Alexander and Persian Women

Perhaps the most dominant symbol of conquest in Greek literature is that of the captive woman, the wife, the mother, the daughter of some once great warrior now slave and perhaps concubine to the man who killed him. It is the image of Andromache led away to do demeaning work for some Greek that most haunts Hector when he foresees defeat; he hopes he is dead before it happens (Il. 6.450–65). As the quarrel over Chryseis and Briseis demonstrates (Il. 1.26–31, 110–85), possession of the women of your enemy both symbolizes victory and is victory. ¹ The family of Alexander’s mother, the Aeacids, asserted their essential Hellenism via connection to the great saga of Troy, not only by claiming descent from Achilles, through his son Neoptolemus, but also from Andromache, the captive of Neoptolemus. ²

The strong influence of the story of Troy in Greek literature has created the image of a male Greek conquering and taking captive an Asian woman. ³ By the fifth century Greeks had defined themselves as superior because they had defeated Asians, Trojans and Persians had been conflated, and by then both were characterized as mere barbarians. ⁴ Thus the capture of Asian women by Greeks could be understood as part of the victory of civilization over barbarism.

It is not incidental that the image is primarily one of a captive woman rather than a captive child; from the point of view of the ancient world, the woman is the more compelling figure. ⁵ More important, women, perhaps because they themselves could not generate status easily, were perceived to have axi ma (‘reputation’), ⁶ to carry the status of their fathers and/or husbands or sons with them, status which could then be transmitted to the male who possessed them—thus the importance of Andromache, widow of the greatest Trojan warrior.

Sexual possession of these bearers of status, whether legitimated by marriage or not, was a particularly powerful symbol of victory—a kind of second victory, both sexual and military, over the males to whom the women had belonged. Victory as rape and conquest as sexual union were commonplaces of Greek literature, metaphors but more than metaphors. ⁷

Thus, that Alexander came into control of the women of the Persian royal family and other women of the Persian elite after the battle of Issus in 333 meant both that he had achieved a real victory and that he had acquired a potent set of symbols of that victory which he could manipulate to his own ends in the varying contexts of Macedonian, Greek, and Persian audiences. However, these Persian women were or could be, thanks to another old Greek literary tradition, dangerously ambiguous symbols to the Greeks and Macedonians. This tradition insisted that Persian monarchy had lost its original toughness by the fourth century and had become overly steeped in luxury. Much of this decadence was understood as effeminacy, often blamed on the role of royal women, especially in the education of princes (e.g., Plato Laws 3.694a–696a). If anything, Greek tradition exaggerated the power and influence of royal Persian women, particularly the mothers of kings. Stories of scheming and seductive queens playing succession politics abounded. ⁸

As is now generally recognized, most of this tradition is false, ⁹ a product of the Hellenic inclination to conceptualize in terms of polarities and to associate two different sorts of “others,” the foreigner and the female, ¹⁰ coupled with Hellenic suspicion of the role of women in monarchy, ¹¹ and envy of the comparatively rich Persian culture. Greeks claimed to pride themselves on their austerity and to disdain the material wealth of the Persians, but in practice proved vulnerable to it. ¹² In fact, a considerable part of the appeal and motivation for warfare in general and the Graeco-Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire in particular was the acquisition of that wealth and luxury supposedly so disdained and so often associated with women. ¹³

Whatever one believes about the ethnicity of ancient Macedonians, one cannot assume that Macedonian views were identical to those [End Page...