Grace Harriet Macurdy on the Seleucid Queens
Gillian Ramsey, Campion College at the University of Regina
There is great power in naming a thing, bringing it into the light, calling it out, identifying it as something with a meaning which must be explored. Grace Harriet Macurdy left a powerful legacy when she named the “woman-power” of the Hellenistic queens.
It was a long time before anyone seriously took up the study of this woman-power again[1] (Elizabeth Carney, on the Macedonian queens), and now at present Hellenistic queens are a more popular topic of discussion, with a number of recent publications.[2] One reason why it took so long for the question of woman-power to re-emerge is that Macurdy so thoroughly compassed it in her volumes Hellenistic Queens (1932) and Vassal Queens (1937). It was only lately that enough new evidence, largely epigraphical, accumulated and afforded the basis for a new look. Indeed, it is still the case that few, if any of the new studies could avoid citing Macurdy — her work remains foundational, canonical even.
Macurdy’s central effort was to take the most powerful queens, all of them vilified in the ancient literature, and revise their personal histories. She transformed them from dangerously, bizarrely, disturbingly, un-womanly power-crazed exceptions to human politics, to being perfectly normal examples of powerful persons in the ancient world.
Her guiding tenet was that these queens acted according to the same logic of getting and wielding power as did kings of the time, and therefore must be evaluated on exactly the same terms as the kings. As she said in her introduction to Hellenistic Queens: “these queens … are generally reputed to have been wicked. This reputation rests, as does the statement that they possessed power equal to that of the men, on the acts of a few of the many who were queens in the Hellenistic centuries. Of these few it may be said that if they were in nature and character the counterparts of the men, they should be judged by the same standard.”[3]
Power was power, and any queen’s bloodthirsty behaviour sprang from precisely the same undercurrent of violence as did any king’s, not because the female brain becomes unhinged when faced with momentous political decisions.
Thus, Macurdy focused on only the queens who self-actualized the most and ruled with the same kind of strong-arm ruthlessness as men. If we restrict her examples solely to the Seleucid dynasty these are queens who famously killed their husbands, killed their friends, left allies to die, pitted their children against one another, started wars, and married too many times. These were the ones most written about, these were the ones in need of a biographical rehabilitation, these were the ones who demonstrated best the gender non-specific violences of Hellenistic rulership.
And yet, she called it “woman-power”.
Did Grace Macurdy understand woman-power to be a specific category of leadership? Ought we to now?
This is a question which does, and ought to, exercise those of us in the field today. Following on Macurdy’s work, I have researched Seleucid queens, particularly some of the ones less studied — partly because evidence for them had until more recently been scanty, but mostly because they were “good” queens, nice, well-behaved ones who did little to incur any historiographical attention (read vilification) either from contemporary commentators or modern interpreters. Based on this research I am inclined to call a much wider array of queens powerful than was Macurdy. Although not remembered as violent, these women were powerful.[4] But there remains a vexing question: ought I, like Macurdy, to regard queenly consortship, or “woman-behind-the-man” forms of power, as indulgently and insultingly dismissive of women, and therefore inadequate as explanations of the evidence? How then does one handle productively the brand of agency and influence wielded by a queen who did not go around murdering people?
One leavening reminder does occur: not all the kings were the bloodthirsty type, and there are, not many, but a few examples of kings with so-called quiet reigns. So as much as it is important to celebrate accurately the strong woman-power of Macurdy’s tigerish queens using the same categories of analysis as for the violent kings, it is also possible and important to start comparing the quiet queens and kings using the same terminology. In fact, given that at this stage, more is written about the quiet queens than the kings, we have the unique opportunity to apply terms of reference devised for studying female leaders to male ones!
One of Macurdy’s legacies for the study of the Seleucid royalty, at least, then is a methodology: a commitment to using the same framework of analysis for both male and female rulers, regardless of whether they pursued aggressive violence or more negotiatory methods of leading. Her emphasis on how earlier studies had “romanticized” the Hellenistic queens by conceiving of their violence as a uniquely feminine failing, finding a kind of perverse pleasure in relaying the litany of crimes against nature committed by these women, is very important. With it she holds us to a standard of equity: treating male and female rulers as dispassionately as each other and eschewing the sentimental soft-focus we might instinctively use for a magnificent specimen of female achievement.
Another of Macurdy’s legacies for the field has more to do with the specific family culture of the Seleucid dynasty. Almost every Seleucid workshop or conference that I’ve attended has had these two questions raised: 1) did queens get divorced or “put aside” (to use Macurdy’s language) to make way for a younger wife? 2) was it only queens who married into the dynasty who behaved like powerful, aggressive leaders?
I will not attempt to answer those specific questions, rather I will reflect briefly on their significance.
Macurdy’s work has been the basis for queenship studies; she established the canonical facts of the queens’ biographies. Therefore, when she stated that several of the queens were set aside and demoted, everyone since has run with the idea.[5] The insulting “divorce” of at least one queen has in the past been put forth as a cause for war (a stance now debunked[6] — but it is taking a long time for the argument to disappear from the communis opinio). I don’t fault Macurdy for her statements, but they have a lasting disadvantage: to legitimize assumptions about the kind of patriarchy operating within the Seleucid dynasty or even among Hellenistic royalty in general. As we study the newer evidence, we are seeing that they were indeed patriarchal, but not in the same expression as we might experience today or observe through a contemporary lens. So, it is important that as we pursue the commitment to analyze these Hellenistic personages and their systems of power, we also articulate what kind of patriarchy and family structures they had, not assuming that we know them.
Likewise, all the aggressive queens of the Seleucids studied by Macurdy were wives of ruling kings and therefore outsiders who brought the attitudes of their birth dynasty to bear on that regime. One thing we have thus questioned is whether the tensions surrounding queens’ violence and the terrible accounts given for them represent a remembrance of deeper struggles between ruling ideologies and loyalties to one dynasty over another, rather than mere misogyny in the ancient records. If we really want to honour Macurdy’s legacy of woman-power, it would be a profitable course to trace out the potential for enate ideologies of queenship passed from mothers to daughters or between sisters. Macurdy did make forays into this type of consideration, they are very much worth taking further.
A question I find myself struggling to answer is how to strike the right balance between analyzing Hellenistic woman-power as it was in its own historical idiom (which will involve frequent deconstruction of the period’s negativity surrounding women in leadership), and talking about it in terms which will strike a chord with today’s mindset, particularly for millennial-generation students raised on a different feminism than what Macurdy fought for. An example from a different area of study serves here.
Scholars of ancient prostitution are in the midst of a debate over how to frame it.[7] Some are adamant that the vast majority of prostitutes were slaves and forced into their profession against their will either by their owners or because they lived in such poverty that there was no other option. They were trapped in a phenomenally unjust position; ancient opprobrium for slaves, the poor, and prostitutes alike makes very clear the despised state and wretched conditions in which they lived and worked.
Others argue vehemently for a more nuanced understanding of ancient sex work, taking a cue from current sensibilities about women’s choice to detach social disgrace from profiting from one’s sexuality. They argue that, even in the lowliest of states, it is now and was then possible for women to exercise agency and claim a form of power for themselves by choosing, or we might say “leaning in” to sex work. The shame men might wish to put on sex workers rebounds upon themselves as those workers repossess their own bodies and fully inhabit their sexuality.
Both outlooks have their place in the discourse right now and challenge preconceptions about the availability and functioning of justice and power. I personally tend toward the former perspective. I have seen the latter, however, in my classrooms, so I know first-hand that it is current among young undergraduates as their go-to stance when they wish to present as enlightened, earnest, justice-oriented investigators. I had the rather (to me) alarming experience of grading a class presentation by a young female undergrad on the topic of Athenian prostitutes in which she enthusiastically outlined the ways that these women had chosen sex work as though it was one in a wide array of viable career options and then built lives for themselves as empowered and happy contributors to the social good. The embracing of one’s own sexual power is most certainly now being inculcated in young women as the next necessary step in feminism, which is fine, but it is being understood on the ground as a way to beat men at their own game of sexual aggression. And this brings us back to the question of those violent queens.
A similar methodological and interpretive dichotomy is at work, in my mind, for the field of Hellenistic queenship studies. One argument might be that our primary objective is to discuss the nature of this queenship in its own idiom, dissecting the terms of reference provided by the ancient sources to get at the truth within that society. This is what Macurdy did with her de-sentimentalization of Hellenistic woman-power. We result with the picture of Hellenistic royalty obsessed with violent conquest as the metric for success, and hell-bent on outdoing rival kingdoms. Into this environment enter the queens, some of whom navigated the same imperatives with equal forcefulness, either out of a desperate need to survive or in the pursuit of success.
Another argument might be that our task now is to take the ancient material in the direction of contemporary gender studies and emphasize the queens’ choices to lean into their own monstrous power. Forget parsing out how the negative historiography has misrepresented the real circumstances, and instead embrace the queenly tigerishness, that feminine violence, those nasty women. This is what will make the ancient story relevant in today’s world.
I do worry that if I push too hard for the notion of the queens’ agency as a particularly feminine power structure (woman-power as a distinctly different entity from man-power), I will end up sentimentalizing their sexuality, deviancy, violence, and exceptionality just like those whom Macurdy criticized for romanticizing the facts. I want to continue creating a herstory which does justice to my subjects without regenerating an historiographic taxonomy of sex, power, and value which limits them all over again.
It is, of course the great privilege and pleasure of academia that we may continue to explore these never-ending(?) problems. Grace Harriet Macurdy was prescient for both her own day and ours now, and her legacy for Seleucid, Hellenistic, queenship, and gender studies remains as vital as it ever was.
Bibliography
Bradford Welles, C. 1934. Royal Correspondence of the Hellenistic Period. New Haven.
Carney, E. 1987. “The Career of Adea-Eurydice,” Historia 36, 496–502.
Carney, E. 2000. Women and Monarchy in Ancient Macedonia. Norman.
Carney, E. 2006. Olympias, Mother of Alexander the Great. London and New York.
Carney, E. 2013. Arsinoe of Egypt and Macedon: A Royal Life. Oxford.
Coşkun, A. 2016. “Laodike I, Berenike Phernophoros, Dynastic Murders, and the Outbreak of the Third Syrian War (253–246 BC),” in A. Coşkun and A. McAuley (eds) Seleukid Royal Women: Creation, Representation and Distortion of Hellenistic Queenship in the Seleukid Empire. Stuttgart: 107–34.
Coşkun, A. and McAuley, A. (eds). 2016. Seleukid Royal Women: Creation, Representation and Distortion of Hellenistic Queenship in the Seleukid Empire. (Historia Einzelschriften 240) Stuttgart.
Kosmin, P. J. 2014 The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire. Cambridge, Mass.
Macurdy, G. H. 1932. Hellenistic Queens. Baltimore.
McGinn, T. A. J. 2014. “Prostitution: Controversies and New Approaches,” in Thomas K. Hubbard, (ed.) A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities. Malden and Oxford.
Pomeroy, S. 1975. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York.
Ramsey, G. 2011. “The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities,” Gender & History 23/3, 510–27.
Ramsey, G. 2016. “The Diplomacy of Seleukid Women: Apama and Stratonike,” in A. Coşkun and A. McAuley (eds) Seleukid Royal Women: Creation, Representation and Distortion of Hellenistic Queenship in the Seleukid Empire, Stuttgart: 87–106.
[1] Pomeroy 1975, in part of the chapter “Hellenistic Women”; Carney 1987.
[2] See for example Carney 2000; 2006; 2013; Coşkun and McAuley 2016.
[3] Macurdy 1932: Preface, x.
[4] Ramsey 2011; 2016.
[5] Macurdy 1932: 78 (of Apame), 83 (of Laodice I), 93 (of Laodice wife of Antiochus III). As for the reception of this putting aside, the bibliography is long and varied; highlights can be bookended by the authoritative Royal Correspondence of the Hellenistic Period of Bradford Welles 1934, in which he titles an epigraphic dossier “…Concerning a sale of land to the Divorced Queen Laodice”, p. 89, and Kosmin’s 2014 volume, in which: “Antiochos II divorced his wife”, p. 18–9 (both italics mine).
[6] Coşkun 2016, especially pages 115–18.
[7] See McGinn 2014.
