Paraded through Rome in golden chains so heavy a 10-year-old could barely walk, the daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony became an unexpected object of public pity. But Cleopatra Selene II refused to let those chains define her, and went on to build a flourishing African kingdom from the ashes of her mother's empire.

This episode follows Selene from the doomed grandeur of Ptolemaic Alexandria through captivity in Augustus's household to her reign over Mauretania. It is a master class in survival, cultural preservation, and quiet defiance against the very power that destroyed her family.

• The Donations of Alexandria, where a young Selene was handed the kingdoms of Cyrenaica and Libya
• The fall of Egypt after Actium and the suspicious disappearance of her surviving brothers from the historical record
• Her arranged mar ...