, at the mercy of Augustus, his family, and their intrigues. But that entanglement lasted beyond her death. If the historical Selene ever had cause to lay a curse on Drusus, then it is a curse that touched off an intimate death spiral between his family and hers. And in the end, Selene’s granddaughter would be another Ptolemaic princess held captive in Rome. But that is another story …