Power Couples in Antiquity

Transversal Perspectives

Anne Bielman Sánchez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351272421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Everyone can name a couple made up of famous, rich, or powerful partners, who cultivate a joint media image which is stronger than either of their individual identities. Since the 1980s they have been known as "power couples". Yet while the term is recent, the concept is not. More than 2, 000 years ago, Greeks and Romans became aware of the media potential of couples and used it as an instrument to reinforce political power. Notable examples are Philip II of Macedonia and Olympias, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, or the Emperor Augustus and his wife Livia.

Power Couples in Antiquity brings together the reflections of ten specialists on Greek and Roman power couples from the fourth century BCE to the first century CE. It is focused on the birth and the development of the "ruling couple" in the Hellenistic Greek kingdoms and in Rome between the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. By taking some emblematic cases, this book analyses the redistribution of public and private roles within these couples, examines the sentimental bonds or the relations of domination established between partners, explores how these relationships played out in private, and highlights the many common points between ancient and contemporary power couples. This book offers a fascinating insight into power dynamics in the ancient world, exploring not only the subtleties within these often complex relationships, but also their relationships with their subjects through the cultivation and manipulation of their joint public image.

1An exceptional Argead couple

Philip II and Olympias

Elizabeth Carney

This chapter focuses, primarily, on one and almost certainly the first exceptional Argead (the dynasty that ruled Macedonia from the seventh century BCE until 309 BCE) couple, Philip II and Olympias, although it also examines a second, perhaps even more exceptional Argead couple, Philip III and Adea Eurydice. I want to consider why and how the role of royal women in the late Argead and early Hellenistic monarchy changed in a way that made such public couples something of a norm and an important way monarchy and dynasty were pictured and understood.¹

Initially, monarchy in Macedonia was not – judging by extant sources – conceptualised as a series of royal couples but rather as a series of reigning males, each somehow descended from an earlier male Argead; biology required a couple but presentation apparently did not.² Argead kings probably practiced polygamy from an early date.³ Whether a cause or consequence of this lack of focus on couples, no institutionalised chief wife or female title existed.⁴ When narrative sources mention very early royal women, they refer to royal daughters, widows, or mothers, not to wives. Admittedly, the paucity of evidence for this period could exaggerate the apparent lack of interest in royal pairings.

Royal wives and their marriages became somewhat more visible during and to some degree because of the career of Eurydice, mother of Philip II (359–336) and wife of Amyntas III (394/3–370/69).⁵ Justin⁶ claims that Eurydice committed adultery with her son-in-law, plotted to murder her husband, and put her lover on the throne, but that Amyntas pardoned her, for the sake of their children. Justin⁷ also alleges that, undaunted, Eurydice later killed her two oldest sons. The scholiast for Aeschines 2.29 attributes only one murder to Eurydice, that of her eldest son, but he also claims that she acted in concert with her – according to him – second husband, Ptolemy, though whether that man was king or regent at the time or, for that matter, her husband, is uncertain.⁸

The monuments Eurydice herself erected commemorated her either as a mother or as a patron, and they employed her personal name and a patronymic. Her husband is not mentioned in her three known dedicatory inscriptions, two of which were found on the site of the Eucleia sanctuary at Vergina/Aegae. In addition, the survival of an inscribed statue base, at Palatitsia, indicates that a portrait of Eurydice once stood near Vergina; it too refers to her by patronymic alone. This base was apparently part of a statue group, but one too large to portray only a couple.⁹ The Philippeum, a building Philip decided to have constructed at Olympia after his great victory at Chareronea in 338, did include statues of Amyntas and Eurydice, apparently placed next to each other, to Philip II’s left, but their images form part of a three-generational construct; they appear together as progenitors – perhaps a first in itself – not really as a couple. Five figures, in all, once stood in the Philippeum.¹⁰

Eurydice was an exceptional woman, but she was not portrayed nor did she portray herself as part of a couple, exceptional or no. This is not surprising since nearly everything we know about her comes from the period of her widowhood. Her career demonstrates that royal women had begun to be public figures, but in her case, this change first happened because of the battle to insure the succession and survival of her sons,¹¹ and later because of the need to demonstrate that she and they were legitimate. If, as I believe, many of these “public appearances” of Eurydice date to the reign of her youngest son, Philip II, then they are also examples of Philip’s elevation of the royal family to prominence in monuments and public events, an elevation often including the women of his family. Apart from his desire to confirm his mother’s and thus his own respectability, Philip was certainly interested in showing his domination and that of his family.

Our sources – of course, nearly all date to the Roman era – do indeed portray Philip and Olympias as a couple. One could argue that Plutarch (in the Life of Alexander but in some of the essays as well) virtually invented Olympias and Philip as a couple, a dysfunctional but certainly exceptional one. While Plutarch’s biographies often focus on the formative years of the person under consideration, the amount of attention Plutarch devotes to Olympias, as well as to Philip, is striking. Plutarch need not have treated them as a couple, particularly granted that Philip had six other wives, but the first part of the Alexander centres on Philip and Olympias as a pair, though primarily as a parental pair.

Plutarch implausibly asserts that their marriage was a love match occasioned by their chance meeting, when both were young, at their initiation into the mysteries at Samothrace.¹² Similarly, he describes Philip’s last marriage to the young Cleopatra as a love match,¹³ and that of Alexander and Roxane as well.¹⁴ Plutarch thus romanticises (and eroticises) marriages actually initiated as part of political alliances.¹⁵ He does seem to characterise these marriages as either the consequence of the previous existence of a couple, as in the case of Philip and Olympias, or as marking the creation of one.

Plutarch treats the sexual union of Philip and Olympias as momentous yet rather frightening: before the marriage is consummated, Olympias dreams that a thunderbolt strikes her womb and causes a fire; later Philip has a prophetic dream about sealing his wife’s womb with the device of a lion, a dream that is interpreted to mean that Olympias is pregnant with a lion-like son.¹⁶ Next Plutarch¹⁷ asserts that Philip stopped having sex with Olympias, or at least having sex with her often, because he peeked in and saw a snake sleeping beside her. Supposedly he concluded that this meant either that she might work magic on him or that she was sleeping with a greater being.¹⁸ Plutarch follows his story of scary royal sex with a description of Olympias’ enthusiasm for and patronage of festivals for women that were wild (and snakey) and frightened men. Plutarch does not tell us directly how Philip felt about this group religious experience Olympias sponsored, but his narrative connects the two stories. He comments, after the account of Philip’s sexual reluctance but before Plutarch describes the festival, that there is another story about these things – Olympias and snakes presumably –,¹⁹ so Philip’s reaction to the festival was probably negative.

Plutarch²⁰ next reveals that Philip had consulted the Delphic oracle after his prophetic dream, and that the oracle told him to sacrifice to and especially venerate the god Ammon, even though it warned that he would soon lose the eye he would have used to peep at Olympias sleeping with the snake. Citing Eratosthenes,²¹ Plutarch tells another tale, that before Alexander’s departure, Olympias confided in Alexander the secret of his origin and ordered him to be concerned with things worthy of his birth. Plutarch comments, however, that others say that she herself rejected this notion (of the divinity of Alexander’s father) and, if jokingly, implied that it was actually Alexander’s own idea. A long section follows in which Alexander demonstrates his precociousness and potential, sometimes in a kind of competition with his father.²²

After recounting these stories of Alexander’s early promise, Plutarch then turns to the trouble developing between Alexander and Philip, trouble that involved Olympias. Plutarch²³ faults Philip’s polygyny since he asserts that his marriages and affairs caused trouble in the royal household as well as accusations and major disagreements between father and son, but Plutarch also specifically blames Olympias. He describes her as difficult and ready to anger and notes that she encouraged her son to quarrel with his father. Plutarch’s diction implies that these two factors – Philip’s many marriages and Olympias’ character – were an issue even before Philip’s supposed love match with Cleopatra. He then goes on to describe the famous quarrel between father and son at a drinking party, during which the Philip’s new bride’s guardian, Attalus, encouraged the Macedonians to ask the gods for a legitimate heir born from Philip and Cleopatra. According to Plutarch, when Alexander threw a cup at Attalus in response to this apparent questioning of his legitimacy, Philip drew a sword on his own son, but was too drunk to do more. Alexander mocked him and then left, taking Olympias with him. Whereas in the Alexander, Olympias is simply t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Power couples: from antiquity to the contemporary world
• 1 An exceptional Argead couple: Philip II and Olympias
• 2 Looking for the Seleucid couple
• 3 A change of husband: Cleopatra Thea, stability and dynamism of Hellenistic royal couples (150–129 bce)
• 4 Marital crises or institutional crises? Two Ptolemaic couples under the spotlight*
• 5 The magistrate and the queen*: Antony and Cleopatra
• 6 Mark Antony and the women at his side*
• 7 An exceptional and eternal couple: Augustus and Livia
• 8 A love poet’s script for an Augustan power couple: Propertius 4.11
• 9 Claudius and his wives: The normality of the exceptional?
• 10 Power couples in antiquity: An initial survey
• Index