Panthea’s Sisters: Negotiating East-West Polarities through Gender in Xenophon

This paper examines Xenophon’s destabilizing of gender polarities in his depiction in the Hellenica of Mania of Dardanus, a widow who rules on behalf of the satrap Pharnabazus in the Persian-controlled Troad. One of the historian’s strategies is to shift the attitudes of readers by modeling the response of an authoritative character within the text, and another is to evoke traditional stereotypes associated with Eastern widow rulers, only to upturn them. I argue that Xenophon’s gender destabilization in the Eastern context goes hand in hand with his problematizing of the associated Greek binary conception of East/West.