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

44 FATHER, SON, AND COURT
comparatively little has been said about them, despite the fact that
Philip II played a seminal role in the development of royal stagecraft.
Spawforth rightly called him an “impresario of monarchy.” 4 Theaters
were often used for assemblies as well as dramatic performances, thus
obscuring the distinction between political and theatrical events. 5 As
we shall see, Philip II seems purposefully to have linked palace and
theater at Aegae. Whereas scholarship on Greek women of this period
written in the 1970s and 1980s tended to stress difference between
women and men and to assume that “woman” as a category was
nearly synonymous with “private” and that “man” had a similar relationship
with “public,” more recent work nuances these categories. 6
Now we recognize that in the area of religion many women played
very public roles indeed. 7 Work on domestic space 8 and on veiling
practices 9 has altered our understanding of women’s physical place
in the Hellenic world. Observations once taken as literal are now
often understood as prescriptive. Class, place, and period now receive
more attention. There is even some realization that not all Greek
women were fi fth century Athenians. 10
Let me begin my discussion of women’s place in Argead monarchy
with the public appearances of their various avatars. The personal
names of royal women appeared in public speech and spaces. These
names themselves sometimes had a public aspect. Philip II gave two
of his daughters—Thessalonice and Europe—names that celebrated
his victories. 11 Olympias had at least three other names (Plut. Mor.
401), apparently selected to commemorate moments in her life or that
of her husband. 12 The name “Eurydice” apparently acquired dynastic
signifi cance. When Adea, the granddaughter of Philip II, married
Philip Arrhidaeus, she took the name Eurydice (Arr. FGrH 156 F
9.23). Her new name alluded to public memory of Philip II’s mother. 13
Inscriptions and monuments from the Vergina/Aegae area demonstrate
the preservation of such of a memory. 14 During the reign of
Alexander, Olympias and her daughter Cleopatra appeared on lists of
grain recipients with only their personal names and no patronymic, a
formulation that duplicated the inscriptional usage for male heads of
state. 15
While the names many Argead women bore functioned as quasititles,
they had a power that the actual title, basilissa, a development of
the early Hellenistic period, lacked. The names recognized public
identity for these women without reference to offi ce or male kin, as the
title did not. In an era when respectable Athenian women’s names
were not mentioned in public and appeared only on funerary
inscriptions, 16 Athenian speechmakers referred to Macedonian royal
women by personal name alone. 17 Hypereides fi rst mentions Olympias,