Cleopatra’s Daughter

After the defeat and deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, their ten-year-old twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios are taken from Alexandria and displayed in Octavian’s Roman triumph. They enter the household of his sister Octavia, where kindness cannot remove the fact that they are valuable captives whose education, marriages and survival depend upon the ruler who destroyed their family.

Selene studies architecture and tries to make herself useful while learning the alliances and rivalries of the emerging Augustan court. Her hopes of returning to Egypt compete with affection, political calculation and the threat created by the Red Eagle, a clandestine opponent of slavery whose actions unsettle Rome. As Octavian decides the future of Antony’s children, Selene must build an identity that is neither wholly Egyptian nor safely Roman.