Jane Draycott (2)

This is the first book-length biography of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra VII and Mark Anthony. Thanks to the twists and turns of her life, Cleopatra Selene stood at the intersection of three different cultures: born a princess of Egypt, she was raised in captivity in Rome after her parents' deaths, before moving to Mauretania (roughly modern Morocco) when she married Juba, the region's Roman client-king.

Jane Draycott squeezes the maximum amount of information possible about Cleopatra Selene from the fragmentary documentary, archaeological, and art historical evidence. For instance, her close reading of the coinage issued in Mauretania during Juba and Cleopatra Selene's lifetime makes a plausible—although not unassailable—case for theirs having been a co-rulership, or at least one where Cleopatra Selene had a great deal of autonomous power. Draycott also provides a great deal of context for the Mediterranean world in the late first century BCE, showing us much about the kind of life Cleopatra Selene might have led. She writes with clarity and I think should be accessible for even people without much of a background in this time period. (Albeit there are times when Draycott's modern references get a bit too "how do you do fellow kids dot gif", as when Draycott says that Marc Anthony was "keen on cosplay", or talks about Juba/Cleopatra "shippers" on Tumblr.)

But I do wonder if a better framing for this book might not have been something like The World of Cleopatra Selene, like a similar pre-modern female ruler about whom only a very little is known, the thirteenth-century Tamta Mkhargrdzeli, who is the fulcrum for Anthony Eastmond's [book:Tamta's World|68754743]. What little we know about Cleopatra Selene's life spurs us to ask many questions—how would you feel as a child being held as a political hostage? did Cleopatra Selene think of herself: as Egyptian, Roman, both, a mix? what were her political objectives?—but there's simply nowhere near enough evidence for us to come to much by way of specific answers. Draycott ends up falling back on a lot of "probablys", "must haves", "likelies", "surelies", and so on. While some or many of these conjectures may be reasonable inferences in their own right, I think it's skirting too close to the wind to composite them together into a person. I'm sympathetic to Draycott's motivations here, but I don't think it quite works.

Equally, I'm sceptical about some of Draycott's claims to historical significance and modern significance for Cleopatra Selene and her immediate family. We simply have too little information about her maternal family tree to know her ethnic make-up with any precision. While the Ptolemies had ruled Egypt for centuries by the time of her birth, they ultimately traced their roots to Macedon with some known intermarriage with elites from what are now Syria and Iran. We have no evidence that Cleopatra, and thus her daughter Cleopatra Selene, had native Egyptian ancestry—although equally no evidence that they didn't, and there are some blank branches on their family tree that could plausibly be filled by Egyptian ancestry. (I'm agnostic on the issue of the familial connections of the Ptolemies. There are simply too many gaps in the sources and too many cousins and (half-) siblings with the same names intermarrying for us to be certain about much, and unless new evidence comes to life we never will be.) Perhaps Cleopatra Selene had a quarter or an eighth Egyptian heritage; but whether that means that if so she would today identify as "white" or "Black" or "person of colour" is far from a settled question. And even then, what would that tell us about the 1st-century BCE? Arguably little.

Yet Draycott asserts that Cleopatra Selene should be read as an "African Queen", one who should be held up as a role model to young women of colour because of her place of origin and because she married a man who was definitely Amazigh and thus had children who today would be perceived as non-white. Well, by that logic, you could also argue that Charlize Theron—someone whose ancestors arrived in what is now South Africa generations ago, and who has non-white children—is a "woman of colour." And I, uh, don't find myself convinced of that, to put it mildly.

It read as if Draycott felt that she needed some kind of hook, some kind of justification for the book she was writing (and why it should be a book as opposed to a journal article for an academic audience.) Why should Cleopatra Selene have to be a role model at all to be worth writing about, as opposed to a figure of minor historical importance who nonetheless can give us some useful evidence as to the normative exercise of client rulership by a woman in the early Roman empire?

In a similar vein, I found Draycott's argument that the Ptolemaic dynasty, through Cleopatra Selene's distant descendants—who may have included people as varied as the Emperor Caracalla and Zenobia of Palmyra—continued to be an active and influential one in the Mediterranean world for many generations in a way that historians have overlooked to be a tad tendentious. It's true that Cleopatra VII's children and their offspring have had far less ink spilled over them than their famous forbear, and that some of the historical neglect may be down to sexism, Cleopatra Selene was the only one of her maternal full or half-siblings, as best we know, to survive to adulthood and have children of her own, and for a long time historians were not very interested in what women did or how they identified. But Draycott provides no evidence that any of Cleopatra's posited grandchildren or great-grandchildren, let alone her more distant descendants, thought of themselves as Ptolemaids, or acted as a dynasty in any discernible way. ("Dynasty", of course, not being a simple synonym for family.) Draycott's argument here seems akin to pointing to the current British royal family and saying that not enough people pay attention to how they're an example of the continual influence of the House of Wettin (the German house to which Queen Victoria's mother belonged.)… (meer)