Olympias and the Image of the Virago

Abstract

SURVIVING SOURCES ON OLYMPIAS, mother of Alexander the Great and wife of Philip ii of Macedon, display a level of hostility toward her perhaps equaled only by the source tradition about Cleopatra vii and Clodia. In recent years scholarship has come to terms with the partisanship of ancient treatments of the latter two; scholarly assessment of their careers is no longer synonymous with the judgments of antiquity. The same phenomenon has yet to shape scholarship on the reigns of Philip and Alexander and the period after the death of Alexander the Great. Judgments of Olympias' career and motivation, her role in Macedonian political history, and her public prestige continue to reproduce the views of ancient sources uncritically. In fact, ancient authors, while generally hostile to Olympias, are not uniformly so. Plutarch, for instance, although he provides an extremely negative picture of Olympias in his life of Alexander (e.g., 2.9, 9.5, 10.1, 4, 68.5), offers a different and much more positive picture of her in the Moralia (141b-c, 243d, 799e). Even Justin, notorious for his implausible account of Olympias' supposed outrageous behavior after the death of Philip (9.7.10-14), gives Olympias a long and heroic death scene (14.6.613). Diodorus, although generally critical of Olympias, also grants her a noble death (19.51.5). Indeed, female bravery, especially in the face of death, and often characterized as man-like, is admired by many ancient authors.1