The Buffed Historian

Bust and artistic recreation of Cleopatra Selene II This post takes a much deeper look into what turned out to be a rather popular thread on my official Legionary Books Facebook Page . The story of Cleopatra's oft-forgotten daughter, Cleopatra Selene II, and their family can best be described as "complicated." First off, in light of that atrocious Netflix series claiming to be a documentary, let's sort out the whole racial elephant in the room and get that out of the way. I don't care what Jada Pinkett Smith says, Cleopatra was not black. Nor was she white. She looked nothing like Adele James or Elizabeth Taylor. Heck, she wasn't even Egyptian! The Ptolemies ruled Egypt, but were ethnically Alexandrian Greek and Macedonian. And because they were obsessed with keeping their bloodlines "pure," they were notoriously inbred. And we're not even talking cousins. Cleopatra's first two husbands were also her brothers! Given the attention-to-detail an...

  Laverie Vallee (stage name: Charmion), pioneer strongwoman and trapeze artist I've always been attracted to strong women. I was six years old when I first saw Conan the Barbarian (the classic original starring Arnold, not the crappy remake). When I saw Sandahl Bergman fighting alongside Arnold as Valeria the Valkyrie, I was immediately enthralled. Despite being years away from finding the opposite sex interesting, seeing an athletic, genuinely strong woman was as enthralling as Arnold's massive chest and biceps. It was the same when, a year later, I gazed upon Virginia Hey in The Road Warrior ... and before you ask, yes, my parents let us watch pretty much anything growing up. A few years later, when I was eleven, Aliens became one of my favourite films. Sigourney Weaver was a bad-ass, though I was immediately drawn to Jenette Goldstein as Marine PFC Jenette Vasquez. The moment she started doing behind-the-neck pullups, I was enraptured. There are other examples, such as Li...