What Happened to Cleopatra’s Children With Marc Antony? 

In August of 29 B.C., Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, held an opulent triumphal procession within the city of Rome. The 33-year-old was the ultimate victor in a long struggle for control of the Roman Empire, and to commemorate his victory, the new emperor held a three-day parade in celebration of his defeat of Marc Antony and Cleopatra and acquisition of Egypt. During the triumph, Octavian marched two children of the ill-fated pair through the streets of Rome as living spoils of war: The ten-year-old twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.

Octavian had wanted to display the vanquished Egyptian herself to the thousands of Romans that lined the streets. The historians Suetonius, writing in the late first and early second century, and Dio Cassius, writing in the second and early third centuries, both reported that when Octavian discovered that Cleopatra died by suicide, he rushed to send for snake charmers to suck out the poison of the asp that bit her. The triumvir was denied the pleasure of parading Cleopatra herself in chains, but he still used her living children to send a message of power.

 In the blistering heat of the Roman summer, attendants carried an effigy of Cleopatra on a couch. Behind marched the queen’s twin children. Octavian received a triumphal arch in the Roman Forum to mark the occasion. The last vestiges of the Republic were fading.

But this ignominious march was neither the end of Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene nor the demise of their mother’s legacy. Instead, the twins carried on the Ptolemaic line and survived as captives within the household of their father’s ex-wife. Contemporary scholarship into their lives reveals how royal hostages kept by Romans played pivotal roles in the cutthroat politics of the late Roman Republic. It also shows how the legacy and memory of Cleopatra lives on today, largely due to the remarkable life and resilience of her daughter. 

By the time of Queen Cleopatra’s death, the Ptolemies had ruled for almost three centuries. The first Ptolemy was one of the generals of Alexander. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, seizing Egypt for Macedonia and his expansive empire. After Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., his generals ruled these lands in the name of his heirs. Ptolemy I saw an opening and assumed the title of king of Egypt in 305 B.C., establishing the Ptolemaic dynasty until Rome annexed the kingdom as a province.

In 51 B.C., an 18-year-old Cleopatra inherited the throne after the death of her father, who had named her his heir. Ptolemaic traditions of incestuous marriage dictated that she would marry her brothers and rule with them. First she wed Ptolemy XIII, who was 10 when he married Cleopatra, and later wed Ptolemy XIV, who was just 12 years old. Despite or likely because of her marriages to her younger brothers, the queen had no children with her siblings. All four of her children were fathered by Julius Ceasar or Marc Antony.

Caesar was introduced to Cleopatra during his military campaign in Alexandria. The biographer Plutarch, writing in the early second century A.D., wrote that she was smuggled to meet Caesar in a bag of bedding. A mistranslation of Plutarch in the 18^th century transformed the bag into a rolled-up carpet, which was cemented into cultural memory by artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme. A year later, Cleopatra gave birth to a son named Caesarion who would later become Ptolemy XV while co-ruling with his mother.

She, Caesarion, and her brother-husband, Ptolemy XIV, were in Rome during Julius Caesar’s quadruple triumph in 46 B.C. They stayed in his villa across the Tiber River while, as Appian notes, the opulent triumph proceeded with gold, crowns, donatives, and captives. Plutarch says an infant named Juba II, the son of the king of Numidia, was carried in the triumphal procession, while Cleopatra’s rebellious sister, Arsinoe IV, also proceeded through the streets as Caesar’s trophy. Cleopatra knew this was not a fate she wanted.

After Caesar’s death on the Ides of March, Cleopatra continued to rule in Egypt. Meanwhile, her future partner, Marc Antony, solidified the political trio known as the Second Triumvirate—a political pact made between Octavian, Antony, and a supporter of Caesar named Lepidus—by marrying the young Octavian’s sister, Octavia, in 40 B.C.

Octavia was not Antony’s first wife; the politician married four times in total. But Antony was not a man bound by monogamy. In 41 B.C.E, he met Cleopatra at Tarsus in modern-day Turkey. Soon thereafter, he wintered in Alexandria with the queen, a move that would later prove permanent.

Not long after Antony’s arrival in Egypt, Cleopatra delivered the twins Alexander Helios, named after the sun, and Cleopatra Selene, named after the moon. Although little is known about their early lives, in 2012, Egyptologist Giuseppina Capriotti identified a sandstone statue from the Temple of Hathor at Dendera as a depiction of the twins. The sculpture is 33 feet high and had stars etched onto it. A snake envelops the children, one wearing a halo made to look like the sun and the other a moon. A third child with Antony arrived in 36 B.C., named Ptolemy Philadelphus. We know little about the daily lives of the children, except that they lived a traditional, privileged life in the palace at Alexandria. Cleopatra Selene, her brothers, and Antyllus, her stepbrother and Antony’s heir, received a liberal arts education and developed a close bond with Cleopatra and Antony. 

Cleopatra’s and Antony’s proclaimed inheritances for their children raised eyebrows in Rome; how could Antony possibly redistribute Roman lands to his illegitimate children as if the Republican system of governance no longer existed?  Yet, in 34 B.C., Cleopatra and Antony held a ceremony, later dubbed the Donations of Alexandria, to divide the eastern empire between their children and Caesarion in a presumptuous ceremony that carved up the eastern Mediterranean and parts of North Africa.

Two years after the infamous ceremony reached the ears of Rome, Antony formally divorced Octavia. This was an unwavering announcement that the tensions between Antony and Octavian had turned into enmity. The antipathy between Antony and Octavian culminated in the sea battle off the western coast of Greece at Actium in 31 B.C. Although Antony and Cleopatra had more ships, they lost the decisive naval engagement. Seeing the battle lost, Cleopatra fled with her royal fleet, followed by Antony who abandoned his crews.

After the couple’s devastating loss, Antony famously fell on his sword; Cleopatra chose the poisonous bite of an asp. It was said that the couple would rather die than be taken by Octavian as living trophies. Their children wouldn’t be afforded such a choice.

After securing the Empire, Octavian moved swiftly to address perceived threats, including Cleopatra’s children.

As Alexandria fell, Cleopatra gave Caesarion gold and sent him to India by way of Ethiopia. He never made it; instead he was tracked down by Octavian’s forces and murdered. Meanwhile, Antony’s son Antyllus was betrayed by his tutor, dragged from a temple and killed.

In the wake of the death of their parents, the twins, along with their younger brother Ptolemy, were sent to live in Rome. Romans often held the children of those they conquered as hostages, but Cleopatra’s children were also to play key roles in the theater of Roman victory that Octavian wanted for his triumph.   

Egypt was annexed as a Roman province and Octavian now prepared to exhibit the twins in his aforementioned triple triumph the following year. Notably, the historian Dio Cassius, does not mention the young Ptolemy Philadelphus walking in the triumph, likely indicating he died prior to the ritual parade. After Octavian’s parade, the twins went to live with Octavia, the emperor’s sister and, perhaps ignominiously, Antony’s ex-wife.

The twins were kept under surveillance by Octavian by keeping them in his sister’s home. Throughout his reign, Octavian, who would later be known as Augustus, cast himself as a dedicated father that cared for his family and for his country. Beyond the paternal performance, it was a way of showing the public how he had extended mercy to Antony’s children—who were half-Roman—while also keeping them under surveillance. Alexander Helios likely died young, in the decade or so after he was brought to Rome, but Selene, raised by her enemies, followed a different path.

Selene came of age in Octavia’s unruly household, alongside her half-brother, Iullus Antonius. Ancient accounts note her beauty and intelligence. She continued her education among the children in Octavia’s household. From personal physicians to dolls to fine clothing, she was raised as a Roman woman.

In Cleopatra's Daughter: from Roman prisoner to African queen, historian Jane Draycott reconstructs what life would have been like for Cleopatra Selene. The author reassesses the literary evidence for Cleopatra’s daughter and brings in new artistic and archaeological evidence. From coins to revisited altars to Selene, Draycott demonstrates that it was Selene who refashioned the Ptolemaic dynasty—and the memory of her mother—to endure in Roman North Africa.

She also met her future husband in the household of Octavia. During the earlier Republic, elite hostages had frequently been housed by aristocratic Romans. But Caesar and then Augustus took the practice to new levels. Ancient historian Elinor Grace Cosgrave has recently written on Julius Caesar’s bragging in his Gallic Wars about taking hundreds of hostages. The often-young hostages were living insurance to guarantee the subservience of foreign kingdoms; they created visible symbols of Roman hegemony, and emphasized the “civilizing” effects of Roman culture on their foreign foes. 

Among the hostages in Octavia’s home: Juba II, the infant once paraded in Caesar’s triumph. As Draycott notes in her book, he “was a person whom we would describe today as a Black African.”

Like Selene, Juba II was taken hostage and raised as a prisoner in the house of Julius Caesar after being displayed in his triumph over his father, King Juba I of Numidia (Today, Numidia encompasses parts of Algeria , Libya, and Tunisia in North Africa). Following Caesar’s death, Juba II eventually went to live in Octavia’s house, too, and became a well-known scholar of geography and African history.

Octavia arranged Selene’s and Juba’s marriage in 25 B.C. As a kind of wedding present with strings attached, Augustus allowed them to become client-kings, puppet monarchs ostensibly permitted to rule under the watchful eye of Rome. The duo reigned over western Numidia and Mauretania, and moved to Iol Caesarea in modern-day Algeria. Together they remade the city and suffused the kingdom with both Greek and Egyptian influences and iconography through rituals, coin portraits, sculpture, and city-building.   

In the years after she moved to Mauretania to become a queen, Cleopatra Selene II maintained the Ptolemaic line and memory. As Draycott points out, her Mauretanian coins cast her—like her mother had—as a Hellenistic queen in terms of her hair and diadem. The diadem was traditional headwear for Hellenistic kings and certain powerful queens. It was a white cloth, knotted in the back, with dangling ties. Like her mother, Selene chose the diadem to wear and did so alongside her husband in a display denoting their equal power.

Selene and Juba named their son Ptolemy of Mauretania, extending the Ptolemaic line well into the early Roman Empire. In these ways, Selene emphasized the African, Hellenistic, and Egyptian identities connected to her mother, keeping Cleopatra’s legacy alive.

The tales surrounding the tragic suicides of Cleopatra and Antony left an indelible mark on the history of Rome and pop culture, but their legacies didn’t end with death. Cleopatra Selene II’s resilience—in the face of war, amid the slanderous Roman views of her mother, and while being held as a hostage—allowed for the Ptolemies to survive for decades after the bite of that fateful asp.