This paper examines how Strabo’s characterization of Pythodoris, a queen of mixed descent who ruled the region around Colchis at the margins of the Roman Empire, disrupts the tropes that regulated the representation of male and female rulers in classical antiquity. It begins by considering some of the prevailing ways in which the sexes were differentiated in the literature of this epoch, particularly in relation to political power. In conclusion, it is argued that the destabilization, in Strabo’s text, of the opposition between Greco-Roman and barbarian, by which the ethnic other was constituted, helps dissolve the ideologically motivated contrast between masculine Romans and feminized Asiatics, and thus simultaneously disarms the idea that women are incapable of ruling autonomously.Empire, Power & Konstan, David. (2000). Women, Ethnicity and Power in the Roman Empire.
also the tale of Plotina in Apuleius Metamorphoses 7.6, discussed in Konstan 1994: 127-28. 16 Clark illustrates her argument with reference to the tale of Aretaphila, a contemporary of Mithridates, who, as Plutarch relates in Virtues of Women (255 E-257 E), obligingly retired from royal authority when her brief rescue operation was done. Cf. Diodorus Siculus report of the mutual cruelty of Eurydice and Olympias, rival regents in Macedonia (317 B.C.), which concludes: Everyone remembered the words of Antipater, who, as though he were pronouncing an oracle at his death, exhorted them never to permit a woman to have charge of the kingship (19.11.9). Blomqvist 1997: 87, after distinguishing between two types of politically active women in Plutarch, represented by the tyrannical figures Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Olympias on the one hand, and the virtuous Aretaphila on the other, concludes that what offends Plutarch is not that a woman acts, but that she acts in order to prom
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See also Gordon, Reynolds, Beard and Rouech 1997: 233 (with bibliography): Against the repeated view that women in Asia Minor became more capable of holding independent civic office, it has rightly been maintained that they might hold a circumscribed set of them, but only within the context of a particular family situation, most notably after the death of a father and in the absence of brothers, but also as junior adjuncts to their husbands. Generally speaking, such women were not free to act as they pleased: they were counters in primarily male conceptions of the family interest.
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18 Ordia Prima manage if her military successes are conspicuous.17 But there is another option. The Historia Augusta includes among the lives of the thirty pretenders who rose up during the reign of Gallienus a biographical sketch of Zenobia, the ruler of Parthia.18 The author begins with a moralizing complaint (Tyr. trig.30.1-2) All shame was now exhausted since, with the republic worn out, it came to the point that because Gallienus behaved miserably even women ruled well. For indeed a foreign woman, Zenobia by name..., who boasted that she was of the race of Cleopatra and the Ptolemies, after the death of her husband Odaenathus draped an imperial robe about her shoulders, bedecked herself in the raiment of Dido, went so far as to accept the crown, and, in the name of her sons ... ruled longer than her female sex allowed.
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The tropes are familiar. Zenobia is foreign, an avatar of Romes traditional enemy queens: Dido, whose adornment suggests oriental luxury and feminine display, and Cleopatra, who serves also to exhibit Zenobias hollow pride in her lineage.19 Her success, moreover, is a reflex of Gallienus effete depravity in Rome: When women are in a position to rule, men must become women this time, Roman men. Finally, Zenobias authority takes the form of an unnaturally prolonged interregnum, in which, following the death of her husband, she acts as regent for her sons.
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