![]() Antony was a largely absent father, but when his daughter was about 6, he made the extravagant, though mostly empty, gesture of declaring her queen of Crete and Cyrenaica (on the North African coast), territories that he had no authority to give away. She was born in Alexandria around 40 B.C. In some ways, Cleopatra’s career mirrors her husband’s. The same goal drives a new full-length biography, Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen, by Jane Draycott, a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow.įrom the January 1896 issue: “Cleopatra to the Asp” Roller) have tried to tell her story from her point of view. How did Cleopatra junior, the daughter of the most famous female enemy Rome ever had, become the wife of a Roman vassal king? How did she negotiate her relationship between the Egypt of her mother and the Rome of her father? And what were her political and cultural ambitions? How did you see yourself if your mother was Cleopatra? A string of contemporary novels and several careful historical analyses (notably by Duane W. She raises just as many questions as Juba does. Unlike her husband, she still has an instantly recognizable name: Cleopatra Selene (“the moon”), the only daughter of one of the most notorious, glamorized, and in the end spectacularly unsuccessful couples in Western history: Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, and the Roman Mark Antony. The 40 or so extracts or paraphrases from Libyka that have come down to us, many of them very brief, were quoted for the scientific “facts” they contain, and give no clue to the underlying ideology.īut in recent years, interest in Juba has been overshadowed by interest in his wife, who went with him from Rome to be queen of Mauretania, and to set up a court in what is now Cherchell, in modern Algeria, a town they called Caesarea. In the ancient world as well, to map meant to own. Systems of geography, history, and even the classification of plants and animals have been imposed as a subtle means of domination. Did he think of himself as Roman or as foreign? Or did he combine those different identities, and adapt them to different circumstances? Is his treatise on North Africa, Libyka, an attempt to define a specifically African history and culture, of which he was a part? Or was it a weapon of Roman imperial control? Most modern empires have used knowledge as a form of power. He was brought to Rome as a baby and reared there. Juba also raises big questions about cultural and ethnic diversity in the Roman world. Juba’s Mauretania was one of many “friendly” border kingdoms, where Rome could exert sway from a distance and establish a broad, easily defensible frontier zone-quite unlike the single line usually marked on our modern maps of the empire. In Rome itself, for example, the royal residences served as a boardinghouse and school for foreign royalty (several other princes and princesses also lodged there). More generally, Juba opens our eyes to all kinds of different perspectives on how Roman power worked. Chances are he’s behind the name of the Canary Islands too, taken from the big dogs ( canes, in Latin) found on one of his expeditions there. He is not only our best witness to that now-extinct elephant drawing on his doctor’s name (Antonius Euphorbus), he christened the group of plants still known as Euphorbia (the red-leaved poinsettia is the most easily recognized of these), which was discovered on one of his expeditions into the Atlas Mountains. Juba’s scientific contributions are his greatest legacy to the modern world. None of his work survives complete, but we have more than 100 extracts quoted by later writers. ![]() He argued, no doubt with a degree of local pride, that the source of the Nile lay in Mauretania, and gave detailed descriptions of the North African elephant. Juba had started writing in Rome (including a history of the city and at least eight volumes on the subject of painting), and in North Africa he produced weighty studies of the region’s geography, history, and culture. The new king seems to have divided his time among the battlefield (there was plenty of “buffering” to be done), the library, and research trips to investigate the flora and fauna of the region. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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