In your book, you have almost a dueling banjo situation between Arsinoe and Berenice, which is so interesting because they come from such opposed points of view and motivations when the book begins with their father, Ptolemy the Piper, fleeing to Rome and Berenice seizing power and the youngest, Arsinoe, waking up to find that she has been abandoned to her fate and to the mercy of her older sister. So Berenice in particular begins from a really unsympathetic point of view. She seems cold and dominating and at least I — when I began — sympathized very much with the scared little girl. And yet you give Berenice equal time and equal perspective.
I can’t remember when I first decided I was going to write from two perspectives, because the idea behind this book — which is going to be the first in a planned set of four — was to tell Arsinoe’s story. From almost the very beginning, I started writing from Berenice’s perspective, and at first it was as a foil in a lot of ways, right? I have this child’s perspective who doesn’t know what’s going on, who’s very much disenfranchised in every meaning of that word — she has no knowledge, she has no power, she has nothing.
But then the more I wrote from Berenice’s perspective, the more I became fascinated with where she was coming from, what brought her to this point, because obviously Berenice starts, not at her pinnacle, but at the beginning of her own rise. The more I was exploring that, the more I decided that this was another almost Greek tragic story to tell, and one of the struggle for power and what it means to have power. I think a lot of the conversation is both of these women — well, a woman and a girl — figuring out how they can operate in a system that is in many ways weighted against them, no matter how high or low they are in any particular moment.
One thing that is so interesting to me in the book is the way that each of these characters — the girl and the woman — have to surround themselves with advisers and have to make the best sense that they can of the advice that they’re given. Berenice has her circle of advisers. She and Arsinoe have their own eunuchs, which I love as a relationship: eunuch pairing with a young woman, meant as this sort of guide through the world and through knowledge. But, as we see with Berenice, the relationship can become quite twisted when she has to trust him for political advice despite having her own ideas about how to operate.
It’s not just with young women although obviously that’s where it comes in here. Ptolemy the brother, who comes in as a character in the next book, also has a eunuch. It was probably especially important for young women because it’s a non-threatening — scare quotes non-threatening — male figure, or pseudo-male figure. And the other thing is that for these eunuchs, this is the only way to power. They have so much invested in their mentees, right? They can’t have their own families.
They’ll never be able to marry into the throne.
They’ll never be able to marry into the throne. They can’t marry into any kind of aristocracy. On some level there’s a paternal relationship but also one where there’s this constant fear of being displaced, either by a husband, or by a new adviser, or by a child or by all these other “natural” family ties. For the eunuchs, it’s best when [the mentees are] kids and as soon as they stop needing them or relying on them as much — that’s their whole livelihood, that’s their whole life.
You give such a vivid sense of all these different political concerns and religious concerns that the rulers had to incorporate for strategy. In this book, it comes across really clearly that these monarchs really are the rulers of these two kingdoms. You have the Ptolemies who are of Greek lineage, who don’t speak the local language, who have this 300-year history of rule. At one point, you have Berenice going to placate the people of Upper Egypt because the Nile has not flooded and the grain has not come. And she is not quite revolted but certainly put off by some of the coarseness of the local culture and the local deity cults.
The Ptolemies certainly would have considered themselves to be the inheritors of Alexander the Great. And the local cults are not Berenice’s favorite aspect of her rule, for sure. It’s a very foreign, it’s a very weird thing [for her]. She goes down there and there is definitely a separation [from Alexandria] … There’s almost an imperialistic vibe to it, if you’re thinking in terms of people who’ve ruled another culture for years and years the way in India you had first the Mughals and then the British, both accepting — well, the British not so much, but the Mughals — a lot of native culture, but also keeping themselves very separate. [And the ancient Greeks] certainly thought of everybody else as being lesser than they were. Even though the Egyptians had a much longer culture and lineage than anybody else at the time, which the Greeks half-recognized, but still saw anyone who didn’t speak Greek as essentially barbarian. So that’s an interesting dynamic we have for Berenice going into this.
And for Arsinoe, “Antigone” seems to be her favorite book. In the beginning, she starts out really sympathizing with Ismene. She loves her older sister, Cleopatra, she thinks of her as brave and fearless and misses her deeply, and thinks of herself as Ismene in deciding whether or not she will be able to be as bold as her older sister is. And you see shifting sympathies as the book goes on, especially as she has this other model of sister and leader before her in Berenice, you see her shifting into if not exactly Antigone position, the position of the more active sister, her own heroine.
A lot of what drew me to this book is my own experience — my own experience ruling a dynasty! [Laughs.] No, my own experience as a younger sister, and as somebody growing out of that almost worshipful idolization of the older child, because they are in so many ways — especially when you are quite little — so much better at everything than you are.