#hellenistic queens

Tarn has striking said: “If Macedonia produced perhaps the most competent body of men the world had yet seen, the women were in all respects the men’s counterparts.” Yet in spite of the notable achievements of women, which Tarn summarizes in his following sentence, the truth is that very few of the queens in Macedonia and in Seleucid Syria possessed any political power at all and that only gradually in Egypt did a woman become the equal of a man as ruler.

From the latter part of the fourth century B.C. for about three hundred years before the Christian era women of Macedonian blood in the Hellenistic kingdoms established by the Successors of Alexander the Great showed a remarkable capacity for ruling in the manner of the kings of whom they were wives and daughters. They possessed to an extraordinary degree, “greater than the measure of women”, as is said of them in ancient historians, the qualities of energy, political foresight, daring, and courage which distinguished the men who took the world in their hands after Alexander’s death. These women had great prestige and influence and in some case great political power, though this last did not come to them as it came to the men by direct inheritance or by conquest, but through the doorway of marriage, which often afforded them opportunity to act as regent for an absent husband, or for a minor child, or as co-regent with a husband whose weakness of character allowed a queen of strong nature to come forward as co-ruler. If, as happened in the last period of the Lagid rule in Egypt, the throne came to a daughter in default of male heirs, a husband as closely connected as possible with the reigning house was sought with all haste as consort for the queen.

The influence of these queens upon the events of their times and the history of their countries was very great. The earliest Macedonian woman to take a part in political affairs of whom history tells is Eurydice, mother of Philip the Second, the last is the famous Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Cleopatra has never lacked historians, poets, and dramatists to tell the story of her life, but many of her predecessors are all but completely ignored by historians ancient and modern and are, when mentioned, often condemned en masse as unscrupulous, cruel, and wanting in all the gentler virtues […] The crime of which they are accused are dynastic murder and infidelity to their marriage vows. Tarn however has noted the fact that they were not licentious; – “no lover is anywhere recorded” for the third century queens. Those whose actions appear most culpable followed in their feminine way the rules of political procedure established and observed by kings whose cruelties are often condoned by the words “political necessity”. Among these queens are some women notable for loyalty and kindness and others whose lives were lived in quietness, of whom we know little or nothing except that they were the wives of kings. It has often been noted that especially among the Lagids in Egypt the queens remained vigorous and capable at a time when the kings were degenerate and worthless.