Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [162]
Historical Note
Lots of the things that happen in this book really occurred. Lots of the characters portrayed in this book really existed. Lots of their deeds and misdeeds, and many of their wildly unlikely actions—including some of the things you’re no doubt sure I invented—actually happened.
Let me clarify that. Lots of the things that happen in this book really are historically based. However, much of the history we rely on to tell us the truth of what happened to Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian, Agrippa, and the rest of these characters in the early days of the Roman Empire is as much enhanced by fiction, imagination, and mythology as this book is.
History is written by and for the conquering heroes—in this case, the Romans—and so the classical sources that deal with Cleopatra and Antony are fascinatingly skewed documents, full of hyperbole, humor, hysteria, and contradiction. Much like today’s political climate, persons on both sides of the events had a great deal to say about the players, some of it true (maybe), and some of it invention.
None of the major primary sources were contemporary with the historic events portrayed herein—Plutarch was writing nearly a hundred years after the death of Cleopatra, who committed suicide (or perhaps not) in 30 B.C.E. They relied on earlier sources, rumor, poetic license, and a hefty dose of subservience to the Roman Empire. Therefore, works of contemporary scholarship on these topics—as the authors themselves agree—have a limited pool to draw from when it comes to factual accounts of what did and did not happen in Alexandria and thereafter.
As a priest of Apollo states in this book, speaking of the mythic arrows of Hercules, “Everything is true. Once a story is told, it becomes true. Every unlikely tale, every tale of wonders, has something real at its core.”
That is absolutely true of the history that inspired and informs this particular tale.
That said, I’m tremendously indebted to a variety of volumes dealing in fact and “fact,” most notably Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars, Plutarsch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Joyce Tyldesley’s Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, and Anthony Everitt’s Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. For a fantastic fictional biography—and a completely different take on many of the characters I portray here—I recommend John Williams’s National Book Award–winning novel, Augustus. As well, I consulted Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Dio, Strabo, Shakespeare, and many more, some poetic, some historic.
One of the great pleasures of writing Queen of Kings was that I was able to use the biographical details of Antony, Cleopatra, Augustus, and more to a new effect, braiding history with my own imagined possibilities. The death of Cleopatra, for example, is portrayed in Plutarch as a locked-room mystery—the queen and her maids discovered dead, with the only mark visible on Cleopatra a couple of pinpricks. No suicide-assisting asp was ever discovered, and Plutarch himself seems suspicious that this was what happened. As time passed, death by asp became the accepted version. It was a small leap of imagination to imagine a different prelude to Cleopatra’s “death,” and a different explanation for the fang marks on her body.
In terms of ancient sorcery, religion, augury, and mythology, I drew inspiration and information from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (sometimes known as Apuleius’s Metamorphoses), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Naming the Witch by Kimberley Stratton, and for some great thoughts on the creepiness and creativity of ancient world warfare, and on the Hydra’s venom, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor.
In regard to Greek witchcraft, Hades, and shades, I consulted a variety of sources and inspirations both classical and contemporary, including The Aeneid (which readers will recognize as the inspiration for the geography of Hades), the Odyssey, Medea (the character found both in Euripides’ play and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The classically accepted process for summoning