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

PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE 49
from now vanished fabric have been found in both male and female
burials, including the tomb at Vergina attributed to Philip II’s mother
Eurydice. Throughout the Hellenic world, luxurious dress was a vital
aspect of an elite woman’s self-presentation. 58 What has survived is
golden jewelry: the beautiful diadem and lovely myrtle wreath from
Tomb II, and the quantities of gold jewelry and decorations from the
presumably royal female archaic burials. 59 Granted the amount of
gold jewelry regularly found in elite Macedonian burials, surely those
of royal women would have been even more impressive.
Whether the story that Arsinoë, widow of Lysimachus, escaped her
enemies by omitting her royal attire and royal litter and by persuading
someone else to wear her robes and occupy the litter (Polyaen. 8.57)
is literally true, 60 it implies that, at a slightly later period, a royal
woman’s face may not have been visible, but the outward signs of her
identity, the fabric of her clothing and litter, were. Llewellyn-Jones
has demonstrated that veiling customs may mean that women were at
once in public, but at the same time privatized by their veiling. 61 He
argues that veils were the Hellenic norm for women, 62 that they got
more common and more concealing in the Hellenistic period, and
that they may be connected to the greater mobility of women in that
period. In effect, he suggests that the veil was a portable house that a
woman brought with her into public areas. 63
We should picture these royal women, faces shadowed by a veil or
perhaps partially visible through translucent fabric, gleaming with
gold and purple, perfumed, and sometimes riding in a litter equally
luxuriously decorated. Their dress, 64 their jewels, and even the vehicles
that carried them showed the wealth and glamour of the monarchy.
65 Sumptuary legislation in Athens from an earlier period reminds
us that elite families had long employed their female members to display/stage
their wealth and power. 66 Argead women performed a similar
role. As Llwellyn-Jones observes, a woman could be “covered and
conspicuous at the same time . . . .” 67 At weddings and funerals royal
women costumed themselves for their roles; one could understand
their own funerals and sometimes splendid tombs as costume of
another sort. 68 In death as in life royal females displayed Argead
power and wealth.
Better evidence for female royal dress exists for the last days of
the Argead dynasty. After the deaths of Philip and Alexander, no
fully competent royal males being present, some royal women certainly
used their attire to shape their image and stage their own
power, as kings did. According to Duris ( ap. Ath. 13.560f), when the
armies associated with Olympias and Adea Eurydice confronted
each other in fall of 317, Olympias appeared dressed as a Bacchant,