Cleopatra’s daughter led a life as eventful as her mother’s

Not many can boast of knowing that Cleopatra had a daughter, Cleopatra Selene. There’s good reason for this. The historical and archaeological evidence for her life is scanty, and the record of her deeds lost in the heady accounts of the civil wars that convulsed the entire Mediterranean at the time. Antony and Cleopatra, of course, are familiar figures to us: principal actors in the Roman Republic’s final showdown, the battle of East versus West at Actium in 31 B. C. — even if, in the aftermath of Octavian’s victory, they were portrayed as depraved and doomed lovers who took their own lives.

Had they not lost the fight at Actium, the elite couple — one Roman, one Egyptian — would have had the chance to shape Rome in their image, to align Western Europe with North Africa and Asia Minor, to subvert the simplistic propaganda pitting Roman austerity against the decadent luxury of the East. But it was not to be.

It’ s no surprise that, once the Roman West triumphed over the exotic East ( the binaries are old ones), the daughter of the suicidal queen of Egypt earned few mentions in the ancient texts, despite the notable fact that Octavian ( later Augustus) let the 10- year- old Cleopatra Selene live, presumably because he saw her as a valuable political pawn. ( To others, he was not so merciful, hunting down and killing the son Cleopatra had with Julius Caesar, Caesarion, even though Caesar had been Octavian’s adoptive father.) We know only that Cleopatra Selene was eventually married to Juba, a Numidian prince and fellow hostage in Octavian’s Rome household, and that the pair were packed off to rule the newly minted kingdom of Mauretania in North Africa, where she died around 5 B.C ., while still in her30s.

This, essentially, would be the extent of Cleopatra Selene’s story, were it not for “Cleopatra’s Daughter,” a labor of love by Jane Draycott, and her attempt to bring the obscure Mauretanian queen to life. For all her hard work, Draycott, an archaeologist and historian, delivers something slightly different from a biography. Hers is an account of Rome and Alexandria at the turn of the first millennium, packed with fascinating information, sometimes droll, about Roman and Egyptian culture, Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship and their daughter’s possible descendants.

Draycott gathers evidence from whatever sources she can find — frescoes, mosaics, jewelry, marble busts, coins, a silver dish — and deploys her considerable erudition to paint a vivid picture of the historical context. A brief glance at the index reveals entries on animal worship, Arretine tableware, birthing stools, Cleopatra Selene’s fondness for crocodiles and her mother’s sex with Antony, alongside many more traditional topics.

At the same time, the protagonist of Draycott’s study remains stubbornly unknowable, a black hole in a more knowable universe. The first four chapters — almost half the book — are devoted to Antony and Cleopatra, their defeat at Actium and its aftermath, while the last two chapters focus on events that followed their daughter’s death. In between, we read about how Cleopatra Selene might have felt at a given moment ( terrified as she walked next to the effigy of her dead mother in Octavian’s “military triumph,” or celebratory parade, in Rome in 29 B. C.) or how others might have reacted to her ( watching her for signs of witchcraft; after all, her mother had supposedly bewitched two prominent Roman generals, luring them to her bed). I don’t mean to be disparaging: There’s no other choice for a historian wishing to resurrect a woman for whom there is meager proof of existence.

Draycott is open about her agenda: not only to tell Cleopatra Selene’s story, but to remind us that competent female rulers existed in antiquity and that the traces of their lives deserve to be located and pieced together. For Draycott, Cleopatra Selene is such a ruler, wielding quiet ( and hence unremarked) power next to her husband before her early death.

As for the question of Cleopatra Selene’s race, Draycott suggests that it would have been largely moot in antiquity. Like Cleopatra, who was descended from the Macedonian general Ptolemy I Soter on her father’s side and unknown ancestors on her mother’s, Cleopatra Selene most likely did not identify as white or Black but as Egyptian. Moreover, Greeks and Romans, inhabitants of societies in which ethnic diversity was the norm, conceived of their superiority in terms not of skin color but of culture. Yet because Cleopatra Selene married an African man and had children who today would be considered biracial, Draycott still wants her to be seen as a model “by young women of color who look for someone they can personally identify and engage with in the historical record.” ( Coincidentally, the casting of a Black actress, Adele James, to play Cleopatra Selene’s mother in a new Netflix docudrama series has triggered a public backlash.)

There are other, perhaps more interesting questions about this book. Given that it is about a real person whose words apparently were never written down, can it be a biography, or does it illustrate a truth about biography, that its subjects can only ever offer the illusion of being known? Or, paradoxically, does it provide a more honest version of antiquity than other contemporary accounts, one unswayed by its subject’s own rhetoric and self- presentation to the world?

Or does it not? In “Against Empathy,” the psychologist Paul Bloom argues against making choices based on empathy, suggesting they do more harm than good. We might wonder whether the stories we choose to recreate from the past are not always the ones that can be told but rather those that flatter our values. So has it always been with history.