Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World 1350050105, 9781350050105

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
FIGURES
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Women and the Orient: A ‘double estrangement’
Ancient powerful women and the Orientalizing gaze
Visualizing the ancient (Oriental) world
Women and the Orient: The female gaze
Cleopatras
Contents of this book
CHAPTER 1 SEMIRAMIDE IN INDIA: THE RECEPTION OF AN ANCIENT ORIENTAL WARRIOR QUEEN IN BAROQUE OPERA
Semiramis in India – main sources and narratives from Antiquity to early modern times
Big opera – Semiramide in India
Semiramide dopo India – an opera perspective
CHAPTER 2 CARIAN QUEENS FROM THE ORIENT TO GREECE AND BACK: THE RECEPTION OF ARTEMISIA I AND ARTEMISIA II
The evidence: Artemisia I and Artemisia II in the ancient sources
Artemisia as a role model for European ruling queens and queen mothers
Artemisia goes to the movies
Postmodern Artemisia
CHAPTER 3 THE PERSIAN BOY, THE BACTRIAN GIRL AND THE MAN FROM MACEDON: GENDER AND ORIENTALISMS IN MARY RENAULT’S ALEXANDER THE GREAT TRILOGY
Bagoas, Roxane and the ancient sources
Mary Renault, the Persian boy and the Bactrian girl
CHAPTER 4 DRYPETIS IN FACT AND (FAN)FICTION*
Drypetis in the ancient sources
Drypetis in fanfiction
Conclusion
CHAPTER 5 EXOTIC, EROTIC, HEROIC? WOMEN OF CARTHAGE IN WESTERN IMAGINATION
Preface
The tragic woman
The exotic woman
The vanished woman
The resurrected woman
Conclusions
CHAPTER 6 IN THE NAME OF CLEOPATRA: EMMA HAMILTON AND CATHERINE STEPNEY MAKE THEIR MARK
Cleopatra’s after-life in Europe
The Augustan legacy
Emma Hamilton: Cleopatra personified
Cleopatra impersonated
CHAPTER 7 COLON(IAL)IZING FULVIA: (RE)PRESENTINGTHE MILITARY WOMAN IN HISTORY, FICTION AND ART
Introduction
Gender and Orientalism
Horizontal and vertical relationships in the Fulvian tradition
Alia oratio in the Fulvian tradition
Aesthetic performances in the Fulvian tradition
Conclusion
CHAPTER 8 THE ORIENTAL EMPRESSES OF ROME: SEVERAN WOMEN IN LITERATURE AND THE PERFORMATIVE ARTS
The Nachleben at a glance
The early modern age
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
From the First World War to the present
Julia Domna, tormented mother
Julia Maesa, Machiavellian matriarch
Julia Soaemias, imperial harlot
Julia Mammaea, ambitious outsider
Conclusion
CHAPTER 9 THE PALMYRENE QUEEN ZENOBIA IN SYRIAN TV: INVERTING ORIENTALISM FOR MODERN NATIONHOOD?
A desert queen through Western eyes
Getting to know the TV series Al A’babid : Setting, characters and plot
Will the real queen please stand up . . .
The warrior queen versus a tyrant
The queen is ours and will live forever
‘Mother desert’ in Syria!
Conclusions
Post Scriptum: Zenobia defeated?
CHAPTER 10 THE DARK GAZE OF GALLA PLACIDIA
The rebirth of Galla Placidia
Re-inventing Ravenna
Ezra Pound
Carl Jung
Conclusion
CHAPTER 11 THEODORA A.P. (AFTER PROCOPIUS) /THEODORA A.S. (AFTER SARDOU): METAMORPHOSES OF AN EMPRESS
Theodora B.P. (Before Procopius)
Minor roles: Theodora A.P. (After Procopius) and B.S. (Before Sardou)
Orientalism, Byzantium and German Theodoras
Theodora B.S. / A.S. (Before Sardou / After Sardou): the femme fatalein France
Theodora during the Roaring 1920s
Theodora’s re-evaluation
CHAPTER 12 FROM HISTORICAL ENIGMA TO MODERN ROLE MODEL: THE RECEPTION OF SĀSĀNID QUEEN ŠĪRĪN IN CONTEMPORARY IRANIAN CINEMA
Introduction
The historical queen – an enigma
Transformation into legend: Ferdowsi’s Šahnama and Nezamı’s Khamsa
Cinematic reception of the Šırın-story in the twenty- first century
Kiarostami’s Shirin
Interpreting Kiarostami: Between self-Orientalism and nativism
Kiarostami: A critique of nativism
Conclusion
CHAPTER 13 INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION: GYNAECOCRACY IN THE ORIENT, ORIENTAL SECLUSION IN THE OCCIDENT *
Orient and Occident, Asia and Europe
The reversal of gender roles in ancient gynaecocracy discourse
The Orient in the Occident: the modern topos of Oriental seclusion and the reinvention of gynaecocracy
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

ORIENTALISM AND THE RECEPTION OF POWERFUL WOMEN FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

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Imagines – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts Series Editors: Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Martin Lindner Other titles in this series A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes, Charlayn von Solms Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition, Richard Warren Classical Antiquity in Heavy Metal Music, edited by K. F. B. Fletcher and Osman Umurhan Classical Antiquity in Video Games, edited by Christian Rollinger The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Rosario Rovira Guardiola

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ORIENTALISM AND THE RECEPTION OF POWERFUL WOMEN FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

Edited by Filippo Carlà-Uhink & Anja Wieber

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Filippo Carlà-Uhink, Anja Wieber & Contributors 2020 Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Anja Wieber have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Clare Turner Logo design: Ainize González and Nacho García Cover image © Juan Luna y Novicio 1857–1899. Cleopatra, 1881, oil on canvas. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3500-5010-5 978-1-3500-5011-2 978-1-3500-5012-9

Series: IMAGINES – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

vii ix xi

Introduction Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Anja Wieber 1

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Semiramide in India: The Reception of an Ancient Oriental Warrior Queen in Baroque Opera Kerstin Droß-Krüpe

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Carian Queens from the Orient to Greece and Back: The Reception of Artemisia I and Artemisia II Irene Berti

29

The Persian Boy, the Bactrian Girl and the Man from Macedon: Gender and Orientalisms in Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great-Trilogy Ann-Cathrin Harders

44

4

Drypetis in Fact and (Fan)Fiction Sabine Müller

57

5

Exotic, Erotic, Heroic? Women of Carthage in Western Imagination Marta García Morcillo

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In the Name of Cleopatra: Emma Hamilton and Catherine Stepney Make Their Mark Mary Hamer

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2 3

6 7 8 9

Colon(ial)izing Fulvia: (Re)Presenting the Military Woman in History, Fiction and Art Peter Keegan

103

The Oriental Empresses of Rome: Severan Women in Literature and the Performative Arts Martijn Icks

123

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV: Inverting Orientalism for Modern Nationhood? Anja Wieber

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10 The Dark Gaze of Galla Placidia

Christopher Bishop

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11 Theodora A.P. (After Procopius) / Theodora A.S. (After Sardou): Metamorphoses of an Empress Filippo Carlà-Uhink

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12 From Historical Enigma to Modern Role Model: The Reception of Sāsānid Queen Šīrīn in Contemporary Iranian Cinema Irene Madreiter

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Contents

13 Instead of a Conclusion: Gynaecocracy in the Orient, Oriental Seclusion in the Occident Beate Wagner-Hasel

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Notes Bibliography Index

210 271 307

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FIGURES

I.1 I.2 I.3 1.1

2.1

2.2 2.3

5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1

7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2

Book cover of Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Carthage et des Villes d’Or, Paris (Georges Rochegrosse, 1920s). Author’s collection. Book cover of Oskar von Wertheimer, Kleopatra – Die genialste Frau des Altertums, Berlin (Walter Schmock, 1950s). Author’s collection. Hans Makart, The Death of Cleopatra (1875). Public Domain. Frontispiece of M. Bisaccioni, Semirade in India, Venice 1648/9. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, DRAMM 915.5; courtesy of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Tourismo. The Queen’s Entry into the Harbor of Rhodes (Central design by Antoine Caron). Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund 48.13.9. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art. Artemisia and Xerxes, The 300 Spartans. Twentieth Century Fox / Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy Stock Foto. Artemisia and Chimera in Crete. From Eterna Artemisia, p. 37, Story and Design by Giuseppe Palumbo, ed. Comma 22, 2008 © Giuseppe Palumbo. Dido on the Funeral Pyre. Etching from a painting by F. Keller (1877). Author’s collection. Salammbô. From the series: Famous women of ancient times (1897). Liebig trading card. Author’s collection. Karthagos Fall. Rom’s Kampf um’s Mittelmeer. Cover from the magazine Illustrierter Film-Kurier (n. 2837, 1937). Author’s collection. Richard Cockle Lucas, Bust of Catherine, Lady Stepney as Cleopatra [1836]. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Gillray caricature. The National Maritime Museum, London. Richard Cockle Lucas, Statuette, wax, Lady Stepney [1836]. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Coin from Eumenea, Phrygia (41–40 bce ): RPC I.3139. Paul-Francis Jacquier Numismatique Antique, Nr. 238 : http://www.coinsjacquier. com/kataloge/jacq34/00238H00.HTM [20/07/2018]. Rouillé 1553: 172. Public domain. Pavel Svedomsky, Fulvia with the Head of Cicero (late nineteenth century). © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Pictures. Genealogical table of the Severan dynasty. Chaillet 2003, 17: Julia Domna in Roman clothing, cradling her stabbed son Geta (left) and Chaillet 2003, 21: Julia Domna in Oriental splendour (right). © Glenat Editions.

6 12 13

21

35 39

42 72 77 80 87 94 100

116 117 120 124

130 vii

Figures

9.1

9.2

9.3

10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1

12.2

12.3

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Reproduction of a painting by Edmund Brüning, ‘Kunstbeilage der Sonntags-Zeitung fürs Deutsche Haus,’ Supplement 1907: Queen Zenobia captured. Author’s collection. Montage of three images: Large image – screenshot ep. 10 Al A’babid: Raghda as Queen Zenobia; Bottom left – screenshot ep. 3 Al A’babid: portrait bust of Zenobia; Bottom right – detail of a Syrian 500-pound note: Queen Zenobia (author’s collection). Montage of two images: Large image – film still Sign of Rome (F/I/BRD 1959), Girosign Ltd. (a shutdown supplier of advertising materials for the movies): Anita Ekberg as Zenobia (author’s collection); Bottom right – screen shot ep. 19 Al A’babid: Abdul Rahman Al Rashi as Emperor Aurelian. ‘Cross of Desiderius’, Musei Civici, Brescia © Archivio Fotografico Musei di Brescia – Fotostudio Rapuzzi. Bride Scratton in a photo of 1909 or 1910. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale. Bride Scratton in a photo taken at Bertram Park Studio, Piccadilly, around 1918. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale. Hanns Anker, illustration to Dahn 1876 (1923). Author’s collection. Liebig Card ‘Theodora / Ulrica’ (series Female Opera Characters), French version (1892) © Look and Learn / Rosenberg Collection. Sebastiano Craveri, illustration for the cover of Italo Fiorentino’s novel, Torino 1927. © Eredi Mauro Giubbolini. Rock relief at Tāq-e Bostān, near Kermānšāh (first half seventh century). Above register: investiture of Chusro II (Anāhitā / ‘Šīrīn’ on the left); below register: victorious king as horseman. Picture: Robert Rollinger. Two stills from the title sequence of Shirin (2008): the column on top of the first manuscript page has in Farsi: ‘Inspired from the work of Hakim Nezami Ganjavi’, and the second has: ‘Screenplay, M. Rahmanian’, Artwork © British Film Institute. Different DVD-covers of Shirin, Artwork © British Film Institute and mk2film.

137

139

144 154 161 162 173 177 179

187

192 195

CONTRIBUTORS

Irene Berti teaches Ancient History at the University of Education Heidelberg and has been a foreign expert for Greek history at the Northeastern Normal University in Changchun (PRC). Her research interests include reception studies, Greek epigraphy, ancient religion and mythology. Christopher Bishop is a lecturer in the Centre for Classical Studies at the Australian National University. His research focuses on Latin literature in Late Antiquity as well as Reception studies, and his most recent monograph was Medievalist Comics and the American Century (University Press of Mississippi). Filippo Carlà-Uhink is Professor for Ancient History at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He specializes, among other research interests, in the reception of Classical Antiquity in modern popular culture and in the modern visual and performing arts. Kerstin Droß-Krüpe is a post-doctoral assistant in Ancient History at Kassel University, Germany. Her main research interests are ancient economy, the ancient textile industry, and the reception of powerful ancient women both in contemporary authors and in later periods. Marta García Morcillo is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History specializing in the Roman Economy and in Classical Reception Studies. She has published several contributions on cinematic receptions of the Classical world, on advertising and on ancient Carthage in modern imagination. Mary Hamer taught at Cambridge before taking up fellowships at Harvard. Her most recent book, Kipling & Trix, was awarded the Virginia Prize for Fiction. Ann-Cathrin Harders is Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Her interests include kinship studies in Greek and Roman societies, the history of the Roman Republic and Hellenistic monarchies. Martijn Icks is Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the author of The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (2011). His current research focus is on imperial representation and visibility in late antiquity. Peter Keegan is Associate Professor of Roman History at Macquarie University. His research interests include sexuality, gender and body history in antiquity and the epigraphic record of Roman Italy.

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Contributors

Irene Madreiter is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research focuses on cultural contacts in the Mediterranean, gender in the Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sasanian era, and Greek perceptions of the ‘Orient’. Sabine Müller is Professor for Ancient History at Marburg University, Germany. Her special fields of interest include ancient Persia, Argead Macedonia, the Hellenistic Empires, especially royal women, and Lucian. Beate Wager-Hasel has been Professor for Ancient History at the University of Hannover from 2001 to 2018. Her main research interests are the social and economic history of the ancient world, ancient historiography, gender studies, and classical mythology. Anja Wieber is an independent scholar. Her main research interests include women’s history and gender studies in antiquity, ancient slavery, the history of education and reception studies, in particular in different filmic genres.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been a very long time in the making, and we are very thankful to all our colleagues and friends who have supported us throughout this project. Annemarie Ambühl, Domitilla Campanile, Christopher Farrell, Marco Formisano, Henriette HarichSchwarzbauer, Sebastian Matzner and Gideon Nisbet have at various stages read and commented upon single chapters and parts of the manuscript. We are very thankful for their feedback, as well as for the feedback by series editor Martin Lindner and by the anonymous reviewers at Bloomsbury: all of them have contributed to substantial improvements of the volume – even while all responsibility for what is written lies firmly with the authors, of course. A particular thank you goes to Vivian Colbert, who supported us with the editorial work. Without her, this book would have been much longer in the making.

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INTRODUCTION Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Anja Wieber

Women and the Orient: A ‘double estrangement’ In 1932, Grace Harriet Macurdy, Professor of Greek at Vassar College, wrote about Cleopatra’s and Marc Antony’s lifestyle in Egypt: In a manner of living as though taken from the Arabian Nights Entertainment, they gambled, drank, hunted and fished together, and wandered about Alexandria by night in disguise. . .1 Even Macurdy – the author of a pioneering study on Hellenistic queens and ‘womanpower’, in which she stressed the necessity of evaluating powerful women by the same standards as their male counterparts – could not avoid using an Orientalist flair when describing the most famous Ptolemaic queen.2 It is the aim of this book to show that Macurdy was and is anything but alone, and that discourses and images developed by the Orientalist imagination have dominated the ways in which powerful ancient women have been represented in modern reception. The reason for this, we argue, is a process that can be defined as ‘double estrangement’: as both the feminine and the Oriental3 are perceived as Others to a normative, masculine, Western point of view, modern reception has structurally aligned these two forms of Alterity. There is thus an overwhelming presence of Orientalist stereotypes (which have at times developed independently from the stereotypes on Antiquity) in how not only an Eastern queen such as Cleopatra has been represented, but also Roman women such as Fulvia and Messalina, or the empress Theodora. Most of the surviving ancient sources were written by men;4 as a consequence, ancient authors write about women as the opposite sex, shaping their identity in the process.5 When the object of their description is a woman in a position of power, this is perceived as something that breaks the norm, and is thus negatively described, the Alterity ‘breaking loose’ and disrupting the normal social and political order.6 In this sense, as Elke Hartmann has noted, in most cases ancient sources do not even mention how power is exercised by women: their being in power is automatically an indecent ambition and, significantly, above all a sign of weakness in their male relatives, who should exert power of their own (including over the women), but end up being influenced and dominated by them, again a subversion of what is perceived as the social and political norm.7 No less topical is the definition of the ‘Orient’ in Classical Antiquity. As is well known, at least since the fifth century bce the Greeks defined themselves in opposition to the barbarians (who were embodied by the Persians), while also shifting their representation 1

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

of the Trojans to transform them into ‘ancestors’ and a prefiguration of the Eastern enemy.8 The East, epitomized by luxury and softness (for which they offered scientific and even climatic explanations)9 thus became not only the Other, but also ‘the Fiend’ – those who wish to subvert the social and political norm.10 Even the Samnites, normally portrayed as warlike, could thus be cast as Orientals when dangerous to Rome.11 In general the Romans not only inherited Greek concerns with ‘the East’, but also amplified them: ‘the preoccupation of Rome with the Orient was obsessive – and as such a powerful element in the cultural process of shaping and re-shaping Roman identity throughout imperial times’.12 The Oriental was in Rome ‘a dazzling figure’, both feared and admired, a paradigm of wealth and luxury, while at the same time one of submission and slavery to autocratic monarchs – in a way which is not entirely dissimilar to how early modern Europeans viewed the Ottoman empire. When he developed the concept of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said argued that its significance went far beyond describing the European approach to the Ottoman empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (on which he focused), and that it represented a very long-lasting form of discursive construction of Alterity: Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.13 It is therefore no surprise that Orientalism was in Antiquity already affiliated with gender, with stereotypes that lasted well into Late Antiquity and far beyond: Oriental men were effeminate and weak; Oriental women, generally subordinated and enslaved by the autocratic system of those regions, could take advantage of such masculine weakness and become, in a complete reversal of the accepted norm, strong and dominant.14 The result was a typical form of political despotism, in which female rulers could be represented as ruthless, cruel and sexually voracious: from the East came both the eunuchs and the Amazons.15 The resulting characters can be mythical, as in the case of Omphale, who forced Hercules into cross-dressing;16 quasi-historical, as with Semiramis, who would even have invented castration;17 or representations and portrayals of actual historical figures, as is the case with Cleopatra, whose ‘Orientalization’ began immediately with the Augustan propaganda directed against her. Fulvia, a noble Roman woman of no Eastern ancestry, even appears in contemporary sources to be ‘Orientalized’ in order to delegitimate her political activity, as well as that of the men around her, as Peter Keegan clearly demonstrates in his chapter within this volume. All of these figures function as negative exempla, intended to show what happens when the gender roles are reversed, when men lose control and women gain it.18 This applies, rather obviously, to both historical figures and those from myth, as well as figures connoted as enemies; Orientalist stereotypes do not appear, for example, when the current queen or empress must be praised and celebrated.19 2

Introduction

Orientalisms Said’s definition of Orientalism has not, in the last forty years, been exempt from corrections and criticism. This is certainly not the right place to thoroughly discuss the characters or limits of this concept, which has completely revolutionized the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences since its very first appearance with the homonymous book that was translated in thirty-six languages.20 Above all, however, it has been noted that while Orientalism is a long-lasting phenomenon, stretching from Antiquity until the modern day, it is not unchanging – something that Said clearly recognized: ‘neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.’21 Specific studies are needed for specific times and contexts,22 including in relation to the various Western countries23 (which produce different forms of Orientalism), as well as for the different genres in which Orientalist discourses are produced.24 As we will see below, there is also a different gaze on the Orient by Western men and Western women. For all these reasons, it is more appropriate to follow Malini Johar Schueller and speak of Orientalisms in the plural.25 As formulated by McEnroe, ‘today Said’s broad equation, scholarship = power = colonialism, seems overly simplistic. His structuralist framework of binary opposites (East/West, We/They, Ourselves/ The “Other”) does not adequately explain the complexity of the situation. Neither “East” nor “West” are monolithic concepts. Rather, within each of these categories there were and are multiple points of view. As a result, the discourse between East and West was not a simple dialogue between two opponents but a complex conversation including many voices’.26 And yet, things are even more complicated: even apart from the differences and nuances that depend on the observer, we must also differentiate from the perspective of the observed. As was the case in Antiquity, it is not only the process of inclusion and exclusion in and from the Orient that shifts and forever changes – there are also various gradations of Orient, both for the Western observer and within the Orient itself. From a Roman perspective, for instance, Greece was Oriental, but less so than Persia; the Greeks, in turn, would have perceived Persia, but not themselves, as Oriental. To explain this series of constructions, Milica Bakić-Hayden has introduced the concept of ‘nested Orientalisms’, using it to explain how different Balkan nations in modern times have perceived their neighbours as more or less Oriental.27 A further crucial aspect is what has been called ‘reverse Orientalism’, or more appropriately ‘Occidentalism’, i.e. the ways in which the East has described and discursively constructed the Occident. Reversing Orientalist stereotypes, discourses have been developed in the East which present the Occident as a sphere of corruption and alienation, void of moral values, opposed to the healthy morality and tradition of the East.28 The complex interactions between all these layers have led Schnepel to identify eight different kinds of potential discourses: Orientalizing discourses by the West; Orientalizing discourses by the East itself; Occidentalizing discourses by the East; Occidentalizing discourses by the West itself; Orientalizing of the West by the East; Orientalizing of the West by itself; Occidentalizing of the East by the West; and Occidentalizing of the East by itself.29 3

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

What’s more, all of these interact on a deeper level with representations of Antiquity, thus developing a huge breadth of historical exempla and historical arguments in support of the various discourses of Orientalization and Occidentalization, often in direct reference to each other. Irene Madreiter demonstrates a perfect example of this complexity within her chapter, by analysing how the figure of Shirin has been represented within modern Iran and embedded into the complex discourses surrounding the Occident, the Orient and Iranian specificity.

Ancient powerful women and the Orientalizing gaze The bias of the ancient sources has, for an extremely long time, also extended into historiography; following the descriptions contained in the available (literary) sources, ancient powerful women basically continued being descripted in the ways of which the quote at the beginning of this chapter provides a significant example (even though Macurdy also extensively used non-literary sources). Scott has identified three ways in which women have been marginalized by scholarship on Antiquity:30 through exclusion, in particular in the field of political history, strongly assumed to be a purely male prerogative; through pseudo-inclusion, which is to be mentioned only in the margins and without depth; or through alienation, which is the inclusion of women only in relation to men, in particular when women’s roles and actions are highlighted, as they do not conform to the male ideal of correct female behaviour, but are passed over when they do. The connection to the topic of this volume should immediately be clear: it is exactly this marginalization that explains how, when women are present on the political stage, they must be explained as ‘abnormal’ and ‘deviant’ cases through strategies of Othering. Alienation is the most crucial mechanism of Othering, that which leads to a convergence with other discourses such as Alterity, and particularly Orientalism. ‘Common sense assumptions’, along with the idea of anthropological constants, i.e. that women’s identity is static throughout the ages, have – especially in the case of Classical Antiquity, perceived as the foundation of Western civilization – hindered a critical rereading of the sources and their topoi.31 Our view of ancient women, their actions and their roles, has quite obviously been shaped at every turn by contemporary debates about gender roles.32 At the same time, these (at times very famous) stories surrounding ancient women have been continuously re-activated and repurposed for modern aims, in a continuous dialogue between Antiquity (especially Classical Antiquity, to which the Western world generally draws a genetic line of derivation) and modernity. In his 1911 book on the wives and daughters of the Roman emperors, for instance, Guglielmo Ferrero notes that the Romans were keen to solve ‘the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest, difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of the unobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of the modern world’.33 And Ferrero was again regressing to stereotypes of Oriental women, attempting to demonstrate that the Romans behaved 4

Introduction

differently by bestowing too much liberty upon women: ‘Rome was unwilling to treat her (i.e. the Roman woman) as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it did not on this account give up requiring of her the same total self-abnegation’.34 Clearly, all this applies not only to historiography, but also to all fields in which Antiquity is quoted, used, and ‘received’. The best way of portraying the Alterity of nonnormative women is connecting them, via the idea of ‘double estrangement’, to what is probably the most important and longest lasting strategy of Othering in Western cultures: Orientalism.35 After Antiquity, the early modern period (or more precisely the end of the Byzantine empire) marked an important turning point in the development of Orientalist discourses.36 From this point until the twentieth century and European imperialism, Orientalism shaped every discussion about the East; logically, this also had an effect on the reception of the ancient world, as historical examples were deployed as arguments to legitimate modern European territorial claims in Africa and Asia.37 The ‘Great Game’, the British battle with Russia over control of Central Asia, could for example be equated with the Persian Wars, as well as with the war fought by the emperor Aurelian against an Oriental queen, Zenobia of Palmyra (see the chapter by Anja Wieber in this volume for more on Zenobia’s reception).38 As in Antiquity, the Orient – now stretching from North Africa to the Near and Middle East, following the extension of the Ottoman Empire – is imagined as a woman;39 the double estrangement continues to be productive, as in the Graeco-Roman world, and continues to generate discourses and visual images. One example will suffice: in the 1920s, the cover of a book from the series ‘Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Carthage et des Villes d’Or’,40 a French society for the preservation of Roman Africa, presented a hyper-Orientalized woman in art deco style, a diva semi-clad in a costly transparent dress and long cloak, showing her bare breasts and arms (Fig. I.1). The entire design, along with her jewellery and hairstyle, is a mixture of the fantastic with ancient Egyptian attributes (a moon boat and the eye of Horus), whereas the upturned toe sandals and the incense burner clearly evoke harem fantasies. The woman is not a historical figure, but an allegory of Algeria, where the original ancient Roman culture must be reinstated by the French colonial rulers, the true heirs of that culture:41 the Orient awaits to be civilized, i.e. penetrated by the West.42 The pervasiveness of this imagery is such that even the Wild West is sometimes represented, in North American culture, through Orientalist stereotypes.43 The connection between Orientalism and gender politics continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, including during the Western women’s emancipation movement and its demands for equality and suffrage. In modern times, highlighting the role of Oriental women and their discrimination within their societies often serves ‘to solidify and legitimize patriarchal gender relations in the West’,44 while the image of the ruthless Oriental woman in power functions both as a powerful scare tactic to oppose equality, and to open up the political field to women. Maria Wyke has shown clearly, for instance, that Orientalized images of Cleopatra in cinema have been powerfully deployed in connection with the suffrage movement, as well as racial issues, as a reaction to ‘waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe’.45 Once again, products of reception 5

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

Fig. I.1 Book cover of Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Carthage et des Villes d’Or, Paris (Georges Rochegrosse, 1920s). Author’s collection. and scholarship are entangled in the discourses and ideas of their age: as demonstrated by Beate Wagner-Hasel, the idea that ancient Greek women were ‘secluded’ was developed, based on an Orientalist stereotype, precisely when the European powers supported the struggle for Greek independence: ‘they banished or abandoned the female half of the ancient culture they admired to the East’, thus commenting on the expected role of women in modern bourgeois society.46 It should be noted at this point that this continuous entanglement and dialogue between scholarship and other forms of reception is exactly the reason why we have renounced any kind of division between ‘primary sources’ and ‘secondary literature’ – both scholarship and literature can play dual roles at the same time, as a reflection on Antiquity as well as a source for how Antiquity has been understood, repurposed and reproduced at various moments. Interestingly, the double estrangement can at times become triple, since the twentieth century, when a further crucial form of Otherness appeared on stage: the technological. 6

Introduction

As highlighted by Rosi Braidotti, ‘the ambivalence of fear and desire towards technology is re-cast in the mode of an ancestral patriarchal suspicion towards powerful women and women in positions of power’;47 this does not, however, detach ‘female Alterity’ from ‘Oriental Alterity’. Unsettling figures in this sense, such as the female machine from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and other cinematic productions, clearly continue to develop Oriental stereotypes, and they do this in continuous recourse to their ancient origins.48 Irene Berti demonstrates a clear example of this in her chapter of this volume, by analysing a post-apocalyptic sci-fi graphic novel which refers to an ancient woman, Artemisia, both in the title and in many other aspects. Even if her case study casts the female protagonist in the positive role of ‘saviour’ (and consistently deploys a famously ‘virtuous’ woman as an ancient model), we nonetheless once again have a dystopic (and future) Orient of oppression and slavery.

Visualizing the ancient (Oriental) world The ‘double estrangement’ is, as already noted, highly productive on both a discursive and a visual level, at times in a very conscious way, not only for the (many) artists who have painted both Classical ruins and Orientalist scenes, such as Lecomte de Nouy.49 The argument, elucidated particularly clearly by the Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century and explicitly formulated by Eugène Delacroix, derives substantially from the colonialist prejudice of increased ‘primitivity’ in the Orient: for the famous painter, travelling to North Africa – at this point an integral part of the Ottoman Orient – meant ‘time travelling’, becoming closer to Classical Antiquity. This was due in part to the many ancient ruins preserved there, but far more to the ‘backwardness’ of the region, which reveals to the Western observer what the more archaic life conditions of Antiquity may have looked like.50 When visiting Alger in 1832, significantly, the French painter was keen to understand the life of the harem, of which he had a typically Orientalized image (in 1834 he would paint ‘Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement’). According to a witness, in conversation Delacroix once exclaimed: ‘It is beautiful! It’s as in Homer’s time! The woman stays in the gynaecium, taking care of her children, spinning wool or embroidering wonderful fabrics. This is woman, how I figure her’.51 Even much later on, for Tessa Korber, travelling to North Africa was one of the main inspirations for writing a novel about Antiquity published in 1998 – which was (interchangeably) set in Syria, more precisely on Zenobia of Palmyra.52 The artistic consequence of this Orientalization is the frequent insertion of Oriental elements in historical paintings, and of ancient elements into representations of the Orient: Théodore Chassériau, for example, in his ‘Tepidarium’ (1853) presents a Roman bath with certain Pompeian features, but which definitely bears a greater resemblance to a hammam;53 in his harem scenes, he uses the Venus de Milo as a prototype for the representation of naked women.54 Indeed, the harem is one of the most important signifiers for the Orient in literature and the visual arts; or rather, the entirely false representation of a harem that is common in the West, which transforms the part of the 7

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

house reserved for women (and with limited access for men) into a place of erotic fantasies.55 Chassériau is certainly not the only one to represent nudity in the Orient: in the prudish society of the nineteenth century, nude figures were tolerated only if they were depicted as representatives of Otherness, of societies that did not share the moral values of the West. On a visual level, the connection between eroticism and the Orient in this way gains further strength and becomes completely institutionalized: ‘the Orient shifts back the boundaries of Western morality’.56 In nineteenth-century Europe, many upperclass smoking rooms (to which only men had access) were decorated in the Oriental style.57 Could there have been a more comfortable place for men from the Occident to imagine the taming of women as the embodiment of the Orient than in the typical retreat of a gentleman? The same applies, unsurprisingly, to Antiquity, where the use of ancient elements and settings even became a way of legitimating early erotic (and homoerotic) photography,58 as happened with Oriental settings.59 Stereotypical elements from both visual worlds were also frequently mixed, as one can see in the photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden, for example. The Otherness represented by women and the Otherness of male same-sex desire also conflate into a multiple-layering of the estrangements, often in an Oriental and/or ancient setting, as Ann-Cathrin Harders clearly shows in her contribution to this volume. This association of Antiquity with Orientalism at a visual level remained strong and productive in cinema. This was partly because in the new medium, ‘outsourcing sin’ was a way to avoid censorship, but mostly because the association of the Oriental with the ancient had become firmly rooted in popular culture and thus reached a very high level of recognisability.60 Quite expectably, this is particularly visible in representations of Late Antiquity: here, the Orient is represented by the idea of Byzantium, along with the luxury and decadence that characterized the Late Roman and Byzantine courts. These conflate into representing a world of eunuchs, cruel tortures and prostitutes becoming empresses (e.g. Theodora, whose reception is analysed in this volume by Filippo Carlà-Uhink). It little matters that Ravenna is not Byzantium – the former could also become a place for Eastern decadence, a court in which Valentinian III, for instance, takes pleasure in petting his leopard before unleashing him on the poor dancers (Attila, Pietro Francisci, Italy 1954).61

Women and the Orient: The female gaze Oriental nudes and semi-nudes are most certainly conceived of as objects of the Western male gaze;62 yet, the images provided by these Orientalist stereotypes could also be appropriated into the twentieth century by women, as revealed by the boom in Orientalizing beauty products, or by the success of ‘Oriental dances’. Many American women took such dance classes in the 1920s, surely to find through dance, and through the Orient, their freedom and self-expression.63 Once again, this was not new, but derived from a connection between the Orient and luxury on the one hand (commodifying the 8

Introduction

Oriental/ancient style was very popular in eighteenth-century USA, for example),64 and from the narratives of powerful Oriental queens on the other. In a speech held at the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia in 1793, for example, Priscilla Mason presented the Roman empress of Syrian origin, Julia Soaemias (one of the ‘Severan empresses’ whose reception is analysed in this volume by Martijn Icks) as a model of education and good taste, referring to the senaculum, a ‘feminine Senate’ who advised the empress, as noted by ancient sources:65 Heliogabalus, the Roman Emperor . . . made his grand-mother a Senator of Rome. He also established a senate of women; appointed his mother President; and committed to them the important business of regulating dress and fashions. And truly methinks the dress of our own country, at this day, would admit of some regulation, for it is subject to no rules at all – It would be worthy the wisdom of Congress, to consider whether a similar institution, established at the seat of our Federal Government, would not be a public benefit. We cannot be independent, while we receive our fashions from other countries; nor act properly, while we imitate the manners of governments not congenial to our own. Such a Senate, composed of women most noted for wisdom, learning and taste, delegated from every part of the Union, would give dignity, and independence to our manners; uniformity, and even authority to our fashions.66 There is, therefore, a female gaze on the Orient, and on Antiquity, which is different from the male, even if it generally builds upon the same stereotypes. Molly Youngkin has recently shown how female Victorian writers presented historical and mythological ancient Egyptian figures as models for their own emancipation, while at the same time insisting on the distance that separated them from modern Egyptian women, seen in purely Orientalist fashion.67 The same figures and examples, the same anecdotes and historical narratives could be repurposed in this way, losing the role of ‘scaremonger’ for the breakdown of social and political order connected to a reversal of gender roles, and becoming instead antecedents, models and referents for emancipation, often in a provocative way. Jennie Churchill, for instance, Winston Churchill’s American mother, embraced the critiques of her emancipated lifestyle and proudly presented herself as the empress Theodora of Byzantium – even being represented as such in a bronze statue.68 Mary Hamer investigates an analogous case in her chapter of this volume, showing how parallels with Cleopatra were used with dismay about Emma Hamilton, but were appropriated for self-description by Catherine Stepney.

Cleopatras Cleopatra is, as is to be expected, a particularly recurrent figure, who is also correspondingly well studied in scholarship.69 Extremely famous, highly present in 9

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

reception (essentially ever since her death), Cleopatra was already the subject of Orientalization – in spite of her Macedonian ancestry – in Antiquity, when Octavian presented the war against her and Antony as a war against Oriental Egypt. She was contrasted with the good, normative, Roman Octavia; she was Omphale subjugating Antony-Hercules.70 An ever-present reference, Cleopatra has been appropriated in all possible forms and from all possible perspectives.71 As early as 1863, the women’s rights activist and artist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon wrote, in a letter from Algeria, the following lines on Cleopatra, which reveal both the extent of her Orientalization as well as her admiration for the ancient, ‘emancipated’ queen: I mean that serpent of old Nile, that Gipsy, that wonderful piece of work whom it would have discredited Mark Antony’s travel not to have seen, and who, being seen, still discredited him very much; this wonderfully clever and beautiful woman killed herself, and left some children behind her.72 Cleopatra enjoys great popularity from her role in ancient history, and the abundance of sources that deal with her, from Horace’s invitation to drink to celebrate her death (Od. 1.37), to her powerful description in Plutarch’s Lives of Caesar and of Antony. Her popularity and her value as a paradigm derive from the specific role that Egypt plays within the sphere of Orientalism. In Antiquity, Egypt was the subject of a process of ‘Orientalization from the East’ (to return to the layers described above), when the Ptolemies adopted forms of pharaonic and Persian self-representation, then Orientalized from Rome in the defaming campaigns against Cleopatra.73 Until the present day, it has experienced a multiple series of diverse Orientalizations, which generally mix together and are moulded into one generalized, ahistorical image of both the Egypt of the pharaohs and that of the Hellenistic monarchy of the Ptolemies. These aspects have been further complicated since the nineteenth century, predominantly through the European ‘Egyptomania’ that developed in the eighteenth century, which was further spurred by Napoleon’s campaign on the Nile and remained very strong throughout the Western world during the nineteenth century (to mention just two of the most important aspects of the story).74 At the same time, while Europe and the West were orientalizing Egypt as a central facet of the process of colonization,75 ‘internal’ mechanisms of self-defining the Egyptians deployed the ancient history of the region to differentiate it from the rest of the Arabic world: Learning about archaeology primarily from the Europeans, Egyptians gradually came to realize that it could be turned to their own ends. Once persuaded of the vital role archaeology could play in shaping their modern national identity, Egyptians began searching for ways to train their own archaeologists. This set the stage for nationalist challenges both to European control of Egypt’s archaeological institutions and to Western imperialists’ interpretations of its history.76 10

Introduction

Cleopatra, ancient and Oriental, thus continued to occupy Western imagination: in 1930, Oskar von Wertheimer called her ‘the most ingenious woman of Antiquity’ – a definition meaningfully changed in the English translation of the book to ‘a royal voluptuary’.77 The Ptolemaic queen is at the same time both the personification of the Orient and of sexuality; it is enough to read how the author describes the city of Alexandria, to correctly place the queen in her imaginary cultural milieu: Through them [the hetaerae] the open sensuality of Greece was combined with the more feverish eroticism of Egypt and the East. Far wilder orgies were celebrated in the service of Aphrodite as she was worshipped in Syria than any that took place in Greece, even in Cyprus and Corinth. The Persian king Cambyses heard that Egyptian women were so skilled in the art of love that he wished to have an Egyptian princess as wife. Sensuality to the Greeks was the most stimulating side of life, but vice, which should have never been allowed to descend to the depths of pederasty, hailed from the East. In Alexandria love soon acquired a coarse, morbid, and decadent character.78 Also, ‘films set in Alexandria tend to overlook the fact that the city was Greek in foundation. Accordingly, the characters that populate the cinematic city, led by Cleopatra, are commonly associated with Egypt and not with the Greek Ptolemies, which explains – with a few exceptions – the general preference in film for the use of Egyptian iconography and settings as cultural identifiers’.79 The cover for a reprint of von Wertheimer’s book, realized in the 1950s by the expressionist German artist Walter Schmock, shows a portrait of the queen that is consistently centred on exoticism and Orientalism, which at that point implied the insertion of visual referents connected to the Far East (Fig. I.2). The background is marked by a red sun and bamboo, while Cleopatra’s necklace evokes Indian artefacts, and her hair identifies her as the Egyptian queen by recalling the style of Claudette Colbert in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934). The Ptolemaic queen thus at times becomes a harem woman, and as with most harem women in Orientalist imagination, she has a fair, Western complexion (and is thus an ‘odalisque’);80 at times she also performs a belly-dance.81 Even her representation in the famous comic Astérix et Cléopatre (1968) signifies her Orientalization: as the Greek and the Hellenistic are not Oriental, or rather not Oriental enough, she is drawn with the elements and motifs of pharaonic Egypt. Additionally, in many jokes throughout the album, Greek architecture is presented as ‘modern’ (and thus disliked by the architect Numérobis), while the ‘traditional architecture’ that both he and the queen pursue is inspired by pharaonic architecture, and strongly Orientalized.82 Once again, the Orient is the pristine, the archaic, the ‘traditional’, to which Cleopatra – the uncontrollable, unforeseeable, strong-willed and dangerous woman in power – belongs. From a Western perspective, against the background of Egypt as a country of an ‘infinite variety’83 of sexual pleasures, of magic and of unknown and uncanny superhuman powers,84 Cleopatra’s story is thus an irresistible topic, especially since order in politics 11

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

Fig. I.2 Book cover of Oskar von Wertheimer, Kleopatra – Die genialste Frau des Altertums, Berlin (Walter Schmock, 1950s). Author’s collection.

and gender relations is ultimately restored by her tragic fate. It is thus no surprise that her death has been one of the most beloved themes of historical paintings (and to a lesser extent sculptures). The death of the queen unifies all the strings that we have been pulling on up to this point: the Oriental setting; the uncommon method of suicide, implying a highly erotic component derived from the contact of the snake with the naked breast (not forgetting the immediate connection with Eve through the snake);85 and the soothing message that the established order, i.e. male domination, would return with Octavian. It has been noted that even in the painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, the famous paintress represented Cleopatra, with resignation, as ‘the abandonment of the woman to her destiny as a victim, without hope of help or of redemption’.86 12

Introduction

When historical paintings assume motifs and themes from Orientalist painting, another element very often appears: a tiger or leopard skin on the couch, upon which the queen lies – for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a very offensive signifier of female sexuality and the art of seduction.87 The most famous representation of this theme is thus unsurprisingly the painting by Hans Makart (1875), very often used as a book cover for biographies of Cleopatra: the tiger skin is directly in front of the couch, and upon it lies a dead servant; another cries while the queen, adorned in jewels, strong and determined even in death, brings the snake to her naked breast (Fig. I.3). One year before, Jean-André Rixens had decided to represent a later moment: Cleopatra, entirely naked but for the jewels, is already dead, and lies on her bed; an Egyptian slave with a dark complexion sits next to the corpse, while another slave lies dead at her feet. The room is decorated entirely according to the Egyptian taste, with a leopard skin once again in the forefront. To give just one further example, Juan Luna (1881) moves the scene into the setting of an ancient Egyptian temple, with giant statues, columns decorated with huge hieroglyphs and, of course, a leopard skin (see book cover). With this example it is particularly relevant to stress, once again, the complex, multi-layered nature of the estrangements: Juan Luna, born in the Philippines, had come to Europe to study art, visited and lived in various European countries, and finally moved back to the Philippines, where he was

Fig. I.3 Hans Makart, The Death of Cleopatra (1875). Public Domain. 13

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

involved in the revolution against Spain for the independence of the insular country. His Cleopatra is not his only painting portraying the Classical world: among his other works are ‘Las damas Romanas’ (1882), clearly influenced by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and ‘Spoliarium’ (1884), featuring dead Roman gladiators, a representation of the persecution of the Christians. At the same time, Luna does not shy away from themes that are dear to Orientalist painting, as in the ‘Odalisque’ (1886).88 We can thus see in him the Orientalism of a Far East Oriental imbued by the Western artistic tradition, as well as a Catholic spirit that allows him to entirely espouse the negative approach towards the Ottoman empire; all of these coexist with his anticolonial stance, which makes him in the Philippines a national hero.89 His interest in European women, a recurring theme of his art, is simultaneously a product of both fascination and disdain for what he perceived as the immorality and depravation of the ‘modern woman’. This is not so different from the approach of his French colleagues, with the addition of a clear sense of Occidentalist disdain for the modern, upper-class, powerful woman. This came to the fore in both his paintings and his dramatic biography: Luna could not cope with his wife’s modern, ‘Parisian’ social life (nor the fact that he was dependent on her money), and killed both her and her mother.90 However, this did not contradict his Orientalism expressed towards the Islamic Near East, nor his Orientalized Antiquity, as the death of Cleopatra – Luna’s first major work – clearly demonstrates.

Contents of this book ‘One who goes too far East, because of geography, arrives in the West. The reverse is also true,’ says the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, commenting on how descriptions of the Other actually say much more about the Self than about the ‘real’ Other. In the previous section we dwelt a little longer on the example of Cleopatra, as the most famous and most frequently represented ancient queen allows us to perfectly elucidate the principal points we wish to highlight. First, the mechanisms of ‘double estrangement’, which from Antiquity until today have created a structural vicinity between the Oriental and the Feminine, thus leading to a representation of non-normative women (and women who held power in the Western world were, until the twentieth century at least, nonnormative) as Orientalizing. The dynamics of Orientalist discourse are also so pervasive that even nuances or reactions to them, such as Occidentalist stereotypes and nested Orientalisms, are essentially derivations and variations of Orientalism itself, deploying the same strategies and very often the same topoi. What this volume aims to do, therefore, is to demonstrate through analysing a broad and varied series of case studies how Orientalist stereotypes have been constantly deployed, reformulated and repurposed in the representation of ancient women, especially women who achieved (or were supposed to have achieved) a position of power. These case studies stretch from the ancient Near East (Semiramis) through to the seventh century ce (Shirin), and the various authors analyse extremely diverse forms of reception, geographically (from the United States to Iran), chronologically (from the 14

Introduction

seventeenth to the twenty-first century) and across a very wide spectrum of genres, including novels, movies, paintings, opera, comics and poetry, as well as scholarship. Precisely because our main concern is to show the complex web of estrangements and of Orientalisms across a range of geography, history and media, we have decided against organizing the chapters into sections, instead creating a purely chronological order, as to follow the timespans of the ancient women represented. We are confident that all the case studies analysed clearly reveal how the double estrangement works, and how deeply rooted it is in all contexts, even for authors and artists who try to challenge and reverse it. Through all their declinations, Orientalism and gender issues are so deeply entangled that it is impossible to investigate one without the other. Antiquity plays a crucial role in providing the themes, paradigms and topoi for this connection; ancient women, through their multi-layered Orientalization, still function as powerful exempla.

15

CHAPTER 1 SEMIRAMIDE IN INDIA: THE RECEPTION OF AN ANCIENT ORIENTAL WARRIOR QUEEN IN BAROQUE OPERA 1 Kerstin Droß-Krüpe

In the early twentieth century, Mitchell Carroll, professor of classical languages at George Washington University, judged Semiramis as follows: Those who look upon the present as the emancipation period in the history of woman have surely forgotten . . . Semiramis, who led her armies to battle when the Great King, Ninus, had let fall the sceptre from his weary hand, and who ruled her people with wisdom and justice . . . I do not believe that the present Empress of China [i.e. Empress Dowager Cixi], strong woman as she is, is greater than Semiramis, or that even Elizabeth of England was the equal of the warrior-queen of Babylon.2 But Semiramis, the legendary female ruler of Assyria and renowned sovereign of Babylon, was far from being seen that positively by everyone throughout the ages. For more than 2,500 years, she has oscillated between the image of a femme forte and a femme fatale. Until the early twentieth century, Semiramis was one of the most prominent female figures of Antiquity in cultural memory.3 Ancient sources alternately describe her with admiration and deep loathing. She subsequently evolved into the archetypal figure of a female Oriental sovereign, esempio di ben or esempio di mal, long-lived and much cited as an example. Her figure found its way into all genres of literature and art during medieval times and the Early Modern Age. One might even state that the figure of Semiramis has emanated such fascination for the European world of literature and theatre through the centuries that she has become a type of ‘general oriental archetype’. Academic publications about Semiramis are numerous and come from a great variety of disciplines.4 However, comprehensive studies on her person in terms of the historical reception are still a lacuna in the research, although there are some tentative approaches.5 But in most studies on the reception of Semiramis, stage texts have hardly been explored or just been considered marginally. The notable exception is Cesare Questa, who has attempted to follow references to Semiramis on the opera stages.6 Opera as a genre preferred to adopt topics related to Antiquity from the moment of its creation and offers a very special medium of projection and reception in early modern times. It offers unique possibilities of expression, rife with clichés, bombast, and a kaleidoscope of exotic, fascinating, albeit completely unrealistic stories. Baroque opera especially was not only 16

Semiramide in India

an entertainment industry but quintessentially a political medium – a site for both political and social representation. It functioned simultaneously as a place for moral and pleasurable edification, and as an entertaining didactic stage for the legitimate organizations and consequently the rendition of the social standards sanctioned by the society of the era. Based on about one-third of the available libretti that are connected to the figure of Semiramis, Questa provides a material or motif history of selected aspects. But Questa ignored one motif that was very present in relation to Semiramis in the ancient literature – namely, her military ambitions. Yet, Semiramis as a female warlord plays an important role in several opera texts.7 Within the scope of this chapter, the objective is to trace the military traits that transform Semiramis into a fascinating figure for classic Antiquity but also for the medieval and early modern Western world and particularly the Baroque opera. The focus is primarily on Semiramis’ campaign against the Indian king and its representation in the opera Semiramide in India (1648/9).

Semiramis in India – main sources and narratives from Antiquity to early modern times In the Histories of Herodotus, Semiramis does not have a prominent role. His interest is directed towards other female figures such as Nitocris, whom he considers the founder of Babylon.8 The name of Semiramis is also mentioned in context with Nitocris: according to Herodotus, she ruled five generations before Nitocris. This is based on the idea of a glorious, great empire that was ruled from Babylon and of which Cyrus as its conqueror became a legitimate successor.9 Herodotus does not mention any military expeditions by Semiramis. In the work of Ctesias of Cnidus, on whose description the later fame of Semiramis is based, the situation is entirely different. He discards Nitocris and the idea of an empire ruled from Babylon. Instead, he makes Semiramis the founder of Babylon – probably to highlight the subordination of Babylonia to Assyria10 – and he conceives her as a major military leader who only fails in the conquest of India. Unfortunately, his description of Semiramis, which was part of his main work, the Persica, is lost and only handed down by third parties. Episodes from Ctesias’ work have been integrated by later intermediaries into their writings, and they often reshaped them according to their own intentions.11 Jan P. Stronk emphasizes that this involved ‘an interpretation and/or adaption – or at best an unbiased and reliable quotation or epitome’ in all cases.12 This is even more regrettable since Ctesias’ Persica developed quite an enormous impact on ancient (and consequently Western) images of the Orient. It is the origin of the Western idea of Oriental rulers as decadent and effeminate despots, as well as other ‘facts’ of Oriental life that have become familiar by now, such as polygamy or the proverbial wealth of the Orient.13 Ctesias’ description of Semiramis’ campaign against the Indian king Stabrobates is extensively explained by Diodorus, who mentions Ctesias several times as his source of information.14 After a multitude of successful campaigns, Semiramis decided to prepare for war against 17

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

India, which was considered to be the biggest and most beautiful country, blessed with abundant gold, silver, gemstones and the like.15 In contrast to the queen’s other military expeditions, Diodorus makes the point – and this appears to be his own addition – that her campaigns against India were not the result of political considerations but were solely motivated by Semiramis’ towering ambition16 and the prospect of spoils.17 This is one of the few moments in Diodorus’ description of the Babylonian queen putting Semiramis in a negative light: it creates the image of a militant, but also self-indulgent, and luxury-loving ruler. Diodorus provides a detailed description of the war preparations on both sides, which lasted for two years. In the first clash with the Indian king, the victory belongs to Semiramis. The second battle goes back and forth for a long time and claims many victims.18 Semiramis is ultimately defeated and flees back to Babylon with major losses.19 The extent to which Diodorus distanced himself from his reference text by Ctesias is difficult to decide, even if there are clear indications that he puts the Babylonian queen in a distinctly more positive light than his source.20 That a woman and an Oriental could achieve something as unbelievable as a war against India at the perimeter of the populated world inspired and impressed both Greek and Roman authors. This especially applied to the Alexander Historians:21 Nearchos mentioned Semiramis’ expedition as the decisive motivation for Alexander’s campaign against India.22 He supposedly wanted to achieve something that even Semiramis and Cyrus could not accomplish or only achieved with great losses. Curtius Rufus also reports Alexander’s admiration for Semiramis,23 whom he wanted to outdo.24 Based on a reference to Megasthenes,25 Strabo claims that Semiramis did not conduct the campaign against India at all, since she had already died during the war preparations. Megasthenes’ Indike is not aware of any other foreign rulers of India aside from Alexander (before Alexander, only Dionysus and Heracles entered Indian territory) – a description that becomes even clearer with the contemporary background of the Diadochi Wars and the Seleucid reign: the military magnitude of the Oriental Semiramis is devalued here in favour of Alexander’s military greatness.26 Roman sources such as Ampelius27 or Pompeius Trogus/Justin are also familiar with Semiramis’ Indian expedition.28 From these sources, Semiramis found her way into Paulus Orosius’ Historiae adversus paganos. This universalist history from an apologetic Christian perspective greatly contributed to the eerie and gloomy image of Semiramis, which also included her campaigns – and these were now given a thoroughly negative evaluation.29 Based on Orosius, Semiramis also has a significance for the Christian world beyond Antiquity since her rule is seen as parallel to the birth of Abraham. All subsequent Christian authors have seen her entirely as a negative image of both an Oriental and a woman. Apart from her licentiousness, they particularly criticize her bloodthirsty and war-like activities. Augustine reported that she attacked India;30 Otto of Freising, who follows Orosius’ description in many points, even claims in order to emphasize how completely inappropriate female rule is that Semiramis assimilated India into the Assyrian empire.31 Even if the sources do not agree as to whether Semiramis just planned a campaign against India or actually executed it, and whether such a campaign was successful or not, 18

Semiramide in India

the tradition that linked Semiramis with India was maintained during Humanism and the Renaissance and into the Early Modern Period. For example, Francesco Petrarca includes her as the only woman in his work De viris illustribus and reports: ‘Indiam infesto agmine ingressa est, quod ante illam nulli, post illam paucis accidit.’32 But there are also more positive voices. In the Late Middle Ages, a group of nine virtuous, legendary men was established, the Neuf Preux or Nine Worthies.33 Following the model of these Neuf Preux, female Worthies (Neuf Preuses) began to accompany the male Worthies, and these included Semiramis. Due to their military merits and virtues, these women were highly praised; they all embodied the chivalrous ideal of prouesse (worthiness). Although many depictions of these exemplary women of Antiquity exist,34 only one narrative work is dedicated extensively to them: L’Histoire des Neuf Preux et des Neuf Preuses, which was written between 1460 and 1468 by the French cleric Sébastian Mamerot.35 Semiramis’ Indian expedition assumes a prominent role within this context.36 Semiramis and the Indian king Stabrobates are likewise mentioned in English drama, e.g. in Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James the Fourth (1594).37 It seems that from the fifth century bce up to the sixteenth century ce , the view that no one except Semiramis and Alexander had succeeded in invading India remained unchanged in its essentials and was firmly anchored in the cultural memory of the Renaissance. The war-like Semiramis and India apparently belonged together for the ‘Western’ cultural memory, Semiramis was consistently perceived as a conquering female ruler.

Big opera – Semiramide in India Against this background, it is hardly surprising that Semiramis’ relationship to India also appeared on the opera stages of that era.38 The first opera stages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were at princely courts and royal houses; the initial sponsors of this new art form were the rulers. Far into the nineteenth century, the opera never entirely lost its bond with the ruling monarchs (of both genders). But soon Baroque opera was opened for a broader audience. In March 1637, the very first public opera house opened in Venice with the Teatro S. Cassiano. It proved to be such a success that within a few years, further public opera houses opened their doors to the middle class, as well as to the many people who travelled to Italy and stopped to visit Venice. This led to the creation of the Teatro SS . Giovanni e Paolo (1639), the Teatro S. Moisè (1639) and the Teatro Novissimo of the Accademia degli Incogniti (1641).39 During the course of the later seventeenth century increasingly more opera companies established themselves throughout all of Italy, offering admission – albeit separated by class – to the broad public for the payment of an entrance fee. This development did not fail to have its effects on the themes which were used in the operas and the manner in which the performances were presented on these courtly and public opera stages. While an opera on the courtly stage was usually just performed one single time, the public stages tried to draw the largest possible circle of spectators – after all, the survival of the whole opera company depended 19

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

on the collection of entrance fees. On the one hand, this meant that a successful opera was now performed repeatedly; on the other hand, it brought a distinctly larger number of operas to the stage. It became necessary to continually develop new material that appealed to the taste of the audience. There was no repertoire system in the modern sense: the Baroque opera was a ‘premiere theatre’ by nature. And if the programmes occasionally did not offer any premieres, adaptations of operas that had recently been staged successfully elsewhere were modified by exchanging, adding or eliminating scenes. On the other hand, it was highly uncommon to do revivals. With these facts as a basis, historians can draw conclusions as to which material was put on stage, how this material was interpreted, which topics were successful with the audience and which were not, and thus illuminate the history of culture and mentality. As an independent drama, the topics related to Semiramis first appeared in Italy in 1593 in a concept by Muzio Manfredi.40 This had been preceded by an adaptation for the Spanish theatre stage by Cristôbal de Viruês41 and was followed almost simultaneously by two very different versions for the French theatre.42 However, in 1648/9, Semiramis first stepped onto the opera stage, where the image of a warrior female had only seldom appeared before.43 Maiolino Bisaccioni, a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti,44 wrote the libretto, and Francesco Paolo contributed the music, which is now lost. Under the title of Semiramide in India, the opera was performed during the carnival season of 1648/9 in Venice.45 This is only six years after historical figures from Antiquity had first entered opera stages with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (composed after  a libretto of Giovanni Franscesco Busenello), a stage that had previously been dominated by mythological themes.46 As was customary in Baroque opera, Bisaccioni as the librettist was of greater importance than the composer, since he was the one who determined the overall form of the opera through his texts. This applied to both the content and the structure, since the verses of the libretto determined the placement of arias (in versi lirici) and recitatives (in versi sciolti).47 The opera text was usually available in print at the performance, as in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the printed libretto fulfilled the function of a modern programme. In addition to a dedication, it contained an index of persons and cast members, and, if necessary, the argomento, i.e. a brief summary of the opera’s contents and sources,48 as well as the complete opera text. The audience could read along during the performance since the lights in the house were not dimmed during the performance until far into the nineteenth century.49 The opera involves the following roles:50

20

●

Semiramide, regina degli Assiri

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Nino, suo figlio

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Serpillo, paggio di Nino

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Argillante, capitan generale di Semiramide

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Capitan della guardia di Semiramide

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Egilda, principessa del sangue di Semiramide

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Arimeno, principe degli Indi

Semiramide in India ●

Euroneo, suo consigliero

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Caristo, pastorella

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Climene, suo padre putativo.

A preserved libretto print in the Venetian Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana provides an impression of how the militant Oriental woman is going to be presented in the opera in its frontispiece (Fig. 1.1): Semiramis is shown sitting in front of a war tent. She wears

Fig. 1.1 Frontispiece of M. Bisaccioni, Semirade in India, Venice 1648/9. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, DRAMM 915.5; courtesy of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Tourismo.

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Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

a dress, but is armed with a suit of armour, helmet, spear and shield.51 A second female figure is at her side, which may be the princess Egilda.52 A male figure stands with his back to the viewer: he is probably her general (and former lover) Argillante. In this picture, nothing characterizes Semiramis as an Oriental in the visual sense, as common for Baroque opera. Nothing indicates that the action takes place in the Middle East (or Asia), neither Semiramis’ clothing and accessories, nor the landscape that can be vaguely perceived in the background. In the argomento, the librettist offers the audience the necessary background to help them understand the dramatic action. The argomento is thus given the function of a threshold text (‘Schwellentext’) in the Baroque opera libretto, while simultaneously fulfilling the function of an external exposition of the action (‘handlungsexternen Exposition’).53 Bisaccioni uses the argomento in precisely this way: Morto Nino terzo Rè degli Assirij, restò di lui un’altro Nino fanciullo non anche habile al governo, & Semiramide di quelle Vedova, e di questo Tutrice. Costei avida del governo, e gloria militare, parendole, che il figlio (a cui moltissimo si assomigliava di effigie) inclinasse alle delitie, prese il nome di Nino fingendosi lui, e’l figlio diede à credere, che fosse Semiramide, e’l pose fra le donne; mà dubbiosa, che ne fosse scoperta la fraude, radunò potentissimo essercito, & uscita in campagna, si fece tribuntarij i Regi vicini avanzandosi infino all’India, di cui era Rè Staurobate. Questi armati anch’egli i suoi, mandò ad incontrarla al Gange, dove incontratisi i legni dell’una, e dell’altra parte, si commise una fiera battaglia con la Vittoria degli Assirij. Semiramide fugato l’inimico, pose piede à terra, venne à nuove conflitto, in cui fù il vantaggio degli Indiani. Questa Historia vera hà dato materia alla presente favola, dove si finge, che Staurobate d’età candente havesse dato l’essercito ad Arimeno suo figlio, il quale valorosamente combattendo su’l Gange, andasse ad attaccar la Reale, e salitovi sopra, fosse soprafatto dalla calca de’nimici, e fatto prigione, delle cui valorose bellezze invaghita Semiramide ne restasse anche innamorata; come il giovane veduto ivi Nino credendolo una giovinetta ne concepisse Amore. Ma poi ripigliate le forze, e vedutasi accostar di nuove la sua nave, fatta forza à chi lo custodiva si riponesse in libertà anche ferendo Semiramide, che volle opponersi per ritenerlo. Fingesi ancora, che nella battaglia terrestre Nino dubitando di esser fatto prigione, buttate le vesti feminili, si ponesse in una barchetta, che trovò alle rive del fiume, & in compagnia di un suo paggio passa all’altra riva.54 Bisaccioni does not provide any information about the sources, but it immediately becomes clear that he was inspired by Diodorus’ portrayal. Volumes 1–5 of the Bibliotheca historica had been available in the Latin translation (by G. Poggio Bracciolini) since 1492 and had therefore been fairly easily accessible to scholars and academies since then.55 Bisaccioni was not only interested in the well-known military expedition by Semiramis to the ends of the world, but also her masculine virtues. As an antithesis, he depicts an

22

Semiramide in India

effeminate Nino – about whom Diodorus had little to report. Instead, the inspiration for the elaboration of the figure appears to come from various descriptions of Sardanapalus.56 So Bisaccioni offers a virtuoso example of double transvestitism that meets the taste of the period to a high degree: the over-emphasized, unusual male character traits of a female figure are elaborated upon as a contrast to the feminine or rather effeminate character traits of a male figure. During this time, neither of these characteristics was connected to Oriental figures, it was a reflection on general attitudes towards genders and their respective positions. For example, a similar case can already be observed in 1636 in the heroic novel La Taliclea by Ferrante Pallavicino, describing the adventures (in love and war) of the royal siblings Taliclea and Nicoterpe, disguised as one another. Ferrante Pallavicino was also a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, which had its heyday between 1630 and 1660. The Accademia was where Venetian aristocrats met leading intellectuals of the time, and immensely influenced the literary output of its members. These were very involved in Venetian opera – be it as librettists or as founders and financiers of the Teatro Novissimo.57 In Italy, women had participated in the intellectual discourse since the sixteenth century, with some even being active in the creation of literature. At the same time, women remained the object of various treatizes urging them to follow traditional norms, especially regarding the rules of conduct by and for women.58 This situation carried a tension that is also reflected in the libretti of contemporary operas, many of which were written by people attending literary circles like the Accademia. While there were some literary circles friendly towards women, broadening the accepted rules of conduct, others – and among them especially the Accademia degli Incogniti – had a tendency to collect rather misogynous members: ‘. . . the Incogniti’s espousal of the erotic betrays a predictable double standard: male sexuality was celebrated while that of women attracted a more complex response, mingling prurience, repulsion, fascination, and fear.’59 The literary creations of many of the Accademia’s members showed a special interest in ‘the toxic mixture of sexuality and power’,60 which they were especially fond of presenting through ancient female figures. The predecessors of Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India in this were Francesco Ferrante Pallavicino’s Le due Agrippine (1642) and Federico Malipiero’s La imperatrice ambiziosa (1640). We encounter two opposing tendencies here: on the one hand harsh criticism of women and especially their sexuality, on the other hand a ‘women-on-a-pedestal poetry’,61 which defends equality or even the superiority of women. It ought to be noted that Renaissance literature in defence of women and their qualities is far less numerous than antifeminist popular texts of that time.62 The particular popularity of literary products on ruling women in Venice is probably connected to the fact that the Republic of Venice explicitly excluded women from any participation in political power.63 In addition to reading the Bracciolini’s Latin Diodorus edition, Bisaccioni could also have found inspiration for his libretto in further works: Luigi Dardano’s La bella e dotta difesa delle donne in verso e prose had already been published in 1554 in Venice. This work attempts a defence or retrial of women who have been judged blameworthy in history. It may be worth noting that Semiramis is included among the defendants as she 23

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

had been in Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames 150 years earlier, but is ultimately still judged to belong ‘fra le scel(l)erate.’64 Noteworthy examples of Venetian writings contributing to the contemporary debate between misogyny and feminism from a pro-women perspective are Lucrezia Marinielli’s La nobilità e l’eccellenza delle donne (1601) as well as Pietro Paolo Ribera’s Le glorie immortali di trionfi et heroiche imprese (1619). Librettist Francesco Pona, mentioned above, who was also a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, had already published La galeria delle donne celebri in 1633 in Verona.65 Here, Semiramis is categorized as ‘lascivious’. Pona complains extensively about the queen: ‘Semiramide in tanto, superando la età, cresceva in forze, e in bellezze. Era impossibile penetrar il suo genio . . .’ (54).66 She is also described here as ‘sempre vittoriosa’ (56)67 and possessing many virtues: ‘così profondo lo Intelletto che a un tempo discorreva, discerneva e deliberava e con tanta acutezza sempre, tanta prudenza, ch’erano i suoi consigli meravigliosi, e le sue opera incorreggibili nel governo politico’ (60).68 But she is also a lascivious seductress: ‘Il braccio era ignudo sin presso il gombito, con due Vipere di fin’Oro, che faceano bizzarro sì, ma bel monile. La gamba senza diffetto, era tutta ignuda . . .’ (56–57);69 she desires and dominates her son,70 and has an evil heart.71 The portrait of the queen by Ferrante Pallavicino in his Scena retorica of 1640 has a similar attitude.72 Especially this latter work, which was printed in Venice, was very likely accessible to Bisaccioni.73 All three works distinctly exhibit the ambivalent attitude towards women mentioned above. But none of them explicitly describes Semiramis as an Oriental woman. Instead her character traits – both her virtues and her vices – are based on how she supposedly violates her ‘natural femininity’. But to return to Bisaccioni’s text version: a position on the military ambitions of Semiramis is already conveyed in the prologue – and with a recognisable judgmental tone – when the first appearance of the choir (Coro di Genij dell’Assiria) says: ‘Dovrà l’Assiria sempre dunque solo trattar usberghi, & haste?’74 The actual opera then starts with two opening scenes at the Indian encampment on the Ganges, in which war is the primary topic.75 Throughout the entire libretto, there are no descriptions as to the actual design of the scenes, so that we cannot get an impression of the stage set.76 But it is certain that the stage offered the customary setting for that time: richly ornamented Baroque palace rooms, temple halls or streets of houses that extend into the depths of the stage. All of this mirrored current architecture, but was always enriched with features of antique architecture such as pillars or an obelisk. The first act then shows the contrasting worlds, which is what interests Bisaccioni: On one side of the river, we find ourselves in the war camp of Semiramis, who gives orders and is depicted exclusively as a warlord,77 and her general Argillante. Only Argillante and Egilda, who love each other, know the true sexual identity of the queen. Argillante plans to betray Semiramis to satisfy his craving for power.78 Egilda is initially undecided to whom she should be loyal, but then decides to be loyal to her man and promises that she will not say anything about this to Semiramis. On the other bank of the river, we see the sweet life of Nino – who has fled the battlefield and is accompanied by his page Serpillo.79 His encounter with the beautiful shepherdess Caristo awakens in Nino a strong passion, for which he is immediately willing to cast aside his royal attributes (I/7).80 The first act 24

Semiramide in India

ends with Argillante crossing to the other side of the river, where he plans to convince Nino of his cause. While the love relationship between Nino and Caristo becomes more intense in the second act, scene II /4 shows us a torn Semiramis. In a melodramatic aria, she reveals her inner conflicts: on the one hand, she is plagued by her weak position as ruler and by the question about her future; on the other hand, she is greatly tormented by her unfulfilled love. Semiramis has fallen in love with the Indian prince Arimeno – a love that could only be fulfilled if Semiramis casts aside her masculine clothing and reveals that she is a woman. But this would mean giving up the throne. This shows the dilemma that is so typical for rulers acting on the stage of the Baroque opera: the inner conflict between royal obligations and their own desires, between power and love. By contrast, Serpillo is attempting to tame the unbridled passion of his master and help the latter’s mind to conquer his heart (or body) – but to no avail.81 As masculinity in the Renaissance was exemplified by controlling one’s passions, he ultimately even questions Nino’s gender: ‘Sei tù donna? Sei maschio, ò hermafrodito?’ (II /2).82 In the further course of the second act, another shifting of the gender roles occurs – which may mean that they return to their ‘natural’ state. While Semiramis becomes increasingly feminine (II /4 & 5), Nino discovers that the potential marriage of his mother with Arimeno would undermine his own claim to the throne.83 Argillante goads him to demonstrate his manliness, and he leaves Caristo to fight for his throne (II /7–9). When Caristo finds out, she believes that he has betrayed her and broken his promise to marry her and furiously contemplates revenge (II /8).84 In the third act, the true genders of Semiramis and Nino are revealed. Scene 2 shows that Nino’s fears are very justified since Semiramis offers Arimeno the throne. In the following scene (III /3), two women disguised as men meet each other – Semiramis and Caristo. Caristo believes that Semiramis is Nino, while Semiramis thinks that Caristo is an Indian prince. The two women share not only male clothing, but also the same destiny: ‘Les deux personnages féminins en feront les frais, chacune croyant être trompée par leur amant respectif.’85 Then Caristo and the real Nino meet and reconcile. But Semiramis accuses Caristo of treason, since she believes that Caristo is Argillante’s envoy and has impermissibly dressed herself in royal garments. This drama then has an unexpected twist that is customary for Baroque opera, as everything takes a turn for the good: Arimeno reveals to the unmasked Caristo that Climene, whom she had always considered her father, is not her biological father; instead, she is Arimeno’s lost sister. So Caristo has royal blood and can therefore marry Nino. Semiramis keeps the throne and accepts Arimeno as her consort. At the time when Semiramide in India was performed, Venice had already developed into a centre for opera culture. Lionel Allaci presumes that the performance venue of this opera was the Teatro S. Cassiano,86 which seats up to 1,200 spectators.87 It is not certain on how many evenings this opera was performed. In 1648/9, the carnival season – during which each theatre usually performed three operas – lasted until 16 February.88 With three to five performance evenings per week, this would realistically mean 15–25 presentations of Semiramide in India.89 Even if we take into consideration that 25

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

performances were often attended more than once, 10,000–15,000 people in Venice could have heard this opera and been exposed to Bisaccioni’s image of Semiramis.90 As no details are known about the cast, it is impossible to tell, whether Semiramide in India involved castrati, male sopranos or female singers in male casts. It is however probable that high male voices were indeed used in the opera, as most of the surviving male solo parts from the birth of the genre until 1750 have vocal ranges above tenor voices. But Saskia Maria Woyke was able to demonstrate with the help of quantitative gender-based studies, that the idea of Baroque opera as dominated by castrati and other male singers is a fallacy. Beyond that, her studies clarify that – especially in Venice – female singers sang female roles, while castrati and male singers were used for male roles. It is thus very likely that Semiramide was performed by a woman, while Nino was cast with a tenor, male soprano or castrato.91 As already shown, Bisaccioni’s image of Semiramis fits very well with the spirit of Baroque opera and its contemporary culture as a whole, since it presents a ruler torn between obligations and love. It also plays with gender roles and disguises of all types. On the other hand, the ultimate return to the ‘natural’ order of gender corresponds well with the discourse about women in Italy and especially in Venice of the seventeenth century.92 As Constance Jordan puts it: ‘In herself, of course, the virile woman tended to reaffirm patriarchal values. Her excellence is seen in her masculinity that is, her rationality, courage, and physical strength.’93 And yet: of the entire 28 scenes, Semiramis is represented in ten of them; by contrast, Nino can be seen on the stage in 13 scenes. So we can ultimately agree with Wendy Heller in her assessment: ‘. . . the opera celebrates the maturity of the son Nino, who boldly reclaims his power, manhood and kingdom.’94 Although the opera has Semiramis in its title and her military abilities assume an important role, it is ultimately about Nino and – above all else – about the restoration of the ‘normal’ gender order. Bisaccioni’s libretto delivers everything that was called for on the stages of the sixteenth century: exotic settings, amorous entanglements and intrigues, stories of disguises and mistaken identities, military parades and travesty.95 And yet, there are no records of further performances after 1649 and the libretto was never again set to music. In contrast to the complex image of Ctesias that can be seen in the Persian sources and in Diodorus, Bisaccioni just uses Semiramis as an interchangeable model to demonstrate the inappropriateness of female rule.96 This does not automatically make it an anti-feminist opera – according to Abbate the sheer presence of women on stages in addition to the sound of their voices is to be seen as a manifestation of their triumph.97

Semiramide dopo India – an opera perspective Semiramis is one of the most popular female figures on the opera stages of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. There are more than 200 libretto prints of opera that deal with the figure of the Babylonian queen. Between 1649 and 1910, it was possible to admire her on almost all the opera stages in Italy and around Europe. A negative image was often 26

Semiramide in India

predominant, especially in the operas of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where incest, murder and a craving for power are the main themes. But there are also other, positive images of Semiramis. The best example is probably the libretto Semiramide riconosciuta by Pietro Metastasio. Premiered with a composition by Leonardo Vinci during the 1729 carnival in Rome, it was frequently set to new music later. Later librettists also repeatedly incorporated the connection of Semiramis with India, even if their operas were not set on the Ganges. In Metastasio’s libretto, the Indian context is reflected in the figure of Scitalce, an Indian prince who initially appears at the court of Semiramis in Babylon, where the opera is set, to ask for the hand of the Bactrian princess Tamiri. However, he ultimately returns to his former lover Semiramis as her spouse.98 The anonymous libretto La Vendetta di Nino also refers to India. It was first set to music by Alessio Prati and had its premiere at the 1786 carnival in Florence at the Regio Teatro di Via della Pergola. The allusion to India occurs in an aria by Azema in the first act (I/7), in which she mentions that only India has not yet been conquered by Semiramis.99 An Indian king, now called Idreno and in a supporting role, is also found in the La Semiramide by Gaetano Rossi and Gioacchino Rossini, which premiered in 1823 in the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice.100 Reaching the limits of the inhabited world is a feat that – with the exception of Semiramis – has only been attributed to a very few (male) persons in Antiquity: Osiris, Dionysus, Hercules, Sesostris and Alexander III . Together with the fascination of the virile woman, this theme runs through most of the libretti and was a main component in the image of Semiramis presented in them for a long time – even where other aspects dominated the depiction. Yet, Semiramis cannot be called a ‘female Oriental ruler’ in the strict sense in any of these opera interpretations: in none of them references to any Persian or Oriental objects or culture-specific items occur. In addition, her characteristics are not explained by her origin in the opera, but by the exemplary nature of her story – in both a positive and a negative sense. The reasons for selecting Oriental subjects in Baroque opera had their root in the socio-cultural, religious and political circumstances of that era, and mainly in the conflict between the movement towards enlightenment and the traditional role of the church. As the musicologist Reinhard Strohm has aptly put it: ‘The subjects of the dramma per musica were mostly taken from pre- or non-Christian civilizations and could therefore be used to promote enlightened tendencies without openly contradicting the Church.’101 There is no doubt that the Oriental material suited the taste of those times. Contemporary voices, such as the Modenese diplomat Giuseppe Riva, describe the London opera taste in 1725, which was undoubtedly not specifically English but rather generally European: ‘Il soggetto dev’essere semplice, tenero, eroico, Romano, Greco o Persiano ancora, non mai Gotico o Longobardo.’102 In opera and elsewhere, Semiramis serves as a model of female virtue and a successful ruler. Her first opera appearance paves the way for a multitude of warrior queens on Venetian stages (and elsewhere).103 At the same time, she can also be presented as a lascivious, modern and depraved example of her gender spreading fear and terror. She is not explicitly shown to be an Oriental woman in anything more than name in either 27

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

Bisaccioni or the later librettists of the Baroque. Her Oriental background is neither made visible nor audible. At best, the ‘Orientalness’ of Semiramis serves as a stimulant to the imagination of the theatre audience – carrying them away from the here and now and creating a mirror for them under the pretence of ‘distant worlds’ in order to entertain and teach them.

28

CHAPTER 2 CARIAN QUEENS FROM THE ORIENT TO GREECE AND BACK: THE RECEPTION OF ARTEMISIA I AND ARTEMISIA II Irene Berti

In the Greek world, the categories of Greek and Barbarian, far from being neutral, are often gendered and intertwined with those of male and female. As noted by Sebillotte Cuchet in her seminal article on Artemisia I in the Herodotean tradition, the Barbarian – who since the Persian Wars has been identified with the Asian – is usually imagined to be feminine, while the Greek is considered to be virile, embodying masculinity.1 The two ancient queens of Caria, both called Artemisia (although probably unrelated), both extraordinary women in the eyes of the ancients as well as in modern reception, at the same time both confirm and contradict this ‘cultural rule’. These two very different women, both born in Asia Minor but actually ‘métis’,2 have in Western reception come to personify a femininity that is out of the ordinary.When seen positively, this personification has given them a Western connotation, turning them into Greek women; when seen negatively, they become a stereotype for the lascivious and sexualized Oriental queen. The shifting reception of both Artemisias is best illustrated by their re-use in the royal imagerie of the Renaissance, where they became the cornerstone for conceptualizing female rulers – an ‘accident of history’, which needed justification. Less famous than Cleopatra or Semiramis, the two Carian queens cannot boast a consistent presence in reception – it is only in contemporary times that they became famous again, embodying two very different concepts of Orientalism.

The evidence: Artemisia I and Artemisia II in the ancient sources In his telling of the Persian Wars, Herodotus places great emphasis on his Halicarnassian compatriot, Artemisia I. Artemisia is leading five ships of the fleet which will fight at Salamis, and is a respected general of Xerxes.3 When consulted by the Great King about the opportunity of engaging in a sea-battle with the Greeks, according to Herodotus she answers by pointing out the superiority of the Greeks, referring to the contemporary stereotype of manly Greeks and feminine Orientals: ‘spare your ships, and do not fight at sea. Their men are as much stronger than your men by sea as men are stronger than women’.4 But Xerxes, despite having a great deal of respect for her opinion, decides against her advice. Artemisia fights with courage during the battle: at one point, in a 29

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desperate situation, she uses a ruse, charging and ramming an allied ship, thus leading the Athenians to think that her ship was either Hellenic or a deserter fighting against the Persians. In doing so, she manages to save herself.5 Xerxes shows on more than one occasion that he holds Artemisia in great esteem; after the defeat of Salamis, the Great King again consults her, recognizing that she alone had advised against the battle. In her role as counsellor, Artemisia appears as an outsider to the barbarian context in which she operates. While in both her advisory interventions she takes for granted the autocratic nature of Xerxes’ authority, her status as adviser depends on her not being subject to external pressure. Every time Artemisia speaks, she shows her pride and her freedom: she is not afraid to disagree with the majority, nor to take responsibility for her choices in front of the king. Moreover, on more than one occasion she defines the Persian generals – in clear opposition to herself – as servants.6 She stands apart from the generally accepted master-slave norms, and by contributing as a voluntary ally in the war, she does her best to ensure that the expedition succeeds. The ‘Greekness’ of her behaviour could not be plainer. Having the andreia of a man, she is both similar and antithetical to the Persians.7 The Barbarians are usually depicted in Herodotus (as with the majority of Greek authors from the Classical and Hellenistic age) as female-like, their culture consisting of (implicitly negative) qualities which the Greeks would associate as being feminine, like softness, excess and ferocity.8 Having grown up in the mixed milieu of a Greek polis of Asia Minor, Artemisia is depicted by Herodotus as clearly Greek: her mother is a Cretan, and her father Lygdamis is ‘Halicarnassius’.9 Although the latter may have been a Carian in the true sense, judging from what Herodotus says about the population of Halicarnassus being altogether Doric, it is clear that he regards him as a Greek (and not a Carian from the population he describes in 1.171).10 Consequently, Artemisia is remarkably free from the barbaric features which usually characterize the dominant female of the East in the Histories.11 Her autonomy of political choice immediately makes her Greek: she is free as the Greeks are, going to war with few resources and great bravery. Furthermore, her freedom of speech makes her even more than a Greek: she behaves as an Athenian. However, Herodotus also writes that the Athenians were afraid of Artemisia and considered it a terrible disgrace that a woman could make war against the Greeks.12 In Athens, such a woman represented an upside-down world, which had to be rejected and kept at a distance. Like the Amazons, Artemisia became a representation of female masculinity in Athenian thought wherein, beginning from the Classical Age, the theme of the Amazonomachia was seized upon to signify the legitimate fight of the polis against invaders who endangered the city and its values.13 The Amazons then began to symbolize the Alterity of the Barbarians to the Greeks, adding to this ethnically conceived dichotomy a new element of Alterity: that between male and female.14 In Caria, on the other hand, the transmission of power to the daughters of the royal house must have been a real possibility – a fact that surprised and scandalized the continental Greeks – during the fifth century, as well as in the age of Mausolos.15 By specifying that the Athenians even offered a bounty for the capture of Artemisia, Herodotus underlines that for the Athenians, a woman in war could only be a spoil of 30

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war. On the other hand, it is clear that Herodotus, being of mixed culture just as Artemisia was, manifestly admires her.16 Reading Artemisia’s story from an ethnically mixed point of view (that of Herodotus and Artemisia), Sebillotte Cuchet has argued that the Herodotean episode reveals the existence of another Greek reality, in which women were not always under such strict male control as they were within the Athenian construction of gender.17 The Athenocentric vision of race and gender as a bipolar model of interpreting the world would usually prevail. In later sources, Artemisia would seldom be represented as a positive figure. The sexism implicit in strong, antithetically shaped female-male roles, which developed in Athens between the fifth and fourth centuries bce , would be transmitted to the Roman world by Plutarch, who – not by chance – never quotes Artemisia among the brave women of his mulierum virtutes.18 In his de Herodoti malignitate, Plutarch mockingly dismisses Herodotus’ account of her advice not to engage in the naval battle as the product of ‘prophetic qualities’ instead of the result of a tactical analysis, and concludes that Xerxes entrusted her with the care of his sons because he forgot to bring women from Susa to this task.19 Jealous and manipulative, she would be described as having blinded a man who refused her love, before jumping off the rock of Leukas.20 Even her competence as a warrior would be diminished. Polyaenus, after telling of her military exploits during the naval battle, describes how she captured a town by using a feminine ruse: she appeared in a nearby grove of the Great Mother, concealing her arms and followed by eunuchs and cymbal players. She thus took the citizens who had come out to join the procession by surprise, gaining through subterfuge ‘what she could not obtain by force of arms’.21 Her namesake and countrywoman Artemisia II , wife of Mausolos, is at first sight a better fit for the traditional scheme. After the Persian Wars and their long aftermath, the Peace of Callias (450/449 bce ), stipulated between the Achaemenid empire and the Delian League, granted stability to the area for a few years: the Persians agreed to leave the Greek cities of the coast free from tribute, and in return the Greeks agreed to leave inland to the Persians. However, just a few years later the Athenians supported the revolt of Amorgos (411 bce ). The rebellion was soon defeated by joint Spartan-Persian forces, but the incident marked the complete loss of Caria for Athens. Nevertheless, Caria was probably not separated from the satrapy of Lydia until during the 390s bce , when the local Hekatomnid family was appointed to rule.22 Mausolos was the eldest son of Hecatomnus, the founder of the dynasty. When Hecatomnus died, Mausolos succeeded him as satrap and dynast (377/6 to 353/2). He moved the centre of government to Halicarnassus and pursued a policy of Hellenising Caria, becoming a major figure in the politics of the Aegean world.23 Mausolos was married to his full sister, Artemisia. Although literary sources only mention Mausolos as ruler, epigraphic evidence shows that Artemisia was probably associated with the reign from the beginning (though hardly as equal), and that she possessed some degree of public authority, even before his death.24 Their marriage was, according to Strabo, childless.25 When Mausolos died, his widow-sister Artemisia succeeded him for a short period (353/2 to 351/0 bce ), before herself dying. She is well known for having organized 31

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impressive funeral celebrations for her husband26 and for having initiated and supervized the construction of his funerary monument, the famous Mausoleum. During the short period of her reign, she also seems to have been involved in some military actions. While her grief for her husband became a topos in Greek literature (and almost the only reason she was remembered in later centuries), Demosthenes and Vitruvius offer a slightly different picture, describing her as a warrior queen. In his speech On the liberty of the Rhodians, Demosthenes tries to convince the Athenians to intervene in Rhodes, and to reinstall the democrats who had been expelled during civil war by the local oligarchs, supported by the Carian dynasty. At the end of his oration, Demosthenes recalls the time when ‘Mausolos and Artemisia got their hands on Cos, Rhodes and other Greek cities’.27 The main obstacle to this project, Demosthenes admits, is Artemisia, who may wish to maintain her influence on Rhodes.28 However, he argues, Artemisia will probably not oppose the Athenian action, because of the general political insecurity. If the Great King’s designs in Egypt met with any success, he argues, Artemisia would have made a great effort to secure Rhodes for him, in order to strongly obligate him. As he had failed in all his attempts, however, she would surely not wish him to have a base so close as to serve as a fortress to overcome Caria and check any move on her part. In this part of the speech, while showing the Athenians the facts and considering the pro and contra of an intervention in war, Demosthenes takes Artemisia very seriously: he does not underestimate her strategic abilities and respects her as a political leader, independent of her sex, which in this passage is not mentioned at all. She has arche, as a military and political authority recognized by the Great King. However, when he has to convince the Athenians, Demosthenes refers back to the rhetoric of the war between Greeks and Barbarians, and of democracy against oligarchy, arguments that were well established in the political and propagandistic discourse of his time and which every contemporary would have understood immediately. That she is not only a Barbarian, but also a woman, fits perfectly into his argument: ‘if when the commons of Argos feared not the authority of the Lacedaemonians in the day of their might, you, who are Athenians, should fear one who is at once a barbarian and a woman?!’29 Vitruvius tells how Artemisia resisted an attack by the Rhodians, taking their city by surprise and then dedicated a statuary group at Rhodes to celebrate the victory, representing herself in the act of branding the statue of the Rhodians.30 Even if the episode is likely exaggerated, its historicity is not completely implausible – especially as it echoes the political rivalries mentioned by Demosthenes – and it seems altogether probable that Artemisia had a political and military role in the turmoil of her age.31 This mention in Vitruvius is important, as it plays a role in reception: it is Vitruvius, more than Demosthenes, who transmitted to the modern age the image of Artemisia as a warrior queen.32 As Elizabeth Carney has observed, although it is impossible to state whether the first Artemisia was related to the second, it may well be that the Hecatomnid dynasty played on the association – the fact that the two queens bear the same name could be more than coincidence. Referring the Hecatomnid dynasty (which was of Carian ethnic origin but culturally Greek) to the daughter of the Halicarnassian tyrant Lygdamis, as well as the 32

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move of the capital to the ancient Doric-Ionic colony, could be interpreted as a clear sign of a Hecatomnid aspiration to Hellenise, in spite of their political loyalty to the Great King.33 Subsequent literary tradition transformed Artemisia II into an exemplum of ‘amor coniugalis’ par excellence. Valerius Maximus and Aulus Gellius report that she was so inflamed with grief and longing for her dead husband, that she drunk his ashes mixed with spices.34 Later, Boccaccio – who had already fused together the two Carian queens into one – gave a lengthy account of her conjugal virtues.35 During the early Renaissance representations of Artemisia were widespread, often inspired by the miniatures of Boccaccio’s manuscripts. She was usually represented as a loving wife and a military strategos.36 Her political role, in contrast, is usually underplayed, at least, until the sixteenth century.

Artemisia as a role model for European ruling queens and queen mothers In July 1559 Catherine de’ Medici, wife of Henry II , king of France, became a widow. Her very young son, Francis II , always delicate, managed to reign for only a year before he died of infection. When Catherine took the regency, she was alone in a foreign country, surrounded by enemies. Although France was unused to being ruled by a woman, Catherine immediately showed that she had no intention of withdrawing from power.37 On the contrary, she staged her campaign for her regency by redefining her public image and creating her own official imagery. From this moment until her own death, all images of Catherine showed her wearing black as a sign of eternal mourning: this underlined her status as a widow – upon which depended her ability to reign – and forged a permanent link to Henry. In the fashion of the time, she needed an ancient or mythical prototype to identify with, one specially chosen to justify her pretentions. But to find a suitable prototype for a woman – one who was in the difficult position of being a foreigner and having no real claim to the throne – was more difficult than to do so for a male, legal heir.38 Since Catherine’s only link to the French throne was through her deceased husband and their male children (all of minor age), any imagery that sought to enhance her legitimacy as a regent needed to be based on her status as a widow and a mother.39 The classical model was found when Nicolas Houel presented her with his newly composed Histoire de la Royne Arthémise.40 The book combined the stories and personalities of Artemisia I and of Artemisia II in an idealized biography, which was in turn adapted to fit the biography of Catherine. Artemisia II , being the widow of Mausolos and having been celebrated during the Middle Ages for her inconsolable mourning, was particularly suitable as a model, but she lacked an heir, because the marriage remained childless. Her historical personality was then extended, including details pertinent to the elder Artemisia, who is said by Herodotus to have had a child,41 and enriched with episodes from the life of Catherine herself. The Histoire, Houel argues, was written to teach and instruct Catherine in her new role of regent queen.42 The author also refers to 33

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certain illustrations that the queen should use as cartoons for tapestries in her residence. While the Histoire was intended primarily as a private reading, the drawings, attributed to Antoine Caron and accompanied by a sonnet from Houel himself, were intended for a public audience. Tapestries were a very expensive form of art, and there is no evidence that the tapestries from Artemisia’s cartoons were actually woven during her reign. But the imagery invented in the drawings by Caron surely had a great impact, as shown by the fact that the designs were reused – and the tapestries finally realized – some 50 years later for another queen, Maria de’ Medici.43 The Artemisia drawings depict the ancient queen in various activities that reflect her wifely yet royal duties: arranging the funeral and planning the Mausoleum, supervising the education of her young son, and ruling with the counsellors of the reign.44 The military power of both Carian queens is downplayed (but not absent), as it was contrary to the peaceful policy that Catherine tried to pursue. In representing the queen regent as an authoritative – yet still female – figure, certain limitations were imposed by the decorum of gender, and the artist had to maintain a balance between the need to strengthen and legitimate the position of the queen and the need to keep her representation within acceptable categories. Artemisia-Catherine is thus usually represented as a figure dominating the scene – she is the tallest figure, or stands at a higher level than the others – but to one side, not in the centre of the composition. When it is a matter of government, she is always shown with her son, in whose name Catherine (at least formally) ruled. On the other hand, the queen could assume gestures similar to those of male figures from the period: when discussing the construction of Mausolos’ tomb, for instance, Artemisia places her left elbow on the shoulder of one of the workmen (a gesture never seen in contemporary female images), or sits at a table, discussing as an equal.45 The relaxed position denotes the confidence and competence generally attributed to a man. In the drawings, Artemisia is the ideal prototype for a woman-ruler because she possesses the virtues of a man but never loses the grace of a woman: she is shown as tall, slender and graceful, according to the contemporary canons of Western female beauty. Nothing in her figure and surroundings remind us of the fact that Artemisia – like Catherine – was a stranger. There is no allusion to the Carian origin of the queen (nor to her Persian connections), who is thus represented by reassuringly European and well assimilated Hellenising looks.46 When, some years after Catherine’s death, the drawings with the story of Artemisia were rediscovered, things had changed. Originally created to legitimize a widow, they were used by the French king Henry IV to commission tapestries celebrating his wife, Maria de’ Medici, in her role as mother and educator of the prince.47 The re-use of the cartoons meant for the first de’ Medici queen became an homage to the second, Maria. The tapestries were intended to celebrate the renewed alliance of the king with the Italian family (realized thanks to the marriage with Maria), and to enhance the dynastic continuity with the Valois, to whom Catherine had belonged by marriage.48 The subject had to be adapted to the situation, as the queen was not (yet) a widow. All scenes of devotion for the deceased husband, as well as the construction of his funeral 34

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monument, so important to the original project, obviously disappeared.49 Instead, drawings showing Artemisia supervising the education of her son were developed, selecting from Houel the scenes that were particularly related to the military training of the prince. The episodes relating to Artemisia’s war against Rhodes became central.50 Of the final 15 tapestries woven under Henry IV, eight are based on the original drawings prepared for Catherine, and seven appear to be new: this new group develops the themes of war and victory, already touched upon in the poem from Houel. Generally, in the tapestries representing war scenes, emphasis is placed on the festive aspect of victory – after all, the reign was in peace at that time – and even the only real wartime episode, the attack against Rhodes, is made less dramatic: we see Artemisia’s military ship passing under the Colossus, which occupies the centre of the scene, creating a sense of the marvellous more than the dramatic (see Fig. 2.1).51 The subject of the victorious king (in this case a queen, though this did not seem to disturb Henry IV ) is very common in contemporary art, and Artemisia’s campaign against Rhodes functioned well as a celebrative parallel: just as the real king had put an end to the civil war, so Artemisia had stopped Rhodes’ rebellion.52 Only a few years later, in spring of 1610, Henry was assassinated and Maria herself became regent, as Catherine had been, in the name of her son, still a child. The tapestries thus once again came to represent the power of a woman ruling instead of a man.

Fig. 2.1 The Queen’s Entry into the Harbor of Rhodes (Central design by Antoine Caron). Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund 48.13.9. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art. 35

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As in the drawings of Houel, there is no trace in the tapestries of the Carian origin of Artemisia. When she is represented at war, as in the tapestry of the Rhodian Colossus, she wears the armour and helmet of a Greek warrior, and her iconography is clearly inspired by the goddess Athena. She was also pictured this way in the original drawing by Caron. In the scenes of civil administration, or when she supervises the education of her son, Artemisia is not represented bearing arms: in this case she dresses as a contemporary woman, with fine clothes, vaguely inspired by ancient models (especially in Caron), but never in Oriental fashion.53 In both iconographic programmes – the first for Catherine, the second for Henry and Maria – Artemisia is presented as a positive model of royal virtue. The theme of the exaggerated mourning of Artemisia II , highly popular during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods and represented in hundreds of subjects as a painting or a tapestry, does not recur in the iconographic programme of the Medici queens. This image of a passionate woman is too excessive and morbid; she may be a perfect mourner and a loyal wife, but this is not the picture of a woman who aspires to be a European queen.54

Artemisia goes to the movies In 300: Rise of an Empire (Noam Murro, 2014) Artemisia I, interpreted by a disquietingly beautiful Eva Green, is not a queen, nor even of aristocratic origin: she is a Greek, and a survivor. With unexpected historical sensibility, the film depicts how her family had been massacred by a squad of hoplites in one of the innumerable episodes of war which plagued the Greek cities of Asia Minor during the late archaic age.55 Greek soldiers killed and raped every member of Artemisia’s family in front of her eyes and took her, still a child, as a slave. Abandoned as half dead after being used and abused on a ship, she is saved by an emissary of the Persian court and educated by Persians, who teach her to fight as one of the best warriors of Darius’ reign, until she becomes the most trusted general of first Darius and then Xerxes. She hates the Greeks and seeks revenge. The script of 300: Rise of an Empire grants Artemisia – who in Herodotus was merely the protagonist of a comparatively small episode in a giant war – much more space. Indeed, she is the true architect of the war, who transforms Xerxes into a God-king and a war machine, against the wish of the dying Darius, who finally acknowledged the superiority of the Greeks. The film thus subverts Herodotus’ narration, where Artemisia tries to avoid the battle. Following the trend in contemporary films of having strong female characters,56 Artemisia, in contrast to most female leading roles of 1970s and 1980s action films, is not a damsel-in-distress who needs to be rescued by the hero, nor the pretty sidekick of the 1990s. Her courage is not passive – she has a dominant (and cruel) personality and is fully capable of leading troops, fighting in person, taking difficult strategic decisions and commanding an immense army of men. But while Artemisia has agency, she has no clear 36

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motive other than revenge; her villainy is not due to personal ambition, loyalty to her country (like Themistocles) or some moral cause, but simply a hatred of men. In 300: Rise of an Empire, director Murro follows the same aesthetic as Snyder’s 300. In both films the Greeks are depicted as semi-nude, hyper-masculine heroes, while the Persians are effeminate and grotesque.57 Xerxes, at least in the beginning, seems to be capable of feelings and is depicted as deeply mourning the loss of his father, expressing emotions which until very recently were not allowed to be felt by cinematic male heroes. Artemisia, on the other hand, in a reversal of roles that is quite typical of recent action films,58 personifies the true ‘macho man’, who takes without asking. But even while acting as the most brutal villain and being as violent and ruthless as the most stereotypical male action hero, she still dresses in very feminine attire, even in combat wearing impossibly sexy long skirts which open to show her thighs, and usually some kind of skin-tight armour with prominent nipples.59 Her gothic-inspired costumes, sexualized and impractical, with sadomasochistic details like a ribbon of spines on the back, only serve to underline that she is a deranged personality. Artemisia’s ‘strength’ is essentially driven by her desire for revenge, a consequence of her rape, which provides the only motive she seems to have in the film, namely to punish not only the Greeks, as she openly declares, but all men.60 Her unnecessary murder of various Persian leaders and her manipulation of Xerxes demonstrates that she is a destructive force that turns the world upside-down, subverting male authority and destabilizing society. Artemisia is a psychopath, depicted with all the clichés of the cruel oriental. Xerxes, on the other hand, who is only a puppet in Artemisia’s hands, not by chance soon loses every form of humanity, transforming into a strange sadomasochistic creature of indefinite sexuality with golden skin: a man manipulated by a woman is clearly no man at all. The Herodotean Artemisia is presented as being equal to a man. She speaks as a member of the elite and takes political risks, acting in every way like a man.61 In the film, Artemisia acts in the role of a man, but she is not like a man (nor are the Persians ‘real men’): with all her military strength, the cinematic Artemisia still remains ‘a bitch’, whose most lethal weapon is her sex appeal, perfectly fitting the old (Western) stereotypes of an East in which women are powerful because men are weak. Although Artemisia is ultimately defeated, in the first half of the film her superiority is undeniable. She not only has more soldiers, she is also better organized and has more modern weapons. But in the sex-scene with Themistocles, the traditional roles are reestablished: in a moment, the powerful queen transforms into the cliché of the femme fatale who needs to manipulate men to get her way. Invited onto her royal ship, Themistocles has violent sex with her, which she enjoys a great deal, as shown by the camera dwelling on every expression of ecstasy on her face. He, instead, clearly does this out of duty, using sex as a weapon. Always dominant and always with a very serious expression on his face, he brutalizes her. Artemisia is clearly attracted to him, and not only sexually: she admires him and offers for him to join her, to become a traitor. Indeed, she truly tries to seduce him, making herself pretty, offering him wine and even making an attempt at witty conversation! He, in contrast, is not attracted to her; he does not 37

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admire her. To him, sex – at least with Artemisia – means only possession and submission. As for the rest, it is nothing more than the answer of his manly body to a purely animalistic instinct. In addition to her sexual brutalization, in the film Artemisia is often violently slapped in the face. This is in contrast to the male protagonists, who are hit in every possible brutal way, but never slapped in the face: this is a weapon one typically uses with women and children, not with men.62 The plot of the film is apparently constructed around the personal antagonism of Themistocles and Artemisia, who, as in Herodotus, play similar roles on opposite fields.63 But the judgemental eye of the film’s director is very different from the admiring gaze of the cosmopolitan Herodotus, who implicitly admitted the equality of Themistocles and Artemisia and turned the Carian queen, through her gestures and democratic rhetoric, into an Athenian. The cinematic Artemisia is seen through a phallocentric lens, whose moral seems to be summed up by Gorgo’s welcome to Themistocles: ‘You’ve come a long way to stroke your cock, while you watch real men train.’ The real antagonist of Artemisia in 300: Rise of an Empire is not Themistocles, but the Spartan queen Gorgo, who is a real Greek, virile and heroic. She, acting in the traditional feminine role of the supporting wife – though, in an ‘emancipated’ way – personifies the moral world of a real (Western) man. The opposition between Artemisia and Gorgo, as well as the way in which the two queens mirror opposite images of femininity (and ethnicity), is even more evident if one compares Murro’s 300: Rise of an Empire with the older The 300 Spartans from Rudolph Maté (1962). In the latter, Artemisia (Anne Wakefield) plays a very small but important role. She is a femme fatale, whose iconography vaguely resembles the Cleopatra of Mankiewicz, a powerful and capricious Oriental queen who lends Xerxes her ships but does not command them herself, as this would have been unacceptable to family audiences of the 1960s. In her first encounter with the Persian king on screen, she is welcomed as a friend (and almost an equal) by Xerxes. However, the encounter immediately assumes some sexual overtones when Xerxes asks her to come at night to discuss military strategies and she, with a voluptuous glance at him, answers that she will come, but only if the discussion is limited to war. It is obvious that it will not be. Her role provides a counterpart to the love stories of Leonidas and Gorgo, and Ellas and Phylon: the two Greek couples, different as they are, represent the ideal relationship between men and women, providing prototypes for the real couples during the Cold War era to identify with. On the other hand, Xerxes and Artemisia quite openly represent the dangerous East, with its decadent costumes and immoral behaviour. Demaratus, who works for the Persians but still considers himself a true Greek, will not even speak to Artemisia, reminding her that, although she is a queen, she is still only a woman.64 The two principal Greek female characters, Gorgo and Ellas, personify purity and innocence.65 To suit the image of a modest wife-queen, Gorgo wears gowns resembling the austere Doric peplos. The simplicity of Gorgo’s attire emphasizes her strength and chastity. By contrast, the representation of Artemisia as an Oriental femme fatale implies extreme artificiality. While Gorgo’s wardrobe is limited to two peploi, Artemisia wears a different outfit each time she appears on screen. Gorgo’s peploi are white and minimally 38

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Fig. 2.2 Artemisia and Xerxes, The 300 Spartans. Twentieth Century Fox / Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy Stock Foto.

decorated; Artemisia’s gowns are voluminous, red or blue, and adorned with golden details and accessories.66 (See Fig. 2.2) Colour codes are always important in the tradition of peplum film and always carry symbolic meaning – white is used to indicate a positive character, while dark or sharp colours like black, blue and red signify evil. The construction of Artemisia’s image as a seductress is completed by her sensual make-up and elaborate hairstyle: her eyes, with long eyelashes, are painted green, her lips are red, her dark black hair is artfully arranged.67 By contrast, Gorgo wears minimal make-up, no jewellery and has her hair tied up in a plain bun. Her looks underline her modesty and denote that – as opposed to the dissolute Eastern queen – she, a wife/queen in the Greek West, is sober and respectable.68 Gorgo is represented mostly in her home, as a loyal wife and mother. Raising a boy to become a soldier who will fight for Sparta emphasizes her image as a caring and patriotic woman in a patriarchal society. Tellingly, while speaking with Leonidas, Gorgo refers to the boy not as ‘our son’ but ‘your son’, highlighting Leonidas’ hegemonic masculinity. The antagonist personalities of Gorgo and Artemisia are better understood against the backdrop of the Cold War and global politics during the early 1960s. The 300 Spartans has been read as a metaphor of the rivalry between the US and its NATO allies, represented by the Greek poleis, and the USSR with the Communist Bloc, embodied by the wicked Persians.69 In the US , the adoption of a foreign policy of ‘containment’ in the 39

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years after the Second World War was paralleled by a trend in domestic politics that saw the home and the family placed at the very centre of the ‘American way of life’. The construction of such a space needed to rediscover traditional gender roles, with men as breadwinners and women as housekeepers. By the early 1950s, communism within popular American imagination was associated with seductive and voracious femininity.70 In The 300 Spartans, Artemisia using her sex appeal to manipulate Xerxes corresponds perfectly to this stereotyped pattern of Oriental femininity. Such a scenario suggests that the Persian empire, and by extension the Communist Bloc, is an upside-down world where the women are men and the men are women. This world threatens to overcome Greece/the US , the place of tradition and normality. The containment of communism seems to require the control of femininity, as well as a renewed emphasis on family values as a pillar of American life.71 While Miller devotes only one page to Gorgo in his graphic novel, she is granted a more prominent role in Snyder’s 300 film and Noam Murro’s 300: Rise of an Empire (where she does not appear much on the screen but epitomizes the story as a voiceover). In 300, not only does she leave the house to join Leonidas when he meets Xerxes’ messenger at the Spartan agora, she also advises and supports him, acting as a peer rather than a subordinate wife.72 Snyder’s Gorgo is dynamic and self-confident, with both regal authority and sex appeal.73 Her look mirrors contemporary aesthetics: slender and strong, with long hair, she usually wears sexy white clothes with a deep neckline that leaves much of her body exposed. Her dresses combine soft fabrics with hard materials, such as leather straps and metal details – a combination that evokes both her feminine and masculine side.74 Just as Maté’s Gorgo was chaste and modest, Snyder’s Gorgo is independent and free: as is not unusual in contemporary cinema, the amount of bare skin shown on screen is directly proportional to the character’s freedom in her social, sexual and intellectual life. Just as her 1962 counterpart is constructed to suit the Cold War ideology, Snyder and Murro’s Gorgo is presented as an emancipated woman, according to the shifting needs of a feminine audience who could no longer identify with the submissive wife of Maté. In sharp contrast to Xerxes (who, although male, does not embody masculinity), Snyder’s Gorgo has courage and agency, like her male fellow-citizens.75 At the same time, the film plays on the post-9/11 coding of the West in mass media as a liberal place where everybody, regardless of gender, enjoys freedom of movement and speech, as opposed to the oppressive Islamic Orient. Gorgo thus acts as a counterpoint to women in Muslim societies, who must follow a very strict dress code and conceal their entire body.76 However, Gorgo is less emancipated than she wishes us to believe. When the queen needs to influence the Council, she seeks help from Theron, and does so in the most traditional way of ‘women politics’: offering herself in exchange, thus using the same strategy as Artemisia with Xerxes in The 300 Spartans, and Artemisia with Themistocles in 300: Rise of an Empire.77 Snyder’s powerful women are thus still characterized in a reductive manner not dissimilar to that of Maté’s film. As Nikoloutsos notes, they still operate within a patriarchal system, which considers power as the domain of males.78 Within this domain, women can interact only in the most traditional way: through their 40

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bodies. Although Gorgo’s role as a powerful and respected Spartan queen is clear from the beginning, it is mostly established through her ability to procreate. When, unaccustomed to women expressing themselves in public spaces, a Persian ambassador insultingly asks: ‘What makes this woman think she can speak among men?’ Gorgo answers, quoting Plutarch: ‘Because only Spartan women give birth to real men.’79 Ultimately, and in total accord with ancient tradition, the superiority of the Spartan women (including Gorgo) is both dependent upon and a function of the superiority of Spartan men.

Postmodern Artemisia These issues come full circle when Artemisia finally returns to Asia in the Italian graphic novel Eterna Artemisia by Giuseppe Palumbo.80 Revitalizing Marija Gimbutas’ feminist archaeology, as well as blending her Kurgan Theory with the myth of the two Carian queens, he creates a future scenario in which women are oppressed and secluded by men.81 The story is set in the imaginary town of Samsara, in a dystopic future. Although we do not know exactly where this imaginary town with the oriental name is located,82 the allusions to the Western civilization and its deviations are evident: it is a hypertechnological city, sterile-clean (at least on the surface), perfectly functioning (they even produce their own clean energy) and anonymous, where bureaucracy and productivity control every aspect of human life. Women in this future horror-scenario have only two options: to marry a man, who will become their protector and absolute master, or become a ‘brood-woman’, a state-controlled procreation machine who delivers children for the state-incubator. The appearance of democracy is still practised, but the elections hold no surprises and fail to change reality: on the contrary, they confirm and legitimate the status quo. Oppressed, scared and brutalized, women still have the right to vote – even if voting women are not well regarded – and are allowed to meet in the so called ‘Gineceo’. There, if they have the courage, they can talk politics without being spied upon. One of the few women still politically active is Artemisia, a young woman married to a progressive politician, Mauso, who is feminist and devoted to the cause of social justice. Obviously, Mauso is disliked by the government and is soon eliminated, thanks to a faked car crash. Artemisia, left alone in a very dangerous position, refuses to become a ‘tolerated but not accepted’ outcast and runs away, seeking refuge in the subterraneanlevels of the ‘vertical town’, a kind of hidden and lawless underground world, in the sewers of the apparently perfect Samsara, where derelicts of all kinds gather. Here she is found by Chimera, who reveals to her that she is a reincarnation of the ancient Artemisia. Both ancient Carian queens, her ancestors, as well as the goddess Artemis, whose name is reflected in hers, are reincarnations of the Great Mother; she, the wife of Mauso, is the last reincarnation. Chimera, the monstrous beast of mythology, is a kind of magical creature: she is imagined as an oppressed female who becomes dangerous by reaction, whose role is to help women to reconquer the power they once had. Her iconography is telling: under the cloak she wears when she travels incognito, she is dressed like the Minoan Snake goddess (Fig. 2.3). Once besieged in mythology by Bellerophon and 41

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Fig. 2.3 Artemisia and Chimera in Crete. From Eterna Artemisia, p. 37, Story and Design by Giuseppe Palumbo, ed. Comma 22, 2008 © Giuseppe Palumbo. Pegasus,83 both males and warriors, she represents the constantly resurrecting power of the feminine. After the first Chimera (who was a priestess of the Great Mother) was killed, an occult dynasty of women developed, the Chimerae, whose mission was to periodically revitalize the cult of the Great Mother and to resist and oppose the constant threat of repression of the feminine. Helped by Chimera, Artemisia goes on a quest to find and collect the fossils of the empire of the Great Mother throughout history; she is hindered from doing this by Kurgan, a dangerous killer with a revealing name.84 Kurgan is responsible for the death of Mauso, who had identified in the cult of the Great Mother and her archaeological survivals a key to the renewal of society. While searching for the identity of the Great Mother, from the oriental Mediterranean to Ireland (where she rediscovers the power of the mother goddess Danu), Artemisia discovers her own hidden potential and grows stronger. People begin to connect with her and Chimera, and they gain more and more supporters. Kurgan and his followers are furious. In Florence, where Chimera and Artemisia attempt to collect the last item, Chimera is killed by Kurgan. Back in Samsara, where she will soon lead a revolution to change the social order and give women back their dignity, Artemisia (who has given birth to Mauso’s son) herself becomes a new Chimera. In this dystopic fantasy-story, the Orient – intended as Neolithic Mediterranean culture – is not a place of oppression. On the contrary, even if some of the loci communes of the male-dominated Orient are reproduced in Samsara (married women are obliged to bind their hair, for example, something which vaguely recalls the Muslim veil) the 42

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oppression seems to come from Western – modern – civilization. The remote past and the eastern Mediterranean (Crete, Malta and Asia Minor in primis), especially its preIndo-European culture, build a sort of mythe du bon sauvage, functioning as a critical voice against the dangers of Western globalized civilization. In Palumbo’s vision, the ancient Orient not only coincides with the very beginning of civilization, but also symbolizes a more human world, one based on values of peace, love and fertility. In the utopic conception of Artemisia and Chimera, the Archaic and the Oriental are the same: they are both emblematic of a spatio-temporal dimension, which is both the mythical past and the aspirational future of humanity, in which a matriarchal society based on feminine values is imagined to repair the injustices of the world. The mythical past reconstructed by Gimbutas becomes in the comics a place of justice and equality, where the ‘bad guy’ is the Kurgan, imagined as the forefather of the white Caucasian male, prototype of the European man. It is not by chance that in this scenario the heroines who free the enslaved women are two Asiatic queens (who again merge together into one person) who fight for a return of the values of love and natural procreation – as opposed to the sterile, assisted generation of Samsara. Artemisia and Chimera claim to return to the most archaic femininity (that of the Neolithic Steatopygian statues), which is perceived by Palumbo to be both the most current and the most attractive, based on peace, nature, a non-hierarchical society and the reproductive power of women. Summing up, the representations of the two ancient Carian queens intertwine gender issues and Orientalism with one another, both being part of a wider propagandistic discourse. Originally of mixed culture, both Artemisias lose their ‘cultural neutrality’ in the bipolar Western model of interpretation of the Other, an attitude whose roots can be found already in fifth-century Athens. With the loss of their original ‘Middle Ground’ in reception, both Carian queens must become either European or Oriental.85 Modernity has projected its own colonial and postcolonial anxieties onto these two ethnic definitions, which are mirrored in the changing reception of the historical protagonists. Contemporaneity definitively returned the two Artemisias to the East, from where they originally came and where Herodotus first separated them. Once again, it is an imaginary East, sometimes seen as an imminent danger and sometimes as a wistful scenario – a projection of the dream of a just society and a mirror of the deep identity crisis of the West after the failure of the democratic ideals of the post-Second World War era. Neither confirming nor inverting the Greek–Barbarian polarity of Athenian tradition, contemporaneity has made it more complex, showing how the ‘Orient’ still repels and fascinates, and the degree to which modern political thought is still shaped by ancient dichotomies.

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CHAPTER 3 THE PERSIAN BOY, THE BACTRIAN GIRL AND THE MAN FROM MACEDON: GENDER AND ORIENTALISMS IN MARY RENAULT’S ALEXANDER THE GREAT TRILOGY Ann-Cathrin Harders

‘. . . a eunuch of exceptional appearance and in the very flower of boyhood’: the Roman historian Curtius Rufus thus introduces the Persian Bagoas when he was first presented to Alexander the Great; the boy became the Macedonian’s favourite shortly afterwards.1 Curtius manages to evoke Oriental Otherness for his Roman readers with very few words: an epicene youth, castrated, sensual, exotic and homoerotic who was to seduce and dazzle the king. Eunuchism was not a part of Roman or Greek culture, but ingrained in ancient perceptions of Persia; together with the other Eastern tropes Bagoas clearly represented the Orient and the Other.2 Two thousand years later, another beautiful young boy served to symbolize the East: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting The Snake Charmer (1880) presents a group of men in an Oriental setting looking at a stark naked boy. He holds a python which crawls around his narrow waist and small shoulders. The snake charmer is no eunuch, nonetheless he is clearly portrayed as a sexual object and, though the viewer is presented with his nudity as well, voyeurism is ascribed to the slumped and clothed audience in the back. The painting was used as the front cover of Edward Said’s ground breaking work on Orientalism (1978) in which Said analyses how the Orient was described and imagined by European artists and scientists in the nineteenth century to configure an Otherness that would legitimate imperialist strategies; the effeminate East was to be rescued and civilized by the masculine West. Bagoas and the Snake Charmer function in a very similar way in the context of their respective narratives; they are both ‘poster boys’ of forbidden sensuality and Otherness to which Westerners might give in. Alexander the Great, however, was not only threatened to surrender to Persia’s charms due to the seductive powers of young Persian boys. There were also wild Bactrian girls to consider: Alexander’s marriage to Roxane, the daughter of a Bactrian warlord, was unexpected, opposed by the Macedonian elite and explained by sexual desire. Ancient authors focus on Roxane’s beauty to which the conqueror succumbed and which led to a marriage of highly differing status and mixed ethnicity. Modern historians still stress her Otherness and picture her as either a Pocahontas to Alexander’s John Smith or the famous Afghan girl with the startling green eyes on the title of National Geographic in June 1985. She thus serves as a symbol of an invaded and war-ridden country.3

44

Persian Boy, Bactrian Girl and the Man from Macedon

The ancient sources as well as modern scholarship present both Bagoas and Roxane as visions of beautiful Otherness. It is hard for the historian to overcome Graeco-Roman notions of Otherness as the perspective of the conquered is not handed down to us. An artist, however, is not confined to the historical evidence; artistic license allows to give to the Other a voice and to present another point of view which is not restricted to the ancient bias nor does it necessarily have to perpetuate Western notions of the Orient as the Other. Mary Renault, one of the most acclaimed historical novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, tackled in her Alexander-trilogy – Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972) and finally Funeral Games (1981)4 – unusual topics for historical fiction at the time: questions of homosexuality and sexual ambiguity, fluid gender roles, the devaluation of Western core norms and Western authority. In The Persian Boy Renault chose the eunuch Bagoas as narrator and allows the reader to see through his Persian eyes Alexander as well as Alexander’s relationship to the Bactrian Roxane. Funeral Games follows Roxane from Babylon to Macedon, where she was eventually murdered. In telling their tales, Renault had to cope with two narratives: the Eastern imaginaire of her readers as well as her historical sources, which gaze upon the beauty of Bagoas and Roxane to cultivate the dichotomy of the West and the East. This chapter analyses how Renault exploits and reformulates both. It first gives an historical overview over Bagoas and Roxane and how they are presented by different ancient authors. In her historical novels, Renault meticulously (re-)imagines the past based on these sources. The second part of the chapter focuses on Renault’s representation of both Bagoas and Roxane; its aim is to show how Renault’s boy from Persia and girl from Bactria serve to undermine not only ancient discourses on East and West, but also subvert modern notions of Orientalism as well as gender stereotypes.

Bagoas, Roxane and the ancient sources Not much is known about the historical Bagoas: according to Curtius Rufus he was an exceptionally good-looking, young eunuch and a former lover of Dareios III who was gifted to Alexander by the fugitive Narbazanes, Dareios’ former chiliarch and one of his murderers. Narbazanes’ pardon was attributed to Bagoas’ charm and persuasive ways – according to Badian, a task that he was carefully trained for.5 Plutarch and Athenaios (citing Dicaearchus) describe that Alexander entertained a sexual relationship with the Persian boy: during a festival in the Gedrosian capital Pura Alexander was dazzled by the dance performance of Bagoas. Afterwards, still in his dance costume, Bagoas seated himself beside the king, and, following the cheers of the Macedonian audience to honour the winner of the agon, Alexander embraced and kissed him.6 Plutarch presents Bagoas in Greek terms as the eromenos of Alexander, referring to socially recognized roles in Greek homoerotic relationships. Nonetheless, the sexual relationship between the king and the young eunuch does not compare to what Ogden calls ‘peer-homosexuality in a military context’7 and to what probably, but not certainly describes the relation between Alexander and Hephaestion.8 Eunuchism, indeed, was not known to the Macedonian 45

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court and Bagoas became a unique figure among Alexander’s circle, not overly prominent, but also not necessarily spurned as the dancing episode demonstrates.9 Curtius Rufus employs the eunuch-motif in a more hostile way: Bagoas is held responsible for the downfall of Dareios’ general Orxines. Allegedly, the general honoured Alexander’s friends (amici regis), but neglected Bagoas, ‘who had enslaved Alexander to himself by giving up his body to him.’10 Bagoas took revenge and, counting on his sexual wiles and Alexander’s infatuation, plotted Orxines’ destruction. He accused him of disloyalty and robbery of the tomb of Cyrus the Great. Alexander ordered Orxines’ execution, and the latter announced that Asia was ruled by a castratus.11 In Curtius’ account Bagoas is instrumental to demonstrate Alexander’s degeneration and his succumbing to Oriental vice and tyranny: not only is Bagoas Persian, but he is also a eunuch and Dareios’ former lover and was therefore part of the Persian court system and Persian monarchy. Roxane plays a bigger part within the ancient narratives about Alexander than Bagoas. However, although she was his first wife, she cannot be ranked among the major or even secondary figures surrounding the king. The Bactrian remains rather a mystery who entered Alexander’s life in 327 bce with much sensual aplomb. Up to this point, Alexander had not married, much to his companions’ dismay. He had neither been a part in his father’s matrimonial politics – Philipp II of Macedon had married seven times, often to secure political alliances and strengthen territorial claims12 – nor did he choose a bride after he acceded to the Macedonian throne. According to Diodorus, he rejected the advice by Parmenion and Antipatros to marry a Macedonian and immediately produce an heir to secure the succession, as he wanted to live the life of a heros and not that of a husband.13 During his campaigns in Sogdia and Bactria Alexander was guest of honour at a feast sponsored by the Bactrian noble Sisimethres. There he met Roxane: like Bagoas she was a dancer, and her native dance struck Alexander’s fancy. Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian stress eros, sexual desire, as Alexander’s motivation for more or less spontaneously marrying the daughter of the Bactrian warlord Oxyartes. They emphasize Roxane’s extraordinary beauty which was second in Asia only to the allure of Dareios’ wife Stateira.14 Beauty is Roxane’s only characteristic; there is no information about her age (probably very young), her bearing, her ambitions or her reaction to being the bride of the most powerful man of the ancient world. Only Plutarch – and probably Diodorus – place Alexander’s first marriage within a cultural-political masterplan to unite the victorious West and the conquered East.15 Curtius Rufus, in contrast, dismisses any political reasons or the king’s emulation of Achilles by finding his Briseis as a pretext for desiring a socially and ethnically inferior woman. The marriage is seen as a political mistake: the ruler of Europe and Persia married a captiva and thus put his own position as well as that of his potential son and successor at risk. Curtius refers to Alexander’s hetairoi to prove his point: they rejected the marriage with a barbarian bride, but they were no longer able to speak their mind freely as they feared Alexander’s wrath. Roxane thus serves as a vehicle to demonstrate Alexander’s road to tyranny.16 Arrian, lastly, is not interested in Roxane as a person either: though she triggered his desires, the king would not just take her by droit 46

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de seigneur, but married her instead and proved thusly his self-composure, his sophrosyne. Arrian compares Alexander’s meeting with Roxane to his cavalier treatment of Dareios’ wife after Issus. This also proved his moral superiority as he would not molest the most beautiful woman of Asia either.17 Although the ancient authors mention the immediate political and military effects of the Bactrian marriage – Alexander’s father-in-law Oxyartes helped to install Macedonian command in Bactria18 – the relationship between Alexander and Roxane itself is portrayed in a noticeably a-political way: by emphasizing eros, Alexander’s actions are painted as irrational, and Roxane is introduced as a passive object to the king’s desires, but not as a political figure and is barely mentioned afterwards.19 However, when Alexander died in 323 in Babylon, she was noticeably pregnant.20 Roxane was not Alexander’s only wife: the king had married Stateira, the daughter of Darius III, in Susa in 324. She had been in Alexander’s care since his victory at Issus in 333. Before, Darius had offered his daughter’s hand in marriage along with half of his empire after the fall of Tyre, but Alexander had rejected both.21 Arrian is the only author who mentions another bride: Parysatis, the daughter of Dareios’ predecessor Artaxerxes III Ochos. By marrying two Persian princesses in Susa, Alexander firmly placed himself in Persian royal genealogies. Arrian sees these marriages as part of Alexander’s plan to unite conquerors and conquered, whereas Justin condemns them as a royal crime (crimen) and sees the mass wedding’s only purpose in hiding this crime.22 All three marriages ended with Alexander’s sudden illness and death one year later in Babylon – and with it, the Persian wives vanish from the historical record. Plutarch blames Roxane for their death. In his account, a jealous Roxane lured Stateira and probably Parysatis by means of a forged letter to Babylon. With the help of Perdiccas she killed her Persian rivals and disposed of their bodies by throwing them into a well.23 The Persian murder is the only recorded incident in which Roxane plays an active part in the political power play before and after Alexander’s death. She was important as she was the only wife pregnant, hopefully with a son. Nonetheless, her Bactrian ancestry became a matter of discussion among Alexander’s generals who showed reluctance in supporting a half-Bactrian heir. According to Curtius Rufus, Ptolemy did not distinguish between the unborn child of Roxane and Alexander’s son Heracles by Barsine, his Persian mistress, as both were by captive women.24 The fact that Roxane was Alexander’s legitimate wife was apparently not decisive; her Bactrian origin rather weighed against her child. Eventually, the generals proposed a joint rule of Alexander’s unborn son and Alexander’s half-brother Philip Arrhidaios, the foot soldiers’ candidate, with Perdiccas acting as regent.25 Although Roxane was the mother of the future king and the sole surviving wife of Alexander, she was not put forward on the political stage as Alexander’s widow. The successors thus chose not to politicize this special social role even though widows enjoyed a certain social standing in Greek society and Roxane might have been staged as a symbol for her dead husband.26 She remained firmly behind the curtain: Roxane and Alexander IV were first in the care of Perdiccas; after his death in 321/320 they shortly stayed with Antigonos the One-Eyed before moving to Macedon with Antipatros. In 319 Polyperchon and Alexander’s mother Olympias took over custody, 47

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until Cassander captured them three years later and brought mother and son to Amphipolis where they were eventually murdered in 310/309.27 Roxane played neither an important part in the political arena as Alexander’s wife and widow nor is she an important figure in the narratives of the various authors.28 Beautiful but silent, Roxane is part of a parcel of exotic women whom Alexander meets in the East and whose purpose is to illustrate the barbarism and Otherness of the conquered land: so, the ancient authors give a gruesome account of the mother-wife of Sisimethres, who unlike her son-husband would rather die than surrender. There also is the wife of Spitamenes who, still dripping in blood, presents the cut-off head of her husband to a surprised Alexander.29 Then Thalestris, the queen of the Amazons no less, makes an appearance: she wants the most powerful man on earth to father her child and leads Alexander into the wilderness for a thirteen days-long love feast.30 Next to incest, blood, murder and sex, the authors also indulge in details of foreign death rites performed by Eastern women: after Alexander’s death Sisygambis, Dareios’ mother, refuses to eat and dies. Her immolation is styled as an act of Totenfolge, a funeral custom where often, but not necessarily, a widow takes her own life shortly after her husband’s death. The practice was known in Antiquity for Thrace and the Herules at the Black Sea and was considered by Greeks and Romans as barbarian.31 Furthermore, Diodorus provides the first account of a suttee in India; although he acknowledges the sati’s bravery and loyalty, he maintains a strictly Greek point of view and condemns the wild and brutal customs as barbaric.32 Alexander’s conquest of the East is told from a Western perspective and with a Greek bias. Bagoas is a unique character, but as a eunuch a quintessentially Persian figure whereas Roxane is part of a set of Eastern women. As historical figures, they remain shadowy. Their main characteristic is beauty and sensuality; both are dancers who are gazed upon and are desired. They do not act on their own, but react to others – even as they eliminate Stateira and Orxines respectively who are perceived as threats to their position. So, both are narrative tools to create and to cultivate the East as the Other.33 Historical novelists such as Mary Renault necessarily depend on this biased material. Yet, the cases of Bagoas and Roxane are instructive as the relative silence of the sources allows to not only crack the ancient perspective and the Western male gaze, but also to turn the tables on the gender dichotomy, gendered notions of desire and concepts of the Other.

Mary Renault, the Persian boy and the Bactrian girl Mary Renault is the pseudonym of Mary Challens who was born in London on 4 September 1905.34 After graduating in English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1928, she began to train as a nurse in 1933. Working as a state registered nurse in 1937, she started writing, which became her full-time profession after the Second World War. In 1948, Renault and her partner, Julie Mullard, left England and moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where Renault died on 13 December 1983. Her first six novels are set in 48

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contemporary England, yet the last eight novels set in ancient Greece established her reputation as a novelist and were international bestsellers.35 Although Renault herself was lesbian, female relationships do not have a prominent place in her oeuvre. Nearly all the male protagonists of her historical novels are (re)cast as gay men. Even in her Theseus-novels and the Praise Singer with their heterosexual protagonists she turns to homosexual relationships and characters. Women, at least heterosexual women, are not treated as nuanced as Renault’s homo- or bisexual characters; they act rather stereotypically in the roles of wife and mother, they are angry and ruthless, but, eventually, frustratingly helpless – Roxane, as we will see, belongs to this set of women. This focus on male sexualities even led to the speculation that a male author was hidden behind the female pseudonym.36 The classical material allowed Renault to explore themes and topics deemed too controversial for novels set in contemporary times. Yet, her turn to Classical and Hellenistic Greece cannot be understood only as a mask: ‘Renault does not write about gay men simply because she writes about Greece. Nor does she write about Greece simply in order to write about gay men. Rather, her Greek historical novels allowed her to write about relationships not based on heterosexual hierarchies and not short-circuited by the heterosexual plot.’37 Renault’s central themes spin around questions of different forms of sexuality and, correspondingly, the fluidity of gender roles. Classical Greece offered a setting to prove that notions of homosexuality were cultural constructs which would change with time and place. Homosexuality was thus not seen as a freak of nature and gay relationships were not presented as a perversion, but as an integral part of a society which itself was considered as the fundament of Western values. One has to keep in mind that K. J. Dover’s seminal work on Greek Homosexuality was not published until 1978 – twenty-two years after The Last of the Wine and six years after The Persian Boy.38 So one should not underestimate the impact Renault’s novels had on the gay community and on the general English and American reader as well. The Persian Boy stormed the bestseller list of The New York Times in 1973 and made ‘homoerotic fiction mainstream for the first time’.39 The setting of the novels was important and Renault took pride in and is still praised for her accurate knowledge of the sources and her historical precision.40 She clearly saw the differences between the aims of a historian and the artistic licence of a novelist: ‘The historian, compelled by his ethics and his discipline to utter at this point the noble Socratic word “I do not know”, gets understandably irritated with the novelist who, having considered all the possibilities and the evidence for each, must finally put his stake on the board and say, “It happened like this”.’41 The Author’s Notes at the end of her novels lay open which sources she read and – more importantly in the case of Alexander – which she preferred. Curtius Rufus, the major source on Bagoas, gets an especially harsh treatment as ‘an unbearably silly man’42 as Renault envisioned not only a totally different Persian boy, but also a totally different Alexander. The past had to be recreated as much as created, but the plot and the action had to be consistent to the standards of the chosen time; anachronisms in dialogue had to be avoided, the elaborate manner of address and behaviour to royalty had to accord to social status and gender and the 49

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historical situation respectively.43 Historical novelists, according to Renault, have to be able to justify their decisions and choices; nonetheless, she was aware that the historical novel was no ‘real’ representation of the past and she recognized the foreignness and elusiveness of the world she created while, at the same time, the reader should be able to identify with its protagonists.44 Bagoas, the titular Persian boy, is an unusual figure, to say the least, to identify with. The novel was published in 1972 and forms the second part of Renault’s Alexander the Great-trilogy. Whereas the first part, Fire from Heaven (1969), was told from an omniscient third person perspective and chronicles Alexander’s childhood and youth as well as the development of his relationship to Hephaestion, Renault chose a minor figure of the Alexander-universe for her sequel – a figure that is barely mentioned by ancient authors (see above) and usually in a hostile fashion. Moreover, the novel is singular in the trilogy as it is a first-person narrative told entirely from Bagoas’ perspective. Renault’s choice has considerable and unexpected consequences: the reader does not follow Alexander’s campaign from the West to the East, but his victories are seen from the point of view of the conquered people and of an individual that, at first sight, combines all Western notions and prejudices of the Orient: a beautiful young boy, a castrated Persian, a courtier and highly skilled pleasure toy of Dareios who becomes Alexander’s lover.45 Renault most emphatically does not share the view of the ancient authors and especially that of Curtius Rufus whose Bagoas is instrumental to demonstrate Alexander’s degeneration to Oriental vice and tyranny. She provides Bagoas with a history and a distinct social background which he proudly declares in the first paragraph: ‘Lest anyone should suppose I am a son of a nobody, sold off by some peasant father in a drought year, I may say our line is an old one, though it ends with me. My father was Artembares, son of Araxis, of the Pasargadai, Kyros’ old tribe.’46 Bagoas recounts his change of fate as the hopeful scion of a noble Persian house to slavery, castration and prostitution in angry detail; his beauty catches the eye of the Persian royal court and he is bought and trained to become an accomplished dancer and Dareios’ lover.47 In contrast to her ancient sources, Renault puts emphasis on the scenery of the Persian world and creates lush visual settings: when Bagoas is introduced to the Great King, the author evokes the harem by combining certain motives from nineteenth-century paintings of harems, sultans and odalisques by Jean Auguste Ingres, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Francis John Wyburd or Gustave Boulanger: ‘The room gave on to a small fountain court, sweet with the scent of lilies; in the flowering trees hung gold cages of bright birds. By the fountain the musicians were putting up their instruments; but the water and the birds made a soft murmuring concert. The court has high walls, and was part of the room’s seclusion. He was on his cushions, looking into the courtyard’.48 Bagoas becomes part of the décor, no longer a subject, but ornamentalized and objectified: ‘I was to be enjoyed, like the flame and crimson birds, the fountain and the lutes. . . . It is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose its owners’.49 Renault assembles visual topoi which dominate European harem paintings and still set the scene for Oliver Stone’s movie Alexander (2004): water fountain, fragrance, birds, the sultan lounging, musicians in the background.50 What is missing is the odalisque: Bagoas is her substitute who becomes 50

Persian Boy, Bactrian Girl and the Man from Macedon

the exquisite collectable to be gazed at, just like Gérôme’s Snake Charmer. The femaledominated harem, so exotically and sensually rendered by European painters, is replaced by homoerotic interaction, and the eunuch, who usually is only the women’s guardian, becomes an object of desire himself. Because of his castration he is allowed to be part of the female-only space of the harem in the first place, but his undefined position on the gender scale – not a boy, never a man, but not a woman either – blurs the line when it comes to pin down gendered notions of desire. Bagoas’ later lover, Alexander, is at first nothing more than a rumour in the West; his victories are seen with the eyes of the Persian court which dissolves after the catastrophe of Gaugamela. In its wake Bagoas is presented as a gift by Narbazanes who clearly tries to play the beautiful 16-year-old boy on Alexander’s sexual desires. When Alexander finally, after nearly one-quarter of the novel, enters the scene, Bagoas first describes Alexander’s appearance. Renault does not render an ekphrasis of the famous bust by Lysippus or the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii. Hers is no Greek Alexander, but a man judged by Persian standards who is found lacking: ‘He was not so small as I had expected. Of course he would have measured like a boy against Dareios . . . Being fair-skinned, he had gone rather red, a tint not much admired by us, recalling the southern savages. But he had not their rufous hair; his was bright gold.’51 To his surprise, Alexander is beardless, among Persians the marker of a eunuch: ‘Persian soldiers would have had any man’s blood, who told them to make themselves like eunuchs, but I don’t think this had even occurred to the Macedonians.’52 On a visual level, markers of status are no longer unambiguous. Renault succeeds in establishing the Persian point of view as the norm; the reader identifies with Bagoas and Persian custom. She achieves this identification by playing with Oriental topoi such as a lush vision of the harem; in her narrative she picks up details established by nineteenth-century painters such as certain colour schemes, an emphasis on rich and embroidered textiles and exotic objects. The Orient is just as it should be – but the reader does not gaze upon it from the outside as one gazes on Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, but shares Bagoas’ eyes and thus is part of the picture. Yet the Eastern world is not only created on a visual level, but on a linguistic level as well. As Renault is a novelist and not a painter, she has to refer to descriptions and a certain style of language to draw the reader in: Bagoas narrates his autobiography in retrospect and clearly not in his native tongue. His English is stilted, his vocabulary sometimes odd as it demonstrates his efforts to translate. The syntax is rather complicated, especially when compared to the ways the Greeks and Macedonians speak.53 Cultural misunderstandings, ignorance and the court eunuch’s specific care for rank and protocol are made explicit in the narrative.54 Bagoas even struggles with the pronunciation of the king’s name whom he calls Iskander or Al’skander as ‘Al-ex-ander’ proves to be too difficult.55 The language transports foreignness so that the reader might imagine a Persian noble speaking and not only adopts his language but also his point of view. In a way of reverse Orientalism Alexander, Macedon and Greece are measured by Persian standards. The cultural hegemony of the West is constantly challenged by Bagoas who sees Persian society and culture as far more advanced and sophisticated than the barbarian conquerors.56 The East is given a voice, yet Renault does not render it as a 51

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uniform concept – just as the West is not presented as a monolith. Bagoas clearly differentiates between Persia, Babylon, Susa, India and Bactria, but he also differentiates between Greece and Macedon. Just as Renault manages to shatter the dichotomy of East and West, she also shatters gender dichotomies – and both go hand in hand. The narrator himself is neither a man, nor a boy, nor a woman. Modern scholars discuss instead whether Bagoas should be ascribed to a ‘third sex’ or should be defined as queer.57 Also Renault’s Alexander defies categorization: he is beardless like a eunuch, eromenos to Hephaestion, erastes to Bagoas and husband to Roxane. Roxane at last enters the scene in Bactria and is presented as the opposite to Bagoas: heterosexual, wild, more aggressive and less artful in her love-making – she is the ‘Orient’ to Bagoas’ ‘Western’ Persia. Renault presents overlapping images of ‘the East’ as Bactria is more eastern than Persia. So, the original dichotomy is reproduced but not by referring to Bagoas’ Persia and Alexander’s Macedon, but to Persia and Bactria which is perceived as more primitive and backward.58 While introducing Roxane, Renault sets up a strikingly visual scene which again recalls nineteenth-century paintings of harems and seraglios59 and seems to give guidance for the setting of a movie. Detailed descriptions of music, textiles, perfume, precious objects etc. evoke the Oriental similarly to the introduction of Bagoas to Dareios: ‘Music came out, quite odd for Sogdiana. . . . It was a big hall. Oxyartes must be rich as well as powerful. Hangings of scarlet, stitched with ramping lions and leopards, smoldered in the light of torches enough to warm the air. The high table was set with gold and silver; gums I had not smelled since I left Susa burned in the fretted censers . . .’60 Then the dancers appear: ‘Their heavy clothes were crusted with embroidery; gold chains, hung with gold pendants, circled their brows; massive rings on their arms and ankles clashed as they moved, or tinkled with little bells. We had hardly glimpsed them before they turned away from us . . .’ Finally Roxane is the vision of a nineteenth-century odalisque:61 ‘I knew at once which she was. . . . She was about sixteen, full womanhood in Sogdiana. Pure ivory, faintly tinted, and not by art; soft hair, blue-black, small fronds brushing her cheeks; a clear forehead under the gold pendants; brows with a perfect arch, over large brilliant eyes. She had the kind of beauty that is famed for leagues around, and made no pretense of not knowing it. Her one defect was that her fingers were not long enough, and the ends too pointed. I had learned to look for such things in Darius’ harem.’62 The scene is almost identically realized in Oliver Stone’s Alexander; but whereas in Alexander the audience shares the perspective of the Macedonian king, Renault’s reader sees and evaluates Roxane through Bagoas’ eyes. His is not the Western male gaze that scrutinizes Roxane as an object of desire. Although Bagoas evaluates Roxane’s sexual appeal, as a eunuch he is detached and rather contemplates Alexander’s complex sexuality: ‘I had found him Hephaistion’s boy, and with me he had wished for manhood. It had been my pride. So now I had given him to a woman. I sat in the hot torchlight, tasting death . . .’.63 By marrying Alexander, Roxane becomes part of a complicated ménage à quatre sharing her husband with both his Macedonian and Persian lover. Bagoas makes his resentment over the differences in status between bride and groom clear as he – as well as the Macedonians – finds the Bactrian clearly lacking: ‘I could have told him that this Sogdian girl had never guessed such splendours existed, and would not 52

Persian Boy, Bactrian Girl and the Man from Macedon

know the use of half the toilet things.’64 When Alexander complains that he could not communicate with his bride, Bagoas is not surprised: ‘Sogdian is to pure Persian as Macedonian is to Greek.’65 Roxane and Bactria are set up as the Orient and the Other to Bagoas’ Persia; but in his view Bactria shares its inferiority and Otherness with Macedon – Alexander being the sole exception.66 Renault thus shatters the conceptions of her Anglo-American readers: Bactria is not a ‘second-class Orient’ to Persia, but Persia is set at the centre against a Barbarian periphery that equally includes the Macedonian West and the Bactrian East. It is therefore not surprising that only Alexander’s wedding to the Persian princess Stateira is considered as worthy and as a ‘real state marriage’.67 As Renault shatters the West–East dichotomy, she also shatters sexual dichotomies as both are interconnected. Her description of the wedding itself is rather brief; Bagoas wryly imagines the wedding night: ‘He [Alexander] must be very much out of practice, if indeed he’d ever been in it, and a virgin of sixteen would not be much help’.68 Alexander’s heterosexual relations fall short – they are not presented as romantic unions and do not seem to satisfy the king sexually or emotionally and thus do not become the norm but are the exception. The Bactrian’s sexual tastes do not please Alexander – to Bagoas’ delight: ‘There was a purple bruise on his neck. She must have bitten him. How did that go, I wondered; it was not in his style at all.’69 In Renault’s novels, Alexander’s charisma is connected to his lack of social, racial, cultural and sexual prejudices which sets him apart from his Macedonian countrymen but also from his Bactrian bride; his greatness is founded in the rejection of a cultural and a sexual bias. As Bagoas (and Renault) turns Alexander into an exceptional figure, with his death and successors who would and could not be his equal, the dissolution of his empire was inevitable.70 Clearly, Renault’s Roxane is not a means to bridge cultural differences. She is presented entirely from Bagoas’ perspective and assembles many clichés about the East: she is an exotic dancer, but after her marriage she stays veiled and hidden in her wagon, a picture of sensuality and passiveness. Nonetheless, on the rare occasions Alexander visits her luxurious tent, Roxane likes it rough: her sexual aggressiveness is contrasted to Alexander’s tenderness and understanding. Thus the only heterosexual relation in The Persian Boy is portrayed as dysfunctional, as the union between Alexander and Roxane very clearly does not bring together East and West.71 Roxane’s only action consists in a murder plot against her husband’s lover whom she tries to poison. She is behind a gift allegedly by Alexander, but Bagoas is suspicious: ‘[The dish] was costly, but unrefined in style; it would have been thrown out of doors at Susa. It looked to me liked Sogdian work.’72 He rejects the gift and reports to Alexander who punishes Roxane’s disobedience by whipping her which she finds, to his bewilderment, sexually arousing. When he learns of this, Bagoas tactfully comments on the peculiarities of Bactria and muses on the cultural and sexual incompatibility of Alexander and Roxane.73 Even or especially in scheming Roxane’s character assembles Oriental and gendered topoi: being a woman she does not confront the enemy but uses poison and subterfuge, and her choice of ‘gift’ betrays her barbaric origins. Furthermore, her preference for sadomasochistic practices is seen as primitive and perverse. After the attempted murder eunuch and wife stay clear of each other. Bagoas dismisses further intercourse between husband and wife as 53

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irrelevant and tellingly compares it to a spicy dish (‘nauseous if one fills one’s plate with it, yet a little now and then will make one crave for the taste again’).74 He shortly refers to her pregnancy and her reaction to Alexander’s death, but does not mention her otherwise.75 As in her other novels, Renault is not overly interested in her female characters. Roxane is not given a voice and only little agency. This changes in the third part of the trilogy, Funeral Games, which was first published in 1981 and relies mainly on Curtius Rufus and Diodorus Siculus. Unlike The Persian Boy, Funeral Games is written from a third person omniscient point of view. The narrative is fragmented and follows several characters in the aftermath of Alexander’s death, thereby presenting conflicting points of view and, above all, a general self-delusion that the diadochoi could succeed: ‘There is neither a protagonist nor a central narrative. The novel is as fractured as the “world” after the emperor’s death.’76 Bagoas makes an appearance as a minor character; Roxane is given more prominence in this third part of the trilogy but her character neither serves to discuss topics like gender ambiguity as Bagoas did in The Persian Boy nor is the reader inclined to identify with her. Instead the most compelling female character is tomboyish Adea-Eurydike, an Argead princess, who, though she tries, cannot escape the confinements of her gender which eventually prevent her claim to power.77 As in The Persian Boy Renault makes a point in emphasizing that the East is not monolithic; Persia is different from Babylon and Assyria and definitely superior to both Bactria and Macedon. Yet, as the narrative shifts from the East to the West, this differentiation becomes less important as the only relevant non-Greek protagonist is Roxane who is viewed and presented as the Other. She is a static character who neither adapts to a Greek way of life nor is she encouraged to do so.78 In the scene following Alexander’s death, Renault focalizes on Roxane and thereby showcases her Bactrian origins and Otherness: she ponders her loss of status in Babylon and its differences to Sogdia, she speaks in her native dialect, she wails and mourns in a frenzy and finally remembers her wedding night on the Sogdian rock which confirms Bagoas’ assessment in The Persian Boy that the Bactrian bride was rather disappointed by her husband’s gentleness.79 Roxane is determined to defend her (and subsequently her son’s) status as Alexander’s ‘real’ wife against the Persian Stateira and immediately plots her murder – her only relevant and independent act in the novel as well as in the ancient sources. But whereas the ancient authors do not give details, Renault employs artistic licence. Her Stateira is also pregnant, which renders Roxane’s position more precarious. Stateira is set as the good wife to Roxane’s evil one; Renault creates another visually lush scene in Susa where Stateira receives a fake letter luring her to Babylon. Although Bagoas is no longer the narrator, the description is in a similar vein as it evokes an elegant and sophisticated backdrop to the Persian princess and her grandmother: ‘[the harem’s] walls were faced with delicately enameled tiles, and the sunlight dappled them through lattices of milky alabaster’.80 Both the room and its inhabitants are nobler and much more civilized than either the Macedonians or Roxane who is dismissed by the Persian ladies as the ‘Bactrian woman’ and a mere concubine.81 Even the Macedonians admire Stateira for her ‘purity of line, the Persian delicacy’ with hands ‘long-fingered and smooth as cream’82 – a striking 54

Persian Boy, Bactrian Girl and the Man from Macedon

contrast to the swarthy Bactrian. But the noble Stateira is no match for the ruthless Roxane, and her murder is painted in gruesome detail shocking even Perdiccas because of its barbarism. There is obvious pain, cramps, blood and vomit. Stateira is poisoned and suffers a miscarriage: ‘[Perdiccas] stared down at it, the four month manikin, already human, the sex defined, even the nails beginning. One of the fists was clenched as if in anger, the face with its sealed eyes seemed to frown. It was still tied to its mother . . . It hardly filled his hands, the son of Alexander, the grandson of Philip and Dareios, carrying in its threadlike veins the blood of Achilles and of Kyros the Great.’83 Renault imagines a child that at least possessed the genealogical potential to unify East and West. Roxane’s son, however, tragically never really had this potential power nor had his father ever intended him to achieve this unification.84 Both mother and son serve as reminders of Alexander’s failed attempts to overcome East–West dichotomies. They represent the East and the Other as Roxane would not adapt to Greek culture and her son does not get the education and socialization his royal parentage deserves.85 Furthermore, Renault paints young Alexander clearly as his mother’s child: ‘[the newborn] was still red and crumpled . . . but she [Roxane] could see through the flush an olive, not a rosy colouring. He would be dark, a Bactrian. And why not?’86 There is no historical account of Alexander IV’s appearance, so Renault imagines his looks to carefully other him. She lets several Macedonians gaze at him in search for Alexander, mostly in vain: ‘Ptolemy took him on his knee, to see Alexander’s son who bore his name. His dark eyes were bright and quick’87 – ‘The first sight of the dark-haired, soft-skinned, plump child had disappointed him; but he had not expected an Alexander in little’88 – ‘Olympias saw a young Persian, fine-boned and dark-eyed . . . He looked up to her from under his fine dark brows and his blue-brown, thick-lashed eyelids; and though there was nothing of him anywhere that was Macedonian, she saw Alexander in his upward, deep-set gaze. It was too much . . .’89 Only Olympias and Roxane recognize glimpses of the father in the son, the Macedonian king in this Persian boy. Of all things, Renault provides the Eastern boy with his father’s gaze: next to the anastole, the dramatic upswing of hair, the intense effect of the eyes was Alexander’s most prominent physiological feature.90 There is a hint at some potential, but as Alexander IV is the spitting image of his mother, he is unacceptable as a Macedonian ruler. His murder – not only because of the ambitions of the diadochoi, but also because of his Otherness – thus seems tragically inevitable. The emphasis on visual aspects is an important element in Renault’s novels. The exotic scenery certainly offers the reader entertainment and escapism. Yet more importantly, the finely honed descriptions of backgrounds, the way the characters gaze or are gazed upon serve to create Otherness and at the same time shatter established conceptions of East and West as well as of gender concepts and heteronormativity. Renault’s aim becomes clearer in comparison to other receptions of the same topics (and especially of her own novels). The visual aspects of her narrative offer a perfect set-up for a movie; and it has already been mentioned that many of the scenes in The Persian Boy more or less found their way into Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004), especially Bagoas’ dance act, his kiss with Alexander afterwards and the wedding scene in Bactria (Alexander is even bitten by Roxane). In an extensive interview Stone admitted that he had read Renault’s novels as a young man and 55

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had been deeply impressed.91 However, although Stone was clearly inspired by Renault, his aims and his choice of perspective are entirely different. Although he touches the topic of Alexander’s sexuality, especially in Alexander Revisited (2007), ‘the film is not a story of homosexual love’, and Bagoas is consequently given only a nearly silent role.92 Alexander’s deeds are not narrated by an outsider, but by Ptolemy and the movie follows – though not in chronological order – Alexander’s campaign from the West to the East, so that the audience enters Babylon with the Macedonian invaders and wonders, just like them, at Eastern excess and opulence. Llewellyn-Jones analyses how Stone designs an extravagant Oriental setting, a glossy Hollywood version of an Orientalist dream culminating in the visit to the harem: ‘The Western male dream of the wanton and available odalisque is promulgated by Stone in a fashion worthy of Delacroix and Ingres or – by direct descent – Edwin Long.’93 The movie rather cultivates than shatters familiar Orientalist notions about the inferiority of Eastern societies; the harem is not cast as a complicated system of power, but as a place of sensuality and excess – and as a foil to Western rationality. By giving to one of these harem creatures a voice, especially to a slave and eunuch which in itself was highly uncommon in historical novels of the 1970s, Renault in contrast to Stone challenges these dichotomies and offers a postcolonial view even before Said’s groundbreaking analysis was published. Renault appropriates established motifs from nineteenth-century paintings, yet through the eyes of Bagoas the reader is not confronted with one monolithic Orient, but with many nesting Orientalisms. It is not Persia that is strange, exotic and inferior, but both Macedon and Bactria. In this aspect The Persian Boy is singular in Renault’s oeuvre, as her other historical novels are set in Greece. In switching to Persia and adopting a Persian as the narrator, Renault interlinks the shattering of the East–West dichotomy with a challenge to traditional gender dichotomies. Bagoas’ ambiguous status as a eunuch and the complicated love-quadruple between Alexander, Hephaestion, Bagoas and Roxane put into question any clear cut definitions of gender and sexual relations; of all the possible relations it is the heterosexual one between Alexander and Roxane that is lacking on a sexual, emotional, intellectual and cultural level. However, Renault is not interested in Roxane’s story; she serves only as a foil to Bagoas and is ‘Orientalized’ from his point of view. Whereas the Persian boy demonstrates how gender and cultural assumptions might be contested, the Bactrian girl stays mostly silent and literally behind the veil. Also in Funeral Games Roxane embodies certain Oriental topoi: Renault stresses her dark looks, her scheming and ruthlessness, the richness of her textiles and wagons etc. But just as her character is not supposed to overcome her Otherness and become a bridge between East and West, the Macedonian and Greek protagonists as well are not able to reunite Alexander’s empire and embrace the East just as he did. ‘When his faults . . . have been considered, we are left with the fact that no other human being has attracted in his lifetime, from so many men, so fervent a devotion. Their reasons are worth examining’,94 concludes Renault in her Author’s Note. She gives to Bagoas a voice to present Alexander as a unique figure not to be defined by any category, cultural or sexual. As such he is cast as a hero and as a dazzling literary character – the ultimate conqueror who shatters the traditional dichotomies of East and West, gender and sexual desire, not only in the past as recreated in the novel, but also in the reader’s present. 56

CHAPTER 4 DRYPETIS IN FACT AND FANFICTION * Sabine Müller

Drypetis, the youngest known daughter of the Persian king Darius III,1 is a minor phenomenon of reception: as one of the Persian brides at the Macedonian mass marriages at Susa in 324 bce , she seems to attract more attention today than in Antiquity. In fact, Drypetis is one of the most shadowy figures in the history of the Macedonian conquest of Achaemenid Persia; there is not even any certainty about the original Iranian form of her name, nor its etymology.2 In the absence of Persian sources,3 the burden of proof rests on Greek and Roman authors, based on lost contemporary Greek and Macedonian sources. Hence, all the scarce evidence on Drypetis comes from a foreign cultural perspective. Arrian mentions her name only once, showing no further interest in her role in Alexander’s empire.4 The same applies to Plutarch, who provides unique information on her violent death – without once mentioning her name.5 However, it is unclear whether he was mistaken and the real victim was Parysatis, the daughter of Artaxerxes III.6 Diodorus and Curtius Rufus pay a little more attention to Drypetis, but their accounts are anecdotal and mostly untrustworthy. In particular, Curtius uses stories about Persian royal women as literary markers of Alexander’s moral development.7 Without Drypetis’ marriage to one of the most influential Macedonian commanders of the time, she would have been even more obscure. However, her husband was also a celebrity in his afterlife: Hephaistion, son of Amyntor, from Pella. Although nothing is known of their (short-time) married life, he is the key to Drypetis’ scarce prominence, which extends at least far enough beyond the circles of scholarship to allow her to appear in fanfiction about Alexander. However, there is a special twist: based on rumours suspiciously mentioned not earlier than in Roman imperial times, it is widely believed that Hephaistion was in love with the man who arranged the marriage, Alexander, his alleged lifelong boyfriend.8 Hence, Drypetis’ reception has been strongly influenced by the assumption that her wedding produced a kind of love triangle and that Alexander – always the victorious conqueror – was the winner of Hephaistion’s heart, before the latter’s early death tragically separated them. Although a characteristic phenomenon of reception, the idea of a love triangle stems from an anachronistic romantic perception of what marriage meant to leading Macedonians. In fact, weddings were political acts.9 There was no time for romance. Members of influential Macedonian families were accustomed to this specific form of networking, and neither expected to marry for love nor to abstain from love affairs after the wedding. Thus, even if there had been something going on between Alexander and Hephaistion (which is purely speculative), his wedding to Drypetis would not have put an end to it. Furthermore, it was an act of Hephaistion’s 57

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loyal obedience to Alexander, as well as support for his Persian policy at a time in that at least some Macedonian circles disapproved of this kind of political change. This chapter aims to explore the perception, interpretation, and portrayal of Drypetis in ancient sources and modern fanfiction (stories using characters the authors did not invent to create alternative narratives), especially regarding her Persian descent. It will examine how ancient and modern references are biased by traditional stereotypes of the ‘Orient’ and its female representatives in Western imagination. It will analyse the perception of her status and role at the Macedonian court and explore whether she was used as a literary device to judge Alexander’s Persian policy. In addition, it will scrutinize whether Drypetis is viewed as a person acting autonomously, a victim of historical events, or as a stepping-stone regarding the alleged romance between Alexander and her husband. According to one approach, fanfiction is regarded as a timeless manifestation of intertextuality, although it can also be defined as the explicit product of fandom, which is characterized as a participatory culture originating in the twentieth century.10 In the following chapter, based on the latter definition and its re-assessment by Maria Rossdal, fanfiction is regarded as a ‘form of highly intertextual literature, closely connected to the participatory culture of fans’11 and particularly associated with the internet as its publishing platform. As a ‘reception far from media mainstream and academic analyzing’,12 fanfiction involving historical persons from Antiquity reflects popular perceptions of ancient cultures, as well as individual, subjective ways to use the past to cope with the present. The authors connect with historical figures, invent alternative solutions or contexts for them, search for role models and identification symbols, and try to come to terms with their own problems by projecting them onto persons from a constructed past.13

Drypetis in the ancient sources Drypetis was the daughter of Darius III and his (sister?-)wife Stateira.14 Her uncertain year of birth is roughly dated 350 to 345 bce , based on the fact that in late 333 bce , she was still unmarried but of a marriageable age, hence likely in the midst or at the end of her teenage years.15 In any case, she did not marry until 324 bce . Together with her elder sister, younger brother, mother and grandmother, Drypetis accompanied her father’s travelling court to the battle of Issus in 333 bce . In the aftermath of the Persian defeat, they were captured by the victorious Macedonians, while Darius was able to escape.16 Rejecting the latter’s attempts to ransom them, Alexander held them in pledge as valuable hostages and tokens of his legitimization as the new Persian king.17 He treated them respectfully, acknowledging their royal status and posing as their new protector.18 However, ancient reports exaggerate Alexander’s kind attitude.19 Honouring the members of the Achaemenid house (who were in fact Macedonian hostages) was not an expression of Alexander’s virtue, but rather a demonstration of his need for acceptance by leading Persian circles. 58

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According to a certainly fictitious anecdote, likely from Cleitarchus, which contradicts the official version echoed by Ptolemy and Aristobulus,20 after their capture, Drypetis and her elder sister Stateira met their future husbands, Hephaistion and Alexander, for the first time. The visit served to console the Persian royals, who were erroneously mourning for Darius.21 They were both dressed alike, but Hephaistion was taller (Curtius) or more beautiful (Diodorus) than Alexander, so Drypetis’ grandmother Sisygambis mistook him for the ruler and greeted him with proskynesis. Mercifully, Alexander pardoned her, while acknowledging Hephaistion as his Second Self.22 As a symbol of Alexander’s clemency, magnanimity and moderation, portraying him as a merciful victor and philosopher’s pupil (in accordance with the Aristotelian image of friendship as one soul in two bodies),23 the story became a standard topos in Roman rhetoric.24 While the anecdote stresses the beauty of the sorrowful Achaemenid girls (in order to highlight Alexander’s self-restraint as he treats them like his sisters),25 the focus is on their grandmother, who gratefully accepts Alexander as their new patriarch. There is no indication of any interaction between Drypetis and Hephaistion. After the misunderstanding over the ruler’s identity is corrected, she and her sister focus on Alexander: Diodorus depicts a tear-filled scene in which his gentleness touches their heart, making them cry.26 Justin-Trogus adds that Alexander promised to arrange good marriages for them.27 There might be an ironic flourish in the following: Justin-Trogus makes clear that Alexander and Hephaistion, the future husbands, are a mad tyrant and his toy-boy.28 Drypetis and her family were taken along with the Macedonian army. She made her next appearance in a unique scene (depicted by Curtius) in which Alexander visited the royal women to share their pain while mourning for Drypetis’ mother Stateira, who had died in their arms.29 At the end of 331, they were left behind at Susa. According to Diodorus, the whole family was given instructions in Greek,30 information that is often accepted as authentic.31 In contrast, Curtius’ version of the paideia enforced upon the Persian royal women sounds suspiciously Roman, influenced by images of Augustus as a pater familias and stereotypes of Roman female virtues: Curtius’ Alexander wanted the Achaemenid women to learn how to perform wool-work in order to produce for him homemade clothes, made of Macedonian material. He also added that his sisters made his clothes.32 However, he caused nothing but tears (again): the Persian women regarded wool-work as the greatest disgrace. Alexander did not insist, and apologized.33 Wool-work (lanificium) – associated with female modesty, chastity and obedience – was a token of virtue of the ‘good’ Roman woman that became a literary cliché and standard symbol of the ‘traditional work of the materfamilias and female virtue’.34 Reportedly, Augustus made the women of his house perform wool-work and said that he only wore clothes made by them.35 Consequently, Curtius portrays Alexander as a would-be Augustus, failing to persuade female ‘barbarians’ to devote their time to a virtuous task for a change. By their strong objection to this essential aspect of female domestic activities in Roman eyes, Curtius makes clear that Drypetis, her sister, and her grandmother are hopeless ‘Oriental barbarians’, predisposed to a love of luxury, idleness, vice, sensual pleasures and 59

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decadence, thus impossible to ‘civilize’. Implicitly, he also criticizes Alexander for being conciliatory towards them by accepting their ‘barbarian’ disposition and even apologizing for his attempt to improve their morals (according to the Roman viewpoint): thus, Alexander is no Augustus. In consequence, Curtius creates a symbolic contrast between ideals of Roman identity and the Eastern ‘Other’. The episode deserves no credence. His implication that the Macedonians (allegedly) shared certain traditions with the Romans is a literary device to emphasize the value of Macedonian mores. Against this background, Curtius’ account that Alexander was willing to neglect them in favour of Persian customs stresses his ruthless villainy.36 Hence, Alexander’s conciliatory gesture towards the Persian women prefigures his violation of Macedonian traditions. Unfortunately, in Curtius’ fragmentary work, the scene of Drypetis’ wedding is missing. Prior to this, he denounced Hephaistion as Alexander’s toy-boy, using him as a mirror image of the ruler’s moral decline, thus doubling Alexander’s loss of morals.37 Curtius implied that by the time of the wedding, Hephaistion and Alexander had perhaps become so dissolute that the female representatives of the ‘decadent East’ were the most suitable wives for them. The Persian royal women remained in Susa until the Macedonians came back from their Indian campaign. In the mass marriages that took place in early 324 bce , Alexander gave Persian brides to about 90 of his high-ranking generals.38 The collective weddings served to consolidate the Macedonian conquest by integrating the Macedonians into the Persian family networks, thus neutralizing the threat of Persian interfamily connections that bonded the nobles throughout the empire. In addition, the event served to create the illusion of political continuity under foreign rule.39 Practising Argead polygamy, a ‘barbarian’ custom in the eyes of Greeks and Romans, Alexander chose two wives, Drypetis’ sister Stateira and Parysatis, the daughter of Artaxerxes III.40 In doing so, he ostentatiously integrated himself into the power structures of his new kingdom, leaving no loose ends for any potential pretenders with hopes of marrying into the Achaemenid house, and thus emphasized his claim to the Persian throne.41 Significantly, instead of also marrying the second daughter of his predecessor Darius, Alexander preferred to give Drypetis to Hephaistion in marriage.42 Whether the bridegroom regarded this marital bond as ‘honour (or obligation)’,43 it clearly distinguished him from the other bridegrooms, and associated him closely with Alexander, his new brother-in-law.44 Hephaistion had proven to be loyal to his ruler, even in hard times. His reward was this extraordinary token of closeness to the monarch, one more honour in a series of signs of royal favour, such as being appointed Alexander’s somatophylax (elite bodyguard), or being served dishes from the ruler’s table.45 Viewed in context, Alexander’s decision to give Hephaistion his sister-in-law in marriage was not a personal step but a political one, in accordance with the latter’s previous honours. Alexander’s alleged statement that he wanted their children to be first cousins, as reported by Arrian, is fictitiously romanticized embroidery, perhaps created by Arrian himself, who had a highly romantic view of them as Macedonian prototypes of Hadrian and Antinous whom he associated with Achilles and Patroclus.46 However, Hephaistion fell ill and died in autumn of the same year, roughly eight months after his wedding.47 Drypetis would have accompanied him to Ekbatana, his 60

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final destination. Her lessons in Greek would have made their interaction easier. However, they did not spend much time together, and no child was reported to have sprung from their matrimony. Only Curtius mentions Drypetis, and then only in the role of widow. Significantly, he mentions her as mourning for her recently deceased husband when she and her grandmother received the news of Alexander’s death about half a year later.48 Thus, Drypetis’ grief is obscured by worries for her security after the death of her family’s royal protector.49 Other sources provide no information about Drypetis’ married life, nor her reaction to the deaths of Hephaistion and Alexander. At Hephaistion’s end, the focus is on Alexander’s mourning for him.50 The short span of time between their deaths was another key element in the theme of Hephaistion as Alexander’s Alter Ego, whose death presaged his own. The idea that the ceremonies planned for Hephaistion were also carried out for the late Alexander shows the extent to which their deaths were styled as being connected with each other.51 Accordingly, Drypetis reportedly renewed her grief by mourning for Alexander. Given the interpolation of the traditions surrounding the two deaths, however, this information should be viewed with great caution. According to Plutarch, after Alexander’s death, his first wife, the Bactrian Roxane (who was pregnant with his child and supported by Perdiccas), had Drypetis and Stateira killed.52 Plutarch depicts this as an act of jealousy on Roxane’s part, but it served to protect Alexander’s unborn heir, as well as his future claims to the throne, which were useful political instruments for Perdiccas’ ambitions.53 Stateira was likely either pregnant by Alexander, or suspected to be. However, it is not clear what Roxane had to fear from Hephaistion’s widow. Even in the case that she too was pregnant, the child would have been no threat to her baby, as the offspring of Hephaistion had no right to the throne. Elizabeth Carney has thus suggested that Plutarch mistook her for her cousin Parysatis, Alexander’s other Achaemenid wife, who may also have been pregnant, but of whom we hear nothing more.54 While eliminating the Achaemenid rivals, Perdiccas and the other members of the courtly faction who backed Roxane may have decided to get rid of Drypetis, too, in order to prevent anyone from marrying into the former ruling house.55 In sum, Callisthenes, Ptolemy and Aristobulus, as the main representatives of the official version of Alexander’s days, hardly paid any attention to Drypetis. The ancient sources in which Drypetis is little more than just a name, Curtius and Diodorus, would have received their information from Cleitarchus’ romanticized storytelling and used it in accordance with their own socio-cultural backgrounds and portrayals of Alexander. Consequently, the anecdotes about her are to be regarded with caution. However, aside from the traditional theme of the changing force of fate exemplified by the fall of the Achaemenid empire,56 the stories of Drypetis may in fact come close to her real attitude towards the Macedonian conquest. Thus, she is constantly depicted as grieving, weeping, wailing and mourning, due to the loss of either her position or family members, or from fear or misfortune. She is never portrayed as acting on her own, but as a victim of shifting fate. The historical Drypetis became an instrument and victim of the policies of the conqueror who usurped her father’s throne.57 There is no information concerning her married life or her attitude to her Macedonian husband. Possibly, during the years 333– 331, he might have had the chance to see her if he had been sent to her family’s tent by 61

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Alexander on some mission. According to Plutarch, Alexander often chose Hephaistion for diplomatic contact with Persians.58 However, this information concerns Alexander’s policies after 330, the year when Hephaistion’s rise began. Furthermore, even if Plutarch’s information were trustworthy, we are not in a position to know Hephaistion’s true attitude towards Alexander’s Persian policy, or his marriage to Drypetis. He might have supported Alexander in this matter for the sake of his career while regarding his Persian wife as a necessary evil – as reportedly, some other of the chosen bridegrooms did.59 According to Arrian, they were not amused that their ruler forced them to marry the defeated ‘barbarians’, in addition in accordance with Persian tradition.60 Hephaistion’s good friend Ptolemy, another of Alexander’s most trusted officials, may have abandoned his Persian wife as soon as Alexander died and is said to have voiced anti-Persian feelings during the debate of the generals at Babylon.61 While the validity of the information is uncertain, elements of anti-Persian bias are at least visible in the fragments of his own historiographical work on Alexander’s campaigns.62 In the end, there is little room left for romance when we consider that Drypetis was a hostage controlled by foreign invaders who had ended the rule of her father, subjugated her homeland and forced her to marry one of them in order to legitimize this usurpation. It would have been even more pragmatic had Hephaistion been a disgruntled bridegroom, who was shocked at Alexander’s demand and only obeyed for the sake of his safety and career. However, despite this disillusioning background, fanfiction can do better.

Drypetis in fanfiction The fanfics involving Drypetis belong to the genre of real person fiction.63 While there are countless fanfics about Alexander and Hephaistion, or Alexander and Roxane, there are only a few that involve Drypetis.64 Oliver Stone’s Alexander is the main source of inspiration. This is visible in the description of the outward appearance of Alexander and Hephaistion, and their relationship that mirrors the one in the movie. In addition, the stories are often adorned by images from the movie, leaving no doubt as to the source of inspiration. In one case, Oliver Stone, Colin Farrell and Jared Leto even appear alongside Alexander, Hephaistion and Drypetis.65 A significant feature of fanfics is that the stories are concerned with romance, love, sexuality, erotic rivalry and jealousy, aiming to fill the gaps in the movie involving aspects that were already missing from the ancient sources.66 Expressions such as ‘I wish it would have happened’67 or ‘in my story neither Alexander nor Hephaistion die’68 often form part of the disclaimer. Thus, although the authors of fanfics may feel the need to pay lip service to historical authenticity, they can also choose to transfer their protagonists to an alternate universe, time and space in order to create their own version, which corresponds to their individual thoughts, opinions, wishes and needs.69 Hence, in this sense, fanfics appear to be more individual, personal texts that allow the authors to share the emotions and problems of their protagonists in a space free from the limitations of historical accuracy. Arguing against the stereotypical view that the authors and recipients of fanfics are mainly female teenagers and frustrated 62

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housewives, Rossdal points at the heterogeneity of the communities that unite both academic and non-academic authors.70 It is no wonder that Alexander triggered a great deal of fanfiction concerning Alexander and Hephaistion.71 Fan culture attempted to find answers to the questions that were raised but left unanswered by the movie, which showed a strangely ambiguous relationship (drama) between an unstable, dissolute egomaniac (Alexander) and his caring, self-sacrificial ‘maybe-kind-of-boyfriend’72 (Hephaistion).73 Paradoxically, at first glance Drypetis is absent from the movie.74 In Alexander, Hephaistion never got married. Portrayed as Alexander’s self-controlled counter-image (rather than his Second Self), Hephaistion, the ‘good’ Western man, resists the evil seduction of the East.75 He could thus not be associated with marriage to a Persian wife, which would have involved sexual encounters with a representative of the alter orbis he was not corrupted by. Often fanfics express a wish to describe an alternative ending that the authors would have preferred, or they attempt to come to terms with their own problems by projecting them onto persons from the past, who serve as role models. Some fanfics transfer their protagonists into the present, or into an alternate universe. The influence of contemporary trends within popular culture is often clearly visible. For example, in one case, Alexander and Hephaistion appear as werewolves.76 Obviously, the historical persons serve as a means to create, reconstruct or reassure identities. Another important source of inspiration regarding fanfics that feature Drypetis was Mary Renault’s trilogy of fictitious novels about Alexander. Fire from Heaven (1969) concerns Alexander’s childhood, and early romance with Hephaistion. The Persian Boy (1972), written from the perspective of Alexander’s (in fact alleged) sex slave, the Persian eunuch Bagoas, focuses on Alexander’s final seven years.77 In Funeral Games (1981), the dying Alexander appears only briefly at the beginning, while the rest concerns events following his death. The trilogy created a lively fanbase, who focused on the erotic relationships between Alexander and Bagoas, Alexander and Hephaistion, Hephaistion and Bagoas, or all three of them in a love triangle. However, while in some fanfics the influence of both Renault’s novels and Stone’s Alexander is detectable, the maryrenaultfics canon focuses exclusively on the novels.78 Another minor source of inspiration for stories involving Drypetis mentioned is the article about her on pothos.org, a website on Alexander founded in 1994, which provides a platform for academics and non-academics interested in Alexander to discuss aspects of his life and career.79 In the stories analysed, the reader is continuously reminded of Drypetis’ Persian origin and ‘Otherness’. It is also stressed that her Macedonian husband perceived her as a representative of this ‘Otherness’, as described by traditional Western clichés of the ‘Orient’. These include luxury, decadence and tyranny, as symbolized by the key element of the ‘harem’, an imaginary place viewed as a prison-like ‘space of sexual depravity and random cruelty’.80 Regarding Renault’s trilogy, in The Endless List of Fic Ideas, one proposition is plainly biased: ‘Entering decadent Persia: not everyone can have been as positive about it as Alexander.’ Regarding Drypetis, there are the following suggestions: ‘Stateira, Drypetis and the mass marriage. How the princesses take to it . . . Drypetis and 63

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Stateira after being captured by the Macedonians.’81 While some of the fics are written from Drypetis’ perspective and attempt to present her in her own right, these are pseudoempathic views biased by traditional Western stereotypes of ‘Oriental’ women. Thus, even when Drypetis appears to speak in her own words, it is still the Western construction depicting her as a representative from an imaginary East. She is the silk-loving82 girl with the ‘large Persian eyes’.83 She wears a veil,84 sits on cushions and carpets in the ‘harem’ guarded by eunuchs, and listens to Roxane telling tales that are reminiscent of 1001 Arabian Nights.85 Thus, Drypetis is a representative of ‘exoticism’,86 usually acting entirely submissive and obedient to the male intruders, convincing herself that nothing better could have happened to her than to marry Hephaistion. For example, in one fic from 2007 Drypetis is depicted as a naïve, spoilt prototype of an It girl, fond of luxury and gossip. Her whole world is the ‘harem’. Thus, the eunuch Bagoas is her best friend, sharing her fondness for silk and interest in make-up. While Drypetis frequently mentions that she and her family are prisoners of the Macedonians, she does not seem to take the situation – her fate, and the loss of her father’s kingdom – too seriously. Thus, she has time to worry that Bagoas might be more beautiful than her. As for the foreign usurpers, Drypetis is only concerned with their looks, and raves about Alexander and her future husband: Alexander spoke to me as we were leaving his tent . . . Oh Bagoas, he is so gorgeous . . . Nobody tells me anything very meaty, but they said that his name is Hephaistion—ooh! Isn’t this just the most INCREDIBLE thing, Bagoas?! I hear he’s very handsome, too, and a great noble! . . . I’ve got to MEET him! . . . Thank Bel the Greeks are here – it’s been so BORING without them!87 Drypetis’ happiness about her own dynasty’s fall is explained by her being tired of the seclusion and strictness of the ‘harem’. She is not allowed to talk to anybody but the other women or the eunuchs, and feels imprisoned – not by the Macedonians, but by the alleged Persian customs she characterizes as ‘the stiff and stodgy old ways’. This is not in accordance with historical information on the life of the royal Achaemenid women.88 However, true to traditional clichés, she also plays with her (former) power to order cruel punishments (‘Bagoas! I’ll have your ears cut off!’) while the effeminate eunuch is completely submissive and devoted to his new Macedonian master. Similarly, the ‘harem’ theme associated with imprisonment, lack of freedom, and subjection occurs in From Now to Eternity (2005), which describes the short married life of Drypetis (depicted as a descendant of the victims of the Babylonian captivity) and Hephaistion, and is told from her perspective: I was secretly glad. Being married to a Persian would have led to a very different way of life. Alexander’s ways allowed women more freedom. They could study any art or craft they wished. They were educated and treated with respect. And in my husband I saw kindness and wisdom. I would never be mistreated by him.89 64

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However, sometimes it is also suggested that Alexander adopted the system of the ‘harem’ and kept all the brides there.90 Perhaps the modern misunderstanding of Argead polygamy as an alleged adoption of the Achaemenid custom could be reflected in this story. While the imagined ‘harem’ is mostly associated with total control over the female inhabitants, their sexual lives and the chastity of unmarried women, it also triggered ideas of depravation, daily orgies and vice. Against this background, one story depicts Drypetis as a secret nymphomaniac.91 Her lack of morals even makes her husband give up any plans for children with her. His talk with Alexander is full of stereotypes about the sexually corrupted representatives of the decadent East. First, Alexander makes fun of his one-night-stand Bagoas, ‘who was just a little too, well practiced, and I’ve always found that to be rather distasteful. You end up thinking about what they might have done with others before you, and that is never a pleasant thought is it?’92 Hephaistion agrees, and begins to slander his Persian wife: Well it would appear our beautiful virgin princess had somehow escaped the watchful eye of her mother, and gained quite a name for herself. She was frank with it, franker than you’d expect a Persian to be . . . So the agreement is that she is both discreet and careful about her choice of lovers, and she gets a regular allowance of money. You already know what I get in return.93 To sum up, Persians are usually dishonest, the Achaemenid princess is as sexually corrupted as the dubious eunuch, and Hephaistion does not mind treating his wife like a prostitute. Alexander is amused and laughs. This example clearly shows the misogynistic bias that forms part of Western ideas of the ‘harem’. Usually, Drypetis is styled according to modern94 Western stereotypes of female submissive, sensual ‘Orientals’, but rarely portrayed as the evil Eastern femme fatale. However, another example of this negative view shows her as the characteristically scheming, manipulative Eastern representative of sin and decline. Not surprisingly, her image as the Eastern female villain is coloured by Christian apocalyptic themes. Drypetis only pretends to mourn for Hephaistion – in reality, she killed him. Even worse, she is also responsible for the end of the world, as the inconsolable Alexander loses his mind and frees Gog and Magog instead of fencing them in.95 The fics based on Renault’s trilogy also involve fictitious interviews with characters from the novels titled In Their Own Words, a project launched in 2008 by members of the shared metafictional universe of maryrenaultfics, which involved many characters from her novels. Sisygambis, Drypetis, and Stateira were also ‘interviewed’ in 2009 on their feelings about their capture and the marriage of the girls.96 Stateira and Drypetis confirm that they were happy to be honoured by marrying such powerful men. Drypetis is depicted as the obedient, submissive Persian woman: ‘Of course I loved him: he was my husband. A wife must always honour and revere her husband.’ While she admits that she had been nervous and scared at the time of her capture, fearing that she would be raped, sold or killed, she then calmed down and became completely submissive: ‘Hephaistion 65

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was all I could ever hope for in a husband. My only regret was that our marriage was so short.’ In the fics concerning Hephaistion and Drypetis’ wedding night and matrimony, he is always portrayed as the perfect gentleman, treating her tenderly and kindly97 – in spite of their frequently mentioned cultural differences. Again, the ‘harem’ is at the core of these differences. For example, Gamos describes Drypetis’ thoughts about her married life: He proves a strange husband . . . he invades her rooms at all hours, treats her eunuchs like men, and terrorizes her maids, and scandalizes everyone, one afternoon by shooing away the girl who was dressing her hair – no husband comes to his wife at high noon, it is most improper.98 Mostly, Drypetis falls in love with Hephaistion the very moment she sees him, as he is so handsome. Promptly, she is willing to subject herself to him – to be as obedient and charming as would be expected of a girl who grew up in a ‘harem’. For example, in one fic Hephaistion thinks of her: He was so bored with people fussing! Drypetis, now – she didn’t fuss. What a dear girl she was . . . ‘I hope I have pleased you, my husband,’ she had said after the marriage had been consumated.99 However, scenes of hot passion are missing, as these are reserved for Hephaistion encountering his ‘real love’ – Alexander. In consequence, in the same fic Drypetis appears once again in the shadow of Alexander: Why couldn’t things be as simple with Alexander as they were with Drypetis? Having her had not cooled his desire for the king, nor had Alexander’s two new wives changed his feelings for Hephaestion – of that he was sure. And it wasn’t as if Hephaestion loved Alexander any less. Yet instead of suddenly being able to spend more time together, they seemed to be further and further apart.100 At the end of the fic, Hephaistion remembers passionate moments with Alexander, and awaits him in his bedchamber. The same is true for Hephaistion’s Letter to his Wife Drypetis, which swiftly changes from kind greetings to Drypetis into a prolonged reflection on Alexander’s nature, followed by the advice for Stateira on how to make him happy: When he looks your way, he will wholly be yours, wholly, even if it is only for the space of a smile. And such smiles will be the food of your soul for days. Believe me.101 This is hardly a letter from a husband making a loving wife happy. In another example, Drypetis is credited with a little more resistance, though quickly smoothed by 66

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Hephaistion’s charms: ‘Drypetis, beautiful Drypetis, whom he has won, though she hated him, and who is wholly his.’102 However, while the story begins with Hephaistion asking Alexander for leave to introduce Drypetis to his mother in Macedonia, it ends with Hephaistion forgetting about Drypetis and his travel plans, falling into Alexander’s arms as his own personal Patroclus. Alexander’s obsessive and possessive love for Hephaistion is one of the main themes of the fics involving Drypetis. The following example is a characteristic scene: ‘I think I am jealous and envious of Drypetis, she is getting everything I ever wanted and needed. I know I am not losing you but it is going to be hard to let part of you go to be with her,’ Alexander said.103 Often, Alexander is depicted as manifestly claiming his sole rights to Hephaistion’s love: ‘Tell me you love me’ . . . ‘I love you . . . I love you!’ ‘Only me? Tell me you love only me!’ ‘You . . . are my only love . . .!’ . . . ‘You are mine . . . no-one deserves you but me . . . you are too beautiful to belong to any lesser man’ . . . ‘I am yours, only yours . . .’ Hephaistion reassures him.104 According to one story, Drypetis is nothing more than an (ineffective) instrument to separate the happy couple – Hephaistion and Alexander – sent by the Goddess of Discord, who has fallen for Hephaistion and wants him for herself.105 Often, Drypetis does not appear in the scene but is mentioned when Alexander and Hephaistion talk. Mostly, it is again Alexander who is credited with the major role even regarding Hephaistion’s wedding. The most important aspect of this marriage becomes his bond with his future brother-in law, so that the question arises: Who marries whom? ‘About your marriage,’ Alexander began . . . ‘I thought you’d like to know the name of your bride . . . You know we once entertained the idea of my marrying Princess Stateira . . . I want to give you her sister, Drypetis . . . Do you understand, Hephaistion? I want to be an uncle to your children. I want your children and mine to be cousins. I want to unite our blood.’ . . . Hephaistion gave up on words and kissed him. ‘Would you like to know just how honoured I feel?’106 Drypetis is depicted as a mere conduit to add a dynastic facet to their bond, reduced to the task of producing children in order to intensify her husband’s relationship with Alexander. These family ties are a major theme in the fics concerning this love game: ‘Hephaestion’s children will be related to his. It’s something out of this world, something so beautiful that he [Alexander] wants to stand up and shout it out to the whole world.’107 67

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Instead of shouting, he spends the wedding night drinking in his bedroom with Hephaistion, both leaving their brides alone. This dynastic bond is the reason why the children of Hephaistion and Drypetis are mentioned in the fics at all.108 Already perceived as a disruptive element, women even become unnecessary when, in the climax of one parodistic fic, thanks to a magic potion made by the Indian Calanus, Hephaistion gives birth to Alexander’s child.109 Drypetis is still there to laugh at him, but her time runs out. In response to the Macedonian objection to the mass marriages, Alexander announces Hephaistion as his true Macedonian partner with whom he has produced a perfect Macedonian heir. In another fic (published in 2006) that seems to be inspired by Ang Lee’s movie Brokeback Mountain (2005), the two of them go ‘hunting’ (mostly without leaving their tent). Plagued by jealousy, Alexander mentions Drypetis: ‘But, after all, you will have female companionship soon enough! Drypetis. . .’. Hephaistion postpones any further thought of this, pointing out that his marriage is years away, before embracing Alexander.110 Drypetis is unimportant again.

Conclusion The historical Drypetis is lost to us. The ancient reports on her are in part fictitious and shaped by literary devices. It is certain that after being captured by the victorious Macedonians at Issus, she and the rest of her family became valuable hostages, tokens of Alexander’s legitimacy as the new king of the Persian Empire. In 324, she was used as an instrument of Alexander’s policy of integrating himself and the leading Macedonians into the indigenous interfamily connections. After Alexander’s death, when his controversial Persian policy was under attack, she was eliminated as a symbol of past times and unpopular policy. In addition, because of her Achaemenid ancestry, she posed a threat to the status of Roxane supported by Perdiccas. Regarding Drypetis’ case, ancient and modern reception are two different phases of the endless spinning of the same myths surrounding the artificial figure of Alexander. While there are some similar dynamics, there are also differences. In fanfiction, the scarce appearances by Drypetis are clearly influenced by traditional modern Western stereotypes about the ‘Orient’ and its key element, the ‘harem’. Thus, Drypetis’ ‘Otherness’ is a constant feature in the fics analysed. While it is often proclaimed that stories are written from her perspective, this is a pseudo-emphatic view based on Western constructions of an imaginary ‘Orient’ that is very different from the results of scholarship concerning the life of the female Achaemenids. Drypetis is predominantly portrayed as the obedient, submissive, beautiful woman who passively accepts her fate and tries her best to satisfy her foreign husband. This is also far from the predominating portraits of Achaemenid royal women in ancient literature in general, who were active, scheming, jealous and influential persons. Fanfics are the exception, where Drypetis is also portrayed as the scheming, evil Eastern femme fatale – the girl you love to hate – or the sexually corrupted man-eater spoilt by the 68

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depraved atmosphere of the ‘harem’. Whether obedient or corrupt, there are echoes of the misogynistic aspects of the ‘harem’ theme colouring her portrayals in each case. Furthermore, although the fanfics cannot be regarded as political statements, they nevertheless mirror the ideological themes and political discourses of their time. There are also somewhat anti-feminist traits within the depictions of Drypetis’ role in the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion. For the most part, she plays only a minor role. She is also reduced to the role of producing Hephaistion’s children to make Alexander their uncle, and thus intensifying his bond with Hephaistion. Alternatively, she is treated as an obstacle to their romance. However, she mostly remains in the shadows (or in the ‘harem’), posing no threat at all to the passionate love between Alexander and Hephaistion. Instead she serves as a trigger to make them realize how much they love each other. In sum, there is a clear desire for a happy ending between Hephaistion and Alexander as an inseparable couple in love. Hence, at its core, this manifestation of fan culture demonstrates the universal longing of mankind: to find and keep the love of one’s life and remain happy. However, problematically, this yearning for romance exploits biased traditions that stem from Western male views and political discourses defining the ‘other’.

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CHAPTER 5 EXOTIC, EROTIC, HEROIC? WOMEN OF CARTHAGE IN WESTERN IMAGINATION Marta García Morcillo

‘Salammbô in her splendour was blended with Tanit, and seemed the very genius of Carthage, and its embodied soul’ Flaubert, Salammbô, ch. 15 (transl. E. Powys Mathers)

Preface Dido, Sophonisba and the anonymous wife of Hasdrubal – the general who defended the city in 146 bce – have for centuries inspired the imagination of artists and travellers searching for traces of the grandeur of Punic Carthage. When, in 1807, Chateaubriand visited Tunis and the famous Acropolis of Byrsa, he was inevitably disappointed by the desolate scenery he encountered. Carthage’s indecipherable ruins were certainly no match for the striking memories left by Hannibal and his military campaigns, but also for those left by the heroic women who embodied the spirit of the city and its tragic fate.1 A similar experience in 1862 inspired Flaubert’s most uncanny creature, the fictional Salammbô, who was about to become the epitome of fin-de-siècle feminized eroticism as moulded by Orientalism. Salammbô was the titular character of a historical novel set during the Mercenary War (240 to 238 bce ), through which Flaubert aimed to ‘resurrect Carthage’. Like the legendary and historical women that preceded and succeeded her, Salammbô was affected by the character and destiny of the Punic city, but also by something dark that inhabits the depths of every human soul. In the following pages, I will discuss the afterlives of the historical, legendary and fictional women of Carthage in the modern arts. The chapter is divided into four sections that propose four types of characterizations, following a kind of diachronic approach: the tragic, the exotic, the vanished and the resurrected woman. The aim of my contribution is to identify the keys to the enduring legacy and the successful transfigurations of ancient and modern models of representation of the ‘Punic feminine Other’.

The tragic woman The highly popular theme of Dido’s death on the funeral pyre, as depicted in the Aeneid (4 .630–692), has been endlessly reinterpreted by artists. It is a moment that epitomizes the double tragedy of the queen’s death and the anticipated destruction of the city. 70

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My analysis begins with a nineteenth-century work: Dido on the Funeral Pyre (Fig. 5.1), a lost painting by F. Keller (1877), reproduced as a book-engraving in Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama (1892).2 The etching shows a halfnaked woman standing upon a sacrificial pyre and altar dominated by a bust of Jupiter. At the woman’s feet lie the spoils of a warrior; remainders of the absent Aeneas. Over these, the bed linen; the tragic souvenir of a love curtailed. The woman is depicted in an erotic, dramatic pose, her gaze turned from the pyre. She looks absent, resigned, lost. Her left arm guides the viewer towards the semi-hidden sword. Queen Dido is about to kill herself with the very sword that Aeneas gave to her as a gift, as Virgil tells us. Keller’s etching is linked to a text: a short, abridged version of the translation of Virgil by Christopher Pearse Cranch. Dido’s desire to sacrifice herself using the relics of the Trojan hero, the account of her achievements as the founder of Carthage and avenger of her husband Sychaeus and, finally, the queen’s curse against Aeneas and his descendants – are all omitted from this version. Their deliberate absence reduces Keller’s Dido to a suicide provoked by abandonment and deprives the viewer of the more complex characterization of a queen crushed by both her emotions and her responsibilities as a ruler. The presence of Jupiter’s bust presiding over the scene reminds us of Aeneas’ divine fate, which can be neither postponed nor prevented by any mortal. Dido is completely alone with her fate. The dramatic body language of Keller’s Dido somewhat recalls the ‘madness of love’ provoked by Venus within the Virgilian reading of the story; the insane state that fatally transforms her from a loyal widow and responsible ruler into a mad, seductive lover, no longer in control of her emotions, and thus undeserving of life. She is a failed queen, and thus a failed ruler. The theme of Dido’s death on the funeral pyre also echoes the pre-Virgilian tradition of the self-sacrifice of the fugitive Tyrian Elissa, who preferred to die and remain loyal to her dead husband than marry the local Numidian chief Iarbas.3 This story, set in the eighth century bce , was conveniently re-contextualized within the aftermath of the Trojan War by the Augustan poet, who presented Dido’s death as a curse against the Romans, and a presage of Carthage’s own fatal destruction in 146 bce . In this way, Virgil featured Carthage as a nemesis of Rome, a city destined to die so that the other could live, and a queen who needed to perish for the hero to leave.4 Virgil’s version was challenged in the seventh book of Ovid’s Heroides. Here, the queen justifies her suicide as an act of redemption for having fallen in love with a treacherous man undeserving of her feelings and generosity. Ovid’s Aeneas is nothing more than a man favoured by the gods, with no self-determination. The Heroides leave no room for Dido’s anger towards the Trojan; her desire to die instead arises as a consequential and courageous act of redemption. Ovid reacted to the Virgilian model of cultural dichotomy embodied by Dido and Aeneas, a model that eschews the irrational, feminized – and thus inferior – Carthage in favour of the rational, masculine, superior Rome. The echoes of 146 bce resounded very strongly in the post-Actium Augustan agenda, where Virgilian narratives were a better match for the construction of Eastern Otherness, fundamentally represented by Cleopatra and Egypt. To Augustan and early imperial readers, the tragedy of the 71

Fig. 5.1 Dido on the Funeral Pyre. Etching from a painting by F. Keller (1877). Author’s collection.

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Carthaginian Dido might have been seen as a truncated precedent of the stigmatized depiction of the Egyptian Cleopatra as seducer of the Roman Mark Antony. Dido’s tragic death found a notable echo among Italian Humanists. Giovanni Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (1374) attempted to trace a clear line between the ‘historical’ Elissa and the fictitious Dido, as shaped by Virgil. This distinction made it possible to elevate Dido to a model of fidelity and chastity that better suited Christian ideals of womanhood, but also to draw a portrait of a capable ruler.5 Multiple illustrated editions and translations of Boccaccio’s work contributed to reconstructing a dignified portrait of the Carthaginian queen.6 These positive perspectives on the historical Dido were greatly echoed after the discovery in 1559 of an epitaph traditionally attributed to Ausonius (‘Poor Dido found but little rest, by neither of her spouses blest; she flies, because the first was dead, and dies because the second fled’).7 These verses recall Dido’s misfortunes caused by the abandonment of two men – one dead, the other departed. This theme was widely explored within the visual arts.8 I wish to specifically consider two relevant works that present this tragedy as a staged drama. One of the most remarkable examples of Dido’s rehabilitation is Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe’s play Dido, Queene of Carthage (1585–8).9 Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido mirrors the challenges and anxieties of Elizabethan England, more specifically the queen’s own model of female sovereignty. The play deconstructs the model of the female ruler conquered by passions, instead celebrating the non-Virgilian narratives of a chaste queen who refuses to remarry the suitor Iarbas. Dido’s model of chastity informed Elizabeth’s firm decision to remain single. Elizabeth’s own political agenda – her conflict with Roman Catholicism and the Habsburgs, and the establishment of prosperous trade agreements and diplomatic relations between England and the Ottoman empire – would also explain the blurring of the Virgilian dichotomies in Marlowe’s play. Here, Dido and Aeneas no longer embody two opposing, incompatible cultures. She is now the ambitious queen of an expanding empire that shared certain challenges, preoccupations and character traits with the Tudor monarch.10 The revisionism of the Virgilian narrative in Dido, Queene of Carthage reverted the negative connotations of the Tyrian queen’s death resulting from her inferior condition, both as a woman and a foreigner.11 The play and its reworking of the ancient tradition empowers Elizabeth and Dido with virtues like dignity, chastity and loyalty. Possibly the most intensively artistic representation of Dido’s tragedy remains Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), with a libretto by Nahum Tate.12 Both the music and the text delineate the contours of a suffering, noble woman who is the victim of a human drama. Dido appears here dispossessed of all the traits that make her a revengeful creature moved by rage, through which Virgil projected a future clash of civilizations. Accordingly, the death of the queen, punctuated by Purcell’s immersive music in Dido’s Lament, is simply depicted as a natural and stylized descent, liberated from all the paraphernalia that suggested a violent end moved by vengeance (the pyre, the spoils, the ‘marital’ bed, the sword).13 Dido’s eternal words during her Lament perfectly synthesize Purcell and Tate’s approach to the story: ‘Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.’ This fate can be read both individually and collectively when we view Dido as the embodiment of Carthage.14 73

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The exotic woman This attempt to provide a recognisable foreign context to the tragedy of Dido ran parallel to interest in the historical drama of Sophonisba, as narrated in Livy’s account of the Second Punic Wars (30.12–15). The beautiful daughter of the general Hasdrubal was promised in marriage to the Numidian chief Syphax, after the latter defeated his rival Massinissa and became an ally against Rome. When Massinissa joined Scipio Africanus in 204 bce , he took Syphax prisoner. In the royal palace at Cirta, he encountered Sophonisba, who begged him for her freedom. He fell immediately in love and married her within the palace. But Scipio obliged Massinissa to reject her and turn her over to Rome. Massinissa decided to send Sophonisba poison, with a note that encouraged her to drink it if she preferred death to slavery. Her dignified decision to drink the cup of poison suggests comparisons with her ancestor Dido. Sophonisba enjoyed a favourable reputation during the Renaissance. Boccaccio included her among his literary ‘noble women’, and Petrarca dedicated the fifth book of his epic poem Africa (published after his death in 1397) to her. Comparisons with Dido also became particularly popular among Baroque painters, who tended to give prominence to Sophonisba’s nobleness and decorum, while marginalizing the theme of cultural clash between Carthage and Rome.15 By contrast, Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Sophonisbe (1663) staged a drama of passions interwoven with politics and violence. Sophonisba’s suicide is presented here as a necessary end that anticipates the fall of Carthage. Corneille’s Sophonisba is a character who, despite her dignity, is shaped by her disdain towards the Romans. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new interest in Punic civilization arose in connection with European colonialism and the decline of the Ottoman empire. Chateaubriand’s evocation of the ruins of Carthage exemplified a nostalgic trend associated with the transformed and vanished topographies of ancient, ‘Eastern’ places.16 This idea boosted the contraposition between Carthage and Rome, the Ottoman empire and the colonial ambitions of the European nations. It also explained to a certain degree the birth of a fictitious character inspired by Dido and Sophonisba, who was destined to surpass them as the exotic and eroticized icon of Carthage in fin-de-siècle imagination. ‘Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde. Mes vêtements n’ont qu’à tomber, et tu découvriras sur ma personne une succession de mystères!’17 The erotic mysteries awaiting Saint Antony beneath the clothes of the Queen of Sheba in La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1849, 1856, 1874) reveal clues about Gustave Flaubert’s fascination with the Orient and the creation of Salammbô. As Edward Said notes, Flaubert’s image of the Orient was ‘eminently corporeal’, an attractive but also enigmatic realm epitomized by the body of a woman. His Salammbô, like Salomé and the Queen of Sheba, seems to have been first inspired by the famous Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem, whose exuberant and intriguing sexuality personally captivated Flaubert when he met her in Wadi Halfa.18 Beyond Kuchuk’s reminiscent presence in the contours of Flaubert’s Oriental women, Salammbô (1862) aimed to, in his own words, ‘ressusciter Carthage’, and recreate a lost world, a chronologically and spatially distanced place.19 The historical framework for the story was the war between the Carthaginians and the Mercenaries during the aftermath 74

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of the First Punic War (241 bce ).20 This crisis concluded with the victory of the Republic, led by Hamilcar Barca, and the execution of the insurgents. The fictional character of Salammbô, and her relationship with the barbarian Mathô, added a necessary ingredient of erotic exoticism. This choice of historical event intentionally avoided the best-known confrontation between Rome and Carthage in the Second Punic War, which tended to be extrapolated into modern political discourses. Michelet’s Histoire Romaine: Republique (1835), one of Flaubert’s most influential texts, conceived the rise and fall of Carthage as part of a rational narrative that elevated Rome to a superior civilization that would give birth to Europe.21 Flaubert moved away from this conventional scenario. For this reason, he was openly attacked by his most fervent critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who believed that any historical novel should deal with events relevant to the present.22 Unlike Chateaubriand, Flaubert was not disappointed by the ruins of Carthage. He made the most of his travels to Tunisia and other regions, capturing ideas, images and sensory experiences that he revamped within the novel.23 His own, accurate research allowed him to recreate an imaginary, yet archaeologically plausible, ancient Carthage. Flaubert’s city feels real. On a deeper level, the remoteness of his Carthage suited his aim to provoke and challenge traditional, rational and moralizing conceptions of history as moulded by anthropocentrism. He aimed to show that human history is ultimately determined by the unpredictable and implacable forces of nature. Flaubert presents Carthage as a place dominated by a continuous cycle of renovation and destruction, as embodied by the gods Tanit and Moloch.24 All the characters within the novel are ruled by a deep spirituality, obscure passions and certain doses of violence.25 The exotic strangeness of the place also applies to the protagonist. Salammbô is depicted as a fascinating yet uncanny woman, and her sudden death following Mathô’s ritualized torment is a necessary step in the cycle of life and death that dominates Carthage. The spirit of Dido, but also that of Sophonisba, are both fundamental to understanding Flaubert’s construction of Salammbô. Her suggested assimilation with Tanit explains her death as a form of regeneration for the city. The uncommon visual qualities of this post-romantic novel were recognized by Flaubert’s contemporaries.26 They also explain why Salammbô subsequently reached the status of diva within Décadence and fin-de-siècle imageries.27 The fact that Flaubert explicitly forbade any illustration of the novel during his lifetime, as he was convinced that a visualization of Salammbô and his Carthage would kill the reader’s imagination,28 likely contributed to her popular ‘mythification’. Salammbô’s eroticism is a consistent element in the afterlife of Flaubert’s heroine.29 Often, this idea is explicitly underlined through nudity, as is the case with the iconic polychrome image created by Alphonse Mucha in Incantation (1896). This visually stunning lithograph invites the viewer to a sensorial experience. This work elevated Salammbô to the status of an irresistible muse of Art Nouveau and inspired countless voyeuristic fantasies of temporally undefined ‘Oriental nights’.30 The difficulties in capturing Salammbô’s disturbing characterization are well-reflected in the work of Gaston Bussière who, influenced by Mucha and Gustave Moreau, explored the theme from various aesthetic angles. The evolution of the artist took him from 75

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Romantic Symbolism inspired by Germanic and medieval mythologies to a study of Orientalism centred around the female body. His Salammbô (1907) is an exquisite ‘medium shot’ of a young, lavishly-clothed, curly-haired blonde woman. Her intense blue eyes stare directly at the viewer, and although her pose is serene and seemingly innocent, the gaze provokes a certain discomfort.31 Bussière’s work as illustrator for the novel, alongside his increasing interest in odalisques, dancers of the seven veils and, in general, eroticized women set in exotic oriental contexts, led him to rework his concept of Salammbô. From the 1910s onwards, Bussière regularly photographed models to recreate his figures. One of them was painted for his La danse de Salomé ou Les papillon d’or (1923), based on Oscar Wilde’s play. The same photograph inspired his interpretation of the famous sensual encounter between Salammbô and the prophetic and terrifying Python (Salammbô 1920). The painting shows both the snake and Salammbô, with long black-hair, next to each other. Bussière very effectively plays with shadows to offer us a delicate nude, partially illuminated by the warm light of the moon. Salammbô’s stylized body transmits fear and fragility, matching Flaubert’s words – ‘elle se sentait mourir’ – while her spectral gaze is again disturbingly directed towards the viewer/voyeur. The striking bronze sculpture by Théodore Rivière, Salammbô chez Mâtho. Je t’aime! Je t’aime (1895), reproduces the moment of the encounter between Mathô and Salammbô in the tent of the mercenary. Rivière’s sculpture is an extraordinary essay on extreme emotions and erotic tensions. The artist proposes a contrast between the violent, corporeal dynamism of the kneeling, half-naked Mathô, and a majestically dressed Salammbô, standing in a hieratical, statuesque, and clearly dominant, position. While in the novel Salammbô seems to be in some sort of trance,32 Rivière’s piece represents one of the most iconic portraits of the Oriental femme fatale. Eroticism, fatal seduction, strangeness, cruelty and certain inhuman (or supernatural) attributes all contributed to shaping this idea, which was moulded by the Décadence, and that to some degree expressed the fear of empowered women menacing masculine spheres of comfort.33 The popularization of Salammbô as an icon of Carthage at the turn of the twentieth century led to a shadowing of her alter egos, the legendary Dido and the historical Sophonisba. I would like to finish this section with a most curious case study that shows the enthroning of Salammbô in Western popular culture. The Liebig Extract of Meat Company (est. 1865) was an international brand that introduced an infallible marketing strategy. Thousands of trading cards with colourful lithographs devoted to the history of humanity, science and the arts were distributed with the product. The didactic impact of this collectable encyclopaedia was comparable to that of popular illustrated history books. An early card-series, Famous women of ancient times (1897), portrays six women associated with the symbols and settings of the culture they embody: Sappho (Greece), Agrippina (Rome), Cleopatra (Egypt), Thusnelda (Germania), Semiramis (Assyria) and, of course, Salammbô (Carthage) (see Fig. 5.2). Flaubert’s figure is the only one that is purely fictitious. This choice reflects the culmination of a process of recognition of Salammbô as a popular icon in collective imagination, a status that transcends any historicity. For the fin-de-siècle Western viewer, the Carthaginian Salammbô might have appeared as real as the Egyptian Cleopatra. Her triumph as a universal star cannot be 76

Fig. 5.2 Salammbô. From the series: Famous women of ancient times (1897). Liebig trading card. Author’s collection.

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disassociated from Flaubert’s talent for creating a world that stands alone as a captivating visual fantasy of the Other. The colourfully clothed Salammbô on the Liebig card appears accompanied by the prophetic snake, but her outfit strongly resembles popular representations of modern Egyptian Ghawazee dancers. Certainly, she more closely resembles Kuchuk than Flaubert’s heroine. Her embellishments include golden chains binding her bare feet, an Orientalist licence with no connection to the novel. This element is aimed at punctuating the idea of a vaguely defined ‘enslaved’ foreign culture.34 Behind the figure of Salammbô, some architectonic elements of the city can be distinguished. Among them the partially hidden staircase and façade of Moloch’s temple. Flaubert’s description of the outside view of the temple is intentionally vague, an ‘endroit sinistre’, darkened by shadows, while the building itself is simply described as a ‘monstrueux tombeau’. The illustrator of the lithograph interprets this monstrous tomb as a gigantic head with arms flanking the mouth-like entrance of the building. The anonymous artist was probably inspired by a popular painting by Henry-Paul Motte entitled Baal Moloch dévorant les prisonniers à Babylone (1876).35 Motte’s work shows a similarly sphinx-like temple of Baal, receiving masses of people that are about to be sacrificed.36 The link between Baal-Moloch and human sacrifices appears in the Bible, and was explicitly linked to the Phoenician-Punic Moloch and to Carthage by Roman historiography.37 Flaubert revamped this tradition to shape his own version of a god that rises as an eclectic signifier of the sinister ‘East’. From a deeper, psychological perspective, Moloch reveals not only the dark side of Carthage and Salammbô, but also a strangely familiar territory of discomfort, the spirit of which inhabits all of us.38 On the Liebig card, the half-hidden temple that remains in Salammbô’s shadow seems to symbolically announce a new age for Moloch – that will crystallize in early cinema – and the evanescence of Carthage’s heroines. The visual afterlives of Salammbô in popular imagination, alongside her enthronization as a symbol of eroticized exoticism, absorbed and to a large degree dissolved the memory and ascendancy of Dido and Sophonisba, just as Virgil’s Dido had almost silenced other versions of her biographies. Flaubert constructed a character aimed at shaking consciences, but her visual reincarnations did not always capture that spirit. She was frequently reduced to a visual fantasy for male voyeurism, as was the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk. Flaubert’s Salammbô was not an ordinary woman, but neither was she a femme fatale. Her inscrutable spirituality was intended to transport the reader to an uncanny territory, yet somehow also contributed to popularizing an objectified stereotype of female eroticism that was interchangeable with other Eastern women like Salomé, Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba.

The vanished woman The lure of Carthage and its women gradually faded away with the arrival of cinema. The marginalization of Dido, Sophonisba and Salammbô, as well as the scarce attention paid to Punic civilization by the medium, can be partially explained by the irresistible appeal 78

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of Cleopatra’s Egypt as an ideal – and visually and culturally more defined – feminized nemesis of Rome. Hollywood’s preference for the Roman Civil Wars rather than the Punic Wars also explains this neglect, as well as its interest in biblical stories, rather than the ‘elusive Eastern-ness’ of Carthage.39 The cinematic oblivion of Carthage found a remarkable exception in the flourishing pre-First World War Italian film industry, in which Carthage towered over the country’s contemporary geo-political agenda and colonial aspirations in Africa.40 The Italo-Turkish War (1911–12), and the subsequent Italian invasion of Libya, Cyrenaica and Tripolitana, increased interest in ancient Carthage. Italy’s colonial ambitions in Africa found in the Punic Wars and the confrontation between Rome and Carthage a suitable theme to explore strategies of identification and opposition between ancient empires and modern nations. Following this momentum, three films featuring Carthaginian topics were produced in Turin during the same year (1914). They attest to the fierce competition that existed for a theme that would appeal to modern audiences. The discrete Salambò, directed by Domenico Gaido, competed with an adaptation of Emilio Salgari’s successful novel Cartagine in Fiamme (1906), called Delenda Cartago! Both of these were destined to remain in the shadows of the immortal Cabiria, however. Giovanni Pastrone’s masterpiece, with contributions from the prestigious writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, remains a milestone in the history of cinema.41 Cabiria merges a fictional plot with several episodes from the Second Punic War, including Hannibal crossing the Alps, the siege of Syracuse, the Battle of Cirta and the final victory of Scipio Africanus at Zama (202 bce ). In between these, the tragic story of Sophonisba provides a touch of visual Orientalism, and above all else, her depiction illustrates Pastrone’s interest in haunting the spectator with an exotic, ‘monumental’ atmosphere. To this end, the recreation of Carthage made use of accurate Punic and nearEastern iconographic elements, as well as pioneering cinematic techniques to enhance authenticity.42 The film’s major aesthetic influence was none other than Flaubert’s Salammbô. Both succeed in recreating a world that stands as an epitome of the irrational Other. Yet unlike the novel, Pastrone’s characterization of a Salammbonian Sophonisba remains in the background, overshadowed by the movie’s most iconic and spectacular motif, the terrifying temple of Moloch, and by the shocking sacrifice of children on the altar-statue of the god.43 More than twenty years after Cabiria, fascist Italy addressed its own colonial ambitions following the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Scipione l’Africano (1937) was a propaganda film that suggested a clear parallel between Scipio and Mussolini. The morally ambiguous Sophonisba from Pastrone’s movie is here a manipulative femme fatale dominated by extreme passions and a deep hatred of the Romans. Her Art Deco outfit and her body language combine to build a stylized Sophonisba, albeit one that was unfortunately marginalized in the plot. Interestingly, while the promotion of the movie in Italy highlighted the figure of the Roman general and the spectacular battle scenes, in Nazi Germany the film was advertized very differently. The title of the movie was changed to Karthagos Fall. Rom’s Kampf um’s Mittelmeer (The Fall of Carthage. Rome’s Fight for the Mediterranean), thus depersonalizing the conflict. Accordingly, the cover of the Illustrierter Film-Kurier magazine (n. 2837, 1937) (Fig. 5.3) does not feature Scipio. 79

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Fig. 5.3 Karthagos Fall. Rom’s Kampf um’s Mittelmeer. Cover from the magazine Illustrierter Film-Kurier (n. 2837, 1937). Author’s collection. Instead, Rome appears characterized by the masses assembled in the forum around a Capitolium-style temple, giving a fascist salute. Superimposed onto this scene (which celebrates Rome’s collective identity), the foreground features a striking close-up of Sophonisba holding the cup containing poison. This image proposes a confrontation between two cultural models, one dominated by the power of the people and their 80

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institutions, the other by feminized weakness and irrationality, all personified by Sophonisba. The Semitic background of the Carthaginian civilization reinforces this opposition from a viewpoint that conveniently suited National Socialism. The fall of Carthage announced in the title is thus associated with the poison and the Carthaginian woman’s death. It is she, rather than the ambivalent hero Hannibal, who embodies the idea of the barbarian Other opposed to the collective values of republican Rome. Still, the portrait of Sophonisba in these Italian movies remains schematic and stereotyped. This neglect of the Carthaginian women is also present in the few films that attempted to adapt Flaubert’s Salammbô. Gaido’s Salammbò (1914) changes the narrative of the story into a happy-ever-after romance. Far closer to the source novel is the FrenchAustrian Salammbô (1925), directed by Pierre Marodon. The film is a monumental canvas filled with Assyrian and Punic visual elements, Art Deco costumes and the Orientalist music of Florent Schmitt. The stage diva Jeanne de Balzac looks splendid in the protagonist’s part, but her static, almost statuesque, performance fails to transmit the emotional and uncanny portrait created by Flaubert. Marodon’s film confirmed the impossible task of adapting a novel whose main strength lies not in the plot, but in the discomforting atmosphere, which also shapes the characters. This handicap explains why Salammbô only returned to cinema during the age of Peplum when many productions looked for inspiration in the silent era. Sergio Grieco’s Salammbô (1960) reunites typical traits of the genre, including the conventional romance and happy-ending story. Carthage here appears as an aesthetically eclectic Oriental place, while Salammbô herself fulfils the role of the typically plain damsel of Peplum. Salgari’s novel Cartagine in Fiamme was revisited in a 1960 movie that constructs a weak adventure of heroism and love in which women play a secondary role. The film is remembered for the return of Moloch and human sacrifices into cinema. Faithful to Polybius’ account of 146 bce , both the novel and the film include the anecdote of the anonymous wife of the general Hasdrubal the Boetharch who, unlike her husband, preferred to immolate herself and her children in the flames than be enslaved by the Romans.44 This act of dignity strongly recalls Dido’s sacrifice, but also Sophonisba’s actions, and even the death of Salammbô. Cabiria’s success, and its deserved reputation in the history of cinema, give us some clues to the medium’s trends. In Cabiria, the space rules over the characters. There are no close-ups of the protagonists, who become the instruments of an exercise in the cultural recognition of a monumental and sinister place, one that is dominated by the horrifying Moloch. Carthage remains an elusive ‘Eastern’ place in cinema, defined only by its opposition to Rome. In this scenario, there is little place for a Dido and a Sophonisba, and certainly none for a Salammbô. Anecdotal, yet symptomatic of this, is a scene from Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941). The wife of the protagonist, a frustrated singer of dubious talent, performs as an extravagant Salammbô in a disastrous operatic adaptation produced by her husband. This staged fiction of luxurious decadence reflects the true emptiness that shapes the lives of the protagonists. To us, this symbolic operatic Salammbô represents a relic of an almost forgotten fin-de-siècle fantasy, an exhausted model of aesthetic and exotic glamour that seems to have no place in modern twentiethcentury fictional entertainment. 81

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The resurrected woman And yet: everything dies to be reborn. The flames that united Dido’s death with the destruction of Carthage were also a fire of resurrection and revival. What cinema failed to create – a memorable portrait of Carthaginian leading women – was achieved by television. Franco Rossi’s Eneide (1971) was a series created for Italian public television (RAI ). Rossi’s adaptation of Virgil followed the success of his previous L’Odissea (1968), and as then he relied on talented collaborators and spectacular scenery to recreate the various topographies of the Virgilian epic.45 Influenced by Pasolini’s and his own setting of Medea’s Colchis in Cappadocia, Dido’s Carthage was recreated using the stunning rocky landscapes of the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan. Rossi made use of the impressive cliffs, as well as one of the gigantic carved Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, as the monumental physiognomy of Dido’s city. The mysterious faceless Buddha statue features in Eneide as an unnamed god that pre-dates the arrival of the Tyrians. Rossi’s Dido is given form by the Greek actress Olga Karlatos, whose performance communicates the internal conflicts of a female ruler caught between her duties to her people and a passionate love turned to inconsolable grief.46 Dido’s dignified portrait in Eneide overshadows the hero, Aeneas, who often looks disoriented and undetermined. Rossi’s Dido goes beyond the Virgilian reading of the character and explores the alternative versions attached to the historical Elissa, as well as her post-classical reworkings by authors like Marlowe and Purcell.47 In this light should be read a relevant scene of the film, a ritual procession and sacrifice, presided over by Dido, that takes place in front of the temple of the faceless god (the largest of the Buddhas). An offscreen voice explains that the rite was an ancient Tyrian tradition that consisted of burning a simulacrum of a king. The ‘killing’ of the king made it possible for his spirit to merge with the inhabitants of the city, from whom a new ruler would emerge. This scene both anticipates and provides a new reading of Dido’s death on the pyre. Beyond the strangeness of the place she inhabits, this Tyrian Dido transmits empathy to the spectator; we understand her suffering and the reasons for her despair. Her grief and melancholic attitude make her approachable. Her death is a touching scene, in which all these human emotions collide. Was Dido’s death truly unavoidable? This question addresses Virgil’s instrumentalization of her fall, a necessary vehicle for an epic, larger than life story that transcends myth and history, from the flames of Troy to those of the destroyed Carthage. In 1905, the French author Jules Lemaître presented in his short story Anna Soror a provocatively alternative reading of the epilogue of Aeneid’s book IV. This story, inspired by the ‘other Didos’, was included in Lemaître’s book En marges des vieux livres (1905), a work that aimed to rewrite the lives of epic heroes into fables. In Anna Soror, Dido’s sister and confidant saves her from death through a gesture of love. When she recovers, the pragmatic Anna confronts Dido with the absurdity of her unrequited love to Aeneas and convinces her to accept a marriage of convenience to the Numidian Iarbas.48 On the way to her new down-to-earth life, Dido finally understands that the pious Aeneas, guided by fate, was not the model man she needed. This modernizing fable ends with an encounter between Dido and a Phoenician merchant, who has just landed in Carthage and tells her about Aeneas’ bad 82

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experiences in Latium. She gives the merchant a very important message for her former lover: ‘Dites-lui que Didon n’est pas morte’ (‘Tell him that Dido is not dead’). Dido is not dead; Didone non è morta is in fact the title of a film directed and cowritten by the feminist artist Lina Mangiacapre in 1987.49 The film, like Lemaître’s story, proposes an alternative life for the Tyrian queen. In Mangiacapre’s film, the queen returns to 1980s Naples, where she reunites with her former lover Aeneas, now a photographer. While Dido’s second life is that of an independent woman, Aeneas’s intellectual nudity – his lack of determination and will – are exposed. His Virgilian qualities – his pious character and blind obeisance to divine plans – once so praised and useful, look faintly ridiculous in the late twentieth century. Aeneas is here closer to the anti-hero depiction outlined by Ovid. While Dido is master of her own destiny, Aeneas is inexorably trapped by it. As Mangiacapre herself explained, the movie arose from her interest in the founding myths of Carthage and Naples, both territories colonized by foreign peoples, both linked by two women – Dido and the Siren Parthenope – fatally in love with two men, Aeneas and Odysseus.50 The choice of locations, the volcanic scenery of Pozzuoli and the Campi Flegrei, and the post-industrial urban landscapes of the harbour-city Naples, all stress the importance of fire and the sea as natural forces that determine the destiny of the protagonists, but also emphasize the cyclic, immortal character of myths. Dido, like a Phoenix, dies to be reborn.51 Mangiacapre invites the viewer to look directly at this modern, empowered Dido, finally liberated from the corset of traditions – including Orientalism – that insisted on undermining her as a failed female ruler ruined by irrational passions.52 Unlike Dido, Salammbô never experienced a comeback in the moving image, but her unbeaten exoticism suited very well the creative freedom of comics. The priestess of Tanit is evoked in Le spectre de Carthage (1977), from the popular graphic novels series Les Aventures d’Alix (1948) created by Jacques Martin. In this story, Dido, Moloch and Salammbô are recalled as enduring memories of Carthage’s past glories, but also as rather phantasmagoric presences that still menace the Roman city of the present. Martin’s work recalls the fascinating, yet mysterious world created by Flaubert, while confirming Salammbô’s status as a historicized heroine who transcends fiction. The most remarkable example of the popularity of Flaubert’s heroine in late-twentiethcentury visual culture is Philippe Druillet’s cult comic trilogy Salammbô (1981–6), a flamboyant futuristic fantasy that abandons any attempt to accurately translate and adapt Flaubert’s novel and its context, while succeeding in creating a similarly epic spectacle. Druillet introduces into the story his space-traveller hero, Lone Sloane, who takes the place of Mathô. This science-fiction Carthage is a place dominated by an archaic idea of religion, in which life and death, peace and violence, cohabit in harmony. Then there is Salammbô. The priestess of Tanit is a woman of stunning, yet non-canonical beauty. Druillet’s artwork, which underlines her erotic nudity, is not a simple modernization of the statuesque femme fatale model and is certainly far from the plain versions of the character seen in her brief encounters with cinema.53 The exaggerated, stylized, curved and angular forms of her naked body, the use of symmetry and the contrasting colours connect this Salammbô with expressionist and primitivist 83

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art. Druillet was interested in Flaubert’s transgressive modernity, in his creation of a deeply ancestral, religious society, and in Salammbô as a symbol and an interpreter of that mystic spirit. Following this idea, Druillet found aesthetic inspiration in Magdalenian art and Prehistoric and African Venuses, which exaggerate and idealize the female body as symbol of fertility and conception. His work attempts to capture that idea of a femininity rooted in the primitive myth of creation and the forces of nature. For Druillet, modernity lies in the cave of Lascaux.54 His Salammbô opened a new window, through which Flaubert’s figure can be vindicated as an alternative idea of the feminine.55

Conclusions Back to 1807. In his evocation of the women who shaped the life and death of Carthage, Chateaubriand created an enduring connection between them and the city they embodied. The solemn words he devoted to Dido also alluded to the creation of myths, which are nothing but history elevated by the Muses to the category of truth.56 Until the twentieth century, the sites of Carthage and Punic Civilization were largely seen as elusive cultural geographies filled with the biased views of Roman narrators and the Eastern fantasies of Western imagination. Carthage was essentially portrayed as Rome’s nemesis. As such, the myth of Hannibal as military genius aimed to further elevate the grandeur of Scipio and Rome. In the same vein, Dido, Sophonisba and the anonymous wife of general Hasdrubal represented the cultural characterizations of an inferior, feminine Carthage, destined to be subjugated by Rome’s model of superior civilization. As has been discussed in this chapter, the Virgilian Dido fed modern imageries of a tragedy moulded by fate and by these cultural dichotomies. This model was replicated in countless depictions of Sophonisba, which also accentuated the motif of revenge. Alternative Didos cohabited alongside this model during the Renaissance, when the subject of chastity and fidelity recalled Punic traditions of the fugitive Elissa. Marlowe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage remains a remarkable attempt to rehabilitate Dido as a capable leader, mirroring Queen Elizabeth’s own ruling model and ambitions. The exoticism of Carthage was particularly underscored by distinguished Grand Tourists and artists inspired by the enchanting fragrances of Orientalism, and by the spectacular discoveries of ancient near-Eastern cultures. In this scenario, the fictitious Salammbô embodied a certain idea of the Orient. Despite Flaubert’s extraordinary design of a place and characters that feel authentic, the visual reincarnations of Salammbô at the turn of the twentieth century tended to reduce her to an erotic symbol, often detached from her context. One interesting result of the case studies analysed here is the idea that Salammbô’s enthronization to the Olympus of universal icons, and as the image of Carthage, implied a marginalization of Dido and Sophonisba in collective imagination. Salammbô’s popularity transformed her into a ‘real’ character, thus inverting Chateaubriand’s model of history becoming myth. Devoid of the deep meaning given to her by Flaubert, Salammbô became an ancient Oriental creature with interchangeable skills and qualities. In a certain way, Salammbô almost killed the memories of Carthage. When cinema 84

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encountered Punic Civilization, the women of Carthage were progressively eclipsed by the spirit of place that was dominated by the sinister lure of Moloch. The resurrection of the Carthaginian women during the late twentieth century was already announced in the alternative fable of Dido’s second life, as signed by Lemaître. However, this renaissance was accompanied by a progressive Westernization of these women, and their detachment from the Orientalizing traits and contexts in which they were traditionally integrated. Dido’s awakening in post-industrial Naples as an empowered, modern, feminist woman is a form of poetic justice that confirms the validity of the cyclical nature and the myth of eternal return already explored by Flaubert. Meanwhile, the wandering Salammbô seems to have found a suitable new home, beyond the frontiers of time and space.

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CHAPTER 6 IN THE NAME OF CLEOPATRA: EMMA HAMILTON AND CATHERINE STEPNEY MAKE THEIR MARK Mary Hamer

‘Cleopatra of Egypt: from History to Myth’: the title of the British Museum’s millennium blockbuster issued a challenge.1 It could have read simply as a reminder that past facts become obscured in the retelling. More significantly, however, it invited visitors to recognize how Cleopatra VII and her story have been transmuted and reabsorbed to create a founding myth of European culture. They became transformed into a story, a fiction about authority and power: how these are, or ‘should be’, assigned, between women and men and between one culture and another. Heterogeneous, crossing time periods, the objects where Cleopatra was represented ranged from medieval manuscript illustration to the movie tie-ins inviting women to copy Claudette Colbert’s ‘Cleopatra’ look in the 1934 film of that name. They marked the figure as restless, resistant to being pinned down and, what is more, enduring. Most striking of all, however, were the royal sculptures from Ptolemaic Egypt, tentatively identified on stylistic and iconographic grounds as representing Cleopatra VII. For viewers accustomed to those Roman-looking marble heads from the museums of Berlin and the Vatican, the accredited and often reproduced versions of Cleopatra, the reminder that Egyptians might have had a different perspective on their queen was salutary. Without a word, the presence of these royal sculptures from Egypt challenged the dominance of the classical view. Obscure, exotic they also tweaked the Orientalist nerve, presenting an enigma both desired and feared.

Cleopatra’s after-life in Europe In its abundance the show also demonstrated how later periods, different moments and settings, constantly developed their own versions of Cleopatra. It invited the viewer to tease out how these were geared to their individual moments of production and their different settings, with their shifts of meaning and implication for the lives of contemporary women.2 There was one exhibit however that foxed me, the marble bust entitled ‘Lady Catherine Stepney as Cleopatra’. The portrait of an Englishwoman, it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836. At that date there could have been no question of referring to any ancient portrait heads of Cleopatra. In 1836 the Vatican and Berlin heads which are now familiar had not 86

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Fig. 6.1 Richard Cockle Lucas, Bust of Catherine, Lady Stepney as Cleopatra [1836]. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

yet been identified. Yet the white marble of Lady Stepney’s portrait, together with the appeal to that famous name from the past, brought it into a vague alignment with classical models, sculptured heads of women from Greece and Rome. Following the publication of the Description de l’Egypte between 1809 and 1829 interest in Egypt, its monuments and culture, had spread. Yet the sculptor, Richard Cockle Lucas, had made no attempt to employ Egyptianizing details of the kind that the American William Wetmore Story would draw on for his 1865 Cleopatra.3 The British Academy bust is utterly decorous with nothing to suggest the exotic or tragic: the identifying snake encircling the right wrist is placid as a bracelet. The demurely crossed hands, the ring on the fourth finger of the left hinting at marriage, the fashionable ringlets, all tie the portrait closely to the world in which within a year Victoria would become queen. What was at stake for Catherine Stepney, I wondered. Why would a woman choose to have her name identified in public with Cleopatra and in such a muted form? Only after twenty years had nearly passed when I visited another exhibition, ‘Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity’ at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, did I find a clue.4 87

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In that moment, behind the story of two English women, born only a decade apart, Catherine Stepney and Emma Hamilton, I began to glimpse an outline that had become blurred, the trace left by women out to survive, to hold on to their identity as they had come to understand it and to keep a place in the public realm. But that public space had been named as the realm of men, centuries before by Augustus, when he framed the woman Cleopatra as an alien, an intruder in the life of Rome. Unaware of the deep roots of the conventions she infringed, of how closely her profile would align her with Cleopatra, Emma Hamilton, stepped out boldly in her relationships with men and in her cultural intervention as an artist. The daughter of a blacksmith, she was vulnerable also as an outsider, an intruder in the world of high society. The wellconnected Catherine Stepney, however, knew how to stay safe as a beautiful woman in the public eye. Contemporary response to Stepney’s life and writings read alongside the response to the life and work of Emma Hamilton, suggests that the legacy of Augustus did indeed remain active at the level of fantasy: it was in the name of Cleopatra, surfacing in these women’s stories as it did, that vigorous life and creativity in a woman were constrained. Set in this context, that portrait bust, so unlikely an image of Cleopatra, begins to make sense.

The Augustan legacy For Augustus, Cleopatra and her denigrated image had been tools in establishing his rule. When he challenged Mark Antony, another Roman, for absolute power it had suited him to dissemble the fact that he was launching a civil war. Instead, he named Cleopatra, ruler of Egypt, Mark Antony’s lover and political ally, as the enemy of Rome, the one to be destroyed.5 It helped that certain features of Egyptian culture were already anathema to Rome, where the lives of women were bound by restriction. Taking a public role, presenting herself to be seen outside the home might expose a Roman woman of family to being talked about and shamed as a whore. In Egypt, on the other hand, daughters and sons were treated equally and Egyptian women in general were free to choose their own husbands.6 Conditions were in place for Egypt and by association, for Cleopatra to slip into symbolizing an invasive corruption undermining a whole way of life, a threat both to Rome and to its order. While Egyptian culture laid an emphasis on pleasure, delighting in display – Cleopatra herself would appear dressed as the goddess Isis – Rome’s values were militaristic, designed for conquest, theoretically at least austere. The Roman ideal of masculinity involved indifference to pain and with that indifference to pleasure, not least to the pleasure of knowing women, that is the pleasure of being in relationship with women, as distinct from making use of their bodies. It followed that particular symbolism was invested in Cleopatra’s person. Although her suicide deprived Augustus of the chance to humiliate her in the living body as he had 88

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intended, he had an image of her carried in his triumph. The body of Cleopatra, known lover of Mark Antony and before him of Julius Caesar, was constructed by Augustus as an emblem of seductive pleasure linked inexorably with defeat and death for leading men. Though not without some ambivalence, writers of the Augustan court, Horace, Virgil, Propertius and Ovid supported this, focusing as one on Cleopatra’s sexuality.7 She became the harlot queen: Lucan wrote to condemn ‘the night which brought the wanton daughter of the Ptolemies to the bed of a Roman general’.8 It was the start of a tradition which appropriated the once-living woman, transforming the figure of Cleopatra into a symbol charged with a specific politics. Stories of Cleopatra’s promiscuous behaviour were linked to her membership of an alien culture, one to be condemned, though in fact Egypt and the gods of Alexandria had significant appeal in Rome.9 Such ambivalence would continue to be a feature of European response to representations of the East. Yet the myth created under Rome, accompanied by the tacit political programme of estrangement and domination which it embodied, would endure for centuries. It was transmitted almost casually in the form of the classical education given to form the minds of those children, for the most part male, who were destined for authority.

Emma Hamilton: Cleopatra personified The sanctions against women and their bodies stunted the development of those who came after, stilling and silencing them. To know what a woman who side-stepped might look like, I turn to the story of Emma Hamilton. In a sense her example vindicates Augustus: as a woman empowered, her abilities freed, Emma did not leave his culture unchanged. In 1765, the year Emma Hamilton was born, a second age of Augustus had recently reinstalled Augustan values in England. Among the wealthy and educated admiration for the cultural achievements of his age had led to widespread imitation of Augustan models in architecture and literature. Beautiful buildings and fine poetry were not the only import from the past. With them came a way of understanding the human world and of defining relations between women and men, also those between the powerful and the powerless. At Emma’s birth in a blacksmith’s cottage on the Wirral, there was nothing to link her with power in any of its forms. Yet by her early thirties, her beauty coupled with her own work as an artist had won her personal fame and she was respected as the wife of a distinguished man of letters, a baronet and diplomat; she had herself negotiated between nations and calmed the panic of a court in flight.10 She was also the lover of Lord Nelson, victor of the Battle of the Nile. When the press began playing on the link with Egypt and started referring to Emma as ‘Cleopatra’ it was not intended entirely as a compliment. More striking even than her rise in social position was the way she had seized opportunities for self-development, for discovering who she was. This section will trace 89

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both that process and the retribution that followed. Emma’s life took off when she was introduced to the painter George Romney and would flourish under her relationship with Sir William Hamilton, antiquary and Fellow of the Royal Society. She was sixteen in 1782 when she was introduced to George Romney, by many considered the foremost portraitist of his age: it was the start of a remarkable expansion of her world.11 Charles Greville, the man who took her to Romney’s Cavendish Square studio, was her ‘protector’ with exclusive access to her. He had rescued Emma when she was abandoned pregnant by his worthless friend, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh. Greville set her up with her mother in a little house with a garden but he did so on strict terms, among them that she must give up her baby, though she begged to keep it. Romney’s imagination responded powerfully to Emma’s beauty. Above and beyond the flowing auburn of her hair, the perfectly shaped mouth, the brilliant eyes, he found she had a natural talent for expressing emotion. Earlier, as a young nursemaid in the household of Thomas Linley the composer, she had been brought into close contact with the world of professional theatre and had the opportunity to appreciate the body’s powers of signifying and expression. Not only her face but her whole person moved instinctively to take up a position in accord with a shift of feeling. It meant that when the painter ‘placed’ her body into a pose her facial expression changed fluidly in response. Today we might say that as a woman she was fully ‘in her body’ to a degree that is rare. Even in repose her figure held the promise of animation and movement. Over the years between 1782 and his death in 1802 Romney painted over seventy portraits of her, most of them drawn from subjects that were literary or classical and displaying her wide range: ‘Emma as Miranda’, ‘Emma as Medea’, ‘Emma as a Vestal Virgin’. Prints were made based on one or two of the portraits, ‘Emma as Nature’ and ‘Emma as the Spinstress’ and in that way her name and image were sold on the street. Overwhelmingly, however, it was the fashionable world that learned to admire the beautiful sitter and to recognize from the use of her first name alone that she must be somebody’s kept woman, not even a well-known actress, certainly not a woman of good family. She was pegged, socially, in a fashion that must endure. Even on these terms it was a gain for an intelligent girl, the beginnings of an education, to spend time in the company of people with intellectual and aesthetic interests. It fitted her to move within a world that was wider: in 1776 her protector, Charles Greville, growing tired of her, his uncle Sir William Hamilton, the distinguished connoisseur who knew her from Romney’s, agreed to take her on. She was sent out to Naples, where Sir William, fifty-six to her twenty-one, was the British Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.12 Emma now showed what she was made of, taking every opportunity to develop herself. In Naples she studied with masters to get the fundamentals of an elite education, while becoming fluent in French and Italian and working on her singing – but there were risks for her as she explored her own powers. Romney had celebrated her person in all its life of emotion and its promise of pleasure, while leaving her humble status perfectly plain. Now she was moving up the social scale, for in Naples she acquired more dignity: in that freer and more tolerant society the presence of the ambassador’s mistress at court 90

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events did not give rise to scandal. The freedom of life and expression that she was beginning to experience would not sit easily in England on her return. She began to perform as an artist, deploying her whole person to make art. In England society hostesses regularly put on household entertainments for guests: at Naples, encouraged by Sir William, at home in the Palazzo Sessa, Emma began to put on shows of her own. Romney had favoured ‘the Grecian style’ of diaphanous draperies that accentuated the forms of the body. He had posed Emma wearing such costumes as a Bacchante, as Circe, as Cassandra: now, of her own accord, letting down her hair, dressed in airy garments and with the aid of whirling shawls she took on the roles of famous women from Antiquity. Marrying the resources of her intelligence with her body’s powers she began to create her own art.13 In the Attitudes, as they were named, she moved fluidly from one posture, one set of emotions, one identity to another. The work involved in developing her wide cast of characters was in part intellectual, involving research. In order to position herself for example as a Sibyl, as Niobe, Medea or Agrippina at her moment of strongest and most characteristic emotion, to be immersed in that woman’s life, Emma had to enter intelligently into her story through study. Performances of the Attitudes may have appeared to take place in a world apart from international politics. Her languorous Cleopatra, longing for the return of Mark Antony, played only to generalized Orientalist fantasies of the transgressive, giving form to desires that were luxurious, unlicensed. Nor did any specific political reference attach to her wardrobe of accessories, the variety of turbans, the Eastern shawls, read interchangeably by viewers as ‘Indian’, ‘Grecian’, ‘Turkish’.14 Yet the presence of Emma’s black maid, Fatima, ‘acquired’ by Nelson after the Battle of the Nile, was a different matter. It was not unusual for a fashionable woman to have a black attendant. Fatima often accompanied Emma in public and on occasion partnered her in dance.15 Celebrated by contemporaries merely as a charming counterpoint to Emma’s whiteness, Fatima’s black presence mutely signalled more. It spoke of ‘white’ Europe’s dependence for its own development on the subjection of Africa and its peoples. Viewers moved by the authenticity of the emotions that were communicated by the Attitudes reported their amazement. Goethe, who visited Naples in 1787, was among those fascinated: she . . . gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations— standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break.16 It was bolder than she can have guessed, that full staging of a woman’s performing body, with a voice that won Handel’s admiration. An evening that might include her singing and performing the tarantella, a wild dance associated with the poor of Naples, went 91

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even further in collapsing the divisions on which social order was meant to depend. Extraordinary in its effect, the direct appeal of these performances was quite counter to that Augustan regime, with its demand for women to be silent and enclosed, yet her choice of classical subjects constantly referenced it. Nothing seemed to impede this remarkable public flowering. As a mistress, Emma’s reputation had been shadowed but her moral disposition was implicitly endorsed when Sir William mastered his initial reluctance and made her his wife on 6 September 1791. When a relative expostulated, Sir William wrote to declare that living with her for five years had led him to put a high value on Emma’s character. As the ambassador’s wife, Emma went on to display ever greater abilities. As the confidante of Queen Maria Carolina, 1793 would see her engaged behind the scenes in an attempt to spring the queen’s sister, Marie-Antoinette, from her prison in the Conciergerie. Capable in a crisis, in 1798 she would go on to take command when the terrified court had to flee Naples for Sicily before Napoleon’s troops which were threatening the city.17 But Naples was not Protestant London. There narrow and puritanical religious ideals meshed with classical strictures reinforcing them, while divisions of social class were rigidly observed. Manners in Naples were freer, its tolerance greater and if Emma’s accent in speaking English betrayed her origins, the locals did not pick that up. It may have been the ruthless policing of social hierarchies carried on by English women of the aristocracy that helped to bring Emma to eventual ruin. Lady Holland had turned away ‘disgusted’ by her pronunciation.18 Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, always declined to receive Emma at court. The rise to prominence of such a woman as Emma Hamilton was a challenge to that rigorous ordering of society which upheld the position of aristocratic wives quite as much as it was endorsed by the classics. Emma had moved onto the international stage. Her love affair with Nelson was to be played out there. As the wife of the ambassador, Emma had already met Nelson in 1793 but it was autumn 1798, the moment of his return from the Battle of the Nile, which proved critical. The excitement of being the first to greet England’s new hero appeared to overwhelm her. Crying ‘Oh God, is it possible?’ she fell towards him half-swooning, more dead – as she claimed – than alive. Her emotion was fed by attending on him in person while he convalesced from a head wound and by the flirtatious intimacy that then developed. Rumours about their relationship grew quickly and were rife in London. By the middle of 1800 Emma was pregnant, travelling in the company of both Sir William, who had been replaced as ambassador, and Nelson as they made their way back to London. There a less tolerant reception than the one they had enjoyed in Naples awaited them, George III snubbed Nelson at a levee, while Sir William prudently avoided any attempt to take his wife with him to court.19 By this time, the newspapers had begun to use the name of Cleopatra when reporting Emma’s engagements.20 A new jealousy of Emma’s relationship was taking shape. This was formulated in terms of the nation and its interests. Nelson had played the part of national saviour and hero: his dedication to this role could only be compromized by the link with Emma. With a clarity that was new, her offence against classical models was spelled out. 92

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It was James Gillray, the political cartoonist, who early in February published two satirical prints focusing on Emma’s relationship with Nelson.21 Both compared her with women from Roman literature who had tempted heroes away from their duty to Rome. According to Virgil, Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, had been delayed almost fatally in his project by an affair with Dido, Queen of Carthage. Nelson had been preparing to set sail for the Battle of Copenhagen at the time when his daughter Horatia was born; one of Gillray’s prints depicted Emma as a lumbering, possibly pregnant Dido, lamenting as her Aeneas sailed away. Gillray also compared Emma with Cleopatra. In a print entitled A Cognoscenti completing ye beauties of ye Antique (see Fig. 6.2) he created an image that synthesized the several ways in which Emma was in herself an outrage, while making a bawdy assessment of what she offered. In the foreground Sir William, her cuckolded husband, then seventy-three, is represented as an old crock earnestly peering through his reversed spectacles at a damaged bust bearing the name of ‘Thais’. The reference to the Greek hetaera who accompanied Alexander was doubly pointed: Reynolds had painted Emma in the character of Thais leading the destruction of Persepolis. Behind the classical fragments littered around Sir William stands a herm. Surmounted by the head of a bull with the label Apis, this herm directs the thoughts to ancient Egypt, where the worship of the Apis bull took place. The bull’s horns, the emblem of cuckoldry, are striking: they point the viewer towards each of a pair of portraits on the wall behind. These are prominently labelled as ‘Cleopatra’ and ‘Mark Antony’. The emphasis is all on disparities of class. Cleopatra is shown in the likeness of a common whore, bare-breasted and clutching a bottle of gin, recalling the debauched poor in Hogarth’s print of Gin Lane. Mark Antony wears a cocked hat and his sleeve is pinned up: unmistakably Nelson but perfectly respectable in appearance. Alongside stands an image of Mount Vesuvius in eruption, where reference to Sir William’s interest in volcanoes and a suggestive nod at the sexual pleasures enjoyed by Nelson are held in lively contrast. To the right of these stands a sketchy portrait that looks very like Sir William, though it bears the title ‘Claudius’ in a further appeal to the framework of authority Rome left behind. Tacitly the image underlines the sexual slur: the emperor Claudius was the husband of Messalina, a woman notorious for her promiscuity. Surmounted by the head of a horned stag, this sketch also works to depict Emma as a woman who brings public humiliation on her high-ranking husband. As ambassador, Sir William had represented the state, as Fellow of the Royal Society he was a member of one of England’s most prestigious institutions. Decrepit as Gillray represented him he could still stand for the ruling class. Emma was not the only target of Gillray’s mockery. It is true that as a whole the print can be read as an ingenious and entertaining satire, even a romp, yet the underlying framework on which it depends for interpretation is political, referring to the structures of power within the state. Giving Emma the name of Cleopatra did not in itself lead to her downfall. But it did bring into focus the fact that she shared a profile with a classical figure of abjection, a figure of anathema. It was an all but conscious recognition of the peril in which Emma might stand, as a woman who had taken full advantage of her independence and freedom to act. Matching her life and 93

Fig. 6.2 The Gillray caricature. The National Maritime Museum, London.

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career against the sanctions she unwittingly invoked is telling. Both the high spending of her last years and her lack of support read differently in that light. When the death of her husband in 1803 was followed in 1805 by that of Nelson, money became an issue. Sir William had instructed his executors to clear her debts but her income was now limited to an annuity of £800 a year from Sir William and £500 a year from Nelson’s estate. In the three years after Nelson’s death she ran up £15,000 of debt.22 Recent writers, in common with both the men she loved, have shaken their heads over Emma’s extravagance, without considering, perhaps, how her way with money and the pleasures it bought, like her quick temper, was a function of her unbounded vitality. Over years of ever-expanding powers and near-universal admiration, Emma had learned to know her own capacities and respect them. Her art had been acknowledged by Goethe, a queen had valued her advice, a royal court obeyed her instructions. Imagining that she could keep up a social position that was no longer supported by the distinction of her late husband and which the memory of her liaison with Nelson did nothing to confirm, Emma bought the best of everything. Although she had been left Merton Place, the Surrey home she had shared with Nelson, she also kept a town house in Mayfair. Her debts increased. Foreseeing that this might easily happen, on the eve of Trafalgar Nelson had composed a codicil to his will. Eccentric by any measure, it proposed that the real services she had rendered to the crown as a diplomat when she lived in Naples, though unappointed and unofficial, should be recognized and rewarded. Emphasizing her value, he wrote: I leave Emma Lady Hamilton therefore a Legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her an ample provision to maintain her Rank in Life.23 It was a bid that Emma clung to with embarrassing consequences as her circumstances slowly declined. She fought to keep the position to which she felt entitled. She boasted that she was invited everywhere, yet this often involved having to perform her Attitudes. On these occasions she was no longer mistress in her own drawing room: her performance aligned her awkwardly between a member of society and a paid entertainer. Over forty and fat, she was not always admired. Emma now drew attention rather as the reminder of her adulterous passion for a dead hero and for the ménage à trois which had defied public censure, leaving her distinguished husband open to mockery. Fashionable friends closed ranks. Once more she became an outsider. At last she had to sell off even the coat Nelson had worn at Trafalgar, in order to secure her release from the King’s Bench prison in Southwark. Echoing Rome’s precedent, it was as though even the intimate bond between the lovers had been brought into contempt. Emma’s humiliation was spectacularly public, as Cleopatra’s had been meant to be. The London papers carried the text of her unsuccessful plea for the pension that Nelson’s codicil had requested on her behalf. Her remaining possessions were sold at auction. A year in the same debtors’ prison soon followed, after which there was nothing for her but 95

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to leave the country. In January 1815, six months after she crossed the Channel, she died in cheap lodgings in Calais. Nelson’s attempt to make Emma a legacy to his country was a failure. Yet Emma herself left Europe a lasting inheritance, in terms of her contribution to European culture. She has a significant place in the history of performance. In the admiration for classical statues, the subtly paralysing effect on viewers of their fixed pose had been overlooked. Taking such poses as her models for the Attitudes, Emma then released them into fluid movement, melting that paralysing effect away. The free interplay of mind and body in the Attitudes created a powerful new form of art that in turn liberated fresh thought and new ideas in her audience. Today her Attitudes are understood as a formative influence on the imagination of poets and artists of her day. An early fusion of neo-classicism with sensibility, her work played a key part in the development of European Romanticism.

Cleopatra impersonated The most enduring legacy of Catherine Stepney’s life, in contrast, was her marble bust, still on show today in the sculpture gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Glimpses of the path that led towards its commissioning are found scattered through the public record, just enough of them to allow an attempt to make sense of the choice she made. The decision to present herself in the English fashions of her own day as an image of Cleopatra seems paradoxical. Yet Catherine was only scrappily educated. Barely out of her teens, she would have seen the name of Cleopatra attached to the famous Lady Hamilton, Nelson’s lover, likely taking that purely as homage in her ignorance. We speak readily of changing times. Catherine Stepney lived through such shifts, when the rackety court around the Prince Regent, later George IV, was obliged to adapt to the more sober tone required under William IV and also under Victoria. Like Emma, Catherine was a country girl, but she was born into what is known as a ‘good family’, that is, one linked to land holdings and whose branches can be traced. As her story reveals, the fortunate accident of birth equipped her mainly with good looks and courage. It does not appear to have provided her with much education. Though she would come to publish six novels, Mary Russell Mitford (1787 to 1855) declared that without correction their ‘grammar and spelling would have disgraced a lady’s maid’.24 She was born Catherine Pollok (23 December 1778 to 14 April 1845), one of the nine children of the Reverend Thomas Pollok LLD, the rector of Grittlesham in Wiltshire and his wife Susannah. She may have been quite a worry to them, for she was very pretty and possibly quite as determined. On 7 January 1799, just turned twenty and probably against advice, she married Russell Manners, a most well-connected man who would later turn out to be a complete cad. It may have looked like a glamorous choice, an escape from the life of the country rectory into a world of fashion and pleasure. Her new husband’s father, also named Russell Manners, had been colonel of several regiments and was at that time a general, an associate of the Duke of York. It is equally possible that she was pregnant and the date of her only child’s birth was fudged. 96

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Catherine’s son, Russell Henry Manners, was born on 31 January 1800: that appears to have been the most satisfactory outcome of her marriage. His father did not hurry to make a place for himself in the world: he relied on the hope that the Duke of York might find something for him. It was 1806 before he bowed to pressure from his wealthy cousin, Sir William Manners, and took up the parliamentary seat of Grantham, which had been obtained on his behalf. If Catherine suspected that this did not mark the start of a splendid career, she responded with some courage, for in that same year she published a threevolume novel, Castle Nuovier, or Henry and Adalina, bringing it out under her own name. It was wise if she was taking precautions. Elected in November 1806, her husband did not make any kind of figure in Parliament and he did not stand in the election that followed in June 1807. This brief career was summed up in a contemporary guide to members: ‘The late member for Grantham is himself a sportsman, and Mrs R. [sic] a celebrated beauty.’25 Catherine was already exploring the value of that beauty. The archive of the National Portrait Gallery holds a print, made after a drawing by the artist Peter Stroehling, who was fashionable and working in London between 1803 and 1807.26 Entitled ‘Catherine, Mrs Russel [sic] Manners’ and dated January 1807, it put into circulation an image of Catherine charming in classical drapery and standing decorously by a pillar. It is conventionally polite and pleasing, in contrast with those seductive portraits of Emma in movement, flushed in her flimsy draperies. The difference is not casual. In distinction from Emma’s, Catherine’s creativity would be invested in maintaining her footing among the society in which her life was placed. Her adult years brought moments of crisis, when without a husband to define her status she risked losing title to respect. In acting to resist such a loss, any woman would also be protecting what she understood to be her own identity and her value. It is by relating Catherine’s experience to the predicament of women in general that a sense of what lay behind her choices may be found. Stroehling’s was the first of a series of portraits made over Catherine’s lifetime, all strictly in line with the times and with the shifts in her circumstances. Although she was a writer, she left neither diary nor letters: she can only be seen from the outside. These images and a handful of contemporary accounts offer the only evidence by which her choices can be traced and read. On 20 March 1807 Russell Manners, Catherine’s husband, was a defaulter, a term that could imply misuse of official funds, beyond a failure to honour personal debts. He appears to have fled abroad, leaving his brother-in-law, Samuel Sneyd, to provide for his son. It sounds as though money had always been a problem. It was up to Catherine Manners to do what she could to retrieve her own standing and even to support herself. A deserted wife, dependent on a brother-in-law to provide for her son, she was doubly humiliated. Authorship, however, could bring in money and furnish a new identity, even some distinction, without necessarily compromizing social position, as the career of Fanny Burney (1752 to 1840) had already proved. Burney’s lively satirical novels of high life had overcome the prejudice against women’s writing fiction, making way for other women to write novels. She had sold the copyright of her novel Camilla for £1,000. 97

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Catherine was certainly in a position to write about high life. Marriage had brought her access to such circles, introducing her to the people around the Duke of York. She was neither inclined nor equipped to adopt Burney’s tone of satire: instead she followed the example of Mrs Radcliffe (1764 to 1823) and gave her stories a Gothic tone. Her second three-volume novel, The Lords of Erith, was published in 1809 under her own name of ‘C. Manners’. It had come readily as a woman of her class to write for money. In future years she would see herself as a writer of significance. But the would-be elevated tone of this novel’s opening sentence confirms that she had none of that ear for language, nor any of that vision that would lead to original work: ‘The sun had almost withdrawn his last refulgent beams when Sir Willoughby Mortimer entered the Gothic porch of St Agatha’s church where throwing himself listlessly along upon the rudestone seat . . .’ Like her appearance in Stroehling’s portrait, her writing depends on available convention. Yet Catherine was to be admired for contriving some independence and a new identity, one that might command respect in the world. At the same time her beauty evidently kept her within the Duke of York’s milieu. Her position as an abandoned wife, a beautiful woman just into her thirties, was at least ambiguous, however. It was Sir Thomas Stepney, ninth baronet and long-term intimate of the Duke, who drew her back into safety and made her future financially secure by marrying her in 1813. The story of Catherine’s Edinburgh divorce belongs to a particular moment in the history of English marriage law.27 It was almost impossible for a wife to bring an action for divorce in England, but Catherine was one of a number who succeeded between 1770 and 1830 in doing so over the border. Adultery and desertion, the grounds on which these Scottish divorces were granted, could be met without difficulty in her case. She was eligible to petition for divorce only because between 1812 and 1813 both she and Russell Manners, who happened to be living in Edinburgh with another woman, could be shown to be resident in Scotland. Had the circumstances of Catherine’s first husband become known to Sir Thomas, suggesting how he might move forward, perhaps to regularize any pre-existing relations of his with Catherine? (He might well have wanted a legitimate heir for the baronetcy, which went back to 1621. He himself had inherited the title only two years before, when his elder brother died without a legitimate heir; his new wife was still only thirty-five.) To pull the matter off would have required careful planning, the best of legal advice and very considerable expense, which could never have been within Catherine’s means. It also required going to live in Scotland for a period, at least in Catherine’s case. Advisedly, the wedding that made her Lady Stepney took place in Edinburgh: Scottish marriages were recognized in England. If they had gone back to London for the wedding, Catherine could have been charged with bigamy. Her second husband, eighteen years her senior, sounds rather like a more satisfactory version of Catherine’s first.28 Like Manners, Sir Thomas had links to the Duke of York having served him for many years as Groom of the Bedchamber. In consequence, Sir Thomas could boast a real intimacy, marked by exchanges of familiar banter going back decades. The stories about him, scattered among memoirs and diaries, suggest a jovial 98

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figure, very popular. Neither clever nor distinguished, by all accounts Sir Thomas had a mind of his own, expressed most forcefully in an eccentric style of dress. One of the circle around the Prince Regent, he enjoyed gambling and betting in the company of friends at his London clubs. His outings with the Duke, his master, were raucous affairs: this was the rackety though aristocratic world in which Catherine took her place as his wife. In the context of this marriage a new and very different image of Catherine was promoted. The dashing portrait entitled ‘Catherine, Lady Stepney’ is held in the primary collection of the National Portrait Gallery.29 Attributed to John Hayter, a fashionable portraitist who first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815, it is undated. In contrast with the demure charm projected in the early print after Stroehling, this pastel is bright with colour, gipsyish in its effect. It immediately recalls the 1813 portrait of Byron in Albanian costume, which took its place in a vogue for portraits in semi-oriental dress. Although it has been linked with Byron’s support for Greek Independence, that portrait was based on an 1809 sitting and predated Byron’s intention of going to Missolonghi. Like so much of ‘oriental’ dressing and in common with Catherine’s portrait, it lacked political responsibility and was merely a piece of self-advertisement in fancy dress.30 Byron’s outfit was at least self-consistent but Catherine’s odd mix was not untypical of oriental get-ups, which tended to ‘a certain amount of confusion’, employing ‘easily recognizable features’ such as turbans and ‘ermine facings to robes’.31 Catherine’s red headscarf, becomingly tied over dark hair parted in the middle strikes a note of the gipsy, the outlaw. Her colour is high, her grey eyes are not cast down but look out sideways at the viewer, discreet and self-possessed. Her jewellery is likewise discreet, consisting of a small pearl necklace and drop earrings whose pinkish tone is picked up from her scarf. There is just a hint of those predictable ermine tails in the wrap over her shoulders. Some might have seen a touch of Cleopatra, an unlicensed freedom, in the confident sexuality of her look. Self-possessed, alluring and of its moment, the portrait is the only visual record of a daring that Catherine did not choose to see displayed in the years that followed. In 1825 Sir Thomas died and as an attractive widow of some means Catherine’s position was no longer unambiguous. Now in her mid-forties, she must set about establishing a dignified public face for herself as a woman alone. Her husband’s death was not the only significant change to which she must adapt. The years of indulgence when George Augustus Frederick, first as Regent then as George IV, set the tone for his court would come to an end with his death in 1830. Under Queen Adelaide, the pious consort of his successor William IV, keeping in favour would require a more sober profile. Catherine had last published a novel in 1809. Now, twenty years on, she reclaimed a literary identity. The New Road to Ruin, the first of her six silver fork novels came out in 1833, followed by The Heir Presumptive two years later. The Courtier’s Daughter would appear in 1838 and The Three Peers in 1841. Silver fork novels, so lucrative for authors and publishers between 1825 and 1840, so low in literary merit, are studied today only for the light they throw on cultural change 99

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Fig. 6.3 Richard Cockle Lucas, Statuette, wax, Lady Stepney [1836]. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

accompanying the period of Reform. It was a time when middle-class readers might be both hostile to the ‘ton’ as it was called and intrigued by the lives of the wealthy and titled. Silver fork novels allowed readers to indulge themselves with fictions that brought them a vicarious knowledge of high life, its tastes manners and fashions. Catherine was ideally equipped to satisfy such a readership. It is around the moment of Catherine’s relaunch as a literary figure, a novelist who could now afford to hold a salon of her own, that her marble bust appears to have been commissioned. The link with Cleopatra must have been her own choice, for she was certainly nothing like Lucas’s idea of Cleopatra. Lucas was a student of the classics: the expression of his later ‘Cleopatra’ plaque is strikingly intense, the features modelled on sculptures from classical Greece, the snake more prominent.32 The bust can be dated only to 1836, the year it was put on show, a moment when Catherine, now in her mid-fifties, had established her name as the author of two recent novels. Also exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year was a second portrait of Catherine by Lucas, a full-length statuette in wax (see Fig. 6.3).33 The head and shoulders of bust and statuette exhibit the same features, with little variation, except in the position of the hands. In the bust they are lifted high enough to allow the arms with the snake bracelet to be seen. Otherwise both images display bunched ringlets, bare shoulders, eyes modestly cast down. The mendaciously youthful face, smooth and unmarked, is almost a blank. 100

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A close reading of the statuette, however, tells us how important it was to Catherine to be recognized as a thinker as well as a beauty. This full-length figure is set in a specific context. Right leg crossed over her left, displaying a raised right foot, she is seated perhaps in a salon, where she might be joined at any moment for intellectual discussion. The hint is reinforced by linking her with many symbols of classical culture. She looks downward at a flower-filled urn which in turn stands on a tripod adorned with masks and medallions. One of these, representing Apollo with a lyre, seems to be making a claim for Catherine’s own work as inspired. To her contemporaries, both Catherine’s pose and her ambitious claims were familiar. Only in a piece of puffery issued under the auspices of her publisher Henry Colburn were the latter endorsed.34 According to this, ‘La grace plus belle que la beauté’, was the note of all she undertook. It found in her novels ‘a naturally quick perception which alone detects the finer shades of character, and the deep feeling which alone can enter into them’. These novels, it goes on, record the powers she displays in conversation. For Harriet Martineau, the pioneering social theorist, who ‘was boarded by Lady Stepney’ at one of the salons she haunted, it was a different story.35 With some amusement Martineau detailed her flow of talk, both trivial and relentless, while being dismayed by an ignorance she could scarcely credit. It appeared that Catherine was under the impression that the newly discovered Magnetic North took the same form as any little red horseshoe magnet. Rosina Bulwer Lytton was not an impartial witness, believing Catherine to have had an affair with her husband, from whom she had separated in 1836. The portrait of a woman intent on seduction that she presented under the name of ‘Lady Stepastray’ in her 1839 novel, Cheveley, must be taken with caution. She addresses Catherine’s ambitions on both fronts. An ironical introduction of ‘the ethereal and intellectual Lady Stepastray’ is accompanied by pointed notice of her fondness for taking up a pose. ‘Reader, hast ever seen a shepherdess worked in a sampler, looking down upon a pet lamb with a look of softness and vacuity. . . stretch to the imagination of the same shepherdess, evaporating on a bank of primroses and you will behold the intellectual and ethereal Lady Stepastray.’36 Another favourite attitude pilloried is the habit of crossing her hands. The portrait is so specific that contemporaries might well have recognized the inclined head and crossed hands of the marble bust. Published after Catherine’s death in 1845, a reminiscence in the New Monthly Magazine neatly links her dual ambitions in a phrase which recalls the posture of the statuette with its prominently lifted foot: ‘proud of her small literature, as well as her small foot, which she took good care to display, she was equally well pleased whether you perused and admired one or the other.’37 As the writer adds, ‘her looks had always stood her in good stead’. But he is under no illusion concerning her gifts: ‘she mistook her vocation when she claimed to be a literary character and a poetess . . . such was her selfdeception, touching her position as a writer, that she never suspected the persiflage of which she was sometimes made the object.’ Despite this clarity, he has a certain tenderness for the dead woman, once known to him as ‘gentle, amiable and friendly’, concluding ‘Noone who knew her could have the heart to give her pain.’ 101

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I too have tried to avoid writing unkindly about Catherine Stepney. ‘Poor dear Lady Stepney’ as William Jerdan wrote.38 She made the best of the chances that came her way, not challenging the social order like Emma but glorifying it, identifying with its systems of power and authority for her own protection. Nor did her writing, dependent as it was on models, carry an original voice to resonate. Yet Catherine did uphold her own value. If to her the name of Cleopatra signified only a beauty and power she refused to relinquish, who would deny her the right to borrow that? In the figure of that marble bust still on public display in South Kensington, Catherine continues to survive on her own terms. Her life was one imprisoned by strictures on women that went back to the denunciation of Cleopatra: in her marble bust she unwittingly presented a monument of confinement and submission, the image of an unrealized self. The historical Cleopatra refused that inner death, knowing what submission, subjection to another’s authority would mean. Instead she chose to take her own life first. There could be a lesson for women somewhere here.

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CHAPTER 7 COLONIALIZING FULVIA: REPRESENTING THE MILITARY WOMAN IN HISTORY, FICTION AND ART Peter Keegan

Introduction Fulvia Flacca Bambula is known best (indeed, only) for the actions undertaken while wife to three important Roman men. As widow of the slain demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher, with a display of his wounds she roused the mob against his murderer T. Annius Milo. Subsequently, with her mother Sempronia she played a significant part in the trial of Milo – defended by one M. Tullius Cicero, the man responsible for thwarting the earlier conspiracy led by L. Sergius Catiline, in which Fulvia’s aunt Sempronia may have played a role. Although her time as C. Scribonius Curio’s wife elicits no comment in the surviving tradition, as the partner of M. Antonius she is characterized as one of the leading (and, tellingly, most vicious) stakeholders participating in the events that follow the death of Caesar. Influenced by Cicero, and later by the Augustan propaganda, modern scholarship has, by and large, expanded on Antique opinions of Fulvia in the same decidedly negative fashion. To reconsider the historical and literary tradition (if not rehabilitate the personal characterization) of Fulvia – a singularly consensus portrayal and assessment, notwithstanding the perspectives of a favourable few – this chapter will apply the heuristic template of the current volume: Orientalism. Since Said’s (1978) coinage of the term, Orientalism has expanded into a concept that engages a range of issues, social identities, power dynamics, legal and political systems, and discursive structures including, but not limited to, gender, sex, sexuality, race, class and age. This chapter serves as a case study, testing the validity of the Orientalist interpretative frame in an ancient context on the reception of a singular (in all senses of the term) ‘colonial subject’: the military woman (and a Roman woman, no less) – she who, according to established socio-cultural systems, transgresses all normative codes of social behaviour. Interrogating a spectrum of key historical texts, formative scholarly commentaries, memorable literary fictions and captivating aesthetic artefacts – from Cicero to Hallett, by way of Appian, Martial and the obverse numismatic tradition of the period 43 to 41 bce – all that follows will explore the extent to which the complex relationship between gender and Orientalism illuminates our understanding of the many portraits of Fulvia, daughter of M. Fulvius Bambalio and Sempronia. To this end, what follows is a critical synthesis of the available pertinent testimony (both incontrovertible and suggestive) speaking to Fulvia’s ‘orientalization’ in ancient 103

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sources. Naturally, while the evidentiary focus of this study lies firmly on the ancient tradition, the process of ‘orientalization’ may (indeed, should and will) also be discerned in post-classical representations of Fulvia in the Renaissance and nineteenth century.1

Gender and Orientalism Let us commence this investigation by highlighting in contemporary representations of Fulvia (during her lifetime and over the next two and a half centuries) how far gender and Orientalism overlap – how far, in other words, a powerful woman like Fulvia assumes Orientalist traits, even when she has historically nothing to do with the Orient. As Said’s argument contends, these traits reflect a very particular ‘reality’: namely, a world ‘other’ than that comprizing the standpoint of the producers of meaning, Broadly speaking, this other world (i.e. the Orient) constitutes what the real world (i.e. Europe, or the West) is not, thereby serving to define what is authentic by representing ‘its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.’2 If this view applies to literary, sub-literary and visual culture in Antiquity in the same way as it has to the same categories of meaning production in the modern age, then we should expect categories of ancient cultural discourse intended to construct an overarching representation of a particular reality (e.g. what it means to be Roman, what it is to be other than Roman) to exhibit certain exemplary characteristics. In brief, these characteristics should comprise (to a greater or lesser extent) mirrored facets of the culture to which the composers of the relevant texts and/or images belong: that is, the reverse, and therefore opposite, of the superordinate discourse. In the case of Roman culture dating to the late republic and early centuries of the imperial period, gender and Orientalism should overlap recognisably in the sources depicting the life and times of Fulvia Flacca Bambula.

Horizontal and vertical relationships in the Fulvian tradition Certain premises regarding the study of gender in Roman Antiquity, in particular, representations of historical persons gendered female, underpin what follows. To begin, I accept the analyses of predominantly literary sources, which identify between male– male, female–female and female–male a grid of horizontal social and sexual relationships. This network of connections oscillates among a variety of interpersonal, socially determined valencies. Centred on the idealized subject position of the virile male (uir), and grounded in the practices of hegemonic masculinity that legitimized elite Roman men’s dominant position in society and complementarily justifies the subordination of women (and other marginalized ways of being male), an individual’s position as a member of Graeco-Roman society could be measured from one standpoint against a spectrum of normative descriptions and deviant prescriptions. Normalcies and deviations revolve around the use of anatomical orifices: vagina, anus and mouth. The informal sexual vocabulary recorded by users of the Graeco-Roman linguistic system 104

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differentiated between female penetration and the phallic agency of the male penetrator, and representations of male receptivity and the quasi-phallic activity of the female penetrator.3 Two contemporary sources speak directly to the manner in which the horizontal Roman socio-sexual grid framed Fulvia’s image: the Perusinae glandes; and the epigram ascribed by Martial to the future princeps, Octavian. Mentioned several times in the literary record and surviving as material remains in the thousands, slingers’ lead bullets were the most sophisticated type of sling shot in Antiquity. Originally an innovation of standard Aegean warfare, the Romans used sling bullets as a weapon no later than from the middle of the second century bce . Until the end of the Civil Wars, they often bore inscriptions – ethnic names, personal names, exclamations, invocations of divine names, military symbols (e.g. eagle, lightning bolt, sword, spear point), numerals, phalluses and brief, aggressive messages4 – that ‘spoke’ about, or to, commanders and combatants in the field. It is within this wider context of what might be understood as ‘militarized discourse’ on Hellenistic and Roman battlefields of the last three centuries bce – whereby soldiers inscribed on sling bullets explicitly obscene, abusive and denigrating messages, speaking about or directed towards specific persons known to be enemy commanders or individuals of renown or influence, or with respect to the opposing forces in general – that we encounter the so-called Perusinae glandes.5 Deployed during the historical siege of Perusia in 41/40 bce , the sling bullets that survive preserve a fragmentary battlefield record of the military, political and personal conflict between Octavian on the one hand and Fulvia, wife of his triumviral colleague M. Antonius, and his brother Lucius on the other. How, then, should we evaluate the inscribed texts and images in light of the implications of the Graeco-Roman linguistic system noted above and ongoing discussions about the representation of the individual and the phenotypically ‘other’ provoked by Said’s Orientalist thesis? First, we need to identify the historical context situating Fulvia in Perusia at this critical juncture in the events following Julius Caesar’s murder, and how that context plays out in relation to the ways she is seen and represented in the contemporary sources. According to the terms of the agreement at Bononia in late October 43 bce ,6 Octavian was to marry Clodia (Clodia Pulchra, also called Claudia), the daughter of Fulvia by her previous husband P. Clodius Pulcher.7 While this was to prove a marriage in name only, remaining unconsummated, the implications at this time for Fulvia were significant: as wife to Antonius, one of Rome’s triumviri rei publicae constituendae, and mother-in-law to Octavian, her husband’s triumviral colleague, she now possessed considerable personal auctoritas.8 As the sources and recent scholarship record, the late republic marks the development of a new phenomenon: the political and public prominence of specific elite women who exercised power in a number of ways.9 Throughout this period we can discern a pattern of female prominence and participation in public life. Prior to Antonius, Fulvia had already demonstrated her propensity towards exercising her auctoritas so as to 105

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influence the course of Roman politics through the actions of her husbands P. Clodius Pulcher and C. Scribonius Curio. Similarly, following Caesar’s murder Fulvia’s position in relation to two of the most powerful citizen males of their time afforded her opportunities to engage in political activities that could be viewed as legitimate extensions of the traditional domestic roles of wife, mother and mother-in-law – responsibility for management of the household, care and education of children, and sharing the concerns of a spouse. Examination of the literary sources will confirm that Fulvia’s public political role came into its own after the assassination of Caesar. What is germane to our evaluation of the evidence provided by the Perusinae glandes pertains to what she is seen to do (or alleged to have done) which mark her not simply as an elite Roman woman acting in accordance with respectable female authority, but rather engaging in public transactions as a male citizen of the senatorial order. By virtue of being known to have transgressed traditional boundaries and customary norms separating the management of conjugal and maternal spheres of activity from the financial, political and military prerogatives of elite Roman fathers, husbands and sons, Fulvia’s perceived identity and culture situated her as explicitly other than Roman. This perception – and, in relation to the contemporary and later evidence, the historical representation – of Fulvia as un-Roman, i.e. the characterization of a person whose actions and attitudes lie outside the acceptable spectrum of behaviour and belief denoted by the mos maiorum (‘ancestral custom’), Rome’s unwritten code from which the ancient Romans derived their social norms – gains widespread traction in the years leading up to the siege of Perusia. One of the outcomes of discussions between Octavian and Antonius after the Battle of Philippi was an extraordinary rendition of prime Italian real estate, provoking the rebellion of the owners that resulted in a new civil war. At the head of the rebels there was L. Antonius, brother of the triumvir, and, as we know, Fulvia, who remained in Italy to watch over her husband’s interests and defend his position. The invitation to rebellion was to restore the republic and the triumvirate, but the real intention was to prevent Octavian from becoming too powerful. In the distribution of land, there had been explicit favour shown to his veterans. Over the years during which these events took place (44 to 42/41 bce ), the evidence pertaining to Fulvia’s recorded actions (alleged, concocted, or historically verifiable) denote a demonstrable elevation of the gendered rhetoric associated with elite women transgressing normative socio-political and cultural limites. Plutarch characterizes Fulvia as ‘a woman who took no thought for spinning or housekeeping, nor would she deign to bear sway over a man of private station, but she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander.’10 While this formulation will be unpacked in more detail later in the chapter, the fact remains that Fulvia’s recorded view of her position and role with regard to the men in her life – whether her husbands, son or sons-in-law – lies outside even the most broadminded customary limits of such relationships in republican society. By the time that we hear about Fulvia’s activities just prior to and during the course of the siege at Perusia, it is clear that she has moved beyond the legitimate actions of an elite Roman woman’s 106

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auctoritas to embody patterns of behaviour indicative of an explicitly masculine and culturally un-Roman identity. Historically contextualized, then, this intersecting grid of perceptions about Fulvia helps us to reframe the representational force of those messages inscribed on the surviving corpus of Perusine sling bullets that feature her name only or in tandem with that of her companion-in-arms, L. Antonius. PG 1. ‘I seek Fulvia’s clitoris’ (with the image of a lightning bolt appended below the final word in the message).11 PG 2. ‘O bald Lucius Antonius and Fulvia open up your anus.’12 The customary hostility associated with messages inscribed on sling bullets is clearly on display in these instances (nn.1, 2). Each statement expresses bluntly the purpose of the weapon on which it appears. Octavian’s slingers intend to injure the named individuals by means of penetrative wounds to specific anatomical features. Additionally, the traditional sexualized or abusive rhetoric directed against women and men known or understood to have transgressed normative social boundaries, or who represent persons embodying deviant sexual characteristics, is plain. Each message threatens to breach Fulvia and Antonius’ physical integrity, and is formulated in such a way that the glans assimilates both functions ascribed technically to the word, that is, acting as missile weapon and penis. According to this frame of reference, Fulvia and L. Antonius are characterized as partners in vaginal and anal sex, thereby rendering both as susceptible to aggressive male force. Finally, that Fulvia is identified explicitly by name simultaneously ascribes to her a prominent role in the military actions unfolding during the siege at Perusia – namely, as a commander in her own right, equivalent in military status to L. Antonius – and therefore as a woman who stands demonstrably and unequivocally outside the margins of customary behaviour defining elite Roman women. If this is the correct interpretation of Fulvia’s perceived status and role as elite female military leader, then it is possible to re-read her susceptibility to the sexualized vis of the glans (noted above) as cooperative or desiring – what Alison Keith terms ‘the dangerous pleasures of female sexuality.’13 By all conventional measures, Fulvia can only be understood in unRoman terms, requiring that she be reconfigured as foreign. Certainly, we may appreciate that, by recognizing Fulvia as another key participant in the action playing out on the battlefield at Perusia (and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula), she is cast in the same mould as other elite non-Roman women engaging in traditionally male spheres of activity – notably at this time, Cleopatra VII – and therefore as socially and culturally foreign (‘other’) in attitude, personality and behaviour. In this context, a critical reading of the poem ascribed to Caesar Augustus by Martial fleshes out the representation of Fulvia as un-Roman. Read six lewd verses of Caesar Augustus, o spiteful fellow, who with a sad face read words of Latin: 107

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‘Since Antony fucks Glaphyra, Fulvia has appointed this punishment for me, that I too should fuck her. Therefore do I fuck Fulvia? What if Manius himself were to beg me to arse-fuck him, should I do it? I don’t think so, if I have any brains. “Either fuck me, or fight” she says. What, is my life more dear to me than my cock itself? Let the trumpets sound!’ You justify for certain my pleasant little books, Augustus, who knows how to speak with Roman frankness.’14 According to select sources treating the causes of the Perusine War (bellum Perusinum), Fulvia acted for personal reasons. While the epigram identifies M. Antonius’ Cappadocian mistress Glaphyra as the spur to Fulvia’s action (Mart. Ep. 11.20.2: futuit Glaphyran Antonius), Appian, Plutarch and Dio write that she was driven by jealousy towards the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.15 In either event, all the relevant evidence implies or states outright that she believed that if she managed to unleash the war in Italy, M. Antonius would be obliged to return from the East. If we accept the view that the young Caesar did write the sex versus that Martial includes in Book 11 of his collected epigrammata and follow Hallett’s dating for composition of the epigram to the outbreak of conflict in 41 bce , then promoting Fulvia’s jealousy of Antonius’ extra-marital activities as a reason for prosecuting the Perusine War was another facet in Octavian’s extensive rhetorical armoury.16 Particularly apropos to the previous interpretation of the Perusinae glandes addressed to or about Fulvia is the corrosive logic framing the epigram’s thesis in relation to the start of the Perusine War. According to the metrical script ventriloquizing Martial’s version of Caesar Augustus, Fulvia presented Octavian with an extraordinary ultimatum: engage in sexual intercourse, or commence hostilities (Mart. Ep. 11.20.7: aut futue, aut pugnemus, ait). Of course, it is abundantly clear from even a surface reading of the poem that its primary purpose was to rehabilitate Octavian’s image and reputation.17 The epigram’s portrait of Caesar Augustus characterizes the triumvir as sexually attractive, judicious, combative, and intrepid: in the spirit of the genre, triumvirile. In other words, as anything other than the laxus Octavius addressed on various sling bullets launched during the siege.18 However, in constructing this refreshed self-representation, which also entailed providing a revisionist political and military history of the Perusine War,19 the epigram portrays Fulvia as hyper-masculine, seeking a sexually aggressive or martial remedy to a personal dispute (Mart. Ep. 11.20.3–5: quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam Fulvia constituit, se quoque uti futuam. Fulviam ego ut futuam?) Moreover, in the course of ridiculing Fulvia by glossing her attitudes, behaviour and language as the inverse of the idealized elite Roman matrona,20 showing her instead to possess, display or express nothing even remotely classifiable as normatively feminine, the epigram reinforces Fulvia’s image as akin to the conventional representation of the Orientalized (i.e. nonRoman, or barbarian) female. In this regard, the fictive yet potent rhetoric reflected in the Perusinae glandes and Octavian’s epigram is mirrored in the discursive motifs of Augustan poetry directed 108

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toward Cleopatra VII , Ptolemaic queen of Egypt and archetype of the Roman construct for representing a dangerously powerful foreign woman. Viewed in iambic, lyric, epic and elegiac verse as hostile to the res publica and inimical to the mos maiorum, Cleopatra was cast as the quintessential Eastern enemy of Rome.21 The surviving literary tradition – exclusively elite, Roman and male – represents Cleopatra as sexually predatory and politically ambitious, the meretrix regina, queen of ‘sympotic and erotic perversity.’22 Even cursory comparison between the inscribed and satirical texts depicting Fulvia and the post-Actium literary assaults on Cleopatra VII provides complementary evidence in the ancient sources for the linking of culture and politics that represents a crucial aspect of Orientalism. Whether considered as discrete items, in conjunction with each other, or in relation to other instances of Orientalist discourse, the sub-literary epigraphic texts on lead sling bullets used during the siege at Perusia in 41/40 bce and the epigram claimed by Martial as the work of Caesar Augustus provide us with an invaluable contemporary corpus relevant to issues of identity and alterity impacting on the representational strategies applied to Fulvia. This nexus of horizontal socio-cultural designations is rendered more intricate by a complementary variety of vertical identifiers, uir/homo (man) and femina/mulier (woman). According to explorations of these terms in the canonical literature of republic and empire,23 the reader was able to separate uiri from homines. The former category included celebrated men of senatorial rank, upper magistrates, notable equites, persons who participated in public life and were politically sound (i.e., the boni). It may also range from those who had distinguished themselves in their country’s service either in the military or in the provinces and those whom the author wished to flatter. On the other hand, homines were almost invariably registered as the priuati who had not chosen a senatorial career (e.g. scholars and lawyers), the lower magistrates (particularly tribunes), members of the lower classes, municipals, foreigners (including, with notable exceptions, their aristocracy), freedmen, slaves and any male member of the upper classes whom the author wished to insult.24 This explicit differentiation is visibly inscribed in the range of statuses comported by the words femina and mulier. Feminae refer to women of the upper class, and appear synonymous with Roman ideals and standards of behaviour applicable to the idealized female of elite society. In keeping with the uir/homo binarism, mulieres incorporate those individuals and/or groups who inhabit socio-political or geographical spaces regarded as exemplary of the subordinate (foreign or low-born) antithesis of representative femaleness.25 Since uir/homo and femina/mulier are linguistically redundant terms,26 they may be viewed as appositive epithets, used for various kinds of rhetorical emphasis: exaggeration, invective, exemplification, intensification and so on. According to this view, it is instructive to note the manner in which the literary sources designate Fulvia’s status. When engaging with any of the series of speeches composed by Cicero during the period 44 to 43 bce in service to the denunciation of M. Antonius, it is difficult for the modern reader – and will have been well-nigh impossible, one can only imagine, for a contemporary audience – to avoid the rhetoric of hyperbole and dissimulation characteristic of forensic and deliberative oratory in republican Rome. 109

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Key to the effectiveness of an orator employing these discursive stratagems – and such ploys may be found throughout Cicero’s self-styled Philippics – is the inclusion of false and malicious testimony directed towards any female relations of the oratio’s target.27 For us, the question is not so much the degree to which Cicero’s rhetoric conforms to the masculinist discourse of Roman oratory – undoubtedly an important socio-linguistic phenomenon to consider, but one that the scholarly consensus would argue is, in the case of the thirteen Philippics, clearly formulated, coherently articulated and applied consistently throughout28 – as whether or not the modern interpreter or contemporary readership can discern accusations or implications of un-Romanitas against Fulvia. On more than one occasion, Cicero uses the Latin term mulier in conjunction with references to actions that reflect explicitly on Fulvia’s social alterity and cultural otherness. In the fifth Philippic, the orator presents a tableau of female behaviour that marks Fulvia as transgressive, deviant and foreign. ‘In the interior of his house there was going on a brisk market of the whole republic. His wife (mulier), more fortunate for herself than for her husband, was holding an auction of kingdoms and provinces: exiles were restored without any law, as if by law.’29 While the elite Roman household was an acceptable site for domestic management and administration, conduct of transactions traditionally subject to senatorial oversight will always have been construed as outside customary bounds. Even more dysfunctional, it is clear that a woman is the primary agent of political exchanges resulting in financial and personal advantage.30 The outrage informing this passage is doubtless directed toward Cicero’s bêtes noires: M. Antonius, who is rendered a mere accomplice to Fulvia’s dealings (sibi felicior quam viris), and Sex. Cloelius, the friend and main political supporter of her former husband (P. Clodius, whom Cicero loathed), and until 44 bce in exile at Caesar’s order. In channelling his indignation and anger, Cicero represents Fulvia as possessing significant personal auctoritas extending to political matters beyond the usual limits of elite female influence. Indeed, Fulvia is cast here as the director of actions that reside explicitly within the jurisdiction of elite citizen males: namely, governance of civic and international affairs. To this end, Cicero depicts her performance of this role according to methods associated with foreign potentates – negotiating political control without due magisterial oversight, according to the rules of the marketplace and the will of the highest bidder (auctionem . . . faciebat); reversing indissoluble political edicts exclusive of legal decision, according to household practice and the whim of the individual (quasi lege sine lege). Reference to Fulvia in the thirteenth Philippic confirms Cicero’s application of gendered, Orientalist rhetoric in his representation of vertical social designations (Cic. Phil. 13.18). Cicero describes Fulvia here in highly charged terms: she is the epitome of the desiring female, actively craving possession of auctoritas over otherwise powerful men, in order that she may participate in, or initiate in her own right, the various features adhering to that influence; and she is morally unfeeling, hard-hearted and unmerciful in the face of the conduct of others. ‘At Brundisium he massacred the chosen centurions of the Martial legion in the lap of his wife, who was not only most avaricious but also most cruel (avarissimae . . . crudelissimae uxoris).’31 110

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Cicero’s representation of Fulvia in this excerpt is not classifiable as Orientalist solely because she accompanies her husband,32 nor that she is shown as instrumental to the decision Antonius takes with respect to his punishment of mutinous soldiers in October 44 bce , but rather in conjunction with the connotations adhering to how she is depicted. One of three occasions when Cicero refers to this event,33 his audience is treated to a very particular physical portrait of Fulvia’s intimate relationship with Antonius. Again, her extremely desirous nature is on display (avarissimae). Additionally, however, and crucially in this context, Fulvia is shown to encompass Antonius’ personal integrity in a manner that simultaneously infantilizes and seduces her husband (in sinu . . . uxoris). Simultaneously constructed as parens and concubine, Fulvia’s representation relies intentionally on the established nexus in rhetorical literature of barbarian culture, sex and power.34 What in other contexts might be depicted as the justifiable and appropriate application of Roman military discipline – namely, Antonius’ decimatio of rebel soldiers as punishment for the capital offence of mutiny – is rendered here as a brutal decision arising from a weak man’s slavish acquiescence to the fierce personal desires of a woman comporting herself as consort.35 Here, Cicero portrays both Fulvia and Antonius as quintessentially un-Roman in motivation, judgement and behaviour. By allowing himself to be seen participating within a highly masculine context of military discipline in a blatant display of affection, which in turn appears to sway his decision in relation to the punishment meted out to the delecti Martiae legionis centuriones, Antonius is rendered susceptible to base passions, open to female influence, and capable of overseeing acts of brutality (trucidavit). For her part, Fulvia – like Cytheris (Volumnia), Antonius’ mistress, who accompanied him to Brundisium in 49 bce 36 – acts in a manner socially unacceptable for a wife, but which would be viewed as perfectly in accord with a woman performing the role of courtesan. So, too, any consumer of Cicero’s rhetoric would more than likely have been receptive to the similarities drawn by the writer between the actions of a former mistress – and the responses of her lover – at Brundisium, a freed slave known to have circulated among other elite Romans and those actions of Fulvia37 – especially in relation to Cicero’s depiction of Antonius’ illegitimate emotional and military responses. Finally, we should note the degree to which Cicero’s rhetorical amplification of these equivalencies provides his audience with a spectrum of discursive clues to interpreting Fulvia’s ‘true’ nature: as a woman acting in every way like Antonius’ former mistress – a ‘mime-actress . . . whose name implies Greek lineage, slave provenance and the carnal sexuality associated with Venus/Aphrodite’38 – and very much a foreign female. Intriguingly, the Orientalist connotations in Cicero’s Philippics associated with representations of Fulvia’s socio-cultural designation as ‘woman’ (femina/mulier) are infrequent in similar depictions of her as uxor, γυνὴ, or γυναικὸς in the works of Appian and Plutarch. This is not to say that these writers fail to apply a gendered discursive template to their portraits of Fulvia’s actions; but in most instances they restrict the categories of otherness that frequently inform their accounts of her behaviour in traditionally male spheres of activity to the social grid of normative masculine and feminine conduct. 111

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By situating her behaviour as idiosyncratic and distinctive in comparison to her peers, yet ultimately acceptable within the frame of vertical social relationships between men and women and among females of the same social status, Appian’s construction of Fulvia may be categorized as conventionally gendered, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the extraordinary socio-historical, political and military circumstances associated with the years after Caesar’s assassination. However, it is possible to adopt a darker interpretation of Fulvia if we consider her characterization in relation to her treatment of a certain Caesetius Rufus. Rufus possessed a very beautiful house near that of Fulvia, the wife (γυναικὸς) of Antony, which she had wanted to buy, but he would not sell it, and although he now offered it to her as a free gift, he was proscribed. His head was brought to Antony, who said it did not concern him and sent it to his wife. She ordered that it be fastened to the front of his own house instead of the rostra.39 What Appian effects here is a snapshot of the extent to which customary norms can be subverted in times of crisis. Fulvia’s aspiration for a desirable property located in proximity to her own residence might be regarded as natural for those who belong to Rome’s possessing class. So, too, as we have seen, the implication that she exerted a degree of influence over her husband should be construed as perfectly acceptable, especially so in relation to matters of a domestic nature. However, Fulvia is depicted in this instance as extending the sphere of her materna auctoritas beyond the usual bounds of household management to influence Antonius’s nominations for inclusion on the list of capital prosecutions and confiscations of property comprising the proscription decreed in November 43 bce .40 By expropriating authority to which she has no legitimate claim, Fulvia’s conduct in relation to Rufus and Antonius positions her outside traditionally gendered, strictly demarcated socio-political limits. Still, though certainly something other than a traditional Roman female of the elite order, her actions would not necessarily mark her as un-Roman. What does Orientalize Fulvia in Appian’s account is his depiction of the lengths to which she is willing to go in order that her role in this affair is recognized, and the inherent nature which these actions represent: namely, that she is willing to advertise the essential savagery underpinning her acquisitive behaviour by affixing the head of her proscribed neighbour to the façade of the home she co-habits with her triumvir husband.41 Within the context of Aristotelian and Ciceronian civil philosophy – an intellectual framework informing socio-cultural perceptions where the terms ‘barbarian’ and ‘savage’ were linked to denote those persons who had not achieved, and perhaps were incapable of achieving, the natural end of human life, which was to live in cities and display the social and political virtues42 – Fulvia is seen here to lack the capacity to live in a community of citizens, as devoid of some of the attributes of humanity, as displaying explicitly ‘barbarian’ or foreign qualities (inter alia, feritas, inhumanitas and ferocia), and therefore as un-Roman. In his biographical profile of Antonius, Plutarch may similarly be seen to test Fulvia’s qualifications as an elite Roman woman by touching on the role she undertook in her 112

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husband’s absence from Rome. ‘Accordingly, inasmuch as she [Cleopatra] ravished Antonius, while Fulvia his wife (γυναικὸς) was carrying on war at Rome with Caesar in defence of her husband’s interests, . . .’43 As we have discussed in relation to the Perusinae glandes, Fulvia in 41 bce is represented as a woman who exerts personal influence over historical events, displaying social, political and military autonomy. It is no coincidence that Plutarch refers at this point in his Life to Fulvia as γυναικὸς exerting independent power over the prosecution of the civil conflict in the months prior to the outbreak of the Perusine War. By juxtaposing Fulvia’s warfaring activity with his application of strong military imagery (ἥρπασεν) to an erotic context – namely, the developing relationship between Antonius and Cleopatra VII – Plutarch simultaneously foregrounds Antonius’ emasculation at the hands of a foreign queen and his wife’s exhibition of a foreign ruler’s military authority. The rhetorical elision in this passage between the authentically exotic and the conceptually foreign neatly frames the manner in which contemporary and later Latin and Greek literature can deploy vertical social designations as markers of, and in service to, Orientalizing discursive strategies.

Alia oratio in the Fulvian tradition The twofold referential significance of gendered terminology – in helping to determine and evaluate the discursive standpoints of literary, epigraphic and associated visual source material – should be evident. A second presupposition of this study relates to the currents of political, social and economic power identified by the structural function of language. As Marilyn Skinner notes, any examination of late republican and early imperial social history will find it difficult to ignore the socio-political transformation of the Roman city-state, the radical demographic shift in the cosmopolitan population, and the fundamental centrality of patronage to the reconstituted cultural experience.44 While a late modern society like ours would more likely disseminate information regarding aspects of class, ethnicity, lifestyle or politics in statistical or quantitative form, it has been argued that specifically sexualized or gendered discourses in the ancient Mediterranean provided ‘an ordered, semantic system for articulating social anxieties’.45 In this schema, problematic sociological modifications in the traditional environments of Graeco-Roman experience would have been codified in terms of a sexual alia oratio (allegory, or ‘other speech’), a species of metaphor which reflected the ‘proofs of status and badges of identity’ most desired in times of anxiety or transition.46 This symbolic exchange of ideas is most often expressed in scenarios of normative confusion or violation, and frequently intersects with the depiction of anomalous gender roles and moral irregularities of behaviour.47 To the ancient references we may add the critical contributions of a welter of modern commentators and historians.48 From the later nineteenth century to the current decade of the twenty-first century, scholarship treating Fulvia’s character, motivations and actions has always reflected, sometimes channelled and occasionally ventriloquized those primary and secondary sources from Antiquity representing her involvement in 113

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the history of the late republic. Over the course of a hundred or so years, modern academic portraits of Fulvia speak suggestively about her ‘inherited insanity’ and ‘excitable disposition’; as the epitome of ‘greed, selfishness, [and] thirst for power’, delighting in murder and vengeance; and, in relation to her unbounded auctoritas over Antonius, as ‘strong-minded’, ‘domineering’ and ‘imperious’.49 While applying a gendered perspective to her survey of Greek and Roman women in mythology, legend and history, Sarah Pomeroy nonetheless aligns Fulvia to the rhetorical paradigm of ‘the evil wife,’ who ‘enter[s] spheres reserved for men,’ is Antonius’ equal in ‘her cruelty during the proscriptions,’ ‘initiate[s] the deterioration of Marc Antony and prepare[s] him to be dominated by Cleopatra.’50 Unfiltered transmission of the ancient tradition adhering to socially skewed and culturally transgressive constructions of Fulvia’s image occasionally results in the application of terminology not included in the ancient corpus that adds to the extant repertoire of gendered, Orientalist epithets, J. V. P. D. Balsdon, for example, describes Fulvia as ‘the Amazon of a woman . . . [who] during the last four years of her life . . . developed into a virago’.51 Charles L. Babcock, too, rehearses and confirms claims in Plutarch and Velleius Paterculus that Fulvia lacked any interest in household duties or domestic management, desired dominion over powerful men, and presented in all respects bar physical appearance as (hyper-)masculine and exotic in thought, word and deed.52 Surprisingly, Catherine Virlouvet’s early twenty-first century study of Fulvia replicates this trans-historical rhetoric, identifying her as a ‘woman of passion’, a ‘war commander’, and a ‘fierce, archetypal Amazon’.53 Even those modern writers aiming to provide a more nuanced reading of Fulvia in evidence (literary, documentary or material) – which they acknowledge is polarized due to generic paradigms, historical tradition, social precepts or cultural predispositions – cannot help but perpetuate the Orientalist standpoint. According to the prosopographical view of Friedrich Münzer, who sought to demonstrate how family relationships in ancient Rome connected to political struggles, she should be understood as the first of a new dynastic line (die erste Fürstin Roms), forerunner of Rome’s restored monarchy under Augustus and Livia.54 Almost eight decades later, Richard Bauman instantiates Fulvia as ‘the first empress in all but name’; and, in his late twentieth-century biography of Agrippina Minor, Anthony Barrett affirms that Fulvia represented everything that the Romans regarded as ‘the outcome of female emancipation and the perversion of the idealized notion of a Roman matron.’55 In line with this view, Eleanor Huzar appropriates the conceptualization in Roman Antiquity of foreign female rulers as autonomous women with independent authority over military forces, observing that Fulvia was ‘essentially if not nominally the commander in chief of a military force, and even wore armour on occasion.’56

Aesthetic performances in the Fulvian tradition A final presumption remains. Reconstructing the historical performer cannot neglect the visual, oral and aural components of the ancient world’s ars rhetorica.57 If, for instance, 114

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visual/oral/aural traditions preserve the problematic, and if the remnants of these traditions are susceptible to identification in the written record, then it may be possible to illuminate and analyse that which otherwise remains hidden, marginalized or irretrievably distorted in later discourses. In this regard, it is instructive to observe instances of performative discourse speaking to exemplary moments in Fulvia’s fragmentary life-story in the extant corpus of evidence and later historiographical and artistic artefacts: the series of coins issued by mints at Rome and certain provincial locations; Guillaume Rouillé’s portrait type and brief profile in Promptuarii iconum insigniorum a seculo hominum, subiectis eorum vitis, per compendium ex probatissimis autoribus desumptis; Mary Hay’s biographical item in Female Biography: or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries; and Pavel Svedomsky’s painting of ‘Fulvia with the Head of Cicero’. The numismatic evidence will not detain us long.58 While some scholars have tried to distinguish the historical representation of Fulvia in images on coins from mints at Rome and provincial cities in Gaul (Lugdunum) and Phrygia (Eumenea, or, possibly during the late 40s bce under Antonius’ imperium, ‘Fulvia’), the consensus of cautious scholarship casts serious doubt on the value of this corpus of source material in identifying an authentic, contemporary portrait of Fulvia.59 Despite the problematic nature of this numismatic corpus, three interrelated observations are apposite in relation to the current discussion. First, as a landmark of gendered mass communication, the female images used on these coins may, on the one hand, replicate (consciously or incidentally) identifiable physical and decorative features of a late republican woman associated closely with M. Antonius (i.e. Fulvia or Octavia, respectively his third and fourth wives); or, at the very least, they should be viewed as an amalgam of historical women of contemporary, elite Roman society. Second, Roman mint officials include their names on coins bearing the non-idealized representation of a definitively Roman female deity – Victoria, a goddess worshipped widely in cult, and personification of victory over death and success on the battlefield. Third, the coins bearing similar images, which were produced in provincial cities (Lugdunum, Eumenea) under Antonius’ command in the late 40s bce – and, in one instance, minted under the aegis of a known triumvir monetalis, a certain T. Carisius – exoticize and thereby complicate the representation of Victoria by depicting a distinctively Roman female profile on one face of the coin and decidedly non-Roman iconography on the other. For instance, on surviving examples of the issues produced at Lugdunum (43 to 42 bce ), the winged bust of Victoria, facing right and displaying the nodus hair style, appears on the obverse, while on the reverse is depicted a lion, walking right; and, on a coin from the city of Eumenea (41 to 40 bce ), the draped bust of a winged Nike is shown on the obverse, in counterpoint to a dynamic representation of Athena, advancing left, holding a spear in her right hand, and bearing a shield on her left arm (see Fig. 7.1). To be clear, then, while depicting a goddess of war and triumph, these coins display either individualized portraits of historical women (Fulvia and/or Octavia) or a pastiche of physical and aesthetic features exhibited by elite late republican females. Moreover, the ‘Victoria’ on the Antonian issues minted at Rome, Lugdunum and Eumenea marks a 115

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Fig. 7.1 Coin from Eumenea, Phrygia (41–40 bce ): RPC I.3139. Paul-Francis Jacquier Numismatique Antique, Nr. 238 : http://www.coinsjacquier.com/kataloge/jacq34/00238H00.HTM [20/07/2018].

startling innovation in numismatic iconography: the first state-supported minting of coins displaying portraits of living women, recognisable as individuals (the wives of M. Antonius) or as a category (elite Roman females); and representations of historical women as powerful, effective warriors, personifying victory on the battlefield. Although the preponderance of evidence in the extant corpus does not allow us to establish beyond reasonable doubt the identity of the person(s) who acted as a model for Victoria’s profile, it should be clear that the appropriation of Fulvia’s features for this purpose will have elevated her already substantial reputation as a formidable fighter well beyond the received tradition and customary socio-cultural expectations about elite Roman women. As Victoria, both in support of her husband and his brother and in her own right, Fulvia’s image as Roman wife and sister-in-law will have blurred in the minds of many with that of the belligerent, potent, independent female warrior found in contemporary prose, poetry and adapted in sub-literary contexts. To a large extent, Fulvia will have metastasized into something familiar to Roman society of the late 40s bce : she will have become the woman who exhibited ‘nothing female about her except for her body’, who ‘mixed disorder of all kinds with military weapons and uproar’, and who ‘desired to govern those who governed and to command a commander-in-chief ’.60 This representation is not very far removed at all from the Orientalizing tradition soon to arise, where we see similar strategies deployed across the available discursive spectrum in relation to the conflict between Octavian, defender of the Western world and Roman values, and Antonius, instrument of Cleopatra VII , queen of the East and of a typologically barbaric non-Roman culture. Turning now to performative representations of Fulvia in the received tradition of European biography, iconography and painting, let us first consider briefly a work that draws significant inspiration from classical literary and numismatic precursors. In Guillaume Rouillé’s 1553 catalogue of portrait types and brief biographies – Promptuarii iconum insigniorum a seculo hominum, subiectis eorum vitis, per compendium ex 116

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Fig. 7.2 Rouillé 1553: 172. Public domain.

probatissimis autoribus desumptis – Fulvia is depicted as a mature woman, where the arrangement of facial features, hair and clothing reflect both the engraver’s passing familiarity with the composition of physical and decorative detail on coins of the late republican and early imperial period bearing images of historical females, modified by concessions to the couture and coiffure of sixteenth-century French provincial society, and a desire to provide a sense of order and familiarity to the representations of historical women belonging to a particular social stratum in the classical Roman world (see Fig. 7.2).61 As far as the text accompanying Fulvia’s image is concerned, the debt Rouillé owed to the parallel lives of Plutarch is evident both in the abbreviated acknowledgement of sources (‘Plut. In Cice. & Anto.’),62 as well as the overarching organization of each page of the catalogue, which show a paired (or, infrequently, triple) alignment of male only or male and female personalities related by blood or marriage. In the case of Fulvia, her ‘life’ is appended beneath a longer excursus about P. Clodius – and her visual icon faces left towards that of her third husband’s image. Taken together, we may note the representative dissonance previously observed in the juxtaposition of ostensibly traditional if non-idealized numismatic portraits of Victoria to the literary accounts of a polysemous historical subject. Here, Fulvia’s visual imprint must be taken in counterpoint to the discursive emphases in the related Latin profile, which informs the catalogue’s viewers and readers that the prim and proper adult female neatly framed in the form of a medallion ‘took pains neither to practice the feminine arts, nor to manage a household . . . but rather to conduct herself as if occupying magisterial office, and to give orders to male commanders.’63 Here, Rouillé’s juxtaposition of gender 117

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and culture in service to the construction of a very specific category of historical female is at once familiar and recursive – a rhetorical ‘routine’ applied repeatedly to the exoticized representation of dangerous women whose behaviour deviates so markedly from acceptable socio-cultural norms that the principles of traditionally gendered depiction are deemed insufficient to the task.64 Mary Hays’ six-volume publication Female Biography (1803) – a work intended, so she claims in the Preface to Volume 1, as an exemplary collection of ‘women whose endowments, or whose conduct have reflected lustre upon the sex’ from which her female readership could find instruction and edification65 – provides another useful point of reference to the preceding observations. Hays’ profile identifies Fulvia as ‘wife of Marc. Antony . . . (who) first married Clodius . . . and, after his death, Curio’, that is, as a matrona – a married woman held in esteem by their community and a significant member of one of Rome’s elite republican families.66 However, Hays chooses at the outset to insert without commentary a long excerpt from Plutarch, familiar by now to us as a pivotal instance of discursive formations that integrate representations of women who display gendered and foreign alterity: ‘She was a woman,’ says Plutarch, ‘not born for the distaff or housewifery . . . a lady capable of advising a magistrate, and of governing a general of an army. Cleopatra, who owed great obligations to her, found no great difficulty in reducing Antony to obedience, since he had learned submission in so good a school.’67 Here, Hays’ limitations with regard to accessing the original sources – most importantly her lack of instruction in Classical Greek and Latin – must be acknowledged. Her engagement with the major and minor literary tradition of Graeco-Roman Antiquity is almost exclusively at second- and sometimes third-hand, by way of contemporary encyclopaedic, historico-lexicographical and encyclopaedic treatments of pre-modern women and men.68 In relation to the item on Fulvia, Hays relies on Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1736) and the anonymous compiler of the Biographium Femineum (1766).69 As a consequence of this deep reliance on the linguistic and ideological interpretations of authors who appear to define themselves as products and perpetrators of a distinctively patriarchal socio-cultural environment, Hays’ use of these sources may be seen to reflect an inability to engage critically with the extant corpus of ancient evidence. As such, despite Hay’s dual premise for her biographical enterprise – to draw imaginative connections between past and present attitudes and behaviours: ‘pleasure,’ so she states, ‘mingled with instruction’; and to craft a female biography for the ‘improvement’ and ‘entertainment’ of ‘my own sex’70 – the distinctive echoes of ancient (and contemporary, interpretative) masculinist and Orientalist voices persist. It is Fulvia, for example, who, independent of Antonius, ‘quarrelled with Octavius’;71 like a foreign queen, she ‘took up arms against him’, and in doing so, like a female commander and warrior, ‘harangued the soldiers’ and ‘accompanied them to the field of battle.’72 Most damning of all, Hays refers incidentally to the story of Caesetius Rufus and rehearses explicitly Cassius Dio’s description of Fulvia’s maltreatment of Cicero’s corpse 118

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after his execution during the proscriptions.73 Reported in the Roman History only, Dio’s account of Fulvia’s actions in relation to the latter episode is profoundly disturbing: Fulvia took the head into her hands before it was removed, and after treating it bitterly and having spat on it, she placed it on her knees, and after having opened the mouth she dragged out the tongue, and pierced it with needles from her own hair, at the same time making many foul jests. During the civil disturbances and military actions characterizing internecine Roman rivalries of late second and first centuries bce , decapitation of the corpses of political enemies in the aftermath of executions was nothing out of the ordinary.74 However, in other accounts of the practice in this period, women are neither identified as the agents of capital punishment (legitimate or otherwise); nor, more particularly, is a Roman woman depicted in any other source as the subsequent desecrator of the executed corpse. Of course, it is more than likely that Hays will have been familiar with the New Testament accounts of the maltreatment of John the Baptist’s corpse by Salome, the daughter of Herodias; and, while almost certainly unaware of Jerome’s comparison of Fulvia and Salome – the embodiment of Oriental women – in his apologetic text on the works of Rufinus dealing with the doctrines of Origen, she may have heard about the paintings by Caravaggio and Francesco del Cairo depicting snapshots of Salome’s actions in the scriptural accounts.75 In any event, citing Bayle’s verdict on Fulvia’s ‘crimes’ – “‘Behold,” says Bayle, “a singular species of woman!”’ – Hays frames her character in terms that mark her as: an active participant in the proscriptions (‘massacres committed by the triumvirate’); hyper-masculine in relation to the degree to which she engaged in the ignominious actions of that period (‘Fulvia irritated [Antonius] to yet farther cruelty’, ‘she caused several persons privately to be put to death’); and lacking even the semblance of those qualities possessed by a Roman matrona (‘her rapacity or her revenge’, ‘her unwomanly and brutal treatment of the head of Cicero’).76 It is a short step to re-imagine Fulvia as represented in the Female Biography according to the received tradition about the nature and behaviour of non-Roman women of power – fighters, rulers and administrators whose authority resided in themselves rather than as the reflected influence of fathers, husbands and sons. Bringing this survey of Orientalist representation through visual media into the nineteenth century is Pavel Svedomsky’s painting of this episode, Fulvia with the Head of Cicero (see Fig.  7.3). This painting provides a clear example of how easily an artist’s fascination with historical subjects displaying salacious or erotic overtones can overlay on any artistic work’s aesthetic quality and historical interest the conceptual transposition of genders (masculine on feminine) and cultures (East on West), reproducing what we have seen as the discursive vocabulary of sexualized and racinated Alterity. Here, the subject of our gaze, Fulvia, holds the subject of her’s, the head of Cicero, two ornate hairpins protruding at odd angles from the open mouth. Svedomsky is at pains to ensure that the line of sight between Fulvia’s voracious gaze and Cicero’s lifeless eyes captures the viewer’s primary focus. Her eyes wide and eager, her sated desire accentuated by the exclamatory 119

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Fig. 7.3 Pavel Svedomsky, Fulvia with the Head of Cicero (late nineteenth century). © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Pictures.

arch of eyebrow, dimpled cheek and ecstatic grin, Fulvia’s full and undivided attention is fixed on Cicero’s lifeless, sightless stare. As Svedomsky formulates the vignette, this framing of explicit gaze and implicit desire is no accident: Fulvia’s left hand grasps Cicero’s head in a vice-like grip, her thumb pressed hard against the forehead to align his eyes to hers; the pins (which we know she has used to pierce Cicero’s tongue) extend beyond the slightly open mouth at angles which together capture the view she clearly craves. Svedomsky’s version of Fulvia may be compared with Hans Makart’s 1875 figure of Cleopatra. As part of the developing nineteenth-century discourse of the Orient, Makart’s Death of Cleopatra exemplifies the Western pictorial approach to representing the Egyptian queen as the zenith of exotic Oriental sexuality. The elements of Makart’s painting that resonate most with nineteenth-century versions of Oriental women – the sumptuous surroundings and characteristically lush harem-like décor, the explicit emphasis on the viewer’s scopophilic gaze – can be discerned in Svedomsky’s motifs of luxury, excess and abandon.77 The sensuality of Cleopatra and Fulvia’s semi-recumbent figures reflect the artistic tradition of the eroticized, Orientalized female subject. Further, the contrast between Cicero’s ignominious demise and his body’s subsequent maltreatment at Fulvia’s hands, and the context within which this post-mortem abuse takes place, emphasizes the extent to which the outcome of a public, political execution has been co-opted by domestic, personal interests. Svedomsky depicts this historical snapshot within a markedly feminine setting – a private, household space draped in expensive textiles, the colourful cloth’s patterned motifs echoing the floral display overhanging the ornate lounge and animal skin floor covering on which Fulvia rests her richly dressed form. The artist’s placement of Cicero’s head – emerging from the burlap sack padded with straw that will have been used to bring Fulvia her prize – emphasizes how completely Fulvia has appropriated the triumviral proscriptions. 120

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Taken together, the painting shows a woman appropriating the outcome of a judgement, customarily associated with the political mechanisms of the Roman state and enacted traditionally by the will of elite male citizens, to her intensely idiosyncratic needs, visibly grounded in the excesses of female passion and situated within the context of an aristocratic, feminized space. The erotic subject of the ceramic ware supporting the display of flowering plants, the floor covering of animal fur and pendant claws, the variety of floor, wall and furniture marbles, finely worked metals, perfume containers and exotic fruits, and Fulvia’s richly clothed, braceleted and bejewelled figure – all these elements conspire to transport this scene to a foreign locale, inhabited by the fiercest, most savage, and profoundly sexualized of women, an Eastern princess revelling in the gruesome spoils of murderous desire.

Conclusion Any discourse, in Antiquity as well as today, has to adopt a human point of view, since discourses are products of human language, and therefore of human thought. From a phenomenological perspective humans (and thus, of course, those classical, postclassical, pre-modern and modern men – and it is an exclusively male list – writing about Fulvia in the surviving catalogue of sources) experience themselves primarily as having a sensuous body, which acts as the norm of embodiment, along with a norm of the firstperson sensuous and mental awareness.78 By having a body, though, we become also sympathetic with other humans to the extent that our body understands the body of the other. In other words, embodiment allows humans to recognize subjectivity in – and to empathize with – the other. It is, of course, the intentional misunderstanding of Fulvia’s ‘body’, articulated through a network of culturally ‘invented’ oppositional binaries seeking to impose order, that renders the sources studied in this chapter susceptible to an Orientalist reading. As we have seen, these binaries may be represented in art, literature and inscribed texts, and framed in such a way as to establish (or, rather, sustain) a hierarchy of the familiar and the other – a ‘stable and natural’ system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another but simultaneously arranged, somewhat paradoxically, in pairs. In many ways, then, we are left with the familiar mystery of historical female experience, mediated through the gendered rhetoric of masculinist/Orientalist interpreters. Not necessarily the most satisfying of conclusions, but in the end a necessary exploration of the discursive practices which colonize the lived realities of real women in ancient (and modern) times, and which must constantly be exposed. If there is agreement about nothing else, the implications of Fulvia’s skeletal narrative frame for the representation of gender relations in text and image of the last decades of the first century bce and the early centuries of the imperial period are clear-cut. The contemporary literary, sub-literary and numismatic record reflects the principles of a distinctive gendered and othered rhetoric – horizontal and vertical socio-sexual relations; alia 121

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oratio; visual performance – applied to the subject of Fulvia. As we have seen, this negotiated representation of destabilized social and political hierarchies found in Rome’s surviving written and visual historical tradition resonates significantly with key discursive strategies of Orientalism. According to the Orientalist way of reading and viewing, the producers and consumers of meaning re-imagine, emphasize, exaggerate and distort differences of non-Western (in the case of the present study, non-Roman) peoples and cultures. This semiological process assigns an individual such as Fulvia a ‘different’ cultural identity that must be seen as exotic, backward, uncivilized and dangerous. Similarly, the ways in which post-classical/pre-modern and modern portraits of Fulvia – whether sixteenth-century portraiture, eighteenth-century biography, nineteenth-century art or twentieth-century classical scholarship – reflect how discourses require the critical reader and viewer to acknowledge that cultural artefacts mediate reality, to identify how they do so, and to ensure that we continue to acknowledge such texts and images as ‘rethinking and reformulating historical experiences’.79 Engaging with Fulvia’s cultural tradition requires the critical reader to recognize the sometimes simplistic, occasionally simplifying, but always illuminating formulations of gender espoused by all our sources, ancient and modern.

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CHAPTER 8 THE ORIENTAL EMPRESSES OF ROME: SEVERAN WOMEN IN LITERATURE AND THE PERFORMATIVE ARTS Martijn Icks

Seldom has human society enjoyed such peace and unity as in the Roman Empire of the first two centuries AD – an empire covering Western Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. This heyday lasted until late in the third century when, with appalling suddenness, the Roman peace collapsed into chaos. The débâcle might have come earlier but for the success with which two generations of women, the four Syrian Princesses, worked with their feminine genius to maintain the stability of the Empire, holding the reins of government in fact if not in name.1 These words, written as part of a blurb for Godfrey Turton’s Syrian Princesses (1974), credit the empresses of the Severan dynasty (193–235 ce ) with nothing less than upholding Roman civilization itself. While not going quite as far, Michael Grant in his book on the Severans makes the bold claim that, during this period, ‘the greater part of the civilized world was ruled by women’.2 Although these may be overstatements, it is undeniable that the women in question – Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus and mother of Caracalla and Geta; Julia Maesa, her sister; and Julia Soaemias and Julia Mammaea, both daughters of Maesa and mothers of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, respectively (see Fig. 8.1) – are credited with a great role in state affairs by Greco-Roman authors, taking up administrative responsibilities and even attending Senate meetings under their sons and grandsons.3 While some of these claims are more credible than others, this is not the place to disentangle the webs of fact and fiction. As portraits, coins and inscriptions attest, Domna, Maesa and Mammaea (Soaemias to a somewhat lesser extent) also played a prominent part in the representation of the imperial house.4 Both in ancient literature and in other sources, they far outshine other women of the Severan dynasty, such as Caracalla’s wife Plautilla and the various wives of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander. It is no surprise, then, that these four empresses, and particularly Julia Domna, have received their share of scholarly attention.5 However, their appeal has also stretched beyond the academic world. The notion of women taking control of the Roman empire, regardless of its foundation in historical fact, has been picked up by many novelists, playwrights, opera librettists and even authors of graphic novels.6 For Maesa, Soaemias and Mammaea, this rich Nachleben is closely tied to that of Elagabalus or Heliogabalus, the Syrian boy-priest who became emperor, brought his local sun god with him to Rome 123

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Fig. 8.1 Genealogical table of the Severan dynasty.

and installed him at the head of the Roman pantheon.7 Since all four of the Severan empresses were of Syrian origins, the notion of the ‘East’ usurping the ‘West’ is a returning element in many of the novels, plays, operas and other works of fiction in which they feature, although it is more closely associated with some women than with others, as we will see.8 In this chapter, I will trace developments in the depictions of Domna, Maesa, Soaemias and Mammaea in literature and the performative arts from the Renaissance to the present day. In particular, I will examine how their gender is related to their role as political players and how their characterization is informed by notions of Orientalism, such as an inclination towards mysticism and sensuousness.

The Nachleben at a glance It would be a mistake to lump the four Severan empresses together and treat them as a collective, since the distinct personalities with which they are credited in Greco-Roman literature shine through in their later evocations. Nevertheless, their close kinship and the fact that they spent much of their lives near each other, either working together or undermining each other’s positions, means that they usually appear in literary works together. The exception is Julia Domna, who was already deceased before the other three gained prominence. Therefore, it seems best to start with a general overview of the empresses’ fictional afterlife, highlighting some broader trends and briefly touching on the most important works in which they feature, before zooming in on the individual women and the ways they have been characterized by authors and artists throughout the ages. 124

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The early modern age Roughly speaking, the Nachleben of the Severan women can be divided into three periods: the early modern age; the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the period from the First World War to the present day.9 When Renaissance scholars and artists once again became interested in the history, literature and arts of ancient Rome, the Severan dynasty was not at the forefront of their attention. In fact, throughout the early modern period, authors and artists only haphazardly focused on this relatively obscure time in Roman history, lured away by the more obvious charms of the Late Republic or the Julio-Claudians.10 Nevertheless, the famous Humanist scholar and writer Giovanni Boccaccio devoted a chapter to ‘Symiamira, Woman of Emesa’ (i.e. Julia Soaemias) in his work Famous Women (written around 1361, but only published in 1374), the first collection of biographies entirely devoted to women.11 Another famous Humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, was intrigued by the story that Julia Soaemias led a women’s senate and wrote a piece called ‘The Lower House, or the Council of Women’ (1529) for his Colloquies. It records a conversation among a group of women who have revived Soaemias’s women’s senate in Erasmus’s own day, which allows the scholar to mock their vanity as they discuss the regulation of fashion.12 Since the dialogue is set in the sixteenth century, though, Soaemias and the other Severan women are not present. A third text, Thomas Artus’s pamphlet L’Isle des Hermaphrodites nouvellement descouverte (1605), mentions Elagabalus’s mother and grandmother in its account of the depraved ‘Island of the Hermaphrodites’ founded by the emperor, but does not have anything substantial to say about them.13 With the Italian opera Eliogabalo (1667), based on a libretto by Aurelio Aureli and composed by Francesco Cavalli, the eponymous ruler gained his first starring role in a major piece of drama, but there is no trace of his mother, grandmother or aunt. Instead, Elagabalus is surrounded by a cast of completely fictional women.14 Fifty years later, another Italian opera, Alessandro Severo (1717), based on a libretto by Apostolo Zeno and composed by Antonio Lotti, focused on the reign of Elagabalus’s cousin and successor. Here, we finally see a Severan empress in a major role: Julia Mammaea features as the young ruler’s domineering mother.15 The Severan women also appear as prominent characters in Gysbert Tysens’s Dutch play Bassianus Varius Heliogabalus, of De uitterste proef der standvastige liefde [‘The ultimate test of persistent love’] (1720), which presents Elagabalus as a tyrannical ruler seeking the hand of Marcia, a young noblewoman who is in love with Alexander.16 Maesa, Soaemias and Mammaea are recurring characters in this play, with Soaemias fulfilling an important role as her son’s malicious adviser, always egging on his evil inclinations. On the whole, though, the early modern age does not provide a rich harvest for the Nachleben of the Severan women. Julia Domna seems to have been completely absent in works from this period, while the others only make sporadic appearances – as does Elagabalus, with whom they are usually connected. The fact that they come from the ‘East’ is not wholly ignored, but is not yet employed as a defining feature of the way they dress, behave and think. All this would change in the nineteenth century, when a modern Orientalist discourse, tied to imperialism and colonialism, gained ground in Western culture.17 125

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The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries The nineteenth century saw a minor explosion in the number of literary works devoted to Elagabalus, which means that the women at his court gained more attention as well. In Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard’s epistolary novel Héliogabale, ou Esquisse morale de la dissolution romaine sous les empereurs (1802), the tyranny of the priest-emperor is contrasted to the virtuous upbringing of Severus Alexander.18 Several of the letters included in the work are written by Julia Mammaea, or addressed to her. Mammaea and Soaemias both feature in Touissant Cabuchet’s play Héliogabale (1837), the first part of his Trilogie sur le Christianisme, which depicts the decline of paganism and the triumph of Christianity.19 Here, the women represent moral opposites, with Soaemias leading her son astray on the path of vice and pleasure, while Mammaea shines as a beacon of Christian piety. More so than in the previous period, the contrast between the worlds of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ is emphasized: in Chaussard’s novel, for instance, Alexander’s teacher Sylvinus writes to his pupil about the philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism, associating the latter with the ‘East’ and condemning it as ‘soft and degenerate’ because it places pleasure above all else.20 While Elagabalus follows Epicurean principles, Mammaea and her supporters have raised Alexander to be a virtuous Stoic. This emphasis on the ‘Oriental’ background of Elagabalus and (some of) his female relatives would be an important aspect of their Nachleben from this point onwards. To a large extent, Elagabalus’s increased importance in nineteenth-century works was due to the age’s preoccupation with degeneration and decline, culminating in the socalled Decadence. This artistic movement flourished during the fin-de-siècle, especially in France, and remained influential in the early years of the twentieth century. Like Nero, Elagabalus became a figure of fascination for many authors and artists associated with the concept of Decadence, who were entranced by his alleged depravity, cruelty and extravagance.21 It would go too far to mention all the plays, poems and novels devoted to the priest-emperor in this period, so I will limit myself to a few key works in which the Severan women play important roles. One of these is Jean Lombard’s novel L’Agonie (1888), which describes the reign of Elagabalus as the death throes of a decadent pagan society which will soon be superseded by Christianity. A similar perspective can be found in Auguste Villeroy’s play Héliogabale (1902), which ends with a Christian triumphantly predicting the victory of the cross over the Roman eagle after Elagabalus and his mother have been murdered. Likewise, the emperor’s death is celebrated with the triumphant cry ‘Glory to Christ!’ in Henry Mirande’s novel Élagabal (1910).22 The Dutch author Louis Couperus takes the opposite view in his novel De berg van licht [‘The Mountain of Light’] (1905–6), presenting the young ruler’s reign as the last glorious flowering of ancient beauty and piety before Christianity came to overshadow the world.23 In all these works, Elagabalus’s ‘Oriental’ background receives great emphasis. His mother Soaemias is usually painted with the same brush as her son, displaying typical ‘Oriental’ traits such as promiscuity and a fixation on luxury. Grandmother Maesa is usually presented first and foremost as a politician, keen to secure the family’s hold on 126

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the throne and to keep family conflicts under control, fitting the Orientalist stereotype of matriarchal rule.24 Mammaea is presented as associating with Christians in three of the four works, either out of sheer political calculation or because she truly sympathizes with their beliefs.25 Completely distinct from the Decadent tradition is the play Julia Domna (1903), the first dramatic work to focus on the first Severan empress.26 Published under the pseudonym Michael Field, its authors were the writers’ duo Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who described Domna’s efforts to reconcile her feuding sons Caracalla and Geta.

From the First World War to the present In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Nachleben of Elagabalus branched out in many different directions, providing us with a plethora of different images. Consequently, we get many different images of the Severan empresses as well, not all of which can be discussed here. In the remarkable essay Heliogabalus or, The Crowned Anarchist (1934) by the French playwright Antonin Artaud, the young ruler becomes a rebel-saviour from the ‘East’, stirring up energies that have too long lain dormant in the stagnant ‘West’.27 In Artaud’s imagination, Syria is associated with magic, mysticism and the supernatural. As he claims, traditional gender roles were reversed in the kingdom of Emesa, where the leading family handed kingly and priestly power down along the female line, producing weak, malicious men and virile women. ‘On that score one could say that Heliogabalus was shaped by women; that his thinking was done according to the will of two women’, the latter probably referring to Soaemias and Maesa, although the author does not specify. Elsewhere, Artaud mentions that the future emperor was surrounded by ‘a pleiad of Julias; – and whether or not practising when in power, all these Julias were highclass whores.’28 Like Elagabalus himself, these Severan empresses are children of the ‘East’, unbound by the restraints of Western morality. In the novels Family Favourites (1960) by Alfred Duggan and Child of the Sun (1966) by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, the women around Elagabalus, and particularly Julia Maesa, are presented as shrewd political players and powers behind the throne.29 We find them portrayed in similar ways in several other modern works – for instance in Pierre Moinot’s play Héliogabale (1971), in which the emperor complains that he feels like a pawn, since the women of his family have ‘calculated everything, foreseen everything, decided everything’ with regard to his rise to power. Likewise, Gilles Chaillet’s graphic novel series La Dernière prophétie (2002–12) shows all four Severan women, including Julia Domna, conspiring to put Elagabalus on the throne.30 A slightly different take is offered in the German-language opera Heliogabal (2003), scripted by Thomas Jonigk and with a score composed by Peter Vermeersch, which re-imagines Elagabalus as a sort of ancient pop star, complete with adoring fans and a manager who keeps track of his media presence and poster sales.31 Nevertheless, Julia Maesa stays true to her role as power behind the throne, working to promote her pop star grandson without ever allowing the boy to get a word in edgewise. 127

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While Heliogabal fuses the Roman past with modern pop culture, other works have found other ways to relate Elagabalus and his family to the present. In Martin Duberman’s play Elagabalus (1973), the focus is on Adrian, a young gay man and New York resident who models his life after that of the long-dead emperor.32 Adrian’s mother and grandmother display characteristics attributed to Soaemias and Maesa in the ancient sources, such as sensuousness and a preoccupation with politics, respectively. Two other works, Sky Gilbert’s play Heliogabalus, a Love Story (2002) and Jeremy Reed’s novel Boy Caesar (2004), keep alternating between the Roman past and the present.33 Both mirror the ancient Elagabalus with a modern counterpart, while Gilbert’s play also includes a modern-day Julia Soaemias. She is the most prominent of the Severan empresses in both works, which focus less on political scheming (a theme that is usually associated with Maesa and Mammaea) and more on Elagabalus’s identity as a gay character and challenger of traditional gender roles. Some of the works mentioned above present the reign of Elagabalus as a culture clash between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, continuing one of the main themes in the Nachleben by presenting both the emperor and the Severan women as typical ‘Orientals’. In Family Favourites, the Gallo-Roman soldier and narrator Duratius marvels at the ‘outlandish clothes’ of Maesa and Soaemias, wondering why they do not dress like Roman matrons. Once Elagabalus has been reigning in Rome for some time, Maesa complains that the Romans keep regarding the Syrian clan as foreigners, despite all her efforts.34 In Chaillet’s graphic novels, the ‘dames’ of Emesa conspire not only to put Elagabalus on the throne, but also to subject the Romans to their sun god Ba’al.35 On the other hand, works like Duberman’s Elagabalus, Jonigk and Vermeersch’s Heliogabal and Reed’s Boy Caesar place little to no emphasis on the ‘Oriental’ otherness of the Severan women, preferring to explore different themes. As far as I have been able to tell, only one modern work in the Nachleben of the Severan women is completely unrelated to Elagabalus: the play Julia Domna (1996) by Françoise Gründ and Chérif Khaznadar.36 It provides an in-depth exploration of the first Severan empress, devoting attention to her ‘Oriental’ background as well as to her roles as empress and mother.

Julia Domna, tormented mother Paradoxically, the Severan empress who has generated the most academic interest has made the smallest impact on art and literature after Antiquity. Julia Domna (c. 170–217 ce ), the daughter of the high priest of Elagabal, the sun god of Emesa, allegedly attracted the attention of the future emperor Septimius Severus because her horoscope predicted that she would wed a king. She bore her husband two sons, Caracalla and Geta. As empress, Domna devoted herself to philosophy and surrounded herself with sophists. She took a more active role in government after Caracalla had taken the throne, although the relation with her oldest son would always remain strained: at the start of his reign, Caracalla had ended his rivalry with his younger brother and co-emperor Geta by 128

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butchering him in their mother’s arms. Afterwards, he forbade her to shed any tears for her dead son. According to Cassius Dio, Domna would have liked to become a ruler in her own right, following in the footsteps of Queen Semiramis of Assyria and Queen Nitocris of Egypt, ‘as she came in a sense from the same parts as they’. However, she lost the will to live after the assassination of Caracalla, perhaps in part because she was suffering from breast cancer, and starved herself to death.37 Considering the tragic drama of Domna’s life story, one might expect her to have a richer Nachleben than she actually does. Perhaps her major disadvantage is that she is not closely connected to the colourful reign of Elagabalus, which has tended to draw more artistic attention than that of the earlier Severans. Nevertheless, her potential as a dramatic character has been recognized by several authors. In Julia Domna, Bradley and Cooper present her as a dignified, imperious woman, clad in magnificent dress and holding audience at the imperial court. The play is set shortly after the death of Septimius Severus, when Caracalla and Geta ruled the Empire together. Both sons profess a deep devotion to their mother, but cannot stand each other; in fact, they intend to split the Empire between them, with Caracalla staying in Rome and Geta moving to Antioch.38 Domna’s aching dilemma is that she cannot and will not choose between her sons, both of whom are entreating her to pick one over the other: How will you divide Your mother, how will she be torn asunder, And shared between you?39 For a brief while, it seems Caracalla and Geta are willing to reconcile, but Geta’s brutal murder at the hands of Caracalla soon shatters that illusion. ‘I am a childless woman,’ Domna laments while she sinks down next to the corpse, but Caracalla does not accept her rejection and implores her to keep loving him. Eventually, Domna gives in: she will stand by her son, even while Geta’s supporters are slaughtered around her.40 A very different Domna emerges from Artaud’s Crowned Anarchist. Typical for Artaud’s fascination with doubles, she is paired and contrasted with her sister Maesa, with Domna characterized as ‘a sex with probably some brains’ and Maesa as ‘a brain in which sex isn’t lacking’. This Domna is not a caring mother, but a woman who above all else desires power and has ‘ambition almost in the blood’. When she sleeps with men, it is to manipulate them and make them subservient to her – including even her own son Caracalla, with whom she allegedly sleeps in Geta’s blood after the fratricide.41 Artaud calls her a monster, someone who ‘waged war, who sparked off and instigated wars to satisfy her womanly ambitions and schemes of domination’ – but also a great lover and sponsor of literature and poetry. Above all, she is the incarnation of Syrian magic and warring supernatural forces, and as such does not only bring death and destruction to the world, but also spiritual renewal, because the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a ‘white magician’, was written at her behest.42 As such, Domna exemplifies the vigorous forces that, according to Artaud, were present in the ‘East’ and, once released, could regenerate the ‘West’. 129

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The protagonist in Gründ and Khaznadar’s Julia Domna is closer again to the empress in Bradley and Cooper’s play, in that she is presented as a mother who sacrifices herself for the interests of her family. However, more emphasis is placed on her ‘Oriental’ origins, not only through the costume she wears, but also through the setting of the piece in a grotto with a statue of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, whose cult she allegedly helped to spread.43 In Chaillet’s La Dernière prophétie, finally, Domna appears in different guises: as a helpless mother, splattered with the blood of her murdered son as she cradles him in her arms (see Fig. 8.2, left), but also as the imperious matriarch of her Syrian clan. As the narrator remarks, borrowing a phrase from Juvenal, the Syrian river Orontes flows into the Tiber once she and the other Syrian women take up residence in Rome.44 While Domna is depicted wearing the Roman stola in the capital, she dresses in splendid ‘Oriental’ garb (see Fig. 8.2, right) after her return to Emesa at the end of her life (for which there is no historic record), with the sun of Ba’al prominently displayed on her headdress.45 Evidently, this is an emphatically ‘Oriental’ Domna, as foreign as the priestemperor himself – and just as determined that the sun of Ba’al will rise over the Roman world.

Fig. 8.2 Chaillet 2003, 17: Julia Domna in Roman clothing, cradling her stabbed son Geta (left) and Chaillet 2003, 21: Julia Domna in Oriental splendour (right). © Glenat Editions. 130

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Julia Maesa, Machiavellian matriarch In the ancient sources, the name of Julia Maesa (c. 165–224 ce ) is closely connected to that of Elagabalus, whose rise to power she is said to have orchestrated. Allegedly, the old lady spread rumours among the soldiers that the boy was Caracalla’s bastard son and bribed them to proclaim him emperor. During his reign, she gave him good counsel, advising him to wear Roman clothes in Rome and to adopt his cousin Alexander as Caesar. The Historia Augusta even claims that Elagabalus took her with him to the Senate and the army camp, as it was the only way he could gain respect. When it became clear that the young emperor would not adjust his erratic behaviour, Maesa came to favour Alexander instead. She survived Elagabalus’s violent overthrow, dying early in the reign of her second grandson.46 Although the evidence for Maesa as the true power behind the throne is relatively thin, she has generally been portrayed as the most politically astute of the Severan empresses. Often, she is presented as ambitious, cold and calculating. According to one of the letter writers in Chaussard’s Esquisse morale, the old woman has no passion left except ambition; she is smart, strong, brave and highly skilled in hiding her true motives. She is prepared to do anything for power, including ‘trampling all the laws of modesty under foot’.47 In Duggan’s Family Favourites, Maesa shows no hesitation in sacrificing Elagabalus to secure the throne for Alexander, declaring that whatever happens, a grandson of hers will rule in Rome. In a similar vein, Horner and Onstott in Child of the Sun make it clear that the old woman considers her grandchildren as no more than pawns. ‘But if you think you are Caesar, think again,’ she snarls at the obstinate Elagabalus. ‘I am Caesar! I rule Rome and I rule you too. Don’t forget it. I put you where you are and I can take it away.’ Julia Donner, the character who may be Maesa’s modern counterpart in Duberman’s Elagabalus, responds with relief when her free-spirited grandson Adrian (i.e. Elagabalus) commits suicide, since he will no longer be able to besmirch the precious family name. However, the play reveals her as a hypocrite, always busy to keep up appearances, but secretly engaging in S&M with her chauffeur.48 Other works cast Julia Maesa in a more sympathetic light. In Tysens’s De uitterste proef, she acts as the voice of reason, entreating the tyrannical Elagabalus to desist from his marriage to Alexander’s beloved Marcia. ‘Oh evil never heard! Oh cruelty never known! Look at what you are starting,’ she warns the emperor after he has locked Alexander up and threatens to kill him. In vain, she begs the tyrant to let justice prevail.49 Lombard’s L’Agonie shows us a Maesa who desperately tries to keep her family together. In a scene reminiscent of Domna’s maternal dilemma, she exclaims at her feuding daughters that she has given birth to them both and does not want one to kill the other. The Maesa in Couperus’s De berg van licht stays devoted to Elagabalus, even though he slips increasingly from her control and even beats her with a sandal during a fight, reversing their roles from the start of the novel, when she was disciplining him through the same means. After the young ruler has perished, Maesa looks like ‘nothing but a suddenly very old woman’, mourning the death of her grandson, ‘whom she loved more than herself and with whom her ambition has been extinguished’. In Artaud’s Crowned 131

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Anarchist, she is the double and opposite of the domineering Domna: a mouse-like character, always scurrying around and putting the interests of others above her own.50 The notion of feminine rule fits well with stereotypes of the ‘East’ as a place where men have been emasculated. At the same time, Julia Maesa is usually imagined as a very rational, self-controlled character – the opposite of the irrational, extravagant ‘Oriental’. When emphasis is placed on her Syrian background, this is usually done through her foreign appearance and devotion to a foreign god, not through descriptions of ‘Oriental’ behaviour. Couperus’s Maesa, for instance, is identified as a ‘Daughter of the Sun’ who values the mysteries of Emesa higher than those of Roman religion. When Elagabalus marries his male lover Hierocles, she disapproves ‘as a Roman matron’, but approves ‘as a Syrian’, since the Elagabal cult is all about the strive for androgyny in Couperus’s view. The Maesa in Family Favourites makes a striking appearance on a dromedary, wearing a ‘helmet of oriental design’ and carrying a bejewelled, curvy scimitar, while the colour of her face is described as ‘black rather than brown’.51 Nevertheless, in several works she is the one advising Elagabalus to tone down his ‘Oriental’ display in order to appease the Romans.52 As such, she is behaving in a manner befitting her image as a woman who places politics above all else.

Julia Soaemias, imperial harlot The contemporary sources Cassius Dio and Herodian do not say much about Julia Soaemias (c. 180–218 ce ), although both mention that she perished with her son when the praetorians revolted against Elagabalus. In the Vita Heliogabali, we learn that the emperor was wholly under Soaemias’s control and did nothing without her consent. Allegedly, she attended Senate meetings and led a women’s senate. She was also ‘a most depraved woman’ who ‘lived like a harlot and practised all manner of lewdness in the palace’. Apparently, Elagabalus’s nickname Varius had been given to him by his schoolmates, because his mother was so promiscuous that he appeared to originate from the semen of various men.53 Undoubtedly, colourful descriptions such as these prompted Boccaccio to discuss Soaemias in his treatize on famous (and sometimes infamous) women. The author makes no effort to hide his contempt for the empress, remarking with regard to her attendance of Senate meetings: ‘O what a shameful spectacle to see a little prostitute, who had been pulled the day before from the brothel, seated in the midst of such eminent men!’54 Like the author of the Vita Heliogabali, Boccaccio places no emphasis on Soaemias’s ‘Oriental’ background, but that aspect of her character gains prominence in later evocations, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. In Lombard’s L’Agonie, Elagabalus’s reign is presented as an effort ‘to immerse the Occident in the pompous Orient to bring it out more dazzling, as from a bath of passions, crimes and gold’. Soaemias is at the forefront of this effort, appearing on the pages of the novel in great splendour, against a background of cushions, floating draperies and smoke of burning perfume, displaying her beautiful body and openly engaging in erotic activities. Mention is made of her ‘violently amorous ancestry . . . which had overwhelmed the world with crimes’, but she is also associated with feverishness and neuroticism – in short, with decadence and 132

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degeneration.55 Couperus puts her in a more sympathetic light, but also mentions her ‘Syrian blood’ and remarks that Elagabalus’s big, violet, flirting eyes are looking more and more like his mother’s as he approaches adulthood, hinting at his depravity and loss of masculinity.56 In many works, Soaemias and her son are presented as kindred spirits, displaying the same preference for promiscuity, sensuousness and extravagant luxury. Several authors even depict or hint at an incestuous relationship between the two, including Artaud, Gilbert, Jonigk and Reed.57 More often than not, Julia Soaemias is portrayed as rather dim and superficial, or at least as a woman who cares little about anything besides sex. However, some authors grant her a more political role. In Tysens’s De uitterste proef, she acts as the emperor’s closest adviser, invariably urging him to follow his tyrannical inclinations. As such, she is even more evil than Elagabalus himself. At a crucial moment in the play, the emperor is overcome with doubt and, in a long monologue, considers whether he should mend his ways and abandon arrogance for virtue. Just when he has decided to become a good and just ruler (‘Begone malicious evil, begone!’), Soaemias appears as an almost-satanic figure, seducing him to return to the dark side: Oh Gods! Which madness weighs on your mind? Would you see your respectability ruthlessly Trampled by the plebs? Will you tolerate that mockery?58 The results are tragic: Elagabalus decides to stick to his tyrannical ways, thus sparking a revolt and condemning his mother and himself to an early grave. Soaemias’s role is equally malicious in Cabuchet’s Héliogabale, where she is contrasted with the virtuous, well-meaning Mammaea as a ruthless tyrant who has deliberately spoiled her own child, so that she could use him as an instrument in her bid for power.59 Probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Soaemias, or at least her modern counterpart, can be found in Duberman’s Elagabalus. As is often the case with Elagabalus and Soaemias, Adrian and his mother Selena are presented as kindred spirits, here characterized by their open-minded approach to life and their rejection of conventional morality.60 In the list of characters, Selena is defined as ‘sensuous’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘likeable’, while Adrian at one stage describes her as ‘merely frivolous’, which makes him worry for her wellbeing. Both are considered as potential risks for Uncle Paul’s political ambitions, resulting in Selena’s banishment to the countryside.61 This ‘Soaemias’, then, is no longer a depraved woman worthy of contempt, but, like her son, a free spirit raising the heckles of an uptight, conservative society.

Julia Mammaea, ambitious outsider Julia Mammaea (after 180–235 ce ) played only a marginal role during Elagabalus’s reign, but Herodian records that she smelled an opportunity when the emperor’s popularity waned and bribed the soldiers to side with her son, Severus Alexander. Allegedly, she 133

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kept the boy away from the cult of Elagabal, giving him a ‘proper’ Greco-Roman education and surrounding him with wise and virtuous men – a habit she kept up after he had assumed the throne. The Historia Augusta in particular portrays Alexander as an ideal type of emperor, the opposite of Elagabalus in every possible way. Apparently he was so devoted to his mother that she exercised considerable power during his reign, which was not to everyone’s liking – especially since she acquired a reputation for greed and envy. When the emperor was killed in a military revolt on the Rhine frontier, Mammaea perished with him. It was the end of the Severan dynasty.62 Zeno’s libretto for Alessandro Severo is the only work focusing on Mammaea’s glory days as empress during her son’s reign. However, her role in this drama is somewhat less than glorious, as she is portrayed in an unflattering light, envious of her son’s wife, Sallustia, whom she feels is threatening her position. When she manages to trick Alexander into signing a document ordering Sallustia’s banishment, the latter’s father, who is captain of the guard, becomes so angry that he makes two attempts to kill Mammaea, first through poison and later through stabbing. Both times, however, the virtuous Sallustia intervenes and saves her rival, eventually leading the two empresses to reconcile. Mammaea, then, functions as the antagonist of the piece, motivated by ambition, envy and the desire to control her son. ‘You will see, proud one,’ she threatens the absent Sallustia in an aria, ‘you will see what Giulia [i.e. Julia Mammaea] shall be; / And that she shall have more power.’ In a later scene, talking to Alexander, she places herself in the role of victim by comparing herself to the empress Agrippina, who was devoted to her son Nero, but was nevertheless killed on his command. The comparison is telling, since Agrippina had a reputation as a domineering mother as well.63 In works set during Elagabalus’s reign, Mammaea is often also characterized as ambitious, scheming for Alexander to become emperor.64 While Soaemias and Elagabalus are usually portrayed as stereotypical depraved ‘Orientals’, Mammaea is shown to keep her distance from their excesses and to secure a proper upbringing for her son. Alexander’s idealization by the Historia Augusta biographer clearly echoes through in this interpretation. In Chaussard’s Esquisse morale, the central theme is Alexander’s education, preparing him to become a virtuous ruler. Yet even while she devotes herself to her son, Mammaea makes an effort to civilize Elagabalus too, calling herself his ‘other mother’ in a letter she writes to him and complaining that he does not heed her good advice. In Couperus’s De berg van licht, the tension between the emperor and his aunt is palpable when he comes to visit her in her rooms, where he finds her in a distinctly Greco-Roman setting: surrounded by marble sculptures, rhetoricians and philosophers, while Alexander is wrestling with a Greek athlete. Likewise, the Mammaea in Duggan’s Family Favourites makes a deliberate effort to win the sympathies of conventional Romans by dressing and behaving in a conventionally Roman manner.65 Remarkably, a tradition developed in Mammaea’s Nachleben which re-imagines her as a Christian. Although there is not a hint of this in the major ancient sources, the church historian Eusebius remarks that she was a pious woman who invited the church father Origen to court.66 To novelists and playwrights depicting the excesses of Elagabalus’s pagan sun cult, this was a useful device to place Mammaea even further at odds with her 134

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‘Oriental’ nephew. Hence Cabuchet’s Héliogabale, the first part in a trilogy of plays about the triumph of Christianity, portrays Mammaea as a devoted follower of Christ, rejecting the decadence of Rome and predicting the rise of a new, better world on the ruins of the old one. In a surprising move, she marries Elagabalus, who is in love with her (!), doing everything in her power to make him see the light of God. Needless to say, her efforts fail. In Lombard’s L’Agonie, Mammaea’s devotion appears less sincere: she promises the (Western) Christians that she will protect them, but as the author states she does not understand their faith all too well. In fact, she is struck mostly by their prediction that Alexander will one day rule the Empire, regarding them as useful allies.67 Couperus describes the empress as a ‘pious Roman’ who has drifted away from her family’s Syrian sun cult. Although she is now devoted to the Roman gods, she is also drawn to the wisdom of Origen, with whom she is corresponding, and has several Christians in her retinue. In the novel’s ominous final scene, the crowd surrounding the newly acclaimed emperor Alexander contains ‘numerous gloomily dressed, monk-like, slavishly cheering Christians’. Thus the reader is reminded what the future will hold. With the rise of Mammaea and her son to power, the end of the pagan world is drawing nigh.68

Conclusion Despite their varied images in a great number of literary and artistic works, Julia Domna, Julia Maesa, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mammaea appear throughout their Nachleben as characters with relatively stable, recognisable and distinct personalities. Although all four of them are associated with the ‘East’ to a greater or lesser extent, Soaemias is the only one who is usually associated with such typical ‘Oriental’ traits as promiscuity, frivolity and extravagance; whereas Mammaea, like her son, is often placed more closely to the culture of Rome and the ‘West’ – sometimes even taking on a Christian identity. The reversal of traditional gender roles is a recurring theme in the Nachleben, not only because women take control of the Empire, but also because they use male characters – Elagabalus and Alexander – as their pawns. Maesa, Mammaea and even Soaemias are all frequently presented as domineering mother or grandmother figures, often leading to tensions with the (grand)sons they are trying to control. Domna is portrayed in a less dominant position with regard to Caracalla and Geta, appealing to their love for her as their mother, but unable to keep one from killing the other. Their reputation as ‘women who ruled the world’ notwithstanding, the Severan empresses are rarely granted a primary place in the spotlight: with few exceptions, they are secondary characters in plays and novels focusing on Elagabalus, albeit often important ones. It is no coincidence that the only two dramatic works in which a Severan empress is the uncontested protagonist – the Julia Domna plays by Bradley and Cooper and Gründ and Khaznadar – are set outside the period 218–22 ce . Nevertheless, Domna, Maesa, Soaemias and Mammaea make for appealing dramatic characters – whether as imperious matriarchs, scheming politicians, devoted mothers or determined champions of an ‘Oriental’ sun cult. 135

CHAPTER 9 THE PALMYRENE QUEEN ZENOBIA IN SYRIAN TV: INVERTING ORIENTALISM FOR MODERN NATIONHOOD? 1 Anja Wieber

A desert queen through Western eyes In 1907, the art supplement of the Sonntags-Zeitung fürs Deutsche Haus (Sunday Newspaper for the German Home), a magazine for the whole family and especially the female reader,2 published a reproduction of a painting by the then well-known German illustrator Edmund Brüning: Die Gefangennahme der Königin Zenobia durch die Truppen des Kaisers Aurelianus (Queen Zenobia captured by the troops of Emperor Aurelian) (see Fig. 9.1). Referring to the year 272 ce , this history painting depicts the arrest of the Palmyrene queen who had taken over – after the death of her husband Odaenathus – his position in the Palmyrene sub-empire during a very critical period of the Roman empire.3 When she started to defy Rome by enlarging the Palmyrene territory, Emperor Aurelian took steps against her and conducted a successful Roman campaign in the East. Ancient and Byzantine sources do not come to any agreement about the end of Zenobia’s reign, let alone her death or her life in retirement after the defeat.4 The unknown author of Historia Augusta, a late ancient collection of biographies of Roman emperors, tells of Zenobia’s escape on camelback, but not without lecturing the reader that Syrians do not call this species by the same name, but by the word ‘dromedary’. Zenobia however did not succeed in escaping and was taken captive by the Roman cavalry.5 The late ancient pagan historiographer Zosimus (around 500) tells also of Zenobia’s flight on camelback, but describes how, shortly afterwards, Roman cavalry forced the queen to leave the ship she had boarded to cross the Euphrates.6 The German artist might have had exactly those ancient sources in mind and conflated them when composing his painting.7 This is the reason why we see Zenobia on a dromedary, whereas reeds in the foreground and palms in the background denote the vegetation of a river valley. Brüning’s definition of authenticity may have included the flora and fauna, but not the way the Palmyrene queen is dressed or her hairstyle with the uraeus diadem. All that makes her resemble the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII from whom Zenobia allegedly claimed descent.8 However, Zenobia’s scantily clad male aides follow more the stereotype of the Moors in Orientalist paintings of the nineteenth century.9 This Zenobia is seen through the lenses of Hellenistic Egypt and the nineteenthcentury Western version of the picturesque Orient, in this case of the North African region. The nineteenth-century discourses of Orientalism10 took as a basis that life in the 136

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV

Fig. 9.1 Reproduction of a painting by Edmund Brüning, ‘Kunstbeilage der Sonntags-Zeitung fürs Deutsche Haus,’ Supplement 1907: Queen Zenobia captured. Author’s collection.

Orient (all the more so if women’s lives are concerned) followed the same rhythm throughout the centuries, no matter which region, be it North Africa, Near or Middle or Far East. And not only in Europe did the depiction of ancient women fall under the spell of Orientalism. Jacob Rama Berman has pointed out that ‘Zenobia was second only to Cleopatra in terms of the visibility of an Oriental woman in nineteenth-century American print culture.’11 Sure enough, through the ages and in different ways the Palmyrene queen has played (and still plays) an important role in the reception process of Antiquity.12 Evidence for her Orientalization can be found as late as the twentieth century. In his romantic novel Queen of the East (1st edn. 1956) the British author Alexander Baron has turned Zenobia into a beautiful harem girl whose bedroom we are allowed to peep into.13 After her defeat, this Zenobia, despite her political skills, ends up in Rome as Emperor Aurelian’s secret mistress: ‘She had forgotten her lost throne, as a woman forgets last year’s fashion. She had forgotten Palmyra.’14 Richard Stoneman has rated this novel as Hollywood material: Yet modern novelistic writers have found in Zenobia a theme as rich as any that graced Hollywood. The heroine of Alexander Baron’s novel ‘Queen of the East’, Zenobia, a sensual and cunning beauty pitted against the hard and ruthless emperor Aurelian, is a match for Cleopatra on any terms.15 137

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From a cinematic viewpoint, Zenobia’s story would indeed make an excellent movie: a widowed woman in power, presiding over a colourful caravan city in the desert and for some time fighting successfully against the super-power Rome, only to be conquered in the end. Astonishingly, so far only one feature film has been made (Nel Segno di Roma aka Sign of Rome, F/I/BRD 1959), starring the statuesque blonde Anita Ekberg as Zenobia.16 Orientalist clichés, e.g. belly dance17 at the Palmyrene court, have also left their mark on this film that is a typical example for an historical movie of the peplum genre.18 So far we have only looked into Western versions of Zenobia’s story. To counterbalance this viewpoint, an Eastern perspective is needed and this is to be found in the role the Palmyrene queen plays in Arab countries. In this article, I will confine myself to a case study about Zenobia in modern Syria,19 using the example of a Syrian historical soap opera from the 1990s. My main focus will lie on the questions of how Zenobia is portrayed in the series against the background of Syrian nationalism or Arab culture and whether in the context of Syrian TV culture the queen’s characterization differs from the Western versions of an Oriental(ized) woman.

Getting to know the TV series Al A’babid: Setting, characters and plot In 1996 the Syrian director Bassam al-Malla20 shot an historical TV series of 22 episodes about the Roman-Palmyrene confrontation, entitled Al A’babid (Separate paths).21 According to the Syrian online social magazine Tahani this is not the Palmyrene queen’s first appearance on Syrian TV; there had been other series before.22 Al A’babid portrays the fate of some families in a community called Ush al-Yaman (Nest of Doves), lying in the Palmyrene empire half way to Egypt, whose development is therefore closely intertwined with ancient global politics. The series starts with a colourful setting and a number of characters:23 the merchant Al-Monzer and his wife Kamra have three unmarried daughters, and all the young men of marriageable age are in love with Taima, the eldest daughter. She loves Malko, who rejects her, whereas her younger sisters are in love with two of her own suitors. During the series, the viewer is taken into the world of ancient Palmyra: we learn about their family life, council sessions and service to the ancient god Ba’al. We watch the well-off families living in rural mansions sustained by their slaves’ work and the caravan trade. As Nest of Doves is chosen to accommodate a garrison headquarters, a lot of quarrelling starts about leadership. Besides, the notables are involved in a dubious arms business. They intend to buy arms for their garrison and thereby to gain safety for their caravans and the queen’s appreciation. Actually, Elabel,24 the negotiator from the city of Palmyra, will reroute arms from the capital’s arsenal and sell them to the community, for his own profit. During all these developments, Zenobia is only a reference point in talks and sometimes the camera is pointed at a portrait bust of her in the background, a Classicistic three-dimensional version, resembling her face on modern Syrian banknotes and the portrait by Michelangelo (see Fig. 9.2, bottom right and left).25 However, the only ancient portraits of Zenobia, stylized and different in their ways of representation, can be found 138

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on coins struck in her name.26 In episode 5 her written decision, whereby Nest of Doves is declared a garrison headquarters and Malko becomes the leader (‘in appreciation of the courage he showed when he served under the command of king Uzaina [Odaenathus] the Great’), is read to the local senate in front of her bust (0:39–0:41). The letter starts and ends with ‘Zenobia, Queen of the whole East’. So it is clear that Zenobia is the string-puller behind all the events and has obviously already extended Palmyrene territory. In episode 7 we watch Malko and Narjess, the leader of the garrison and his prospective wife, having a conversation about books. Narjess speaks of her astonishment at the Romans’ brutality because she has found out about the destruction of Petra (al-Batra). Malko tells her another example of Roman politics – the end of Carthage (ep. 7, 0:05– 0:07) – and admits that he would like to build up a library just to get to know the Roman enemy better. He anticipates that the emperor Aurelian would not tolerate a strong Palmyrene kingdom. Here we learn that Palmyrene history is seen in a specific line of tradition, i.e. Carthage – Petra – Palmyra, a view that corresponds to the idea of the Phoenicians as Proto-Arabs and Palmyra as a second Carthage as presented by the Syrian General Moustafa Tlass27 in his book about Zenobia.28 Later in this TV series, the

Fig. 9.2 Montage of three images: Large image – screenshot ep. 10 Al A’babid: Raghda as Queen Zenobia; Bottom left – screenshot ep. 3 Al A’babid: portrait bust of Zenobia; Bottom right – detail of a Syrian 500-pound note: Queen Zenobia (author’s collection).

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queen will repeat that idea after the Romans had brutally sacked Nest of Doves, their flames of destruction giving the perfect introduction to her speech (ep. 13, 0:15–0:16:35). In episode 9 it has been decided to divide the leadership of the garrison between Malko and Mali because of some opposition against Malko. The garrison’s trainer Ailami therefore quits the service because he thinks this unwise. When the young officers come to say goodbye he gives them an historical lesson (0:26–0:31): When I fought King Sabour [Shapur], I did not do so for a man called Uzaina [Odaenathus]. I fought him for Uzaina the Palmyran. I fought him for Palmyra. Listen to what I finally want to say, you knights! Do you think the Romans are preparing themselves only to eliminate a woman called Zenobia? If you believe so, I would be ashamed of you and ashamed of myself too. Zenobia stands for Palmyra. Both of them are one thing. Ailami’s appearance in this scene, reminiscent of a Bedouin (especially because of his turban and his cloak, both black), makes this speech an appeal for unity, with an Arab subtext to Palmyra. A musical theme, reappearing in the series whenever Palmyrene unity is at stake, reinforces the message (e.g. ep. 9: 0:22; 0:31).

Will the real queen please stand up . . . In episode 10 Zenobia’s bust is again present when her ban on the archaic ritual of Marriage of mourning (the groom dies if his bride does not save him from an awful death ceremony) is communicated to the senate of Nest of Doves. Her official title is now: ‘Queen of the whole East, Sebtima (sic!)29 Zenobia’. After a cut, we witness an enormous gong in action and eventually the queen herself enters the stage for the first time in this series: she is played by the famous Syrian-Egyptian actress Raghda.30 Her council room seems to be huge compared to the local senate and she takes her seat on an impressive throne, decorated with purple velvet cushions, placed on an elevated pedestal reached via several stairs (0:07; Fig. 9.2). Her robe is all gold and purple and she is laden with jewellery. Her hairstyle and her regal headdress clearly seem to cite Michelangelo’s drawing of Zenobia,31 without the bare breasts.32 Actually by the end of the eighteenth century, the toplessness has already been altered by William Sharp in his engraving after the drawing.33 In an Arab TV show the original Renaissance style would have been inconceivable, too. Her necklaces, however, are reminiscent of the jewellery with which Palmyrene ladies are portrayed.34 The senators and Zenobia’s advisers (General Zabada [Zabdas], the Greek philosopher Longine/Lonjin and the Arab wise man Shmisati) perform proskynesis to her and she addresses them as follows: Gentlemen, it came to my hearing that the Roman Senate hailed as one man in the presence of the Emperor Orlean [Aurelian]: ‘Save us from Zenobia, save us from Zenobia.’ Why does the Roman Senate want to get rid of Zenobia, though Zenobia 140

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV

has not stood against any of their rights and she has not invaded a cubit of their land either? If the Romans want to take revenge of [for?] the defeat of their previous emperor Jalinous [Gallienus], then this isn’t their right because we were not the ones who acted unjustly against Jalinous, rather he was the one who acted unjustly towards us and invaded our land and declared war against us. All what we did was that we defended our sovereignty. And we were able to defeat him and to put him to shame. And we will do the same with Orlean, if he dares to invade us. Zenobia’s argument is that of a bellum iustum. Interestingly the TV script changed some details of the historical tradition: first of all ‘Save us from Zenobia’ is reported by the Historia Augusta to have been the adclamatio when Claudius, the predecessor of Aurelian, was declared emperor.35 Secondly, the place was not the Senate but the temple of Apollo. Last but not least, our only source for Gallienus at war with Zenobia is the Historia Augusta telling us that after Odaenathus had died, the emperor sent his general Heraclianus to the Orient.36 A very late source (not widely accepted) could explain the death of Odaenathus (267 ce ) as being the result of the scheming of the Roman emperor: Gallienus finally wanted to get rid of the ruler of Palmyra who had become over-mighty after having driven back the Persians, while he himself was constrained by western turmoil.37 But we have little proof that combat action actually took place on Syrian soil at that time.38 Nonetheless such a construction has a modern subtext: Syria is a country constantly under fire and has to protect its territory against foreign invaders. The discussion between Zenobia and her advisers about the strategies to deal with the Romans, by either military or diplomatic means, ends with her statement: ‘. . . but I won’t be indulgent towards whoever wants to harm our dignity or our sovereignty.’ (0:11). Later on we witness Zenobia making arrangements for a war, when the commander of Palmyra’s garrison, Zabai, asks for an audience (0:19). An assassination attempt with poison on Zenobia’s life has failed. ‘The son of the leader of the desert tribes, Wa’el, son of Qusai’ is the culprit. When Wa’el appears in the Crown Council to be questioned, he is every inch an Arab sheikh (0:30). It transpires that he has only come into contact with the conspirators because he believed that the queen had murdered her husband and her stepson.39 His explanation that he was only approached as a diversion, being the son of one of the sheikhs who withdrew from the assembly after Odaenathus’ death, meets with queenly leniency. The musical theme of unity is added and reinforces the message. Then Zenobia tells her astonished general and her commander to arrest the chief as he is not a Palmyran but is of Roman origin. The leitmotif of unity as a target value that is endangered because of disagreement and tribal interests has modern overtones, which is said to be intended by the director.40 Eventually, the defection of the desert tribes indeed plays an important role in Zenobia’s downfall (ep. 15 and 16).41 In episode 11 (0:24–0:25; cf. also ep. 12: 0:02–0:03) we watch the garrison of Ush alYaman split up between Malko’s and Mali’s followers. They have two flags and are clad in red or green, both very symbolic colours in Islamic countries.42 Malko is supervising the red party, his competitor Mali the green party. An intertitle in episode 12 (0:39: ‘The 141

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beginning of the year 272 A.D.’) introduces The Massacre at Ush al-Yaman. But the imminent Roman ambush makes the warriors tear down the fences and they want to fight the Roman invader side by side, no matter from which party they are. Again the message is underlined by the national anthem-like music (0:41).

The warrior queen versus a tyrant Meanwhile (ep. 11 0:28–0:38), Zenobia has had a meeting with the Roman senator Maximinian during which they could not come to an agreement. In the Palmyrene senate, the Roman negotiator delivers Emperor Aurelian’s message of disapproval, he talks of Palmyra illegally occupying Egypt, of rebellion and of the coins Zenobia is minting with her son’s portrait instead of the emperor’s.43 After having offered an alliance, Zenobia alludes to the fact that Palmyra was not some city or only a part of the Roman empire, that her husband beat the Persians on behalf of the Romans. Maximinian on the other hand insists that Odaenathus was rewarded with the title King of Kings, whereas Zenobia puts emphasis on the fact that Rome murdered her husband and tried to murder her. During the whole conversation her queenly air of authority meets with her generals’ approval and she makes the Roman senator obey like a schoolboy. Then she causes him to watch the questioning of her unsuccessful assassin, and holds her answer to Aurelian’s letter back. On the next day she lets the Roman emperor know: As for Egypt, I find it arrogance and injustice to demand it back. How do you want to return [to get?] back something that does not belong to you and demand to own a land which is not yours? The queen’s answer could also be read as a modern phrase considering Near Eastern politics, and from the Syrian point of view such a sentence could bear a meaning for their current territorial conflicts, e.g. the Golan Heights.44 As the quarrel becomes more heated (Zenobia: ‘We have never been subordinat[e] to Rome. And if you think so, then it does not mean that your thinking is right.’ 0:38), a messenger reports hostile Roman actions in Egypt, and Zenobia accuses the Romans of deceitfulness and sends the following message through the senator: The power of Rome will not make it an immortal civilization, but Palmyra’s civilization is the power itself. (0:40) Whereas Aurelian is introduced to the viewer in quickly passing scenes, as part of the marching Roman army and its powerful war machinery, we witness Zenobia as a proficient and deliberate commander-in-chief, standing with her generals Zabada and Zabbai at a sand table meant for military simulation. Zenobia expresses her understanding that Aurelian needs the conquest of Palmyra for his personal glory, that is to secure his position in the Senate, and therefore he will be ruthless: ‘It is a war of extermination 142

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV

which we have never fought before.’ (0:44) She believes the attack on Egypt to be a diversion so that Palmyrenes would leave their Northern borders unprotected. We meet the emperor Aurelian for the first time in his tent (ep. 12, 0:30), where he is engaged in a conversation with the Roman senator Maximinian about Zenobia. Aurelian: ‘They [The Roman senators] perceive Zenobia the way they perceive their women. They perceive her as soft [indulgent?] women wearing damask and silk, . . . and as stupid who doesn’t know what is going on outside her room, isn’t it how they perceive Zenobia?’ Quite the contrary, we are told by Aurelian, Zenobia is powerful and resourceful, a ‘dreadful dragon’ from whose mouth the ‘jewel’ Palmyra has to be restored to Rome. Whereas these figures of speech, i.e. Zenobia’s characterization as a monster and at the same time the admission of her power and wisdom, concur with the ancient Roman objective of making her a worthy opponent for Rome,45 the way Aurelian is portrayed differs from the known topoi used to describe him as a good emperor.46 In contrast to Zenobia’s dignity, Aurelian is seen reclining in casual posture on an oversized seat, and at the end of the conversation wagging a finger to emphasize his message and thereby losing his poise (0:32–0:33). For him the throne might prove to be too great. In episode 13 (0:41) we witness the emperor listening to his commander-in-chief Claudian with only half an ear; instead he is drinking, and patting his nameless concubines who sit on the stairs to his throne like pets. The camera’s slightly low angle does not generate an emperor we look up to – quite the opposite: Aurelian is cast as a grotesque tyrant. After Palmyra has been under siege Aurelian asks Zenobia via a messenger to surrender.47 Again their behaviour is contrasting. Whereas Zenobia is every inch a queen with severe selfcontrol, who declines to abandon her people, once more Aurelian is shown (by an unfavourable camera angle) in a fit of rage. He throws away Zenobia’s answer and frantically threatens her. He has decided to drag her through Rome in his triumphal procession (ep. 17, 0:13–0:16). Here and in many other scenes, Aurelian is definitely cast as the bad emperor,48 governed by haughtiness, luxury and fury, surrounded by personal attendants (cf. ep. 18, 0:12 and 0:36; ep. 19, 0:11 and 0:17:48). Interestingly, the Syrian TV Aurelian is now seen with a typical attribute of an Eastern sovereign, which in the Italian film Nel Segno di Roma marked Zenobia as a representative of the Orient: the fan.49 (See Fig. 9.3.) As it was not regarded as suitable for Roman men to use a fan in public (it was thought to be a female requisite), Aurelian is thus marked as effeminate.50 The Eastern queen and the Western emperor have obviously changed their roles: whereas the Orient resonates with (male) efficiency, the Occident is characterized by (female) laxity and lack of self-control.

The queen is ours and will live forever Once the desert tribes have defected from Palmyra (Aurelian has bribed them, ep. 16) and, to make things worse, the Palmyrene army has been defeated (ep. 17, 0:30–0:36), 143

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Fig. 9.3 Montage of two images: Large image – film still Sign of Rome (F/I/BRD 1959), Girosign Ltd. (a shutdown supplier of advertising materials for the movies): Anita Ekberg as Zenobia (author’s collection); Bottom right – screen shot ep. 19 Al A’babid: Abdul Rahman Al Rashi as Emperor Aurelian.

Zenobia takes extreme measures. She decides to ask the Persian king for support, and she is ready to accomplish the mission herself, notwithstanding her generals’ opposition. The queen, clad in all shades of green (in Arab culture the symbol of hope and the favourite colour of the Prophet Mohammed) is determined to risk her life as is obvious from her announcement: ‘The dream of an independent Palmyra will not come true unless we sacrifice ourselves.’ Not surprisingly, Zenobia is at home in the role of a Bedouin; dressed appropriately in black, she leaves the place through a secret passage. On their way (Ailami and two soldiers are her only companions) she tells her men not to address her by her title. Instead they should call her Taima (ep. 18, 0:05) which is in fact the name of the fictitious main character of that series and the name of a famous oasis in Northwest Arabia.51 As if it were not enough to demonstrate her being deeply rooted in the desert, she gazes in the distance and contemplates: I like this desert which embraces Palmyra with its two hands. It is like a compassionate mother who takes care of her baby. ep. 18, 0:05 144

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV

Finally, Zenobia and her men are caught by Roman soldiers and the news plunges the whole city into deep grief. The generals and the senators gather around her empty throne. General Zabada reminds them with a fierce paraenesis that Zenobia is still with them, in their hearts and minds, and in the end everybody swears on her name with the right fist raised (0:42:20). While the members of her council are all in tears, General Zabada calls their and our attention to the queen’s words: Gentlemen, the queen’s doing is a lesson for us and an example to be followed. I hear her sound loud, clear, shaking the whole world and ahead of time and place. I hear it coming from the past, present and future. Listen, listen to her. The camera turns to Zenobia’s statue and we actually hear her voice: Damn[ed] is the crown of a meek and submissive king. And praised are the shackles in the hands of a free and reluctant king. Zabada is repeating her phase: Damn[ed] is the crown of a meek and submissive king. And praised are the shackles in the hands of a free and reluctant king. Palmyra is great, gent[l]emen. This is what we learnt from the Queen, yes, Palmyra is great . . . . Therefore, Zabada will lead an attack against the Romans to rescue the queen who sacrificed everything to save Palmyra from slavery (ep. 18, 0:40–0:45). In the end Zenobia and Aurelian meet in person; although in chains, the Palmyrene queen still keeps her countenance, accuses the Roman emperor of cowardliness and declares that at any rate her people are independent of Rome. Zenobia: ‘We have our land, tongue and civilization.’ Aurelian: ‘There is only one civilization in the world. It is Rom[e]’s.’ Zenobia: ‘Which civilization are you talking about? Are you talking about the civilization that is built on others’ civilization[s] or are you talking about the civilization that is established on dead bodies and ruins? Your power is your civilization but there is a big difference between the civilization of power and the power of civilization.’ Aurelian (laughing): ‘I see that your civilization is not of any use for you.’ Zenobia: ‘And I see that what you see is incorrect, Emperor. History will judge, not you.’ Aurelian: ‘History?! History will talk for [a] long [time] about the procession of victory I prepared to enter Rome. History will tell tales and stories about the Emperor who came back home dragging behind him a prisoner of war who is shackled with chains of pure gold.’ 145

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This dialogue finishes with a close-up of Zenobia repeatedly shaking her head in denial (ep. 19, 0:12–0:15). The last episodes present different interwoven threads: the surviving members of the main families and of the court as well as the people of Palmyra join in an uprising against Rome (ep. 19–22; gathering in ep. 21, 0:03) and all die heroically for queen and country. Zenobia, although imprisoned, finally carries off the victory over Aurelian: after a hunger strike and forced feeding she manages to persuade her guard (who is actually a Roman soldier of Palmyrene birth) to provide her with poison (ep. 20). Her swallowing the poisonous plant is accompanied by the music that has become a leitmotif of Palmyrene unity and strength throughout the whole series (ep. 21, 0:01:50–0:03:30); some minutes later we learn that she summons the emperor who comes to her deathbed. Aurelian: ‘What does my prisoner want from me?’ Zenobia: ‘I’m no longer your prisoner, Orlean. You’re the one who will undo my chains in a while.’ Aurelian: ‘No, not before I drag you with them in the victory{’s} procession.’ Zenobia: ‘You have not become victorious yet, Orlean. The victorious is the one who’ll fulfil[l] [impose?] his will on the other.’ Aurelian: ‘You’re here {with} [by] my {own} will, Zenobia.’ Zenobia: ‘But I’ll get out from here by my own will (death rattle). Your soldiers or guards will not be able to surprise me by death and I know this well.’ Aurelian: ‘You are not in a position that allows you to dictate your will, Zenobia.’ Zenobia: ‘Except in my death, Orlean.’ Aurelian: ‘You’ll die by my {own} will too. And my will not be late [belated?] too long. Your life is not [will not be] precious anymore after the victory{’s} procession is finished.’ Zenobia: ‘My will is free, Orlean.’ Then she dies, and a desperate Aurelian orders her to wake up and to end this silly game; next the emperor sends his men out of the tent. In a dialogue with the dead queen he asks her why she could not honour his victory. She should not think that she has won, because the dead have no will (ep. 21, 0:06–0:11). This Aurelian is portrayed as lacking selfcontrol and virility. At the very end, dead bodies are scattered everywhere in Palmyra and gradually Zenobia’s portrait bust emerges out of flames and we hear her repeat the moral: Rome’s power will not grant it immortal civilization – But Palmyra’s civilization is the power itself. Then her bust is crossfaded into Aurelian’s real film face and suffused with thick black smoke to change quickly into a human hand, stretched out, with rain drops falling as a background image for a credit sequence: 146

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV

Orlean came back to Palmyra and exterminated Absose’s [Septimius Apsaios] revolution.52 Then [he] took revenge {of} [on] Palmyra’s people. He killed its men and women and had no mercy {over} [on] its old men and children. He left his barbarian print on its ruins. But its lofty monuments show{es} till today the big difference between the civilization and power [of power?] and the power of civilization. ep. 22, 0:57–0:58 That text combined with the depiction of waterdrops – highly symbolic for a desert country – could bear the connotation of the everlasting oasis Palmyra. We do have different ancient traditions concerning Zenobia’s death, one of which is that the queen died on her way to Rome.53 To choose that as an end for the series is quite clearly motivated by national pride and the concept of victory in failure: this Zenobia has avoided the public humiliation of a triumphal procession abroad.54 The modern subtext is that the East did not bow to the West no matter whether they suffered a defeat, a construct that makes Rome a representative for the West which can be replaced by the USA or other Western countries. The expression ‘civilization of power’ can be traced back to Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on Nationalism (1917): in his view Western civilization is to be characterized as a ‘civilization of power’.55 By now this argument has become part of the discourse of Occidentalism, which is an inversion of the concept of Orientalism and is referred to as stereotyping of the Western World.56 Above all in the context of radical Arab-based nationalism and fundamentalism, one can come across the idea that their own Eastern culture is the embodiment of civilization in contrast to the West’s thirst for power.57 To emphasize Zenobia’s image as a Proto-Arab-Syrian heroine the traditional ancient Latin and Greek sources are used,58 but they are reinterpreted so that Aurelian is drawn with traits of an Eastern tyrant. Hence by a shift of discourse Zenobia as an Arab freedom fighter has taken the place of the Oriental creature, who through the Western lens is a once ambitious, then tamed queen of the East.59

‘Mother desert’ in Syria! In the TV show, General Zabada’s dictum ‘the queen’s doing is a lesson for us and an example to be followed’ corresponds to the ancient definition of an exemplum adhortativum.60 Considering General Tlass’s book about Zenobia, the queen is to be emulated, even today.61 But why and how could an ancient queen obtain importance in an Arab-Muslim country of the twentieth and twenty-first century? The twentieth century brought about tremendous changes for the Arab countries, of which the end of the Ottoman dynasty after the First World War was the first important one and the end of the colonial empires of France and Great Britain after the Second World War was the second. As a result, Syria gained national independence in 1945.62 Since 1947, the dominating force in Syria’s political life has been the Ba’ath Party, whose 147

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ideology is based on an eclecticism of Pan-Arab, Arab Socialist, Syrian Nationalist and anti-imperialist interests. The more Pan-Arabism failed (e.g. Arab disaster in the Six-Day War against Israel and the death of Nasser), the more Syria made friends with the Soviet Union. In 1970 Hafez al-Assad rose to power and established a regime in which his son Bashar followed in 2000. In the 1990s Syrian policy had to change because the Soviet support ceased after the USSR disintegrated. Therefore, the Assad regime had to look for new strategies and an intensified Syrian nationalism served to maintain power. The October War Panorama in Damascus gives proof of that development. A museum of panoramic images to remember the October War against Israel in 1973, built with the assistance of North Korea (1992–8), it glorifies the war in question as well as the history of that region, melding the time of early settlement with the Roman empire, with the times of Mohammed and of the Crusades and finally with the French occupation into Syrian national history. Not surprisingly, a painting of Zenobia is also displayed beside Khalid ibn al-Walid, Mohammed’s famous general, and Sultan Saladin.63 Ever since the Palmyrene ruins were rediscovered by Europeans in the seventeenth century and later on excavated by archaeologists of different countries (among which, after the independence of Syria, were also Syrian experts),64 the oasis city has been present for Syrian people. Turning to pre-Islamic Antiquity for national self-assurance is a common practice in other Arab countries: e.g. Jordanian banknotes show ruins of Petra and quote the Nabataean history;65 also in modern Persia, to name another Oriental, albeit non-Arab example, the young Pahlavi dynasty tended to refer to Achaemenid Persian empire.66 Hafez al-Assad was also called Lion of Damascus to denote his strength, as Assad is another Arabic word for lion.67 The name might also, however, bear an echo of Antiquity. For his victory over Persians and usurpers, Odaenathus, Zenobia’s husband, was praised by the Sibylline oracles as ‘a dread and fearful lion . . . sent from the sun.’68 Considering General Tlass’s Zenobia book and his close friendship with Hafez and Bashar al-Assad,69 as well as their different historicizing projects from museums to stamps and banknotes to TV programmes, such a connotation seems possible. From the mid-1990s Syrian privatized TV production has become famous for its drama output.70 Especially during Ramadan, it is a tradition for Syrian Muslims to gather around the screen to watch TV in the evening, during the time of fast breaking; ‘Ramadan prime time’ is reserved for a type of dramatic miniseries (musalsal) that is used by the Syrian government for constructing a national identity via folklore and history.71 With this in mind, the series about Zenobia becomes more important, not only on a national, but also on a Pan-Arab level, as this type of series is usually written and produced in Syria but watched throughout the Arab world, in particular by expatriates in other countries.72 As a result, the TV Zenobia can figure as a Syrian role model and an ambassadress of Arab identity at the same time.73 That TV has an impact on Syrian culture is beyond question74 and can be seen in blogs and chat fora in which the participants have gained their knowledge about Zenobia from the series.75 The Syrian series about Zenobia and its reruns might have shaped the Palmyrene queen’s 148

The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV

public image more effectively than other media before. As a result her persona has (once again?) been engraved in the collective and cultural memory76 of Syria and the Arab world.

Conclusions The city of Palmyra as well as Queen Zenobia still raise many historical questions.77 For that reason, the lacunae of historical knowledge have given rise to various speculations and it seems as if Zenobia’s persona is like a contour in a mirror: whoever looks into it, completes the whole picture. Therefore she can be the embodiment of a lavish Oriental femme fatale who needs to be tamed by the civilized and disciplined Western male, as in the portrait by Alexander Baron. With her local connection to the Middle East Zenobia is not only involved in the discourse of Orientalism, but also has turned into a signifier for Occidentalism and for the process of nation building.78 Taking into consideration that Theodor Herzl in 1896 believed a new Jewish Palestine to be an ‘outpost of civilization’79 in contrast to barbarian Asia, one can easily understand how important it was and still is in the Middle East which nations can claim to be civilized. As a result the Syrian TV show turns Zenobia (notwithstanding her defeat)80 into a heroine who is a representative of the East, morally superior to the Western tyrant Aurelian. At the same time it is imperative that she is an ethnic ancestor to Syrian people. Actually the Jerusalem Post’s headline about that programme read in 1997: ‘Arab TV: Our heroine was Syrian, not Jewish.’81

Post Scriptum: Zenobia defeated? For many years I have been collecting material concerning the history of the reception of Palmyra and its famous queen. But in 2011, when I finally got the chance to travel through Syria, the project failed because of the outbreak of the civil war. Nowadays it has become more and more difficult to get first-hand information from the region. As the Syrian reception of Zenobia can be understood through the concept of ‘realms of memory’,82 it comes as no surprise that the queen is still referred to by different parties in this time of crisis. The German-Israeli journalist Joseph Croitoru quoted headlines of Arab media assigning Zenobia an important role in times of war.83 In the internet newspaper Huffingtonpost, the team of journalists, Zach Carter and Akbar Shahid Ahmed, coined the caption: ‘Want to Annoy ISIS? Learn About This Awesome Ancient Queen.’84 And before IS appeared on the scene, local Syrian rebels against the Assad regime are said to call themselves ‘grandchildren of Zenobia’, whereas government troops posted in social media ‘Zenobia will never fall’.85 Consequently, the Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi announced the launching of a new Syrian channel by the name of Zanoubia TV.86 In the videos covering the ceremony of that event, representatives of the Assad regime and the loyal media explain why the name of the 149

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ancient queen has been chosen; also, they declare Zenobia a soldier of the Syrian cause and express their hopes that the channel will be victorious as the Palmyrene queen once was (sic!).87 For the future of Syria and Palmyra, it is to be hoped that Zenobia will be remembered rather in a period of peace than in times of war.

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CHAPTER 10 THE DARK GAZE OF GALLA PLACIDIA Christopher Bishop

The crypts are silent, Dark and cool their thresholds, So that the black gaze of the blessed Galla, Awakened, might not burn through stone.1 Aleksandr Blok, Ravenna (1909) For the Russian Symbolist Aleksandr Blok, the dark gaze of Galla Placidia was a fearful thing, a supernatural force that could incinerate stone. The Roman empress features in Blok’s Ravenna, written during the summer of 1909, which begins his 23-poem cycle Итальянские Стихи (Italian Verses). Disenchanted with Florence and Rome, Blok found Ravenna immediately appealing, and began to meditate upon the liminal geography of the ancient capital – a city between the sea and the land, an architectural style between the classical and the medieval, a signifier between the living and the dead. In Ravenna, Blok could imagine a pagan empire transformed by the promise of celestial rule and, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, he could imagine a tomb transformed into a womb. Blok’s engagement with Galla was both intensely personal and erotically charged, and yet the relationship he projected onto the long-dead empress was not unique. In the years between the two World Wars, Galla was to become the objet petit a for two quite different men – the American poet Ezra Pound and the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung – both of whom would find the opportunity to insinuate themselves into the interstices that punctuated the empress’ historical record. In fact, the verifiable history of Aelia Galla Placidia remains elusive. Moreover, her history is one often delineated, not in terms of her own achievements, but in terms of her relationships with powerful men. Daughter of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, and half-sister to emperors Arcadius and Honorius, Galla outlived two husbands (Ataulf, king of the Visigoths, and the emperor Constantius III ) before serving as regent to her son, Valentinian III . From 423 until 437, the year Valentinian achieved his majority, Galla exercised power over the Western provinces of the Roman empire, having coins minted in her own name and permitting the Senate to proclaim her Augusta, or empress. Even after Valentinian assumed the throne, Galla remained a major force in Roman politics, right up until her death in 450.2 It will not be the task of this chapter, however, to alter that record. I offer no fresh insights into the history of the empress, no new documents or artefacts. Indeed, in one sense, I shall do nothing more than compound the injuries already done by continuing to discuss Galla, not as her own agent, but rather as the object of others’ desire. Edward Said famously argued that ‘women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy’ and that 151

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this gender-based fantasy also informed Western attitudes towards the Orient, that imaginary other in European thought defined by Western projections of its ‘separateness, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability’.3 Said noted the tendency for Western commentators to conceive of Oriental power-models as decadent and luxurious, and to use deliberately feminized and feminizing language when describing them. It could further be argued that the resultant axiom – that Oriental rulers were viewed by Westerners as feminine – also finds expression in its reverse, that the Occident has demonstrated a tendency to view feminine rulers as Oriental. This chapter argues that it is this reflex that can be seen operating beneath the engagement of Western intellectuals with the historical figure of Galla Placidia during the early decades of the twentieth century. The extraordinarily personal relationships that Pound and Jung projected onto the dead empress, relationships of containment and control, and their willingness to envision Galla as Oriental, all find explanation in Said’s model.

The rebirth of Galla Placidia For more than a thousand years, the dark gaze of Galla Placidia stared back at the curious from her ‘mausoleum’ in Ravenna. We have no idea where Galla is actually buried, although it seems logical to assume that she was laid to rest with other members of the imperial family near St Peter’s in Rome, but from at least the first half of the ninth century clerics were asserting that her mortal remains were to be found in Ravenna.4 The socalled ‘Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’ was originally the oratory of Santa Croce, a church built for the adjoining imperial palace in 417. That palace now lies in ruins, and there is no historical evidence to link the oratory to Galla. The ‘mausoleum’ still contains three sarcophagi, the central and largest of which was long purported to contain the body of Galla, while commentators have argued as to who might have been in the two flanking coffins – Galla’s husband Constantius, her son Valentinian or her brother Honorius being the common contenders. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, tourists were invited to view the mummified corpse of the Augusta through a small hole that had been drilled in the side of the largest sarcophagus, the grisly sight at times illuminated by tapers that were pushed through the opening. In 1577, however, one of these tapers set fire to the desiccated body, reducing it to ash. That a mummy might burn so easily should come as no surprise, of course, but that an unnamed building in Ravenna might house the remains of an empress who died in Rome; or that a Roman emperor might be subordinated in burial to his spouse, mother or sister; or that a body preserved in the Egyptian style, encased in a sarcophagus, and interred among Oriental mosaics might be an Augusta of the Western Empire – these things seem more difficult to credit. This is not to say that the sarcophagi are misplaced. The layout and decorative motifs of the ‘mausoleum’ certainly delineate its funerary purpose, but as Ellen Swift and Anne Alwis have argued, in support of much earlier analysis by André Grabar and Carl-Otto Nordström, that purpose was more ‘suited to a martyrium containing relics of the saints’.5 152

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Swift and Alwis were also quick to point out the Oriental precedents for the mosaics in the ‘mausoleum’ – an Imperial temple in Palmyra, a synagogue and a mithraeum in Dura Europos. The form and function of the building fit neatly together, but both also point towards an origin in Oriental practices. No less contested is the reception history of that other great artefact of Galla, the Brescia Medallion – a small group-portrait under glass, now mounted on the seventh century ‘Cross of Desiderius’ housed in the Musei Civici Brescia, Italy (see Fig.  10.1). From the eighteenth century until the early twentieth, the portrait was credited to be that of Galla and her two surviving children, Valentinian and Grata Honoria. Although this attribution has had little academic support since the end of the 1920s,6 the belief that Galla’s dark gaze meets us from the medallion remains a hard one to dispel.7 The scholarly consensus, however, that the Brescia Medallion is an Egyptian portrait from the third century, finds a disturbing parallel in the ‘mausoleum’ of Galla Placidia, for in both instances there would seem to be a discernible ontological process in operation, a readiness to see the Western empress in these Oriental objects. It must be remembered that although Said’s Orient often functions as an imaginary signifier, its definition also encompasses a geographical reality as well. The Orient is the philosophical other of the Occident, but it is also its physical adjacent – the lands lying east of Europe and, to some extent, south of the Mediterranean. The division of the laterRoman empire into Eastern and Western spheres of control finds some resonance in this model, although the conception of a ‘Byzantine’ empire, which gained ascendency only after Montesquieu, certainly distorts our understanding of how the Romans themselves might have viewed their world. Nevertheless, it is true to say that provinces such as Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia lay as much in the Roman Orient as in Said’s. Moreover, the city of Ravenna, on the eastern shores of Italy, its port aligned to welcome the seaborne traffic from Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople, was established as an imperial capital precisely because of its Oriental aspect. This aspect was subsequently augmented by centuries of imperial patronage that saw the city rebuilt and redecorated in a distinctly Eastern style. In a very real sense, Ravenna became the Orient of Italy, both a ‘second Rome’ and a ‘second Constantinople’, and we know also that the ‘birth of this phenomenon occurred precisely during the age of Galla Placidia’.8 It should come as no surprise, then, that Galla Placidia, an empress who came from the East and who ruled from Ravenna, should fall subject to an Orientalizing gaze. This is not to say, however, that the reception history of Galla is one of Orientalism only. In 1879, the great luminary of the Catalan Renaxeinça, Angel Guimerà, chose the Augusta as the eponymous hero of his first tragedy, Gala Placidia.9 Galla’s sojourn in Roman Hispania and her marriage to a warlord whose family would eventually rule Visigoth Spain made her a suitable vehicle, it would seem, for the aspirations of Catalan nationalists. Guimerà’s play was widely admired in Catalonia and retained a popularity with audiences in Barcelona for decades after its premier. Photographs by Pau Audouard i Deglaire now housed at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona evidence the costumes of a 1909 production of the play undertaken by the New Empress Theatre Company.10 These prints show suitably barbaric warriors with enormous beards, clean shaven Romans in 153

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Fig. 10.1 ‘Cross of Desiderius’, Musei Civici, Brescia © Archivio Fotografico Musei di Brescia – Fotostudio Rapuzzi.

classical togas, and an empress adorned just as she appeared in the many coins issued during her lifetime. It is a vision of Galla (a nationalistic vision of her) that was taken up soon after by another Catalan voice, that of Jaime Pahissa. By the time the New Empress Theatre Company was performing Gala Placidia, Pahissa had been working on an opera based on Guimerà’s tragedy for more than two years. It 154

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would take another four before audiences were able to see it, but, when they did, the response was rapturous. The 1913 premier of Pahissa’s Gala Placidia drew praise not only from local commentators,11 but even from notoriously hard-to-impress critics in Paris,12 and in an interview with Pahissa some three years later, one reporter was still referring to the importance of the opera.13 Two of the articles published at the time (Merletti, ‘La ópera Gala Placidia en el Liceo’ and Ballell and Gómez Durán, ‘Notas de Barcelona Y Valencia’) provide photographs of the principals and the sets, and the similarities of these prints with those of the 1909 production of Guimerà’s play are obvious. For the Catalans, Galla was not an Eastern princess. Rather, she was the manifestation of their nascent nationalism, determinedly Western in its identity and classically Roman in its lineage. But Guimerà’s Galla, and Pahissa’s, was not the Galla Placidia of Ezra Pound or Carl Jung. For that woman, we must look to the east, and to the city of Ravenna.

Re-inventing Ravenna From at least the ninth century, Galla had been seen as the empress who ruled from Ravenna, and so her reception history follows closely that of the city itself. Ravenna, like Galla, also began to re-emerge into the European consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century. The city had rated a mention in Thomas Nugent’s Grand Tour, the quintessential travel guide of the eighteenth century, although readers were advised that the countryside around Ravenna was ‘marshy and unwholesome’.14 Nugent extolled the virtues of San Apollinaris’ ‘exceeding fine’ gilded mosaics, and commented on those of San Giovanni Evangelista, but said nothing of the mosaics in the ‘Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’. That structure, he wrote, was ‘remarkable for its fine marble engravings’.15 Byron spent several years in Ravenna (1819–21), a fact celebrated by Oscar Wilde in his 1878 poem, Ravenna. The young Wilde had been in the city the previous year and his reminiscences focus on Romantic ruins and the fall of empires: How lone this palace is; how grey the walls! No minstrel now wakes echoes in these halls. The broken chain lies rusting on the door, And noisome weeds have split the marble floor: Here lurks the snake, and here the lizards run By the stone lions blinking in the sun.16 A few years later, in 1884, Sarah Bernhardt also travelled to Ravenna, as Filippo Carlà-Uhink details in his chapter in this publication,17 there to research Byzantine costumes for her upcoming role as the empress in Victorien Sardou’s Théodora, but this trickle of visitors to Ravenna became a flood when, in 1897, the Italian government began appointing scholars to oversee important historical and archaeological sites. The first such position created was that of the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti di Ravenna, and Corrado Ricci, a native of the city, was given the honour. Ricci became Director General 155

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of Arts and Antiquities in 1906, and in 1909 the superintendent’s post passed to Corrado’s close friend Giuseppe Gerola. Gerola was the author of the monolithic Monumenti Veneti nell’Isola di Creta (Venetian Monuments on the Island of Crete), publication of which had begun in 1905 and was not to be completed until 1932. He had been director of the Museum of Bassano del Grappa from 1903 until 1906, and then director of the Museum of Verona. As superintendent in Ravenna, he was extremely successful in raising the profile of the former imperial capital. He oversaw major excavations of the ‘Palace of Theodoric’ and the basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo between 1908 and 1914, continued work on the ‘Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’ and the Basilica of San Vitale already begun by Ricci, and in 1911 began publishing the influential journal Felix Ravenna.18 By 1919 the funding he had secured resulted in a project that would completely restore not only the ‘Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’, but also the Mausoleum of Theodoric, the Arian Baptistery and the Basilicas of San Vitale, San Apollinare Nuovo and San Giovanni Evangelista. In 1920, Gerola moved on to the diplomatically delicate position of director for the regional office for Monuments, Fine Arts and Antiques in Trento (in territory acquired following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), but he retained a vital interest in the work going on in Ravenna and ensured that it continued until at least 1925.19 The breadth of the restoration carried out under Ricci and Gerola, and the material that it uncovered, transformed Ravenna into a major destination for culture-tourism. Gustav Klimt and Maximilian Lenz stood in awe of the gold mosaics of San Vitale in 1903. Wassily Kandinsky visited in 1911, and Clive Bell in 1914. Cole Porter, transported by the starry skies of Galla’s ‘mausoleum’ was purportedly inspired to compose ‘Night and Day’. Vernon Wright, in looking for a design to crown his Taplin Gorge Dam (completed in 1925), reinterpreted the Mausoleum of Theoderic in poured concrete. J. R. R. Tolkien chose the concentric fortresses of Ravenna as a model for Minas Tirith, the capital of his fantasy kingdom, Gondor. In the first decades of the twentieth century, then, Ravenna was calling to the world, and it was to this call that Pound and Jung responded, but their responses, as we shall see, were particularly idiosyncratic.

Ezra Pound Galla Placidia haunts The Cantos of Ezra Pound: And there was grass on the floor of the temple, Or where the floor of it might have been; Gold fades in the gloom, Under the blue-black roof, Placidia’s, Of the exarchate; and we sit here By the arena, les gradins . . . Canto XXI , ll. 87–92

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The poet positions himself in the cheap-seats and watches the world fall to ruin, weeds grow in a derelict temple (like the weeds that ‘split the marble floor’ in Wilde’s Ravenna), and the golden tesserae of Galla’s mosaics subside into darkness. It could be dismissed as a passing reference, were this not Pound, whose intense verbal economy demands a meaning wrung from every word. The numerous drafts of Canto XXI now housed in the Beinecke Library, Yale, demonstrate the significance of the empress in Pound’s thought. All but elided from the final publication, Galla’s palimpsest is still discernible in these earlier versions where her dark gaze, objectified and Orientalized, meets our own. One of these drafts follows ‘by the arena’ with a list: By the arena- you. Galla Placidia

the Roman. and myself

inside it the footlights the clowns- dancers performing dogs

20

In another draft, Pound elaborates on the addressee (it was T. S. Eliot), and removes himself from the text, although he does not remove Galla: By the arena, you, Thomas amics, Galla Placidia, and the Roman, inside it, the footlights, the clowns, dancers performing dogs.21 The lines refer to a meeting in Verona, at a café near the Roman arena, where Pound met Eliot in the summer of 1922. Ferdinando Guillaume, stage-name Tontolini, presented his Teatro della Risata (Theatre of Laughter) in that arena from 1 June through to 6 June, and we know that Pound was challenged by the performance he saw. Tontolini was a pioneer in the emerging world of cinema, and his new theatre combined traditional circus acts with English music-hall routines, mediated through the presence of a character named Polidor (played by Tontolini) who would provide running commentary on the show and improvise performances from a side-box placed on stage. The modernist sensibility of the Teatro della Risata must have appealed to Pound, but he saw in it also a disturbing vulgarity, and found himself ‘uncertain [as] how to react to the social and cultural ambiguities it represented’.22 He sat in the bleachers (les gradins) and watched the world fade. This uncertainty became pathological in the poet’s memory once Pound collocated the performance with his meeting Eliot outside the arena. To complicate matters further, we know that Pound was in Verona with both his wife, Dorothy, and his lover, Bride Scratton, and the latter had a strong recollection of Eliot placing a manuscript of The Waste Land on the table before Pound.23 Pound had made exhaustive revisions of that poem the previous year and found himself both in awe of Eliot’s genius, and dismayed by what he saw as his own inability to achieve the same level of brilliance. Now the poem was ready for publication, and Eliot, on leave from his position at Lloyds Bank, was becoming increasingly 157

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critical of Pound’s Bel Esprit venture, fearing that the public-funding promised by it would see him lose his job. And so they met, Pound and Eliot, in a café beside the Veronese arena, with a copy of The Waste Land between them, in the first week of summer, 1922. In The Cantos they meet there perpetually, a single moment arrested in time, a definitive fault in the fabric of Pound’s memory to which he must return endlessly, habitually. They sit by the arena in so many of the drafts still extent, and although the details of the meeting seem elided in the final, published version of The Cantos, the meeting itself remained a palpable, painful touchstone. Indeed, once readers attune themselves to the gravity of the incident, its resonance can be encountered continuously throughout Pound’s opus. Canto IV finishes enigmatically with ‘And we sit here . . . there in the arena . . .’. In Canto XI the refrain becomes more of a reproach: ‘And we sit here. I have sat here . . . For forty four thousand years’. A scant fifty lines later, Canto XII opens with the same melancholy nostalgia: And we sit here under the wall, Arena romana, Diocletian’s, les gradins Canto XII , ll. 1–3 Modern scholarship disavows that the Veronese arena was built by Diocletian, but Pound would not have had the benefit of this research. He might also be making a link between the famously anti-Christian emperor and his own hopes for a post-Christian modernity. Or perhaps it is a statement about the plasticity and unreliability of history as a collective memory. Or perhaps it is just a mistake. Whatever the case may be, Pound certainly insinuates the significance of his meeting with Eliot by constant reference to it. The reader encounters the scene yet again in Canto XXIX , by which time even the meeting itself has been reduced to the most fragmented of memories – ‘And another day or evening toward sundown by the arena (les gradins)’ – the words, by now, serving as referents to themselves. Pound also piques the curiosity of the reader by deliberate obscuration of the people involved in this meeting – ‘we sit here’ he tells us repeatedly, but who constitutes this ‘we’? In the original version (cited above) the poet might be implying the presence of four people: himself; Eliot (‘Thomas amics’); Galla Placidia; and ‘the Roman’. I say ‘implies’, because it is not entirely clear that Pound is enumerating those present with any exactness, and I would argue that ‘the Roman’ is Pound himself. Massimo Bacigalupo has argued convincingly that we should read the ‘roman on Olivia’s stairs’ (note the use of the lower case ‘r’) from Canto LXXVIII as both selfreferential and self-deprecatory, that Pound is likening himself to a homeless man he knew of who lived in a church by the house of Olivia Rossetti Agresti.24 Earlier, in the same Canto, Pound returns to the seminal meeting at Verona: So we sat there by the arena, outside, Thiy and il decaduto. . . Canto LXXVIII , ll. 136–7 158

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Here replacing Galla Placidia with Thiy, and ‘the Roman’ with ‘il decaduto’ [the pauper]. If the impoverished ‘roman on Olivia’s stairs’ is Pound himself, it seems logical to assume that ‘the Roman’ of the earlier drafts was also the poet. As one of the Pisan Cantos, LXXVIII deals explicitly with Pound’s incarceration for war-crimes following the Allied victory in Europe. It can be no coincidence, therefore, that we witness Pound’s earlier ‘Roman’ lose his capital letter with his transformation to il decaduto. The Pisan Cantos were written more than two decades after the Malatesta verses, and yet they serve as the first published indicator of who was present at the meeting in Verona. Of the people mentioned in the original draft, only Galla remains in the final recension, and only in an oblique reference – ‘Under the blue-black roof, Placidia’s, Of the exarchate; and we sit here . . . ’ (Canto XXI ) – but the conflation of Galla (in the draft) with Thiy (Canto LXXVIII ) is significant. Pound often referred to his lover, Bride Scratton, as Thiy or Thij or Ti. Bride (originally Evelyn St. Bride Mary Goold-Adams) had married a wealthy businessman (Edward Blackburn Scratton) in 1905, but had begun an affair with Pound perhaps as early as 1910.25 She grew more distant from her husband over the course of the Great War, during which she volunteered at a military hospital in York, while ‘Ned’ Scratton saw service at Gallipoli. After the war, they continued to live apart, and by 1923 Ned filed for divorce, naming Pound as the co-respondent in what became an unpleasant litigation. Although the affair had finished by the end of the Second World War, Bride always held a privileged place in Pound’s memory and we know that he thought about her often during his postwar incarceration – Wendy Stallard Flory surmised that one of the three sets of eyes that haunted Pound in the Pisan Cantos were those of Bride: ‘there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent, whether of spirit or of hypostasis’ (Canto LXXXI ).26 Pound adopted ‘Thiy’ as his epithet for Bride very early in their relationship, influenced, no doubt, by contemporary archaeological finds in Egypt. In 1907 Arthur Brome Weigall had published ‘A new discovery in Egypt: the recent uncovering of the tomb of Queen Thiy’ in the Century Magazine, adding the queen’s name to the pharaonic lists then dominating the popular interest in Egyptology,27 and in 1912 the German Oriental Company under the leadership of Ludwig Borchardt discovered the celebrated bust of Nefertiti (Thiy’s daughter-in-law) at Amarna. Tiye (as her name is more commonly transliterated today), died about 1338 bce and was the first woman to exercise power in Egypt as a queen.28 Women before her, such as Sobekneferu (died c. 1802 bce ) and Hatshepsut (died c. 1458 bce ) had ruled as kings, but Tiye’s name appears on legal documents that indicate her importance in an official capacity, and she was the first Egyptian queen for whom this could be said.29 She serves as the perfect focus point, therefore, for the Orientalizing gaze – as the wife of one pharaoh (Amenhotep III ) and the mother of another (Akhenaten), she becomes, as Said might argue, a kind of ‘male power-fantasy’, exercising control of the state through ‘feminine penetrability’ and ‘supine malleability’. In an early draft of The Cantos, this Orientalism is intensified when Pound apparently equates Thiy with a Chinese empress by positioning both of them at the meeting in Verona: 159

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Ti and the Chinese empress, then, and the arena behind us30 The empress being referred to here is most probably the empress-dowager Cixi, who is named explicitly in Canto LXXX . Cixi inherited power from her imperial marriage and ruled China following her husband’s death, first as regent for her son, and then in her son’s name. From 1861 until her death in 1908, Cixi was the absolute ruler of China. We know that Pound read Katharine Carl’s biography of the empress,31 and the obvious parallels between the two powerful, and Oriental, women informed his Cantos, but there is also a third woman of power in The Cantos present at the fateful meeting between Pound and Eliot – the empress in Ravenna. That Galla Placidia and Thiy were inextricably linked in Pound’s mind is made clear in the earliest drafts of The Cantos: Thiy, we are told, was ‘Galla’s hypostasis’.32 By using this unequivocal philosophical term, Pound informs his reader that the Roman empress was, in fact, a manifestation of a deeper, underlying reality – that Thiy was the essential substance of Galla. But neither Thiy nor Galla (nor Cixi for that matter) were at the meeting in Verona. It was Bride Scratton who witnessed Eliot give Pound the final manuscript of The Waste Land, who sat in the bleachers of the ancient arena as the gold began to fade, whose eyes came back to haunt the poet in his cage at Pisa. A ‘new subtlety of eyes’, Pound wrote, ‘whether of spirit or of hypostasis’, using the same term encountered in an earlier reference to Thiy and Galla. We are dealing not so much with a particular woman, therefore, as a concept. The Cantos strip Bride of her singularity, presenting her as an abstraction – a powerful, non-individualized usurper who inhabits Pound’s moments of impotence. Bride, who had married into wealth, becomes indistinguishable from the other dowagers (Cixi, Galla and Tiye), and in this metamorphosis the Western historical woman becomes the Orient, while the American poet is reassured in his Western manliness. Pound ensures that his audience sees an Orientalized Bride by confounding (in the literal sense of mixing together) her persona with that of a Chinese empress, an Egyptian Queen and a Byzantine ruler – the Easternness of the latter dictated by her (ahistorical) appellation ‘of the exarchate’. Thus conceptualized, and emptied of herself, she can serve as an archetype to be adored, or placated, or worshipped or feared. We know from Pound’s close friend William Carlos Williams that, as early as 1910, Pound had created a small shrine in his house with a lighted candle before the photograph of a beautiful woman33 and David Moody has argued that this woman must have been Bride Scratton.34 A photograph of Bride now housed in the Beinecke Library (see Fig. 10.2) would have served such a purpose well, and even the most casual observer can see the similarity of another of Pound’s photographs of Bride to the portrait of the woman in the Brescia Medallion (Fig. 10.3).35 The two women share remarkably similar facial features, and this closeness is enhanced in the second Beinecke photograph by having Bride posing in a similar way, with hairstyle and jewellery mirroring that of the medallion. By the time that Pound met Eliot in Verona, he had also journeyed to Galla’s ‘mausoleum’ in Ravenna and this visit, like the meeting itself, became a constant 160

Fig. 10.2 Bride Scratton in a photo of 1909 or 1910. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale. 

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Fig. 10.3 Bride Scratton in a photo taken at Bertram Park Studio, Piccadilly, around 1918. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.

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touchstone in The Cantos, a mnemonic for decay and the despair of the finite. Galla’s name resurfaces in Canto XCVI , and the tomb itself, ‘Galla’s rest’, is intoned in Cantos LXXVI and CX . Hers is also possibly one of the ‘old sarcophagi’ that conclude Canto IX . More importantly, the fading radiance of Galla’s mosaics, the image with which this section started, is foreshadowed twice before its final, definitive and entropic appearance in Canto XXI . ‘In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it’ we are told in Canto XI , a line repeated almost verbatim in Canto XVII , but the gathering of the light is not enough, and in Canto XXI the gold ‘fades in the gloom’ under Placidia’s ‘blue-black roof ’.

Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological engagement with Galla Placidia extended far beyond that experienced by Pound. Indeed, it became a defining moment for the founder of analytical psychology, ‘among the most curious events’ in his life, one ‘scarcely [to] be explained’.36 Jung first visited Ravenna during the winter of 1913/4, travelling there with an ‘acquaintance’. Like so many others, Jung was deeply moved by the ‘Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’. The incident that so disturbed the founder of analytical psychology was not this initial visit, however, but a second trip he made some twenty years later. In 1933, Jung returned to Ravenna with the same acquaintance. He visited the ‘mausoleum’ once again where he fell into a ‘strange mood’ and found himself ‘deeply stirred’.37 Leaving the ‘mausoleum’, the two companions entered an adjacent Orthodox Baptistery where the incident in question took place: Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable. The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory . . . The fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all. We looked at this one last. It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves. We stopped in front of this mosaic for at least twenty minutes and discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with real peril of death . . . After we left the baptistery, I went promptly to Alinari to buy photographs of the mosaics, but could not find any. Time was pressing – this was only a short visit – and so I postponed the purchase until later. I thought I might order the pictures from Zurich. 163

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When I was back home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to obtain the pictures for me. He could not locate them, for he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist.38 Decades after the event, Jung could still remember the mosaics he had ‘seen’ in vivid detail, as could the ‘lady’ who had accompanied him to Ravenna. This woman corroborated Jung’s memory of the mosaics and ‘long refused to believe that what she had “seen with her own eyes” had not existed’.39 This extraordinary event is a remarkable moment in the reception of Galla Placidia, and one made all the more compelling by Jung’s narrative – both in what he recalled and in what he chose not to recall. 1913 was the year that Carl Jung’s life fell apart. He had famously formed an intensely close friendship with Sigmund Freud following their meeting in 1906, but Jung’s 1912 publication of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (often referred to in English as ‘The Psychology of the Unconscious’) had fractured that relationship. By the end of 1913 Jung realized that this sundering was irreparable. He was also, by that time, engaged in an extra-marital affair with his former patient, Toni Wolff, the same ‘acquaintance’ who accompanied him to Ravenna.40 Indeed, the two travelled to the ancient capital while Jung’s wife Emma was heavily pregnant with what was to be their last child, Helene – Lill, as she was to be known – who was born in March the following year. In the midst of all this, Jung began to experience what he would later describe as a horrifying ‘confrontation with the unconscious’ – in effect, a series of psychotic episodes during which he saw visions and heard voices. Jung would later rationalize this period as his own ‘night sea journey’ – ‘a kind of descensus ad inferos–a descent into Hades and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious’41 – an experience that found resonance for him in the life of Galla Placidia. When the Augusta and her children returned to Ravenna from Constantinople in the winter of 423, the family was caught in a storm on the Adriatic. A dedicatory inscription on San Giovanni Evangelista indicates that Galla had the basilica built in order to make good her promise to God for safe passage through that storm.42 By the time of his second visit to Ravenna in 1933, Jung had reimagined his breakdown of 1913 as a more positive experience, and was in the process of rationalizing cross-cultural examples of baptism as performative enactments of the ‘night sea journey’ – indeed, in his first lecture on this theory, Jung cited as examples the mosaics that he believed he had seen in Ravenna. In Jung’s mind, therefore, his own (metaphorical) ‘night sea journey’ had coalesced with the (historical) sea journey of Galla Placidia. Jung had been, ‘from the first visit’ to Ravenna, ‘personally affected by the figure of Galla Placidia’, but following the episode in Galla’s ‘mausoleum’ in 1933, he began to believe that her ‘fate and her whole being were vivid presences’ in his life and that, ‘with her intense nature, she was a suitable embodiment’ for his anima. For Jung, Galla became more than an historical metaphor (as she had been for Pound) – she represented the personification of his own consciousness, all ‘those elements that he ought to know about his prehistory . . . all life that [had] been in the past and [was] still alive in him’.43 Jung’s

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‘identification with the Byzantine Empress and his internalized, psychic, feminine other’,44 also evidences considerable Orientalism. Jung’s engagement with the Orient was problematic. It has been said that ‘Jung is easy prey for the post-modern Orientalist-hunter as much as he was before easy prey for the Orientalist historian’45 and that part of his significant ‘contribution to Orientalism, and to its half-sister, Comparative Religion’, was his ‘participation in the Eranos Seminars’.46 It was just such a seminar that Jung was preparing for when he misremembered seeing the mosaics in Ravenna, and Toni Wolff, whose recollection of the mosaics was equally incorrect, assisted him in this process and took notes on the delivered lecture.47 Wolff had been in Ravenna with Jung in 1913, a former patient now acting as his analyst. As part of the therapy undergone during that first trip, Jung drew and painted images from his troubled unconscious and collected them in a document he called his Red Book. Commentators have noted that the Orientalism of Jung’s Red Book images were heavily influenced by the art of Ravenna,48 and although the Red Book was never published during Jung’s lifetime, he did share a summary of the material within it with the world in 1916, when he released Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) under the pseudonym Basilides of Alexandria, ‘the city where East and West meet’.49 The frequency of Oriental signifiers in Jung’s version of his second encounter with Galla is also striking. Jung’s language accentuates both the Otherness and Easternness of his subject. He was at pains to emphasize that the baptistery he visited was Orthodox – he used this term twice when he might simply have omitted it or used the more neutral ‘Christian’. The mosaics he ‘saw’ were all Oriental in their subject matter: baptism in the river Jordan; the pharaoh’s failed crossing of the Red Sea; the curing of Namaan, the Aramean general of King Ben-Hadad II ; Peter’s crisis of faith on the sea of Galilee. Jung’s Galla is not a Westerner, rather she travels to the West from the East, and in his projection of her role in his unconscious, she becomes the Eastern anima for his Western ‘barbarian’ self. Even when looking for comparisons for his breakdown, Jung reached for Oriental examples: What had been the fate of Pharaoh’s army could have been mine. Like Peter and like Naaman, I came away unscathed, and the integration of the unconscious contents made an essential contribution to the completion of my personality.50 For Jung then, like Pound before him, Galla became the embodiment of the East, an essentially Orientalized other.

Conclusion The history of Galla Placidia remains almost as illusive today as it was in the early twentieth century. More than just daughter, sister, wife and mother to emperors, Galla 165

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exercised real power and left tangible monuments to her rule – but she was a woman, and, like all women of Antiquity, her history has been palliated through centuries of benign neglect on the one hand, and active elision on the other. As Hagith Sivan wrote in her work on the Augusta: ‘To write a biography of an ancient woman is an exercise in remembering what has been forgotten and relegated to a place outside the mainstream of society.’51 But removing the historical figure from her place in history creates a lacuna which cries out to be filled, and the historical abnegation of a subject allows us to interject with hypothesis, conjecture and, sometimes, outright fiction. This chapter has focused on two, highly creative, individuals who saw just such a space and filled it with their own projections – allegories informed by received notions of the other and forged from residual ontologies of gender and geography. Said wrote that the Orient is ‘watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behaviour issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity’ while ‘the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached’.52 Pound and Jung also toured, also watched, and both of them saw in the historical character of Galla Placidia a vessel for their power-fantasies, projecting upon her variously their own assumptions of her separateness, her eccentricity, her silent indifference, her feminine penetrability, her supine malleability. They stared into the void and the void stared back, not, as Nietzsche might have imagined, with the eyes of a monster, but with the dark gaze of an Eastern empress.

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CHAPTER 11 THEODORA A.P. AFTER PROCOPIUS / THEODORA A.S. AFTER SARDOU: METAMORPHOSES OF AN EMPRESS Filippo Carlà-Uhink

Theodora B.P. (Before Procopius) We can but imagine how Nicolò Alemanni must have felt when he discovered Procopius’ Anekdota in the Vatican Library. Until then, Justinian had been celebrated in the Western world as one of the greatest Roman emperors, protector of the faith, author of the Codex, the basis of the legislation of civilized peoples (just as Aristotle was the basis of philosophy, and the Bible in religious life);1 it is sufficient to think of Dante’s representation of Justinian in the Paradise (6.1–96). His wife Theodora had not, up to this point, received so much attention, as sources were simply lacking.2 Procopius’ De aedificiis stated that her beauty was simply impossible to represent (Aed. 1.11.9; see also Anth. Gr. XVI, 78), but that she nonetheless had a statue in Byzantium (Aed. 1.11.8) and had been portrayed in a mosaic on the Chalké (the monumental entrance to the Imperial palace in Constantinople) as triumphing against the Vandals and the Goths together with Justinian (Aed. 1.10.17).3 Nothing remains of these representations; no coins were minted in her name, and only one famous mosaic portrait of Theodora is known, that in the church of S. Vitale in Ravenna.4 Another contemporary portrait found in Milan is sometimes interpreted as a statue of Theodora, though only since 1913.5 A passage in Procopius’ Persian Wars (1.24.32–37) contains the speech that Theodora would have made during the Nika revolt in order to convince Justinian to stay in Constantinople and fight (the most famous phrase being that ‘purple would be the best shroud for her’). This is thought to have characterized her as a brave, energic and intelligent woman (and to rather denigrate Justinian and the other men – outspoken by a woman!);6 four letters written to her by the Ostrogoth Theodahad and his wife also confirm her political role at court.7 Procopius and Malalas present her as being involved with Justinian in a plan to combat prostitution, including the transformation of a palace into a monastery for former prostitutes (Proc., Aed. 1.9.1–10; Malal. 18.24–25); the latter also remembers her activity in founding and endowing churches (17.19).8 A law by Justinian could still be understood as proof of the great love between the imperial pair: the emperor states that the measures were discussed together with the ‘most pious consort given to Us by God’ and imposes on the governors an oath in the name of both members of the imperial couple (Just., Nov. 8, 1).9 This love and union is confirmed by the fact that, after her death, in 559, Justinian interrupted his adventus in the capital after 167

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his victory against the Kutrigurs to light candles on Theodora’s grave and pray (Const. Porph., De cer. 1, app. 14).10 This also aided in the creation of Justinian’s legend. Less positive was her portrait in Zonaras, who made her Justinian’s stooge for inventing new taxes (14.6); in any case, prior to the Anekdota she appeared as a powerful and determined queen, with perhaps a tendency for intrigue.11 It is therefore no wonder that she was never represented in a painting during the Renaissance, and that in historiography she was generally a virtuous empress.12 Even her sympathies for Monophysismus (e.g. Evagr. Schol., HE 4, 10 or V. Sabas 71) do not seem to have damaged her,13 if we exclude her role in the deposition of Pope Silverius according to the Liber Pontificalis (60), and the Counter-Reformation description given of her by Cardinal Baronio. In his Annales Ecclesiastici (published between 1588 and 1607), Baronio portrays her as another Eve, another Delilah or Herodias, due to her heretical tendencies,14 which may be why the only extant manuscript of Procopius’ Anekdota was in the Vatican library.15 However, everything changed:16 in 1623, the editio princeps of the Anekdota described Justinian as a tyrant and a monster, Theodora as a former actress and prostitute, cruel and ice-cold.17 According to Procopius, Theodora, daughter of a bear-keeper of the Circus, grew up in Constantinople as a dancer and a prostitute. Later she became the lover of Hecebolus, the governor of Pentapolis, before being cast away to wander in the Eastern regions, practising prostitution. Back in Constantinople she met Justinian, then heir to the throne, and in spite of opposition from his uncle, the Emperor Justin, and his wife Euphemia, Justinian enacted a new law removing the obstacle that would have prevented him from marrying Theodora. After becoming empress, Theodora, who stopped having a great number of lovers due to her interest in power, managed to govern the empire (along with Antonina, Belisarius’ wife) with cruelty and a love of luxury. What Procopius says must be in part true,18 as it is confirmed by other sources (John of Ephesus called her Theodora ‘from the brothel’: Joh. Eph., Vit. 13 = PO 17, 189), and in 523–4 a law was enacted by Justin I (CJ V, 4, 23) to enable ex-actresses to marry men of senatorial rank: a law ‘custom-made for Theodora’, which was immediately followed by her marriage to Justinian.19

Minor roles: Theodora A.P. (After Procopius) and B.S. (Before Sardou) Nonetheless, for another century Theodora remained confined to the studies of historians and philosophers and was not greatly featured in the figurative and performative arts. The hero of the day was Justinian’s general Belisarius, to whom three tragedies were dedicated in France during the seventeenth century.20 In Rotrou’s La Bélisaire, Theodora appears as a negative character: having been rejected by Belisarius, she tries in every way possible to kill him,21 and finally succeeds, allowing Justinian to believe that the general tried to seduce her. Belisarius would still be centre-stage during the next two centuries: operas were written about him by Philodor in 1796, Saint-Lubin in 1827, Maurer in 1830 and Donizetti in 1836. In 1767, Marmontel’s novel Bélisaire was published. The author 168

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explicitly stated that he refuted the horrible lies of the Anekdota, which in his opinion could not have been written by Procopius.22 With the Enlightenment, a paradigm shift in the interpretation of the Byzantine empire took place: now Byzantium became a repository of negative values, corrupt, obscurantist and decadent.23 Theodora could not escape her destiny: through Procopius, Enlightenment authors were ready to see in her a perfect example of Byzantine corruption. Montesquieu, who dedicates great attention to Byzantium, ‘the Greek Empire’ (intended as a continuation of the decadence of the Roman empire), thus wrote that Justinian had taken from the theatre a woman who had long prostituted herself to immodest pleasures, and she governed him with an authority that has no parallel in history, perpetually intermixing his affairs with the passions and fanciful inconsistencies of her sex; in consequence of which she defeated the victorious progress of his arms, and disconcerted the most favourable events. The eastern people were always accustomed to a plurality of wives in order to deprive the sex of that strange ascendant they maintain over men in our climates; but at Constantinople the prohibition of polygamy made the Empire subject to the will of a female or, in other words, threw a natural weakness into the government.24 The portrait provided by Gibbon was not so different:25 Theodora pretends to lead a virtuous life in Constantinople only because she saw in a vision that she would become the wife of a potent monarch. She subjugates Justinian, whose mother Vigilantia dies of affliction: ‘The prostitute, who, in the presence of innumerable spectators, had polluted the theatre of Constantinople, was adored as a queen in the same city, by grave magistrates, orthodox bishops, victorious generals, and captive monarchs.’ As virtues, Gibbon recognizes only her sympathy for less fortunate sisters, along with her prudence. The fact that she was faithful to Justinian is explained by her interest in the throne.26 The unity and agreement of the imperial couple had now become the effect of Theodora’s lust for power and of Justinian’s weakness, as he ‘in the room of a theatrical prostitute, might have selected the purest and most noble virgin of the East’.27 The importance of Gibbon in influencing not only the scientific production, but also the broader reception of Late Antiquity throughout the decades and centuries cannot be underestimated – through him, Theodora became a perverted, decadent queen.28

Orientalism, Byzantium and German Theodoras Against this background, one last element was missing from Theodora to achieve truly enormous success – Orientalism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the exploding Orientalist aesthetics and the growing interest in Late Antiquity (as visible, for instance, in the decadent movement within literature and art) combined to form an image of Byzantium as the Eastern Roman Empire, the connection between Antiquity, Christianity and the Orient, giving rise to the possibility to imagine and represent a 169

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Christian world in Oriental, Arabic costume.29 The Byzantine empire was now not only a representation of decadence, of the fall from virtue, it also became the most complete example of Alterity. ‘Byzantium is always the other. It is an unnatural world and one of the manifestations of its unnaturalness is the role of women within it’:30 Theodora, now interpreted only through Procopius’ lens, could thus become one of the most powerful representations of a femme fatale – the Oriental queen, on a par with Semiramis and Cleopatra. In this context, Theodora acquires her first major role in 1876, in Felix Dahn’s monumental novel in seven parts, Ein Kampf um Rom. A professor of law specializing in the history of political institutions and the law of Germanic peoples, Dahn composed this novel, his most popular, between 1857 and 1858.31 In parallel, he worked on his Kings of the Germans (12 volumes, 1861–1909), as well as on a monograph on the value of Procopius as a historical source, Prokopius von Cäsarea – Ein Beitrag zur Historiographie der Völkerwanderung und des sinkenden Römertums (1865).32 In this work he defended, among other things, the authenticity of Procopius’ Secret History, which was highly disputed at the time.33 Dahn’s political ideals, characterized since the 1860s by a strong nationalism and an admiration of Bismarck’s plans,34 were perfectly expressed in his vision of the history of Late Antiquity. This was interpreted from a strictly Herderian perspective as the rejuvenation of the dying (or rather dead) Romanness through the pure, idealized and honest strength of the Germanic peoples – even if Dahn’s ‘tragic’ approach makes such a plan, embodied by Totila, an impossible dream.35 Ein Kampf um Rom is a historical novel based on the Gothic war and stretches from Theodoric’s last days to the Battle of Mons Lactarius, after which the heroic (though defeated) surviving Ostrogoths are rescued by their allies, the Vikings, and brought ‘back north’ to Thuleland, where they truly belong.36 The noble Ostrogoths (with very few exceptions) struggle heroically against two enemies: the ‘dark hero’ Cethegus, prefect of Rome, the ‘last of the Romans’, who wishes to reinstate the Roman empire (with himself as emperor), but attempts this through cunning, with a terrifying display of the most immoral tricks and frauds;37 and the Byzantines, the representatives of a degenerate empire, represented through all the stereotypes of Orientalism.38 This is very explicit; for example, when Justinian must wear his silver shoes and his chlamys: The palace servant put on his feet the sandals with thick soles and high heels, which made his figure a couple of inches higher, and threw on his shoulders the mantel, full of folds and strewn of golden stars. He kissed every piece of clothing when he touched it; after repeating the prostration to the ground, which had been recently intensified in this oriental form of submission, the velarius left the room.39 Belisarius is alone in being portrayed – rather traditionally – as the last of the Romans, though his inability to cheat and act with cunning condemns him to be the victim of his fellows.40 Byzantium is in the end physically represented by its most successful general: Narses. A crippled dwarf, he conducts armies in between his epileptic crises, but clearly 170

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knows that the real danger, or rather ‘the decadence’ (das Verderben) does not come from the West, but always from the East (in his case, from Persia).41 In 1923, Dahn’s novel was reprinted in an edition of three volumes with illustrations by Hanns Anker, which are very faithful to the spirit of the author. In one scene at court, Justinian, dressed in most luxurious clothing, is shown at the back in the shadows. In the foreground are: Narses, a small, bald, older man with a stick; Tribonianus, a young, good-looking man wearing a toga; and Belisarius, looking serious in his Roman armour with a laurel crown.42 Not by chance, the ‘real’ Romans such as Valerius, in spite of their desire for a reconstituted Roman empire, would rather die beside the Goths than help the Byzantines to conquer Italy.43 With a typical stereotype that has recurred since Classical Antiquity, the Byzantine army (which only wins through betrayal and fraud)44 is not a ‘national’ army, but rather a mixed army of mercenaries composed of the most diverse peoples and interests – a clear sign of its degeneration.45 The empire, once it gained control over Italy, became immediately unpopular due to the greed of its functionaries and its rates of taxation,46 etc. It is Theodora who actually holds the power in Byzantium, as her skills in seduction and cunning allow her to control not only Justinian, but also Antonina, Belisarius, etc., and to act behind their backs – most often in accordance with her exlover Cethegus. Only at the very end, when she is already sick, are her tricks discovered, and she commits suicide.47 As has been noted, it is true that – together with Amalasuntha and Gothlindis – Theodora represents the woman who wishes to usurp typically male spheres of action, such as politics, and as such is a powerful symbol of Dahn’s bourgeois approach to family and gender roles.48 However, as opposed to the former two (who are Romanized, or a degenerate Goth), Theodora is the only one to be represented through undoubtedly Orientalist stereotypes. The first appearance of Theodora, in absence, occurs when Theodoric organizes everything for his death, including the letters that will have to be sent to Byzantium. Amalasuntha and Cassiodorus had prepared one for the empress, as ‘she has a great influence on her spouse’ (it is not important that, historically, Justin I was still the emperor when Theodoric died), but the Gothic king, a gigantic figure throughout the novel, destroys the letter to ‘the dancer of the circus, the shameless daughter of the lion tamer’, arguing that ‘my daughter does not write to any whore, who has besmirched the honour of all women’.49 Her lust, highlighted at many points during the novel, is consequently constructed according to the model of the insatiable maneater, which is in contrast not only to the modest (Gothic) ideal woman, but also to the model of pure love, which is presented throughout the novel as a high (romantic) ideal.50 Her physical description could not be clearer: A seductive woman. All the arts of feminine creativity in a time of refined luxury and all the means of an Empire were provided daily and for hours, in order to keep fresh and glaring this beauty, which was in itself superior, but affected early by an unrestrained life of the senses. Gold dust gave a metallic brilliance to her dark blue/black hair. . . . Eyebrows and eyelashes were coloured of a brilliant black 171

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with Arabic antimony; and the red of the lips was applied in such a mastery way that not even Justinian, who kissed those lips, ever thought of an assistance of nature with Phoenician purple. Every single small hair on the arms, white as alabaster, was removed with care, and the smooth pink of the fingernails occupied every day a special slave for a long time. And yet Theodora, who was not forty yet, then, would have stood out as a very beautiful woman even without all these arts.51 It is not necessary to list all the details which contribute to a portrait of the perfectly Oriental, intriguing, luxurious woman, from her pillows filled with feathers of Pontic cranes, to the Syrian slaves, the baths, the leopard furs,52 her lovers, her ability to blackmail everybody into fulfilling her wishes,53 or the fact that she had her own diplomatic contacts, of whom Justinian was completely unaware.54 It should be clear that Dahn had constructed a Theodora built on a model of Orientalist imagination: a femme fatale pulling the strings of power through her intelligence and beauty, thus both extremely dangerous and a sign of deep moral degeneration. In her own words, her philosophy is simple: ‘Ha, to hate and to love is to live. And when ageing, hate becomes almost sweeter than love. Love is unfaithful, hate is faithful’55 – and indeed, only the Goths are capable of true love.56 Cethegus, admitting to himself what a dangerous ally she is, makes a play on her name and calls her Dämonodora, not the gift of God, but the gift of the demons.57 In Anker’s illustrations, she appears first in connection with the first of the descriptions above, lasciviously sitting on a leopard fur while a slave washes her feet (see Fig. 11.1). Her transparent clothing, almost underwear, allows the reader to clearly see her breasts.58 When she is alone with Cethegus and expresses her philosophy, she again wears transparent cloths, while fumbling with both hands beneath the praefect’s mantle, near his genitals.59 With the exception of her first appearance, it is hard to speak of Oriental elements in these illustrations, which still consistently reinforce the idea of the perverse and diabolic femme fatale. Her official, hieratical appearance is different, as she sits on a high throne, while at the bottom of the stairs leading up to it an elderly person dressed in white lies prostrated on the floor at her feet.60 Theodora is only scared of one person: Amalasuntha, the beautiful daughter of Theodoric, who could marry Justinian and bring the empire again to unity. She arranges her brutal death at the hands of her Gothic enemy; just before her death, the queen realizes the trap she has fallen into and writes a letter to the Gothic people, inviting them to ‘fear Byzantium. Byzantium is perfidious as the hell and no peace between them and us is conceivable’.61 Indeed, the opposition is clear: in Dahn’s nationalistic perspective, the Goths are a people without a State, and Byzantium, the evil imperial formation, a State without a people;62 for Dahn, the people or nation (Volk) are the main organizing entity of mankind, and thus the only frame in which heroism can be expressed,63 so it is clear what kind of hierarchy of value such a statement implies. As Dahn’s novel became an extremely successful Bildungsroman in the German tradition (and was particularly appreciated in the Third Reich),64 this image of Theodora (and of Byzantium) remained very strong for a century, and clearly appears in the film version of the novel (in two 172

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Fig. 11.1 Hanns Anker, illustration to Dahn 1876 (1923). Author’s collection. parts, 1968–9), in which Constantinople is actually the modern Istanbul, and S. Sophia appears as in modern times, with minarets. The first scene set in Byzantium shows the dwarf Narses watching a dance of odalisques while he pets a lion, Cato, who lies at his side like a cat. Theodora (Sylva Koscina) is the same Orientalist manipulator as in the novel and commits suicide with poison when her tricks are discovered.65 173

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Theodora B.S. / A.S. (Before Sardou / After Sardou): the femme fatale in France While this view of Theodora (and Byzantium in general) is particularly enduring in Germany, due to the special role of the Germanic invasions in national and nationalist cultural memory, the image of Theodora created by Dahn was, in his times, not exclusive to German culture. In a similar fashion, she also attracted the attention of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. He portrayed not only the contemporary Eastern world (or rather an idealization of it), but also an imagined past Oriental world, mixing the Orientalist genre with the historical painting, which had traditionally represented the classical GrecoRoman world;66 his interpretation of the historical East, as with that of the modern East, could be summarized as ‘despotism and violence linked to sex’.67 This allowed him to realize monumental paintings in which a sense of historical conscience is lacking, using history as an excuse to show a world of exoticism and allure.68 While other Orientalists had used their style to illustrate biblical figures and scenes69 (since the very beginning of this artistic tendency pharaonic Egypt and the Ancient Near East had also attracted huge attention),70 Benjamin-Constant devoted his attention instead to the Byzantine empire, which he interpreted as an Eastern exotic world of luxury and autocracy.71 His choice was not unusual: this was the time of the so-called ‘Byzantine Revival’, visible in Decadent poetry,72 but also in art and architecture73 – and of great importance in spreading an image of Byzantium consistent with that proposed by Benjamin-Constant. In his colossal Justinien of 1886, the emperor is presented according to the traditional image of the wise lawgiver,74 sitting in a luxurious throne room and surrounded by counsellors covered in gold and purple. By contrast, in Throne Room in Byzantium, an empress (clearly Theodora) sits in a steady position, seemingly in possession of far greater power than the emperor, who lies comfortably on the throne. The proverbial hieraticism of the Byzantine figures is here demonstrated only by the empress, who reappears in a very similar position, alone, in Empress Theodora Seated on Her Throne (1887).75 Finally, L’Impératrice Théodora au Colisée represents Theodora in Rome (which she never visited). The theme is derived from contemporary historical paintings on the Roman empire, which frequently portray gladiators or scenes from the arena. However, in those paintings the mob is generally shown as frantic and bloodthirsty; here, the contrast is provided by the absolute calm of Theodora, who lies languidly, covered in gold and surrounded by purple, untouched by the cruelty of the show (two tigers rending two people), nor by the presence of the public, a pure example of a decadent woman living in luxury and devoid of humanity – the expression on her face is particularly eloquent. Her long flowing red hair – not present in the sources – contrasts with the purple of the background and contributes to the creation of a true femme fatale (the subject of other paintings by Benjamin-Constant in the form of biblical women, such as Judith or Herodiade),76 and the spectator finds himself in a sort of half-voyeuristic position while contemplating her. The jewels immediately attract the attention of the spectator, their ostentatiousness and luxury visible at first sight. This particular image of Theodora has the longest story and the greatest success: not only is it on the cover of 174

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numerous books, scientific publications and novels dedicated to Theodora (from David Potter’s monograph to Stella Duffy’s The Purple Shroud, 2012), but is also the direct inspiration of the image of Theodora which appears as an embodiment of the Byzantine empire in the videogame Civilization V. Here, the empress is directly taken from Benjamin-Constant’s painting, but represented full-figure on a kline, with the crown from S. Vitale on her head, and behind her S. Sophia instead of the Colosseum.77 With his choice of Theodora as a topic, Benjamin-Constant was following the fashion of the time; the empress had enjoyed a particular popularity ever since 26 December 1884, when Victorien Sardou’s Théodora premiered, with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role. Still, the literary and artistic products previously mentioned should have made clear that Sardou represents the next ‘revolution’ in Theodora’s success in a very different way from Procopius. He did not ‘rediscover’ a neglected historical figure; rather, he created the most successful work in which she appeared as a protagonist in a context which had been, for at least twenty years, very sensitive towards the empress. In the play, Theodora has a young lover, a pagan – or rather ‘Hellenist’ – Andréas, who with his friends plans a revolt against Justinian. He does not know that his beloved, whom he knows as the widow Myrtha, is actually the empress.78 Coming from a past in the circus, and having worked in Alexandria before abandoning this part of her life when she was prophesied to gain great power, Theodora tries to protect Andréas when the revolt (the revolt of Nika) is defeated. When everything comes to light, she is executed. Sardou’s main sources for his historical reconstruction were Procopius (even if Sardou argued against believing his slander against the empress) and Marrast’s La vie byzantine au VIe siècle (1881).79 From both, he took the idea that the extraordinary power that Theodora held over Justinian (and therefore on the empire) was a trace of the decadence.80 Indeed, Theodora holds a tight grip on power: she takes care of foreign politics, appoints the governors, and the rebels know that she is in charge.81 This is the connection between power and sensuality which is typical of the femme fatale, and of the Oriental queen,82 together with the magic arts which, within the play, Theodora had learned in Alexandria. The contrast is provided by Caribert (who opens the play), a diplomat coming from France, showing the morality and strength of the young Frankish nation, with no sign of a reign of lust and violence where people are killed due to races in the Circus.83 The rebels, faithful to the old classical world (here identified in Greece)84 are called ‘Hellenic’;85 they represent a strong and moralistic power, which fights to put an end to the decadence and restore traditional Roman virtues.86 In this sense, Christianity is cast in a bad light, as Andréas states that in Byzantium, in contrast with classical Athens, women must stay at home or leave it only veiled87 – another image stemming from Orientalist stereotypes.88 The ‘Oriental’ character of Byzantium is clearly visible in the scenography and costumes.89 Georges Clairin, a renowned Orientalist painter who had created the poster and programme for the play, also left some drawings of the scenes, which reveal the use of stereotypical Orientalizing images of luxury and decadence, and reveal a clear connection with Benjamin-Constant’s paintings.90 Sardou is known for using history as a ‘giant field of events and passions’. Through use of ‘local colour’, the past must be materialized within the scene, giving birth to an 175

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aesthetical experience that is centred on costumes and scenography.91 Nonetheless, the message of the play must be tangible, and clearly connected to the daily life of the public.92 In this case, Sardou’s ideas on marriage are relevant: the necessary attention the spouses must give each other, and the necessity of marriage and its preservation from divorce.93 All this is within the borders of contemporary bourgeois moralism, though with greater attention given to women’s rights. This perspective hints at Justinian’s responsibility, due to having neglected Theodora to engage in his theological studies. The apex of this is reached when Andréas confesses to Myrtha (the ‘positive pole’ of femininity, confronted and contrasted with Theodora)94 that if she were married he would still love her, but in another way – as one of many lovers, not as the one woman he wishes to share his life with.95 Theodora is thus not an entirely negative character,96 though she is the embodiment and the product of a particular society, of a decadent empire. She is beautiful, takes great care of herself and her make-up, and cultivates her physical appearance and seduction techniques.97 Her character as a femme fatale is indubitable:98 she even confesses that she would have liked to become a lion tamer,99 and this characterization is made even more credible by the actress, the ‘Divine Sarah’, the femme fatale par excellence.100 It is therefore no surprise if the renowned (and much-discussed) Jennie Churchill chose Theodora as her alter ego for a costume party in 1897, and was represented in this way in a bronze statue by Emil Fuchs in 1900. This was a way of appropriating and proudly performing the role of femme fatale, a role that gossip had already thrust upon her.101

Theodora during the Roaring 1920s Everywhere the name of the empress had become a symbol of decadence and of strong passions; the success of Sardou’s Theodora was unbelievable.102 Le Figaro had already published on 27 December 1884 a supplement on Theodora, which took most of its information from Marrast,103 even if the general theme was that success was due to the Divine Sarah, and not to the play itself.104 Théodora would enjoy more than 250 representations in Paris and more than 100 in London,105 as well as a tournée in South America in 1886;106 in 1907 it became an opera by Xavier Leroux, Massenet’s pupil. In a series of Liebig cards dedicated to female opera characters, Theodora appeared in 1895, next to Ulrica from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, dressed in white and gold, sitting on a high throne, demonstrating the might of her power through reference to traditional Byzantine frontality and immobility (see Fig.  11.2). This is not dissimilar to her aforementioned representation in one of Anker’s illustrations.107 During the first twenty years of the twentieth century her popularity brought various filmic versions of Sardou’s play,108 particularly in Italy (where the play had been premiered in Milan in 1885).109 The most famous of these (silent) films was Leopoldo Carlucci’s Teodora.110 The movie, shot between 1919 and 1920, led to consistently full theatres and people queuing for hours.111 Byzantium was portrayed as more of a continuation of Antiquity than as a different world. The scenes and costumes realized by Brasini are inspired by Ravenna, 176

Fig. 11.2 Liebig Card ‘Theodora / Ulrica’ (series Female Opera Characters), French version (1892) © Look and Learn / Rosenberg Collection.

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but also by Baroque architecture (references have been made to Bibiena’s drawings), and are not particularly Oriental.112 In this sense the movie is unusual; just as atypical was the representation offered by Galileo Chini in 1909, when he painted the dome for the International Art Exposition of Venice, summarizing the entire history of mankind and art. Byzantium was also present – or rather Ravenna, the most important Italian testimony of Byzantine art. The Theodora from S. Vitale stands alongside the virgins of S. Apollinare Nuovo. Here, as the description accompanying the fresco explains, Byzantium is a mixture of Christianity, paganism, exoticism, mysticism and luxury.113 In spite of these artistic expressions, which were derived from an interest in parts of the Italian culture for French Decadence and Symbolism, Byzantium is more frequently seen within Italy as a form of ‘degenerate Antiquity’, heretical (in opposition to catholic Rome) and depraved.114 In order to understand this Italian attitude, the historical novel Teodora, written by Italo Fiorentino, is particularly interesting. First published in instalments in 1885–6, and following an international trend of feuilletons dedicated to Late Antiquity,115 the Theodora presented here is more melodramatic and evil than Procopius’, her family even more depraved: Theodora’s mother is the lover of her second husband even before the death of her first. Theodora is inhuman: she abandons her son, and wants his father, Hypatius, killed after the Nika revolt. Byzantium is a sort of Babylon, a capital of perversion and depravity, a perfect Oriental stereotype (Fiorentino even precisely dates this degeneration to the mid-fifth century, the death of Marcian).116 This appeared clear in Giuseppe Pigna’s illustrations, which sometimes featured erotic scenes that were clearly connected to the Orientalist representations of baths and odalisques.117 The cover of the first instalment shows Theodora lying on a couch, one breast uncovered, while watching herself in a mirror. A black servant combs her; another, dressed in Oriental style and wearing a turban, touches her leg. The caption states that ‘amid that Oriental luxury her statuesque figure, her provocative glances were shining in all their might’.118 All this was unchanged when the novel was reprinted in 1927 in one volume, with twelve illustrations by Sebastiano Craveri. A glance at the book cover is enough to show the kind of imagination underlying the activity of the artist (see Fig. 11.3): a darkskinned odalisque dances on an Oriental carpet, on which lies the corpse of a dead man, while next to her are pillows on the floor (as is imagined to be the Oriental way of sitting), a leopard skin and a woman playing a harp of somewhat Indian form. Under fascism, and its cult of imperial Rome, the image of Byzantium could only get worse,119 as revealed by Flora Santucci’s scholarly publication on the empress in 1929. The author portrayed Theodora as a ‘passionate woman, tender and steady mate, sincere friend, protector of women, pious believer, missed mother’.120 She was an exceptional woman, ‘a flower of mud and gems’, her curious life the product of a degenerate period.121 She was not a professional prostitute, a true femme fatale, she merely had ‘a hot temperament’, and threw herself into love and passion with enthusiasm and curiosity, an acute political mind and great strength. She simply could not have been anyone else, since she was a ‘creature of an extremely corrupt century, atom whirling in the dissolute universe of a big metropolis and of very low social level’. Here, fascist anti-urbanism contributes to ‘explaining’ Theodora’s story and to somehow ‘exculpating’ her. Her 178

Fig. 11.3 Sebastiano Craveri, illustration for the cover of Italo Fiorentino’s novel, Torino 1927. © Eredi Mauro Giubbolini.

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Christian faith would have eventually purified and absolved her from the accusations of cruelty – if it had not been heretical.122 She understood the unavoidable, historical process of Orientalization of the Empire – that which Justinian failed to understand while squandering time, money and men in trying to re-Westernize it, an impossible endeavour.123 During the sixth century, the path was already clear for what would become the Ottoman empire, and thus the paradigm of Orientalism. Outside of Italy, the ‘Roaring 1920s’ had otherwise led to an ever stronger characterization of the femme fatale, now completely unbound by any rules, and potently erotic and destructive in all her manifestations. Such is the Theodora portrayed in 1922 by the Austrian novelist Alma Johanna König in Der heilige Palast, a historical novel, derived from Procopius, which became a bestseller more for its scandalous erotic content and sex scenes – described in detail – than for its literary qualities.124 The setting is the sticky empire of a tyrannical emperor (Justinian is already on the throne when he meets Theodora), always covered in gold and precious stones, with black slaves milling around and performing most of the duties, while the aristocracy lives in decadent pleasure. In this novel, Theodora is the abandoned child of a lion tamer and an aristocratic woman turned nun (whom Theodora strangles with her own hands at the end of the novel, when she refuses to absolve her of the sin of abortion).125 Theodora is a woman capable of dancing the veil dance since she was a young child, a skill she learned from a Phrygian dancer; a woman of strong will and determined manners, who interprets Semiramis, Roxane and Cleopatra in her theatre mimes (and later, in her performances as empress).126 Theodora embodies the typically decadent, immoral character of the Übermensch, but as a woman,127 which automatically leads to the adoption of the Orientalist stereotypes from the Eastern queen/femme fatale. She is, in this sense, a further example of the connection in König’s work between femininity and Orientalism – an encounter that is disruptive to her female characters.128 When Justinian hears of her, the most famous prostitute in the city, and wishes to meet her, she at first refuses. The emperor goes in person to her house, offering her various gifts, which she refuses; when he finally asks why, since she is known to offer herself for just three coins, the answer is what we would expect from such a maneater: “‘Those three coins are all he has to give, Justinian!” “Do you always request all?”’ And with her head tilted back she looked at him: “Always! Justinian!” ’. To have her, Justinian must make her an empress. With a motif inherited from Messalina, Theodora disappears every night to go to the ‘locations of lust’, and does not hesitate to have sex with Procopius’ young and chaste wife in front of her bound, frustrated and crazed husband, as a sign of her hostility to him. She sets wild animals on the rebels of Nika, animals she controls perfectly, as a man-eating bear is her pet, entirely obedient to her. With murder after murder, torture after torture, Theodora becomes ever more gigantic in her evil and decadent enormity; two heroic young Goths both fall victim to her, one seduced through the arts of love, the other through her ability as an actress. It is the latter’s murder which pushes her into a madness worthy of Caligula, one made from jewels, orgies, animals and blood, and finally into a less than human death. As formulated by the guard Ventidius: ‘I do not love her. I am afraid of her. Upon all women, whom we use and reject, comes 180

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seldom one, for whom we are commodities, objects of lust, ambition, pleasure, and who despises us without limits. I saw how Theodora looks upon . . .’

Theodora’s re-evaluation The academic world had, even before Sardou, begun to ‘rediscover’ Byzantium in a less negative light,129 and Théodora further influenced the evolution of academic studies:130 Debidour completely revised his thesis on Theodora after seeing Bernhardt’s empress, stating that Byzantium was generally not such a corrupt society. This attitude would sometimes lead to criticism of Sardou, as being responsible for divulgating a bad image of Constantinople.131 The leading role was now taken by Charles Diehl, author of Theodora, impératrice de Byzance.132 The first edition of the book was accompanied by a limited edition of 300 copies with sixty illustrations by Manuel Orazi, an important designer of the time, and the author of the poster for a rerun of Sardou’s Théodora in 1892.133 Beautiful, intelligent, attractive and seductive, of strong will, full of ambition, always inclined to love, Theodora is the ‘heroine of a more banal history’, a simple dancer, living as dancers did then, who one day ‘leaves behind her the loves without future and, having found the serious man who would guarantee her a lasting stability, converted to marriage and devotion’.134 She would not risk the throne for a love affair: ‘the adventures which Sardou attributed her’ are pure invention.135 The historian is aware of the success of Byzantium in contemporary literature – he devotes an article to this topic – and explains it, above all, through ‘the rich collection which it presents of perverse and fatal women’.136 The relationship between Diehl and Sardou is complicated: the historian appreciates the scenes, the costumes and the general pictorial representation of Constantinople given in Théodora and also enjoys the general representation of the population of the city.137 Both demonstrate certain common basic elements in the evaluation of the empress, in particular the idea of Theodora as an active, willing and practical politician who reigns in place of the abstract, theologian Justinian. Diehl is somehow still in debt to the stereotype of the femme fatale138 and begins his book on the empress underlining how she moved the brush of Constant and Clairin and inspired Sardou and Sarah Bernhardt.139 However, alongside the sensual, bloody and corrupted Byzantium, which he still describes in high moralistic tones, he dislikes the absence of the artistic, elegant, refined, virtuous city and concludes with a generally different idea of Theodora’s psychology, clearly stating that the real Theodora would never have liked how Sardou portrayed her.140 The same applies to Wilhelm Schubart, who in 1943 meaningfully titled his monograph Justinian und Theodora. He does not hide his appreciation for the empress, a ‘true co-regent’, a rare case of such a strong person, who was able to free herself from the bonds of her low-born origin when she met Justinian (in spite of already being in her mid-twenties, ‘for a woman of those lands, on the threshold of the Orient, already beyond the limit of youth’), and achieve a (deserved) absolute power.141 Friendlier interpretations began to slowly substitute those that came before,142 which did not take Procopius at face value and switched to new, interpretive categories that are 181

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present in historiography as in novels and plays, and summarized by Liz James as ‘she didn’t really do it’ (e.g. in Masefields’s Basilissa)143 and ‘she didn’t really mean to’. This could be further divided into the potential variants of ‘she had to but didn’t want to’,144 ‘she repented completely’ and ‘she became older and wiser’, which is more similar to Diehl’s ideas. These two tendencies would survive into the twentieth century, together with two others which are, to use James’ words, ‘she’s a tart with a heart of gold’ and ‘she can’t help it/she can’t help herself ’ that we witnessed in Carlucci’s movie.145 This last position is the closest to that which, in the end, continued to be inspired by the powerful portrait presented by Procopius. A more positive Theodora appeared in 1938 in Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius (1938), which was characterized by a rediscovery of the centuries-old heroization of Belisarius. The general, much too noble and upright in a corrupt world, marked by Justinian’s ingratitude,146 acts beside a remarkably strong and loyal Theodora, intelligent and aware (even if still prone to intrigue),147 and shares the generalized hatred against John the Cappadocian,148 an arch-enemy of Theodora and a truly bad man according to most ancient sources (even Procopius and John Lydus, who seldom agree, are consistent on this).149 Such interpretations still remained, at least in part, bound by Orientalist stereotypes. For René Kraus (Theodora, the Circus Empress, 1938), the empress is a positive character: an independent, strong and intelligent woman, at times ruthless, but for good purposes,150 even from the extremely chauvinistic perspective of the author.151 ‘As an empress she was great, but as a woman she was even greater. Power had been her object in life, but love was her natural element’152 – essentially a revised, and less uncanny, femme fatale. ‘True Oriental and child of her age that she was’,153 up to the point that her marriage to Justinian represents the clash and the fusion of East and West,154 Theodora lived in a corrupt and decadent time, in a Levantine Empire inhabited by superstitious, treacherous, false and fickle people;155 yet still, she comes from those people, understands them and represents them.156 In J. W. Vandercook’s Empress of the Dusk (1940), the dusk is the unavoidable decadence of the Roman/Byzantine empire (an empire which ‘had grown more Greek in taste’),157 which Justinian and Theodora are unable to halt, in spite of their conquest of Africa and Italy. Theodora, who was likely not a cheap prostitute in her youth but rather a real, ancient hetaira,158 changed Justinian entirely; she was also deeply faithful to him and represents, with Belisarius, one of the last examples of Roman intelligence and virtue, in a corrupt and deeply Oriental world. The perfect visualization of this Oriental corruption is Hecebolus, who with his ‘heavy-lidded eyes’ had ‘in the blood of his being’ the conviction that women must be entirely subject to men;159 this could not have pleased Theodora, who found a lover and was afterwards sent away from the Pentapolis. The sexual liberation and the feminist movement showed their impact on Theodora and her reception, too. The empress continued to be a powerful symbol of both emancipation and liberation, and a scaremonger for conservatives and chauvinists of all kinds.160 One could say that a further interpretation appeared: ‘she did it: all of it, but there is nothing wrong with it’. This interpretation appeared in France in 1934, in Brion’s novel L’aventureuse réussite de Théodora, in which Theodora’s ‘generosity’ in all spheres, 182

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including sexual matters, comes to the fore: her wits, her intelligence, her capacity to challenge stereotypes and to move through the world and all its hardships entirely at ease. Here, Oriental describes not so much Theodora as her world – predominantly Constantinople and Antioch – as well as her lovers, both the Levantine Hecebolus and an Arab camel driver she falls in love with after Hecebolus, with whom she has a son. Once empress, in disagreement with Justinian’s Reconquista, Theodora, re-gendered as Alexander, dreams of making the entire East her subjects, all of Asia.161 A few years earlier, the German psychiatrist Heinrich Stadelmann had composed a trilogy of Cleopatra, Messalina and Theodora, three women who marked the passage from one world to another that was new. Theodora, the last daughter of the (also sexually) free, creative and natural ‘Greek world’, which dies through the suffocation of women operated by the Christian faith,162 must suffer at the hands of Hecebolus, and through her union with her opposite Justinian, who represents the ‘counterrevolution of life’,163 ends up creating ‘Byzantinismus’. She achieves this by establishing a female imperialism against the male one; she thus pushed the ‘dictatorship of the proletarians’, created when people from the lower social strata became emperors, to its final consequence: to be turned against the proletarians themselves.164 A new Orientalism rises, the socialist one of the Soviet Union, which had also risen on the horizon in Vandercook’s novel, but was there attributed to the Persians.165 Theodora assumes the character – for good or evil – of a ‘red princess’, from the people and for the people, which she would continue having at various times after the Second World War.166

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CHAPTER 12 FROM HISTORICAL ENIGMA TO MODERN ROLE MODEL: THE RECEPTION OF S Ā S Ā NID QUEEN Š Ī R Ī N IN CONTEMPORARY IRANIAN CINEMA Irene Madreiter*

Introduction Nez. āmī describes Šīrīn as ‘daughter of fairies’, as ‘a dark-eyed beauty’, ‘a princess tall and slender, with pearl teeth, both her lips and named Šīrīn [‘sweet’].’1 Apart from her famous beauty, she is portrayed by Nez. āmī as an ideal woman also thanks to her confident appearance, her high sense of ethics, and her noble virtues. On the basis of the available evidence, we cannot say for certain how close this idealized figure is to the historical Sāsānid queen Šīrīn (fl. sixth/seventh century ce ), the favourite wife of Xusrō II of Persia. The following chapter analyses different layers of reception concerning the historical queen. In a first step, the scarce ancient sources available for Šīrīn’s life are to be confronted with the major reception by Ferdowsi and Nez. āmī. By embellishing the bare facts with legendary deeds, Ferdowsi and Nez. āmī were the first to create a mystified image of the queen that surpassed the socio-political realities of medieval Iran. However, it was precisely their idealized image of the queen that persisted in Iran until today. This chapter’s main focus lies on the ambivalent reception of Šīrīn in modern Iran where her story still inspires Iranian artists. An example is the film Shirin directed by Abbas Kiarostami (2008) where the relationship between literary model on the one side and cinematic translation on the other reveals an attractive play with both the changing meanings and semantics of this legend in the twenty-first century. It will be argued that the enigmatic historical persona that had become a mystified female ideal over time finally turned into a role model even for modern Iranian women.

The historical queen – an enigma Nearly nothing is certain about the historical queen Šīrīn. Thus, difficulties emerge with the extant sources: As in many other cases within Sāsānid history, there is a total lack of contemporary indigenous sources. Scholars have to rely on either later Byzantine sources, Christian authors or the Perso-Arabic tradition. These sources, however, are both biased and often intertwine different stories or overestimate certain details. The earliest authors 184

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that mention Šīrīn are the church historian Evagrius Scholasticus2 and Theophylact Simocatta.3 While the former died in 593/4, the latter served under the Roman emperors Phocas and Heraclius (602 onwards). Pseudo-Sebeos’4 Armenian Chronicle and the anonymous Khuzestan Chronicle are providing further information about Šīrīn. They were composed about forty or fifty years after her death. In the following, these four earliest historiographical sources are taken as the basis for a historical reconstruction of Šīrīn’s life. Neither Evagrius nor Theophylact refer to the birthplace or origin of Šīrīn (Greek Siren or Seirem). Theophylact first mentions her without name as one of the Sāsānid king’s wives who fled with him to Syria during the civil war against Bahrām Čōbīn (591 ce ). Both authors provide us with the earliest account concerning Šīrīn’s life which is about a petition by Xusrō that was sent to the sanctuary of Saint Sergius of Resapha (593) in Syria concerning Šīrīn’s infertility.5 The sequence of events is as follows: In 591/2, Xusrō married Šīrīn. Not long after that, he asked Saint Sergius in a letter asking for help in making his wife pregnant. To emphasize the seriousness of his concern, he also sent an inscribed golden plate and a cross to the sanctuary. Sergius appeared to the king in a dream for three times to tell Xusrō that Šīrīn had conceived. Shortly after that, she bore her first child, which was probably a girl.6 The story of her difficulties in getting pregnant seem to reflect contemporary rumours or folk-tale, as another miracle of conception is mentioned in the Khuzestan Chronicle. Furthermore, this continued to live on as a recurring feature in later epics also.7 Pseudo-Sebeos’ History is the oldest source that mentions Šīrīn’s place of birth recording that she came from Khuzestan8 in south-western Iran. According to the History, she bore the titles ‘queen’ (bambišn)9 and ‘principal wife’ (tiknats ‛tikin) of Xusrō.10 Pseudo-Sebeos describes her as ‘a very beautiful Christian woman’,11 courageous and assertive in Christian matters that even the king’s advisers at court did not dare to refute her.12 The Syriac Khuzestan Chronicle13 mentions Šīrīn seven times in detail and in different contexts promoting a very positive image of a strong woman who offered the king counsel and support. The Chronicle calls her both an ‘Aramaean’14 and a Christian wife of Xusrō. It also includes a folk-tale about Šīrīn’s infertility claiming that only after her Christian doctor Gabriel of Sinğar had conducted a phlebotomy she gave birth to her first son Merdānšāh having born only daughters previously.15 Under his influence, Šīrīn also turned towards monophysitism (the West-Syrian church), a countermovement to the East-Syrian Church, which hitherto had possessed a dominant position in Persia. From 609, the king also supported the West-Syrian church.16 Whether this was a consequence of Šīrīn’s conversion to monophysitism or her general political influence on the king remains unclear. Yet already in 605, she is credited with arranging the election of her compatriot Gregory of Prāt-Mīšān to be the new catholicos. This was against the will of all the other bishops and even in opposition to the king himself who favoured Gregory as metropolitan of Nisibis.17 According to later sources, she cunningly took advantage of the homonymy of both candidates to manipulate the election.18 But yet, one even more important instance recorded in Christian sources is that Šīrīn 185

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preserved the True Cross at her palace19 after it had been brought to Persia as booty from Jerusalem in 614. All hitherto mentioned authors are interested in the strength and political influence of a woman acting either against or in favour of their own faith. The episodes mentioned always depict an association with Christianity (e.g. the election of a new catholicos, the petition to Saint Sergius and the restitution of the relics of the Prophet Daniel). The love story between Šīrīn and the king or details about their relationship do not play any role yet. This might also explain why none of these early sources records Šīrīn’s death. Her demise, however, builds up to a dramatic scene in later epical versions of her story where she commits suicide over the king’s corpse. Although her suicide cannot be totally excluded, there are some indications that she could have outlived Xusrō. For the Arab geographer al-Yakubi (end of the ninth century) claims that Šērōë20 married all of his father’s wives after he usurped the throne. In his Vita, catholicos Išō῾yahb II (628–46) states that during his lifetime Ardašīr had succeeded his father Šērōë to the throne (September 628) and that a rumour existed implying that Šīrīn had poisoned Šērōë because he had killed Šīrīn’s son Merdānšāh.21 Hence, Šīrīn’s image as a jealous poisoner was enlarged in later adaptations of the story, especially in that of Ferdowsi. In conclusion, the bare historical facts are the following: Somewhere in the wider region of today’s Iraq or south-west Iran a Christian woman became the principal wife of King Xusrō II and consequently queen of the Sāsānian empire. The extant sources stress her influence especially within Christian religious policies. As Persia was still a predominantly oral culture at that time,22 episodes of Šīrīn’s miraculous conception suggest that some Iranian folk-tales had not perished yet. Šīrīn either died a violent death together with her husband in the course of Šērōë’s coup d’état in 628 or she may have outlived Xusrō for some time. Surprisingly soon after her decease, however, a process of omission in Christian and Western sources occurred. Thus, only the Perso-Arabic and later Indian tradition deliver her as a kind of ‘archetype of pure love’ for posterity from an early stage.23

Transformation into legend: Ferdowsi’s Ša¯hna¯ma and Nez. a¯ mˉı ’s Khamsa After the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Sāsānian period oral tradition soon transformed into a written account. In this early phase of reception, two tendencies are visible: On the one hand the increasing importance of the love story between queen (or more often concubine) and king and on the other hand the inclusion of a certain Farhād, Xusrō’s master builder within the story which creates a love triangle. This constellation may be exemplified by one of Khalid ibn Fayyaz’s poems (first half of the eighth century), revolving around both the love story and the famous legend of the death of Šabdiz, Xusrō’s favourite horse.24 Within this version, the Sāsānian rock relief at Tāq-e Bostān near Kermānšāh seems to have inspired the poet (see Fig.  12.1). Modern scholarship suggests that the lower part of the relief depicts the king’s victory symbolized through an armoured horseman. In addition, the upper part shows the coronation of Xusrō with the 186

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Fig. 12.1 Rock relief at Tāq-e Bostān, near Kermānšāh (first half seventh century). Above register: investiture of Chusro II (Anāhitā / ‘Šīrīn’ on the left); below register: victorious king as horseman. Picture: Robert Rollinger.

help of the goddess Anāhitā standing beside him. The Arab conquerors no longer understood these scenes. Thus, the relief soon inspired the creation of aetiological legends leading to a reframing of the original meaning:25 In Arab sources, the whole relief was called Šabdiz26 in commemoration of the king’s mythical horse bearing that name. The figure of Anāhitā, standing beside the king, was now identified with Šīrīn. One of the earliest references for the second tendency, i.e. the creation of a love triangle, is Balʿamī’s Persian adaptation of T.abarī’s History (dating 963), where he writes: ‘[. . .] this concubine [Šīrīn] was the one with whom Farhād fell in love. Parvēz punished Farhād by sending him to cut through the mountain [Bīsotūn].’27 This becomes the core of later versions of Šīrīn and Farhād, either by self-contained narrative poems on this aspect of the legend or within the wider frame of the Xusrō and Šīrīn romance.28 Despite Nez. āmī’s influential version, the former nearly surpassed the latter in popularity. In Ferdowsi’s (934–1020) Šāhnāma, Farhād is omitted from the story as even Šīrīn’s role becomes secondary to political history. Ferdowsi tells Iran’s mythical and historical past from the creation of the world to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. He uses a lost Sāsānian source, the so-called Xvaday-nāma, (Book of Kings), on which he expands his narrative. Especially his description of the reign of Xusrō II reveals a tendency to suppress every reference to the last Persian-Roman wars against Heraclius. 187

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Instead, he fills Xusrō’s II reign with entertaining content extracted from folk-tales about Xusrō and Šīrīn. It is the peacetime pattern of Xusrō’s life upon which he dwells. The plot can be summarized as follows: Šīrīn and Xusrō fell in love in their youth29 and meet again during a royal hunt conducted by the king. Where the king and his entourage have to pass by, Šīrīn takes position unveiled and adorned with jewels and make-up on a wall. As the king arrives, she reminds him of their former love and they reunite after many years of separation. Subsequently, Šīrīn becomes another of Xusrō’s numerous wives, besides Maria, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Maurice. Ferdowsi also recounts Šīrīn’s successful intrigue and poisoning of Maria.30 A year later, Šīrīn becomes ‘principle queen of Iran’ (banu-ye Iran), but soon she starts another intrigue to set aside Maria’s son Šērōë from political power. Finally, Šīrīn is rehabilitated but becomes victim of Šērōë’s coup d’état who kills his father. Misleading Šērōë, she agrees to marry him, but commits suicide beside her husband’s corpse.31 Contrary to older sources, Šīrīn here is not of Christian faith and is considered to be of humble origin. She is even portrayed as being a ‘fallen’ woman and not worthy as legitimate queen. Nevertheless, the king marries her despite the reservations of the aristocracy and the opposition of the religious authorities.32 Overall, Šīrīn subverts gender-stereotypes of Ferdowsi’s time: Being a woman of ill repute, she does everything to save her love and protect her family. She makes use of poison mercilessly, is wrought with jealousy and emphatically tries to influence Sāsānian power structures. Ferdowsi adopts an ambivalent or even negative attitude33 towards Šīrīn compared with her positive traits in Nez. āmī. Between 1175/6 and 1191,34 Nez. āmī composed five long poetic books, commonly called ‘The Five Treasures’ (Khamsa). The second among these, Xusrō o Šīrīn, is generally regarded as his masterpiece. It focuses on the love story between the king and the Armenian princess Šīrīn. Nez. āmī expands the narration of T.abarī and Ferdowsi both with folk tradition and his own inventions. It is Nez. āmī, who so intensely romanticized the story. The complex plot is summarized in simplified form: Xusrō and Šīrīn fall in love due to reputation after pictures from each other have been shown to them. Their first meeting, long delayed by the poet, confirms their love but it is doomed to end with Šīrīn dying on Xusrō’s grave. Within that framework, Nez. āmī incorporates episodes of the king’s reign. However, he subordinates all historical causality to love as a motive. For instance, Bahrām Čōbīn revolts against the king because he accuses him to be love-stricken. Šērōë, then a nine-year-old boy, already loves Šīrīn and plans to marry her. In Nez. āmī’s version, Šīrīn explicitly does not poison Maria since she is a chaste but also passionate woman and rigid in her resistance to Xusrō’s attempts to seduce her. As Paola Orsatti rightly observed ‘the insistence with which she defends her good name (niknāmi) can also be seen as the poet’s reaction to the bad reputation attributed to Šīrīn in the sources.’35 Therefore, Nez. āmī created the figure of Šakar of Es.fahān,36 a duplication of Šīrīn, bearing the negative traits attributed to her by T.abarī, Ferdowsi and other poets.37 188

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Farhād – here an architect and sculptor well-versed in the sciences and also endowed with immense physical strength – appears at a point when relations between Šīrīn and her royal lover are strained. Maria, again the daughter of the Byzantine emperor and already Xusrō’s wife, had not accepted Xusrō’s love for Šīrīn and forbidden the king to take her into the palace. Therefore, Šīrīn grieves and secludes herself into a remote palace. Acting on Šīrīn’s request, Farhād cuts a stone canal for the flow of milk from the pasture to her palace, a popular scene in miniature paintings. Later in the poem, Farhād defeats Xusrō in a stichomythia about Šīrīn. Orsatti emphasizes that ‘the dialogue is the culmination of the clash between two conflicting codes and concepts of love. While one is heroic and sensual regarding the beloved as a prize or booty to be conquered and possessed the other is unrequited and all-consuming relishing the very notion of the annihilation of the self through love.’38 When Xusrō recognizes that he will be unable to dissuade Farhād to abandon his love for Šīrīn, he orders him to cut a road through the rocks of Bīsotūn. If he succeeds, the king promises to give up his own claim upon Šīrīn. Soon it is clear that Farhād will accomplish the impossible task. Therefore, the king sends Farhād the false news of Šīrīn’s death. In his despair, Farhād commits suicide by lunging from a rock.39 Soon after this incident, Maria also dies. Even after her death, Xusrō avoids marrying Šīrīn but instead marries the courtesan Šakar before he finally takes Šīrīn as his legitimate wife.40 The king’s strange hesitation is probably connected with the Christian faith of Šīrīn that made her unacceptable as a legitimate wife for the Zoroastrian king. Nez. āmī’s plot also reveals the importance of marriage as prerequisite for sexual intercourse,41 an imperative in Christian and Islamic faith. Despite her love for Xusrō, Šīrīn is not willing to give in to Xusrō’s sexual demands whom she resists tenaciously. Thus, she is morally superior to Xusrō but at the same time makes him a better man and king. Nez. āmī created a hybrid version,42 mingling elements from historical reality with legends, folk-tales and his own phantasy. It is noteworthy that he portrays Šīrīn as a lover, heroine, ruler and even educator of men.43 This is in contrast to contemporary genderstereotypes of Muslim theologists or legal scholars of that time who saw the source of all evil in every woman.44 Nez. āmī’s Šīrīn trespasses across the social rules and boundaries set for women. Modelled after his beloved wife Āfāq, Nez. āmī created Šīrīn as a positive female exemplum.45 The idea of ‘exceptional women’ can be connected with ‘andronormative’ historiography, as feminists like Gerda Lerner have phrased it. Due to selection framed by patriarchal norms, only those women were mentioned who ‘did what men did and what men recognized as important’.46 Nevertheless, Nez. āmī shows both sides of the coin: In general, his female characters are not only wise, beautiful or passionate but also sometimes dreadful, arrogant or despondent. This proves the multivalence of his characters. In contrast to Ferdowsi who celebrates the exploits of men in love or war and raises his protagonists to a position of supermen Nez. āmī on the opposite emphasizes their human traits. At the same time, both stories have nothing to do with the socio-political reality of their times but portray idealistic gender-stereotypes of a bygone elite. Nevertheless, it was Nez. āmī’s version that remained the most influential until the present.47 189

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Cinematic reception of the Šˉır ˉın-story in the twenty-first century In the decades of the Pahlavi era (1925–78), Nez. āmī’s poem was part of a glorified monarchic past of Iran, but the historical Sāsānid queen did not play a role. On the occasion of the 2,500-year anniversary of Persia in 1971, the Shah issued stamps and banknotes with different historical images. Among them were also stamps with rulers from Sāsānian times, like queen Bōrān or the kings Ardašīr and Šāhpūr.48 Regardless of their historical importance, Šīrīn or Xusrō were not included. In modern schoolbooks, the Sāsānid dynasty is presented as part of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, but there is also no reference to the queens of the dynasty.49 In the decades after the Islamic Revolution, at times even Nez. āmī was in danger of being condemned. In August 2011, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG ) refused a publishing house the permission to issue the eighth edition of Nez. āmī’s Khamsa because of its alleged indecent content.50 Officials considered ‘references to the consumption of wine and unchaperoned visits between unmarried male and female characters’51 as inappropriate for readers. The Islamic government’s concerns reportedly also centred on the act of Šīrīn embracing her dead husband seeing in this a vulgar display of physical affection between a woman and a man. After strong reactions by some media and Iranian artists, the Ministry soon denied that it had deposed any kind of censorship and allowed re-publication. Although stories from the Šāhnāma figure prominently in Iranian Ghavhe–kaneh (‘coffee shop’) folk-tale paintings,52 Šīrīn seems to be omitted from the walls of coffee shops in Tehrān today.53 This is even more surprising, as the last decade has seen a certain revival of the old stories in different media: Iranian photographer Babak Kazemi (born 1983) concentrates in a series of mixed-media pictures on The Exit of Shirin and Farhad (2012). He makes use of the Persian rug imagery54 in combination with photographs of a man who usually carries a woman sitting on a bicycle.55 This scene refers to a popular motif taken from Persian miniature paintings in which Farhād shoulders both the fatigued Šīrīn and her horse Šabdiz and carries them back to her palace. Similarly to the cinematic version discussed below, the Šīrīn-story serves as a projection screen to criticize current socio-political problems in Iran56 such as political oppression, restrictions on common-law marriages, the segregation of the sexes, the economic crisis, etc. This kind of reception can be termed ‘intervention’ in the sense of reworking ‘the source to create a political, social or aesthetic critique of the receiving society’.57 This short overview illustrates that Xusrō and Šīrīn and especially their variant Šīrīn and Farhād still play a role in Iranian artistic media today. Despite its popularity, however, cinematic reception within Iran is scarce. Anne Démy-Geroe observed, that Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) is the ‘first version of the Shirin story filmed in the Islamic Republic, despite it being the subject of one of the earliest Iranian films, Abdolhossein Sepenta’s Shirin va Farhad (1934) and Ismael Koushan’s Iranian Turkish co-production Shirin and Farhad (1970) from the late Pahlavi era.’58 In comparison, there have been six versions of Šīrīn and Farhād which were made into a film in the Indian sub-continent.59 At first sight, this seems astonishing because cinema plays an eminent role in Iran 190

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‘effectively replacing poetry, plays, short stories, and novels as the most significant cultural medium’.60 Yet there is a direct link to the political developments after the Islamic Revolution. The laws of gender segregation and modest dress (hijab) from the 1980s also had consequences for filmmaking including the prohibition of close-ups61 of women’s faces and body parts, both direct touching or even looking between a man and a woman, and request of wearing a veil in all scenes – even interior.62 This affected thematic and formal aspects of Iranian films.63 Moreover, cinema was (and still is) considered to serve for educational means rather than for entertainment.64 Abbas Kiarostami affirmed in an interview in 2009: ‘Our government policy is focused on using cinema as a tool of propaganda and religious manipulation, as they’ve done for 30 years.’65 Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad has shown that the international acclaim for a certain film or director ‘facilitated the cinema’s engagement with issues of socio-political significance in the country’.66 Until 2003, Kiarostami had tried to avoid contentious issues, and instead adjusted the content of his films in order to avoid censorship.67 Since then, though, he has publicly spoken out against censorship and become more daring in depicting contentious issues. This is a consequence of his growing international reputation. The opening of the political atmosphere since 1997 has played a part in this change, too, as some filmmakers finance their own films and sell the international distribution rights to foreign companies. But still, all these limitations make it hard for Iranian directors to film narrations concentrating on bodily love or romances between men and women. However, many directors found ways and means to subvert official Iranian cinematic policies.

Kiarostami’s Shirin Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) was one of the most renowned Iranian filmmakers who won major prizes in Western film festivals such as Locarno (1989) and Cannes (1997). In 2008, he shot Shirin, a film officially banned from Iranian cinema. In 2010, the film received a single permit to be shown in Iran on the occasion of a documentary-film festival. One year later, it received a limited release in two Iranian theatres.68 The plot, however, is quite simple: In the first ninety seconds, fourteen pages with miniature paintings from an old woodcut book of Nez. āmī are shown (see Fig. 12.2). After that, the viewer sees a sequence of 114 close-ups of women with headscarves sitting in a darkened cinema hall watching a performance of Xusrō and Šīrīn. Yet one only hears the dialogues and sounds of the performance without ever seeing what actually happens on the moviescreen the women are looking at. The female audience act as characters of a film that only exists in the mind of the viewers, as the story is only present as an off-shot sound. We can only imagine what the women are watching by their changing gaze or their different facial expressions: They react to Šīrīn telling her sad story, to the noise of galloping horses, or to the tumult of battle. Sometimes they appear indifferent and sometimes they show empathy with or fear of what they see, and sometimes women even cry. No two faces ever look the same, and the female gaze clearly dominates. There are a few male 191

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Fig. 12.2 Two stills from the title sequence of Shirin (2008): the column on top of the first manuscript page has in Farsi: ‘Inspired from the work of Hakim Nezami Ganjavi’, and the second has: ‘Screenplay, M. Rahmanian’, Artwork © British Film Institute. characters69 but they are always sitting in the eclipsed background of the cinema and also mostly out of the camera frame. In interviews, Kiarostami often claimed that the choice of the Šīrīn-story was merely accidental.70 A close look at specific details, however, indicates the opposite. The initial sequence of the film shows illustrations of old manuscripts with famous scenes from Xusrō and Šīrīn such as a bare-breasted Šīrīn bathing in a lake, hunting scenes of the king, the beautiful palaces and pavilions of Persia, Xusrō and Šīrīn embracing each other, Šīrīn’s suicide with a knife, throwing herself on Xusrō’s corpse, etc. The first picture even shows the symbol of kingship, the twin lions and stars, underlined by trumpet fanfares. 192

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These illustrations are surrounded by Farsi-texts and a changing column naming the screenplay writer, producer and director of the film (see Fig. 12.2). As a result, Kiarostami creates a bridge between modern film and ancient literature by ‘inscribing the original or source text with his own adaptation and response’.71 Thus, there is a clear relationship between the plot of the film and the Šīrīn-legend. To truncate the original title to ‘Shirin’ (in contrast to Shirin and Xusro or Shirin and Farhad) is a sign that he concentrates on the female side of the story and on the female vision of the audience within the film. Kiarostami has cast a hundred and thirteen popular Iranian actresses and the French star Juliette Binoche for Shirin.72 Iranian viewers know them through roles they have played in earlier Iranian films but outside of Iran only a few of them are famous. Remarkable is the inclusion of different generations73 even from pre-revolutionary Iran such as the recently deceased Iren or the daughter of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose films were also banned and who was imprisoned in 2010 for making a film critical of the government.74 The film does not credit Nez. āmī’s poem, but credits the prose adaptation75 from 1998/2000 by Iranian novelist Farideh Golbou. Golbou’s other stories are known for dealing with the social conditions of Iranian women criticizing inhuman traditions and injustice in family and society.76 Thus, it is a deliberate choice of Kiarostami to use this particular version written by a woman. In Golbou’s adaptation, Šīrīn is more of a tragic heroine repeatedly pointing out that she is a victim, a helpless outsider of history, and of the wars and intrigues of men. Nevertheless, Šīrīn still appears as a wise, independent, active princess with power, protecting her virginity and regulating her desire for Xusrō. As the female audience members are surely aware of the restrictions for premarital sexuality or the modesty codes of their own time, this evokes empathy and admiration for the princess. Another point allows easy identification with the historical figure and encourages women of today to reflect on their own situation: Šīrīn directly calls on the audience in the cinema to listen to her story. At the end of the film she asks whether her female compatriots (and the audience members!) are crying for her or for ‘the Šīrīn that hides in all of us’.

Interpreting Kiarostami: Between self-Orientalism and nativism What impression does a Western viewer get from this film? Does Kiarostami borrow conventions expected of Iranian films? In Western eyes, not familiar with the concealed meanings of the works, the film could in fact acknowledge and even reinforce existing stereotypes of a perdurable Orient as it builds on traditional, allegedly ‘typical’ elements of Oriental cultures. The notion that the Orient is the cradle of torpid cultures and impervious to change has deep roots in European thought. In his controversial book Orientalism, Edward Said has identified a whole set of stereotypes made up about the Orient: Beside the eternal and unchanging East, it is the image of the sexually insatiable Arab, the ‘feminine’ exotic, the teeming marketplace, corrupt despotism and mystical religiosity to name just a few.77 Talking about unchanging civilizations endowed with a 193

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fixed repertoire of core cultural attributes and a frozen mentality78 has long been unmasked as essentialism. The dichotomization of East and West, though, has little to do with reality. Today, Said’s Orientalism itself looks back onto a history of nearly half a century since publication. Its central concepts are seen as partly outdated overcome in several academic disciplines. Nevertheless, Orientalism continues to play an important part in everyday culture and has returned to political thinking, especially after 9/11 and the increasing threat of IS -terrorism. One wonders to what extent the film promotes or encourages pre-existing Orientalist attitudes towards Iran. Although it would certainly be a Eurocentric interpretation reducing the film to this aspect, already Said has observed that ‘the modern Orient . . . participates in its own Orientalizing’,79 and thus perpetuates former colonist stereotypes. Imad Gebrael defines this kind of ‘Self-Orientalism’ as ‘a process that mimics the dynamics of traditional Orientalism but is planned, practiced and projected by the traditionally defined “other” (i.e. the Oriental himself) onto his own context.’80 Thus, ‘Self-Orientalism relies on using the tools of Western perception to represent one’s own culture.’81 In my opinion, there are some indications of Self-Orientalism in Shirin. As mentioned above, the initial sequence of the film consists of a bricolage or hybrid mixing of ancient manuscript paintings with the credits in modern Farsi. These ninety seconds could be seen as Self-Orientalizing, a concession to the Western audience that expects such pictures in an Iranian film. Another example of probable self-orientalism concerns the different covers of the DVD and the film posters of Shirin: The visuals vary between depictions of veiled women for the European market and an Oriental decoration without figures for the US one. Cinema Guild, a distributor of independent, foreign and documentary films based in New York City published a dark-blue cover with ornaments (see Fig.  12.3).82 Most other covers use stills of the veiled women, the fictive audience of Shirin. The British Film Institute (bfi)83 put a single woman with a sorrowful look on the DVD cover, whereas the booklet inside the DVD shows another image of a veiled woman but with a more neutral gaze. For the French-speaking market, mk2 Films84 designed a black and white cover with red letters, and three veiled women above. For the Spanish audience they varied the cover by depicting a green rectangular in the middle of the cover bearing the title of the film, surrounded by a mosaic of veiled women. The same distributor produced another poster for the Iranian market. There, they used a still of the initial sequence imitating a miniature painting, abandoning any female face. In her study on memoirs of female diasporic Iranian writers, Sanaz Fotouhi observed that ‘titles and covers, blurbs and promotions for these books often draw on notions of silence, veiling and unveiling, oppression and imprisonment, highlighting the acute difference between women’s lives over “there” and “here”.’85 These titles and covers are often constructed by publishers as selling points, sometimes with authors themselves having little control over them. The same holds true for the covers of the DVD of Shirin, where the clever packaging and marketing strategies surely strengthened its reach to a Western audience. Especially the covers with veiled women tap ‘into a [Western] fantasy of the illicit penetration of the hidden and gendered spaces of the Islamic world, offering Westerners a glimpse into the presumably forbidden world beneath the veil.’86 194

Fig. 12.3 Different DVD -covers of Shirin, Artwork © British Film Institute and mk2 Films.

195

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Analysing Self-Orientalism in modern Arab design, Imad Gebrael observed a politicization of the veil. While classical Orientalism was centred on erotic images of ‘unveiling’ and erotica, neo-Orientalism consists of ‘hyper-veiling’ the female body and an exaggerated focus on conservatism, in order to maximize the social, cultural and political distance between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ and to convey a sense of threat.87 This view might be true for the entire representation of women in Shirin: They not only play exaggerated roles, but by concentrating on the veil Kiarostami stresses the exotic and the glimpse of absolute difference to non-Islamic women. This again corresponds to the expectant attitude of Western viewers and at the same time is a simplification of the real role of Iranian women. He seems to confirm the image of a never-changing, static society, reducing the complexities of Iranian women’s history to the hijab. In this respect, Kiarostami’s presentation of women could not only be seen as self-orientalization but even as nativism. Yet, things are more complex in my eyes.

Kiarostami: A critique of nativism Besides self-orientalization, Orientalism itself has a political consequence. Already in 1981, the Syrian philosopher Ğalāl S.ādiq al-‘Az. m had defined a counter-concept to Said which he called ‘Orientalism in reverse’,88 sometimes also called as ‘occidentalism.’89 In his opinion, Said’s criticized. ‘Image has left its profound imprint on the Orient’s modern and contemporary consciousness of itself.’90 Moreover, Said apparently had promoted a thinking within nationalists or Islamists who gratefully picked up on the ontological difference between East and West, and translated it positively for their own purpose: a division of the world into two with similar assumptions of a fundamental ontological difference separating the natures, peoples, thoughts, etc. The former Orientalists’ essentialist ontology had supposedly been reversed to favour one specific people of the Orient (be it the Arabs, the Iranians, etc.) and to prove the ontological superiority of the Oriental mind over the Occidental one. Mehrzad Boroujerdi has termed this way of thinking ‘nativism’. It is a form of rejection of the West combined with a tendency to defend Iran’s Islamic or national heritage. Nativism is ‘the doctrine that calls for the resurgence, reinstatement, or continuance of native or indigenous cultural customs, beliefs, and values.’91 Orientalism in reverse and nativism subscribed to a modern fallacy that there is a binary split between what is perceived as Iranian (native, familiar, traditional, positive) and imagined as Other (Western, alien, modern, negative). Now it essentializes the West as a monolithic bloc. But did Kiarostami really support such concepts? If we return once more to the role of women in Shirin, Kiarostami in fact breaks up Iranian self-stereotypes, although he seems to acknowledge them at first sight. For instance, it is exactly the only Western actress in Shirin, Juliette Binoche, who becomes part of a juxtaposition. For contrarily to the Iranian women Binoche is the only one who wears no make-up at all, thereby constructing an alien Other as make-up is one of the paradoxical issues in Iranian society and politics. Official announcements of Iranian 196

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leaders stress that make-up is a despicable sign of Western decadence. On the other hand, however, in recent years Iran witnessed a surge in popularity in cosmetic surgery among both men and women. Official Iranian medical statistics record that more than 20,000 rhinoplasties are performed every month in Tehrān.92 Moreover, Iran is the seventh-largest market for cosmetics in the world, and second in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia.93 Thus, Saeid Golkar concludes: ‘Too much makeup, for both genders, is a way of life, a clear split from the view of the religious-Hezbollahi class.’94 Being heavily made up, Kiarostami’s female characters undermine official ideology. Another subtle critique of nativism can be seen in the movie’s musical accompaniment. Kiarostami did not choose traditional Iranian music for Shirin. Heshmat Sanjari, one of the composers, is a well-known Iranian conductor and composer. His Persian Pictures, a suite for large orchestra from 1995, is a masterpiece of contemporary Persian symphonic music. Since the Islamic Revolution this kind of music was seen as a promotion of Western culture. All other composers (Morteza Hananeh, Hossein Dehlavi, Samin Baghchehban) are also among the most prominent of contemporary Iran. They are all embracing a melodic-modal style, a ‘Western’ kind of music, harmonic polyphonic writing, unknown to the traditional monodic style of traditional Iranian music.95 They mix non-Western musical traditions with classical canon elements into a complex crosshybridization.96 At the end of the film, Kiarostami inserts passages from ʿAt. t. ār, another medieval poet and contemporary of Nez. āmī.97 Within these, a male and female voice sing some verses in a dialogue form. Again, this is an indirect critique of the government since performances of solo vocalists for male or mixed audiences are restricted in public space (cinema halls being among them).98 In addition, the lack of visual representation of Xusrō and Šīrīn is a metaphor of the forbidden visual representation of the human body according to radical Muslim rules. In Blake Atwood’s words, this ‘challenge(s) the government’s role as moral compass, and the notion of love threatens the very existence of the Islamic Republic, which established itself on war and violence.’99 Anne DémyGeroe suggests that the concept of love in Kiarostami is also used for protesting the suppression of pre-Islamic culture.100 The vivid narration, full of passion and erotic elements, cannot be filmed as long as the restrictive rules persist. This gives the sound utmost importance. Kiarostami used famous figures of radio and movie dubbing for the voice-over of the film, thus paying homage to an era in Iranian cinema when foreign films were dubbed for screening and not censored.101 By separating image and sound track, Kiarostami liberates the female voice and ‘gives an independent identity to the female voice and body’.102 Paradoxically, Šīrīn is only heard but not seen, and the veiled female viewers are seen but not heard (they never ever speak). Thus, both are not fully exposed to the viewer’s gaze.103 This trick is a certain concession to the codes of modesty as Iranian officials favour the depiction of Islamic values and religious subjects over national culture and myths. Hence, Kiarostami’s film does not fit the preferred image promoted by conservative forces:104 It neither accords to the historical (pre-Islamic) context of the story within the film nor to the close-ups or the bare faces of women. 197

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That the hijab (mandatory head covering) is still an important matter becomes obvious in recent protests of Iranian women publicly removing their headscarves, tying them to sticks and waving them for all to see – all in defiance of the law. Many of those women have been arrested, and one was sentenced to prison for two years in March 2018.105 On the ‘International women’s day’ 2018, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reacted by posting tweets: ‘By promoting modest dress (hijab), Islam has blocked the path which would lead women to such a deviant lifestyle. Hijab is a means of immunity, not restriction [. . .]. The features of today’s Iranian woman include modesty, chastity, eminence, protecting herself from abuse by men, refraining from humiliating herself into appeasing men [. . .]’106 Even if these statements show that the promotion of traditional patriarchal thoughts still exists, things have become porous at least within certain classes of the Iranian society.107 Kiarostami’s film already has shown this porosity: His female audience stages the official ideal image of modern Iranian women but at the same time reacts against it as Kiarostami reinterprets the Islamic codes of modesty to ‘present a liberated portrayal of Iranian women’.108 Although Kiarostami consciously plays with existing stereotypes of the Orient and sometimes even falls prey to Self-Orientalization, his film is directed against an official Iranian discourse about Occidentalism which stereotypes the West by overemphasizing an alleged Iranian tradition. On a low, subtle level, he criticizes contemporary conditions by using a story from the literary past to inspire women to revive their mobility and courage.109 Thus, historical Šīrīn has finally become a role model for modern Iranian women to be actively engaged in improving their situation, to live out their passions and try to achieve their aims.

Conclusion From Late Antiquity onwards, the stories about Šīrīn underwent various kinds of reception. In that process, Persian oral traditions allowed flexible use of the historical facts. Besides adaptation of certain motifs, there is also hybridization (e.g. Nez. āmī who romanticized the story), foreignization (e.g. in the various imitations of Nez. āmī that changed the plot, setting and its main characters), intervention or transplant. These latter forms of reception are characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries when Iranian filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami or photographers like Babak Kazemi used and use the old poems as starting points to put them in a modern context and subsequently give them a new meaning. However, some patterns of the story have recurred since Late Antiquity. Šīrīn is always a strong, autonomous woman with political influence and actively shaping her life. This frame could be filled either with positive traits like beauty, passion or high ethics or with negative ones like jealousy, deceit or murder. Using these elements, Nez. āmī and Ferdowsi created an idealized woman, not corresponding to the real gender relations of their respective times. This picture remains until the present day. Due to sexual segregation laws and codes of modesty set up after the Islamic Revolution, the romantic love story of Nez. āmī would have been forbidden to be shown 198

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as a ‘real’ film on-screen. Therefore, this motif is ‘hidden’ in Shirin by only reciting the text. Especially in the last decades, changing Iranian society has seen a slow breaking down of gender-stereotypes. Educated women from the middle classes of society have tried to transcend old attitudes and to react against the political system and its restrictions.110 The 2008 movie also relates to the gender politics in Iran at the time and uses the ancient story to question the present. Kiarostami challenges the nation’s SelfOrientalization that has repeatedly relegated women to the margins of the nation. Even as the historical Šīrīn has vanished under a veil of legends, exactly these legends seem to have the power to offer a positive role model for contemporary Iranian women.

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CHAPTER 13 INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION: GYNAECOCRACY IN THE ORIENT, ORIENTAL SECLUSION IN THE OCCIDENT * Beate Wagner-Hasel

Orient and Occident, Asia and Europe The Orient is an elusive space. In ancient thought, ‘orient’ simply referred to the direction of the rising sun: sol oriens (Greek: anatolé). By analogy, the direction of the setting sun was known as sol occidens (Greek dýsis). In Antiquity, the course from sunrise to sunset could metonymically represent the world. However, these terms were not used for a concrete, geographically definable space.1 Only in Late Antiquity were the regions east of the borders of the Roman empire and the Eastern part of the Roman empire itself understood to constitute the Orient. When the Roman empire was divided into its Eastern and Western parts, the border between the Orient and the Occident ran through the middle of the Mediterranean and separated linguistic regions at the same time; Greek was to the Orient as Latin was to the Occident.2 The ancient terms in common circulation for the geographical space that we today associate with the Orient and the Occident were: Europe, Asia, Libya (Africa). Just as in the case of other social and cosmic phenomena such as the Earth Ge or Justice Themis, in the cosmological thinking of the Greeks, Asia and Europa were embodied by female figures. Poets like Aeschylus portray Asia and Europe as sisters who differ only in respect of their clothing. They appear in Aeschylus’ Persians (472 bce ) to the Persian empress Atossa in a dream as ‘sisters of the same stock’, ‘one arrayed in Persian garb, the other in Doric robes’.3 The sisters are each assigned their respective place of residence by lot. This does not however prevent the siblings from quarrelling: As Aeschylus says in allusion to the Persian Wars: ‘I seemed to see these two raising some kind of strife between themselves.’4 Such powerful images of feminization of territories not only arose in the poetic imagination at the time of the Persian Wars; they also circulated among ancient historians and philosophers, who often described political relations in terms of categories of kinship and lineage.5 The embodiment of territories by female figures can also be found in the Roman tradition. On their coins, Romans depicted their newly conquered provinces – such as Egypt – as mourning female figures.6 Even if it stands to reason to connect the feminization of the Orient with the experience of the Persian Wars or of the victory over the Ptolemaic sovereign Cleopatra VII, this falls short as an explanation. In part, such origin narratives are projections of a political alliance or political power 200

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constellation onto a particular genealogical mode of thought. This thinking corresponded to the practice of concluding or at least securing military and political alliances in the form of marriage or of ritual friendship relations. Up until Late Antiquity, alliance through marriage was a tried and tested method for states to expand and stabilize areas under their control. The original understanding of the Orient as the place of sunrise has one thing in common with notions of the Orient as a geographical space, a space charged with moral significance. The Orient exists only where the viewer is not. Due to the orientation – quite literally – of sunrise and sunset, the viewer always finds himself or herself at a fixed location in the centre, between those two points. This holds just as true for exposure to Oriental imaginations, with which this volume is concerned. The Orient serves not only as an imaginary space of the Other, but also as a space of projection of the Self, as we have known since at least the time of Edward Said’s work.7 But the Occident, too, has been understood as an imaginary space that is projected and charged. This means that the contrast between Orient and Occident cannot be resolved into binary thought patterns. Rather, it is a game of superimposed projections. Their meanings can never be grasped in generalized terms. They can only ever be understood situationally, i.e. depending on the perspective and on the concrete historical situation from which we look towards the Orient or the Occident. What I want to do here is to disentangle the thicket of projections that relate to the Orient. I will discuss two contrasting concepts that, from their inception, fed into conceptions of the feminized Orient; namely, the notion of a native gynaecocracy in the kingdoms of Asia Minor, and the trope of Oriental seclusion. Both are connected with different reception phases of the Orient.

The reversal of gender roles in ancient gynaecocracy discourse Powerful images depicting the feminization of territories, such as those that circulated in the figures of Asia and Europa, had been associated with habitual differences since the time of the Persian Wars. In Aeschylus’ Persians, these differences were linked to clothing. While the Doric péplos, independent of the gender of the wearer, denoted manhood (andreía), Persian dress was associated with immoderate indulgence (tryphé).8 There was in fact no real cultural contrast between Greeks and Persians, or a common and negatively connoted image of the ‘barbarian’,9 but rather a discourse on tyranny conducted in Athens that served to oppose what they saw as the dynastic rule of the Persians. This tyranny, in turn, was imagined from the fourth century bce on as rule by women, gynaecocracy. Structurally this form of tyranny was not a matriarchy proper, but rather the domination of a ruling house that was constituted by the ruling couple’s attachment and relationship. Such a form of rule was practised in Athens in the sixth century bce , but was outlawed after the introduction of the majority rule and the extension of political participation rights to the rural population which took effect after the reforms of Cleisthenes.10 Concepts central to the Athenian gynaecocratic discourse included ánesis and tryphé – unbridledness and exorbitant desire. These are the patterns of behaviour that were 201

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attributed above all to tyrants.11 However, they were mostly not located in the city’s own past, but mainly outside the world of the beholder, in aristocratic Sparta – Athens’ adversary12 – in the monarchy of Lydia,13 and in the imperial period in the Eastern part of the Roman empire.14 It was above all Aristotle and his pupil Clearchus of Soli who shaped this topos and brought it into common circulation. Again, the freedom (ánesis) in regard to women is detrimental both in regard to the purpose of the constitution (politeía) and in regard to the happiness of the state (pólis). . . . And this has taken place in the state under consideration [Sparta], for the lawgiver wishing the whole community (pólis) to be hardy (karteriké) displays his intention clearly in relation to the men, but in the case of women has entirely neglected this matter; for they live without restraint, and luxuriously (tryphéos). So that the inevitable result is that in a state thus constituted, wealth (ploutos) is held in honour, especially if is the case that the people are under the sway of their women (gynaikokratoumenoi – gr. gynaikokrateísthai = to be ruled by women), as most of the military and warlike races are . . . .15 While Aristotle concentrates on Spartan and Melian conditions,16 his pupil Clearchus looks to the Lydian state of affairs. For Clearchus, the rule of a single woman, namely the Lydian queen Omphale, connotes an exchange of status roles between free and unfree people, as well as an effemination of men. According to him, the Lydians were ruled by a woman because of their effeminate lifestyle, that is they preferred a life in the shadows. The tyrannical character of this rule is demonstrated here by the fact that Omphale forced free women to be joined to male slaves.17 One of her slaves was the Greek hero Hercules, who was sold abroad for killing his children and who entered the service of the Lydian queen.18 In her service, which is first mentioned in fifth-century-bce tragedy, Hercules acts as a mercenary and fights against highwaymen and takers of tribute. He punishes the Itonians who had seized part of Omphale’s country and he kills Syleus, who had forced him into to service while he was on his travels.19 The interpretation of this narrative current since the 1960s,20 is that it depicts reversals of the Self, built as counterimages to the supposedly patriarchal world of the Greeks. This interpretation falls short. These reversals of roles, which go hand in hand with ideas of gynaecocracy, follow by no means identical patterns and they refer to very different practices that do not tally with the concept of a universal patriarchy.21 Thus the image of the feminization of the Lydian way of life refers to the gendered social spaces found for example in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus that dates from the same time. Here, women are responsible for the area inside the house, and men for the area outside, including the spheres of war and agriculture.22 Such an ascription also occurs in fifth-century tragedy. In Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon calls on Clytemnestra to obey, but she resists: ‘No, by the goddess queen of Argos! You can go off and do what you must; I go inside and see to those things that girls must be permitted on their wedding day.’23 The oikos, a space with female connotations, we learn from Xenophon, is well organized if the husband becomes his wife’s servant.24 202

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This reversal of inside and outside is also supported by the model of gynaecocracy attributed to the Melians, as here it is the men’s refusal to act outside the house that leads to the rule of women. Thus, according to Aristotle, gynaecocracy among the Melians was a consequence of men refusing to assume their roles and came about as a result of a curse cast by Hippotes, the founder of the colony of Melos, on those who had refused to sail with him: ‘For those who stayed behind excused themselves by saying that their wives were sickly or that their ships were leaky; so he laid a curse that their ships might never be watertight and that they might always be ruled by their wives.’25 Once the Melians’ ships had become leaky, seafaring became a sphere closed off to them and they no longer shared this domain of influence which the Athenians had dominated since the Persian Wars thanks to their fleet and the Delian League. What manifests itself in this reversal of gender-specific spaces, is a structural conflict between oikos and polis, in other words, between the institutionalized sphere of the political, from which women were absent – only adult male soldiers assembled at the ekklésia and boulé – and the domestic sphere, that is, a political form that originated in the home and, in retrospect, was disavowed as tyranny. This institutionalization of the political was something new in the fifth century bce . The transformation of informal power into institutional power, the establishment of a ‘bureaucratic’ system and lawmaking by political bodies such as by the ekklésia and boulé, these are developments that have been interpreted in scholarship partly as a side effect and partly as the consequence of the tyranny of the sixth century bce . The difference in marriage practices in Athens and on Crete can especially be related to the reversal of naming and of status roles among the Lycians. According to Heraclides Ponticus, the Lycians had been ruled by women from time immemorial.26 According to other traditions, they also lacked laws and, in a reversal of Greek practice, were named after their mothers.27 Matrilineal affiliation among the Lycians had consequences for the status of their children. Children of free women and male servants or slaves were regarded as citizens; while children born of liaisons between free male citizens and female slaves or foreign women were deemed to have no citizenship. According to Reinhold Bichler, Herodotus, here, on the one hand refers to the tradition of a Cretan origin of the Lycians (in Crete inscriptions seem to give evidence of such rules), on the other hand he refers to the Athenian citizenship law, which denied citizenship to children born of relations between Athenian citizens and foreigners. This law was designed to prevent such marriage alliances beyond the borders of the polis.28 In Rome, on the other hand, reversal of roles did not pertain to social spaces but to work roles. This becomes particularly evident in the Roman reception of the role reversal that took place between Hercules and Omphale, a reversal accompanied by an exchange of both dress and work roles. In contrast to the Greek tradition, slave status now implied the loss of a hero’s warrior prowess. Hercules therefore loses his masculine strength: andreia. Omphale forces him to spin yarn and dresses him in women’s clothes, while she herself takes possession of his lion’s pelt and club. Hercules is thus transformed into a female slave. The assumption of spinning duties casts the myth within the framework of a specifically Roman gender ideology, since baskets of wool and spindles constitute the 203

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virtuous symbols of a Roman matron.29 The change of clothing also has a particularly Roman character. Male clothing, especially of the elite, was highly standardized and subject to an ideology of equality. Women’s clothing and jewellery, on the other hand, were a means of displaying the wealth of the aristocratic domus. Earliest evidence is found in Ovid’s Heroïdes, where Hercules’ relation with Omphale is depicted as a love affair that stirs jealousy in Hercules’ wife Deianira. In Ovid’s portrayal, his heroine Deianira takes action against her unfaithful husband’s effemination: I will mention one mistress (a recent offence) – the Lydian queen Omphale, mother of your son Lamus . . . saw necklaces hanging from the neck of Hercules (which had supported with ease the weight of the sky). Weren’t you ashamed to put gold bracelets around your strong arms and to cover your solid muscles with jewels? And those were the arms, of course, that killed the deadly Nemean lion . . . They say you held a wool-basket among Ionian slave-girls and were really scared of your mistress’ threats. Those hands were victorious in countless labours, but you didn’t refuse to touch a smooth basket with them, and you used your strong thumb to spin your portion of coarse wool, giving back the full amount as thread to your notorious mistress? As you twisted it into strands with those hard fingers, your mighty hands shattered the spindle again and again. At your mistress’ feet . . . Omphale even adorned herself with your arms . . . Oh, the disgrace! She covered her soft flank with the rough pelt of the shaggy Nemean lion. . . . Head held high, she presented her face to the crowd as if you’d been defeated.30 It was precisely this accusation of effeminacy that was deliberately deployed as a weapon to defame political opponents in the late republic and the early empire.31 A prominent example is Mark Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra: ‘Antony, on the contrary, like Hercules in paintings where Omphale is seen taking away his club and stripping off his lion’s skin, was often disarmed by Cleopatra, [and] subdued by her spells . . .’32 Mark Antony’s opponent Octavian/Augustus circulated clay crockery that depicted Antony in the role of an effeminate Hercules, sitting in a wagon and longing for Omphale. ‘Driving behind him, Cleopatra/Omphale proudly wears the hero’s lion skin like a helmet and wields the hero’s club. A slave girl extends toward her an enormous drinking cup. This touch is aimed directly at Cleopatra, who was ridiculed by Octavian and his circle for her bibulousness (cf. Horace and Propertius).’33 The subtext was clear: The Roman commander Antony, in the form of Hercules, was subject to a foreign, Eastern and female ruler and had betrayed the interests of the res publica.34 The concept of effeminacy underlying the variant of the Roman myth and encompassing Hercules’ and Omphale’s role reversal, referred to a different role in Roman household affairs. In contrast to Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bce , the house in Rome was not a sphere that existed in contrast to the political sphere, one that could be equated with femininity. Rather, the Roman domus was a semi-public space and of great significance for the political reputation of the elite.35 Since the time of the Gracchi, female members had been instrumental in promoting the status of the family. 204

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The most famous example of this is the role played by Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, who acted as a guardian for the gens Cornelia’s commemorative memory, and who disseminated the fame of her father Scipio Africanus. Such a deliberate family policy was pursued above all by popular politicians (populares) looking for approval among the plebs urbana.36 Another example is Fulvia, who came from a famous plebeian family. She was married to three influential popular politicians. First to Clodius, who enacted a series of reforms by which the Roman plebs became a significant political element in Roman politics, secondly to Curio and finally to Mark Antony, whose policies she supported.37 In the Roman variant of the myth, Hercules’ and Omphale’s role reversal therefore appears to be oriented towards the gendered boundaries of the domus; that is, towards different work roles (war and spinning) and towards emblems of status (clothing and jewellery), through which the prestige of the domus would manifest itself. The motif of Deianira’s jealousy is also alluded to in an open reference to Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia, whom Cicero accuses of controlling Antony and waging war in his name.38 According to Florus, she is supposed to have put a male military belt on herself – much in the style of the mythical weapon-wielding Amazons.39 The role reversal that takes place between Hercules and Omphale also alludes to the motif of servitium amoris, which was widespread in Roman love poetry. Such an interpretation is suggested, above all, by the comical role reversal in the depiction of the Hercules-Omphale myth in Ovid’s Fasti. At the centre of the narrative there is Faunus, an ancient god of shepherds and flocks, to whom a temple on Tiber Island had been dedicated in 194 bce . At the sight of the bejewelled Omphale, Faunus is consumed by desire. These events take place in a grotto in a grove of the wine god Bacchus, where Hercules, still clad in lion pelt, accompanies his mistress, parasol in hand. Just prior to their evening meal, they change clothes. She lays out for him ‘gauzy tunics in Gaetulian purple dipped’, and gives him ‘the dainty girdle, which but now had girt her waist’. She herself takes ‘the heavy club [and] the lion’s skin’. Fooled by appearances, Faunus approaches the wrong bed at night and is sent flying by Hercules. For Ovid, the episode is the aition of a cult practice. ‘Thus betrayed by virtue, the god loves not garments which deceive the eye, and bids his worshippers come naked to his rites.’40 It is in particular in the context of burial cult practices that we find a number of positive references, made by Roman citizens as well as freedmen and freedwomen, to the myth of role reversal.41 These motifs were readily taken up in early modernity, when the ruling classes linked on to this myth of role reversal. One example is Maria de’ Medici, who assumed power of state in 1610 after the death of her husband Henry IV. In her newly built residence, the Palais de Luxembourg, she had a painting by Simon Vouet showing Hercules and Omphale. In 1643 the painter Dorigny made a copperplate of the Lydian queen with the hero’s attributes, while Hercules sits beside her holding a distaff and spindle. Since the rulers of the Ancien Régime liked to be portrayed with the characteristic attributes of Hercules, a royal widow claiming the right of governance would of course make use of a classical myth telling the reversal of gender roles and Hercules’ submission to the power of an ancient female ruler.42 205

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Different as these classical narratives of female rule may be, they have, nonetheless, something in common. They reveal and express their influence within the context of a shift in power structures. It is especially in matters relating to a change from a monarchical to a republican system or vice versa that myths pertaining to gender-specific role reversals seem to offer suitable models for the negotiation of cultural conflicts. The negative use of these myths seems to go along with a republican worldview, while the positive use seems to belong into aristocratic-monarchical contexts. It is therefore no coincidence that in dynastic Europe, not only in royal houses, but also in Upper Italian aristocratic republics dominated by powerful families, it was precisely such female figures who were used as positive role models. These included the Assyrian queen Semiramis, the Carian queen Artemisia, the Carthaginian queen Dido and, last but not least, the Egyptian Cleopatra VII. These women all operated in Eastern regions of the Mediterranean where monarchies had been established. In this volume, contributions by Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Irene Berti, Marta García Morcillo and Mary Hamer all demonstrate this very clearly. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff and Lynn Hunt draw attention to changes in the art of political representation in the wake of the French Revolution. While among European monarchies portraits of ‘royal parental couples’ dominated, newly proclaimed republics used such female figures only in an allegorical fashion to represent general values such as freedom or fraternity. Here, Classical goddesses were the standard, while Heracles/Hercules became the representative of the people, the ‘victorious horde of brothers’, and thus of the male citizen.43

The Orient in the Occident: the modern topos of Oriental seclusion and the reinvention of gynaecocracy With the transformation of Europe’s dynasties into republican constitutional nation states, the depiction of female rulers changed and a timeless image of the Orient was created.44 Drawing upon this image, Oriental conditions were projected onto the Occident, in a reversal of the political domination of the Orient.45 Above all, the idea of Oriental seclusion, in which women were said to have lived in democratic Athens, had its origin in the emergence of the modern nation state. The idea can be traced back to the eighteenth-century conception of the harem,46 which emerged in the context of Enlightenment discourse about courtly ideals. Here the harem was presented as a moral model that functioned in contrast to the excesses of the French court.47 Moral philosophers of the late Enlightenment, the Göttingen philosopher Christoph Meiners among them, transported this image of the harem into the world of classical Greece, at the same time converting it into a negative model. Athenian women have since then been portrayed as living a life of Oriental seclusion.48 Christoph Meiners, in his four-volume Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts published from 1788 onwards, says that: All of Solon’s laws, which concerned the opposite sex . . . [proclaimed] either the oriental spirit of the lawgiver, or the oriental vices and inclinations of Athenian 206

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women. . . . Solon not only forbade most of the artificial and barbaric manifestations of female suffering, but also women’s frequent visits to tombs and monuments that did not belong to the family. This was because such visits to tombs in Athens, or generally in the Orient, were mere pretexts for criminal association or debauchery.49 For Meiners, the real subject of the Solonian law code mentioned here was sexual morality, and its natural addressee was the morally endangered female sex. Meiners therefore assumed that women lived a life of Oriental seclusion.50 Even though our conception of the lives of Athenian women has changed since these early modern interpretations, nevertheless European cultural memory has for the most part held onto the idea that women lived far away from public life, within the confines of the home.51 These images of Oriental seclusion have been constructed along modern experiences of mobility, and reflect, in manifold ways, the debates about women’s access to and exclusion from civil and public spheres in the modern age.52 Those who rejected the concept of Oriental seclusion produced sources detailing women’s freedom of movement in the public sphere, while those who wished to confirm the concept found sources that proved the opposite. The concept is based on the idea of a strict separation between private and public spheres, one that, in fact, did not emerge until the nineteenth century, but was turned into a universal structural category of human society.53 Since the turn of the millennium, this debate has taken a new direction and the house no longer forms the decisive boundary. Instead, a piece of textile now takes that role. In his book Aphrodite’s Tortoise (2003), Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones argues that in ancient Mediterranean societies – just as in contemporary regions dominated by Islam – women essentially only moved in public while veiled, that they always carried their home with them, like a turtle, as it were, and thus remained invisible. Llewellyn-Jones does not assume a contrast between private and public but rather between open and closed society. According to Llewellyn-Jones, a closed society orientated towards modesty, chasteness and chastity has a different value orientation than an open society focused on individuality and freedom.54 This concept also however relies on contemporary notions of the Orient as the Other. Just like the contrast between private and public, this dichotomous concept ignores temporal, spatial or social differentiation. Following the belief in Oriental seclusion, rule by women was relegated to prehistory.55 The Basel legal historian Johann Jakob Bachofen, drawing on ancient ideas of gynaecocracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, developed the concept of an original phase of rule by women through which all peoples were supposed to have passed, and whose origins he located in the East.56 Bachofen imagined Rome’s legendary queen Tanaquil, who helped her husband Lucumo, later renamed Tarquinius Priscus, to the throne,57 as an Assyrian goddess or an Asian king’s wife who in the Roman tradition was changed beyond recognition. A decisive argument for Bachofen is Tanaquil’s or possibly her husband Lucumo’s foreign origin. For Bachofen, female succession is above all Oriental: ‘the royal legends of the Asian dynasties have more than one Tanaquil.’58 And he postulates: ‘The Apennine Peninsula appears to have been a colony of Asia long before 207

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World

it took on the same meaning for a strengthening Hellenism.’59 In other words, the inhabitants of the Orient are the first to colonize classical Italy long before the Greeks arrived. Bachofen’s conceptualization of an Eastern origin of the rule by women fits seamlessly into conceptualizations of the Orient that circulated in literature and painting from the eighteenth century on and that were only deconstructed in the twentieth century. Above all, his idea of original promiscuity, which he associated with an early phase of gynaecocracy, corresponds to the sexually charged image of the Oriental harem that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters served up to their avid public.60 It is only logical that the nation states emerging after the end of British and French colonial rule in the territory of the former Ottoman empire would also make use of these ancient traditions. However, they adopted a different path and – as Anja Wieber is arguing for Syria in this volume – chose an Eastern ruler, Zenobia of Palmyra, as the bearer of their own identity and national consciousness, and as a representative of the Syrian state. At the same time, Orientalization downgrades the West and the Roman emperor as this Eastern ruler becomes its rival. The Syrian state, dominated by a powerful family as it had been for the past decades, adopted the dynastic model that had prevailed in conceptualizations of the Orient, that of gynaecocracy. In contrast, Western democracies, which grant their women far more participation than the nation states of the Middle East, once again turn to popular images of an original oppression of women as reflected in the orientalist concept of the harem. Mary Beard in her 2017 polemic Women & Power, revives this Western concept of an ancient tradition that had made women silent and invisible.61 A scene in the first book of the Odyssey, in which Telemachus challenges his mother Penelope, serves her as decisive proof: ‘Go in and do your work. Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves to do their chores as well. It is for men to talk, especially me. I am the master.’62 According to Mary Beard, ‘Telemachus’ outburst was just the first case in a long line of largely successful attempts stretching throughout Greek and Roman Antiquity, not only to exclude women from public speech but also to parade that exclusion.’63 Beard could also have referred to Helen who, in a male audience, is the only woman who tells the tale of the Trojan War; that is, she is by no means silent.64 Or perhaps Beard could have mentioned Arete, in the mythical kingdom of the Phaeacians, as the one who decides on the gifts given to guests,65 or of Andromache, who advises her husband in the defence of the city.66 They all tell a different story than Beard, namely one of female power. And this power is not tied to the role of male warrior, but instead to the right of recruiting female labour services. In her quotation of Homer, Mary Beard omits precisely the decisive sentence that refers to this female power: ‘and bid (keleúe) thy handmaids ply their tasks’. The poet uses the same word to indicate that a woman is giving instructions with authority, as he does for a military commander leading his warriors: keleúein – to command.67 Women of rank have others to work for them, at the spindle and the loom. They command maidservants, while men command warriors. The battlefield and the place where the loom stands are locations where value is generated. In all high-ranking households, be that of Troy, Mycenae, Sparta and Ithaca, or in the mythical kingdom of the Phaeacians, groups of women are active at work at the spindle and the loom. Only by equating power with 208

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physical strength is it possible to claim that women had no power in Antiquity. Of course, not all women had a share in power, just as not all men were able to exercise power. Mary Beard gives a wide-ranging overview from Antiquity to the present day, but her gaze is directed solely to the Occident, to the Western world, as it has become known. Her view is deeply Eurocentric and she seems to be unaware that the image she creates ultimately originates from Oriental fantasies of the nineteenth century. While Meiners, around 1800, had made the case that Athenian women led a life of Oriental seclusion, and had thus paved the way for the later Oriental fantasies, one of his contemporaries, his Göttingen colleague Carl Gotthold Lenz, had been so much more progressive. He had contradicted him vehemently and referred to evidence from the Homeric epic as discussed above.68 Mary Beard’s supposedly feminist view of history, in its backwardness, is as amazing as it is strange. Sometimes historiography, instead of taking a leap forward, will turn a somersault backward.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Macurdy 1932: 198. 2. See Penrose 2017. On Macurdy, see McManus 2017. 3. Throughout the chapter, we use ‘Eastern’ in a geographical sense, and ‘Oriental’ always in the sense of a Western discursive construction, in the sense of Orientalism as defined by Said 2003. 4. For an overview of women’s history and gender history in Antiquity, as well as the gender bias of male-authored sources see Späth and Wagner-Hasel 2000. 5. Bullough 1976: 94: ‘one of the influential factors in setting sexual outlooks is the attitude towards the opposite sex, and since in the male-oriented history of the past the opposite sex has almost invariably been women, the views on women become crucial’. The ‘classical’ reference on this is de Beauvoir 1949; Schmitt-Pantel 1984 even elaborates the theory of a connection between the theorization of gender dichotomy and the birth of Western thought in Greece. 6. Wieber-Scariot 1999: 175–86, on ancient topical discourses about evil and powerful women; for a discourse analytical approach to the representation of the imperial women as transgressors in the Annals of Tacitus, see Späth 1994: 83–96, 322–6. 7. Hartmann 2007: 113; for an overview of the structural characteristics of powerful queens and empresses in ancient times cf. Wieber-Scariot 1999: 39–72. 8. The literature on this is abundant: see, among others, Hall 1989; Huang 2010. Troy maintains its ‘Oriental’ traits in the Roman empire, too, as shown by the comparison of the emperors Otho and Elagabal with Paris: Bittarello 2011: 106–8. 9. See, among many others, Müller 2007. 10. Hall 1989: 99, shows that the Greek definition of the Orient has had an impact down to the present day. 11. Dench 1995: 100–3. On the representation of the Samnites and of other Italic peoples, as well as the accusations of ‘luxury’ moved to them, see also Carlà-Uhink 2017c: 175–89. 12. Schneider 2006: 241. 13. Said 2003: 3. 14. Ulf and Rollinger 2002 analysed ancient discourses on women of foreign ethnicity, showing how they overlap with the representation of powerful women. 15. Kuefler 2001: 47; Wagner-Hasel 2010; Mayor 2014; Penrose 2016. On the role of the Amazons in debates about gender roles and gender boundaries, see Wagner-Hasel 2008. 16. On this myth and its multi-layered meanings see, among others, Cyrino 1998; Wagner-Hasel 1998; Eppinger 2017. 17. Amm. 14.16.17; Claud. In Eutr. 1.339–341; see Pettinato 1985: 275 (symbolic castration) and 289; for a general overview of the reception of Semiramis from Antiquity to modern times,

210

Notes to pp. 2–5 see Asher-Greve 2006. Famously, Cicero called Gabinius ‘that Semiramis’ (Prov. Cons. 9): according to Steel 2001: 50, ‘this is a brilliantly damaging insult: the comparison to an eastern woman suggests that Gabinius is not a proper man and not a proper Roman’. 18. For catalogues of Eastern women in power (including Semiramis) see Wieber-Scariot 1999: 318–46; for female catalogues from Antiquity to Renaissance see McLeod 1991; for the use of Semiramis and Dido as exempla in defining the effeminacy of the Roman emperors Otho and Elagabal, see Bittarello 2011: 101, 111–12. 19. As, for example, in Julian’s praise of Eusebia: Wieber 2010. 20. Said 2003: xi. See, for the debate on Said’s Orientalism, among others, Macfie 2000; Lewis 2004; Schnepel, Brands and Schönig 2011; Elmarsafy, Bernard and Attwell 2013; Pouillon and Vatin 2014. 21. Said 2003: xii. 22. See e.g. Phillips 2014 on Orientalist discourses before the early modern period. 23. Some examples: Schueller 1998; Edwards 2000 on the United States; Loimeier 2001 on German Orientalism; Cohen-Vrignaud 2015 on Orientalist stereotypes developed in British political discourses. 24. More attention has been devoted to the visual arts: see, e.g. MacKenzie 1995; Lemaire 2000; Tromans 2008; Diederen and Depelchin 2010. On cinema, see Bernstein and Studlar 1997. 25. Schueller 1998: 4: ‘multiple and diverse varieties of imaginary Orients’. 26. McEnroe 2002: 60. 27. Bakić-Hayden 1995. 28. See Carrier 1995; Thum 2010. 29. Schnepel, Brands and Schönig 2011: 24–5. 30. Scott 1995. 31. Revell 2016: 4–5. 32. Wagner-Hasel 1988: 17: ‘Aussagen von Historikern über antike Frauen (bilden) einen guten Seismograph für zeitspezifische Konfliktpotentiale bilden’ (‘the opinions of modern historians about ancient women are a good seismograph for conflict potential specific to their time’). 33. Ferrero 1911: 40. 34. Ferrero 1911: 36. 35. Kohl 1989; Wyke 2002: 244–78. 36. Kleinlogel 1989; Sievernich and Budde 1989. 37. Mattingly 2011: 49. 38. Wieber 2017a: 126–7. 39. Wyke 2002: 267; Kabbani 2008: 113: ‘The European was led into the East by sexuality, by the embodiment of it in a woman or a young boy’. 40. Bertrand w.d.; the cover was designed by Georges Rochegrosse, who did the illustrations for the Ferroud edition (Paris, 1900) of Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô and was one of the honorary members of the ‘Société des Amis de Carthage’, see Dridi and Mezzolani Andreose 2012: fn. 11. 41. Jansen 2008; Dridi and Mezzolani Andreose 2012. 42. See Hughes-Hallett 1990: 201–24; Peltre 2010: 164: ‘Cette vision de la femme comme objet de convoitise, passive, dominée, peut être rapprochée de la relation que l’Occident entretient avec l’Orient’.

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Notes to pp. 5–10 43. See e.g. the painting ‘Keeoma’, by Charles M. Russell: Edwards 2000: 186–7. Said argued that America developed Orientalist thinking only with the Second World War; this has since been corrected; on Orientalism in American popular culture, see Rosenblatt 2009. 44. Carrier 1995: 9–10. 45. Wyke 2002: 271. See also Studlar 1997: 100. 46. Wagner-Hasel 2003: 242–3. 47. Braidotti 2013: 105–7. 48. Müller 2014a. 49. See Kabbani 2008: 134. 50. Diederen 2010: 80–4. 51. Escholier 1927: 84–7: ‘C’est beau! C’est comme au temps d’Homère! La femme dans le gynécée d’occupant de ses enfants, filant la laine ou brodant de merveilleux tissus. C’est la femme comme je la comprends!’ 52. Wieber 2007: 136–7; Orientalized places of Antiquity seem to be interchangeable, as the use of the same book cover in harem style for novels about Alexander the Great and Zenobia proves, see Wieber 2017a: 135, fig. 1, and https://pulpcovers.com/alexander-and-the-campfollower-original-titl/ (accessed 15 September 2018). 53. Reproduction of the painting at http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/ search/commentaire_id/tepidarium-101.html?no_cache=1&cHash=a040b2e185 (accessed 4 September 2018); see Gallet 2016: 152–3. 54. Peltre 2010: 162. 55. Kabbani 2008: 112–38; Müller 2012a: 59, 63–4. 56. Depelchin 2010: 31–2: ‘L’Orientalisme recule les frontiers de la morale occidentale’; see also Kabbani 2008: 113–16. 57. Gere 2015. 58. See e.g. Martínez Oliva 2008. 59. Boone 2014: 270–9. 60. Michelakis and Wyke 2013: 8, 13, 15, 21 insist on the importance of such blends of Orientalism and Classicism in silent cinema. This connection remains strong in later movies: see Wieber-Scariot 1998: 77–84. 61. Wieber-Scariot 1998: 79; Wieber 2002: 30–1; Carlà and Goltz 2015: 215–19. 62. See e.g. Mulvey 1975; Kabbani 2008. 63. Studlar 1997. 64. Winterer 2009: 7–8, 22–3, 105–6, 111, 115, 127–31. 65. HA Hel. Vita Heliogabali 4.3–4; see Icks 2011: 19. 66. Quoted in Moore, Brooks and Wiggington 2012: 294–5. 67. Youngkin 2016; for female travellers to the Orient from different European countries, see Czarnecka, Ebert and Szewczyk 2011; for Western as well as Eastern female gazes on the Orient, see Roberts 2007. 68. Carlà 2015: 31–2; Carlà-Uhink and Fiore 2016: 200–1. 69. E.g. Hughes-Hallett 1990; Wyke 1997: 73–109; Wyke 2002: 244–390; Wenzel 2005; Rhein 2006; Hamer 2008; Kleopatra 2013; Pina Polo 2013; Restellini and Brizzi 2014. 70. See e.g. Wyke 2002: 195–243; Schwentzel 2014: 213–21. 212

Notes to pp. 10–16 71. See Schwentzel 2014: 221–49. 72. Bodichon 1863: 413. 73. Müller 2008. 74. See e.g. Brier 1992; Curl 1994; Humbert 1994; Trafton 2004; Ruo Redda 2006; Warmenbol 2010; Fritze 2016. 75. See Mitchell 1988. 76. Reid 2002: 2. 77. Hughes-Hallett 1990: 221; Wyke 1997: 94; Wyke 2002: 287–8; Schwentzel 2014: 239. 78. Von Wertheimer 1931: 39. 79. García 2015: 118. 80. On the whiteness of harem women in European Orientalist painting, see Kabbani 2008: 133–4. In the Western tradition, these fair-skinned beauties were often imagined as victims of abduction: see Müller 2012a: 57, 65–6. Their Western name, ‘odalisque’, originates from a term for a concubine or favourite of the sultan with a room of her own. For an example of an ancient powerful woman (Zenobia) represented as an odalisque, see Wieber 2017a: 133. 81. Wieber-Scariot 1998: 77–80. 82. Rouvière 2006: 90–2. 83. Shakespeare, Antony And Cleopatra II.2.236: ‘her infinite variety’. 84. Hughes-Hallett 1990: 217–19. 85. Schwentzel 2014: 231–2, 237–8. 86. Schwentzel 2014: 233. 87. Winterer 2009: 128; Youngkin 2016: 143. 88. Reyes 2008: 70–1. 89. See e.g. Rodriguez 2000; Velasco 2008. 90. Reyes 2008: 39–83. It is worth noting that at the trial the prosecutor used Orientalist stereotypes against Luna, representing his jealousy and irrational passion as typical of the peoples of the Tropics and of South-East Asia.

Chapter 1 1. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the editors for inviting me to be part of this venture. I owe thanks to Manfred Krebernik (Jena) for the opportunity to present an earlier stage of this paper at the 33rd Deutscher Orientalistentag (DOT) 2017 and the audience for their fruitful comments. Likewise I am very grateful to Florian Krüpe (Marburg) and Sebastian Fink (Helsinki) for their stimulating comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I further owe great thanks to Michaela Oberhuber (Bozen) for her help in the translation of the argomento. Delia Jordan (Innsbruck) assisted with some other Italian passages, while Stefanie Hoss (Nijmegen) and Michael Keil (Munich) helped to perfect the English. I am further indebted to Falk Ruttloh (Kassel) for his help with the editorial makeover. 2. Carroll 1907: 10, 22. 3. Semiramis’ remembrance on musical stages continues until the twentieth century: in 1910 Ottorino Respighi composed an opera entitled Semirâma (Libretto: Alessandro Ceré, based on Voltaire’s novel Sémiramis) and in 1939 Richard Strauss considered creating an opera 213

Notes to pp. 16–18 about Semiramis, that ought to be based on the drama La Hija del Aire by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Cf. Brosche 2012: 255–67. 4. Lehmann-Haupt 1900/1, 1910 and 1918; Eilers 1971; Nagel 1982; Pettinato 1985. Among the recent publications, Capomacchia 1986; Gera 1997: 65–83; Comploi 2000; Dalley 2005; Bichler 2014; Stronk 2017 and Walter 2016: 45–59 stand out. 5. Samuel 1943; Dronke 1970; Asher-Greve 2006; Benz 2015; Behringer 2017. 6. Questa 1989. He especially devotes attention to what is now still the best-known operatic version of the material, namely the Semiramide by Gioacchino Rossini based on a libretto by Gaetano Rossi (premiere 1823, Venice). This is preceded by a brief outline of the most important ancient and early modern models. Unfortunately, Questa neglects all predecessors in Spanish, French and Italian drama. 7. For her and other female warriors in opera cf. Freeman 1996: 431–60. 8. Hdt. 1.184–6. 9. Bichler 2014: 55. For Herodotus’ chronologies concerning Babylonia, see Bichler 2010: 135–40. 10. Bichler 2014: 62. 11. Cf. Bigwood 1980: 198–200 and 203–7; Comploi 2000: 223–44; Stronk 2007: 30–3. 12. Stronk 2010: 3; similar Ctésias de Cnide. La Perse. L’Inde. Autres fragments, ed. by D. Lenfant, Paris 2004: CXC and n. 784. 13. Madreiter 2011: 247; Gorman and Gorman 2014: 270. 14. 2.1–28 and 32–34 [= F 1B § 1–28 and = F 5 § 32,4–34 Lenfant]. Comploi 2000: 223–44; Seymour 2014: 62–4. Other early authors refer likewise to that episode, cf. Daffinà 1990: 93–4, with n. 12. 15. Stronk does not consider this a reversed imitatio Alexandri (Stronk 2017: 113, n. 130). He regards Semiramis’ Indian campaign as fictitious (Stronk 2017: 115, n. 142). 16. 2.16.1; 2.16.4. 17. 2.16.3–4. 18. Remarkably enough, Stabrobates fights on the right flank, a position considered the most prestigious by Greek historiographers. Stronk takes the view that this array of troops is imaginary (Stronk 2017: 118, n. 148). Xenophon establishes a narrative model for Greek battle descriptions by placing the opposing rulers face to face (Anab. 1.8.21–8). Cf. Bichler 2009: esp. 20–2. 19. It is worth noting that Diodorus particularizes the full course of military events in Semiramis’ Indian campaign only. 20. Comploi 2000: 223–44. 21. Bichler 2014: 62. 22. BNJ 133 F 3. 23. 7.6.20. 24. 9.6.23–4. 25. BNJ 715 F 11a. 26. By idealizing Alexander, Seleucus I likewise gains importance, even more so as Semiramis’ former empire is now under Seleucid rule. In return, Diodorus adopts a rather proPtolemaic position. Cf. Bichler 2014: 63. 27. Liber memorialis 11.3. 214

Notes to pp. 18–20 28. 1.2.8–9. 29. Her connection to Alexander is also retained here (1.4.5). 30. Civ. 18.2. Augustinus (Civ. 16.17) states likewise that Ninus’ empire does not include India. Differently Nicolaos of Damascus, BNJ 90 F 1 (Exc. Insidiis 3.24). 31. 1.6. The portrayal in the World Chronicle by Rudolf of Ems in the thirteenth century takes a similar approach (3584–91): ‘. . . und twanc darnah mit kreftin sa / dú kúnicriche in India / das si ir dientin sunder danch, / dú nieman ê vor ir betwanch / noh sidir lange: doh twanc si sit / with sinir power bi sinir zit / der kúnich Alexander / und nieme dekein ander’ [‘. . . and later with her forces invaded the kingdom of India, so that it served her afterwards, no one before her had conquered it nor after her: yet in his time King Alexander with his strength invaded it but no one else.’]. 32. 2.2: ‘She invaded India with a threatening campaign, which no one before her and after her only few conducted.’ As early as 1397 De viris illustribus was translated into Italian. The translation was very popular and enjoyed a large readership. Semiramis and her Indian campaign are also mentioned in a letter from Petrarch to Empress Anna of Świdnica, the third wife of emperor Charles IV, on the occasion of the birth of her daughter Elisabeth in 1358. F. Petrarca, Familiaria: Bücher der Vertraulichkeiten, vol. 2, ed. by B. Widmer, Berlin et al. 2009, 97* and Fam. 21.8. Also Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (first published in 1374) gained enormous popularity. Even though he stresses Semiramis’ military achievements, he neglects her Indian campaign. Semiramis does already appear in one of his earlier works, Teseida delle Nozze d’Emilia (1340/1). Again, the Indian episode is omitted, but an extensive commentary on that work dating from the second half of the fifteenth century demonstrates that the connection between Semiramis and India is firmly anchored in the cultural memory. It reads: ‘Anche fece gran gue(r)ra et co(m)mese de grandi bactaglie acquelli de India . . .’ [‘And she conducted a huge war and fought huge battles against India . . .’] Cf. Maggiore 2016: quote on 805. 33. Cf. Collignon 1924: 1–82; Schroeder 1971: passim. 34. Schroeder 1971: passim; Sedlacek 1997: passim. 35. S. Mamerot, Le Traictié des neuf preues, ed. by A. Salamon, Genf 2016 (Textes Littéraires Français). 36. The chapter is entitled as follows: ‘Conment la royne Semiramis conquesta Ynde ou nul n’avoit par avant elle osé entre par force . . .’ [‘How the queen Semiramis conquered India, where no one had dared to force his way into before . . .’]. 37. Interlude after act I: ‘Semiramis, the proud Assyrian queen, When Ninus died, did levy in her wars Three millions of footmen to the fight, Five hundred thousand horse, of armed cars A hundred thousand more, yet in her pride Was hurt and conquer’d by Stabrobates.’ R. Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, The Dramatic and Poetical Work of Robert Greene and George Peele, ed. by A. Dyce, London 1861. 38. From the very outset of the operatic genre in the late sixteenth century, ancient material played a leading part. Rosand 1991; Sternfeld 1993. The reception of ancient topics in the opera has received increasing scholarly attention in recent times, e.g. Ketterer 2009; Manuwald 2013; Droß-Krüpe 2017. Cf. also Tarling 2015, who aims at combining Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism with opera, but surprisingly omits most operas on Semiramis. 39. Albrecht 1991: 89–99; Prato 1971: passim. 40. M. Manfredi, La Semiramis, Bergamo 1593 and La Semiramis boscareccia, Pavia 1594; cf. Haun 1949: 27–34. 41. C. de Virués, La gran Semiramis (1579/80). Semiramis is designed as a strongly sexualized character, a victim of both her abhorring lust and her greed for power, and a murderer. Her 215

Notes to pp. 20–23 martial abilities and the Indian campaign only occur at the margin. Cf. Haun 1949: 64–8; Froldi 2003: 315–24. Another theatrical adaption by Lope de Vega dating to the early seventeenth century is lost; Haun 1949: 68. The most famous Spanish version came from Calderón de la Barca. His Hija del Aire was published in 1664, but had premiered already in 1653 at the royal court in Milan. Again, Semiramis is a wicked, voluptuous, and murdering femme fatale. 42. G. Gilbert, Sémiramis, Paris 1647; J. Desfontaine, La veritable Semiramis, Paris 1647. As Eleanor J. Pellett rightly points out: ‘The trend of the two pieces is in opposite directions. Gilbert’s Semiramis is a warrior and a devoted wife, who through the operation of the tragic intrigue is set, by popular wish, upon the throne; Desfontaine’s Semiramis is upon the throne at the beginning, and disgraced and unhappy, takes her life in the end.’ (Pellett 1931: 122). In both plays the Semiramis’ martial virtues matter – in particular with Gilbert – but her military expedition to India is not covered. 43. Cf. Freeman 1996: 431–60. 44. For the Accademia degli Incogniti see Rosand 1991: 37–40; Miato 1998: passim. 45. Sartori 1990–1994: #21529; cf. Allacci 1755: 710; Sonneck 1914: 988; Thiel 1970: 1474; for this opera see Heller 1993: 93–114, whose overall view is partly – and with good arguments – contradicted by Freeman 1996: 459 n. 35. 46. By then only two operas had presented warrior queens on Venetian stages: Argiope (Giovanni Battista Fusconi) in 1646 (or 1648/9) deals with Augea (i.e. a mythological figure) and La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore (Giovanni Francesco Busanello) in 1646 presented Cleopatra VII Philopator (though it is not certain if this opera has actually ever been performed); Freeman 1996: 448. 47. Schreiber 1988: 269; Leopold 2004: 102. 48. Gier 2012: 25–7, 32. The mentioning of sources occurs especially when deviations from the tradition of the material need to be made comprehensible. The argomento is a characteristic feature of the opera seria only. 49. The development of a darkened auditorium is connected to Richard Wagner; Schivelbusch 1983: 198. 50. The characters in this opera thus differ from the ancient sources as well as from the preceding theatrical adaptions in Spain, France and Italy. The cast is not given, as libretti habitually contained the names of the singers only from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. 51. Her appearance resembles the goddess Roma. For representations of Roma see Mellor 1981: 950–1030. 52. It might thus well illustrate Semiramis’ first appearance on stage (I/3; in the further course of this paper Roman numerals refer to the act, Arabic numerals to the scene of an opera). Wendy Heller, however, considers the second female character an anonymous maidservant (Heller 2003: 229). 53. Gier 2012: 20. 54. ‘After the death of Nino, the third Assyrian king, he left another Nino behind, a child who was not yet capable of ruling, and Semiramis, his widow and his [i.e. Nino the younger’s] guardian. Due to the fact that she – being greedy for power and military glory – thought that the son (whose appearance very much resembled hers) had been drawn to the enjoyments of life, she took on the name of Nino and pretended to be him, while she had her son believe that he was Semiramis and let him live amongst the women, but as she had misgivings as to whether this fraud might be discovered, she called together a powerful army, and, after leading a military campaign, she obliged the neighboring kings to pay tribute and advanced as far as India, 216

Notes to pp. 23–24 where Staurobates was king. He armed his troops too and sent them to the Ganges, in order to meet Semiramis there, where, as the boatmen arrived at the one and the other riverside, a wild battle broke out and the Assyrians were victorious. After Semiramis had put the enemy to rout, she entered the country and a new conflict ensued, whereby now the advantage lay with the Indians. This true story delivered the material for this fable, in which it was depicted that Staurobates at an advanced age handed over the army to his son Arimeno, who fought bravely on the Ganges and then set about attacking the ship of the queen, but when he climbed the bank, he was overpowered by the throngs of the enemy. He was taken prisoner and Semiramis was affected by his courageous beauty and fell in love with him, whereas the youth, when he saw Nino there, whom he believed to be a young woman, fell in love with him. However after he had recovered and saw his ship approaching again, he overpowered those who were guarding him, and escaped, whereby he also injured Semiramis, who had attempted to hold him back. It is also depicted that Nino, during the battle on the land, scared of being taken prisoner, abandoned the feminine clothes; he entered a ship that he found at the river’s bank and crossed the river together with a court page’. 55. Pinkepank 2007: 201–3. The first printed Greek version only appeared about 70 years later. One must not forget that well into the sixteenth century only members of the elites were able to read ancient Greek fluently. Cf. Büttner 2001: esp. 271–2. 56. Diod. 2.23.1–3; cf. Fink 2014: 239–50; Monerie 2015: 167–85. 57. Rosand 1991: 37–8. 58. Zancan 1986: 792; Schneider 2003: 76 with n. 5. 59. Cox 2008: 183. 60. Cox 2008: 183. 61. Bell 1999: 334. 62. Cf. Daenenes 1983: 11–50; Schiesari 1989: 66–87. 63. Cf. Chojnacki 2000: passim with further literature. 64. These Querelles des Femmes, defined as eloquent and strident dialogue of the sexes, originate in the late Middle Ages, when many of the misogynistic texts were composed and spread, that Christine de Pizan opposed in 1404/5 with her Le livre de la cité des dames (Bock and Zimmermann 1997: 20). 65. F. Pona, La galeria delle donne celebri, Verona 1633. 66. ‘With increasing age, Semiramis blossomed in power and in beauty. It was impossible to penetrate her genius.’ 67. ‘always victorious’. 68. ‘Her intellect was as profound that she once had a say and made decisions and always her counsel was wonderful, accurate and with great acumen and her political actions were unsurpassed.’ 69. ‘The arm was naked up to the elbow with two vipers made of fine gold, which looked bizarre, but were a beautiful decoration. The flawless leg was completely naked . . .’ 70. ‘innamoratasi del figliuol Nino . . . dominando ella con assoluto freno le voglie tutte di Nino’ (65) [‘in love with her son Nino . . . she dominates with tight reins all desires of Nino’]. 71. ‘cuor male habituate’ (62). 72. F. Pallavicino, Scena retorica, Venezia 1640. 73. Similar Lattario 2012: 2. 74. ‘Will Assyria only ever have to deal with armaments and spears?’ 217

Notes to pp. 24–26 75. Arimeno: ‘Venia superbo, & oroglioso Nino grauvando il dorsi al Gange con cento navi, e cento.’ [‘Bear with me, haughty and prideful Nino (i.e. Semiramide in male disguise), who with hundred and hundred ships passed the Ganges.’] (I/2). 76. For stage designs see Tintelnot 1939: passim; Hartmann (forthcoming). 77. Argillante: ‘Sospira adunque, e piange quel cor che osò guerriero dall’Eufrate, e dal Tigre il glorioso Impero Dell’Assiria portar all’Indo, e al Gange?’ [‘So this heart sighs and cries that war dares to bring the glorious Empire of Assyria from the Euphrates and the Tigris to the Indus and the Ganges.’] (I/3) // Semiramide: ‘Il mio voler sarai.’ [‘My will be done.’] (I/4). 78. ‘Se saggia sei, seconda della mia stella il fato, che con piè fermo, e vero mi conduce all’Impero.’ [‘If you are wise, fate will follow my star and guide me without fear to kingship.’] (I/5). 79. Nino: ‘in questo sito ameno par che l’alma respiri, e già il timido seno più non forma sospiri’ [‘At this quaint place, the soul would seem to breathe and yet the timid breast does not sigh any more.’]. // Caristo: ‘se ride, se canta, se dorme, sempre hà d’Amor pensieri, oggetti, e forme.’ [‘when she laughs, when she sings, when she sleeps, Amor always considers her matters and forms.’] (I/6). 80. Nino: ‘Vita beata, e cara, se Amor vive con voi con i diletti suoi.’ [‘A beautyful and precious life, if Amor with his pleasures lives with you.’] // Nino: ‘Ite scettri e corone / Delle timide menti / Portentosi tormenti, / Vi ricuso per sempre.’ [‘Begone, sceptres and coronets of timid minds, marvellous torments, I deny you forever.’] (I/7). 81. ‘. . . hor sei pastore; Tale ti hà fatto Amore; Io, se mai amarò, femina diverrò?’ [‘. . . now you are a shepherd. Amor has made it that way. I, if I will ever love, will turn into a woman.’] (II/2). 82. ‘Are you a woman, a man, a hermaphrodite?’. 83. Nino: ‘Mà se in Assiria un giorno io vorrò far ritorno, salva, eresa mi fia la dignitade mia.’ Argillante: ‘La vita, è’l regno è uguale’ [Nino: ‘But if I wanted to return to Assyria one day, my dignity will be saved.’ Argillante “Life and reign are the same’] (II/7). 84. Caristo: ‘Vendetta, Amor, vendetta. Un’ amante infedele, un tiranno crudele, questa à tua lesa manesatà si aspetta.’ [‘Revenge, Amor, revenge. An unfaithful lover, a cruel tyrant, this is to be expected from your damaged soul.’] (II/10). 85. Lattario 2012: 7 [‘Both female figures will pay their price, each believing to have been betrayed by her respective lover.’]. 86. Allacci 1755: 710; Monterosso-Vacchelli 1977: 85. 87. On the interior of this theatre Albrecht 1991: 21; for attendance figures cf. Bianconi/Walker 1984: esp. 225–7; Lynn 2005: 100. 88. In the major Italian theatres, opera life was divided into three main seasons: carnevale (January to Fat Tuesday, later on 26 December to the end of Lent), spring (Ascension of Christ to 15 June) and autumn (1 September to 30 November). Of these, without any doubt, carnival was the most important theatrical season. The Lenten part of the season was usually devoted to serious opera and oratorios, while carnival was a time of amusement, merrymaking and festivity accompanied by a certain degree of insubordination. Cf. Feldman 2007: 144–52; Walter 2016 : 73–4. 89. Cf. Grosley 1769 : 97: ‘L’Opéra joue, à Naple, depuis la S. Charles jusqu’au Carême, à trois représentations par semaine . . .’ [‘The Opera at Naples acts from St. Charles’ day to Lent, three times a week . . .’]. 90. During the breaks between the acts, ballets were performed that did not bear any conceptual connection to the opera itself. Their titles are added by hand in one libretto (Deutsches Historisches Institut, Rom: Rar. Libr. Ven. 40/42#40): Gl’amori d’Apollo, e di Dafne and La Daidamia.

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Notes to pp. 26–30 91. It may be important to stress, that castrati were never seen as predestined to present femininity on Baroque opera stages – vocal capabilities and vocal aesthetics determined the cast of an opera. For castrati see Knaus 2011: passim; Woyke 2012: 2–26; Herr 2013: passim. 92. Cf. Heller 1993, who demonstrates that ‘Semiramide and her operatic sisters were, in other words, participants in the discourse about gender in seventeenth-century Italy . . .’ (96). 93. Jordan 1990: 137; see also Freeman 1996: 431–60. 94. Heller 1993: 101. 95. Questa 1989: 84. 96. He certainly aimed at pleasing his principal(s). The opera is, according to the libretto print, dedicated to Giovanni Battista Cornaro dalla Piscopia, who was appointed among the procurators of S. Marco shortly after the opera was staged (March 1649). Being one of the nine procurators of S. Marco was a very prestigious life appointment in the Republic of Venice. Cornaro might well have commissioned this opera. 97. Abbate 1991: ix. 98. Included in Metastasio 1781. 99. ‘Il mondo é vinto alfin . . . Il Gange e l’ultimo oriente sol ti resto a domar’ [‘The world is finally defeated . . . The Ganges and the utmost Orient alone remain to be subdued by you’]. Sonneck 1914: 1123; Questa 1989: 151–62. 100. Questa 1989: 257–329. 101. Strohm 1997: 6. 102. Degrada 1967: 117 [‘The subject must be simple, tender, heroic, Roman, Greek or possibly Persian, but never Gothic or Lombard.’]. 103. A list is included in Freeman 1996: 142ff.

Chapter 2 1. Sebillotte Cuchet 2008: 1, ‘Dans le monde grec les catégories de grec et de barbare interagissent avec celles d’homme et de femme. Le Barbare, confondu avec l’Asiatique à partir des guerres médiques, est pensé comme féminin, et le Grec comme viril, avec, il est vrai, tout un nuancier de possibilités dans la virilité comme dans la féminité.’ 2. See Sebillotte Cuchet 2008: 1 for the modern concept of mixed race and its use in the definition of ancient mixed populations. On hybrid cultures in the Greek colonies see also Antonaccio 2003; Malkin 2004. 3. See Carstens 2013: 209–10 for the historical background of this episode. 4. Hdt. 8.68.1. 5. Hdt. 8.87.2–3. Herodotus states that he doesn’t know if the incident was provoked intentionally, or if the other ship just fell in Artemisia’s path by chance. The use of a trick could at first appear a typically feminine resource, but in Herodotus’ account Themistocles also considers using tricks, and even betrayal. Munson 1988: 99–103 rightly interprets his attitude as political realism and considers it a mirror of Athenian ideology (the importance of the individual’s initiative among the masses), concluding that simulation and cunning are aspects of Athenian intelligence as Herodotus represents it throughout the Histories, beginning with Solon. In Themistocles’ realism, she sees the seed of the unscrupulous Athenian politics after the Persian Wars: ‘Athenian self-interest and pragmatism include the

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Notes to pp. 30–31 notion that the end justifies the means; in particular, it even justifies, if need be, the use of force directed against allies and other Greeks’. 6. So for instance in Hdt. 8.68.3 and 8.102.3 (referring to Mardonius). 7. Hdt 7.99.1; see Munson 1988: 92 and, with a slightly different perspective, Harrell 2003: 81–3. 8. Munson 1988: 93. Contra Flower 2007: 275. 9. Hdt. 7.99.2–3. 10. Halicarnassus is originally a Doric settlement, but in Herodotus’ time it was already strongly influenced – in language and in arts – by Ionic culture. For Herodotus’ intellectual background, see Thomas 2006. 11. Persian royal women are mostly (but not exclusively) depicted by Herodotus as cruel, powerful, violent and vengeful: see for instance Hdt. 7.3.4 and 3.133–4 (Atossa); 7.114.2 and 9.112 (Amestris). Flower 2007: 283–4. 12. Hdt. 8.93.2. 13. Blok 1995: 407–17. The Amazons were, within the epic, still positively characterized as valorous warriors (see for instance Hom. Il. 3.182–90; 6.185: antiáneirai, ‘of equal value to men’, lit. ‘a match for a man’), but progressively transformed at Athens into a symbol of hostility. See also Duvall Penrose Jr. 2016: 153–5. 14. Sebillotte Cuchet 2008: 5. 15. On the succession of power to women in mixed regions, see Sebillotte Cuchet 2008: 6–7. On the role of women in vassal regions controlled by the Persians, see also Duvall Penrose Jr. 2016: 153–4. 16. Sebillotte Cuchet 2008: 4. 17. Sebillotte Cuchet 2008: 5–8. See also Jouanna 1984 for a different take on Artemisia’s episode in the Hippocratic corpus. Only a couple of years after Herodotus, Aristophanes ridicules Artemisia on two occasions. In Lys. 672–675 the chorus of the elders complains that women are at war against men, believing themselves to be ‘Artemisias’. In Thesm. 1200 Euripides, dressed as a woman to sneak in to the Thesmophoria, pretends to be named Artemisia, or, as the Scythian slave says, misspelling the name, ‘Artemouxia’. The latter passage shows especially clearly how racism and sexism are strongly intertwined within Athenian fifth-century ideology. On gender roles in the Greek East, see also Duvall Penrose Jr. 2016: 181–2. 18. Sebillotte Cuchet 2015: 243. A complete list of ancient sources mentioning Artemisia I can be found in Gera 1997: 205. 19. Plut. Mor. 869f–870a. 20. Ptolemy Hephaestion in Photius 190: 153a. 21. Polyaenus 8.53.4 (although this stratagem has been alternatively attributed to Artemisia II, see Gera 1997: 216 note 46). A significant exception is the late Hellenistic anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus, which in paragraph 13 paraphrases Herodotus, adding some anecdotal details. Although the brief description does not add anything truly new to the construction of the historical figure and presents her in a rather neutral light, the general tone of the script suggests admiration for the women described (text and translation, with commentary, in Gera 1997). 22. Carstens 2013: 210. 23. On fourth century Caria between Carian identity and Ionic culture, see Pedersen 2013 and Carstens 2013, who speak of a multiethnic society.

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Notes to pp. 31–33 24. Staatsverträge 260 (integrated); I Erythrai 8. The same is true for her successor, Idrieus, who was married to his sister Ada. Also in this case, the literary sources mention only Idrieus, though the inscriptions demonstrate that they shared public authority. There may have existed some tradition in Caria of shared rule by married couples and the feeling that a widow was a more direct heir to a deceased husband than a son or a brother. After all, even if Carians (and especially the Hecatomnids) were Hellenized, some native customs likely still remained in use. See Carney 2005: 66, 71–5. On Carian women sharing dynastic power, see also Penrose Jr. 2016: 164–5, 182–3. 25. Strab. 14.2.17. 26. Gell. 10.18.5–7. 27. Dem. 15.27. See Sebillotte Cuchet 2015: 231. 28. Mausolos is only mentioned by Demosthenes in connection with past events. Moreover, Demosthenes acknowledges Artemisia’s legitimacy as a dynast and an emissary of the Great King, considering her equal to her dead husband: ‘No one has come forward to dissuade Mausolus when he was alive, or Artemisia since his death, from seizing Cos and Rhodes and various other Greek states, which the King, their overlord, ceded by treaty to the Greeks’ (Dem. 15.27). The episode must therefore refer to Artemisia’s regency after 353 bce . 29. Dem. 15.23; Sebillotte Cuchet 2015: 231–3. 30. Vitr. 2.8.14–15. See also Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris 57.18 for a Medieval reception of this episode. 31. Carney 2005: 67. 32. Although ‘rediscovered’ by the Italian Humanist Poggio Bracciolini, who gave new input to its reception, Vitruvius’ De Architectura had never disappeared and was copied and re-copied throughout the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, the treatise became one of the most influential writings for artists and architects and Vitruvius’ theory of proportion, as well as his description of Ancient architectural orders, became fundamental components of architectural theory. On Vitruvius’ reception during the Middle Ages, see Verbaal 2016 (with previous bibliography). 33. On the ambiguity of their position as dynastic rulers and satraps – as well as being Hellenized and philopersians – see Carney 2005: 83–4. 34. Val. Max. 4.6; Gell. 10.18. See also Strabo 14.2.16–17. 35. Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, ch. 57. Artemisia II already featured in a catalogue of virtuous women by Francesco Petrarca (Triumphus cupidinis III, 73–8), where she is quoted as an exemplum of conjugal love, as opposed to licentious women. 36. See Sframeli 2008. Later, the pathetic image of Artemisia drinking the ashes of her husband would prevail (see Contini 2008 for some examples). 37. Ffolliott 1986: 228. See also Gaehtgens 2008: 109. On female regency in France, see Cosandey 2005. 38. Sixteenth-century royal self-presentation used classical mythology to stage absolutism in narratives in which the language of political and sexual power were intimately connected. Pageants and official portraits were studied exhibitions of power, in which French kings were identified with Jupiter, Hercules or Mars, whose attributes represented and reinforced their male sovereignty (Ffolliott 1986: 227). 39. See Gaehtgens 2008. 40. The poem was probably presented to the queen in 1562 (Ffolliott 1986: 230) or after 1580 (Auclair 2000: 159). The question of whether the queen herself commissioned the poem, or

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Notes to pp. 33–37 if Houel himself took the initiative hoping to receive her favour, is unresolved. But although never published, the book circulated at court and influenced the official iconography strongly. Auclair 2000 describes the Histoire as an ‘œuvre en evolution’, whose content was adapted to the changing situations of Catherine’s life. 41. Hdt. 7.99 reports that she was a widow and had taken the tyranny after her husband’s death, though she had a young son. Artemisia II, who was known to the Renaissance from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, had already been proposed as a prototype for the French regent Anne de Beaujeu 1483. See Ffolliott 1986: 373, note 20 and Cahn 1979: 47. See also von Haumeder 1976: 125–9. 42. Histoire 12r. See Ffolliott 1986: 231. 43. By a strange twist of fate, the tapestries were actually commissioned for her by her husband, Henry IV, probably in 1607, only a few years before his murder (1610) and the beginning of her regency. 44. The majority of the drawings are dedicated to the subjects of the funeral of Mausolos, of the construction of the Mausoleum and of Artemisia drinking the ashes. Gaehtgens 2008: 110–11 (see also von Haumeder 1976: 66). 45. See for instance: http://expositions.bnf.fr/renais/grand/091.htm, a cartoon by Antoine Caron. 46. The Persian background of Artemisia II is, by contrast, very much present in the contemporary baroque private artistic production, when she is presented as an isolated subject drinking the ashes of her husband. In this case, a ziggurat or even a pyramid in the background, a servant clothed in Oriental fashion, as well as details of her own attire, are clearly supposed to suggest an exotic, Oriental setting. 47. On the complicated genesis of the tapestries, starting from Caron’s drawings inspired by Houel but adapted and reworked many times, see Vittet 2008 and Auclair 2008. 48. Mamone 2008: 40–1. 49. Generally, the drawings featuring Mausolos’ death seem not to have had a great reception: there seems to have been only one tapestry realized from a cartoon showing Mausolos’ death (Denis 1999: 46). 50. Auclair 2008: 102. 51. Auclair 2008: 104. 52. Rhodes was accused of rebellion in a sonnet by Houel. 53. Images can be seen here: https://collections.artsmia.org/search/Artemisia; https:// de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildesheimer_Artemisia-Gobelins#/media/File:Gobelin_Die_ Botschaft_(Dommuseum_Hildesheim).jpg 54. On the reception of the tapestries realized for Maria de Medici and the production inspired by them of tapestries with a similar subject, see Denis 1999. 55. Artemisia’s past is of course invented and clearly functions as a ‘backstory wound’ (see http://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/index.php?action=lexikon&tag=det&id=5928 [accessed 26 March 2018]). Nevertheless, the story is imagined in conformity to our historical knowledge of late archaic-early classical Greek society, a period of turmoil for which contemporary literature preserves evidence. 56. See for instance the character of Mira, female warrior and agent of the Eastern Roman Empire in The Last Legion (2007). See also Wieber 2015 for a discussion and some good examples. 57. Generally, with their biased depiction, both directors significantly exceeded the original graphic novel by Frank Miller. Women are virtually absent in the graphic novel 300 (see on 222

Notes to pp. 37–40 this subject Beigel 2013). For the sequel 300: Rise of an Empire, the direct parallel with Miller’s aesthetic is missing, as the novel has not yet been published. 58. On female leading roles in contemporary action films, see Hills 1999; Magoulik 2006; Gilpatric 2010. Especially on female leading ladies as role models in contemporary historic and pseudo-historic films, see Wieber 2015: 235–40. 59. It must be mentioned that the dress code of the Greek heroes is not much better: they wear a kind of iron slip (the Spartans) or leather miniskirt (the Athenians) and nothing else, except for a cloak which is open to show the muscles. As Kofler 2011: 167–9 has demonstrated, the aesthetic of Batman and Superman, with their muscular costumes, deliberately influenced this picture more than a desire for ancient authenticity. 60. As has already been noted, the script victimizes Artemisia twice, making her the object of rape against historical evidence, and replacing the independent, clever historical queen ‘with a cheap male fantasy of a dangerous woman who needs to be defeated to preserve male sexual authority’ (https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/300-2-lets-talk-aboutartemisia/) (accessed 26 March 2018). 61. Sebillotte Cuchet 2015: 242. 62. Artemisia’s deranged personality and her love of brutal sex are clearly presented as a consequence of her rape as a child. Apparently, a woman cannot be strong (or evil!) just because she is, she must have been broken in the past. While rape can be a powerful motive in the construction of a tormented heroine, in this case the motive is used as an excuse to demonize Artemisia’s character. On the use of rape in the construction of ‘strong’ female personalities in recent cinematographic trends, see https://aelarsen.wordpress. com/2014/05/02/300-2-lets-talk-about-artemisia/ (accessed 26 March 2018); on female leadings roles see Gilpatric 2010. 63. On the affinity between Themistocles and Artemisia in Herodotus, see Munson 1988: 97–8, 103–4. 64. An analysis of the political subtext of this film can be found in Lillo Redonet 2008 and in Nikoloutsos 2013 (especially: 256). Analysing the role of Gorgo in The 300 Spartans and 300, Nikoloutsos shows how both films present her as a kind of ‘anachronistic “first lady”, as an iconic wife, mother, and queen, a woman who matches her husband in loyalty, patriotism, and intelligence’, and that ‘while her domestication in Maté’s film is in full agreement with the policy of Containment adopted by the US government during the Cold War period, her alignment with the rhetoric of politicized womanhood in 300 reproduces a binarism central to post-September 11 American ideology, that between the liberal white West and the oppressive Muslim Orient’. In both The 300 Spartans and in 300: Rise of an Empire, Artemisia represents an upside-down world, in which Gorgo’s values are completely overturned and degenerated. 65. Lillo Redonet 2008: 119. 66. Nikoloutsos 2013: 13. 67. As Nikoloutsos 2013: 269 note 60 remarks, an Orientalized and sexualized queen is often depicted as a man-eater in peplum films. See, e.g. Lagny 1992: 175–6; Günsberg 2005: 120–3, 125–6; Shahabudin 2009: 206–11. 68. Nikoloutsos 2013: 14–15. 69. See Clough 2004: 374–8; Levene 2007: 386, 392–3, 399–400; Blanshard and Shahabudin 2011: 105–7; Lillo Redonet 2008. 70. See Nikoloutsos 2013: 273; Wieber 2006: 150–1, 154–5 and 2015: 231–5. 71. On Hollywood and female politics in the years after the Second World War, see also Wieber 2015. 223

Notes to pp. 40–44 72. Cyrino 2011: 23; Nikoloutsos 2013: 20. 73. These considerations are valid also for the figure of Gorgo in 300: Rise of an Empire, where she appears in just a few scenes. 74. Nikoloutsos 2013: 21. 75. See also Lauwers, Dhont and Huybrecht 2013, 83–4. Generally, on the construction of Gorgo’s character in 300, see Cyrino 2011: 23–4. 76. Nikoloutsos 2013: 21. 77. Lauwers, Dhont and Huybrecht 2013: 87 comment on the scene of Gorgo’s rape in 300: ‘from the male discursive standpoint which colors the character’s depiction, this scene seems to bestow on Gorgo a certain heroism, but not for her traditional feminine virtues but for her performance of the characteristic toughness which is also continuously on display in the actions of Leonidas and his three hundreds brave men’. The brave men, though, are never raped, nor do they need to offer sexual intercourse to obtain what they want; it is clear, I think, that the script treats men and women in very different ways. 78. Nikoloutsos 2013: 278. 79. Plut. Mor. 240.5; Plut. Lyc. 14.4. 80. For information on this comic: https://andreaplazzi.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/palumboeterna-artemisia/ (accessed 23 March 2018). 81. The archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas introduced her Kurgan hypothesis in the 1950s, identifying the Kurgan culture. These were Proto-Indo-European, patrilineal, pastoral and seminomadic groups, who, she believed, originated in the Russian steppes. They were a military society, riding horses and mastering metallurgy; they venerated male gods. Gimbutas traced their migrations from the north Caucasus to Europe, Anatolia, India, Iran and Turkestan. The indigenous people, on the other hand, were peaceful and agrarian. They worshipped female goddesses and had an equalitarian social structure. When the male-dominated Kurgan peoples invaded Europe, they imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors. Gimbutas proposed her theory of the Neolithic civilizations and their mother goddess in Gimbutas 1974 and Gimbutas 1991. See also, published posthumously, Gimbutas 1999. 82. According to the Indian religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, samsāra (Sanskrit, ‘wandering’, ‘cycle of rebirth’, ‘cycle of existence’) refers to the state of perpetual reincarnation, in which all beings are caught, see Lipner 2012. Available online: http://dx. doi.org.ubproxy.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/10.1163/2212-5019_beh_COM_2050270 (accessed 5 September 2017). 83. Hom. Il. 6. 179–80; Hes. Theog. 319–25; Pind. Ol. 13.85–90; Apollod. 1.9.3; 2.3.1. 84. See note 81. 85. On the concept of ‘Middle Ground’, see Malkin 2004: 356–9.

Chapter 3 1. Curt. 6.5.22. 2. See Hall 1989: 80–3, 126–8 on luxury and sensuality as an Eastern trope; 99–100 on Orientalism; see also Llewellyn-Jones 2017. 3. See e.g. Romm 2016: 39; Holt 2005: 88–9.

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Notes to pp. 45–47 4. The trilogy was reissued by Virago Press, London in 2014 as part of the Virago Modern Classics Series (nr. 623, 624, 625). 5. Curt. 6.5.23; see Badian 1958: 145. On Bagoas see Badian 1958 (with an in-depth study of the sources); Heckel 2006: 68; Tougher 2008; Ogden 2009: 210–17; Ogden 2011: 167–70. 6. Plut. Alex. 67.3; Athen. 13.603a-b. 7. Ogden 2011: 167; see also Baynham and Ryan 2018: 625. Tarn 1948 (vol. 2, 319–22) dedicated an appendix on Alexander’s sexuality to prove the non-existence of Bagoas and thus the non-existence of Alexander’s homosexuality; see Badian 1958. 8. See Reames-Zimmerman 1999. 9. See Llewellyn-Jones 2002 on eunuchs in Achaemenid Persia. 10. Curt. 10.1.25: obsequio corporis devincerat sibi. For the whole episode: Curt. 10.1.22–9. 11. Curt. 10.1.37. See Baynham and Ryan 2018: 633. 12. Athen. 13.556b-d. 13. Diod. 17.16.1–2. Baynham 1998b points to political reasons for Alexander’s decision: choosing a Macedonian bride would have meant a re-shuffling of the political tableau in Macedon. The wife’s family would have had a closer connection to the new king who just planned his Asian campaign. The same reasoning explains Alexander’s reluctance to marry off his sisters. 14. Alexander’s meeting and marriage to Roxane: Strab. 11.11.4; Plut. Alex. 47.4; Mor. 332e; Mor. 338d; Arr. An. 4.19.5–6; Curt. 8.4.22–30; Metzer Epitome (ed. Thomas) 28–31. For Roxane s. Carney 2000a: 106–8, 146–8; O’Neill 2002: 164–8; Holt 2005: 87–91; Heckel 2006: 241–2; Ogden 2011: 124–33; Müller 2012b. 15. Plutarch (Alex. 47.5) places Alexander’s marriage next to his adaptation of Persian customs and costumes and the Greek education of 3,000 Persian boys; see also Plut. Mor. 332e; 338d. Diodorus’ account is lost; in the synopsis to Book 17 eros is named as Alexander’s motivation as well as his wish for intermarriage between his companions and ‘the daughter of famous barbarians’. 16. Curt. 8.4.25–30. Cf. Ogden 2011: 131–2; Müller 2012b: 114–15. 17. Arr. An. 4.19.6. 18. On Oxyartes: Arr. An. 4.21.5–7; Curt. 9.8.10. The military effects are held as the main reason for Alexander’s choice of bride: Bosworth 1988: 117; Carney 2000a: 105–6; Ogden 1999: 44; Holt 2005: 90; Heckel 2009: 42. 19. According to Metzer Epitome (ed. Thomas) 70 she suffered a miscarriage during the campaign in India. 20. Curt. 10.6.9; Just. 12.2.5. 21. The capture of Dareios’ women and Alexander’s treatment: Arr. An. 2.11.9–10; 2.12.3–8; 4.19.6; 4.20.1–3; Curt. 3.11.24–6; 3.12.1–17; 3.12.21–6; Diod.17.37.3–38.7; Just. 9.9; Plut. Alex. 21; 22.3; Ath. 13. 603b-d. On Dareios’ offer see Curt. 4.5.1; Arr. An. 2.25.1; Diod. 17.54.2; Plut. Alex. 29; Just. 11.12.3. See Günther 2009; Ogden 2011: 135–6. On Stateira see Carney 2000a: 108–11; O’Neill 2002: 167–8; Heckel 2006: 256–7; Ogden 2011: 133–8. 22. Arr. An. 7.4.4–7; Just. 12.10.9. On Parysatis see O’Neill 2002: 169; Ogden 2011: 138. 23. Plut. Alex. 77.4. See Bosworth 1988: 157; Romm 2016: 66–7. Carney 2000a: 110–11 argues for a misunderstanding by Plutarch and identifies the second body as Parysatis instead of Stateira’s sister Drypetis who had been married to Hephaestion at Susa; see also Ogden 1999: 47 and 2011: 138; Romm 2016: 40. On Drypetis, see the contribution by Sabine Müller in this volume.

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Notes to pp. 47–49 24. Curt. 10.6.13–14. Barsine’s son was put forward as potential heir by Nearchos who was married to Barsine’s daughter: Curt. 10.6.10–11; Arr. An. 7.4.6. On the situation in Babylon, see Meeus 2008; Romm 2016: 50–66. 25. Arr. Succ. 1.1–8; Curt. 10.8.22–3; Diod. 18.2.4; Just. 13.4.1–4. 26. See Harders 2014: 365–71. 27. Roxane with Perdiccas in Egypt: Paus. 1.6.3. With Antigonos: Arr. Succ. 1.38; 1.42–3. In Macedon: Arr. Succ. 1.44; Diod. 18.39.7; 19.11.2; Heidelberger Epitome, FGrHist 155 F2. With Olympias 317/6 in Pydna: Diod. 19.35.5; Just. 14.6.2 (who confuses Alexander IV with Alexander’s bastard Heracles). In Amphipolis: Diod. 13.52.4; Just. 14.6.13; 15.1.3. Roxane’s murder: Diod. 19.105.2; Just. 15.2.5; Paus. 9.7.2. 28. There are hints that Alexander probably had a more prominent role for his wives in mind but died before establishing a queen-like position; see Harders 2014: 371–6. In the Liber de morte testamentumque Alexandri an alternative position of Roxane is imagined. She is introduced as a loving and caring wife who captures Alexander’s last breath with a kiss. Dying, Alexander places his widow in the care of Perdiccas and designates him to marry her (Metzer Epitome [ed. Thomas] 101–2; 110; 112; 118). The sentimental and dramatic account is singular; it was probably written as a piece of propaganda by someone close to Ptolemy and served to villainize Perdiccas. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the narrative and political potential of Roxane. See Harders 2014: 368–70. 29. Curt. 8.2.28–31; 8.3.1–16. 30. Diod. 17.77.1–3; Curt. 6.5.24–32; Just. 12.3.5–7. On Thalestris see Baynham 2001; Munding 2011. 31. Curt. 10.5.19–25; Just. 13.1.5–7. See Kotova 2005; Harders 2014: 358–9. 32. Diod. 19.33.1–34.6. See Frisch 1998: 221–7. 33. Said ([1978] 2003: 55–8) traces his argument back to Homer and the Greek tradition. 34. On Renault’s life see Wolfe 1969; Sweetman 1993; Zilboorg 2001 and 2004. 35. The Last of the Wine (1956); The King Must Die (1958); The Bull from the Sea (1962); The Mask of Apollo (1966); Fire from Heaven (1969); The Persian Boy (1972); The Praise Singer (1979); Funeral Games (1981). 36. Zilboorg 2001: 187; on her female characters see below and Zilboorg 2001: 155 in general. Hippolyta, the Amazon leader in The Bull from the Sea and great love of the novel’s protagonist Theseus, is cast as gay; Eurydike in Funeral Games is an epicene tomboy; both are probably Renault’s most nuanced female characters; see Abraham 1996: 67. 37. Abraham 1996: 67. 38. See Baynham and Ryan 2018: 629. 39. Tom Holland in his introduction to Renault [1972] 2014: xiii. See e.g. the rave review of The Persian Boy by Vidal 1973, the appreciation of Conrath 2014 or the impact of Renault on Mendelsohn 2013 in the 1970s. In contrast Thomas Lask of The New York Times preferred a ‘decent Greek history’ to ‘[a description] of the winning of the West as if seen from a Tana bordello’ (1972: 23) referring to Marlene Dietrich’s bordello keeper in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. – On fanfiction that Renault’s novels still inspire, see http://community.livejournal. com/maryrenaultfics (accessed 20 February 2018) and the contribution by Sabine Müller. The Persian Boy was furthermore translated into German (Ein Weltreich zu erobern, 1974; reissue 2007), French (L’enfant perse, 1984, reissue 2004), Italian (Il ragazzo persiano, 1994), Chinese (2010) and Spanish (El muchacho persa, 2011).

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Notes to pp. 49–52 40. On Renault’s sources see McEwan 1987: 61–2; Verstraete 1998: 152; Baynham and Ryan 2018: 624; see also Mendelsohn 2013 on his correspondence with Renault. Furthermore, Renault wrote a biography on Alexander, next to a monograph on the Persian Wars her only non-fiction work (The Nature of Alexander. New York: Pantheon Books 1975). See also the review by classicist and novelist Harry Sidebottom, The Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 2004, No. 5266: 24 on the reissue. 41. Renault 1973: 316. See also Lane Fox 2008: 5–6 and Chaniotis 2008: 188–9 on artistic licence in contrast to the historian’s uncertainty. 42. Renault [1972] 2014: 472. 43. Renault 1973: 315–16. 44. Renault 1973: 316; see also Beard 1993. 45. See Baynham and Ryan 2018: 626–31 on Bagoas as narrator. 46. Renault [1972] 2014: 1. 47. On Renault’s construction of a eunuch identity, see Tougher 2008; on male dancers in the Middle East see Shay 2006. 48. Renault [1972] 2014: 30. 49. Renault [1972] 2014: 43. See also Abraham 1996: 75. 50. See Llewellyn-Jones 2010: 243–5; Förschler 2010: 149–51. 51. Renault [1972] 2014: 122. 52. Renault [1972] 2014: 124. 53. See e.g. Renault [1972] 2014: 122–4 (Bagoas’ first meeting with Alexander): Bagoas uses the formal language of the Persian court, addressing Alexander (unlike the Macedonians) by his title. Bagoas’ syntax is rather paratactic, sometimes elliptical, his vocabulary stilted: ‘They stood about and stared, and discussed my looks as if I had been a horse, not knowing I could understand them. The lower ranks, I could not; but though they spoke Macedonian, which is barely Greek, I knew what they meant. I fought back the tears of wretchedness.’ (Renault [1972] 2014: 124). See Hall 1989: 78–80, on Aeschylus’ use of language to suggest barbarian diction. Although Renault stresses the formality of language as well, she does not rely on anaphora or repetitions like Aeschylus. 54. See e.g. Renault [1972] 2014:128–9 on Bagoas’ Greek; Hephaestion remembers how Alexander himself learned Greek; see also Renault [1972] 2014: 142–3; 156–7. Bagoas does not understand Macedonian (Renault [1972] 2014: 147) and rejects Xenophon’s view of the Persians (Renault [1972] 2014): 162–4); on his Persian notions of kingship: Renault [1972] 2014: 193; 229–30; 233; esp. 247–52 (Kleitos’ death). 55. E.g. Renault [1972] 2014: 202; 205; 224. 56. See e.g. culturally different views on Alexander and the death of Kleitos: Whereas a Persian great-king would not answer to his courtiers, Alexander had to deal with the Macedonian assembly. Bagoas is therefore asked not to interfere (Renault [1972] 2014: 250). 57. See Abraham 1996: 75; Hoberman 1996: 290–2; Zilboorg 2001: 225–6; Tougher 2008: 83–4. The concept of the eunuch as a ‘third type of human being’ can be traced back to Antiquity; see Kuefler 2001: 36; Carlà-Uhink 2017a: 15–16. 58. On the concept of nesting Orientalisms, see Bakić-Hayden 1995. 59. See Förschler 2010: 149–51 on these topoi. 60. Renault [1972] 2014: 265–6. 61. Förschler 2010: 232. In her first appearance, Roxane is described as a white-skinned odalisque (‘ivory’). The skin colour is an important feature in Oriental paintings juxtaposing

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Notes to pp. 52–55 passive white odalisques with black serving girls. Later in the novel, Bagoas describes Roxane as dark and swarthy, which echoes nineteenth-century ideas of Arabic dancers who were associated with untamed sexuality; see Förschler 2010, 232. 62. Renault [1972] 2014: 267–8. 63. Renault [1972] 2014: 468. 64. Renault [1972] 2014: 272. 65. Renault [1972] 2014: 276. 66. See McEwan 1987: 60, 71; Abraham 1996: 72; Zilboorg 2001: 179. 67. Renault [1972] 2014: 396. 68. Renault [1972] 2014: 275. 69. Renault [1972] 2014: 276. 70. The events after Alexander’s death are dealt with in the third part of the trilogy, Funeral Games. See McEwan 1987: 76; Abraham 1996: 73. Baynham and Ryan 2018: 632 call Renault’s ‘romantic idealism [. . .] uplifting, if a little naïve.’ 71. Wieber 2008: 160–1 points out alternatives in Indian movies: In Sikander (1941) Rukhsana/ Roxane’s love puts an end to Alexander’s Indian campaigns and provides an ‘anti-colonial subtext’ to the film; see also Wieber 2017b: 331–5. 72. Renault [1972] 2014: 280. 73. Renault [1972] 2014: 281–2. 74. Renault [1972] 2014: 423. 75. Renault [1972] 2014: 450; 440; 464. 76. Abraham 1996: 73. 77. On Eurydike see Abraham 1996: 76–7; Hoberman 1996: 289–90; Zilboorg 2001: 231. 78. Bagoas conspires with Ptolemy to move Alexander’s corpse to Alexandria; he comfortably spends his old age there. Alexandria also serves as an ‘ancient Miami’ in Stephanie Thornton’s The Conqueror’s Wife (2015, New York: New American Library). The novel is inspired by Renault who is cited in the Further Reading section (see p. 478). Unlike Renault, Thornton gives a voice to the women surrounding Alexander to tell their tales. Roxane serves as a barbarian foil to the Persian Drypetis: whereas the Bactrian does not adapt to Western customs and (in contrast to ancient sources and Renault) kills herself, Drypetis changes her Eastern ways and survives to old age in Alexandria. 79. Renault [1981] 2014: 23, 25, 26, 31–2. 80. Renault [1981] 2014: 61–2. 81. Renault [1981] 2014: 73–4. 82. Renault [1981] 2014: 96. 83. Renault [1981] 2014: 100. 84. In Funeral Games Olympias reads a letter by her son expressing his intent to pass over Roxane’s children in favour of children born by Stateira (Renault [1981] 2014: 247). 85. As in The Persian Boy, Renault establishes Otherness via language skills: Alexander IV forgets speaking standard Greek during his imprisonment and falls back into an uncouth patois (Renault [1981] 2014: 300). 86. Renault [1981] 2014: 123. 87. Renault [1981] 2014: 196.

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Notes to pp. 55–57 88. Renault [1981] 2014: 224. 89. Renault [1981] 2014: 248. On Alexander IV’s looks see also ibid., 135, 176, 224, 265, 300; being his mother’s son: Renault [1981] 2014: 129, 165, 196–7, 232, 235, 247, 300. Roxane as an adorned and malicious Oriental woman: 168, 175, 223–5, 246, 299–300. 90. See von den Hoff 2008: 47 on portraits of Alexander. 91. Zoller Seitz 2016: 383; see also Petrovic 2008: 169; Stone 2010: 351. The blurb advertises the German reissue of The Persian Boy (Ein Weltreich zu erobern, 2007, Köln: Bastei Lübbe) as the ‘Romanvorlage zum großen Alexander-Film von Oliver Stone’. In his review, Mendelsohn 2005 remarks that ‘a good deal in Stone’s film is borrowed [from Renault’s novels] without credit’; see also Wieber 2008: 156. Furthermore, the ‘rape scene’ between Philip and Olympias is more or less directly taken from Fire from Heaven. 92. Chaniotis 2008: 193–4, also on modern projections on Stone’s Alexander as well as on the historical person. See Baynham 2009: 300 on the treatment of Bagoas. On Alexander’s sexuality as depicted on screen, see Nisbet 2008: 119–24, who also hints on the popularity of Renault’s novels that brought Alexander’s sexuality to mainstream popular culture (Nisbet 2008:122). 93. Llewellyn-Jones 2013: 31. On the stereotypical depiction of women, especially of Olympias and Roxane, in the movie, see Carney 2010. 94. Renault [1972] 2014: 475.

Chapter 4 * Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Anja Wieber and Filippo Carlà-Uhink. 1. Arr. An. 7.4.4; Diod. 17.107.6. Berve 1926: 148; Schmitt 1996: 565; Heckel 2006: 116. On his daughters see Brosius 1996: 76. 2. Schmitt 1996: 565. 3. There is no Persian Achaemenid historiography at all. Oral tradition predominated. In addition, royal women were not mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions. While some of them appear in the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, Drypetis does not belong to them. A daughter of the Great King was called sunki pakri in Elamic, see Brosius 1996: 29; Brosius 2006: 89. 4. Arr. An. 7.4.4. 5. Plut. Alex. 77.4. 6. Carney 2000a: 110–11. 7. However, Curtius does not mention her name. Diod. 17.107.6 and Arr. An. 7.4.4 do. The spelling differs: either Δρυπῆτις (Diodorus) or Δρύπετις (Arrian). 8. Curt. 7.9.19; Just. 12.12.11–12; Epictet. 2.22.17; Ael. VH 7.8; 12.7; Diogenes Sinopensis Epist. 24.1 (Hercher); Luk. DM 14.4; Calumn. 17. Not explicitly: Arr. An. 1.12.6; 7.14.4. As a joking hint: Luk. Hdt. 5–6. Reames-Zimmerman 1998; Reames-Zimmerman 1999; Ogden 2009: 210–12; Reames 2010. However, the ideas of Hephaistion being Alexander’s lover, his own personal Patroclus, or his Second Self did not stem from Alexander’s political selffashioning or contemporary sources but were literary models transferred posthumously upon them by later writers. Justin-Trogus and Curtius both hint at it in the context of the theme of Alexander’s depravation. Curtius’ unique claim that they had been brought up and educated together forms part of a literary pattern styling Hephaistion as Alexander’s mirror image sharing the same experiences. It does not deserve much credence. Arrian put the romance into Alexander’s relationship with Hephaistion by emphasizing the Patroclus 229

Notes to pp. 57–59 theme probably thinking of Hadrian and his lover Antinous while describing Alexander and Hephaistion, cf. Stadter 1980: 39, 169. Any speculation about a possible love affair is misleading and probably brought up by the Romans; Müller 2011; Müller 2013b: 87–9; Müller 2018. On Alexander’s problematic reception in Rome in general see Spencer 2002. 9. Carney 2000a: 98. 10. Jenkins 2003: 281–314; Derecho 2006: 62. 11. Rossdal 2015: 47, 59: She points out that therefore, fanfics are for insiders. In general see also Sandvoss 2005; Hills 2002; H. Jenkins 2006; Jenkins [1992] 2012. 12. Rossdal 2015: 47. 13. Rossdal 2015: 60. 14. Curt. 3.11.25; 3.12.22. Brosius 1996: 68; Nylander [1993] 1997: 147; Heckel 2006: 255–6. 15. Diod. 17.36.2–3; Plut. Alex. 21.1; Curt. 3.11.25 (adultae duae virgines); cf. 4.10.19–20 (at the time of her mother’s death); 4.11.12 (puella). Berve 1926: 148, 363; Atkinson 1980: 392. 16. Diod. 17.36.2–4; Curt. 3.3.22–3; Arr. An. 2.11.9; Plut. Alex. 21.1; Just. 11.9.12. According to Curtius, Darius’ children travelled in their own harmamaxae (a kind of enclosed litter, cf. Xen. An. 1.2.16) with their governesses and a group of eunuchs. However, Nylander [1993] 1997: 155, n. 28 has his doubts about this report: ‘Darius looks like much of a family man: it seems an unusual feature to bring one’s whole family on a military campaign’. Contra: Brosius 2006: 95. 17. Diod. 17.54.1–2; Plut. Alex. 29.4; Just. 11.12.1–3. Brosius 1996: 77; Heckel 2006: 256; Olbrycht 2010: 355. 18. Diod. 17.38.1–3; Curt. 3.12.21–6; 4.10.18–19; Plut. Alex. 21.5; 30.3; Just. 11.9.15–16; 11.12.6–8. 19. On artifice in Alexander historiography in general see Carney 2000b. 20. Arr. An. 2.12.6–7 (Leonnatus was the only one sent to the women). On the fictitious character of the story of Alexander’s and Hephaistion’s visit to the tent: Müller 2014b: 141; Bosworth 1980: 221; Atkinson 1980: 252; Berve 1926: 410. On Cleitarchus as the probable source: Berve 1926: 356; Baynham 1998a: 80–1; McKechnie 1995: 431. Until the publication of P.Oxy. LXXI. 4808 in 2007, there had been agreement that Cleitarchus wrote under Ptolemy I in Alexandria, cf. Atkinson 2009: 21. The new evidence led to the – however debated – suggestion of a new dating of Cleitarchus as the tutor of Ptolemy IV. Curt. 9.5.21; 9.8.15 alludes to Cleitarchus’ work he has used for his history of Alexander. 21. Curt. 3.12.3–16. 22. Curt. 3.12.15–21; Diod. 17.37.5–6. Diodorus calls her Sisyngambris, Curtius calls her Sisygambis. Cf. Val. Max. 4.7.ext.2; Arr. An. 2.12.6–8. 23. Atkinson 1980: 248–55; Bosworth 1980: 222; Baynham 1998a: 124–5; Heckel 2006: 256. On friendship: Aristot. Eth. Nic. 1156 B, 1157 B, 1159 B; Diog. Laert. 5.20; Plut. Mor. 93e. 24. Baynham 1998a: 80. 25. Curt. 3.12.21–22; 4.31.3 (he guarded their chastity like a father). The same applies to the theme of his chaste behaviour regarding Darius’ beautiful wife, cf. Berve 1926: 362–3; Nylander [1993] 1997: 155, n. 23. 26. Diod. 17.38.3. 27. Just. 11.9.15–16. 28. Just. 12.12.11–12. On Justin-Trogus’ negative portrayal of Alexander see Baynham 1998a: 33; Müller 2014b: 121–4. 29. Curt. 4.10.19–22.

230

Notes to pp. 59–61 30. Diod. 17.67.1. Accepted by Berve 1926: 363. 31. Berve 1926: 363; Heckel 2006: 116. 32. Curt. 5.2.17–19. On the implausibility of the story see Heckel 2006: 116, 256. Contra: Berve 1926: 357. 33. Curt. 5.2.19–22. 34. Larsson Lovén 1998: 86. Milnor 2005: 29; Langlands 2006: 87, n. 30. 35. Suet. Aug. 64, 73. Larsson Lovén 1998: 89; Milnor 2005: 84. Also, Lucretia as the role-model of the virtuous, chaste, faithful Roman woman was associated with wool-working instead of leisure and parties (Liv. 1.57.9; Ov. Fast. 2.741–3). Atkinson 1994: 68; Larsson Lovén 1998: 86–7, 89–90 (it was an ideal far from reality in Augustus’ days but very influential in Roman literature); Milnor 2005: 30; Langlands 2006: 87. 36. Curt. 6.2.1–6; 6.6.1–12: Alexander loses his mind and morals. 37. Curt. 7.9.19. Ogden 2009: 210–11, n. 59; Müller 2011: 431–2, 445–8; Müller 2016a: 77. 38. Diod. 17.107.6; Plut. Mor. 329e. 39. Berve 1926: 363; Heckel 2008: 51: a ‘blueprint for political stability’, 137; Briant 2010: 128–9 (‘a veritable pact of governing’); Müller 2016a: 303. 40. Arr. An. 7.4.4; Diod. 17.107.6 (he names only Stateira). Brosius 1996: 77 (a symbol of the continuity of Persian rule under Alexander); Heckel 2006: 192; Ogden 2009: 206. Parysatis was captured at Damascus in 333 bce (Curt. 3.13.12). Probably, she was left behind in Susa in 331 bce , too. In Argead Macedonia, similar to Achaemenid Persia, royal polygamy was practised for political reasons: on the one hand, it was meant to secure a sufficient number of candidates for the succession. On the other hand, it formed part of the marriage policy of monarchs who usually tried to confirm or establish alliances by taking a wife from the circles of the ally’s ruling classes. Moreover, it could serve the purpose of tying strategic female figures with influential families and factions to the ruler in order to prevent her from marrying a rival. 41. Hamilton 1969: 195; Brosius 1996: 77 comparing Alexander’s marriage policy to that of Darius I in 522/521 bce ; Heckel 2008: 137. 42. Diod. 17.107.6; Arr. An. 7.4.4. Heckel 2006: 116, 136. 43. Atkinson 2009: 154. 44. Berve 1926: 173; Wirth 1967: 1023; Brosius 1996: 77; Olbrycht 2004: 47; Müller 2014b: 222; Müller 2016a: 303. 45. Arr. An. 6,28.3–4; Diod. 17.61.3; Plut. Alex. 28.3. 46. Arr. An. 1.12.6; 7.14.4. His teacher Epictetus called Hephaistion Alexander’s eromenos: Epict. 2.22.17. On Arrian’s romantic view of Achilles and Patroclus: Arr. Per. 23.4. Cf. Stadter 1980: 39, 169; Müller 2011: 452; Müller 2016a: 189; Müller 2018. 47. Arr. An. 7.14.1; Plut. Alex. 72.1–2; Diod. 17.110.7–8; Polyain. 4.3.31. Müller 2011: 448–51 (in about October). The wedding took place in spring (March, Heckel 2008: 330). 48. Curt. 10.5.20. 49. Curt. 10.5.20–2. Atkinson 2009: 154 points out that Curtius omitted the elimination of the Achaemenid women after Alexander’s death but alluded to it by the reference to their fears. See also Baynham 1998a: 101. 50. Arr. An. 7.23.6; Plut. Alex. 75.2–3; Pelop. 34.2; Diod. 17.115.6; Just. 12.12.11–12. 51. Ael. VH 7.8. Arr. An. 7.18.1–5; Plut. Alex. 73.2; App. BC 2.152. McKechnie 1995: 418–19; Heckel 2006: 194, 401–2; Müller 2011: 448–51. 231

Notes to pp. 61–63 52. Plut. Alex. 77.4. The episode is styled in accordance with the traditional stereotypes of the cruel and scheming Eastern queen. According to Just. 13.2.5, Roxane was seven months pregnant, Curt. 10.6.9 gives five months. 53. Berve 1926: 363; Heckel 2006: 199, 242; Müller 2013a: 201. 54. Carney 2000a: 110–11. Accepted by Müller 2013a: 214, n. 8. Contra Stähelin 1918: 415; Hamilton 1969: 216; Schmitt 1996: 565; Heckel 2006: 116; Atkinson 2009: 154. On Parysatis see Berve 1926: 306. 55. Müller 2013a: 201. On Perdiccas supporting the claims of Roxane’s child see Hamilton 1969: 216. 56. Diod. 17.36.3–4. 57. Baynham 1998a: 127 on Curtius’ portrayal of Sisygambis who has no illusions about her status as a Macedonian captive and mentions the term famula (3.12.25) associated with slavery and the loss of liberty, Atkinson 1980: 252. 58. Plut. Alex. 48.5. Olbrycht 2004: 47, 54, 338–40; Olbrycht 2010: 360; Ogden 2011: 157–67. 59. The old assumption that Seleucus was the only bridegroom who did not repudiate his Iranian wife has fallen out of vogue. It was mainly based on the single case of Krateros who divorced his Persian wife Amastris (Memnon, BNJ 434 F 1). 60. Arr. An. 7.6.3; 7.6.5. See Heckel 2008: 137; Briant 2010: 129; Müller 2013a: 201; Müller 2016c. On the procedure of the marriages: Arr. An. 7.6.2; Chares BNJ 125 F 4 (The marriages were celebrated five days long with great splendour). According to this, the couple ate from the same loaf of bread cut in half. See Brosius 1996: 79. Curt. 8.4.27–28 refers to this in the context of Alexander’s marriage to Roxane. 61. Curt. 10.6.13–14. See Heckel 2006: 56; Müller 2014b: 223. 62. See Böhme 2009: 179–80. Also, Ptolemy made no attempts to conquer territory in the Persian heartland. 63. See Rossdal 2015: 52. 64. This will have been the reason why I did not find any pictures of her illustrating fanfics involving her. 65.

Alexander Revisited (2011): http://m.gofanfiction.club/s/7130393/30/Alexander-Revisited (accessed 21 September 2017).

66. Rossdal 2015: 52–3. Stories about erotic relationships between men and women are labelled as het and about between persons of the same sex as slash. The original text on which they base is termed as canon (Rossdal 2015: 55). 67. http://dishonorablewar.livejournal.com/1842.html (2007) (accessed 21 September 2017). 68. Alexander Revisited (2011) http://m.gofanfiction.club/s/7130393/30/Alexander-Revisited (accessed 21 September 2017). 69. Therefore, fanfiction might have earned its label as a ‘democratic genre’, see Rossdal 2015: 51. 70. Rossdal 2015: 53–4. 71. F.e. http://www.fanfiction.net/community/The_Best_Alexander_Hephaestion/42247/ (accessed 21 September 2017); http://www.fanfiktion.de/Alexander/c/104017000 (accessed 21 September 2017). 72. Nisbet 2010: 230. 73. Nikoloutsos 2008; Nisbet 2008: 128; Baynham 2009: 300; Ogden 2009: 201; Nisbet 2010: 229; Müller 2016b. It is debated whether their relationship in Alexander is sexual at all. No sex: Nisbet 2008: 128; Baynham 2009: 300; Nisbet 2010: 227–30. Contra: Wieber 2008: 157; Chaniotis 2008: 193. In addition, also Alexander’s marriages at Susa are missing. The focus is 232

Notes to pp. 63–65 on Roxane whose portrayal as an ill-tempered, violent savage is biased by characteristic clichés of the ‘Orient’. See Baynham 2009: 300. In general see Carney 2010. On the clichés see Brosius 1996: 1; Brosius 2006: 89: cruel, violent, powerful, revengeful, instigating intrigues, causing upheavals, exercising considerable influence on the king. 74. On the other Persian women see Llewellyn-Jones 2010. 75. Müller 2016b. Hephaistion feels for Alexander alone. 76. To the Ends of the Earth (2014): http://archiveofourown.org/works/1470742/ chapters/3099502 (accessed 21 September 2017). 77. Bagoas is a shadowy figure, not attested by Arrian and Diodorus but suspiciously only by Plut. Alex. 67.4; Mor. 65d; Athen. 13.603a-b and Curt. 6.5.23; 10.1.25–9, each time forming part of a moralistic description of Alexander’s alleged loss of morals when he fell victim to Eastern vices and transformed into the new Persian tyrant, thereby even adopting Darius III’s former concubines and boy-toys. There are doubts about Bagoas’ existence or at least about the historicity of his role at Alexander’s court and their sex affair, see Briant 2015: 10, 213. Suspiciously, Bagoas bears the name of the prominent Persian eunuch at the court of Artaxerxes III, Bagoas, son of Pharnuches, who engineered the king’s death, succession by his son Arses (Artaxerxes IV), and also the latter’s death (Diod. 17.5.3–4; Strab. 15.3.24; Plut. Mor. 337; Ael. VH 6.8). His name has become synonymous with Persian eunuchs depicted as scheming and unworthy of respect. See Heckel 2006: 67. 78. http://community.livejournal.com/maryrenaultfics (accessed 21 September 2017). 79. http://www.pothos.org/content/index53c8.html?page=drypetis-daughter-of-darius (accessed 21 September 2017). 80. Lewis 2004: 13, 96, 98–9, 182, 185–7. 81. https://toujours-nigel.dreamwidth.org/tag/alexander (accessed 21 September 2017). 82. http://dishonorablewar.livejournal.com/1842.html (2007) (accessed 21 September 2017). 83. Workshop of the Gods (2007): www.fanfiction.net/s/3806103/1/Workshop-of-the-Gods (accessed 21 September 2017). 84. Sharing Emotions (2009): www.fanfiction.net/s/5489726/1/Sharing-Emotions (accessed 21 September 2017). 85. The Hate of a Queen (2016): https://archiveofourown.org/works/8702875 (accessed 21 September 2017). 86. Bloodstains (2006): https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3056242/1/ (accessed 21 September 2017). 87.

A Dishonorable War, Chapter 17 (2007): http://dishonorablewar.livejournal.com/1842.html (accessed 21 September 2017).

88. See Brosius 1996; Brosius 2006. 89. www.fanfiction.net/s/2235859/1/From-Now-To-Eternity (2005) (accessed 21 September 2017). 90. The Hate of a Queen (2016): https://archiveofourown.org/works/8702875 (accessed 21 September 2017). Even worse, while the women are fenced in, Alexander and Hephaistion secretly spy at them – while making love to each other. 91. Bloodstains (2006): https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3056242/1/ (accessed 21 September 2017). 92. This portrait is in clear contradiction to Curt. 10.1.25–9. 93. Bloodstains (2006): https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3056242/1/ (accessed 21 September 2017). 94. However, in Antiquity, predominantly, Persian royal women, particularly the female Achaemenids, are portrayed as active, dominating women such as Atossa, the wife of Darius

233

Notes to pp. 65–68 I (Aischyl. Pers. 150–851; Hdt. 3.134), or as influential schemers such as Amestris, the wife of Xerxes I (Hdt. 9.108–13), or Parysatis, the mother of Artaxerxes II (Plut. Art. 6; 16–19). 95. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (2009): http://cobalt-violet.livejournal.com/51145.html (accessed 21 September 2017). On the tradition that Alexander fences Gog and Magog, see Stoneman 2008: 174. 96. www.foreverknight.org/FK4/5YO_Sisygambis_Drypetis_Stateira.htm (2009) (accessed 21 September 2017). 97. Sharing Emotions (2009): www.fanfiction.net/s/5489726/1/Sharing-Emotions (accessed 21 September 2017). 98. Gamos (2010): https://archiveofourown.org/works/72082 (accessed 21 September 2017). 99. Workshop of the Gods (2007): www.fanfiction.net/s/3806103/1/Workshop-of-the-Gods (accessed 21 September 2017). 100. Workshop of the Gods (2007): www.fanfiction.net/s/3806103/1/Workshop-of-the-Gods (accessed 21 September 2017). 101. www.fanfiction.net/s/3955680/1/Hephaestion-s-Letter-to-His-Wife-Drypetis (2007) (accessed 21 September 2017). 102. Achilles and Patroklos (2010): https://archiveofourown.org/works/72092 (accessed 21 September 2017). Cf. Gamos (2010): https://archiveofourown.org/works/72082 (accessed 21 September 2017): She did not want to marry the guy who helped to steal her father’s empire but then she was smitten by his beauty. 103. Sharing Emotions (2009): www.fanfiction.net/s/5489726/1/Sharing-Emotions (accessed 21 September 2017). 104. Discord in Love (2009): www.fictionpress.com/s/2083588/1/Discord-in-Love (accessed 21 September 2017). This also becomes clear in one story about Hephaistion’s last days with Alexander (erroneously set in Babylon as in the movie) titled by a citation from Romeo and Juliet and pointing at the superfluous character of any other people (such as their wives) disturbing their romance: ‘Sie waren wieder in Babylon und sie waren ausnahmsweise zusammen. Ausnahmsweise, weil diese Augenblicke in ungestörter Zweisamkeit so selten geworden waren, dass sie mit deutlicher Ignoranz gegen ihre Pflichten und Mitmenschen übereinander herfielen, wenn sie sich endlich wieder trafen’ – (They were back at Babylon and for an exception, they were together. This was an exception for these moments of undisturbed intimate togetherness had become so scarce that they ate each other alive when they finally met again, thereby plainly ignoring their duties and fellow beings) Und Liebe wagt, was irgend Liebe kann (2007) https://www.fanfiktion.de/s/4640d02b0000429e06804268/1/Und-Liebewagt-was-irgend-Liebe-kann- (accessed 21 September 2017). 105. Discord in Love (2009): www.fictionpress.com/s/2083588/1/Discord-in-Love (accessed 21 September 2017). 106. Rediscovery (2006): www.fanfiction.net/s/3218145 (accessed 21 September 2017). 107. The Grapevine, Chapter 1 (2011): www.fanfiction.net/s/7304678/1/The-Grapevine (accessed 21 September 2017). www.fanfiction.net/s/2235859/1/From-Now-To-Eternity (accessed 21 September 2017), published in 2005: Alexander thinks: ‘In reflection, perhaps Hephaestion only agreed to the marriage for my sake. I had not been subtle in my wishes. Not less than a day of broaching the subject with him, had I announced proudly to an audience that, “Our children shall be kin.” ’ 108. When the gods were generous (2014): www.fanfiction.net/s/10799562/1/When-the-godswere-generous (accessed 21 September 2017). A still heartbroken Alexander thinks of the dead Hephaistion holding a toy of his daughter by Drypetis in his hand. We are informed 234

Notes to pp. 68–74 that Drypetis died in childbirth and so did her baby son. http://qaddafics.livejournal. com/1716.html (accessed 21 September 2017), published in 2005: Hephaistion and Drypetis have two daughters who play together with Alexander’s children. While Drypetis is mentioned, Hephaistion and Alexander grow old together. 109. Daddy’s Little Conqueror (2004): www.fanfiction.net7s/2196665/1/Daddy-s-Little-Conqueror (accessed 21 September 2017). 110. Rediscovery (2006): www.fanfiction.net/s/3218145 (accessed 21 September 2017).

Chapter 5 1. Fr-R. Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, 1st publ. 1811, ch. 7 (ed. Gallimard 2005): 489–540, 720–6. On the feminine character attributed to Carthage by ancient authors, see Bonnet 2011. 2. A Revised American Edition of the Readers’ Handbook (vol. I), edited by E. C. Brewer. 3. This story was attributed to Timaeus of Tauromenium (FGrH 3b.566.82), cited by Trogus and later Justin, 18.4–6. On the founding of Carthage, see also Appian (1.1–2) and Flavius Josephus, who in Against Apion quotes Menander of Ephesus and the List of the Kings of Tyre, Ap. 1.18; 1.106–27. On Elissa in ancient sources, see Ladjimi Sebaï 1995. On Virgil’s reworking of this tradition, see Starks 1999. 4. On Virgil’s construction of a Dido opposed to Rome, see Davidson 1990. 5. Dido’s chastity as a Christian virtue had already been emphasized in Augustine’s Confessions (1.13.20–1). 6. Around the 1550s, Alessandro Cesati created a medal inspired by Roman coins from the Severan period that celebrated Dido as builder and ruler. 7. Ausonius Epigr. Al. 30: Infelix Dido nulli bene nupta marito: hoc pereunte fugis, hoc fugiente peris (Transl. Waring). 8. The striking Morte di Didone (1625), a Baroque painting by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino), which portrays the scene as the death of a virgin bride, is symptomatic of this. 9. Gamel (2005: 613) notes the influence of Ovid’s Heroides 7 on the play, and the linguistic and dramaturgic centrality of Dido. 10. As Williams (2006: 32–47) has convincingly argued, the Elizabethan Dido found in the non-Virgilian traditions a more suitable model of identification for a female ruler. 11. Williams (2006: 34) interprets Virgil’s treatment of Dido as a means of reducing Carthage from an expansionist rival equivalent to Rome to an ‘inferior geography’, a colonized territory symbolized by Aeneas’ sexual domination of Dido. Dido’s curse of Aeneas and his descendants only reinforces this idea. 12. Purcell and Tate’s opera was preceded by Didone, an opera released in Venice in 1641 with libretto of Gian Francesco Brusenello and music by Francesco Cavallo. 13. Schmalfeldt (2001: 611–14) has noticed the differences to the Virgilian text. The author argues that Purcell’s music confers on Dido a sympathetic human character that devalues Aeneas to a secondary role. 14. The depiction of Dido’s death as a collective drama of grief was a constant theme in Baroque painting, e.g. Sébastien Bourdon, La mort de Didon (1637/49). 15. Notable examples of the interest in Sophonisba’s death are the paintings by Giovani-Battista Zelotti (1569–70), Guercino (1639), Nicolas Régnier (c. 1645), Mattia Pretti (c. 1675), Simon Vouet (c. 1623), Andrea Casali (1743) and Jean Charles Nicaise Perrin (1783). 235

Notes to pp. 74–75 16. J. M. W. Turner’s The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817) further highlights this narrative. Turner depicts a crepuscular Carthage in which women and children hopelessly await their fate. The painting can be read as an allegory of the Ottoman empire, but also of other empires like the Napoleonic and British. 17. ‘I am not a woman; I am a world. My cloths have but to fall, and you shall discover upon my person a succession of mysteries!’ (transl. M. Walter Dunne). 18. Said ([1978] 2003: 184–7) concedes to Flaubert a relevant role in the shaping of nineteenthcentury Orientalism in France. According to Said, Kuchuk reminded Flaubert of the goddess Tanit. The Egyptian dancer also inspired Flaubert’s depiction of Salomé in the tale Hérodias, published in Trois Contes (1977). 19. Letter to Ernest Feydeau, 29/30 Nov. 1859. Aillagon (1995: 19). 20. Polyb. 1.65. 21. This narrative had an important cultural momentum thanks to the popular Romantic opera Les Troyens à Carthage (libretto 1958, released in 1963) by Louis-Hector Berlioz, which explored the genesis of Rome’s nemesis in Dido’s desire for revenge. 22. See Sainte-Bouve’s criticism in the journal Nouveaux Lundis (22 Dec. 1862.4: 84). Séginger (2003/4: 41–2) discusses Flaubert’s opposition to the traditional philosophical vision of history as a rational succession of events that suit politics. On Salammbô as a criticism of nineteenth-century France, see Durr 2002. 23. Influential works like Dureau de La Malle’s Recherches sur la Topographie de Carthage (1835) contributed to this interest in the Punic city. 24. Séginger (2013) discusses Flaubert’s interest in the Heraclitean idea of human life as a dynamic cycle, as well as in the works of Naturalists like Louis Bouilhet and his poem Les Fossiles (1854); see also Percheron 2015. Flaubert made use of Punic-Phoenician religious syncretism, in line with the works of Ernest Renan. On Flaubert’s opposition to Biblical anthropocentrism, see Blix 2013: 724. As Toumayan notes (2008), Flaubert confronts the reader with the concepts of civilization and barbarism. 25. On the influence of Sade in the ritualization of horror and violence in the novel, see Séginger 2003: 47. The symbolism of exotic and violent animals, and the animalistic behaviour of certain characters, underscores the characterization of Carthage as nonanthropocentric, cf. Blix 2013. 26. Théophile Gautier qualified the novel as an epic poem, Eugène Fromentin described Flaubert as a great painter and visionary, while Guy de Maupassant and George Sand mentioned the operatic and musical virtues of Salammbô. Berlioz admitted his fascination and horror for the mysterious Salammbô. Jullien (2013) argues that Flaubert impregnated his novel with a sense of the spectacular by means of almost impressionistic pictorial canvasses in the form of Orientalistic tableau vivants. 27. The imageries inspired by Salammbô are analysed in the issues 11 and 12 (2014) of the journal Flaubert. Revue Critique et Génetique. Available online: http://journals.openedition. org/flaubert/ (last accessed 10 June 2019). 28. The first illustrated editions were not published until 1884 (by Pierre Vidal), George Rochegrosse’s (1900) being the most famous. Ernest Reyer’s polemic opera Salammbô (1890), with a libretto by Camille du Locle, and Andrei Arends’ homonymous ballet for the Bolshoi Theater (1910) are notable examples of successful transfigurations of the novel. The set and costumes of Arends’ innovative ballet were designed by Kostantin Korovin who, inspired by the sensorial plasticity of the novel, created a colourful, eclectically Oriental Carthage. 29. On Salammbô in late-nineteenth-century visual arts, see Kohle 1998. 236

Notes to pp. 75–82 30. The scene illustrates Salammbô’s invocation of Tanit. On Mucha’s Salammbô, see Warren 2017: 125–7. 31. A second version of the painting shows the same figure in a pose that suggests a more active seduction. 32. Throughout the novel, Flaubert insists on Salammbô’s hypnotic state and the divine force that seemed to drive her actions. 33. The epitome of this phenomenon was Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891). 34. The representation of golden foot chains as a symbol of slavery are typical of Orientalism, e.g. Emile Prisse d’Avennes, Egyptian Dancing Girls Performing the Ghawazi at Rossetta (1848). 35. Motte was a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme. The painting was presented in the Salon of 1874 and was later popularized in history books. 36. The scene shows a monumental setting with distinctive Neo-Assyrian iconographies. The gigantic Sphinx is crowned with an Egyptian-like wig and horns, and flanked by pylons. 37. Jeremiah (19.5) explicitly mentions the sacrifice of children to Baal, who is compared to Moloch (32.35). See also, Diod. 20.14. 38. The term das Unheimliche is defined by Freud (1919) in connection to aesthetics as something frightening but not necessarily strange to the human psyche. 39. On the city of Carthage in cinema, see García Morcillo 2015 (with bibliography). 40. An example of the declining Carthaginian women in early cinema is Didone Abbandonata (Maggi, 1910), a now lost filmic adaptation of Pietro Metastasio’s libretto (1724). The film reduced the plot to a love triangle between Aeneas, Dido and her pretender, Iarbas, while the Tyrian queen is portrayed as a typical nineteenth-century operatic diva. Carthage is recreated as a distinctive Eastern place with a Neo-Assyrian look, yet punctuated by African elements. Black servants and the skins of wild animals are there to remind the viewer that Carthage is, after all, neither Babylon nor Khorsabad. 41. On the impact and influence of Cabiria in the history of cinema, see Wyke 1997: 188–204; Bertetto and Rondolino 1998; Alovisio and Barbera 2006. 42. The film makes remarkable use of Phoenician-Punic iconography, including for instance the stelae of Carthage’s Tophet, published by Alfred-Louis Delattre in 1900. On the semantic use of scenography in the movie, see Bertetto 1998: 206–7. On Cabiria’s pioneer travelling shots that emphasize cultural characterization through the exploration of space, see Dragada, Gaudrenault and Gunning 1998. 43. The iconic temple of Moloch in Cabiria looks very similar to those in Motte’s engraving and on the Liebig card, which suggests to me that they could have been possible sources of inspiration for the film. 44. Polyb. 38.7–8. 45. The cinematography of the movie was directed by Vittorio Storaro, while Mario Nascimbene created the soundtrack. The consultants of the series included the Latinist Luca Canali and the well-known literary critics Carlo Bo and Geno Pampaloni. 46. Karlatos’ convincing performance, and the many virtues of Rossi’s Eneide have been analysed by Winkler 2013. 47. This explains, for instance, as Winkler (2013: 146–7) has noted, the intentional echoes of Purcell’s Dido’s Lament in Nascimbene’s Canto di Didone, used in the movie as a leitmotiv that anticipates the end. 48. A comparative analysis of Anna Soror and the sources reworked by Lemaître is provided by Brescia 2007. 237

Notes to pp. 83–91 49. The film was co-written by Adele Cambria and produced by the cooperative Tre Ghinee. For more on the film and other works by Mangiacapre, see: http://www.lenemesiache.it/ (last accessed 10 June 2019). 50. In an interview for the journal La Repubblica (12 November 1986), Mangiacapre makes a plea in favour of the fundamental cultural and social function of ancient myths. 51. In her lecture ‘Didone non è morta’, il fondamento filologico (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 6–9 December 1988), Mangiacapre highlights the importance of the fraternal love between Anna and Dido as the immortal power that brings the queen back to life. 52. Dido has made a successful re-entry in the twenty-first century as an ambitious and capable ancient oriental ruler with Semitic traits thanks to Civilization V, Gods and Kings (2012), the popular video game created by Sid Meier. The worldwide impact of the game, and the acceptance of the character as the personification of the imperialistic Carthage confirms Dido’s deserved status as femme forte in the new millennium. 53. Lagerwall (2014) explores the kaleidoscopic depiction of Flaubert’s heroine in the comic and her connections to other visual representations. 54. ‘Pour moi, la modernité c’est la grotte de Lascaux’. Druillet discusses his sources in a series of interviews on the occasion of an exhibition of his artwork entitled Salammbô, le nus, at the Gallery Pascal Gabert (Paris) in 2010: Le Figaro 4 June 2010; Program L’Invité, TV5Monde 19 July 2010; DJcarre Productions 1 October 2010. 55. In this line, the graphic artist Brandon S. Pilcher (Tiranno Ninja), has created a series of illustrations of famous ancient African women that address post-colonial deconstructions of Western classicism. These colorful black-African characters include Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Cleopatra VII, Hypathia and Sophonisba. Cf. https://tyrannoninja.deviantart.com/ (last accessed 10 June 2019). 56. Chateaubriand, Itinéraire (1811), ch 7: ‘L’histoire prend alors son rang parmi les Muses, et la fiction devient aussi grave que la vérité’.

Chapter 6 1. Walker and Higgs 2001. 2. Hamer 2008. 3. Hamer 1996: 53–67. 4. Colville and Williams 2016 5. Pelling 1996: 1–69. 6. Tyldesley 1995: 41–4, 55–9 and Professor J. D. Ray, personal communication. 7. Wyke 2002: 195–243. 8. Luc. Phars. 10.68–9. 9. Alfano 2001: 276–91. 10. Williams 2007: 322–8. 11. Riding 2016: 63–93. 12. Kelly 2016: 109–37. 13. Russell 2016: 139–59. 14. Trench 1862: 107–8. 238

Notes to pp. 91–105 15. Lamb and Bruhl 2013: 183–211. 16. Goethe [1786–1788] 1970: 208. 17. Fraser 2012: 231. 18. Holland 1908: 243. 19. Lincoln 2016: 187. 20. Williams 2007: 349, 341. 21. Lincoln 2016: 188–9. 22. Lincoln 2016: 197. 23. Greig 2016: 215. 24. L’Estrange 1870: 94. 25. Wilson 1808. 26. Inventory number NPG D47476. 27. Leneman 1996: 225–43. I owe this reference to the kindness of Professor Andrew Lewis. 28. Harrison 1870: 44; Mackenzie 1828: 90–2; Ziegler and Seward 1991: 174–5. I owe these references to Dr J. D. Davies, the naval historian, who generously shared his unpublished study of Sir Thomas Stepney with me. 29. Inventory number NPG 5390. https://goo.gl/3uqLfE 30. Geczy 2013: 85–8. 31. Ribeiro 1995: 77–8. 32. Richard Cockle Lucas 1847: ‘Cleopatra’ https://goo.gl/SmnGJb 33. Richard Cockle Lucas 1836: Lady Stepney https://goo.gl/5AcaJD 34. Hook 1837: 511–12. 35. Martineau 1983: 371–3. 36. Bulwer Lytton 1839: 302, 307. 37. Smith 1847: 461–8. 38. Jerdan 1852: 71.

Chapter 7 1. Understanding post-classical receptions of Fulvia demands detailed scrutiny of the ancient evidence, which constitutes the formative frame through which later receptions are produced and consumed. This chapter limits examination of such receptions to key periods in the formulation of Said’s theory. According to Said (1985: 93), Orientalism was ‘a rationalization of colonial rule’, a process which he sees culminating in the great works of the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries and a critical theory representative of the anti-colonial tradition associated with Marxist and socialist theory since the late nineteenth century. 2. Said 1978: 2. 3. For a succinct discussion of the Graeco-Roman sociolinguistic system’s propensity to generate normative and monstrous representations of sex/gender, see Parker 1997; for a convincing critique of Parker’s grid, see Williams 1998; and, for a different schematization of the Roman insertive-receptive sexual vocabulary, see Williams 1999: 161–2, with 326n.4. 239

Notes to pp. 105–108 4. Of special interest in the context of this study, certain messages inscribed on the Perusinae glandes refer explicitly to reproductive organs or sexual activities. To date, these messages are unique in the extant corpus of inscribed lead sling bullets: Hallett 1977: 154. 5. Originally published by Zangemeister 1885, the inscriptions collectively identified as Perusinae glandes can be most conveniently found in CIL XI.6721. For a detailed historical and epigraphic study of the Perusinae glandes, see Benedetti 2012. For a close reading of ten of these inscribed sling bullets through the lens of ‘insulting obscenity’ and ‘ribald humour’, and how these rhetorical ploys serve to ridicule the various antagonists standing against Caesar Augustus, see Hallett 1977. 6. The Lex Titia, a plebiscite carried through the assembly by the tribune P. Titius on 27 November 43 bce , ratified legal force to the collaboration of Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavian. 7. The sealing of pacts by marriages is commonly noted throughout history, and occurred on at least three occasions during the period that Octavian was rising to power. 8. Suetonius (Aug. 62.1) tells us that Octavian ended this arranged marriage, quintessentially political in form and function, after a quarrel with Fulvia: duxit uxorem vixdum nubilem ac simultate cum Fulvia socru orta dimisit intactam adhuc et virginem (‘. . . he [Octavian] took her [Clodia] as his wife, even though she was barely of marriageable age; but, because of a falling out with his mother-in-law Fulvia, he divorced her, untouched until then, and still a virgin’). 9. Examples of particular historical women who act in such a way as to blur the distinction between respectable women’s authority and public/political power include Terentia, wife of M. Tullius Cicero, who incited her husband against the Catilinarian conspirators (Dio 37.35, Diod. 40.5, Flor. 2.12.6, Plut. Cic. 16, 20, Sall. Cat. 23, 26, 28, [Sall] Inv. In Tull. 3) and Servilia, elder half-sister to Cato Minor, and mother (by her first husband) of Brutus the tyrannicide, who influenced her son after the assassination of Caesar (Cic. Att. 15.10.2). On the networks of elite families in the republican period, see Münzer 1920 (English translation 1999). On elite women of the republic, see inter alia Dixon 2007; Roller 2010; Skinner 2010; and Treggiari 2007. 10. Plut. Ant. 10.3. 11. Eph.Ep. VI 56 (= CIL XI 6721.5): FVLVIAE / [la]NDICAM // PET[o] / (image of lightning bolt). 12. Eph.Ep. VI 65 (= CIL XI 6721.14): L[ucius]A[ntonius] CALVE / [et] FVLVIA / CULUM PAN[dite] 13. Keith 2004: 49. 14. Mart. Ep. 11.20.1–10: Caesaris Augusti lascivos, livide, versus | sex lege, qui tristis verba Latina legis: | ‘quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam | Fulvia constituit, se quoque uti futuam, | Fulviam ego ut futuam? Quid si me Manius oret | pedicem, faciam? Non puto, si sapiam. | ‘Aut futue, aut pugnemus’ ait. Quid quod mihi vita | carior est ipsa mentula? Signa canant.’ | Absolvis lepidos nimirum, Auguste, libellos | qui scis Romana simplicitate loqui. 15. App. BC 5.3.19; Plut. Ant. 30.4; Dio 48.28.2. 16. On the authenticity or otherwise of the epigram, see Hallett 1977: 169nn.60, 61; Bardon 1968: 18, Kay 1985: 111; for the dating, see Hallett 1977: 161. In relation to the extensive rhetorical campaign waged by Octavian against Fulvia, see, in addition to the relevant inscribed texts collected under CIL XI 6721 and Mart. Ep. 11.20, Vell. Pat. 2.74.3 and Liv. Per. 125. 17. Evidence reflecting contemporary criticism of Octavian’s role at Perusia requiring a countervailing response includes Prop. 1.21, 22, Verg. Ecl. 1.9, and Hor. Epist. 2.2.49; cf. references on the Perusinae glandes to the young Caesar’s effeminacy, e.g. Eph.Ep VI 58 (= CIL XI 6721.7: (PET[o] / OCTAVIA [i?] // CULUM (‘I seek Octavian’s arsehole’). As a measure of the derogatory sophistication informing those responsible for composition and 240

Notes to pp. 108–111 inscription of messages like this, note the likely use of the feminine form of Octavius (Caesar Augustus’ birth name). 18. E.g. Eph.Ep. VI 61 (= CIL XI 6721.10): (image of phallus) / OCTAVI // LAX[e]; Eph.Ep. VI 61 (= CIL XI 6721.11): no. 4 above. 19. In contrast to the testimony of the Perusinae glandes and later literary sources (Liv. Per. 125–6; Suet. Aug. 14; App. BC. 5.3.19), a significant omission in the epigram relates to the key historical role in the origins and ongoing management of the Perusine War by L. Antonius. 20. On the denigrating connotations associated with use of futuo, see Adams 1982: 119. 21. Hor. Ep. 9, Od. 8; Verg. Aen. 8; Prop. 4.6. 22. Prop. 3.11.39; cf. Wyke 2009: 235. 23. See especially l’Hoir 1992 and Viden 1993. 24. The late republican category of the ‘new man’ (nouus homo) is perhaps the most concrete instance of this phenomenon. On the one hand, individuals like M. Porcius Cato, C. Marius, or Cicero rose from outside the senate to the consulship; on the other, each measured the terms of his advancement as part of a self-fashioning regime per se cognitus (‘known through himself ’). In contrast to the nobilitas of the ‘known’ men, noui homines were required to justify their origins and defend the pattern of their career. Demonstrable moral excellence (uirtus) and hard work (industria) were insufficient; patronage or circumstances determined the registration of a new man’s achievement. In these respects, the sociolinguistic resonances of the uir (nobilis)/(novus) homo dichotomy stand confirmed. For a particularly apt expression of the rhetorical slipperiness of these denominations, consider Cicero’s attack on the lineage and achievements of the son (?) of one of Sulla’s ‘new’ senators, the infamous C. Verres, in 2 Verr. 5.180ff. 25. For references supporting the femina/mulier distinction, see L’Hoir 1992: Chapter 2. 26. Sexual distinctions can be expressed in Latin (and Greek, for that matter) by substantives (demonstrative and relative pronouns). 27. Kennedy 1972: 271; Delia 1991: 199; Griffin 1985: 43n.79. 28. On Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric in the Philippics, see, e.g. Hall 2002 and Wooten 1983. 29. Cic. Phil. 5.11. 30. Fulvia as primary agent: mulier . . . faciebat; financial gain: auctionem provinciarum regnorumque; personal advantage: restituebantur exsules. 31. Cic. Phil. 13.18. 32. Cf. Cic. Phil. 2.58. Cicero’s reference to Antonius’ mother, Julia, accompanying him in his role as tribune (49 bce ) communicates none of the vituperative passion that he devotes to Fulvia’s presence at Brundisium. 33. Cic. Phil. 3.4, 5.22, and this passage. 34. For a useful overview of Greek and Roman ethno-sexualities, see Roisman 2013. 35. Cf. Cicero’s depictions of Fulvia in relation to this incident as (a) cruel and bloodthirsty (Phil. 3.4: sanguine os uxoris respersum esse); and as (b) integral to, and greedy for, the execution of the centurions (Phil. 5.22: ante pedes suos uxorisque suae . . . iugulari coegit). 36. Volumnia Cytheris: Serv. ad Buc. 10.1. Cytheris at Brundisium: Cic. Phil. 2.20, 58, 61–62, 69. 37. Brutus, Antonius, Gallus: Vir. Ill. 82.2; Volumnia Cytheris and Fulvia: Cic. Phil. 2:61 (venisti Brundisium, in sinum. . .tuae mimulae). 38. Keith 2011: 45.

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Notes to pp. 112–115 39. App. BC 4.4.29. 40. On the political auctoritas of Roman matronae, see Hillard 1983. 41. On Fulvia’s mistreatment of Cicero’s head after his execution (as reported in Dio 47.8.4), see below, discussing Hay’s Female Biography and Pavel Svedomsky’s painting, ‘Fulvia with the head of Cicero.’ 42. Pagden 1982: 15–26. 43. Plut. Ant. 28.1. 44. Skinner 1998: 4ff. 45. Skinner 1998: 5. 46. For a discussion of sexualized allegory following these principles, see Warner 1985. 47. Cognate parallels to this formulation would seem to obtain in referential and sociological fields. For useful introductory remarks on the relationship between social anxieties in ancient Rome and the genres of political invective and erotic love elegy, see Skinner 2004: 19, 217–18, 221–6, 240–1. 48. A. C. Clark’s 1895 commentary on Cicero’s Pro Milone; Münzer’s 1910 entry in Pauly’s Realencylopaëdie; Helen E. Weiand’s 1917 article; T. R. Holmes’ 1928 history of the late Roman republic; A. Weigall’s 1931 monograph on the life and times of M. Antonius; R. Syme’s 1939 treatise on Rome’s civil wars; J. P. V. D. Balsdon’s 1962 overview of Roman women; C. L. Babcock’s 1965 study of the early career of Fulvia; S. B. Pomeroy’s 1975b survey of women in Antiquity; H. Bengtson’s 1977 biography of M. Antonius; J. P. Hallett’s 1977 examination of the inscribed sling bullets used at the siege of Perusia; C .B. R. Pelling’s 1988 commentary on Plutarch’s Life of Antony; D. Delia’s 1991 portrayal of Fulvia; Bauman’s 1992 study of women and politics in ancient Rome; K. Welch’s 1995 rebuttal of Delia’s thesis; A. J. Barrett’s 1996 biography of Agrippina; R. A. Fischer’s 1999 comparison of two Roman wives, Fulvia and Octavia; C. Virlouvet’s 2001 chapter on Fulvia; H. Stegmann’s 2004 update on Münzer; A. J. Weir’s 2007 Master of Arts unpublished study of Fulvia; and J. P. Hallett’s 2015 discussion of Fulvia as a military woman. 49. Mentally disordered and volatile: Clark 1895: xviii; exemplar of extreme passions: Weiand 1917: 430; resolute and influential: Weigall 1931: 220, 255; Syme 1939: 208. 50. Pomeroy 1975b: 175, 185–6. 51. Balsdon 1962: 49. Cf. Cluett 1998: 82, who acknowledges the Ciceronian construction of Fulvia as virago, without succumbing to its rhetorical power in his comparative study of Roman women and triumviral politics over the period 43 to 37 bce . 52. Babcock 1965: 10–12, 19. Cf. Plut. Ant. 10.3: ‘Fulvia took no thought for spinning or housekeeping . . . and wished to rule a ruler and command a commander’; Vell. Pat. 2.72.2: ‘Fulvia had nothing feminine but her body.’ 53. Virlouvet 2001: 66, 75, 80. 54. Münzer 1910: 7.284. 55. Bauman 1992: 89, 216; Barrett 1996: 10. 56. imperator: Huzar 1986: 102. 57. For a refined taxonomy distinguishing between kinds of speaking, reading and writing in different ancient and modern contexts, see Robbins 1995. 58. Coins from Rome: Crawford 1974: 100, 522; no. 514/1, pl. 62; Banti/Simonetti 1973: 87–8, nos. 1–2; Sydenham 1952: 180, no. 1086; 181, no. 1095; Grueber 1910: 570, no. 4215, pl. 56.1; 575, no. 4229, pl. 56.10. Coins from Lugdunum: Banti/Simonetti 1973: 88–90, nos. 3–5; 242

Notes to pp. 115–120 Sydenham 1952: 189, nos. 1160, 1163; Grueber 1910: 394–5, nos. 40–5, pl. 103, fig. 10, 396–7, nos. 48–51, pl. 103, figs. 13, 14; Burnett et al 2003: 151, nos. 512–13. Coins from Eumenea (‘Fulvia’) in Phyrgia: Bartels 1963: 12; Grueber 1910: 499, n.1; van Zwet 1956: 2, fig.3, 4; Burnett et al 2003: 509, nos. 3139–40. 59. Scholars who claim that the coins portray Fulvia include: Babelon 1885: 168–9; Balsdon 1962: 49, cf. 295n.13; Bauman 1992: 89; Bengtson 1977: 19; Burnett et al 2003: 508; Head 1964: 213; Huzar 1978: 132; Huzar 1986: 102; Kleiner 1992: 360. Scholars who argue that the coins do not portray Fulvia include: Babcock 1965: 19–20; Crawford 1974: 523; Delia 1991: 202; Grueber 1910: 571; Mattingly 1960: 76n.2; Virlouvet 2001: 67; Wood 1999: 41–4. 60. Vell. Pat. 2.74; Plut. Ant. 10.3; cf. 10.28–30. 61. Rouillé’s ‘effigies’ of historical figures reflects the development in the sixteenth century of a conception of authentic portraiture that relied on physiognomic likeness as opposed to medieval paradigms of distinctiveness and memorability. The contrast between Rouillé’s visual representation of Fulvia and the accompanying narrative conforms to a trend in this period for printed volumes showing images (in the style of numismatic portraits) of certain female subjects from Antiquity with short biographies that question the physiognomic and exemplary rhetoric characterizing biographies of men, Gaylard 2013. 62. Rouillé 1553: 172. 63. Rouillé 1553: 172. 64. For a historical overview of this rhetorical practice in visual representations of violent women, see Minowa et al (2014). 65. Hays (1803: I.v–vi). 66. Hays (1803: IV.368). 67. Hays 1803: IV.368. Cf. Plut. Ant. 10.3. 68. Biographium Faemineum (1766); Bayle 1736; LaCroix 1769; Serviez 1752. For discussion of Hays’ tendency to appropriate material from these (and other) texts – verbatim, rehearsed without major deviation, or glossed freely, and with or without acknowledgement of the source – see Walker 2014; Spongberg 2014: 543. 69. Keegan 2018: 157. 70. Hays 1803: I.iii–iv. 71. Hays 1803: IV.368. 72. Hays 1803: IV.368–9. 73. On Caesetius Rufus, see previous discussion of the account in App. BC. 4.4.29; On Fulvia and Cicero, see Dio 47.8.4. 74. Examples of Roman politicians and soldiers beheaded in times of civil unrest include: Cn. Papirius Carbo (82 bce ): App. BC. 1.11.96; M. Crassus (53 bce ): Cn. Pompeius (48 bce ): Plut. Pomp. 80; Plut. Crassus 33.2–3; M. Antonius, maternal grandfather of the triumvir (37 bce ): Plut. Ant. 1. 75. Matthew 14: 6-11; Mark 6: 21-8. Comparison of Fulvia’s treatment of Cicero’s head and Salome, the daughter of Herodias’ treatment of John the Baptist’s head: Jerome, Apologia adversos libros Rufini 3.42; cf. Caravaggio’s 1607–10 painting, ‘Salome with the head of John the Baptist’, and Francesco del Cairo’s 1625–30 painting, ‘Herodias with the head of John the Baptist.’ 76. Hays 1803: IV.369. 77. Images of historical or imagined female subjects from Classical Antiquity, frequently embedded within a frame of ancient ‘Orientalizing’ decadence, characterize Svedomsky’s

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Notes to pp. 120–125 oeuvre: ‘In the Harem’ (1885); ‘Julia in Exile’; ‘Medusa’ (1882); ‘Messalina’ (1900); ‘The Orgy’ (1883); ‘A Roman Lady’ (1884); ‘Two Roman Ladies’. While his depiction of Fulvia conforms to this trend, his choice of subject – an historical figure otherwise overlooked in postclassical visual representations of the femme fatale – not only reflects the broad allure of the Orient on the imagination of Western artists like Antoine Jean Gros, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Théodore Chassériau, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and William Holman Hunt, but also Svedomsky’s fascination with historical women whose imprint in the source tradition resonates with Romantic themes of human pathos, uncontrollable force and emotional extremes. 78. In this regard, it is instructive to note the continuing reliance of modern writers of historical fiction – Alan Massie’s Antony (1997), Colleen McCullough’s The October Horse (2002), John Maddox Roberts’ A Point of Law (2006), Robert Harris’ Dictator (2015) – on constructions of Fulvia’s actions and character transmitted through the source tradition and, in those instances where modern scholarship is consulted (notably McCullough and Harris), the consensus historiographical view. 79. Said 1978: 351.

Chapter 8 1. Blurb text for Turton 1974. 2. Grant 1996: 4. Grant’s comment concerns the period 211–35 ce . See also Burns 2007: 201: ‘More than any previous Roman empress, [Julia Domna] managed to combine beauty and brains with real political power. Her example laid the groundwork for the political dominance of her sister and two nieces.’ 3. References to ancient sources are provided in the sections on the individual empresses. 4. See Nadolny 2016: 19–134 for a detailed discussion of the evidence. 5. For Julia Domna, see: Levick 2007; Carbó García 2010; Langford 2013. For the Severan women in general, see: Turton 1974; Kettenhofen 1979; Golfetto 2002; Nadolny 2016. The empresses are also discussed in works focused on Severan emperors and Severan representation, such as Cleve 1982; Birley 1999; Icks 2011; and Rowan 2012. 6. For whatever reason, the Severan women have not had much impact in visual media after Antiquity, including film. As Barbara Levick has noted (Levick 2007: 167 n. 1), Julia Domna features as a minor character in an episode of the BBC show Timewatch, but this is the only representation of Severan women on the big or small screen that I am aware of. 7. See Icks 2011 for an analysis of Elagabalus’s reign and his Nachleben in art and literature from Antiquity to the present day; also Arrizabalaga y Prado 2017. 8. This notion is also present in some (particularly older) works of scholarship, for instance Jean Réville’s remark that, with the rise of Elagabalus to power, ‘le triomphe de l’Orient était complet’ (Réville 1886: 240). 9. This periodization roughly corresponds with the three main periods I distinguished in the Nachleben of Elagabalus, namely 1350–1850 (depiction as ‘evil tyrant’), 1850–1914 (depiction as ‘decadent emperor’) and 1914–present (depiction as ‘modern prince’); see Icks 2011: 123–213. 10. For a good introduction to the reception of Classical Antiquity in the Renaissance, see: Bolgar 1954: 239–379; Weiss 1969; Grafton 1992.

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Notes to pp. 125–128 11. Boccaccio 2001. I only refer to works by their English title when they are available in English. Symiamira is the name used for Soaemias in the Historia Augusta (e.g. Vita Heliogabali 2.1). 12. Erasmus 1965. 13. Artus 1996: 82. See Hartnik 2015 for a detailed analysis of L’Isle des Hermaphrodites. 14. Aureli 2004. The original version of the opera was rejected by the commissioners for unclear reasons and not put on stage until 1999, in Crema. In the version performed in the 1667/8 Venetian opera season, Cavalli’s score had been replaced by a score by Antonio Boretti. Aureli’s libretto had been revised, with the tyrant Eliogabalo no longer being killed offstage, but repenting and continuing to rule. See Calcagno 2006. 15. Zeno 1717. Zeno’s libretto was often re-used by later composers, including by Georg Friedrich Händel for his pastiche opera Alessandro Severo (1738); see Strohm 1985: 75–6. 16. Tysens 1720. The play was refused by Amsterdam’s Schouwburg and as far as we know was never performed, except perhaps at village fairs; see Zijde 1996: 73. However, the text was published by Hendrik Bosch and could be read by anyone who was willing to purchase a copy. 17. Said 2003: 3. 18. Chaussard 1802. Although the work was published anonymously, its authorship is generally attributed to Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard. 19. Cabuchet 1837. 20. Chaussard 1802: 149–51: ‘molle et dégénérée’. I have provided my own translations for works not available in English, citing the original text in the notes. 21. See David 2001 for the place of ancient Rome in decadent literature, with frequent references to Elagabalus; for Elagabalus’s role as a decadent icon, see also: Goedegebuure 1987: 72–105; David 1996; Icks 2011: 148–79. 22. Lombard 1888; Villeroy 1902: 136; Mirande 1910: 375. 23. Couperus 1993. The novel was originally published in three parts. For a detailed discussion, see Icks 2006; Icks 2011: 173–8. 24. Maesa’s powerful position is reminiscent of that of the valide sultans of the Ottoman Empire. The mother (sometimes grandmother) of the sultan wielded great authority under this title; see Peirce 1993: 91–112. 25. The exception is Villeroy’s Héliogabale. Mammaea is also presented associating with Christians in Émile Sicard and Déodat de Séverac’s musical piece Héliogabale (1910). 26. Field 1903. The play is the third part of a trilogy, preceded by The Race of Leaves (1901) and The World at Auction (1898) (published out of chronological order); see Parejo Vadillo 2015. 27. Artaud 2003. Artaud’s portrayal of Elagabalus as a ‘crowned anarchist’ is heavily influenced by his ideas on the ‘theatre of cruelty’, which would reconnect the audience with primeval metaphysical forces by submerging them in chaotic, mostly non-verbal and non-narrative performances; see Barber 1993: 43–72. Also David 1996, comparing Artaud’s Elagabalus with older Decadent interpretations; and Dumenil 2012. 28. Artaud 2003: 13–14, 19. 29. Duggan 2007; Onstott and Horner 1968. 30. Moinot 1971: 21; Chaillet 2003; Chaillet 2004. Elagabalus and the Severan empresses only feature in the second and third volumes of this five-volume series. 31. Jonigk 2003. 32. Duberman 1975. See Winkler 2005 for a brief biography. 245

Notes to pp. 128–133 33. Gilbert 2002; Reed 2004. Gilbert’s play is unpublished, but the author was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the script. 34. Duggan 2007: 59, 189. The narrator Duratius is presented as a descendant of Duratius, chief of the Pictones in Julius Caesar’s day, and hence as a Westerner; Duggan 2007: 3–4. 35. Chaillet 2003: 26. 36. Gründ and Khaznadar 1996. 37. Horoscope: Vita Septimii Severi 3.9. Devotion to philosophy: Cassius Dio 76.15. Murder of Geta: Cassius Dio 78.2.2–6; Herodian 4.4.3. Ambition to rule: Cassius Dio 79.23.3. Death: Cassius Dio 79.23–4. 38. The notion of a divided empire goes back to Herodian 4.3.5–7, although there it is stated that Caracalla and Geta will take up headquarters in Byzantium and Chalcedon, respectively. 39. Field 1903, xv (act 1). I refer to the pseudonym under which this work was published. The exclamation clearly goes back to Herodian 4.3.8: ‘But your mother, how would you parcel her? How am I, unhappy, wretched – how am I to be torn and ripped asunder for the pair of you?’ 40. Field 1903, xxxviii (act 2; childless woman); xlviii (act 3; ‘My first-born; I am with you to the end’). 41. Artaud 2003: 11, 31–2. The author attributes the story of Domna sleeping with Caracalla in Geta’s blood to Cassius Dio, who records nothing of the sort. 42. Artaud 2003: 30–1. 43. Gründ and Khaznadar 1996. 44. Chaillet 2003: 13; Juvenal, Satires 3.62. The original phrase refers to eastern immigrants and has nothing to do with Julia Domna or the Syrian clan, who only rose to prominence decades after Juvenal’s death. 45. Chaillet 2003, 17–18, 21, 25–7. 46. Orchestrating Elagabalus’s coup: Herodian 5.3.10–11; Vita Macrini 9.4–6; in contrast, Cassius Dio 79.31 claims Maesa was ignorant of the conspiracy. Good counsel: Herodian 5.5.5; 5.7.2. Means of respect: Vita Heliogabali 12.3. Favouring Alexander: Cassius Dio 80.19.4; Herodian 5.8.3. 47. Chaussard 1802: 49–50: ‘prête à fouler au pieds toutes les lois de la pudeur’. 48. Duggan 2007: 244; Onstott and Horner 1968: 125; Duberman 1975: 329–35, 351 (scene 6). The name Donner is obviously derived from Domna, but the character’s role as grandmother of Adrian and her constant concern with politics point towards Maesa. 49. Tysens 1720: lines 328–32 (act 1, scene 7), 1202–38 (act 3, scene 8). The quoted lines are 1205–6: ‘ô Boosheid nooit gehoord! ô wreedheid nooit gekent! / Zie toe wat gy begint’. 50. Lombard 1888: 332; Couperus 1993: 300–1, 392: ‘niét dan een plots heel oude vrouw’; 393: ‘die zij meer lief had dan zichzelve en met wie haar eerzucht gedóofd is . . .’; Artaud 2003: 40–1. 51. Couperus 1993: 253: ‘Dochter der Zon’; 230–1: ‘als Romeinse matrone’; ‘als Syrische’; Duggan 2007: 76. 52. For instance in Chaussard 1802: 75 and Couperus 1993: 92. 53. Perished with her son: Cassius Dio 80.20.2; Herodian 5.8.8. Political influence: Vita Heliogabali 2.1; 4.1–4. Depravity: Vita Heliogabali 2.1–2; 18.2. It should be noted that Varius was not a nickname, but Elagabalus’s praenomen before he assumed the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus as emperor. 54. Boccaccio 2001: 9. 55. Lombard 1888: 110: ‘d’immerger l’Occident dans le pompeux Orient pour l’en ressortir, plus éclatant, comme d’un bain de voluptés, de crimes et d’or’; 73: ‘l’ancestralité violemment 246

Notes to pp. 133–136 amoureuse . . . qui de crimes avait accablé le monde’. Soaemias is characterized by her ‘nervous gestures’ (50: ‘gestes nerveux’) and is described as the ‘feverish mistress of Empire’ (72: ‘fébrile maîtresse d’Empire’). 56. Couperus 1993: 19: ‘Syrische bloed’; 138. 57. Artaud 2003: 66–7; Gilbert 2002: 14–18 (involuntary on Elagabalus’s part); Jonigk 2003: 20–1 (scene 4.5; hinted at when Elagabalus climbs in bed with his scarcely-clad mother, who tries to seduce him); Reed 2004: 19–20. 58. Tysens 1720: line 1322 (act 4, scene 1): ‘Wyk snóde boosheid, wyk!’; lines 1337–9 (act 4, scene 2): ‘ô Goôn! wat rázerny bezwaard u het gemoed? / Wilt gy uwe agtbaarheid dan ruuk’loos met den voet / Zien tréden door het Graauw? zult gy dien hoon gedógen?’ 59. Cabuchet 1837: 165–7 (act 4, scene 4). In using Elagabalus as a political pawn to gain power herself, Soaemias assumes a role usually attributed to Maesa. 60. Selena’s name links her to the moon and hence pairs her with Adrian, who is associated with the sun; this might refer to ruling couples in Antiquity and their symbolic representation by stars; see Wieber 2010: 269–72. 61. Duberman 1975: 281, 311, 326–7 (scenes 4 and 5). 62. Plotting for Alexander: Herodian 5.8.3. Education of Alexander: Cassius Dio 80, fr.; Herodian 5.7.5; 6.1.5–6. Political dominance: Herodian 6.1.10; Vita Severi Alexandri 14.7. Greed and envy: Herodian 6.1.8–10; Vita Severi Alexandri 14.7. Killed in revolt: Herodian 6.9.6; Vita Severi Alexandri 59.4–60.2. 63. Zeno 1717: 12 (act 1, scene 3): ‘Oggi vedrai, superba, / Vedrai, qual Giulia sia; / E se avrà più potere’; 30 (act 2, scene 3). My thanks to Rianne Hermans for her help with the eighteenthcentury Italian. The libretto’s plot goes back to Herodian 6.1.9–10, but takes considerable liberties with the historic record. 64. See for instance Lombard 1888: 306–9; Couperus 1993: 326; Artaud 2003: 79; Duggan 2007: 111; Jonigk 2003: 15, 22 (scenes 3.5 and 4.6). 65. Chaussard 1802: 369: ‘autre mère’; Couperus 1993: 180–2; Duggan 2007: 211. 66. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.21.3–4. 67. Cabuchet 1837: 92–9 (act 2, scene 2); Lombard 1888: 175–7, 239. 68. Couperus 1993: 309: ‘vrome Romeinse’; 398: ‘talloze somber geklede, monnikachtige, slaafs jubelende Christenen’. Mammaea is also portrayed as a protector of Christians (and Jews) in Mirande 1910. Artaud scoffs at her alleged piety, calling her a ‘so-called christian’ (Artaud 2003: 116).

Chapter 9 1. My thanks go to the following for their help in the different stages of preparing this chapter: Filippo Carlà-Uhink, Mamoun Fansa, Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Udo Hartmann, Martijn Icks and Stefan Sandführ. Special thanks to Judith Rhodes who has again shown patience in grappling with my English language. 2. For that type of magazine cf. Reusch 2015: 71–2. 3. For Palmyra the most extensive study is Hartmann 2001; cf. also Hartmann 2008c; Ball 2000: 74–87; Retsö 2003: 462–6; Potter 2004: 251–76; Bowman 2005: 511–16; Sommer 2005, 2006 and 2018. For the Palmyrene queen cf.: Stoneman 1992; cf. also Breytenbach 2005; Southern 2008; Winsbury 2010 and recently Sartre and Sartre 2014.

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Notes to pp. 136–138 4. For the (in some aspects) inconsistent historical sources concerning Aurelian’s campaign against Zenobia cf. Hartmann 2001: 364–94; for her life after the defeat cf. footnote 53 in this article and Hartmann 2001: 411–24. 5. Vita Aureliani 28.3: victa igitur Zenobia cum fugeret camellis, quos dromedas vocitant, atque ad Persas iter tenderet, equitibus missis est capta atque in Aureliani potestatem deducta. – Therefore, when Zenobia after her defeat fled on camels (which they use to call dromedaries) and headed for the Persian territory, she was taken captive by the cavalry sent after her and was brought into the power of Aurelian; for the Historia Augusta and its value as a source cf. Johne 2008. 6. Zos. 1.55.1–2; for Zosimus cf. Hartmann 2008a: 44. 7. History paintings, based on written (hi)stories and with a focus on prominent characters and dramatic moments, were reprinted frequently in art supplements around 1900; cf. Reusch 2015: 321–7. 8. Tyranni Triginta 27.1; 30.2; Vita Claudii 1.1; Vita Aureliani 27.3; Vita Probi 9.5; modern scholars however are not convinced of this ancestry: Wieber-Scariot 1999: 323; Hartmann 2001, 23–4. 9. Although the Syrian cohors I Flavia Chalcidenorum had been stationed in Numidia for a short time during the second century and returned then to Palmyra (thanks to Udo Hartman for bringing that to my attention), I can so far find no verifiable evidence for black Africans in Palmyra; there is however a tradition within the movement of black self-empowerment – based on the information of the Historia Augusta (Tyranni Triginta 30.15) about Zenobia’s dark complexion – to count the Palmyrene queen among the World’s Great Men (sic!) of Color (Rogers [1946]1996: 135–7); but the painting under discussion portrays Zenobia more in the style of an oriental queen with fair skin, accompanied by her black guards (eunuchs?). 10. For a critical revision of Orientalism in general cf. Wiedemann 2012; I follow Schueller’s (1998) decision to use the plural ‘Orientalisms’ or ‘discourses of Orientalism’ in so far that I specify the type of Orientalism under discussion by defining time or place, if possible; cf. also Schnepel 2011. 11. Berman 2012: 199. 12. Asmus 1911; Hartmann 2001: 470–5; Stoneman, 1992: 156f., 197–200; Charles-Gaffiot 2001: 139–79; Wieber 2007 (esp. German twentieth-century novel); Southern 2008: 13–16; Grassi 2010; Dallapiazza 2013; Sartre and Sartre 2014: 191–258 (early modern times and modern times). 13. For a closer examination of Baron’s novel cf. Wieber 2017a. 14. Baron 1960: 270. 15. Stoneman 1992: 4. 16. Wieber-Scariot 1998: 86–7; Wieber 2000: 281–2 (with illustration on 307); Pucci 2001; Grassi 2010: 306–11; Dumont 2009: 543–4 (with details about the film shooting); Judith Weingarten in her blog about Zenobia (Zenobia on the Big Screen; http://judithweingarten. blogspot.de/2012/06/zenobia-on-big-screen.html (accessed 23 September 2017)); Sartre and Sartre 2014: 243–5; Curti 2017: 168–9. 17. For the history of the so-called belly-dance as series of Western misinterpretations of a traditional Eastern female solo dance, performed in privacy, cf. Buonaventura 2010. 18. For this genre of mostly Italian films cf. Kaczmarek 2012. 19. For Zenobia as a Syrian national heroine cf. Sartre and Sartre 2014: 246–58; using an inductive approach in this article, I will start my analysis of the TV series with a focus on ancient history, classics and discourses of Orientalism and Occidentalism; for the modern historico-political background of the show cf. 147–50 below.

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Notes to pp. 138–139 20. Apart from Arabic sources, there are not many facts available about the director Bassam al-Malla who has, over the years, made a name with historical TV series, most of them set in Syria during the days of the French mandate (1923–46). According to Hudson 2014, 131, his TV series mainly deal with the theme of relational masculinity in traditional society; cf. also https://www.elcinema.com/en/person/1101850/ (accessed 28 February 2018). 21. The following quotes refer to the episodes of the original TV series (listed in IMDb as Al-Ababeed) as screened on Syria Drama Net with English subtitles of unknown origin. The transcription of the names is not always consistent and the English text contains some misprints; corrections and explanations will be indicated by brackets [], deletions by {}; many thanks to Khaled Elgawady for telling me about this series. 22. Zenobia . . . pearl of the East is one of the articles in the cinema section of this EnglishArabian internet page; others are about Alexander the Great, Saladin, Hitler (with a clear Holocaust denial – sic!), and James Bond in movies (http://tahani-mag.com/index.php?page =category&lang=en&id=80 (accessed 23 September 2017)); Croitoru 2015 also mentions a TV series from the early 1970s. 23. Many of the fictitious characters bear names that can be found on Palmyrene inscriptions cf. Stark 1971: 26, 32, 35; Henning 2013: 93–9: Moqimo, Hairan, Mal(i)k(h)o, Yamlik(h)o. 24. This name refers to members from one of the famous Palmyrene families – mostly it is transcribed Elahbel; cf. Piersimoni 1995: 607. 25. Cf. ep. 2: 0:18 – an over-the-shoulder-shot only shows part of the bust and 0:26 – a slight over-head perspective of her bust, practically watching over the senate of the community; cf. also ep. 3: 0:08. According to Linzmayer 2013, 8–9, new bank notes were issued in Syria in 1997/8: a new Zenobia is portrayed on the 500-pound note. Before, she was to be seen on the 100 pound note, which is now decorated by the portrait of Philippus Arabs. The series was obviously filmed before the new issues, but perhaps the motives were public previously; for the Michelangelo drawing see below fn. 31 and 33. 26. For Zenobia’s minting cf. Hartmann 2001: 356–9; Senden 2008/9; Schwentzel 2010; Bland 2011; for illustrations of the differing coin types cf. Weingarten (My Money On Zenobia) on her blog: http://judithweingarten.blogspot.de/2008/11/my-money-on-zenobia.html (accessed 23 September 2017). For the iconography of Roman coinage (that shaped Palmyrene minting, too, cf. Schwentzel 2010) fraught with symbolical meaning cf. Howgego 1995: 75–7; according to Wenkel 2017: 141, the portraiture on coins has to be read as social construction and a reflection of a real person’s individuality. 27. Born in 1932, M(o)ustafa Tlas(s) has been one of the key figures in Syrian politics since the 1960s: commander-in-chief of the armed forces, deputy prime minister, defence minister; when the revolt against Assad started, he left the country (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/3127058.stm and http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/05/us-syria-crisistlas-idUSBRE8640X920120705 (accessed 23 September 2017)). 28. Tlass 2000: 178, 204. The date of the original Arabic edition is unknown; the French version is from 1986; as far as I can see this book could well have been source material for the teleplay. My edition has been printed by Tlass House, and all proceeds go to the Schools of the Sons and Daughters of Martyrs in the Syrian Arab Republic (edition notice); cf. also the idea that Palmyra anticipated the Arab-Islamic State four centuries later (169) and In modern terms, Zainab [Zenobia] took charge of leading the liberation movement on behalf of all the East or, more specifically, all the Arabs. (194); for a comparable interpretation cf. the Palestinian-French author Zahran 2003 who contributes more to the mythologization of

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Notes to pp. 139–141 Zenobia’s life than to historical analysis (my review: http://www.hsozkult.de/ publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-6924 (accessed 23 September 2017)). For a critical voice against Proto-Arab identity in ancient Palmyra: Hartmann 2001: 63–4; Retsö 2002: 465; Sommer 2006: 89; Hartmann 2008d; against an interpretation of Zenobia’s rule as pan-Arab policy: Graf 1989; Ball 2000: 83–7, pleads by contrast for a Semitic character of Palmyrene culture; Hartmann 2016: 53–4, gives a concise summary of how differently third-century Palmyra’s character (polis or more tribal society or a Roman colony) is interpreted by scholars. 29. This misspelling might be due to the fact that there is no letter ‘p’ in the Arabic language; thanks to Udo Hartmann for bringing this to my attention. 30. According to the Arabic Movie Database elcinema Raghda is known for fiercely supporting Bashar Al Assad’s regime (http://www.elcinema.com/en/person/1089996/ (accessed 23 September 2017)). 31. Cf. Turner and Joannides 2003: 20–1. 32. In Antique iconographic tradition defeated Amazons or subdued barbarian women are often depicted topless (Aldhouse-Green 2004: 75), so that this type of Renaissance portrait refers to Zenobia as a defeated foreign warrior queen; for the reception history of the Amazons cf. Wagner-Hasel 2008. 33. For one of the many versions of that etching cf. The British Museum Collection online (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx? assetId=591940&objectId=3150610&partId=1 (accessed 23 September 2017)). 34. Cf. the Palmyrene stone funerary bust of Aqmat (second century; (https://www.bmimages. com/results.asp?image=00030797001&imagex=8&searchnum=0001 (accessed 23 September 2017)). 35. Vita Claudii 4.4: ‘Claudi[i] Auguste, tu nos a Palmyrenis vindica.’ dictum quinquies. ‘Claudi[i] Auguste, tu nos a Zenobia et a Vitruvia libera.’ dictum septies. – ‘Emperor Claudius, free us from the Palmyrenes’, said five times. ‘Emperor Claudius, set us free from Zenobia and from Vitruvia’, said seven times. 36. Vita Gallieni 13. 4–5: Gallienus sane, ubi ei nuntiatum Odenatum interemptum, bellum Persis ad seram nimis vindictam patris paravit collectisque per Heraclianum ducem militibus sollertis principis rem gerebat. qui tamen Heraclianus, cum contra Persas profectus esset, a Palmyrenis victus omnes, quos paraverat, milites perdidit, Zenobia Palmyrenis et orientalibus plerisque viriliter imperante. – Admittedly, Gallienus did, when he learned that Odaenathus was murdered, make ready for war with the Persians – an over-delayed vengeance for his father – and, gathering an army with the help of the general Heraclianus, he played the part of an able emperor. This Heraclianus, however, on setting out against the Persians, was defeated by the Palmyrenes and lost all the troops he had gathered, because Zenobia was ruling Palmyra and most of the East in a masculine manner. 37. For Emperor Gallienus as responsible for Odenaethus’ murder cf. John of Antioch, frg. 176 (about the so-called Johanine question, i.e. the fragmentary condition of the text, the doubtful authorship and dating cf. Mariev 2008, 4–8); for a thorough discussion of all the sources about Odenaethus’ assassination cf. Hartmann 2001: 218–30, and Sartre and Sartre 2014: 71–2; for Odenaethus’s position and titles cf. Potter 1996; Hartmann 2001: 102–8; Sommer 2008: 312 fn. 52. 38. For the modern scholars who believe in the information about Gallienus at war with Zenobia, cf. Hartmann 2001: fn. 47, 260–1; Hartmann however thinks it is possible that the Historia Augusta exaggerates, whereas Gallienus only had planned a campaign to restore order in the Orient, but never came to conduct it. 250

Notes to pp. 141–143 39. For this allegation cf. Eutrop. 9.13: quae occiso Odenatho marito Orientem tenebat – this one holds power over the East, after her husband Odaenathus had been murdered; Zenobia as a bad stepmother and a confidante of her husband’s murderer: Tyranni Triginta 10.3 and 17.2. 40. My source for this is the British journalist specializing in the Middle East, Tom Gross 1997: Malla said he hoped the film would educate young Arabs about their own history, and also serve as a message to Arab leaders that they should stay united in their fight against the Israeli enemy. ‘Zenobia was betrayed by Arab tribes,’ he said. 41. Vita Aureliani 28.2: Zenobia’s Saracen allies who defected to Aurelian; for Arabian legends and Zenobia’s fight against Arab tribes cf. Hartmann 2001: 332–51. 42. Schirrmacher 2005: red is the colour of fight and danger, green is said to be the favourite colour of Mohammed, therefore many Arab flags are green (translation from German by the author); Riedel 1987: 114, refers to the so-called green man, who is the patron of nomads when looking for green in the desert. 43. Cf. fn. 26 above. 44. In an essay about Palmyra Sahner 2011 calls the show a thinly veiled television miniseries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 45. Wieber 2000: 294–5; for the topos of political women portrayed as monsters cf. WieberScariot 1999: 86–96; 143–7, 175–86. 46. Many scholars of Antiquity agree that Aurelian was one of the successful soldier emperors. He restored the unity of the Empire and among other things made a reform of the monetary system and the fortification of the City of Rome his priorities; cf. Watson 1999; White 2007; Hartmann 2008b: esp. 308–9, fn. 40; for Aurelian’s legal achievements from a juristic point of view cf. Jacob 2004; for a critical analysis of the Vita Aureliani and the techniques of the HA cf. Pausch 2011. In modern Serbia, Aurelian (of Balkan descent) is still held in high esteem; cf. Pantelić 2012. 47. The letters (between Aurelian and Zenobia and another one addressed to the Senate about Zenobia as a worthy opponent) mentioned by Tyranni Triginta 30.4–11 and Vita Aureliani 26.2–27.6) are believed to be fictitious and were used in the ancient source as a marker of authenticity (Birley 2003, 133; T. E. Jenkins 2006, 138); Jones 2016 holds the view that the invented letters are used to question the stability of the relationship between power and gender, which is also true of the letters in the TV show. 48. For the stereotype of the bad Roman emperor in film: Lindner 2007: 140–89; Aurelian does not appear regularly in film, apart from short references in documentaries the only appearance I know so far is in Nel segno di Roma aka Sign of Rome (see above fn. 16). 49. For the feathered fan as signature of the Orientalized Cleopatra cf. Hughes-Hallett 1990: 207 and 213; 54: a drinking vessel from Augustan times shows the pair Cleopatra, i.e. Omphale, and Antonius, i.e. Hercules, the latter carrying the fan as symbol for his loss of manhood. According to antiquarian literature of the nineteenth century fan holding is a classical slave job for young girls, boys or eunuchs; and ancient Greeks believed that fans were of barbarian origin, especially used by Oriental sovereigns from India, Egypt, Assyria and Persia (cf. Smith 1875: s.v. flabellum; Fougères 1896: 1149, 1152). 50. Weeber 1995: 85; for the dichotomy between manliness and unmanliness as epitomized by the good and bad Roman emperors in late Roman historiography cf. Kuefler 2001: 26–9; for all the different signs of mollitia that can range from gesture and cloths to sexual preferences and relationships and mark the effeminatus who is lacking manliness cf. Edwards 1993: 63–97. Martijn Icks drew my attention to the fact that the ‘Syrian’ Aurelian shared his unmanliness

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Notes to pp. 143–147 with emperor Gallienus from the Latin sources; for the latter’s effemination cf. Wieber 2000: 294–5. 51. For Taima cf. above p. 151; the history of that oasis (here: Tayma) from neolithicum to the time of Islamic conquest has been the subject of different research projects run by the Deutsche Archäologische Institut: https://fallback.dainst.org/projekt/-/project-display/42027 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=23&v=K7GX995Rz2s (accessed 30 December 2017). 52. For the local rebellion after Zenobia’s defeat cf. Hartmann 2001: 395–402. 53. Zos. 1. 59: Zenobia’s death because of an illness or a hunger strike; as opposed to this version, the Historia Augusta presents Zenobia as a show piece in Aurelian’s triumphal procession in Rome (Tyranni Triginta 30.24–26 and Vita Aureliani 33–34); Hartmann 2001, 412, accepts the queen’s presence in the procession, but he thinks that the author of the Historia Augusta exaggerates in his description of the triumph. 54. This type of patriotic view is expressed in a contemporary blog entry from a Syrian student about Zenobia’s end: Was she really made to walk in the Emperor’s Triumph in Rome, chained and humiliated? Or did she, as some historians claim, commit suicide before that? I hope she did. (posted by Ayman Haykal on 23 January 2005; http://damascene1.blogspot.de/2005_01_01_ archive.html (accessed 23 September 2017)); concerning the triumphal procession Tlass 2000 follows the Historia Augusta, but his interpretation reads: Zenobia was in her chains, strong and victorious and Aurelianus was in his caravan weak and defeated (225). 55. Tagore 1917: 33. 56. Carrier 1995; Thum 2011; Wiedemann 2012: 8; for different types of interdependencies in the process of Orientalizing and Occidentalizing cf. Schnepel 2011: 24–5. 57. For a word-for-word analogy to the lines of the TV show cf. Tlass 2000: 224–5; the subchapter is entitled: The clash of civilizations – The Victorious Palmyra. As an example of fundamentalists cf. part of an interview with Ali al-Neeme, the media spokesman of the Islamic Army in Iraq – question: Do you think that the American people misunderstand the aims of the Resistance? If so, what message would you like to give to the American people about the political goals of the Resistance? answer . . . You have a civilization of power, but if we look at the history we will find that civilization of power may win its wars but won’t defeat the nations which have [the] power of civilization (emphases by the author). (http://ouraim.blogspot.de/2008/01/interview-with-islamic-army-of-iraq.html (accessed 23 September 2017)); this site is labelled by the British political blog Harry's place as a fansite for Hamas and Hizbollah (http://hurryupharry.org/2008/05/16/sukant-chandana-man-for-all-seasons/ (last accessed 23 September 2017)). 58. Arabic sources were obviously not very important for the plot of the TV series. Admittedly, the seceding desert tribes could refer to the Arabic legendary tradition of the Tanukh tribe fighting against Zenobia, cf. Hartmann 2001: 332–51, Weingarten 22 June 2008 in her blog The Zenobia Romance II (Truth or Fiction?) (http://judithweingarten.blogspot.de/2008/06/ zenobia-romance-ii-truth-or-fiction.html (accessed 23 September 2017)) and Sartre and Sartre 2014: 247–52. 59. For the restoration of traditional gender hierarchy by taming a female intruder into politics cf. Wieber-Scariot 1999: 191–5. 60. For the different types of exempla in ancient rhetoric and historiography cf. Wieber-Scariot 1999: 307–9. 61. Tlass 2000: chapter five: Palmyra and its Historical Experience, 227–48. 62. Halm 2006: 103–24; Schweizer 1998: 223–40. 252

Note to p. 148 63. For the museum cf. the webpage of the International Panorama Council (http:// panoramacouncil.org/en/what_we_do/resources/panoramas_and_related_art_forms_ database/?nID=737 (accessed 23 September 2017)); for a detailed report of the museum’s paintings and exhibition cf. the Blog about a journey to Syria in 2011 by Joel Veldkamp (http://joelveldkamp.blogspot.de/2011/03/glorious-tishreen.html (accessed 23 September 2017)); for Sultan Saladin as a revived hero during the Arab nation building process after the end of the Ottoman Empire cf. Möhring 2005. 64. For the European visitors cf. Stoneman 1992: 193–5; for Syrian excavations cf. Bounni 1995. 65. Khouri 1997; for Jordanian banknotes and their archaeological motifs cf. the collector’s page http://www.banknotes.com/jo.htm (accessed 23 September 2017). 66. Möller 2010: 85–6. 67. Saidi 2011. 68. Orac. Sibyll. 13.164–5; cf. Sommer 2008: 311, 314; Hartmann 2009: 89–92. 69. Anonymous Lebanese author 2000. 70. Salamandra 2010; even private channels are controlled by the state, cf. Shoup 2008: 73–5. 71. Salamandra 1998: 228–9. 72. Salamandra 2005; for the prevalence of Syrian Arabic through broadcasting Syrian TV series or dubbing foreign TV programs in Syrian Arabic cf. Clec’h 2008. Even the historical series Bab al Hara (2006) by Bassam al-Malla is mentioned as an example for this language usage. But this seems to be a recent development, as according to Mamoun Fansa the series about Zenobia is Standard Arabic, with some Syrian expressions interspersed. For the social impact soap operas in general have on the Middle East cf. Nina Maria Paschalidou’s documentary about the recent success of Turkish TV shows Kísmet – How Turkish soap operas changed the world (Gr 2013). 73. For the fact that it is easier to merchandise an historical plot in more orthodox Arab countries cf. Salamandra 2005: 17: A story of medieval heroism is simply more marketable than a contemporary urban tale featuring a policewoman. This is of course also true about Zenobia as an ancient heroine. 74. Salamandra 2005: 10: Television drama has become the contemporary Syrian cultural form par excellence; for Syria as a quasi-post-literate society cf. ibidem 7. 75. A stanza from poem by a young Syrian author with the name Hamoudi (nom de plume?) very much reminds one of lines from the TV series about Zenobia: How i (sic!) wish to have been your lover In the times of the bravery of Saladdin and the mercifulness of Zenobia . . .who taught us that the power of civilization always outweighs the civilization of power. . . (http://hamoudispoetry.blogspot.de/2012_12_01_archive.html (accessed in 2014)). Cf. also The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum (6/2006; a forum of Syrian Christians): It is interesting to note that Queen Zenobia, queen of Palmyra did indeed once say to the Romans, ‘you may have the civilization of power, but we have the power of civilization.’ (http://www. insideassyria.com/rkvsf4/wwwboard/msgs/Re_Dear_Mr_Hajjar-0EXu.html (accessed 23 September 2017)). Apparently Zenobia also is a person of reference to Syrian Christians many of whom are expatriates keeping contact with their culture of origin via internet; Wozniak 2012.

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Notes to pp. 148–151 For Zenobia as a Palestinian and Arab heroine cf. Zahran 2003; also Gross 1997: The paper [London Sunday Telegraph] reported that during scuffles with Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem last month, some Palestinian youths were heard to cite Zenobia’s daring lines from the TV series. 76. For the different categories of memory, sometimes overlapping, cf. Assmann 2008; Eichenberg, Gudehus and Welzer 2010: 75–125; following those definitions cultural memory is not bound to one generation and shaped by institutionalized storage of memories. 77. Sommer 2008: 281–2; for Antiquity and its openness to national re-interpretations due to lack of sources cf. Krüger and Lindner 2009: 14. 78. For manifold examples from ancient history as part of different nation building discourses cf. the whole volume by Krüger and Lindner 2009; for Occidentalism in the epic cinema of non-European countries see also Wieber 2017b. 79. Herzl 1896: We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism (15). For the Westernization project of the young Israeli state and its discourses by which Mizrachim, i.e. Jews born in Muslim countries, as well as indigenous Arab people were and are Orientalized cf. Khazzoom 2003. 80. For national myths describing defeats as part of victim mythology cf. Krüger and Lindner 2009: 15. 81. Gross 1997; cf. also his quotation of director’s al-Malla saying: ‘We wanted to tell them that she followed the Syrian religion of her time. She was 100 percent Arab.’ For Zenobia’s alleged Jewishness, an ascription that might result from her interest in the Jews or the Jewish heresy of Bishop Paul of Samosata, with whom she was on friendly terms, cf. Hartmann 2001: 319–21, and Athan. Hist Arian. ad Mon. 71. 82. The concept realms of memory (lieu de memoire), originally introduced to modern history by the French historian Pierre Nora, has been adapted for ancient history (cf. SteinHölkeskamp/Hölkeskamp 2006) and does not necessarily refer to sites of memory, but can also imply persons, ideas and myths. 83. Croitoru 2015: Zenobia, prisoner of the jihadists and Zenobia fights IS. 84. Carter and Ahmed 2015; Ahmed is an American-Pakistani. 85. Barnar and Saad 2015 – both journalists are from the New York Times Beirut bureau; cf. the temporary erection of a statue of Zenobia in the centre of Damascus in 2015 to remind of the siege of Palmyra by IS and the execution of Khaled al Asaad, a Syrian archaeologist and expert on Palmyra (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x35g5w2 (accessed 23 September 2017)). 86. http://syriatimes.sy/index.php/news/local/18394-al-zoubi-opens-zanoubia-tv-stressessyrian-media-proved-great-ability-to-resist-challenges (accessed 23 September 2017). 87. https://uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/zenobia-broadcast-tv-stationlaunched-to-join-the-syrian-media-family/ (accessed 23 September 2017); many thanks to Suliman Harbaji for translating the whole text of the Syrian videos.

Chapter 10 1. ‘Безмолвны гробовые залы, Тенист и хладен их порог, Чтоб черный взор блаженной Галлы, Проснувшись, камня не прожег’: Pyman 1972: 135 [my own translation]. 2. For histories of the empress see Busch 2015; Storoni Mazzolani 1975; Sirago 1961 and Sirago 1996. Stewart Oost’s monograph (1968) is still the definitive work on Galla in English. But see also Sivan 2011 and Salisbury 2015.

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Notes to pp. 152–163 3. Said 1978: 206–7. 4. Oost 1965: 1–10, 7; Deliyannis 2010: 74. Although it should be noted that Milan also laid claim to being the resting place of Galla, see Carlà 2010: 197–272, 211. 5. Swift and Alwis 2010: 193–217, 352–4, 205; but see also Grabar 1946 and Nordström 1953. 6. See Breck 1927: 352–6. 7. An internet image search for ‘Galla Placidia’ invariably returns multiple versions of the medallion, but see, also, its use as cover art for Joyce Salisbury’s Rome’s Christian Empress. 8. Carlà 2010: 231. 9. See Carlà 2008: 91–114. 10. Audouard i Deglaire 1909 (registry # 316509). 11. See, for example: Pahissa 1913: 52–3; Ballell and Gómez Durán 1913; ‘Gala Placídia’ 1913: 74–5; and Merletti 1913: 82. 12. Basset 1913: 6. 13. Carretero 1916 (journalist used a pseudonym: El Caballero Audaz). 14. Nugent 1778: 191. 15. Nugent 1778: 193. 16. Wilde 2000. 17. See chapter 12 in this publication. 18. Deliyannis 2010: 10. 19. Smith 1990: 86–97, 86. 20. Rainey 1991: 238. 21. Moody 1993: 79–92, 81. 22. Rainey 1991: 55. 23. Stock 2011: 8. 24. Bacigalupo 2011: 584–5. 25. Wilhelm 1990: 48. 26. Flory 1980: 206, 217; but see Peter Makin’s review that warns against the ‘mis-spent effort of biographical interpretation’ in Pound’s work — Makin 1982: 431–3, esp. 431. 27. Weigall 1907: 727–38. 28. O’Connor and Cline 1998: 6. 29. Tyldesley 2006: 118. 30. Moody 1993: 82. 31. Terrell 1984: 431, n. 41 — although Philip Furia argues that it was an article in Time that peaked Pound’s curiosity, see Furia 1984: n. 80/495. 32. Moody 1993: 81. 33. Williams 1951: 116. 34. Moody 1993: 48. 35. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), YCAL MSS 179, Box 1, fs. 55 and 56. 36. Jung 1997: 135. 37. Jung 1997: 134. 255

Notes to pp. 164–168 38. Jung 1997: 134–5. 39. Jung 1997: 135. 40. Molton and Sikes 2011: 6. 41. Jung 1998: 83–4. 42. Dietz 2005: 15. 43. Jung 1997: 131. 44. Kuberski 1992: 12. 45. Gómez 1995: 197–250, 198; although, for a dissenting opinion, see Marchand 2009. 46. Gómez 1995: 206. 47. Molton and Sikes 2011: 7. 48. Sherry 2010: 51. 49. Sherry 2010: 50. 50. Jung 1997: 132. 51. Sivan 2011: 3. 52. Said 1978: 103.

Chapter 11 1. Renan 1990: 201. 2. See Foss 2002: 142–54 for a reconstruction on how we would write Theodora’s life if we did not have the Anekdota. 3. McClanan 2002: 139–44. 4. Theodora is represented, together with Justinian, also in a small clypeus on Justin’s consular diptych, but this small and standardized representation cannot be considered as any sort of ‘realistic’ portrait. 5. Wessel 1962; Pratsch 2011: 117–18. The first to identify this statue as a portrait of Theodora was in 1913 R. Delbrück. See http://laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk/database/detail. php?record=LSA-760 (accessed 6 June 2017). 6. What Procopius meant, and what kind of image of Theodora he wanted to create through this speech, as well as its contextualization in sixth-century rhetoric, are not the topic of this chapter: see Houssaye 1885: 590–1; Diehl 1906: 65–7; Rubin 1960: 111; Maslev 1966: 315–16; Evans 1984; Fisher 1984: 300–1; Cameron 1985: 69; Beck 1986: 38–40; Allen 1992: 93–4; Pazdernik 1994: 271–2; Evans 2002: x; 47; Foss 2002: 152–3, and in particular Garland 1999: 32–3; Meier 2004; Neville 2010: 73–5. 7. Cassiod. Var. 10.20; 21; 23; 24. See Leppin 2000: 84. 8. Garland 1999: 17–21; Evans 2002: 30–2; Foss 2002: 148–50; McClanan 2002: 96–9, 103–5. 9. The problem of the juridical and institutional basis of Theodora’s power is off-topic here: see Maslev 1966: 312–14; Amelotti 1984/5; Pazdernik 1994: 266–7; Garland 1999: 15; Evans 2002: 21; Foss 2002: 150–1. Epigraphic material has confirmed that Theodora was generally honoured together with Justinian across all the Empire. 10. Leppin 2002: 437. 11. Foss 2002: 154. 256

Notes to pp. 168–170 12. Leppin 2002: 444. 13. Leppin 2000: 77–80; Leppin 2002: 467. But Evagrius was not well known before the editio princeps by Stephanus in 1544. On Evagrius and his evaluation of Theodora, see Pazdernik 1994: 264–6. 14. Bernabò 2003: 10. 15. McClanan 2002: 109. 16. Leppin 2002: 480. 17. It is nonetheless important to highlight that chapter 9 and chapters 14–25 were censored in the 1623 edition, and only became known in 1693: see Potter 2015: 208; Castelli 2015: 176. 18. This does not exclude that Procopius’ work must be read through the canons of Late Antique rhetoric, and in particular of Late Antique invective: Fisher 1984; Allen 1992; McClanan 2002: 107–17. 19. Daube 1967; Cameron 1985: 77; Garland 1999: 13–15; Foss 2002: 159–64. 20. By Desfontaines (1641), Rotrou (1643), La Calprenède (1659): see Delouis 2003: 104. 21. It is possible that Proc. BP 1.25.6–7 (John the Cappadocian knows that Theodora hates him, and every night he cannot sleep, as he is afraid of being killed) is not extraneous to Rotrou’s elaboration of the plot. 22. Bernabò 2003: 8–9. 23. Stephenson 2010: 462. 24. Montesquieu 1752: 278. See also 300. 25. On Theodora in Gibbon, see McClanan 2002: 117–18. 26. Gibbon 1898: 212–18. 27. Gibbon 1898: 218. See Proc. Anekd. 10.2. 28. James 2000: 237–9; Ricks 2000: 225–8. This image of Theodora also dominates other works from this period, such as the descriptions of Italian travels including Ravenna and the S. Vitale mosaics (e.g. Antoine-Claude Pasquin or Théophile Gautier): Bernabò 2003: 9–10. 29. Delouis 2003: 118–21. On the ‘Oriental’ character of Byzantium in European perception, Auzépy 2003: 7–8. On the general success of Byzantium in literature at the end of the nineteenth century, see Ricks 2000: 229–30; Delouis 2003. 30. James 2000: 247. 31. Kipper 2002: 124–6; Wahl 2002: 57–9; Goy 2015. 32. Dahn refers to this work in the preface of the novel, revealing that the latter must also be seen from a methodological perspective as a reflection of historical knowledge and its limits: Sohns 2004: 56–65, rightly highlights the important function of Procopius as a character in the novel. See also Kipper 2002: 121–3; Wahl 2002: 44–6, 48–9. Late Antiquity, the Germanic migrations and the Roman-Germanic successor states were in general constantly at the centre of both Dahn’s scholarly and artistic activity: Kipper 2002: 127–8. 33. Dahn 1865: 49–58, 253–86. 34. Kipper 2002: 121–2; Wahl 2002: 50–5. See also Neuhaus 2002: 230–43. 35. This is the explicit aim of Totila, the ‘real’ hero of the novel: Dahn [1876] 1925: 822. See Lilie 1987: 186–90; Frech 1996: 693–7; Goy 2015. 36. Lilie 1987: 196; Wahl 2002: 72–4; Goy 2015. Actually, the surviving Ostrogoths did move north after the battle, and settled in what is today southern Austria.

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Notes to pp. 170–172 37. Lilie 1987: 195–6; Kipper 2002: 132; Wahl 2002: 76–83. 38. Wahl 2002: 107. In general, on the negative view of Byzantium in German historiography in the nineteenth century, see Lilie 1987. 39. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 224. Justinian has also been interpreted as a figure who evokes Napoleon III; in this sense, it has been argued that Theodora also takes character traits from the Empress Eugénie, most of all the integralist defence of the ‘orthodox’ faith: Frech 1996: 694–5; Wahl 2002: 83–6. 40. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 2: 93–4. 41. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 227. 42. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 229. 43. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 380–1 44. Lilie 1987: 194–5. 45. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 2: 14–15. See Kipper 2002: 133. 46. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 3: 2–4. 47. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 3: 401–4. See Lilie 1987: 191, on Theodora’s description in the novel; though Lilie does not consider at all the importance of Orientalist stereotypes, and concentrates only on the Procopian inspiration which, in his words, confers ‘objectivity’ on the description! 48. Wahl 2002: 89–94. 49. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 60–1. 50. Wahl 2002: 118–19. 51. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 235. 52. See e.g. Dahn [1876] 1925: 244–6. 53. In the novel, Theodora is also responsible for the ‘moral failings’ of Antonina, who would be a perfectly virtuous woman, but is under the spell of the empress: Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 2: 96–7. 54. See e.g. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 247, where Theodora admits paying Justinian’s doormen double the amount he pays to be informed about all the secrets of the empire; vol. 2, 382–3, where in a letter to Cethegus Theodora admits having tricked Justinian, who trusts only her, and then adds ‘do not forget, to whom you owe your victory. And remember, Theodora lets herself be used as an instrument only as long as she wishes. Never forget this’. 55. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 3: 175. 56. Lilie 1987: 198–9, but Lilie argues that all the non-Byzantine characters of the novel are moved by hate and love, while the Byzantines are cold and calculating. 57. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 2: 383. 58. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 245. In the next illustration (249), Theodora is again wearing a transparent dress and being served by one young and one old servant. 59. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 3: 179. 60. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 3: 161. 61. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 1: 423. 62. Dahn [1876] 1925, vol. 3: 142–3. 63. Frech 1996: 690–3; Kipper 2002: 134–6; Wahl 2002: 56, 99–100. Dahn himself stated, as both the authors mentioned quote, that ‘there is no mankind beyond the sum of the peoples, through which alone mankind expresses itself ’.

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Notes to pp. 172–175 64. Kipper 2002: 149–50; Wahl 2002: 122–8, 143–5. 65. Carlà and Goltz 2015: 218–19. 66. Cardis-Toulouse 1988: 79. 67. Benjamin 1997: 9. 68. Cardis-Toulouse 1988: 85–6. 69. Peltre 1997: 188–94. 70. Benjamin 1997: 18.90–8. Peltre 1997: 206–13. 71. Next to the Byzantine empire (and the following Ottoman empire), Benjamin-Constant also devoted his attention to medieval Muslim Spain: Cardis-Toulouse 1988: 81. 72. Solely as examples, one can think of Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium, Verlaine’s ‘Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la decadence’, or of the role of Late Antiquity and of the early Byzantine period in Huysmans’ À rébours. 73. See e.g. Bullen 2003; Kampouri-Vamvoukou 2003. 74. The same theme was at the centre of a painting realized by Delacroix for the French Conseil d‘État: Cardis-Toulouse 1988: 82. 75. http://www.artvalue.com/auctionresult--constant-jean-joseph-benjamin-the-empresstheodora-seated-on-1617957.htm (accessed 28 August 2017). 76. Cardis-Toulouse 1988: 82. 77. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEVUbxHXyjQ (accessed 5 July 2017). 78. It is possible that Sardou was writing here with influence from Hugo’s Reine Margot: Stathakopoulos 2004: 434–5. 79. Steinmetz 1984: 78; Balk 1994: 76; Ronchey 2002; Delouis 2003: 108; Stephenson 2010: 470–5; Castelli 2015: 174–84. Proof of Sardou’s historical and archaeological knowledge is also found in the interview in L’Illustration Théatrale 66, 7 September 1907: 1–4. 80. E.g. Sardou 1934: 481 = Proc. Anekd. 12.27; 13.28; Sardou 1934: 494 = Proc. Anekd. 4.7–12. See Stathakopoulos 2004: 435–6. Here it is supposed that Sardou used also Malalas and Theophanes. If this is true, they were used only for the reconstruction of single details, and are therefore unimportant in defining the general reception of the character and the period. See Mazzocut-Mis 2015: 12–14. 81. Sardou 1934: 422–3, 473, 514. See Proc. Anekd. 2.35: Theodora writes in a letter to Zaberganes that Justinian ‘does nothing without my advice’. 82. Thorun 2006: 108. 83. Sardou 1934: 448. 84. This characterization is implicitly connected with the closure in 529 of the philosophical school in Athens by Justinian, a fact which is not explicitly mentioned in Sardou’s play. 85. Proc. BP 1.25.10: ‘the old faith which they are now accustomed to call Hellenic’ (transl. H. B. Dewing). 86. Sardou 1934: 475 (‘Ce n’est pas les païens endurcis qu’il redoute, mais les derniers Romains’), 477–8 (purifiée par nous, que la vieille patrie romaine trouve dans un sang nouveau une jeunesse nouvelle!). See Stathakopoulos 2004: 440. The same characters are attributed to Aetius in the works about Attila and Galla Placidia. 87. Sardou 1934: 473–4. 88. Stathakopoulos 2004: 437–8.

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Notes to pp. 175–178 89. One of Theodora’s costumes, for example, displayed around 4,500 precious stones: Balk 1994: 76; Thorun 2006: 98–100. 90. The critics continuously underlined the deep connection between play and scenes, and how the first would be unconceivable without this particular setting: Thorun 2006: 96–8. On the sources available on costumes and scenography, see Bara 2015. See also Bernabò 2003: 13–14. For a comparison with Benjamin-Constant, see Balk 1994: 73; Stathakopoulos 2004: 443. 91. Victoroff 2007: 376–7. 92. Mazzocut-Mis 2015: 14–15. 93. As revealed also in e.g. Les vieux garςons or Divorςons! (Steinmetz 1984: 103–11). 94. Thorun 2006: 108–9. 95. Sardou 1934: 491. See Stathakopoulos 2004: 441–2 on the influence of gender roles and ideals of the late nineteenth century in the construction of Theodora and Andréas’ love story. On Sardou’s idea on women’s role in society see also Steinmetz 1984: 122–4. 96. Sardou himself wrote sarcastically: ‘Je n’ai donné qu’un amant à Théodora, un seul. Dans ces conditions, au VIe siècle comme au nôtre, on est presque une honnête femme’ (L’Illustration Théatrale 66, 7 September 1907, 4. See Thorun 2006: 96, but the idea, expressed here, that this should show Sardou’s liberal attitude towards affairs outside of marriage is completely wrong). Procopius states clearly that, for power’s sake, Theodora was faithful to Justinian and there were rumours of only one possible lover, Areobindus, who conveniently disappeared. The character of Andréas is derived from Marrast: Ronchey 2002: 446–50. 97. Sardou 1934: 413. See Proc. Anekd. 15.6–7. Other plays show a general criticism against women who take too much care of their physical appearance, i.e. with clothes and jewels: Steinmetz 1984: 119–22. 98. Thorun 2006: 94. 99. Sardou 1934: 454: ‘Si je n’avais pas quitté le cirque, je me serais faite dompteuse. Ça a toujours été mon rêve.’ 100. Balk 1994: 63–5. 101. Carlà 2015: 31–3; Carlà-Uhink and Fiore 2016: 200–1. 102. Balk 1994: 75–6; Delouis 2003: 112–14; Potter 2015: 209–11. 103. Delouis 2003: 108–9. 104. Thorun 2006: 92–3. 105. On Sardou’s importance in British theatre, see Gay 2007. 106. Thorun 2006: 91–2. 107. While Ulrica’s opera is clearly indicated in the picture, Theodora’s illustration is simply defined as ‘Byzantine costume’. 108. Teodora Imperatrice di Bisanzio (Ernesto Maria Pasquali, Italia 1909); Justinian and Theodora (Otis Turner, USA 1910); Thédora (Henri Pouctal, France 1912); Teodora (Arturo Ambrosio, Italia 1913); Teodora (Roberto Roberti, Italia 1914). See Musumeci 1998: 323; De Berti and Gagetti 2015: 76–7. 109. Lapeña Marchena 2009: 47–50. 110. On this movie, see Carlà 2013: 244–5; Carlà 2015: 48–50; Carlà and Goltz 2015: 212–13. See also Musumeci 1998; De Berti and Gagetti 2015. 111. Musumeci 1998: 323–4. 112. Hollander 1991: 228–31; Redi 1998; De Berti and Gagetti 2015: 78–81.

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Notes to pp. 178–182 113. Basso 2006: 51–2: ‘Paganesimo e cristianesimo, opulenza orientale e misticismo s’accostano e talora si confondono’. See Bernabò 2003: 35–8; Carlà 2013: 245–6. 114. Bernabò 2003: 15–16. 115. Harich-Schwarzbauer 2018: 137. 116. Fiorentino 1886: 15–16. 117. Bernabò 2003: 21–4. 118. A reproduction of this illustration is provided in Carlà 2013: 247. 119. Bernabò 2003: 87–115. 120. Santucci 1929: 52. 121. Santucci 1929: 42–4. 122. Santucci 1929: 47. 123. Santucci 1929: 48. 124. Gürtler and Schmid-Bortenschlager 2002: 103. On König’s novel and on her interest for Antiquity, see now Harich-Schwarzbauer 2018. 125. On this, Hey’l 1994: 191–2. 126. Semiramis and Cleopatra, less Roxane, belong to the stereotypical catalogue of negative Oriental female exempla since Antiquity: see Wieber-Scariot 1999: 325–37. 127. Hey’l 1994: 191; Bohm 1997: 463–5; Harich-Schwarzbauer 2018: 150. 128. Mańczyk-Krygiel 2011: 134. 129. Bernabò 2003: 71–9; Stephenson 2010: 475–6. 130. This was already recognized in L’Illustration Théatrale 66, 7 September 1907: 1. 131. Bernabò 2003: 16–17; Delouis 2003: 131–2. 132. Diehl 1903, in particular 113–22; but see also Diehl 1906: 51–75. 133. Some illustrations from the book can be seen at http://www.booktryst.com/2013/07/ancientempress-heats-up-rare-book.html (accessed 6 June 2017). The poster from 1892 can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orazi_Theodora.jpg (accessed 6 June 2017). 134. Diehl 1906: 61. See also Ronchey 2002: 451–2; Delouis 2003: 132. 135. Diehl 1906: 63–5. The same idea of an empress who would not risk the throne for the sake of adventure is to be found in Evans 2002: 110. 136. Diehl 1922: 231. 137. Diehl 1922: 236–8. 138. McClanan 2002: 118–19. 139. Diehl 1903: 6. 140. Diehl 1903: 6; Diehl 1922: 243–7. With Sardou’s answer in L’Illustration Théatrale 66, 7 September 1907: 3–4. It may be further highlighted that in Diehl, as with many other historians, the partial reappraisal of Theodora does not apply at all to Antonina, who remains a model of perversity. 141. Schubart 1943: 50–9. 142. More negative images of Theodora continued to exist of course, as in the case of Underhill 1932, portraying an ambitious, avaricious and ruthless Theodora, who only experiences some form of repentance on her deathbed. 143. Masefield 1940. In this British novel, which begins with Theodora’s arrival in Alexandria after having been sent away by Hecebolus, and finishes with her betrothal to Justinian, 261

Notes to pp. 182–183 Theodora’s ‘past’ is never mentioned beyond its having taken place ‘in the theatre’. Throughout the novel, Theodora helps Justinian and the Blue party to uncover and defeat a conspiracy of the populist Greens, who try to win the election to the consulship (sic!) and thus to overthrow Justin’s power and the imperial order (interestingly often called ‘Commonwealth’). 144. Payer 2002: 77: Theodora does not like her life as actress, and she was just waiting for the moment when she could finally have ‘ein menschenwürdiges Dasein’, which of course happened – in this strongly Christian publication – when ‘God took her hand and showed her the way to Egypt’. 145. James 2000: 241–4. 146. Tougher 2015: 78–9. 147. Coulston 2015: 104–6. 148. Christensen 2014. Graves follows closely Procopius throughout most of the work: see Tougher 2015: 82–4. 149. Proc. BP 1.25.3; Joh. Lyd. Mag. 3.65 and 70; Zach. Mityl. 9.14. 150. Kraus 1938: 18: ‘the most misunderstood woman in the world’s history’. 151. Kraus 1938: 122: ‘She had achieved what every woman in every age seeks: self-fulfilment in a complete a satisfying union with one man’. 152. Kraus 1938: 335. 153. Kraus 1938: 58, 119 (‘all the magic of the East was concentrated in Theodora’). As a true Oriental, Theodora also believes in magic and knows many spells (151). See also the ‘Oriental’ extravagance of her ceremonial and luxury: Kraus 1938: 216–17. 154. Kraus 1938: 121. 155. Kraus 1938: 9, 20–1 (‘a decadent race’). 156. Kraus 1938: 234: ‘Sprung from the lowest classes of the entertainment world, she had never lost touch with the masses’. 157. Vandercook 1940: 2. 158. The idea that Theodora was a hetaira in the classical meaning of the term, as used in Athens in the fifth century bce , has also appeared in Underhill 1932 and then in scholarship, though only almost seventy years later: Schuller 2008: 224–9. 159. Vandercook 1940: 91. Hecebolus wants Theodora to live in ‘a veiled seclusion’: 93. 160. See Carlà 2013: 249–56. 161. The author introduces here a different kind of Orientalism, the Far East: the Chinese are present, for example, at the Byzantine court, and the forms of torture deployed by Theodora in her jails are also Chinese. 162. E.g. Stadelmann 1927, I: 21–2, 143. 163. Stadelmann 1927, I: 222, 232, II: 218. 164. Stadelmann 1927, II: 207–9, 237–40, 247, 254. 165. The Persians follow ‘Mazdak’s communism’ (Vandercook 1940: 191–2). The Byzantine empire could itself become a symbol and a parallel to the Soviet Union, since Rostovzeff ’s work: see Carlà 2011: 32–4. 166. Most notably in Riccardo Freda’s movie ‘Teodora Imperatrice di Bisanzio’ (1953), on which see Carlà 2013: 251–3; Carlà and Goltz 2015: 223–4; Carlà-Uhink 2017b: 310–11. On Theodora after the Second World War, see also Carlà 2011; Carlà 2014.

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Notes to pp. 184–186

Chapter 12 * This paper was written during an APART-Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I thank Hendrik Stanway for improving the English text. Special thanks go to Yazdan Saface (FU Berlin) and to my colleagues in Innsbruck for discussion. 1. Her name means ‘sweet one’, see Justi 1956: 302–3. 2. Evag. Eccl. Hist. ed. Whitby 2000. 3. He published his Universal History in the years between 630 or 640, see Whitby 1988: 28–30. 4. Sebeos was an Armenian bishop during the middle of the seventh century, but probably not the author of the work attributed to him; Thomson and Howard-Johnston 1999: xxxiv. 5. Theophyl. Sim. 5.13.7–14.11. Evagr. Eccl. Hist. 6.21.7–10. ed. Whitby 2000: 312–14. The story is repeated nearly verbatim in Nikephoros’ (fourteenth century) Ecclesiastical History. 6. As Evagrius died in 593/4 this is the latest possible date for the birth of Šīrīn’s first child. 7. E.g. in ʿAt.t.ār’s (1145–1222) Xusrō-nāma, see Orsatti 2006. 8. Ps–Sebeos ch. 13 ed. Thomson (= p. 85 Abgaryan), see Thomson and Howard-Johnston 1999: 29. The Chronicle of Seert 4.466 from the early eleventh century specifies that Šīrīn came from Nabat. that is either Khuzestan or Mīšān. 9. Ps-Sebeos ch. 13 ed. Thomson (= p. 85 Abgaryan); Thomson and Howard-Johnston 1999: 28–9. 10. Thomson and Howard-Johnston 1999: 28; Baum 2003: 42. 11. Ps.-Sebeos ch. 13 ed. Thomson (= p. 85 Abgaryan). On the motif of the queen’s beauty, see Hutter 1997: 18–21. 12. Thomson and Howard-Johnston 1999: 115. 13. Editions by Guidi 1893 and al-Kaᶜbi 2016; Anon. Guidi 10 (= al-Kaᶜbi: 16–17). Al-Kaᶜbi prefers to call the chronicle Short Chronicle on the End of the Sasanian Empire and Early Islam because there is no indication that its author(s) in fact came from Khuzestan, ibd. XV. 14. ‘Bit Aramaiye’ sometimes denotes the region around Kufa northwards (modern middle Iraq) or the region of Basra in the south. 15. Anon. Guidi 13 (= al-Kaᶜbi: 22–5). 16. Hutter 1998: 373–86. Baum 2005: 57–8. 17. Anon. Guidi 18–19 (= al-Kaᶜbi: 34–5). 18. Chronicle of Seert 4.521–24. 19. Antiochus of Galatia, CSCO 203, 45 Nr. XX 4–5. Note, that here and in later sources the name of Šīrīn is never mentioned. She was apparently forgotten in Christian chronicles of the seventh century onwards. 20. He was Xusrō’s firstborn son (Chron. Alex. 908.21–3, 916.8; Chron. Pasch. 401) from another Christian wife called Maria (see e.g. Anon. Guidi 5.10 (= al-Kaᶜbi: 16–17); Eutychios II 210 Pocock). Later Arabic sources claim she was a daughter of the Roman emperor Maurice, but this has to be doubted (Tabarī 1.994 de Goeje/305 Bosw.; I 999 de Goeje/311–12. Bosw.; Ferd. 7.107 Mohl; Mas‘ūdī, Murūğ 2.221 Meynard/Courteille). Baum 2005: 35–8; Scarcia 2003: 89–92. Unconvincingly is al-Kaᶜbi’(2016: xl) who thinks that the marriage ‘was part of Sasanian propaganda to hide the humiliating concessions giving up vast lands to Byzantium.’ 21. ‘Ferunt, Shiroem a Sirina veneno sublatum, quod filium eius Mardansaam intermisset,’ cf. Assemani 1725: 96. The Chronicle of Seert (4.555) has the same story.

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Notes to pp. 186–190 22. Wiesehöfer 2018: 99–112. 23. Baum 2005: 89. 24. Baum 2003: 77 and 2005: 91. 25. Soucek 1974: 27–52; in Lorna Hardwick’s terminology (2003: 10), this is a ‘transplant’, a text or image taken into another context where it is allowed to develop. 26. Details in Soucek 1974: 41, 43. 27. Balʿamī 1090–1 ed. Bahār. 28. On different versions and imitations, see Moayyad 1999. 29. Ferd. 8.56, Warner 1923: 383–7. 30. Ferd. 8.58, Warner 1923: 389. 31. Ferd. 9.6, Warner 1923: 36–42. 32. Ferd. 7.300–01. Mohl. 33. Khaleghi-Motlagh 1971: 84–6; Scarcia 2003: 23–6. 34. Orsatti 2006. 35. Nez.āmī band 71/50–1; Orsatti 2006. 36. Her name means ‘sugar’, Justi 1956: 279. 37. Orsatti 2006. 38. Orsatti 2006. 39. Moayyad 1999. 40. The intimacy in the wedding night is ‘the most lavishly detailed erotic description of lovemaking in classical Persian literature’, see Keshavarz 2008. 41. Bürgel 1988: 148. Šīrīn’s aunt, the queen of Armenia, warns her explicitly not to have premarital sex. 42. See the terminology in Hardwick 2003: 9–11. 43. Bürgel 1988: 150. 44. Bürgel 1988: 137–8 (especially on al-Ghazzali), and 155. 45. Keshavarz 2008. 46. Asher-Greve 2006: 324–5; Lerner 1993: 16. 47. On various later imitations and adaptations, see Orsatti 2006. 48. Günther 2016: 37–40; a coin of queen Bōrān, who reigned autonomously in 631, is depicted on a one rial stamp, see pl.15. 49. Mirfakhraie 2008: 123, 136. Mehran 2002: 240. 50. Recknagel 2011. 51. Atwood 2012: 38. 52. See some examples on http://gdiran.blogspot.co.at/2011/03/iranian–folklore–painting– ghahvehkaneh.html#!/2011/03/iranian-folklore–painting–ghahvehkaneh.html (accessed March 2018). 53. I owe this information to Yazdan Safaee (FU Berlin), April 2018. Shortly before the publication of this book, he made me aware of a wall painting in Tehrān’s Karimkhan street, ordered by the mayor and realized by Mohammadreza Farzaneh, that depicts Farhad and Shirin. 264

Notes to pp. 190–193 54. On carpets and silk textiles from Safavid Iran depicting Šīrīn and Xusrō and Šīrīn and Farhād, see Munroe 2017 with Fig. 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 13. The characters appear only on textiles from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. The designs correlate closely with the iconography established in manuscript paintings, ibd. 1, 5, 132. 55. http://www.silkroadartgallery.com/portfolios/exit-of-shirin-and-farhad/ (accessed February 2018). 56. Such problems were stimuli for recent uprisings in Iran, see Golkar 2018: 1–3. 57. Hardwick 2003: 9. 58. Démy-Geroe 2013: 152. 59. E.g. Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi from 2012. Closer to Nez.āmī is Shirin Farhad from 1956. 60. Elena 2005: 105 and Király 2010: 135. 61. Naficy (1994: 147) stressed that the close-ups ‘may be coded by the director and decoded by spectators as intimate love scenes even though the contents of the shot itself do not show such intimacy in an obvious way [. . .]’, thus, an “‘innocent” shot becomes charged with intimacy’. 62. Moradiyan-Rizi 2016: 45 with fn. 3. Unveiled women should only been seen by their husbands or close relatives. 63. Naficy 1994: 133 describes the consequences: Actresses had to wear long, loose-fitting dresses; they had to behave in a dignified manner, with no direct contact to men, only averted looks with no direct gaze. Women were depicted as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and often in inactive roles. See also Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003: 62f. Moradiyan-Rizi 2016: 45–6. 64. Démy-Geroe 2013: 149. 65. The Guardian, June 13, 2009; cf. Jaggi 2009. 66. Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 385. 67. Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 385 and 387 quotes an interview, where Kiarostami explained: ‘I will not be proud and pleased to make a film which gets banned. I have to use my knowledge of the government and the socio-political situation to pass under the censorship blade. I don’t want the cut-up pieces of my film be taken out of a box years later.’ 68. The film soon found its way back to Iran as half-price illegal copy, cf. Jaggi 2009. On the use of banned films inside Iran, see Zeydabadi-Nejad 2016: 99–113. 69. Saljoughi (2012: 526) notes correctly that the male actors are not even named in the end-credits. 70. E.g. in two interviews in 2009, with Offscreen (Khodaei 2009) and with The Guardian, (Jaggi 2009). 71. Saljoughi 2012: 522. She wonders if the first two minutes are also the title sequence for the film within the film. 72. Shirin is his first film with only female actors whereas women were missing in his earlier films. Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003: 68; Elena 2005: 176; Khodaei 2009; Grønstad 2012/13: 28; Saljoughi 2012: 519. 73. Saljoughi 2012: 526; Démy-Geroe 2013: 150–1: e.g. contemporary actresses like Hedieh Tehrani, Leila Hatami and Niki Karimi. 74. Moradiyan-Rizi 2016: 51; Démy-Geroe 2013: 151. Jafar Panahi himself is sitting as a shadowy figure in the background. Although his imprisonment has been lightened to house arrest, he is still banned from working. 75. Saljoughi (2012: 519) calls it an ‘intertextual re-imagining’ of Nez.āmī, Grønstad (2012/3: 26) an ‘affect-inducing allusion’. 76. Masoomeh 2017: 52.

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Notes to pp. 193–198 77. Said 1978: 258. 78. This resembles Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, 1996. 79. Said 1978: 325; Fotouhi 2012: 32. 80. Gebrael 2017: 42. Following the work of Hamid Dabashi 2009. 81. Gebrael 2017: 81. This confrontation with the West can lead to self-criticism and reversion of own potentials. See for instance the many examples of Western influence on Iranian culture in the exhibition catalogue of Mostafawy/Siebenmorgen 2010. 82. http://www.cinemaguild.com/about.html (accessed June 2018). 83. http://www.bfi.org.uk/ (accessed June 2018). 84. https://mk2films.com/en/ (accessed June 2018). 85. Fotouhi (2012: 29) also observed, that memoirs of diasporic Iranian women mostly have covers with veiled women, sometimes even depicting the same woman on different books. 86. Whitlock 2007: 58. 87. Gebrael 2017: 28. 88. al-‘Az.m 1981, Engl. reprint 1984. Boroujerdi 1996: 11–12. 89. For a short German overview of these concepts, see Enderwitz 2014. 90. al-‘Az.m 1981: 17. 91. Boroujerdi 1996: 14. 92. Golkar 2018: 8 with references to the statistic in n. 48. 93. Golkar 2018: 7–8. Taylor 2014. 94. Golkar 2018: 8. 95. Pustijanac 2018: 205–20, esp. 215. 96. Pustijanac (2018: 212) calls the appropriation and integration of the Western style ‘decorative orientalism’. 97. He composed a Xusrō–nāma in about 1178, see Reinert ([1987] 2012). 98. Démy-Geroe 2013: 153. 99. Atwood 2012: 38. 100. Démy-Geroe 2013: 149. 101. Moradiyan-Rizi 2015: 47 with fn. 6. 102. Moradiyan-Rizi 2015: 53. 103. Moradiyan-Rizi 2015: 54. 104. Even Reformists have a selective focus on political films. If the MCIG labelled a film mokhatab-e khas.s. (‘for special audiences’), the release of such a film could be reduced to a kind of new censorship. Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 383–5. 105. Mackintosh 2018. Golkar 2018: 2; Salari 2018. 106. Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir, 8 March 2018). 107. On the gaps between state and society and the widening rift between ‘the religiousHezbollahi group and the hybrid-postmodernists’ see Golkar 2018: 1–12. 108. Moradiyan-Rizi 2016: 46. For the changing gender consciousness of Iranian women in the last decade, see Moradiyan-Rizi 2015; Masoomeh 2017: 50–6. 109. Moradiyan-Rizi 2016: 54. 110. See recently e.g. Wiedemann 2015; Golkar 2018: 1–12; especially 7–8. 266

Notes to pp. 199–202

Chapter 13 * Thanks go to Liselotte Glage for her supportive reading of my text. 1. Szlezák 2000: 22–3. 2. Szlezák 2000: 22–3. 3. Aesch. Pers. 185. Transl. Sommerstein. 4. Aesch. Pers. 188/9. 5. When the political powers in the Peloponnese formed an alliance in the fifth century bce , the story of a common progenitor called Perseus, from whom the ruling dynasties on the Peloponnese supposedly descended, began to circulate. Perseus was considered Greek by his father and Egyptian by his mother. Hdt. 6.53–5; at 2.91 Herodotus tells of the emigration of Danaus to Egypt and of the veneration of Perseus at Chemmis. 6. Levick 1999. 7. Said 2003. 8. Geddes 1989. 9. For a nuanced view of the ‘barbarian’ see Nippel 2001 and Nippel 1990; Hall 1989. 10. Helen Sancisi-Weerdenburg 2000: 13 on tyranny as a family affair. Cf. Wagner-Hasel 2017: 93–103. 11. Davidson 1997: chapter 9. 12. In a comparison between Sparta and Athens, Aristotle criticizes the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, who supposedly failed to demand that the discipline imposed on men also be imposed on women. According to Aristotle, such a lack of rules goes hand in hand with a love of wealth and leads to conditions whereby men can be ruled by women (1269 b 12–14 and 19–26). For Aristotle there is no difference whether women themselves hold political leadership (archein), or whether political leaders, the archons, are led by women (archesthai) (Arist. Pol. 1269 b 23–34). 13. Nymphis asserts that the Lycian city of Xanthos was ruled by women (as transmitted by Plut. Mor. 248 d). Equally, according to Herodotus (4.26.2) among the Issedones the women have equal power (isokratees) to the men. 14. In Claudian’s invective against the eunuch Eutropius, centuries later, he claims that the peoples of the Near East and the barbarians were ruled by women (Claud. In Eutropium 1.321–3). The Late Antique chronicler Procopius even thought a gynaecocracy existed within the imperial house (of Constantinople) itself (Procop. Anecdota 5.26). On Claudian’s image of the Orient see Ware 2012 and Harich-Schwarzbauer 2006. 15. Arist. Pol. 1269 b 12–14 and 19–26. (transl. Rackham with his suggestion). 16. Arist. fr. 554 Rose (on gynaecocracy among the Melians). Aristotle also detects gynaecocracies in tyrannical constitutions, among which he counts the final form of democracy (Arist. Pol. 1313 b 31–39). In this case, the lack of control also includes slaves: ‘Also the things that occur in connection with the final form of democracy are all favourable to tyranny – dominance of women (gynaikokratía) in the homes, in order that they may carry abroad reports against the men, and lack of discipline (ánesis) among the slaves, for the same reason; for slaves and women do not plot against tyrants, and also, if they prosper under tyrannies, they must feel well-disposed to them, and to democracies as well (for the common people also wishes to be sole ruler (mónarchos)).’ Transl. Rackham. 17. Clearchus in Ath. Deipnosophistae 12.515 d–516 a. Clearchus uses the classical term for political leadership, árchein and árchesthai, for female tyranny. 267

Notes to pp. 202–204 18. Cf. Wagner-Hasel 1998; Cyrino 1998. A similar pattern of reversal can be found in a compilation of earlier coastal descriptions (periploi) from the fourth century bce . According to an account attributed to the Greek sea navigator Scylax (who died around 480 bce ), the Libyans were also thought to have been ruled by women (gynaikokratoúntai). He states that the women consorted with slaves and foreign men of neighbouring tribes, in reversal of normal Greek custom (Scylax, fr. 21 = GGM I). 19. Diodorus (4.31.7) makes mention of the Itonians’ punishment for overrunning much of Omphale’s land. Hercules destroyed their city and sold the inhabitants into slavery. Hercules also killed Syleus who, according to Apollodorus (Apollod. Bibl. 2.6.3) and Diodorus (4.31.7), forced strangers passing by into servitude and made them hoe his vineyards. This motif can be found of several Attic red-figure vases from between 490 and 460 bce . Brommer 1984: 35 20. Cf. e.g. Pembroke 1967. 21. For a critique of the concept of patriarchy and of interpretations of gynaecocracy as reverse images of an ancient patriarchy cf. Wagner-Hasel 1992: 337; Wagner-Hasel 2001 as well as Carlà-Uhink 2017a. 22. Xeno. Oec. 7.5–42. 23. Eur. IA. 714–16. Transl. Eckhardt/Harrison. 24. Xeno. Oec. 7.42. 25. Aristotle fr. 554 Rose. 26. FGH II 217.15. 27. Hdt 1.173.4–5; Nik. Dam. fr. 3 = FGrHist 90 F. 28. Bichler 2000: 36–7. On Athenian citizen rights cf. Wagner-Hasel 2017: 118–30. 29. Wagner-Hasel 1998: 215. Cf. also Eppinger 2017. 30. Ov. Her. 9.53–4, 57–62, 73–81, 103–4, 111–12, 129. Transl. Murgatroyd/Reeves/Parker. 31. Meyer-Zwiffelhoffer 1995: 64–6; Thurn 2018. See also Meister 2009; Corbeill 2002. Gestures, mimicry, posture and the manner in which people moved, were, just as in the case of consumption and sexual behaviour, the subject of political defamation strategies and were associated with various political factions. It was the flip side of the enormous pressure of conformity that weighed on the Roman elite due to the coupling of social and political power. A distinction was made between an urban lifestyle (urbanitas), which could open one up to an accusation of effeminacy (mollitia), and a traditional rural lifestyle, which was evaluated – in both positive and negative senses – as being, respectively, virtuous or peasant-like and uncivilized (rusticus). 32. Plut. Vit. Ant. et Demetr. 3.3. Transl. Perrin. 33. Zanker 1987: 67. 34. See also Kleiner 2005: 174–5 for a terracotta relief that refers to the myth of the fight over a tripod between Hercules and Apollo. Augustus is depicted as Apollo, Antony as Hercules and Egypt, that is, Cleopatra, as a lotus flower: ‘The same message was delivered through the terracotta relief scenes, which were repeated again and again for emphasis. The key scene depicting the battle between Apollo and Hercules for the Delphic tripod is, for example, the subject of nine preserved panels. Apollo and Hercules, shown in profile, each grasp a leg of the central tripod. . . . While the struggle seems evenly matched, the result is preordained because Apollo, protector of the tripod, will prevail. The victories decorating the tripod ensure his success. Since statues in Rome depicted Antony as Hercules, and Augustus was garbed as Apollo at dinner parties, it would have been obvious to anyone who saw or heard about these 268

Notes to pp. 204–207 terracotta panels that the clash over the tripod was really the contest for Rome. The mythological saga was a perfect story line for Actium. Hercules (Antony) had committed an offence and sought absolution at Apollo’s shrine at Delphi. Furious at receiving no oracle, he tried to steal the tripod but was halted by Jupiter’s intervention. Apollo (Octavian) retained the tripod, but Hercules was sold to Omphale (Cleopatra) as a slave.’ 35. For the debate on the public and political character of the Roman domus see, among others, Laurence and Wallace-Hadrill 1997: 137–64, Rilinger 1997, Winterling 2005. 36. Burckhardt and Ungern-Sternberg 1994. 37. On assessments of Fulvia see Hallett 2015 and Schubert 2003. 38. Cic. Phil. 244; Plut. Vit. Ant. 10, 28–30; Vell. Pat. 2.74.3. 39. Flor. Epit. 2.16. On belt symbolism see Schmitt-Pantel 2019. 40. Ov. Fasti 2.304–59. See also Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 371–77; Hercules furens 465–76; Phaedra 317–29, as well as Lucian, Dialogi deorum 13. On episodes in the Fasti pertaining to Roman love elegy see Fucecchi 2018. 41. See e. g. the tomb of a freed woman who depicts herself as Omphale. Cancik-Lindemaier 1985. Moldenhauer 2019 examines the late antique example of woven images. 42. Baumgärtel 1995: 156. 43. Schmidt-Linsenhoff 1989: 428; Hunt 1986. 44. Budde and Sievernich 1989, especially pp. 15–16, as well as Syndram 1989 in the same volume. 45. See Rohde 2009. 46. Wagner-Hasel 1988; Wagner-Hasel 2003; Schnurr-Redford 1996, 13–34, 266–8, 270–4. 47. de Montesquieu 1748: book 16.8 (The enclosure – clôture – of women is a consequence of polygamy), book 16.9 (The containment of women preserves peace, since women’s intrigues have fatal consequences for their husbands), book 16.10 (The enclosure of women is widespread in the countries of the Orient), book 16.11 (The climate justifies the containment of women), de Montesquieu 1721. See also Opitz 1991. 48. Meiners 1788: 317 and 331. For the genesis of this concept see Wagner-Hasel 1988; 1989. Schnurr-Redford 1996: 15–19 discusses the forerunners of Montesquieu. 49. Meiners 1788: Vol. 1 331, transl. Glage. 50. On Meiner’s moral perspective see Zeidler-Johnson 1988. 51. The following verdict from an archaeological study on textile work represents the epitome of the cliché: ‘Athenian women, unlike Egyptian ones, lost their social equality during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. We learn from various texts that by the dawn of the Classical age the married women of Athens, like their Mesopotamian sisters, were held in harem-like seclusion and scarcely allowed out of the house except for major rituals and festivals.’ Barber 1994: 273. The extent to which this perception of the Oriental harem fails to tally with its reality and the perception of the women living as part of a harem is shown by the fascinating depiction in Ruete 1989. 52. Wagner-Hasel 1992: 273–93. 53. For a critique see Wagner-Hasel 1988; 1989; 2017: 118–20. 54. Llewellyn-Jones 2003: 13. 55. Corbeill 2002: 192–204. 56. On the conception of a female Orient in Bachofen see Kohl 1989. On dealing with the Orient in ancient studies in general see Meyer-Zwiffelhoffer 2007.

269

Notes to pp. 207–209 57. Livy 1.34–47. 58. Bachofen [1870] 1951: VIII; transl. Gershon. 59. Bachofen [1870] 1951: XIV; transl. Gershon. Scholars such as Jacques Heurgon (1971), who ran with Bachofen’s hypothesis, suspected that the narrative referred to an Etruscan matriarchy since the few testimonies we have of the Etruscans indicate that they took their names not only from their fathers but also from their mothers. Above all, Etruscan sarcophagi of married couples have been interpreted as being indicative of equal rights between the sexes, as have murals showing banquet scenes where women and men lie side by side. Like the myth of Omphale’s role reversal, narratives of powerful women in early Rome are understandable only within the context of the times in which they were transmitted, namely the late Republic and early imperial period. The Etruscan Tanaquil and her granddaughter Tullia, who also helped her own husband to the throne, are reflections of the behaviour of emperors’ wives in the early Principate, who set about ensuring that their sons would ascend to power. Cf. Aigner-Foresti 2003. 60. On the Orient as a place of free love and sensuality see Pape 1989. Furthermore, images of the Orient depicting it as a place of ancient Oriental wisdom circulated widely. See Syndram 1989. 61. Beard 2017: 26. 62. Beard 2017: 3–6. Hom. Od. 1.356–9. Transl. Wilson. 63. Beard 2017, 8–9. 64. Hom. Od. 4.235–43. 65. Hom. Od. 11.336–8. 66. Hom. Il. 6.431–9. Hector does not rebuke his wife, as Sarah Pomeroy rightly argued in the 1970s, but he rather takes her advice seriously. Pomeroy 1975a: 16–19. 67. Wagner-Hasel 2018; Wagner-Hasel 2000: 141–52, 192–4, (English translation in preparation). 68. Lenz [1790] 1976: 14–15, 26–7.

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306

INDEX

Note: Bold numbers refer to persons who are treated extensively within that chapter. *Denotes the year of birth of persons still living at time of publication. Abbate, Carolyn (US-American musicologist; *1955) 26, 219 n.97 Achaemenid empire 31, 57–61, 64–5, 68, 148, 229 n.3, 231 n.40, 233 n.94 Achilles (character from Greek mythology) 46, 55, 60, 231 n.46 Adea-Eurydike (Perdiccas’ wife; 335–317 bce ) 54 Adelaide (Queen consort of the UK; 1792–1849) 99 Adrian (character from Duberman’s Elagabalus) 128, 131, 133 Adriatic Sea 164 Aegean empire 31, 105, 231 n.40 Aeneas (character from Greek and Roman mythology) 71, 73, 82–3, 93, 235 n.11, 237 n.40 Aeschylus (Greek poet; 525–456 bce ) 200, 234 n.94 Āfāq (Nez.āmī’s wife; 12th century) 189 Agamemnon (character from Greek mythology) 202 Agrippina minor (Roman empress; 16 ce –59 ce ) 76, 91, 115, 134 Ahmed, Akbar Shahid (Pakistani journalist) 149 Ailami (character from Al A’babid) 140, 144 Akhenaten (Pharao; ca. 1353–1336 bce ) 159 Al Rashi, Abdul Rahman (Syrian actor; 1934–2014) 144 Al-ʿAzm, Ğalāl Sādiq (Syrian philosopher; 1934–2016) 196 Al’skander (see Alexander the Great) Al-Assad, Bashar (Syrian president; *1965) 148–9 Al-Assad, Hafez (Syrian president; 1930–2000) 148 Alemanni, Nicolò (Roman antiquarian; 1583–1626) 167 Alexander the Great (Alexander III of Macedon; 356–323 bce ) 18–19, 27, 44–69, 93, 183, 225 nn.13–15, 226 n.28, 229 n.8 Alexander IV (King of Macedon; 323–309 bce ) 47, 55, 227 n.53, 228 n.85 Alexandria 1, 11, 89, 153, 175, 228 n.78, 230 n.20 Alighieri, Dante (Italian poet; 1265–1321) 167 Allacci, Lionel (Greek philologist; 1586–1669) 25, 216 n.45, 218 n.86 Al-Malla, Bassam (Syrian film director; *1956) 253 n.72 Al A’babid 138–47, 249 nn.20–1

Alma-Tadema, Lawrence (Dutch painter; 1836–1912) 14 Al-Monzer (character from Al A’babid) 138 Alwis, Anne (UK classicist) 152–3 Al-Yakubi (Arab historian; 9th century) 187 Al-Zoubi, Omran (Syrian information minister; 1959–2018) 149 Amalasuntha (Ostrogothic queen; 495–535 ce ) 171–2 Amazons (legendary female warriors) 2, 30, 48, 114, 210 n.15, 220 n.13, 250 n.32 Amenhotep III (Pharao; 1388–1351 bce ) 159 Amorgos 31 Ampelius, Lucius (Roman author; 1st or 4th century ce ) 18 Amphipolis 48, 226 n.27 Amyntor (Macedonian nobleman; 4th century bce ) 57 Anāhitā (Iranian goddess) 187 Andréas (character from Sardou’s Théodora) 175–6 Anker, Hanns (German painter; 1873–1950) 171–3, 176 Antigonos I the One-Eyed (Antigonos Monophthalmos of Macedon; 382–301 bce ) 47, 226 n.27 Antinous (Bithynian boy, beloved of the emperor Hadrian; 110/115–130 ce ) 60, 230 n.8 Antioch 129, 153, 183 Antipatros (Macedonian general; 389–319 bce ) 46–7 Antonina (Belisarius’ wife; 495–565 ce ) 168, 171 Antonius, Lucius (Roman politician; 82–39 bce ) 106–7, 241 n.19 Antonius, Marcus (Roman politician; 86/82–30 bce ) 1, 10, 73, 88–9, 91, 93, 105–16, 204–5, 240 n.6, 241 n.32, 242 n.48, 243 n.74, 251 n.49, 268 n.34 Antony, Saint (Egyptian monk; ca. 251–356) 74 Aphrodite (Greek goddess) 11 Apis (Egyptian god) 93 Apollo (Greek and Roman god) 101, 141, 268 n.34 Appian of Alexandria (Greek historian; 95–165 ce ) 103, 108, 111–12, 235 n.3, 243 n.73–4 Apsaios, Septimius (leader of the Palmyrene rebellion in 273 ce ) 147

307

Index Aramaean empire 185, 263 n.14 Araxis (Bagoas’ grandfather) 50 Arcadius, Flavius (Roman emperor; 377–408 ce ) 151 Ardašīr I (Sasanian king; 180–242 ce ) 189 Ardašīr III (Sasanian king; 621–630 ce ) 186 Arete (character from Greek mythology) 208 Argeads (Macedonian dynasty) 54, 60, 65 Argillante (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 21–2, 24–5, 218 n.83 Argos 32, 202 Arimeno (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 20, 22, 25, 217 n.54, 218 n.75 Aristobulus of Cassandreia (Greek historian; 375–301 bce ) 59, 61 Aristotle (Greek philosopher; 384–322 bce ) 167, 202–3, 230 n.23, 267 n.12, 267 n.16 Arrian, Lucius Flavius (Greek historian; 92–175 ce ) 46–7, 57, 60, 62, 229 nn.7–8, 231 n.16, 233 n.77 Artaud, Antonin (French author; 1896–1948) 133 Heliogabalus or, The Crowned Anarchist 127, 129, 131, 245 n.27, 246 n.41 Artaxerxes III Ochos (Persian king; 390–338 bce ) 47, 57, 60, 233 n.77 Artembares (Bagoas’ father) 50 Artemisia I of Caria (regent of Halicarnassus; 484–460 bce ) 7, 29–41, 43, 206, 220 nn.17– 18, 22 n.41, 223 n.60, 223 nn.62–4 Artemisia II of Caria (satrap of Caria 353–351 bce ) 29–34, 36, 41–3, 206, 220 n.21, 221 n.28, 221 nn.35–6, 222 nn.44–6 Artus, Thomas (French author; 16th–17th century) L’Isle des Hermaphrodites nouvellement descouverte 125, 245 n.13 Assyria 16, 18, 24, 54, 76, 81, 129, 217 n.54, 218 n.83 Ataulf (Visigothic king; 374–415 ce ) 151 Athena (Greek goddess) 36 Athenaios of Naucratis (Greek author; 170–223) 45, 225 n.21, 233 n.77 Athens 30–1, 43, 175, 201–4, 206–7, 219 n.5, 223 n.59, 262 n.158, 267 n.12, 269 n.51 Atossa (Achaemenid queen; 550–475 bce ) 200 ʿAt. t. ār, Fariduddin (Persian poet; 1136–1221) 197 Atwood, Blake (US-American media historian) 297 Audouard i Deglaire, Pau (Spanish photographer; 1856–1918) 153 Augustus (C. Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, Roman emperor; 63 bce –14 ce ) 2, 10, 12, 60–1, 88–89, 105–6, 107–8 ,114, 116, 204, 231 n.35, 240 nn.5–8, 240 nn.16–17, 268 n.34 Aureli, Aurelio (Italian librettist; 1630–1708) Eliogabalo 125, 245 n.14

308

Aurelianus, Lucius Domitius (Roman emperor; 214–275 ce ) 5, 136–7, 139–47, 149, 248 nn.4–5, 251 nn.46–8, 251 n.50 Ayhan, Ece (Turkish poet; 1931–2002) 14 Azema (character from Rossini’s Semiramide) 27 Ba’al or Bel (Sun god) 64, 128, 130, 139, 237 n.37 Ba’ath Party (political party in Iraq and Syria) 147 Babcock, Charles Luther (US-American classicist; 1924–2012) 114, 243 n.59 Babylon 16–18, 26–7, 45, 47, 52, 54, 56, 62, 65, 130, 178 Bacchus (Roman god) 205 Bachofen, Johann Jakob (Swiss legal historian; 1815–1887) 207–8, 270 n.59 Bacigalupo, Massimo (Italian translator; *1947) 158 Bactria 27, 44–7, 52–6, 61, 228 n.78 Badian, Ernst (Austrian-American classicist; 1925–2011) 45, 225 n.5, 255 n.7 Baghchehban, Samin (Iranian composer; 1925–2008) 197 Bagoas (Persian eunuch, around 325 bce ) 44–6, 48–56, 63–5, 227 nn.53–4, 228 n.78, 233 n.77 Bakić-Hayden, Milica (US-American scholar; *1954) 3, 227 n.58 Balʿamī, Muhammad (Persian historian; 10th century) 187 Balsdon, John V. P. D. (English classicist; 1901–1977) 114, 242 n.51, 243 n.59 de Balzac, Jeanne (French actress; 1891–1930) 81 Bambalio, M. Fulvius (Roman nobleman; 1st century bce ) 103 Bambula, Fulvia (see Fulvia) Bamiyan valley 82 Barcelona 153, 155 Baron, Alexander (English author; 1917–1999) Queen of the East 137, 149 Baronio, Cesare (Italian historian; 1538–1607) Annales Ecclesiastici 168 Barrett, Anthony (Canadian classicist; *1941) 114, 242 n.48 Barsine (Persian concubine of Alexander the Great; 363–309 bce ) 47, 226 n.24 Basilides of Alexandria (Gnostic religious teacher) 165 Bauman, Richard (Australian classicist; 1919–2006) 114, 242 n.48, 243 n.59 Bayle, Pierre (French philosopher; 1647–1706) 119, 243 n.68 Historical and Critical Dictionary 118 Beard, Mary (UK classicist; *1955) 208–9 Bedouin 140, 144 Bel (see Ba’al)

Index Belisarius, Flavius (Eastern Roman general; 500–565 ce ) 168, 170–1 Bell, Clive (UK art critic; 1881–1964) 156 Bellerophon (character from Greek mythology) 41 Ben-Hadad II (Aramaic king; 9th century) 165 Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Joseph (French painter; 1845–1902) 175, 181, 259 n.71 Empress Theodora Seated on Her Throne 174 Justinien 174 L’Impératrice Théodora au Colisée 174 Throne Room in Byzantium 174 Berman, Jacob R. (US-American author; *1971) 137 Bernhardt, Sarah (French actress; 1844–1923) 155, 175, 181 Bibiena, Ferdinando (Italian architect; 1656–1743) 178 Bichler, Reinhold (Austrian classicist; *1947) 203, 214 n.9 Binoche, Juliette (French actress; *1964) 193, 196 Bisaccioni, Maiolino (Italian historian; 1582–1663) 20–4, 26, 28 Semiramide in India 17, 19–20, 23, 25–6 von Bismarck, Otto (German chancellor; 1815–1898) 170 Bīsotūn 187, 189 Blackburn Scratton, Edward H. (Bride Scratton’s husband) 159 Blok, Aleksandr (Russian poet; 1880–1921) Ravenna 151, 220 n.13 Boccaccio, Giovanni (Italian poet; 1313–1375) 33, 74, 126, 132, 245 n.11 De mulieribus claris 73, 215 n.32, 222 n.41 Bologna (ancient Bononia) 105 Bonaparte, Napoleon (see Napoleon) Bōrān (Persian princess; 7th century) 190, 264 n.48 Borchardt, Ludwig (German architect; 1863–1938) 159 Boroujerdi, Mehrzad (Iranian scholar; *1962) 196 Boulanger, Gustave (French painter; 1824–1888) 50 Bradley, Katharine (see Field, Michael) Braidotti, Rosi (Italian philosopher; *1954) 7 Brasini, Armando (Italian architect; 1879–1965) 176 Brescia 153–4 Brindisi (ancient Brundisium) 110–11, 241 n.32, 241 nn.36–7 Brion, Marcel (French author; 1895–1984) L’aventureuse réussite de Théodora 182 Briseis (character from Greek mythology) 46 Brome Weigall, Arthur (English Egyptologist; 1880–1934) 159 Brüning, Edmund (German illustrator; 1865–20th century) Queen Zenobia captured 136–7 Buddha (Indian sage) 82

Bulwer Lytton, Rosina (Irish author; 1802–1882) Cheveley 101 Burney, Fanny (English author; 1752–1840) 98 Camilla 97 Bussière, Gaston (French painter; 1862–1928) 75 Salammbô 76 La danse de Salomé ou Les papillon d’or 76 Byron, George Gordon, or Lord Byron (English poet; 1788–1824) 99 Byrsa 70 Byzantine empire 5, 9, 136, 155, 160, 165, 169–76, 178, 181–4, 188–9 Byzantium 8, 153, 167–9, 178, 181, 183, 246 n.38, 257 n.29, 173, 175, 262 n.165 Cabuchet, Touissant (French author; 19th century) Héliogabale, Trilogie sur le Christianisme 126, 133, 135, 247 n.59 Caesar, C. Julius (Roman consul and general; 100–44 bce ) 10, 89, 103, 105–6, 110, 112–13, 240 n.9 Calais 96 Calanus (Indian philosopher; 398–323 bce ) 68 Caligula (Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Roman emperor; 12 ce –41 ce ) 180 Callias (Athenian politician; mid-5th century bce ) 31 Callisthenes of Olynthus (Greek historian; 360–328 bce ) 61 Cambyses II (Achaemenid king; 559–522) 11 Campi Flegrei 83 Cannes 191 Cape Town 48 Cappadocia 82, 108 Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus, Roman emperor; 188–217) 123, 127–9, 131, 135, 246 n.36 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi, Italian painter; 1571–1610) 119, 138, 140, 243 n.75, 249 n.25 Caria 29–32, 221 n.24 Caribert I (Merovingian king; 517–567 ce ) 175 Carisius, Titus (triumvir monetalis; 1st century bce ) 115 Caristo (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 21, 24–5, 218 n.79, 218 n.84 Carl, Katharine (US-American author; 1865–1938) 160 Carlucci, Leopoldo (Italian film director 1915–1928) Teodora 177, 182, 260 n.110 Carney, Elizabeth (US-American classicist; *1947) 32, 61, 225 n.23, 229 n.93, 230 n.19 Caron, Antoine (French painter; 1521–1599) 34–6 The Queen’s Entry into the Harbor of Rhodes 35 Carroll, Alexander Mitchell (US-American classicist; 1870–1925) 16

309

Index Carter, Zach (US-American journalist) 149 Carthage 5, 70–6, 78–9, 81–5, 139, 235 n.16, 236 n.25, 237 n.40 Cassander (King of Macedon; 355–297 bce ) 48 Cassandra (character from Greek mythology) 91 Cassiodorus, Flavius Magnus Aurelius (Roman senator and author; 485–585 ce ) 171 Catalonia 153 Catiline, L. Sergius (Roman politician; 108–62 bce ) 103, 240 n.9 Cavalli, Francesco (Italian composer; 1602–1676) Eliogabalo 125, 235 n.12 Cethegus, Rufus Petronius Nicomachus (senator and patricius; 512–558 ce ) 170–2 Chaillet, Gilles (French author; 1946–2011) 128 La Dernière prophétie 127, 130 Chassériau, Théodore (French painter; 1819–1856) 244 n.77 Tepidarium 7–8 Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste (French author; 1766–1823) 245 n.20 Héliogabale, ou Esquisse morale de la dissolution romaine sous les empereurs 126, 131, 134 Chimera (creature from Greek mythology) 41–3 Chini, Galileo (Italian artist; 1873–1956) 178 Churchill, Jennie (US-American socialite; 1854–1921) 9, 176 Cicero, M. Tullius (Roman politician and author; 106–43 bce ) 103, 109–12, 115, 118–20, 205, 211 n.17, 240 n.9, 241 n.24, 242 n.41, 242 n.51, 243 n.75 Philippics 110–11, 241 n.35 Circe (character from Greek mythology) 91 Cirta 74, 79 Civilization V (videogame by Firaxis Games) 175, 237 n.52 Cixi (Chinese empress dowager and regent; 1835–1908) 16, 160 Clairin, Georges (French painter; 1843–1919) 175, 181 Claudian, Claudius (Latin poet; 370–404 ce ) 143, 267 n.14 Claudius (Tiberius Claudius Germanicus, Roman emperor; 10 bce –54 ce ) 93 Claudius Gothicus, Marcus Aurelius (Roman emperor; 214–270) 141, 250 n.35 Clearchus of Soli (Greek philosopher; 340–260 bce ) 202, 267 n.17 Cleisthenes (Athenian politician; 565–508 bce ) 201 Cleitarchus (Greek historian; 4th century bce ) 59, 61, 230 n.20 Cleopatra VII Philopator (Ptolemaic queen; 69–30 bce ) 1–2, 5, 9–15, 29, 38, 71, 73, 76, 78–9, 86–9, 91–3, 95–6, 99–100, 102, 107–9, 113–14, 116, 118, 120, 136–7, 170, 180, 183,

310

200, 204, 206, 216 n.46, 238 n.55, 251 n.49, 261 n.126, 268 n.34 Climene (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 21, 25 Clodia (Claudia) Pulchra (Octavian’s wife; 42–40 bce ) 105, 240 n.8 Clodius Pulcher, Publius (Roman politician; 93–52 bce ) 103, 105–6, 110, 117–18, 205 Cloelius, Sextus (Roman politician; 1st century) 110 Clytemnestra (character from Greek mythology) 202 Čōbīn, Bahrām (Sasanid general and usurper; around 590–591) 185, 188 Cockle Lucas, Richard (English sculptor; 1800–1883) 100 Lady Catherine Stepney as Cleopatra 87 Colbert, Claudette (French/US-American actress; 1903–1996) 11, 86 Colburn, Henry (English publisher; 1784–1855) 101 Colchis 82 Constantinople (see Byzantium) Constantius III, Flavius (Roman emperor; 370–421 ce ) 151–2 Cooper, Edith (see Field Michael) Copenhagen 93 Corinth 11 Cornelia Africana (Roman aristocratic woman; 190–100 bce ) 205 Couperus, Louis (Dutch author; 1863–1923) 133–5 De berg van licht 131, 134 Cranch, Christopher P. (US-American author; 1813–1892) 71 Craveri, Sebastiano (Italian illustrator; 1899–1973) 179–80 Crete 42–3, 156, 203 Croitoru, Joseph (German historian; *1960) 149, 249 n.22, 254 n.83 Ctesias of Cnidus (Greek historian; 5th–4th century bce ) 27 Persica 17–18 Cuchet, Sebillotte (French historian; *1954) 29, 31, 219 nn.1–2, 220 nn.15–18 Curio, C. Scribonius (Roman politician; 90–49 bce ) 103, 106, 118, 205 Curtius Rufus, Quintus (Roman historian; 1st century ce ) 18, 44–7, 49–50, 54, 57, 59–61, 226 n.24, 229 nn.7–8, 231 n.49, 232 n.57, 233 n.77 Cyprus 11 Cyrenaica 79 Cyrus II the Great (Achaemenid king; 601–530 bce ) 17–18, 46, 50, 55 Cytheris (see Volumnia)

Index D’Annunzio, Gabriele (Italian author; 1863–1938) 79 Dahn, Felix (German author; 1834–1912) 170–4 Ein Kampf um Rom 170, 258 nn.53–4 Kings of the Germans 170 Prokopius von Cäsarea – Ein Beitrag zur Historiographie der Völkerwanderung und des sinkenden Römertums 170, 257 n.32, 258 n.63 Damascus 148, 231 n.40, 254 n.85 Daniel (Biblical character) 186 Dardano, Luigi (Italian author; 16th century) La bella e dotta difesa delle donne in verso e prose 23 Darius I (Achaemenid king; 550–487 bce ) 36, 23 n.41, 233 n.94 Darius III (Achaemenid king; 381–330 bce ) 45–8, 50–2, 55, 57–60, 225 n.21, 230 n.16, 230 n.25, 233 n.77 De Chateaubriand, François-René (French author; 1768–1848) 70, 74–5, 84 De Pizan, Christine (French author; 1364–1430) Le Livre de la Cité des Dames 24, 217 n.64 De’ Medici, Catherine (Queen of France; 1519– 1589) 33–6 De’ Medici, Maria (Queen of France; 1575–1642) 34, 36, 205, 222 n.54 Debidour, Antonin (French historian; 1847–1917) 181 Dehlavi, Hossein (Iranian composer; *1927) 197 Deianira (character from Greek mythology) 204–5 Del Cairo, Francesco (Italian painter; 1607–1665) 119, 243 n.75 Delacroix, Eugène (French painter; 1798–1863) 59, 244 n.77 Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement 7 Delilah (Biblical character) 168 Demaratus (Spartan king; 510–480 bce ) 38 DeMille, Cecil B. (US-American film director; 1881–1959) Cleopatra 11 Demosthenes (Athenian politician; 384–322 bce ) 221 nn.27–9 On the liberty of the Rhodians 32 Démy-Geroe, Anne (Australian film curator) 190 Dicaearchus of Messene (Greek philosopher; 3rd century bce ) 45 Dido (Queen of Carthage) 70–6, 78, 81–5, 93, 206, 211 n.18, 235 nn.3–14, 236 n.21, 237 n.40, 238 nn.51–2 Diehl, Charles (French historian; 1859–1944) 182 Théodora, impératrice de Byzance 181 Dio, Cassius Lucius (Roman historian; 155–235 ce ) 108, 118–19, 129, 133 Diocletian, Gaius Aurelius Valerius (Roman emperor; 244–312 ce ) 158

Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian; 90–30 bce ) 17–18, 22–3, 26, 46, 48, 54, 57, 59, 61, 214 n.19, 214 n.26 Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Greek historian; 54 bce –7 ce ) 29 Dionysus (Greek god) 18, 27 Donizetti, Gaetano (Italian composer; 1797–1848) 168 Donner, Julia (character from Duberman’s Elagabalus) 131, 246 n.48 Dorigny, Michel (French painter; 1616–1665) 205 Dover, Kenneth J. (English classicist; 1920–2010) 49 Druillet, Philippe (French author; *1944) Salammbô 83–4, 237 n.54 Drypetis (Achaemenid princess; 350/345–323 bce ) 57–69, 225 n.23, 228 n.78, 229 n.3, 234 n.108 Duberman, Martin (US-American historian; *1930) 128, 131, 133 Duffy, Stella (English author; *1963) The Purple Shroud 175 Duggan, Alfred (British-Argentinian author; 1903–1964) Family Favourites 127, 131, 134, 246 n.34 Dura Europos 153 Duratius (character from Family Favourites) 128 Ecbatana 60 Edinburgh 98 Egilda (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 20, 22 Ekberg, Anita (Swedish actress; 1931–2015) 138, 144 Elabel (character from Al A’babid) 138, 249 n.24 Elagabalus or Heliogabalus (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor; ca. 204–222 ce ) 9, 123, 125–9, 131–6, 210 n.8, 211 n.18, 244 nn.7–9, 245 n.21 Eliot, Thomas S. (US-American poet; 1888–1965) The Waste Land 157–8, 160 Elissa (see Dido) Elizabeth I (Queen of England and Ireland; 1533–1603) 16, 73, 84 Ellas (character from The 300 Spartans) 38 Emesa 125, 127–8, 130, 132 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Desiderius (Dutch humanist; 1466–1536) Colloquia 125 Eumenea 115–16, 243 n.58 Euphemia (Byzantine empress; 518–524) 168 Euphrates 136, 218 n.77 Euripides (Greek poet; ca. 480–406 bce ) Iphigenia at Aulis 202 Eusebius of Caesarea (Church historian; 263–339 ce ) 134

311

Index Evagrius Scholasticus (Church historian; 536–590 ce ) 185, 263 n.6 Eve (Biblical character) 12, 168 Farhād (character from Nez.āmī’s Khamsa) 186–97, 189–90, 264 n.53 Farrell, Colin (Irish actor; *1976) 62 Fatima (Emma Hamilton’s servant; 18th century) 91 Faunus (Roman god) 205 Ferdowsi, Abū l-Qāsem (Persian poet; 940–1020) 184, 187–8, 199, (Šāhnāma) 186–7 Ferrante Pallavicino, Francesco (Italian author; 1615–1644) La Taliclea 23 Le due Agrippine 23 Scena retorica 24 Ferrero, Guglielmo (Italian historian; 1871–1942) 4 Fetherstonhaugh, Harry (English politician; 1754–1846) 90 Field, Michael (pseudonym of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) Julia Domna 127, 129–30, 135 Fiorentino, Italo (Italian author; 19th century) Teodora 178–9 Firenze 27, 42, 151 Flaubert, Gustave (French author; 1821–1880) 236 n.24 La Tentation de Saint Antoine 74 Salammbô 70, 74–9, 81, 83–5, 236 n.22, 236 n.26, 237 n.32 Florus, Lucius Annaeus (Roman historian; 2nd century) 205 Fotouhi, Sanaz (Iranian author) 194 Fox, Elizabeth (English political hostess; 1771–1845) 92 Francis II (King of France; 1544–1560) 33 Francisci, Pietro (Italian film director; 1906–1977) Attila 8 Frederick Augustus (Duke of York; 1763–1827) 96–8 Freud, Sigmund (Austrian neurologist; 1856–1939) 164, 237 n.38 Fuchs, Emil (Austrian sculptor; 1866–1929) 176 Fulvia (Roman noblewoman; 84/73–40 bce ) 1–2, 103–22, 205, 239 n.1, 241 n.35, 242 nn.51–2, 243 n.75, 244 n.78 Gabriel of Sinğar (character from an Iranian folk tale) 185 Gaetuli 205 Gaido, Domenico (Italian film director; 1914–1921) Salammbô 79, 81 Galilee, sea of 165

312

Galla Placidia, Aelia (Roman empress; 392–450 ce ) 151–60, 162–6, 254 n.2 Gallienus, Publius Licinius Egnatius (Roman emperor; 218–268 ce ) 141, 250 nn.36–8, 252 n.50 Gallipoli 159 Gange 22, 24, 27, 217 n.54, 219 n.99 Gaugamela 51 Gaul 115 Ge or Gaia (Greek goddess) 200 Gebrael, Imad (Libanese designer; *1990) 194, 196 Gedrosia 45 Gellius, Aulus (Roman author; 125–180 ce ) 33 Gentileschi, Artemisia (Italian painter; 1593–1653) 12 George IV (King of the UK; 1732–1830) 96, 99 Gerola, Giuseppe (Italian historian; 1877–1938) Monumenti veneti nell’isola di Creta 156 Gérôme, Jean-Léon (French painter; 1824–1904) 50 The Snake Charmer 44, 51, 244 n.77 Geta, Publius Septimius (Roman emperor; 189–211 ce ) 123, 127–30, 135, 246 n.38 Gibbon, Edward (English historian; 1737–1794) 169 Gilbert, Sky 139 (Canadian author; *1952) Heliogabalus, a Love Story 128, 246 n.33 Gillray, James (English caricaturist; 1756–1815) 93–4 Gimbutas, Marija (Lithuanian-American archeologist; 1921–1994) 41, 43, 224 n.81 Glaphyra 108, 240 n.14 von Gloeden, Wilhelm (German photographer; 1856–1931) 8 von Goethe, Johann W. (German poet; 1749–1832) 91 Gog and Magog (Biblical figures) 65, 234 n.95 Golan Heights 142 Golbou, Farideh (Iranian novelist) 193 Golkar, Saeid (Iranian political scientist) 197 Gondor 156 Gorgo (Spartan queen; 5th century bce ) 38–41, 223 n.64, 224 n.73, 224 n.77 Gothlindis (character from Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom) 171 Göttingen 206, 209 Grabar, Andre (French historian; 1896–1990) 152 Gracchus, Gaius (Roman politician; 154–121 bce ) 204–5 Gracchus, Tiberius (Roman politician; 163–133 bce ) 204–5 Grant, Michael (US-American author; *1954) 123 Grantham 97 Graves, Robert (English author; 1895–1985) Count Belisarius 182 Great Mother (goddess) 31, 41–2 Green, Eva (French actress; *1980) 36

Index Greene, Robert (US-American author; *1959) The Scottish History of James the Fourth 19, 215 n.37 Gregory of Prāt-Mīšān (bishop; 7th century ce ) 185 Greville, Charles Francis (English politician; 1749–1809) 90 Grieco, Sergio (Italian film director; 1917–1982) Salammbô 81 Grittlesham 96 Gründ, Françoise (French scenographer; *1938) Julia Domna 128 Guillaume, Ferdinando (French-Italian actor; 1887–1977) 157 Guimera, Angel (Spanish author; 1845–1924) Gala Placidia 153–5 Hades 164 Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus, Roman emperor; 76–138 ce ) 60, 230 n.8 Halicarnassus 29–32, 220 n.10 Hallett, Judith P. (US-American classicist; *1944) 103, 108, 240 n.5, 240 n.16 Hamilcar Barca (Carthaginian general; 270–229 bce ) 75 Hamilton, Emma (English actress; 1765–1815) 9, 87–93, 95–7, 102 Hamilton, William (Scottish diplomat; 1730–1803) 90–3, 95 Hananeh, Morteza (Iranian composer; 1923–1989) 197 Hanem, Kuchuk (Egyptian dancer; 19th century) 74, 78, 236 n.18 Hannibal Barca (Carthaginian general; 274–183 bce ) 70, 79, 81, 84 Hartmann, Elke (German classicist; *1969) 1, 210 n.7 Hasdrubal the Boetharch (Carthaginian general; 2nd century bce ) 70, 74, 81, 84 Hatshepsut (Egyptian pharao; 1495–1458 bce ) 159, 238 n.55 Hays, Mary (English author; 1759–1843) Female Biography 118–19, 242 n.41 Hayter, John (English painter; 1800–1895) Catherine, Lady Stepney 99 Hecatomnids (Carian dynasty) 32–3 Hecatomnus of Mylasa (satrap of Caria; 430–377 bce ) 31 Hecebolus the Tyrian (Syrian official; 5th–6th century) 168, 182–3 Helene – Lill Hoerni (Carl Jung’s daughter; 1914–2014) 164 Heliogabalus (see Elagabalus) Heller, Wendy (US-American historian; *1955) 26, 216 n.52, 219 n.92 Henry II (King of England; 1133–1189) 33

Henry IV (King of France and Navarre; 1553–1610) 34–6, 205, 222 n.43 Hephaestion or Hephaistion (Macedonian nobleman; 360–324 bce ) 45, 50, 52, 56–7, 59–69, 229 n.8, 233 n.90, 234 n.104, 234 nn.107–8 Heracles (see Hercules) Heracles of Macedon (son of Alexander III; 327–309 bce ) 47, 226 n.27 Heraclianus, Aurelius (Roman general; 3rd century ce ) 141 Heraclides Ponticus (Greek philosopher; 387–312 bce ) 203, 236 n.24 Heraclius, Flavius (Byzantine emperor; 575–641 ce ) 194, 196 Hercules or Heracles (character from Greek and Roman mythology) 2, 10, 18, 27, 202–6, 221 n.38, 251 n.49, 268 n.19 Hermaphrodite (figure from Greek mythology) 125, 218 n.82 Herodiade or Herodias (Biblical character) 119, 168, 174, 243 n.75 Herodian (Greek historian; 170–240 ce ) 132–3 Herodotus (Greek historian; ca. 390/380–320 bce ) 17, 29–31, 33, 36–8, 43, 203, 219 n.5, 220 n.11, 222 n.41, 267 n.5 Herules 48 Herzl, Theodor (Hungarian author; 1860–1904) 149, 254 n.79 Hezbollahi (Lebanese political and military organization) 197 Hierocles (character from Duberman’s Elagabalus) 132 Hippotes (character from Greek mythology) 203 Historia Augusta 131–2, 134, 136, 141, 245 n.11, 252 nn.53–4 Hogarth, William (English painter; 1697–1764) Gin Lane 93 Homer (Greek poet; 8th–7th century bce ) 8, 208–9, 220 n.13, 270 n.66 Honoria, Justa Grata (Roman empress; 417–455 ce ) 153 Honorius, Flavius (Roman emperor 384–423 ce ) 151–2 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Roman poet; 65–8 bce ) 10, 89, 240 n.17 Horner, Lance (US-American author; 1902–1973) Child of the Sun 127, 131 Horus (Egyptian god) 5 Houel, Nicolas (French author; 1524–1587) 33–6, 222 n.40, 222 n.47 Histoire de la Royne Arthemise 33 Hunt, Lynn (US-American historian; *1945) 206 Huzar, Eleanor (US-American author; 1922–2018) 114 Hypatius, Flavius (Byzantine usurper; 532 ce ) 178

313

Index Iarbas (character from Roman mythology) 71, 73, 82, 237 n.40 Idreno (character from Rossini’s Semiramide) 27 Ingres, Jean A. (French painter; 1780–1867) 50, 56 Ishtar (Babylonian goddess) 130 Isis (Egyptian goddess) 88 Iskander (see Alexander the Great) Išōʿyahb II (Persian historian; 7th century) 186 Issus 47, 58, 68 Ithaca 208 Jalinous (see Gallienus) James, Liz (UK art historian; *1955) 182 Jerdan, William (Scottish journalist; 1782–1869) 102 John of Ephesus (Syro-Roman bishop; 507–586) 168 John the Baptist (Biblical character) 119, 243 n.75 John the Cappadocian (praefectus praetorio per Orientem; 490–548 ce ) 182, 257 n.21 Jonigk, Thomas (German author; *1966) 134 Heliogabal 127–8 Jordan 165 Jordan, Constance (US-American author; *1935) 26 Judith (Biblical character) 174 Julia Domna (Roman empress; 160–217 ce ) 123–4, 127–32, 135, 244 n.2, 244 n.5–6 Julia Maesa (Roman empress; 165–224 ce ) 123–9, 131–2, 135, 245 n.24 Julia Mammaea (Roman empress; 180–235 ce ) 123–8, 133–5, 245 n.25 Julia Soaemias (Roman empress; 180–222 ce ) 9, 123–8, 132–5, 245 n.11, 247 n.55, 247 n.59 Jung, Carl G. (Swiss psychiatrist; 1875–1961) 151–2, 155–6, 163–6 Septem Sermones ad Mortuos 165 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido 164 Jung, Emma H. (Swiss author; 1882–1955) 164 Jupiter (Roman god) 71, 221 n.38 Justin (Roman historian; 2nd–3rd century ce ) 18, 47, 59, 226 n.27, 229 n.8, 232 n.52, 235 n.3 Justin I (Flavius Iustinus Augustus, Roman emperor; 450–527 ce ) 168, 171 Justinian I (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus, Roman emperor; 483–565 ce ) 167–72, 175–6, 180–3, 258 n.39, 259 n.81, 259 n.84, 261 n.143 Kamra (character from Al A’babid) 138 Kandinsky, Wassily (Russian artist; 1866–1944) 156 Kazemi, Babak (Iranian photographer; *1983) 199 The Exit of Shirin and Farhad 190 Keith, Alison (Canadian classicist) 107 Keller, Ferdinand (German painter; 1842–1922) Dido on the Funeral Pyre 71–2 Kermānšāh 186–7

314

Khalid ibn al-Walid (fellow of Mohamed the prophet; 585–642) 148 Khalid ibn Fayyaz (Arab poet; 7th–8th century ce ) 186 Khamenei, Ayatollah A. (supreme leader of Iran since 1989) 198 Khaznadar, Cherif (French-Syrian author; *1940) Julia Domna 128 Khuzestan 185, 263 n.13 Kiarostami, Abbas (Iranian film director; 1940–2016) Shirin 184, 190–9, 265 nn.67–8, 265 n.72 Klimt, Gustav (Austrian artist; 1862–1918) 156 König, Alma J. (Austrian author; 1887–1942) 162 n.124 Der heilige Palast 180 Korber, Tessa (German author; *1966) 7 Koscina, Sylva (Italian actress; 1933–1994) 173 Koushan, Ismael (Iranian film director; 1917–1981) Shirin and Farhad 191, 193 Kraus, René (US-American author; 1902–1947) 162 n.153 Theodora, the Circus Empress 182 Kurgan (character from Palumbo’s Eterna Artemisia) 41–3, 224 n.81 Kutrigurs 168 Kyros (see Cyrus) Lamus (character from Ovid’s Heroides) 204 Lang, Fritz (Austrian film director; 1890–1976) Metropolis 7 Lascaux 84 Latium 83 Lecomte de Nouÿ, Jean (French painter; 1842– 1943) 7 Lee, Ang (US-American film director; *1954) Brokeback Mountain 68 Lemaître, Jules (French author; 1853–1914) 83, 85 Anna Soror 82, 237 n.48 En marges des vieux livres 82 Lenz, Carl G. (German philologist; 1763–1809) 209 Lenz, Maximilian (Austrian artist 1860–1948) 156 Leonidas I (Spartan king; 540–480 bce ) 38–40, 224 n.77 Lerner, Gerda (US-American historian; 1920–2013) 189 Leroux, Xavier (French composer; 1863–1919) 176 Leto, Jared (US-American actor; *1971) 62 Leukas 31 Liber Pontificalis 168 Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company 76–8, 176–7, 237 n.43 Linley, Thomas (English composer; 1733–1795) 90 Livia Drusilla (Roman empress; 58 bce –29 ce ) 114 Livy (Titus Livius, Roman historian; 59 bce –17 ce ) 74, 231 n.35

Index Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd (UK classicist) 56 Aphrodite’s Tortoise 207 Locarno 191 Lombard, Jean (French author; 1854–1891) L’Agonie 126, 131–2, 135 London 90, 95, 102 Long, Edwin (English painter; 1829–1891) 56 Longinus, Cassius (Greek philosopher; 212–272 ce ) 140 Lotti, Antonio (Italian composer; 1676–1740) Alessandro Severo 125, 134 Lucan, Marcus Annaeus (Roman poet; 39–65 ce ) 89 Lucumo (see Tarquinius Priscus, Lucius) Luna, Juan (Filipino painter; 1857–1899) 13, 213 n.90 Las damas Romanas 14 Odalisque 14 Spoliarium 14 Lycia 203, 267 n.13 Lydia 31, 202–5 Lydus, John (Byzantine author; 490–560 ce ) 183 Lygdamis I (ruler of Halicarnassus; 5th century bce ) 30 Lygdamis II (ruler of Halicarnassus; 5th century bce ) 32 Lyon (ancient Lugdunum) 115, 242 n.58 Lysippus (Greek sculptor; 390–300 bce ) 51 Macedonia 10, 44–7, 51–61, 63–4, 67–8, 227 nn.53–4, 227 n.56, 231 n.40 Macurdy, Grace H. (US-American classicist; 1866–1946) 1, 4 Makart, Hans (Austrian painter; 1848–1884) The Death of Cleopatra 13, 120 Malalas, John (Byzantine historian; 491–578 ce ) 167 Mali (character from Al A’babid) 140–1 Malipiero, Federico (Italian author; 1603–1643) La imperatrice ambiziosa 23 Malko (character from Al A’babid) 139–41 Malta 43 Mamerot, Sebastian (French author; 1430/1440–1490) L’Histoire des Neuf Preux et des Neuf Preuses 19 Mangiacapre, Lina (Italian screenwriter; 1946–2002) 238 nn.49–51 Didone non è morta 83 Manius (Roman; 1st century bce ) 108 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. (US-American film director; 1909–1993) 38 Manners, Russell (English politician; 1771–1840) 96–8 Manners, Russell Henry (UK admiral; 1800–1870) 97

Manners, William (English politician; 1766–1833) 97 Marcia (character from Tysen’s de uitterste proef) 125, 131 Marcianus, Flavius (Roman emperor 396–457 ce ) 178 Maria (wife of Xusrō II; 6th–7th century) 188–9 Maria Carolina (Queen of Naples and Sicily; 1752–1814) 92 Marie-Antoinette (Queen of France; 1755–1793) 92 Marinielli, Lucrezia (Italian author; 1571–1653) La nobilita e l’eccellenza delle donne 24 Mark Antony (see Antonius) Marlowe, Christopher (English poet; 1564–1593) 82 Dido, Queene of Carthage 73, 84 Marmontel, Jean-François (French author; 1723–1799) Bélisaire 168 Marodon, Pierre (French film director; 1873–1949) Salammbô 81 Marrast, Augustin (French author; 1829–1877) 176 La vie byzantine au VIe siècle 175 Martialis, Marcus Valerius (Roman poet; 40–104 ce ) 108, 240 n.14 Martin, Jacques (French comic author; 1921–2010) Le spectre de Carthage 83 Les Aventures d’Alix 83 Martineau, Harriet (English social theorist; 1802–1876) 101 Masefield, John (English author; 1887–1967) Basilissa 182, 261 n.143 Mason, Priscilla (US-American speaker; 18th century) 9 Massinissa (King of Numidia; 238–148) 74 Maté, Rudolph (US-American film director; 1898–1964) The 300 Spartans 38–40, 223 n.64 Matho (character from Flaubert’s Salammbô) 75–6, 83 Maurer, J.-M. (French composer; 19th century) 168 Maurice (Flavius Mauricius Tiberius, Byzantine emperor 539–602) 188 Mauso (character from Palumbo’s Eterna Artemisia) 41–2 Mausolus (satrap of Caria; 377–353) 30–4, 221 n.28, 222 n.44, 222 n.49 Maximinian (character from Al A’babid) 142–3 McEnroe, John C. (US-American historian) 3 Medea (character from Greek mythology) 82, 90–1 Megasthenes (Greek author; 350–290 bce ) 18 Meiners, Christoph (German philosopher; 1747–1810) 206–7, 209 Melos, Melian 202–3 Merdānšāh (Šīrīn’s son; 7th century) 185–6 Merisi, Michelangelo (see Caravaggio)

315

Index Messalina, Valeria (Roman empress; 20 ce –48 ce ) 1, 93, 180, 183 Metastasio, Pietro (Italian poet; 1698–1782) 237 n.40 Semiramide riconosciuta 27 Michelet, Jules (French historian; 1798–1874) 75 Milano 167, 176 Miller, Frank (US-American comic author; *1957) 40, 222 n.57 Milo, T. Annius (Roman politician; 95–48 bce ) 103 Minas Tirith 156 Miranda (character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) 90 Mirande, Henry (French painter; 1877–1955) Elagabal 126 Missolonghi 99 Mitford, Mary Russell (English author; 1787–1855) 96 Mohammed (prophet and founder of Islam; 570/573–632 ce ) 144, 148 Moinot, Pierre (French author, 1920–2007) Héliogabale 127, 245 n.30 Moloch (Carthaginian god) 75, 78, 80–1, 83, 85, 237 n.37, 237 n.43 Mons Lactarius 170 Moody, David (English author; *1970) 160 Moreau, Gustave (French painter; 1826–1898) 75 Mortimer, Willoughby (character from Manners’ The Lords of Erith) 98 Motte, Henry-Paul (French painter; 1846–1922) 237 n.43 Baal Moloch dévorant les prisonniers à Babylone 78 Mucha, Alphonse (Czech painter; 1860–1939) 237 n.30 Incantation 75 Mullard, Julie (Mary Renault’s partner; 1912–1996) 48 Münzer, Friedrich (German classicist; 1868–1942) 114, 240 n.9 Murro, Noam (Israeli film director; *1961) 300: Rise of an Empire 36–8, 40 Mussolini, Benito (Italian dictator; 1883–1945) 79 Mycenae 208 Nabataea 148 Namaan (Biblical character)165 Napoleon I (French emperor; 1769–1821) 10, 92 Napoli 83, 85, 90–2, 95, 218 n.89 Narbazanes (murderer of Darius, 4th century bce ) 45, 51 Narjess (character from Al A’babid) 139 Narses (Byzantine general; 478–573 ce ) 170–1, 173 Nashe, Thomas (English poet; 1567–1601) Dido, Queene of Carthage 73

316

Nasser, Gamal Abdel (Egyptian president; 1918–1970) 148 Nearchos (Macedonian general; 360–300 bce ) 18 Nefertiti (Egyptian queen; 14th century bce ) 159, 238 n.55 Nelson, Horatia (Emma Hamilton’s illegitimate daughter; 1801–1881) 93 Nelson, Horatio (UK navy officer; 1758–1805) 89, 91–3, 95–6 Nemean lion (monster from Greek mythology) 204 Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Roman emperor; 37–68 ce ) 126, 134 Nez.āmī Ganjavi, Hakim (Persian poet; 1141–1209) 184, 187–91, 193, 197–8 Khamsa 186, 188, 190, 265 n.54 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (German philosopher; 1844–1900) 166 Nike (Greek goddess) 115 Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. (US-American classicist) 40, 223 n.64 Nino (character from Rossini’s Semiramide) 20, 22–7, 216 n.54, 218 nn.79–80, 218 n.83 Ninus (Assyrian king; 22nd century bce ) 16, 215 n.30, 215 n.37 Niobe, (character from Greek mythology) 91 Nisibis 185 Nitocris (Egyptian pharao; 22nd century bce ) 17, 129 Nordström, Carl-Otto (Swedish author; 1916– 2009) 152 Nugent, Thomas (Irish author; 1700–1772) Grand Tour 155 Numerobis (character from Astérix et Cléopâtre) 11 Numidia 71, 74, 82 Octavian (see Augustus) Odaenathus, Septimius (Governor and later Palmyrene king; 220–267 ce ) 136, 139–42, 148, 250 n.37, 251 n.39 Odysseus (character from Greek mythology) 83 Olympias of Epirus (Macedonian queen, 375–316 bce ) 47, 55, 226 n.27, 228 n.84, 229 n.93 Omphale (character from Greek mythology) 2, 10, 202–5, 251 n.49, 268 nn.18–19, 269 n.41, 270 n.59 Onstott, Kyle (US-American author; 1887–1966) Child of the Sun 127, 131 Orazi, Manuel (Italian painter; 1860–1934) 181 Orbiana, Sallustia Barbia (Roman empress; 225–227 ce ) 134 Orlean (see Aurelian) Orontes 130 Orosius, Paulus (Roman historian; 385–420 ce ) 18 Orsatti, Paola (Italian scholar) 188–9 Orxines (Persian governor; 326–324 bce ) 46, 48 Osiris (Egyptian god) 27

Index Otto of Freising (Austrian historian; 1114–1158) 18 Ottoman empire 2, 5, 7, 14, 73–4, 147, 180, 208, 236 n.16, 245 n.24 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, Roman poet; 43 bce –17 ce ) 83, 89, 205 Heroides 71, 204, 235 n.9 Oxford 48 Oxyartes (Bactrian nobleman; 4th century bce ) 46–7, 52, 225 n.18 Pahissa, Jaime (Spanish composer; 1880–1969) Gala Placidia 154–5 Pahlavi dynasty (Persian shahs; 1925–1979) 148 Pahlavi, Mohamed Reza (Shah of Persia; 1919– 1980) 190 Palmyra 136–50, 149, 153, 247 n.3, 248 n.9, 250 n.28, 254 n.85 Palumbo, Giuseppe (Italian author; *1954) 43 Eterna Artemisia 41–2 Panahi, Jafar (Iranian film director; *1960) 193, 265 n.74 Paris 92, 205 Parmenion (Macedonian general; 390–330 bce ) 46 Parthenope (character from Greek mythology) 83 Parvēz (see Xusrō II) Parysatis (Persian noblewoman; 4th century bce ) 48, 57, 60–1, 225 n.23, 231 n.40 Pasargadai 50 Pasolini, Pier P. (Italian film director; 1922–1975) Medea 82 Pastrone, Giovanni (Italian film director; 1883–1959) Cabiria 79, 81, 237 nn.41–3 Patroclus (character from Greek mythology) 60, 67, 229 n.8, 231 n.46 Pegasus (character from Greek mythology) 42 Pella 57 Penelope (character from Greek mythology) 208 Pentapolis 168, 182 Perdiccas or Perdikkas (Macedonian general; 365–321 bce ) 47, 55, 61, 68, 226 nn.27–8, 232 n.55 Persepolis 93, 229 n.3 Persia1, 3, 10–11, 26–31, 36–41, 44–60, 62–5, 68, 148, 167, 185–7, 190, 197, 200–1, 220 n.11, 220 n.15, 232 n.62, 264 n.40 Perugia (ancient Perusia) 105–9, 113, 240 n.17, 241 n.19, 241 n.48 Peter, Saint (apostle; 1st century ce ) 165 Petra 139, 148 Petrarca, Francesco (Italian poet; 1304–1374) 221 n.35 Africa 74, 215 n.32 De viris illustribus 19 Phaeacians 208 Philip Arrhidaeus, or Arrhidaios (King of Macedon; 359–317 bce ) 47

Philipp II (King of Macedon; 382–336 bce ) 46, 55 Philippi 106 Philodor, François-André (French composer; 1726–1795) 168 Philostratus, Lucius Flavius (Greek author; ca.170–250 ce ) Life of Apollonius of Tyana 129 Phocas (Byzantine emperor; 547–610 ce ) 185 Phrygia 115–16, 180, 243 n.58 Phylon (character from The 300 Spartans) 38 Pigna, Giuseppe (Italian illustrator) 178 Pisa 160 Plautilla, Fulvia (Roman empress; 202–205 ce ) 123 Plutarch (Greek historian; 45–125 ce ) 41, 45–7, 57, 61–2, 107–8, 111–14, 118, 225 nn.14–15, 225 n.23, 233 n.77, 242 n.52, 243 n.74 De Herodoti Malignitate 31 Life of Antony 10 Life of Caesar 10 Mulierum virtutes 31 Parallel lives 117 Pocahontas (native American; 1595–1617) 44 Pollok, Catherine (see Stepney, Catherine) Pollok, Susannah M. (Catherine Stepney’s mother; 18th century) 96 Pollok, Thomas (Catherine Stepney’s father; 1738–1801) 96 Polyaenus (Greek author; 2nd century ce ) 31 Polybius (Greek historian; 200–120 bce ) 81 Polyperchon (Macedonian general; 394–303 bce ) 47 Pomeroy, Sarah (US-American classicist; *1938) 114, 242 n.48 Pompeii 51 Pompeius Trogus (see Justin) Pona, Francesco (Italian author; 1595–1655) La galeria delle donne celebri 24 Porter, Cole (US-American composer 1891–1964) Night and Day 156 Potter, David S. (US-American historian; *1957) Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint 175, 257 n.17 Pound, Ezra (US-American poet; 1885–1972) 151–2, 154–60, 163–6 Bel Esprit 158 Malatesta verses 159 The Cantos 156–60 The Pisan Cantos 159 Pozzuoli 83 Prati, Alessio (Italian composer; 1750–1788) 27 Procopius (Greek historian; 500–565 ce ) 167–70, 175, 178, 180–2, 256 n.6, 257 n.18, 257 n.32, 258 n.47 Anekdota or Secret History 167–70, 260 n.97 De aedificiis 167 Persian Wars 167

317

Index Propertius (Roman poet; 48 bce –15 ce ) 89, 240 n.17 Pseudo-Sebeos (Armenian historian; 7th century) 185, 263 n.4 Ptolemy I Soter (Macedonian general and king of Egypt, 367–283 bce ) 47, 55–6, 61–2, 226 n.28, 228 n.78, 232 n.62 Pura 45 Purcell, Henry (English composer; 1659–1695) 82 Dido and Aeneas 73 Dido’s Lament 73, 237 n.47, 235 nn.12–13 Python (character from Greek mythology) 76 Queen of Sheba 74, 78 Questa, Cesare (Italian classicist; 1934–2016) 17–18, 214 n.6 Qusai’ (character from Al A’babid) 141 Radcliffe, Ann (English author; 1764–1823) 98 Raghda (Syrian actress; *1957) 139–40, 250 n.30 Ravenna 8, 151–7, 160, 163–5, 167, 175–6, 178, 257 n.28 Red Sea 163 Reed, Jeremy (US-American poet; *1951) 133 Boy Caesar 128 Renault, Mary or Challens, Mary (US-American author; *1951) 48–56, 226 n.34, 227 nn.53–6, 228 n.78, 229 nn.91–2 Fire from Heaven 45, 63, 226 n.35, 229 n.91 Funeral Games 45, 54, 56, 63, 228 n.70, 228 n.84 Praise Singer 49 The Last of the Wine 49 The Persian Boy 45, 49–50, 54–6, 63, 226 n.39, 228 n.85, 229 n.91 Resapha 185 Reynolds, Joshua (English painter; 1723–1792) 93 Rhine 134 Rhodes 32, 35, 221 n.28, 22 n.52 Ribera, Pietro P. (Italian author; 17th century) Le gloria immortali di trionfi et heroiche imprese 24 Ricci, Corrado (Italian archaeologist; 1858–1934) 155–6 Riva, Giuseppe (Italian diplomat; 18th century) 27 Riviere, Theodore (French sculptor; 1857–1912) Salammbô chez Matho 76 Rixens, Jean-Andre (French painter; 1846–1925) 13 Rochegrosse, Georges (French painter; 1859–1938) 5–6 Roman empire 1–5, 7–10, 31, 44, 48, 59–60, 71, 74–6, 79–81, 84, 86–9, 93, 104–19, 122, 128, 130–2, 134–48, 151–4, 169–71, 175, 182, 200, 202–5, 207–8, 210 n.8, 211 nn.17–18, 216 n.52, 231 n.35, 236 n.21, 239 n.3, 242 nn.47–8, 268 n.31

318

Rome 27, 71, 80, 93, 95, 113–15, 118, 123, 128–31, 137, 147, 151–3, 160, 174, 178, 235 n.4, 242 n.58, 251 n.46 Romney, George (English painter; 1734–1802) 90–1 Rossdal, Maria (German classicist) 58, 63, 232 n.66 Rossetti Agresti, Olivia (English-Italian author; 1875–1960) 158 Rossi, Franco (Italian film director; 1919–2000) Eneide 82, 237 n.46 L’Odissea 82 Rossi, Gaetano (Italian author; 1774–1855) La Semiramide 27, 214 n.6 Rossini, Gioacchino (Italian composer; 1792–1868) La Semiramide 27, 214 n.6 Rotrou, Jean (French poet; 1609–1650) Bélisaire 168 Rouille, Guillaumé (French author; 1518–1589) 115–17, 243 n.61 Roxane (Sogdian princess; 345–310 bce ) 44–9, 52–6, 61–2, 64, 68, 180, 225 n.14, 226 n.28, 227 n.61, 229 n.93, 232 n.55 Rufinus (Church historian; 340–410 ce ) 119 Rufus, Caesetius (Roman; 1st century bce ) 112, 118, 243 n.73 Šabdiz (horse of Xusrō II; 7th century ce ) 186–7, 190 Šāhpūr or Sabour, Shapur I (Sasanian king; 240–270) 140, 190 Said, Edward (US-American literature critic and theorist; 1935–2003) 2–3, 56, 74, 103–5, 151–3, 159, 166, 196, 201, 210 n.3, 212 n.43, 215 n.38, 236 n.18, 239 n.1 Orientalism 44, 193–4 Sainte-Beuve, Charles A. (French literature critic; 1804–1869) 75 de Saint-Lubin, Léon (Italian composer; 1805–1850) 186 Šakar of Esfahān (character from Nez.āmī’s Khamsa) 188–9 Saladin (Egyptian sultan; 1138–1193) 148, 253 n.63 Salamis 29–31 Salammbô (character by Flaubert) 70, 74–9, 81, 83–6, 236 n.29, 237 n.30 Salgari, Emilio (Italian author; 1863–1911) Cartagine in Fiamme 79, 81 Salome (Biblical character) 74, 76, 78, 119, 236 n.18, 243 n.75 Samnites 2 Samsara 41–3 Sanjari, Heshmat (Iranian composer; 1918–1995) Persian Pictures 197 Santucci, Flora (Italian author; 20th century) 178 Sappho (Greek poet; 630/612–570 bce ) 76 Sardanapalus (Assyrian king; 7th century bce ) 23

Index Sardou, Victorien (French author; 1831–1908) 168, 174, 259 nn.78–80, 259 n.87, 260 nn.95–9 Théodora 155, 175–6, 181 Sasanian empire 184–8, 190, 263 n.13, 263 n.20 Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Viktoria (German historian; 1944–2013) 206 Schmitt, Florent (French composer; 1870–1958) 81 Schmock, Walter (German painter; 20th century) 11 Schnepel, Burkhard (German ethnologist; *1954) 3 Schubart, Wilhelm (German historian 1873–1960) 181 Schueller, Malini J. (US-American scholar; *1957) 3 Scipio Africanus, Publius Cornelius (Roman politician; 236–183 bce ) 74, 79, 84, 205 Scitalce (character from Metastasio’s Semiramide riconosciuta) 27 Scott, Eleanor (UK archeologist; *1960) 4 Scratton, Bride (Ezra Pound’s girlfriend; 1882– 1964) 157, 159, 160–2 Scratton, Ned (Bride Scratton’s husband; 20th century) 159 Selena (character from Duberman’s Elagabalus) 133, 147 n.60 Semiramis (Assyrian queen; 8th or 6th century bce ) 2, 14, 16–28, 29, 76, 129, 170, 180, 206, 215 n.32, 215 n.17, 216 nn.41–2, 216 n.54 Sempronia (Roman aristocrat; 1st century bce ) 103 Sepenta, Abdolhossein (Iranian film director 1899–1969) Shirin va Farhad 190 Septimius Severus, Lucius (Roman emperor; 145–211 ce ) 123, 128–9 Šērōe (character from Ferdowsi’s Šāhnāma) 186, 188, 263 n.20 Serpillo (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 20, 24–5 Sesostris (Egyptian king; 1975–1930 bce ) 27 Severus Alexander, Marcus Aurelius (Roman emperor; 208–235 ce ) 123, 126, 132, 134 Shakespear, Dorothy (Ezra Pound’s wife; 1886– 1973) 157 Sharp, William (Scottish author; 1855–1905) 140 Shmisati (character from Al A’babid) 140 Sibyl (Ancient Greek prophetess) 91 Sibylline oracles 148 Silverius (pope; 536–538 ce ) 168 Simocatta, Theophylact (Byzantine historian; 580–630 ce ) 185, 253 n.3 Šīrīn or Shirin (wife of Xusrō II 591–628 ce ) 4, 14, 184–93, 197–9, 263 n.1, 263 n.8, 263 n.19 Sisimethres (Bactrian noble; 4th century bce ) 46, 48, 230 n.22, 232 n.57 Sisygambis (Achaemenid queen; ca. 400–332 bce ) 48, 59, 65 Sivan, Hagith (US-American classicist; *1949) 166

Skinner, Marilyn B. (US-American classicist; *1939) 113, 242 n.47 Sloane, Lone (character from Druillet’s Salammbô) 83 Smith Bodichon, Barbara L. (English artist; 1827–1891) 10 Smith, John (English explorer; 1580–1631) 44 Sneyd, Samuel (governor of Brisbane; 1811–1885) 97 Snyder, Zack (US-American film director; *1966) 300: Rise of an Empire) 37, 40, 223 n.64, 224 n.73, 224 n.77 Sobekneferu (Egyptian pharao; 19th century bce ) 159 Sogdia or Sogdiana 46, 52–4 Solon (Athenian politician; 640–560 bce ) 206–7 Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (Queen consort of the UK; 1744–1818) 92 Sophonisba (Carthaginian noblewoman; 235–203 bce ) 70, 74–6, 78–81, 84, 235 n.15, 237 n.55 Spain 153 Sparta 31–2, 38–41, 202, 208, 223 n.59, 267 n.12 Spitamenes (Achaemenid nobleman; 370–328 bce ) 48 Stabrobates (Indian king; 8th or 6th century bce ) 17, 19, 214 n.18, 215 n.37 Stallard Flory, Wendy (US-American literary analyst) 159 Stateira I (Persian queen; 336–331 bce ) 46, 59 Stateira II (Persian princess; 364–323 bce ) 47–8, 53–5, 59–61, 63, 65–7, 225 n.21, 225 n.23, 228 n.84, 231 n.40 Staurobate (character from Bisaccioni’s Semiramide in India) 22 Stepney, Catherine (English novelist 1785–1845) 9, 89, 97–102 Castle Nuovier, or Henry and Adalina 97 The Courtier’s Daughter 99 The Heir Presumptive 99 The Lords of Erith 98 The New Road to Ruin 99 The Three Peers 99 Stepney, Thomas (Baronet of Prendergast; 1760–1825) 98–9 Stone, Oliver (US-American film director; *1946) Alexander 50, 52, 55, 62–3 Alexander Revisited 56, 229 nn.91–2 Stoneman, Richard (English classicist; *1951) 137 Story, William W. (US-American sculptor; 1819–1895) Cleopatra 87 Strabo (Greek geographer; 63 bce –23 ce ) 18, 31 Stroehling, Peter E. (German painter; 1768–1826) 97–99 Strohm, Reinhard (German musicologist; *1942) 27, 245 n.15

319

Index Stronk, Jan P. (Dutch historian) 17, 214 n.15, 214 n.18 Susa 31, 47, 52–54, 57, 59–60, 225 n.23, 231 n.40, 232 n.73 Svedomsky, Pavel (Russian painter; 1849–1904) Fulvia with the Head of Cicero 115, 119–20, 242 n.41, 243 n.77 Swift, Ellen (UK archeologist; *1972) 152–3 Sychaeus (mythological character) 71 Syleus (character from Greek mythology) 202 Sylvinus (character from Chaussard’s Héliogabale) 126 Symiamira (see Julia Soaemias) Syphax (Numidian king; 250–202 bce ) 72 Syracuse 79 Tabarī (Persian historian; 839–923 ce ) 187–8 Tagore, Rabindranath (Indian philosopher; 1861–1941) 147 Taima (character from Al A’babid) 138, 144, 252 n.51 Taliclea (character created by Pallavicino) 23 Tamiri (character from Metastasio’s Semiramide riconosciuta) 27 Tanaquil (Roman queen; 6th century bce ) 207, 270 n.59 Tanit (Carthaginian goddess) 70, 75, 83, 236 n.18, 237 n.30 Taplin Gorge Dam 156 Tarquinius Priscus, Lucius (Roman king; 6th century bce ) 207 Tate, Nahum (Irish poet; 1652–1715) 73, 235 n.12 Tehrān 190, 197, 264 n.53 Telemachus (character from Greek mythology) 208 Thais (Greek hetaera; 4th century bce ) 93 Thalestris (Amazon queen; 4th century) 48, 226 n.30 Themis (character of Greek mythology) 200 Themistocles (Athenian politician; 524–459 bce ) 37–8, 40, 219 n.5, 223 n.63 Theodahad (Ostrogothic king; 480–536 ce ) 167 Theodora I (Byzantine empress; ca. 500–548 ce ) 1, 8–9, 167–83, 256 nn.4–6, 256 n.9, 259 n.81, 261 nn.142–3, 262 n.153 Theodoric the Great (Ostrogothic king; 454–526 ce ) 156, 171–2 Theodosius I, or the Great (Flavius Theodosius, Roman emperor; 347–395 ce ) 151 Theron (character from The 300 Spartans) 40 Thiy or Thij, Ti (character from Pound’s Cantos) 158–60 Thrace 48 Thuleland 170 Thusnelda (Arminius’ wife; 1st century ce ) 76 Ti (see Thiy) Tiber 130

320

Tlass, Moustafa (Syrian general and politician; 1932–2017) 139–40, 147–8, 252 n.57, 249 nn.27–8 Tolkien, John R.R. (English author; 1892–1973) Lord of the Rings 156 Torino 79 Totila (Ostrogothic king; 516–552 ce ) 171, 257 nn.35–6 Trafalgar 95 Tribonianus, Flavius (Byzantine jurist; 6th century ce ) 171 Tripolitana 79 Troy 82, 208, 210 n.8 Tunis 70 Turton, Godfrey E. (English author; 1901–1985) 123 Tyre 47, 71, 73, 82–3, 237 n.40 Tysens, Gysbert (Dutch author; 1693–1732) Bassianus Varius Heliogabalus, of De uitterste proef der standvastige liefde 125, 131, 133, 245 n.16 Ulrica (character from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera) 176–7, 260 n.107 Uncle Paul (character from Duberman’s Elagabalus) 133 Uzaina (see Odaenathus) Valentinian III (Flavius Placidus Valentinianus, Roman emperor; 519–555 ce ) 8, 151–3 Valerius Maximus (Roman historian; 1st century ce ) 33 Valerius (character from Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom) 172 Valois dynasty (French kings; 1328–1589) 34 Vandercook, John W. (US-American author; 1902–1963) Empress of the Dusk 182 Velleius Paterculus (Roman historian; 19 bce –31 ce ) 114, 242 n.52 Venezia 19–21, 23–7, 178, 214 n.6, 219 n.96, 235 n.12 Ventidius (character from König’s Der heilige Palast) 180 Venus (Roman goddess) 71, 84, 111 Verdi, Giuseppe (Italian composer; 1813–1901) Un ballo in maschera 176 Vermeersch, Peter (Belgian composer; *1959) Heliogabal 127–8 Verona 24, 156–60 Vesuvius 93 Victoria (Queen of the UK; 1819–1901) 87, 96, 115–16 Vigilantia (mother of Justinian I; 6th century ce ) 169 Villeroy, Auguste (French poet; 1895–1939) Héliogabale 126, 245 n.25

Index Vinci, Leonardo (Italian composer; 1690–1730) 27 Virgil (Roman poet; 70–19 bce ) 71, 73, 78, 82–4, 89, 93, 235 nn.3–4, 235 n.13 Aeneid 70 Virlouvet, Catherine (French historian; *1956) 114, 243 n.59 Visigoths 151, 153 Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus (Roman architect; 1st century bce ) 32, 221 n.32 Volumnia (Roman actress; 1st century bce ) 111, 241 nn.36–7 Vouet, Simon (French painter; 1590–1649) 205, 235 n.15

Wright, Vernon (US-American architect; 1863–1938) 156 Wyburd, Francis J. (English painter; 1826–1909) 50 Wyke, Maria (UK classicist; *1957) 5, 237 n.41, 241 n.22

Wa’el (character from Al A’babid) 141 Wadi Halfa 74 Wakefield, Anne (UK actress; *1931) 38 Welles, Orson (US-American film director; 1915–1985) 226 n.39 Citizen Kane 81 von Wertheimer, Oskar 11 (Austrian author; 1892–1944) Kleopatra – Die genialste Frau des Altertums 12 Wilde, Oscar (Irish author; 1854–1900) 76 Ravenna 155, 157 William IV (duke of Clarence; 1765–1837) 96, 99 Williams, William C. (US-American poet; 1883–1963) 160, 235 n.10, 239 n.3 Wiltshire 96 Wirral 89 Wolff; Toni (Swiss psychologist; 1888–1953) 164–5 Woyke, Saskia Maria (German music historian) 26

York 159 Youngkin, Molly (US-American scholar) 9

Xenophon (Greek author; 431–354 bce ) 214 n.18, 227 n.54 Oeconomicus 202 Xerxes (Achaemenid king; 519–465 bce ) 29–31, 36–40, 234 n.94 Xusrō II (Sasanian king; 570–628 ce ) 184–93, 197 Xvaday-nāma, 187

Zabada (Palmyrene general; 3rd century) 140, 142, 145, 147 Zabbai, Septimius (Palmyrene general; 3rd century) 142 Zama 79 Zeno, Apostolo (Italian poet; 1669–1750) Alessandro Severo 125, 134, 245 n.15 Zenobia Septimia (Palmyrene queen; 240–274) 5, 136–50, 208, 248 n.4–5, 249 n.26, 252 nn.53–4, 252 n.58, 253 n.75, 254 n.81 Zeydabadi-Nejad, Saeed (UK scholar) 191 Zonaras, John (Byzantine historian; 1074–1130) 168 Zosimus (Greek historian; 460–520 ce ) 136, 252 n.53 Zürich 163

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