Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

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Putting Women in Their Place
Women in Public under Philip II and
Alexander III and the Last Argeads
Elizabeth Carney
P hilip II and Alexander III used the women of their dynasty to shape
the presentation of Argead monarchy. While father and son frequently
employed the images of royal women for their own purposes,
it is not clear how often royal women themselves actually appeared
in any public setting and even less clear, when they did, whether they
interacted with individuals or simply played nonspeaking roles in
ceremonies and spectacles. Indeed it is diffi cult to locate royal women
in any specifi c physical context, an actual place, public or private. In
the light of this absence of direct evidence, we historians, myself
included, have tended to temporize and not “put” these women anywhere,
1 but fi lmmakers like Oliver Stone have no such luxury. 2 In his
Alexander, the character of Olympias had to appear in some sort of
physical context. Stone chose, in one scene, to locate her, face
unveiled, in a theater audience, but during much of the rest of the
fi lm she lurks on the edge of male public space. Indeed, in the sections
of the fi lm that depict her actions after Alexander’s departure
for Asia, Olympias seems always to be in her own quarters. While
not in general sympathy with the characterization of Olympias in
Alexander, 3 I do admire Stone’s commitment to picturing the material
world that Olympias and her son inhabited. What I would like to
do in this paper is “place” Argead women. This is a topic that cannot
justifi ably be avoided on the grounds of lack of evidence; these women
were, of course, somewhere, and wherever that somewhere was makes
a difference in how one interprets the dynamics of the Argead court.
Two strands in current scholarship on the ancient world inform
my discussion of the place of women in Argead monarchy. A body of
recent work has dealt with the staging of monarchy, the ways in
which monarchs employed images, rituals, costume, and processions
to legitimize, stabilize, and empower royal dynasties. Most of this
work has focused on the Hellenistic or Roman periods. Though there
has been recognition that the Argeads also employed these methods,
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