 So Dr. Roller, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. Cleopatra is one of these very complex, self-mythologizing figures. Not only do we mythologize her in terms of how we see her, she was somebody very self-conscious about this. She was highly aware of her legacies as a polymaic and solukid descendant. She was polylingual and she was very much in tune to the culture traditions of her kingdom and also a brilliant naval commander. So give us a little bit of background into the colonistic world that Cleopatra is born into. Well, by the time of Cleopatra, which is the middle of the first century BC, the Romans had spread really throughout the Mediterranean. And this is something that could not have been predicted a couple of hundred years previously. The Romans were nothing. And suddenly they were the most powerful culture and state in the world. And of all the various kingdoms that had been left behind after Alexander the Great died 300 years previously, the only one of significance that was left was the Ptolemaic one, which controlled Egypt and much of surrounding areas. And so Ptolemy, the original Ptolemy was one of the companions of Alexander. He set himself up in Egypt after the death of Alexander. And now 300 years later, his direct descendant, Cleopatra VII, has come to rule the Ptolemy kingdom. It's very interesting you were saying Rome was pretty much a non-factor for a lot of this period of time. They came into dominance almost by accident through the wars with Paris and the wars with Carthage. The earliest mention we have of Roman Greek sources is about the time of Alexander the Great. It's by Aristotle. All during the Greek classical period, nobody knew anything about Rome. It was just a minor Italian city-state. And then poof, suddenly it rules the world. So Cleopatra, she's not only a Ptolemy, she's also descended from the Seleucid Empire. She's very aware of the traditions of her ancestry. So could you give us a little bit of family background? The name Cleopatra is actually Seleucid. The first Cleopatra was a Seleucid princess who married one of the Ptolemies several hundred years before Cleopatra. And so Cleopatra was very much aware of the fact that she was descended from two companions of Alexander the Great. The Seleucids were also intermingled with the Persian aristocracy. So she had that background, the famous Persian Empire of Darius and Xerxes and people like that. She had a pretty distinguished background, about as distinguished as one could hope for. Certainly much more than the upstart Romans. And this very much cultivated her personality. She was royal in every sense of the word. What we don't know is details of her education, which must have been immense. We have a couple of names of people who might have been her teachers. But as again, with people in antiquity generally and worse with women, we don't know very much about their childhood and their adolescence. It's very important to understand when we get towards Cleopatra eventually becoming sole ruler of Egypt, there was a kind of Roman foreign policy at this period of time. And I feel it's important to maybe touch upon that a bit. It was what was called the vassal king or friendly king. The technical term is the allied and friendly king. It shows up in modern parlance as client king, which we're trying to get rid of because that doesn't mean much today. But the allied and friendly king, the Romans realized as they expanded, they were moving into areas which were not ethnically Roman. And so they developed a policy about as early as the second century BC of cultivating local rulers. And the trade-off was really a very simple one. The local ruler would be allowed to retain his or her kingdom. And we're talking about Asia Minor, the Levant, North Africa, a little bit in the West, but mostly in the East. So the local ruler could retain the kingdom, but they would support Roman policy. And in return for this, they would get Roman military and perhaps financial support when necessary. And it usually worked relatively well. It allowed places on the fringe of Roman territory to become Romanized and maybe in theory eventually become part of the Roman Republic itself. And it allowed these kingdoms to continue with their own traditions, but knowing they could turn to the Romans when necessary. And Cleopatra, I think she becomes probably the most important of these friendly kings. Ptolemies, of course, had a long tradition of independence, and they weren't a minor principality. We have some minor principalities, Asia Minor that we know very little about. But the Ptolemies had a long tradition. They were fond of pointing out they'd been important long before anybody heard of Rome. It was kind of a difficult situation with the Ptolemies because they didn't fit the traditional mold of the Allied King because they weren't really dependent on Rome. But at the same time as Roman power became greater and greater, some kind of relationship was necessary to ensure their own survival. Sometimes these younger royalty figures inherit the sins of the fathers, so to speak. And this is no different with Cleopatra in terms of the tributes. They inherited having to pay it. Her father was in a real mess. He was heavily in... And he'd spent a lot of time in Rome trying to straighten this out and letting the kingdom languish. And so when he died, it was kind of up to Cleopatra to clean this all up, if the Ptolemies were to survive. And then the long run, it didn't work because the Romans took over Egypt within a few years. But that was the idea at least. What are some of the circumstances that led to Cleopatra being sole ruler? She starts as co-ruler with her brother slash husband. There was a certain kind of way that they did things. Her brother-sister marriage certainly produced offspring, but at the same time was a formula. And the brother that she married was 11 years old. So we see it more as a kind of ritual formula of keeping the relationships and the family. She had two brothers and two sisters. One sister had been eliminated before she came to the throne. And there's always the problem here of giving less respect to a potential woman ruler than a male ruler. But by the time her father died, obviously she was the strongest personality. Her younger sister, Arsenae, was not in Egypt. Her two brothers, Ptolemy 13 and 14, were essentially children. So Cleopatra is left. But the formula there is to connect her with a male ruler. So it's a joint rule between Cleopatra and the first of her brothers, Ptolemy 13. And then there's also Ptolemy 14. And they conveniently disappear rather quickly. And so out of the five children of her father, one is already dead. The two brothers disappear quickly. And the other one is outside of Egypt. So who's left? Cleopatra. And she obviously had a hand in manipulating a lot of this. And so did the Romans. It was perfectly obvious that she was the strong one. Cleopatra obviously did this through a huge foresight taking into account that she needed to forge relationships with powerful Roman figures, the most famous of which is, of course, Julius Caesar. Such has been made, of course, in the Western tradition of these relationships. And we have to remember that, especially as a woman, she was very vulnerable in terms of producing offspring. And she wanted her offspring to have someone thought to be a proper father. So when Julius Caesar came to Egypt in 48 BC, for reasons really unconnected with Cleopatra, she obviously realized that the liaison with him was to her advantage. She was the most powerful Roman of the time. Obviously, some kind of agreement with the Romans had to be worked out. And even though it's seen in modern popular literature and so on, like Shaw's, Caesar and Cleopatra, as basically a romantic issue, it's a very practical one. She needs an heir. She has no heir. It's far more difficult for a woman to produce an heir than a man. But here's the most powerful Roman on her doorstep. And he is the one that makes it certain she can keep the throne. So why not have a relationship with him? Why not have a child with him, Caesarean, who can be the heir? After Cleopatra's brothers are gone, she starts using that iconography with Caesarean, herself as Isis and Caesarean as Horus, right? There's a relief in Egypt that shows her as Isis and Caesarean as a grown young man, but he was four, five or six years old at the time. So obviously he's being planted for the future. And we always have to remember that we know how this is all going to play out, but they didn't. So she was perfectly committed to continuing her kingdom, putting Caesarean on the throne after she is gone, and assuming the Romans who have come from nowhere are not a serious issue. What I found interesting about this relationship with Caesar is that very early on, she's causing a lot of problems in Rome proper, like when she actually comes to Rome and visits. Well, the Romans had kind of this love-hate relationship with the Eastern kingdoms. And they very much remembered as part of their received wisdom how in probably about 500 BC, they had eliminated their kings and established this new form of government called the Republic. And here they, now at the time of Cleopatra, they were having to connect with these Eastern monarchs. And so when Cleopatra comes to Rome, there are several issues here. One is that Caesar is married to a very distinguished Roman woman. And so that didn't play over well, whatever Caesar and Cleopatra were doing. And secondly, bringing a foreign monarch, a foreign queen, setting her up in an estate in Rome didn't play well with these republican sentiments. And probably all of it was one, not the primary factor that Caesar was assassinated not much later. He obviously was tilting too much toward the concept of Eastern monarchy. And all kinds of rumors began to flow. They was going to marry Cleopatra. She was going to be queen of Rome. And he was going to be king of Rome. And it's hard for us today to realize how totally anathema this was to the Roman population. They don't have kings. So it was a real difficulty. And she seemingly was in Rome when Caesar was assassinated and stayed for a while. The picture in the Elizabeth Taylor movie of her quickly leaving town is just wrong. She stayed for a while because she wanted to get herself accepted and get Caesarean accepted by the new regime. But things went in strange directions and that never happened. And she goes back to Rome after a few a short time after the assassination of Caesar. You're right. Modern eyes tend to see their relationship as kind of like a bristling romance that transcends the ages. But really, for Cleopatra, it was almost just like foreign policy in a way. So Caesar was assassinated, then we have a second triumvirate. Enter Octavian, enter Marcantini. And this is perhaps the more important relationship that Cleopatra has. And it almost happens by axonic. While he's on campaign in the East, they seem to cross paths again. Well, after Caesar was assassinated, this triumvirate was formed straighten out things. And Octavian took control of the West. Antony took control of the East, the third member Lepidus, we don't have to think about. Antony set himself up at Tarsus, northeast corner of the Mediterranean, and he summoned all the Eastern royalty to come visit him. And this was basically to say, who side are you on? Among those, of course, was Cleopatra. And Cleopatra, knowing that her very survival depended on cultivating a relationship with Antony, did it in as elaborate a way as possible. And we have the very elaborate description in Plutarch, which was picked up by Shakespeare, of her coming up the Kidness River with dancing girls and musicians and so forth and so on, and seducing Antony in both a political and personal sense. Obviously, it's a relationship that went from political to personal very quickly. They clicked in a personal way. But again, we must never lose sight of the fact that Cleopatra needed Roman support at this time. And Antony was the most powerful person in Rome, just as Caesar had been a few years later. But the fact that it has this strange personal twist to it means, again, things go in a strange direction. And again, modern views of it emphasize the personal, sometimes forgetting the actual political underpinning of it all. You mentioned something earlier that I wanted to touch upon. That is Rome's kind of love, hate relationship with the East. They're looking at this vast wealth. Just think of like Cleopatra's ships, the ships that she's sailing on, just for a leisure. These things have opulence and somebody like Cicero would probably say decadence. But it's also something that Romans envy. How did Octavian weaponize this in his propaganda war with Mark Antony? Well, the Romans, of course, had this self-image of themselves being hardy agriculturalists, hardy farmers in Italy and living a life of genteel poverty, basically. And then they come into contact with this incredible wealth of the East. Probably about 200 B.C. is really when it starts to click. And they just see wealth like they've never seen before, and they're both horrified and seduced by it. And we have contemporary accounts of the phrase that's used as Luxoria Peregrina, foreign or alien luxury that comes into Rome and transforms Rome. And they're all kinds of things. People start wearing elaborate clothing. They make elaborate architectural innovations. It completely changes Rome. But at the same time, there's a whole group in Rome that says, this is not what we want. This is not where we want to be. And that gets back to the idea of having a king of Rome and the suspicions of Caesar. But of course, in the long run, the luxury of the East went out because the Roman Empire from Augustus on is basically the kind of Hellenistic monarchy that they abhorred. But the disparity in wealth at the beginning is far beyond what we can imagine. The Romans had never seen such wealth as the Eastern monarchs had. I want to touch upon a relationship that's very interesting, the Herodian dynasty and their relationship to Cleopatra. Well, Herod the Great is another one of these figures whose popular image has kind of overridden his actuality. He's known to most people for the massacre of the innocence in the Bible. And whether or not this happened and what it really means and so on isn't really relevant. Herod, when he came to the throne in 40 BC, was really the only rival to Cleopatra as an Eastern monarch. The Romans controlled essentially all of Asia Minor except for some tiny little principalities. They controlled everything west of Egypt, what's now modern Libya and onto the West. But Herod, whose kingdom was essentially a good chunk of Syria and what's Israel and Jordan today right to the Egyptian frontier, was a very crafty and inventive monarch. He didn't have the finesse that somebody like Cleopatra had. But Cleopatra realized that Herod could be useful to her. At one point she offered him command of her army which he was smart enough to turn down and their stories about the two seducing each other, which I think is popular fiction. But Herod, of course, was in a position to some extent call the shots because he was a buffer between the Romans and Cleopatra. The Romans were in what's now Syria. Cleopatra is in Egypt and Herod sits in between. So cultivation of Herod became very important and the Romans realized this too, especially as Cleopatra's situation deteriorated. Herod, who had been a supporter of Antony and Cleopatra, goes over to the Roman side and that's one of the nails in the coffin for Cleopatra. There was one thing that is a theme that kind of runs throughout your biography of Cleopatra and that is her approach to ritual and cults, especially in the Ptolemy Egyptian sense. As a polylingual person, she was the only Ptolemy who actually knew the Egyptian language. You also mentioned that there might be some connections to Cleopatra's actual maternity because Cleopatra's maternity is kind of hazy. Well, one problem is that we don't know who Cleopatra's mother was and the conventional wisdom, the best wisdom is that she may have been an Egyptian aristocrat because we know that the Ptolemy's did connect with the Egyptians and her mother may have been the one who imbued her with the sensitivity for the Egyptian world that her ancestors never had. As you said, learning Egyptian, adopting the persona of Isis, she always appeared at diplomatic functions dressed as Isis and treading this very difficult path between the indigenous Egyptian world, which is far older than any other civilization, and her own Ptolemaic heritage, which is Macedonian and Greek and brings in Greek cult and so forth. She's dealing with the world of Herod, so there's a Jewish component. We have an inscription which says that she donated money to rebuild a Jewish temple in one town, so she's very astutely playing all the different things together, but the thing that's really unusual about her is that she didn't spend her time stuck in the palace in Alexandria. She really went out and connected with the people. Her trip up the Nile with Caesar, which again has become in popular imagination, just a fun trip for two lovers, is a way of looking at her kingdom and seeking out her kingdom, knowing Egyptian she could connect with people. That's one of the things that makes her unique. She is totally different from all of her Ptolemaic ancestors that way, and we kind of think without proof that her unknown mother may have played a role in this. The trips on the Nile with Caesar, Cleopatra seemed to be the type of person who used everything almost like a performance to reinforce and legitimate her claims to the past and her present as the monarch. She obviously was a person who had a very great presence. She probably was not terribly beautiful. People have misinterpreted this to say she wasn't good looking, but the point is that her presence was what moved her along. She probably was short and she probably did not have this kind of femme fatale look that popular imagination has, but as Blutarch says, when she entered the room, everybody stopped talking and she immediately took command of the situation. So she had an incredible presence. She could talk to foreigners in their own language. We have allegedly 12 languages that she could have spoken. We have to speculate about some of them. Clearly, she was a person who could take command of any situation she was in. Yeah, not like a Hedy Lamar or an Elizabeth Taylor, but somebody who could get the job done in terms of that charisma. Her approach to religion and cult is even taken up by Antony, right? They present themselves as Dionysus. They present their children as the sun and the moon. Just one of the things that got Antony into big trouble, of course, because he's a person in the service of the Roman government. He has left Roman territory to be with Cleopatra for whatever reason, and that is not part of his legal mandate. He has adopted these attitudes of Eastern cult, something again the Romans were very suspicious of, the Isis and Osiris thing, having the children as the sun and the moon, but he's trying to play it both ways. Alexander the sun, Cleopatra the moon. He's trying in a way, again, ahead of his time, blending Eastern cults with Roman cults, but it's the wrong time. And Octavian, of course, is the one who really goes to town using this against Antony, saying, in effect, he's not being a decent Roman here. He's being too friendly with a foreign queen. He's acting like a foreign ruler. And Octavian plays that perfectly back at Rome. We're kind of in these final years where there's really that huge power play leading up to the Battle of Axiom, which just kind of tells about these final years for Antony and Cleopatra. I should say that Antony is a very difficult person to understand. Why he ended up in the mess he ended up in is hard to believe. He probably had problems with depression and alcoholism, and this caused him essentially to throw away a brilliant career. Remember, Caesar had chosen him essentially to be a second in command and end up in this very strange situation. Living in Egypt, after his majesty runs out in 32, he has no legal position in Rome anymore. He's living in Egypt. There's all this talk about taking over Rome, turning in into a monarchy. He goes on this great expedition with the Parthians, which is a total disaster, losing thousands of men, getting lost in the high altitude snows and not carrying it well at all. And so his personality really deteriorates, but it's very hard to understand how one person can make so many bad decisions. In an attempt to patch things up, Octavian had Antony marry his sister, Octavia. And of course that didn't work out very well, but it turns the dispute between Antony and Octavian into a family dispute. Octavian can go in front of people in Rome and say, look what this guy's doing to my sister. We need to make him pay for this. So it's a real tangle of things, but at the same time it reflects this kind of contradiction between Rome's attempt to become more like an eastern monarchy and Cleopatra in total futility fighting against the inevitable takeover of Rome. That's one thing that jumps out about Antony, especially in Plutarch's bi-way of Antony. He really seems to be, when he doesn't get his way, a retiring figure. He seems to be an impulsive person at times. Plutarch really emphasizes that after his defeats, he really would just like hang out by himself most of the time. Cleopatra is really the one who seems to be keeping him existing many times. At the very end, Cleopatra is ready to dump Antony. And again, this doesn't quite fit with the great romance theory of their lives that she realizes, especially after Actium, that he's a liability. And again, the depiction of Actium in Shakespeare and so on is that she was a coward and she ran. And that's not the case at all. She realized Egypt was open to the Romans and she had to get back there. But that has been turned against her. And we have to deal with the usual problems of male-dominated historiography here, prejudices against women and so forth, but to pull out the real personality of Cleopatra and to realize that she, for the last couple of years at least, was really the person in control as Antony's personality for whatever reason deteriorated. And as I said, there's evidence of alcoholism and depression, which led him to make really bad decisions. Up until the time of the death of Caesar, or maybe the beginnings of the triumvirate, he was a great military hero and had been very much involved in the Roman activities of those period. But after he gets involved with Cleopatra, he goes steadily downhill. He's really in out of his depth. An Octavian, who's just a kid during most of this, is again very much the dominant personality. He shows up in Rome when he's 17, 18 years old and manages to take control of the situation. And he's dismissed by the people in power. Cicero says we'll just play along with him and then get rid of him. And Cicero was the one who was gotten rid of. So a misjudgment of Octavians extraordinary abilities and Antony's personal deterioration are certainly major factors in this whole situation. You mentioned Actium. And that reminded me there's a lot of naval battles happening during these wars between Octavian and Mark Antony. What we tend to overlook in the mythology of Cleopatra is that in her actual life, she commanded these vast numbers of naval ships and she herself was a naval commander. Well, that's a very interesting point. Earlier on in 42 at the time of the final confrontation between the murderers of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, and Octavian and Antony, she had been asked to send a fleet to help. But she didn't. And whether she realized this was not a smart thing to do, we don't know. But the point is that if she was not known as a naval commander, nobody would have asked her to help. And then of course, at Actium 12 years later, she is commanding her own forces, her own fleet, which tends to get lost as we see it a confrontation between Antony and Octavian. And actually Antony was on land during a significant part of the battle. So it was Cleopatra's fleet, but then she realizes the battle is going the wrong way. And if the Roman fleet, remember Actium's on the west coast of Greece, so if the Roman fleet gets around her, it's open all the way to Egypt and it's all over. So she turns and takes her fleet back to Egypt. And that unfortunately has been reported as cowardice on her part, but it was a very sound strategic move. Well, let's get to the end, so to speak. What were the circumstances that led to Cleopatra's suicide and why so many conflicting reports of her death? We have to remember to begin with that suicide was an honorable way to end it all, especially in a pre-Christian world. And so if you have no other way out, you don't want to live your life in prison or be paraded through the streets as a hostage or something like that. And Cleopatra in the one actual quotation we have from her says, I will not appear in a triumph. And so when Actium turned in the Romans favor, we have to remember that things kind of stagnated for nearly a year. Again, you get the impression it's Actium one day and the death of Cleopatra a few weeks later. It's really over a year later as Octavian makes this triumphal journey around the Eastern Mediterranean lining up allies including Herod now and then parks outside of Alexandria and kind of nobody knows what to do at this point. Cleopatra of course wants to save her kingdom at all costs. Octavian probably has no real desire to take over Egypt, but at the same time there's the question of Antony who's become a liability to the Roman state, who is technically his divorced brother-in-law, so there's a family underpinning do-it-all. And so things just stagnate for about a year and various proposals are made. The kingdom will become Roman, she can keep the kingdom, Caesarean can get the kingdom, but the sticking point really is what to do about Antony. And this is the time where Cleopatra realizes that dumping Antony is in her best interest, but obviously these negotiations go nowhere. And Cleopatra remember has four children that she wants to secure their future, one of whom Caesarean hopes will rule Egypt. And there are all kinds of proposals that she go to India, that she go into honorable exile. It's a long Roman tradition you give a defeated foe of villa in Italy somewhere and hopefully don't cause any more trouble. But eventually realizing that Antony is the problem, Cleopatra tricks Antony into suicide. And then 10 days later she commits suicide herself. She sends a note to Octavian and of all the things we've lost from antiquity, we'd love to know what she wrote in her suicide note. And Octavian realizes what has happened and rushes and finds Cleopatra dead and her two mates dying. And the last words of one of the mates is she was the greatest king that Egypt ever had, giving Cleopatra the gender oriented honor of saying she's as good as a man basically, which was really quite a thing. Again going back to Elizabeth Taylor, the final scene in the movie is just perfect. It's exactly as we have it. But there's the question of how did she kill herself? And this ASP story comes out very early. It's reported by Strabo who's a contemporary. The ASP appeared in her triumph but by the time of her triumph we've got two ASPs, not one. And it's hard to say. Herpetologists who've looked into this have said it doesn't make any sense. Hiding an ASP and using it and pointing out the ASP disappeared entirely. And even with Strabo and other contemporary sources they're very confused about it. It said that puncture marks were found on her arm. Is that an ASP bite? Is that some kind of thing of scraping her skin with a poison? Poison makes much more sense. It's the way you go in this kind of environment. But somehow the ASP story was generated very early, probably by people who were on the spot, Octavian and his entourage, and became a very dramatic way because again there's this love-hate relationship. Cleopatra was the defeated enemy, but as Horace pointed out and is owed on Cleopatra, she was a magnificent woman. And she really did wonderful things and her final statement, as Horace says, was she would not be humiliated and be carried in a triumph. I think everybody in the mainstream, how maybe less interesting it is, rejects the ASP story and says poison is the way to go. Cleopatra is not going to deal with a poison method that isn't going to work. And the ASP business is too problematic. I would tend to agree. It makes more sense that like pharmacists, the poisons would be probably a more discreet and more sensical way to go. Cleopatra was well aware of the works of Mithridates the Great, who was a generation previously who was an expert on pharmacology. And she probably had his books on pharmacology and poisons. She's not going to do something crazy like an ASP. She's going to get the best poison and she has to kill off her two maids too. So the three of them have to have a way that works. It just doesn't make any sense to sneak an ASP and a basket with figs in it and everything. Why are we making such a big deal about triumph? Why does Cleopatra not want to be in a triumph? Well, if you look at the introduction to my show, you'll see something from what are called these triumphal arches that the Roman emperors would show themselves as conquering defeated nations in the semblance of prone female barbarians. And Cleopatra, as a Ptolemy, as a Seleucid, as somebody very much into her royal heritage is not going to go out that way. She knows what that entails. They parade these people out there as a person who's very self-mythologized. And you know what Octavian is trying to say there, putting you out on that stage? Very conscious of her status. She was Isis. The goddess is not going to be led in front of these upstart Romans who are nobodies. The honorable way to go to avoid the triumph, even though many other people did, but she had a very strong sense of status. Yeah, you're not going to find Cleopatra on the Sevastaean. Octavian, as you pointed out earlier, he has a strategy in East post-Achtium. And Cleopatra, the seventh, really lays the blueprint. Despite the fact that he's like putting her down in his propaganda, he's really using the tools that she kind of laid the groundwork for, and ultimately what became the Roman imperial cult. One of the ironies is, of course, that Rome turned into essentially a Hellenistic monarchy. And we see this very quickly. We see, for example, prominent women coming out, Livia, Augustus's wife, Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the mother of the Emperor Claudius. It becomes a monarchy in the sense that we eliminate the more Republican forms of elected magistrates every year. They're still elected, but their powers diminished. We have a hereditary monarchy. We have a sense of luxury that we didn't have previously. So the great irony of it all is by defeating Cleopatra, Octavian becoming Augustus was very much absorbed by her and her ways of thinking. And of course, not only that, but the whole history of Hellenistic monarchy going back to Alexander the Great. For those who would think that Cleopatra's story ends with her death, it really doesn't. And you've actually written a couple of books on Juba II and Cleopatra Selene, who is Cleopatra's daughter. So tell us about Cleopatra's descendants, Mark Antony's descendants. Both of these families still have importance in the history immediately after Cleopatra's death. Cleopatra has four children. The first, of course, is Caesarean, the son of Julius Caesar. And as the only known child of Caesar, he's a liability in the new world that Augustus is establishing. So he's quickly eliminated. The other three children, two boys and a girl. And the two boys kind of disappear from the record very quickly, and they probably just died. I mean, they'd seen their parents commit suicide. They'd been taken from Egypt to Rome. Their life was totally disrupted. So we're left with the single daughter, Cleopatra Selene, Cleopatra the Moon. Again, you can't just eliminate her to begin with. She's the daughter of Mark Antony, and she's the only survivor of the Ptolemaic dynasty. She is a person herself, even though she's still a child of great status and importance. It would not be politically correct to eliminate her. So she is brought to Rome. She is raised in the house of Octavian's sister Octavia, the former wife of Antony. And there's already another person, a dispossessed royal in that house, and that's Juba II, the displaced king of Numidia, which is essentially part of modern Tunisia, who had come to Rome when his kingdom was taken over by the Romans in the time of Julius Caesar. So he, too, is a displaced royal, a king without a kingdom. She's a queen without a state. But Western North Africa, what's today, Algeria and Morocco, is a vast unorganized area with a lot of Roman population. So in 25 BC, Juba and Cleopatra Selene are married and sent off to be the monarchs of what's called Mauritania. It's the Latinized form of Moorish, basically, and set themselves up at a new capital, which is in modern Algeria called Caesarea after Caesar. And they try to recreate a Ptolemaic dynasty there. They bring in Ptolemaic art. They create a library. Juba's a scholar of note. He writes like history of much of what has happened recently. But it eventually kind of fades from the scene. And eventually, within about 70 years, the Romans take over. But we should not think it all ended with Cleopatra. There were another couple of generations of Ptolemaic rule, but transplanted a thousand miles to the other end of the Mediterranean. She influenced the Roman Empire in so many ways. It's all there. Your book really brings it together. One final note that I alluded to previously, we've suffered from a long period of male dominated scholarship. And that has tended to diminish the accomplishments of women. I mean, we have a biography of Antony. It's not a biography of Cleopatra. Practically, everything we know about Cleopatra is from this biography of Antony. And this has continued in modern times. It's Antony and Cleopatra, even though Cleopatra was often the dominant one. So, like you say, it's all there. But it's an effort by scholars of my generation to dig out these invisible women. And it's not only limited to classical studies, it's to all historical scholarship and find out that there's a lot that's ignored about their accomplishments. Dr. Roller, did you want to plug anything you're working on? I mentioned Mithridates the Great and another great opponent of Rome of the previous generation who ruled the area around the Black Sea. And I have a book called The Empire of the Black Sea, which Oxford has published, which connects to some extent with the same world, although a generation earlier. And that might be interesting reading for some people. It's come out fairly recently. At the moment, I'm working on, shall we say, less popular things that mostly connected with ancient geography, as you said, but things that probably do not have a wide appeal outside the academic audience. Or insane people like me who would just love to talk to you about Strabo's geography all day. Well, he's an excellent person. Dr. Roller, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. You have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you. Take care.