Grace Harriet Macurdy and “Woman Power” in Argead Macedonia: Eurydice, Mother of Philip II
Elizabeth Carney, Clemson University
My freshman year, during what proved to be my last conversation with my paternal grandmother, I told her that I was thinking about taking Greek the following year. She urged me to do so, supporting her advice by noting that her own professor at Columbia Teacher’s College had termed classical Greek a “happy language.” Only after I read Barbara McManus’ manuscript and then checked a notebook of my grandmother’s, did I realize that my grandmother’s professor was Grace Harriet Macurdy. Given that I nearly flunked my first semester of Greek, I often questioned Macurdy’s dangerously perky advice. When, in the summer of 1980, I first began to work on Olympias, Macurdy once more entered my academic life and, as I have continued to work on the role of royal women in Macedonian monarchy, there she has remained, a genial ghost of sorts with whom I often argue.
I quickly gave up any thought of working on Macurdy myself, but spoke to Barbara on and off, over the years, about her own research on the Vassar scholar. Irish Americans both, we laughed about the fact that Macurdy’s family, fearful that people would assume that they were Irish, changed the spelling of their surname to look more overtly Scottish.[1] Barbara and I had hoped to put together a panel somewhat like the current one, but sadly that was not possible. Despite these conversations and what I had read of Barbara’s early work on Macurdy, I had no clue what an unusual life Macurdy’s was and what a remarkable biography Barbara was composing, rich in detail about a female academic of working class background who spent her life at an elite woman’s college and, despite a variety of hardships, acquired a doctorate, studied in Germany, and produced some path-breaking scholarship.
Macurdy initiated her study of royal women with a public lecture in 1925, followed by a 1927 article “Queen Eurydice and the Evidence for Woman Power in Early Macedonia,” in AJP, Hellenistic Queens in 1932, Vassal Queens in 1937.[2] Macurdy authored the first serious scholarship on royal women: her work reacted against the then common notion of a matriarchal period, the belief that inheritance in in northern monarchies was matrilineal, and the idea that royal women in Macedonia could “govern directly” as opposed to exercising influence over the men who did govern.[3] She also objected to the numerous lurid and sensationalized comments about royal women.[4]
Though Macurdy says that Eurydice, mother of Philip II, was “the first Macedonian queen who is recorded to have taken any political action,”[5] I suspect that she made Eurydice the starting point for her new line of research not only because of this but also because two contradictory source traditions about Eurydice exist. In one (Justin 7.4.7–8, 5.4–8 and to some degree the scholiast for Aeschin. 2.29), Eurydice is a murderous mother (she manages to kill her two older sons) and/or a murderous and adulterous wife (she plots unsuccessfully with her lover to kill her husband) who may have married her son’s murderer. In the other tradition (Aeschin. 2.26–9, Plut. Mor. 14c; Suda s.v. “Karanaos”), she is a heroic and successful defender of her sons’ right to the throne and her husband’s legacy (she summons the Athenian admiral Iphicrates, an adoptive son of her husband’s, to safeguard the throne for her sons), as well as a doting a mother, who later in life, learned to read and write, modeling education for her sons.
Previous scholarship had favored Eurydice the wicked activist, but Macurdy,[6] preferred a toned-down version of the alternate tradition in which Eurydice was less evil, more victimized, but somewhat less heroic. Macurdy prioritized the near contemporary Aeschines over the much later Justin, arguing that Philip II would not have countenanced, in Aeschines’ embassy speech, favorable mention of a woman who had actually killed his older brothers.[7] She noted that the story of Eurydice’s late education supports the “good mother” tradition. She also deduced that even if Eurydice did marry her son’s murderer, she had no choice about it; royal widows with sons tended to be married by successors.[8] Despite Macurdy’s compelling analysis of the sources, the murderous and disloyal Eurydice tradition persisted in scholarship until the 1990s, when Mortensen supplemented Macurdy’s arguments with some new inscriptional evidence.[9]
What stands up today about Macurdy’s work and what should be read with caution? Much does hold up. Macurdy took the lives of individual women seriously and treated royal women as a category of analysis; by focusing on women rather than men, as Barbara McManus notes, she created an entirely different perspective on events.[10] She read women into monarchy. Conclusions she made about any royal woman came only after careful analysis of the available sources, sources she painstakingly accumulated. Since she initiated discourse about the role of women in monarchy, she established the base for subsequent discussion. Naturally Hellenistic Queens now needs to be supplemented with more recent evidence and scholarship, but it remains the only general study of royal women in the Macedonian tradition and thus puts in one place material about and analysis of four or more dynasties.[11]
Two aspects of Macurdy’s interpretation remain important. She tried not to sexually stereotype these women, arguing that they were very like the males in their dynasties — she noted that there were not simply “tigress princesses” (Bevan’s phrase) but “tigerish” royal men[12] and observed that when royal women turned to conspiracy and murder, they did so for political reasons, much as did the men. She created a level playing field for analysis of the careers of these women and placed them in their appropriate cultural context. Barbara McManus concluded that Macurdy’s biographical approach recognized a kind the agency exercised by some of these women.[13] Unfortunately Macurdy often connected her implicit recognition of women’s “agency” to a perception of their total lack of political power. For instance, Macurdy insisted that: “in the actions of Eurydice there is no trace of independent power on her part. The power which she possessed was a natural gift, whether resulting from an indomitable will, or the charm of her beauty, or both, should not be confused with the question of political power.”[14]
Another enduring feature of Macurdy’s work is that, quite simply, she wrote very well. Four of her books have been reprinted, with good reason. Students still like her work and rarely notice how long ago it was composed. Her late Victorian prose is clear, livelier, the diction more vivid than is common in academic work today: this very style enables her to continue to reach a wider audience. For instance, commenting on Justin’s implausible account of Eurydice’s doings, she observes that Justin found “the crimes of a woman more piquant than those of a man…”[15]
Though Macurdy rejected ideas and attitudes that were standard in her day, she did not do so entirely and or consistently. She didn’t want to worry about the sexual virtue of women, but sometimes did.[16] Though we haven’t a clue what Eurydice looked like (even if the statue from the Eucleia sanctuary at Vergina was ever intended as a portrait of her), Macurdy assumed Eurydice’s looks might have swayed her contemporaries. She notes how much female royal behavior resembled male, but then characterizes such women as “masculine”.[17] She tends to accept anecdotal material more literally than we would today.[18] It is always hard to reject received opinion entirely, especially if one wants to publish and manuscript authors are not yet anonymous.
Two aspects of Macurdy’s work mean she needs to be read with caution. Macurdy concluded that Argead women had no “woman power” because she limited “real” power to the holding of office; influence, to her, was not power.[19] She tended to apply this view in a binary way: if royal women did not rule, then they had no power at all. There was no “woman power” because no royal woman had power equal to that of a male. Though she correctly noted that the role of women in monarchy was much more circumscribed in Macedonia than it would later be in some of the Hellenistic dynasties and that the prominence achieved by late Argead women proved ephemeral, she was comparatively uninterested in why these changes occurred. Sometimes, in connection to this view, masculine/feminine norms of Macurdy’s own day were naturalized. For instance, an ancient source may claim a woman went into battle, but Macurdy thinks she can’t really have done that.[20] Similarly, for Macurdy, Eurydice’s summoning of Iphicrates is insignificant, and probably not her idea anyway. She strongly suggests that Eurydice only summoned Iphicrates because the regent Ptolemy suggested it to her yet Aeschines — our only source for the episode — mentions only Eurydice, Ptolemy may not yet have been regent, and probably could not make the claim to adoptive relationship that Eurydice did in making the appeal to Iphicrates.[21] For Macurdy, being in the room where it happened did not much matter. She seems surprisingly uninterested in monarchy and dynasty — thus we hear of “Egypt” or “Syria” as often as the Ptolemies or Seleucids — and the fact that royal women often filled dynastic vacuums she treats as chance rather than a basic function of hereditary monarchy. She was interested in queens, but not queenship. Macurdy participated in the suffrage movement[22] and I would suggest that the effort to achieve votes for women — formal and institutionalized power, if in a democratic setting, with a focus on equality — helps to explain why she tied political power to the holding of office and considered influence and anything short of full equality insignificant. One could also wonder if her own career — characterized by struggle against those with greater institutionalized power — colored this view.[23]
Like many of her contemporaries, Macurdy speaks about “blood” (as in ethnicity) as a motivator. We hear that Illyrian women had a “strain of greater daring and wilder blood” and of “old Macedonian blood” continuing to produce “tiger princesses.”[24] In 1939, M. I. Finkelstein, also known as M. I. Finley, briefly reviewed her Vassal Queens and accused her of “racialism”.[25] Despite Barbara’s spirited defense of Macurdy’s views and the dismissive sexism of Finkelstein/Finley’s review that she notes,[26] I think he was right on this point if, by racialism, he meant not a theory of the superiority of a particular ethnic group but rather the assumption that racial differences exist in some essentialist way and help to explain human action. “Blood” is too frequent an explanation of individual action in Macurdy’s work to be written off as simply an old-fashioned way of speaking about identity. Speaking of “blood” as an explanation closes down rather than opens up analysis of motivation. Moreover, I think it helps us to understand why Macurdy focuses on the individual and downplays the ways in which monarchy and dynasty provided or removed the basis for the acquisition of power by royal women. For her the personal was not political.
No matter how hard we try not to be trapped by the conventions of our place and time — Grace Harriet Macurdy was certainly an unconventional woman who rejected many social norms of her day — we can never quite escape them. Scholarship is in the end a long conversation. In this case, Grace Macurdy began a conversation that we continue, but the conversation has moved on past its beginning, at least in part. We should continue to use her work, but be careful to note its historical context.
Bibliography
Bevan, E. 1902. The House of Seleucus. 2 volumes. London.
Carney, E. D. 2000. Women and Monarchy in Macedonia. Norman, Oklahoma.
Coşkun, A. and McAuley, A. (eds.) Seleukid Royal Women: Creation, Representation and Distortion of Hellenistic Queenship in the Seleukid Empire. Stuttgart.
Finkelstein, M. I. 1939. “Review of Vassal-Queens,” American Historical Review 44: 683.
Greenwalt, W. S. 1988. “Amyntas III and the Political Stability of Argead Macedonia” AncW 18, 35–44.
Greenwalt, W. S. 1989. “Polygamy and Succession in Argead Macedonia.”Arethusa 22, 19–45.
Macurdy G. H. 1927.“Queen Eurydice and the evidence for woman-power in early Macedonia.” AJP 48, 201–14.
Macurdy, G. H. 1928. “Basilina and Basilissa, the Alleged Title of the ‘Queen Archon’ in Athens,” AJP 49, 276–82
Macurdy, G. H. 1929. “The Political Activities and the Name of Cratesipolis.” AJP 50, 286–8.
Macurdy, G. H. 1932a. Hellenistic Queens: A Study of Woman-Power in Macedonia, Seleucid Syria, and Ptolemaic Egypt. Baltimore.
Macurdy, G. H. 1932b. “Roxane and Alexander IV in Epirus.” JHS 52, 256–61.
McManus, B. 2017. The Drunken Duchess of Vassar: Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Scholar. Columbus, Ohio.
Mortensen, K. 1992. “Eurydice: Demonic or Devoted Mother?” AHB 6, 156–71.
[1] McManus 2017:15.
[2] See also Macurdy 1928, 1929, 1932b
[3] Macurdy 1927: 201–2.
[4] Macurdy 1932: 3, for example.
[5] Macurdy 1927: 207.
[6] Most thoroughly and convincingly argued in Macurdy 1932: 17–22.
[7] Macurdy 1932: 19
[8] Macurdy 1932: 20.
[9] Mortensen 1992.
[10] McManus 2017: 200.
[11] Carney 2000 deals only with women in the dynasties that ruled Macedonia. Even now, there is still no general study of the role of women in Ptolemaic monarchy and Coşkun and McAuley is a collection of articles on Seleucid women, not a monograph on the topic.
[12] Macurdy 1932: ix, 5.
[13] McManus 2017: 202.
[14] Macurdy 1937: 212.
[15] Macurdy 1932: 19.
[16] Macurdy 1932: 3.
[17] Macurdy 1927: 203.
[18] E.g. Macurdy 1927: 202 and 213.
[19] Macurdy 1927: 202.
[20] Macurdy 1932: 232–3.
[21] Macurdy 1927: 212.
[22] McManus 2017: 188.
[23] McManus 2017: 61–77, 172–86.
[24] Macurdy 1927: 210, 1932: 5.
[25] Finkelstein 1939: 683.
[26] McManus 2017: 206–8.
