In the Source Link, you will find a gif pack of Kosha Engler in miniseries, Alexander: The Making of a God.
The miniseries was about Alexander the Great's life and rise to become one of the world's most famous military commanders. Kosha played the role of Alexander's mother Olympias.
Olympias was the eldest daughter of King Neoptolemus I of Epirus and as such was a Princess of the Molossians. She was also known as Polyxena, Myrtale and Stratonice. She was one of several wives of King Phillip II of Macedon, along with Alexander, she also bore a daughter, Cleopatra.
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"Stratonike was a prominent person in her own right, in Babylonia where she is noted in a building inscription from Borsippa, in Syria where she is associated with the development of the Atargatis temple at Hierapolis-Bambyke, in Asia Minor where she was honoured by the Ionian League, at Delos where she made numerous gifts to Apollo (as did her brother Antigonos Gonatas), at Sardis where she gave gifts to Artemis. This last example gives a clue to the reason for her prominence, for she is there described as ‘daughter of Demetrios, granddaughter of Antigonos’, to which everyone could add wife of Seleukos I, wife of Antiochos I, and by the time of her death, mother of Antiochos II and of the Queens of Kappadokia and Cyrenaica. The Babylonian diaries noted in 274 that when Antiochos went to fight the Egyptians he left Queen Stratonike in Sardis, and twenty years later he noted that she had died, also at Sardis.
Such a prominent and well-regarded woman would obviously have considerable influence at the royal court. The coincidence of her death and the peace treaty [between the Seleukids and Ptolemies] might suggest that it was her death which opened the way for the peace agreement to be made, and that she had been hostile to the new marriage [between her son Antiochus II and Berenike Phernophorus]. Her long apparent residence in Sardis will have made her a centre of power in Asia Minor, as would her ancestry and fame, and her gifts to the various deities made her influential elsewhere. Her association with Atargatis at Hierapolis-Bambyke in Syria involved the story of one of her courtiers castrating himself because his desire for her was so great. We do not have to believe the tale, but it goes along with the story of her being handed on to Antiochos I by his father, to suggest that she became the subject of male sexual innuendo and fantasy. If so, it only emphasizes her importance."
— John D. Grainger, The Rise of the Seleukid Empire (323—223 BC): Seleukos I to Seleukos III
Valentine Green, after Benjamin West - Erasistratus, a physician, realising that Antiochus's (son of Seleucus I) illness is lovesickness for his stepmother Stratonice, by observing that Antiochus's pulse rose when ever he saw her.
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
Description
Struck by a mysterious illness, Antiochus lies in bed near death. His grieving father, who has recently taken Stratonice as his wife, summons a doctor. Noticing that the sight of the young woman quickens Antiochus’ pulse and that passion causes his sickness, the doctor describes the youth’s predicament to his father, who selflessly offers Stratonice to his son. The subject, both a love story and an example of parental devotion, enjoyed considerable popularity well into the 1800s.
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Which is your favorite couple from Ancient Greece?
Alexander the Great/Hephaistion
Alexander the Great/Roxanne
Pericles/Aspasia
Leonidas/Gorgo
Socrates/Xanthippe
Seleucus/Apama
Antiochus I/Stratonice
Pelopidas/Epaminondas
Philip/Olympias
Phryne/Praxiteles
Harmodius/Aristogeiton
Cleopatra/Perdiccas
Voting ended onFeb 9, 2024
Based on this post from @suburbanbeatnik. There are some others that unfortunately I couldn't mention due to limited space, so I picked the most famous/the ones I liked the most.
"No poetic celebration of a Seleucid queen survives extant, but an anecdote preserved by Lucian sheds intriguing light on Seleucid poetic practice (Pro Imaginibus 5) [...] Queen Stratonice, while still the wife of Seleucus I (c. 300-294 BCE), is said to have set up a competition to see which poet could best praise her hair:
She said that Stratonice the wife of Seleucus did something similar and even more ridiculous than this: she set up a contest for poets with a talent as the prize for whoever could best praise her hair – despite the fact that she was bald and didn’t even have a few hairs of her own. Even so, although this was the state of her head and everybody knew that it had happened because of a long illness, she listened to those wretched poets calling her hair hyacinthine, plaiting thick tresses, and comparing her completely non-existent curls to celery.
This is an intriguing passage, with many peculiar details. Stratonice had apparently lost all her locks through a protracted illness, but this did not stop Seleucid poets, impelled by the prospect of a talent’s reward, from praising her ‘hair’ in ornate and figurative terms. In particular, the description of Stratonice’s allegedly ‘thick’ (οὔλους) and ‘hyacinthine’ (ὑακινθίνας) hair recalls the beautified locks of the Homeric Odysseus, whom Athena divinely enhanced before his meetings with both Nausicaa and Penelope:
[Athena made him] taller and broader to look upon, and from his head she made the locks flow thick like the hyacinth flower.
Such an underlying Homeric analogy renders this praise doubly culpable in Panthea’s eyes: not only does it falsify the truth of Stratonice’s bald state (it is not ‘appropriate’ to her nature, cf. προσόν, Pro imag. 2), but it also associates the queen with a major figure of the heroic age, transgressing Panthea’s sense of encomiastic decorum (cf. Pro imag. 7). The whole scene is a travesty of κολακεία σαφής, ‘outright flattery’. In such a context, the verb ἀναπλεκόντων is particularly appropriate, since it not only denotes the plaiting or garlanding of hair, but also evokes a common metaphor of poetic production: the Seleucid poets ‘weave’ Stratonice’s locks into existence, fashioning a deceptive and poetic εἰκών (cf. εἰκαζόντων). Like the goddess Athena, they are purveyors of artifice.
Despite (or because of) its oddities, this anecdote is particularly alluring for our exploration of the poetic celebrations of Seleucid queens. Before going any further, however, we must assess the reliability of Lucian’s account. What should we make of this anecdote? And is it any truer than the author’s playfully apocryphal ‘True Stories’? Lucian is a difficult source, frequently inventive and creative in his handling of the (literary) past, so we must be extremely careful. […]
Nevertheless, however tempting it is to see Lucian up to his old tricks, in this case I believe there are substantial grounds for seeing the Syrian author building on some kind of prior tradition and not just freely inventing. For a start, it is significant that Lucian names Stratonice explicitly here, unlike the anonymous noblewoman of his first anecdote. Such specificity requires explanation. Either Lucian chose her as the butt of an invented joke (perhaps through fondness for her character and a sense of geographical kinship), or rather he drew on a pre-existing tradition attached to her name. Given the degree to which this episode maps onto other accounts attached to this Seleucid queen, the second of these options seems more plausible. Daniel Ogden has noted how well the whole episode coheres with Lucian’s account of Stratonice in the De Dea Syria, in which the queen (again, while still married to Seleucus) suffers from a serious illness after failing to heed a dream-request from Hera Atargatis to construct a temple in Hierapolis Bambyce (μιν μεγάλη νοῦσος ἔλαβεν, Syr. D. 19). Such a ‘serious illness’ (μεγάλη νοῦσος) parallels the ‘long illness’ (νόσου μακρᾶς) which caused her baldness in the anecdote and which ‘everybody was aware of’ (ἁπάντων εἰδότων, Pro imag. 5). In both these passages, Lucian appears to be building off different elements of the same Stratonice story.
Nor is the cohesion of this Stratonice story restricted to Lucian’s own corpus. As Ogden has further noted, the ‘healthy sense of self-deprecating humour’ which Stratonice seems to show in Lucian’s account is paralleled by another anecdote concerning the queen’s portrayal by a different creative artist, in this case a painter:
innotuit … Ctesicles reginae Stratonices iniuria. nullo enim honore exceptus ab ea pinxit volutantem cum piscatore, quem reginam amare sermo erat, eamque tabulam in portu Ephesi proposuit, ipse velis raptus. regina tolli vetuit, utriusque similitudine mire expressa. (Pliny, HN 35.140)
Ctesicles became famous as a result of his insult to Queen Stratonice. Because she did not receive him in honourable fashion, he painted her rolling around with the fisherman with whom she was rumoured to be in love. He put the picture on display in Ephesus’ harbour before making a quick escape by sail. The queen forbade its removal, because he had represented each of them with amazing accuracy.
Here too, we find a playfully subversive Stratonice who seems to revel in her unqueenly behavior (adultery with a fisherman), just as in Lucian she revels in her unqueenly appearance (baldness). This Pliny passage further highlights a recurring aspect of Stratonice’s character which is only implicit in the Lucianic anecdote: her erotic allure. The queen’s amatory escapades with the fisherman parallel other accounts of her alleged liaisons with her step-son Antiochus (Syr. D. 17-18; Plut. Dem. 38) and the courtier Combabus (Syr. D. 19-27), all of which seem to reflect her cultic association with Aphrodite. This same element is present in Lucian’s account, but on a more implicit level through the poet’s description of Stratonice’s ‘hair’. Flower similes are a staple feature of erotic literature, a topos which lends an underlying amatory flavour to the comparison of her locks to hyacinth and celery, especially given the erotic association of both flowers. And this is reinforced further by the Seleucid poets’ Odyssean echoes, which point to two specific Homeric moments in which Odysseus’ beauty is divinely enhanced before his encounters with Nausicaa and Penelope (scenes endowed with a great deal of erotic potential).
Stratonice’s ill health (νοῦσος, Syr. D. 19; νόσου, Pro imag. 5) may also reflect this erotic association. It is well known that the noun νόσος/ νοῦσος can refer to lovesickness as much as a real disease. Indeed, this meaning dominates the story of Antiochus’ love for Stratonice, in which the doctor explicitly recognizes the prince’s ‘illness’ as ‘love’ (ἔγνω τὴν νοῦσον ἔρωτα ἔμμεναι, Syr. D. 17). But one particular symptom of such extreme desire is hair loss. […] The whole story of Stratonice’s long illness and hair loss thus complements and resonates fruitfully against the queen’s larger association with immoderate passions.
Considered against the larger backdrop of the ‘Stratonice tradition’, therefore, Lucian’s anecdote in the Pro Imaginibus does not seem so fanciful. Indeed, it reflects key aspects of her character and story that can be found elsewhere: her illness, sly humour and erotic allure. Taking the evidence together, I think it likely that Lucian drew this episode from a pre-existing source.
Of course, this conclusion does not prove the strict historicity of the episode, something which is ultimately unprovable on current evidence. Rather, it suggests that traditions surrounding Stratonice were already circulating in antiquity before Lucian’s day, part of the larger canon of Seleucid legend which has been so well charted by recent scholars. Like many other elements of that legend, however, it is likely that this tale too can be traced back to the myth-making of the Seleucid court itself. At various other points in his works, Lucian appears to treat Seleucid myth in a way that seems to echo Seleucid ideology and literature. The romance of Antiochus and Stratonice (Syr. D. 17-18), for example, has been traced back to Seleucid propaganda, while Lucian’s account of Antiochus’ Elephant victory (Zeux. 8-11) also appears to reflect Seleucid commemorations in the wake of the battle. Given these parallels, it is likely that Lucian’s account of Stratonice’s baldness can also be traced back to Seleucid traditions, even if perhaps in a comically distorted form."
— Thomas J. Nelson, "The Coma Stratonices: Royal Hair Encomia and Ptolemaic-Seleucid Rivalry?", Women and Power in Hellenistic Poetry