In August 30 BC, Cleopatra VII of Egypt killed herself in the palace at Alexandria, leaving four children. The eldest was Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar. He was seventeen and a theoretical rival imperial claimant; Octavian — the future Augustus — had him hunted down and executed within weeks. The other three were the children Cleopatra had borne to Mark Antony: the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, born in 40 BC, and their younger brother Ptolemy Philadelphus, born 36 BC. They were ten, ten, and six years old when their parents died.
Octavian had them brought to Rome. The boys disappear from the historical record within a few years; both are assumed to have died young, possibly in the same disease outbreak. The girl survived. Octavian gave her into the household of his sister Octavia the Younger — the same Octavia who had been Mark Antony’s other wife, the wife he had set aside in favour of Cleopatra. Octavia had no reason to be kind to the dead Egyptian queen’s daughter. The Roman sources unanimously report that she raised the child as her own.
The marriage
Around 25 BC, when Cleopatra Selene was approximately fifteen, Augustus arranged her marriage. The bridegroom was Juba II, the son of the defeated Numidian king Juba I (who had committed suicide after Caesar’s victory at Thapsus in 46 BC). Juba II had been raised in the same Roman aristocratic household as Cleopatra Selene — possibly literally in the same nursery — and was substantially Romanized. He was a scholar of considerable ability; surviving fragments of his historical and natural-history works were cited by Pliny the Elder.
Augustus gave the couple the kingdom of Mauretania to rule. The territory ran across what is now northern Morocco and Algeria, with its capital at Iol on the Mediterranean coast. The two young rulers renamed the capital Caesarea in honour of their imperial patron. The site — modern Cherchell, about sixty miles west of Algiers — still preserves the surviving Roman-period theatre, baths, and substantial mosaic floors.
The kingdom under Juba and Cleopatra Selene was a client kingdom in the formal Roman sense: nominally independent, with its own coinage and court ceremonial, subordinate to Roman foreign-policy direction. The political point of the arrangement was that the Roman state did not yet want to administer Mauretania directly. The two scholarly young rulers, both raised in Rome and both substantially Romanized, were trusted to do it on the empire’s behalf.
The Egyptian queen of Africa
Cleopatra Selene’s coinage at Caesarea is the surviving documentation of how she chose to present her political identity. The coins style her as Queen, in Greek (BAΣΙΛΙΣΣΑ KΛEOΠATPA), with the isis crown — the moon-disc-and-horns iconography of Egyptian royal religion — explicitly worn on her head. She had been raised in Rome from age ten; she chose at thirty to project the Ptolemaic Egyptian identity her parents had defended at Actium.
She and Juba had two children. The older was a daughter whose name has been lost. The younger was a son: Ptolemy of Mauretania, born around 1 BC. He was named after Cleopatra Selene’s Ptolemaic ancestors — and after her dead brother. The name was a deliberate political statement.
Cleopatra Selene died around 5 AD, in her late thirties. The cause is not recorded; a Greek epigram by Crinagoras of Mytilene, written for her funeral, attributes her death to a lunar eclipse seen at Caesarea. Juba II survived her by about eighteen years and died in 23 AD.
Ptolemy’s reign
Ptolemy of Mauretania inherited the client kingdom on his father’s death and reigned until 40 AD. His reign was administratively unremarkable. He maintained the Caesarea court, continued the political-cultural Romanization his parents had begun, and married the daughter of an unnamed senator (the marriage produced one daughter, Drusilla, who would later marry the procurator of Judaea Felix and play a small role in the New Testament Book of Acts).
In 40 AD the Emperor Caligula summoned Ptolemy to Rome. Ptolemy was approximately forty. The two were second cousins (through their common descent from Mark Antony). The Roman sources are unanimous and circumstantial: Caligula received Ptolemy with public honour, attended the gladiatorial games with him, observed that the spectators applauded Ptolemy’s purple cloak more enthusiastically than Caligula’s own, and ordered Ptolemy’s execution within a few days. The reported cause was that Ptolemy was too rich and too well-dressed. Caligula was assassinated himself a few months later, in January 41 AD.
The kingdom of Mauretania did not pass to Ptolemy’s daughter. Caligula’s successor Claudius annexed it as two new Roman provinces — Mauretania Tingitana (in modern Morocco) and Mauretania Caesariensis (in modern Algeria) — in 44 AD. The kingdom that the daughter of Cleopatra and Antony had built across the southern Mediterranean was, by then, the property of the Roman state. The Ptolemaic dynasty had outlived Cleopatra herself by exactly seventy years.
The afterlife
Cleopatra Selene’s tomb has never been definitively identified. The substantial Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania — a circular stone pyramid roughly thirty metres high, on a low coastal hill east of modern Tipaza, Algeria — was almost certainly built for her and Juba II as a dynastic burial. The interior was looted in late antiquity and emptied in the medieval period. The structure survives.
The daughter Cleopatra had raised in the palace at Alexandria, born into the most spectacular royal dynasty of the Hellenistic world and orphaned at ten, spent her life ruling a kingdom her mother had never seen. Her son was killed by an emperor she would have known as a small child in the Roman household of Augustus’s sister. Her granddaughter Drusilla would marry a Roman procurator named Felix, and through Felix would meet (and according to one disputed Christian tradition, listen to) the apostle Paul. The Ptolemaic political dynasty failed in 40 AD. The Ptolemaic family tree continued for another generation.