Cleopatra's Daughter

Roller has succeeded in synthesizing a considerable amount of information that is not necessarily widely known or readily accessible and making it engrossing and entertaining for both specialist and non-specialist readers. He has offered a fresh perspective not only on the subject of women in antiquity, but also on the Augustan Principate and the Julio-Claudian period. -- Classical World Gillespie makes a significant contribution to the study of Boudica by placing her as complex literary construct in the geopolitical setting of Iron Age Roman Britain and its people and centering her textual sources within the cultural and historical framework of first- and third-century Imperial Rome... [An] elegantly written and closely argued monograph. -- Classical World Studies of Hellenistic queenship usually end with the death of Cleopatra VII. Overcoming the inadequacies of the sources, Duane Roller demonstrates that the tradition of strong queens continued into the Principate in this illuminating study of the careers of seven royal women, including Cleopatra Selene of Mauretania, Salome of Judaea, and Dynamis of Bosporos. --Stanley M. Burstein, California State University, Los Angeles Roller's careful and learned book offers its readers engaging accounts of the hard-to-recover lives of several redoubtable queens in the realms allied to Augustus' Roman empire. Roller shows how these women, although often operating under the most perilous of circumstances, managed to stay at the top, sometimes by deploying their regal heritage or glamour, at others by exploiting their imperial connections or wealth--but always by dint of their deep political acumen. This is a detailed, impressive historical investigation. --W. Jeffrey Tatum, Victoria University of Wellington A useful, enjoyable, deeply learned account of female dynasts of the era of Augustus. Roller introduces the period's politics, discusses terminology and precursors to late Hellenistic queens (this chapter is particularly well done), and offers excellent, concise biographical sketches of his seven subjects. He concludes with a discussion of Roman women vis-a-vis these queens. This is fine historian-as-detective work, using coins, literary references, and other evidence ... Highly recommended. -- CHOICE I think with a sound knowledge of Roman history and politics this book would fill in the gaps of these women, who are almost invisible in the records but who ruled different parts of the Roman Empire following the demise of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII. -- Dr. Charlotte Booth