Olympias

by Elizabeth Carney

  Olympias acted as participant, patron, and probably organizer (she provides the snakes and seems to introduce them into the ceremony as an innovation, possibly of Molossian origin) of a public Dionysiac festival; only women participated but men were present as observers.96 Granted that the entire passage implies that Olympias played a leadership role in these activities, she may well have been a priest of Dionysus,97 but, if so, Plutarch does not state it. Evidence from other sources, however, indicates that female Dionysiac participation more heavily involved women in the elite, especially in leadership roles.98

  Nonetheless, while Plutarch may have been right to say that such rites were particularly popular with women in northern regions, it is important to understand that they were very popular with men of this region as well99 and that, elsewhere in Greece, both men and women participated in Dionysiac cults,100 although they were particularly associated with women.101 Objects with Dionysiac significance appear in Macedonian elite houses and tombs, and several temples to Dionysus are known.102 The royal tombs, in particular, contain many items associated with Dionysus.103 Euripides spent time at the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus and there is a good likelihood that, possibly influenced by practices he saw while there, he wrote the Bacchae in Macedonia.104 As we have seen, Olympias’ letter indicates that ancestral Dionysiac rites were celebrated by the royal family. Certainly Philip and Alexander both paid considerable attention to this cult.105

  Greek ambivalence about Dionysus, as well as the variety and complexity of the worship of this god of transcendence (through wine, theater, ecstatic religion), complicates any attempt to understand what Olympias’ Dionysiac connections might have meant to herself or to her contemporaries. Despite the antiquity of Dionysus worship in the Greek peninsula, many Greek sources insist on the exotic, Oriental nature of the deity and cult, in effect transmuting the “otherness” of transcendence into an understanding of the god and cult as Other,106 even though most Greeks would have participated in some form of Dionysiac experience. This was a god of many aspects, one whose worship encompassed many forms.

  Some aspects of Dionysus appealed primarily (but not exclusively) to women or to men, whereas others attracted significant numbers of both sexes.

  In Macedonia and elsewhere, Dionysus’ patronage of wine primarily attracted men, partly because many Greeks considered female wine-drinking as, at best, problematic, and partly because wine-drinking was embedded in social activities that excluded women: symposia and some public festivals.107

  Many cities, however, had Dionysiac festivals celebrating wine or including dramatic performances and processions that may well have involved all citizens, not just men.108 There must have been much regional variation.109

  Greeks considered women more vulnerable to emotion and ecstatic posses-

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  sion, and many sources associate ecstatic Dionysiac experience with women.

  Female Dionysiac worship, though it inspired masculine distrust and temporarily gave greater freedom to those women who participated, thereby reinforced the existing order and, to some degree, validated male stereotypes about female nature.110 Some Dionysiac bands were all female and departed from the city to the mountains;111 participants (maenads) in these seemed and looked wild,112 if not as wild as male imagination has made them.113 Evidence, however, suggests that the wildness of maenads was emotional and involved neither sexual activity nor wine.114 Whatever their ecstatic experience, such bands also organized conventional festivals held at regular intervals.115 By the late fifth century, some men belonged to such groups, and later this was more common.116 City cults of Dionysus, sometimes with female priests, also existed.117 Both men and women could choose to become initiates in Dionysiac cults, often associated with Orphism,118 ones that focused on Dionysus as not just a god of life but a god of rebirth. Initiation guaranteed a blessed afterlife.119 Such beliefs, judging by Macedonian burials, were popular in Macedonia.120 Evidence is a problem for all of these Dionysiac cults: myth, literature, and art provide abundant Dionysiac material, but distinguishing reality from myth or male fantasy can be difficult.121

  We can describe the varying aspects of the cults of the god, but it’s not clear how differently they were seen by participants. Some individuals participated in several different kinds of Dionysiac experience,122 but others clearly focused on only one aspect and might even have been hostile to other varieties. Plutarch, for instance, was obviously very uncomfortable with Olympias’ highly emotional, personal, and female-dominated cult, yet he himself was an initiate of a cult of Dionysus that seemed focused on the hope of rebirth to a better life ( Mor. 611d–e). Not everyone, however, would have shared Plutarch’s discomfort. If, as Duris claimed, Olympias did go to battle dressed as a Bacchant, to the beat of a Dionysiac drum, then this was immensely successful as a strategy. She may have recalled a story (Polyaen.

  4.1) about how a band of Macedonian maenads once turned away an enemy army.123 The Macedonian army’s religious sensibilities were not those of Plutarch, a learned gentleman from central Greece, many centuries removed from the world of Olympias and Alexander. Apparently Macedonians found the image of Olympias as a Dionysiac worshiper a compelling one, perhaps one that summarized the two things Diodorus (19.11.2) said made the army go over to Olympias: her reputation or authority and the benefits her son had secured for his people. What for us seems exotic and disconcerting was for them familiar and yet powerful: the daughter, the wife, the mother of kings leading her army into battle, dressed to show the support of a popular deity, part of the dynasty’s ancestral religion, a favorite of her son and husband.

  Obviously, her Dionysiac experience could and probably did signify something quite different to Olympias herself. In virtually all aspects of her life, she tried to exercise power and influence over others when it was possible

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  to do so. She took pride in her high birth and distinguished ancestry.

  Doubtless she enjoyed organizing the activities of what may have been a group of women taken from the Macedonian elite, perhaps adding her own ancestral customs to Macedonian ritual, reveling in a ritual role that allowed her to act out her position (at least by the period of Alexander’s later childhood) as the dominant woman at court. Although Dionysiac cult may have offered only illusory freedom to most female participants, if Duris’ testimony is to be believed, Olympias actually managed to use it to acquire greater power and prestige. Though Olympias, as far as we know, never asserted herself against either her husband or her son in any significant way, she certainly did so against other men, most notably Antipater and Cassander.

  She may have savored the male reaction engendered by those upsetting snakes. Even if the story about her pet snakes is a fiction, her Dionysiac experience probably provided her with personal and emotional solace as well. Though she exercised a degree of independence and control over her own life, if only after the death of Philip, that was unusual in the Hellenic world, and most of her attempts to assert herself against various male figures ended, as we have seen, in failure. She would therefore have needed a transcendent experience as much as, if not more than, the typical Greek woman.124

  Although, thanks to sexual stereotyping and contemporary political propaganda, our sources exaggerate the degree to which emotion motivated Olympias, her actions suggest that she was a person with strong feelings. Her role in Dionysiac cult, particularly during the reign of Philip, when her life was otherwise quite limited, may have provided a means to express these feelings in a comparatively acceptable way. Apart from those who would take seriously the idea that Olympias was cuckolding Philip with a divine snake, few would now believe that Olympias’ Dionysiac experience, like that of other elite women, was in any way sexual.125 Plutarch’s assertion ( Alex.

  2.5) that Olympias was interested in both Orphic and Dionysiac rites may well mean that she was, like others in the Macedonian elite, also an initiate in the Dionysiac cul
t associated with rebirth.126

  While Olympias’ intense and personal religiosity may well have influenced the development of a similar religious sensibility in her son,127 and certainly her focus on Aeacid ancestry had a profound effect on Alexander’s emulation of Achilles, her Dionysiac beliefs and activities are less likely to have shaped his. Both certainly had interests in Dionysiac experience but, whereas Olympias’ revolved around ecstatic female cult, perhaps some sort of civic cult, and hopes for the afterlife, Alexander’s Dionysiac interests related to symposia and to emulation of Dionysus as the conqueror of the East. Moreover, Alexander’s attraction to Dionysus largely related to the later period of his life, not to his early years, when maternal influence would seem more likely.128

  In short, though mother and son shared an enthusiasm for Dionysus, that enthusiasm manifested itself in conventionally gendered ways.129

  Since her husband Philip II came close to asserting his divinity and that of his dynasty (and some would say did more130) and her son first advanced

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  claims to divine sonship and ultimately to divinity itself,131 we must address Olympias’ possible role, both active and passive, in these developments. No royal woman received cult until at least ten years after the death of Olympias, and when female royal cult began, it occurred in the context of the need of Alexander’s Successors to legitimize their rule.132 Nonetheless, some evidence implies that Philip may have included Olympias (and his mother133) in his flirtation with divinity, that Alexander may have contemplated her deification, and that Olympias may herself have inspired her son’s belief in his divine or semi-divine nature. We must therefore consider Olympias’ part in the early stages of the development of ruler cult.

  While Philip II most famously approximated divine status for himself when he arranged for the inclusion of a statue of himself to be marched along with those of the twelve Olympian gods at the wedding festival for his daughter (Diod. 16.92.5), he also authorized the construction of a building that hinted at the divinity of his immediate family. Pausanias (5.17.4, 20.9–10) describes a round building at Olympia, within the sacred area of the Altis, constructed by Philip some time after his great victory at Chaeroneia in 338, which housed five large statues of the king himself, his father Amyntas, his son Alexander, his mother Eurydice,134 and Olympias.135 The Philippeum looked like a temple, was placed where one would expect a temple to be, and the statues it protected were made of gold and ivory, a fabrication previously associated only with images of the gods.136 Thus the building, unlike the procession at Cleopatra’s wedding, intimated that not only Philip but each member of his immediate family was isotheos (equal to a god) and perhaps more. The presence of Olympias’ image in the Philippeum group demonstrates the definition of his dynasty that Philip wanted to present to the Greek world. He included her statue (and the implied allusion to divinity) because she was the mother of his heir, not because he did or did not like her. Its inclusion cannot be used to date the Philippeum.137 Here was Philip’s official, semi-divine family.138

  According to Curtius (and he alone), Alexander, after his nearly fatal wounding while fighting the Malli in India, told his close associates that, after long reflection, he intended to have his mother “consecrated to immortality”

  after his death. Alexander justifies or explains this action as the greatest reward for his labors and tasks, and commands them to accomplish it if he dies too soon to do it himself (9.6.26). At the end of his work, when Curtius is summing up Alexander’s character (10.5.30), he alludes to the king’s decision to consecrate Olympias “among the immortals” as part of his general piety toward his parents. No other source refers to Alexander’s determination to deify his mother after death, but in the light of Philip’s posthumous cults, Alexander’s hope for the deification of Hephaestion, and his own lifetime cult, the notion is unsurprising, though not necessarily historical. The failure of other sources to mention Alexander’s intention is not reassuring: it could be a Roman fiction based on posthumous cults for several imperial women or material taken from the Alexander Romance. Alexander,

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  of course, claimed divinity on the basis of his actions, which he deemed great enough to merit elevation to divine status. If the story about Olympias is true, Curtius implies that Alexander believed his mother deserved divine status not because of any actions of her own but because of his. Parental piety apart, a deified mother matched to a deified father certainly strengthened Alexander’s own claims; traditionally divine status required both parents to be divine, not just one. We know nothing of how Olympias reacted to Alexander’s plan, though it is difficult to imagine her objecting to it.139 In any event, much like her inclusion in the quasi-divine dynastic group in the Philippeum, Olympias’ supposed posthumous cult did not derive from any action of her own.

  In contrast, many scholars believe that Olympias herself first suggested to Alexander that he was the son of god, whether Zeus Ammon or some other.140 Little convincing evidence survives that would either support this belief or deny it. In antiquity, views apparently differed as to whether Olympias inspired Alexander’s conviction that he was the son of a god.

  Plutarch ( Alex. 3.2) preserves opinions on both sides. He cites Eratosthenes for the story that, as Alexander departed for Asia, Olympias told him alone something secret concerning his birth and urged him to do nothing unworthy of his origins, obviously implying that she had confided that his birth was divine. Others, he observes, insisted that she denied any part in the idea and wittily urged her son to cease slandering her to Hera.141 Plutarch, of course, in his account of the snake sleeping by Olympias’ side and more explicitly in the immediately preceding passage (3.1), connects Philip, but not Olympias, to acceptance of the idea that a god, rather than Philip, had fathered Alexander. Arrian (4.10.2) claimed that Callisthenes, Alexander’s official historian, referred contemptuously to Olympias’ lies about Alexander’s birth, insisting that Alexander’s participation in divinity depended instead on his history of the king’s exploits. For a variety of reasons, it is quite unlikely that Callisthenes said or wrote any such thing.142

  From a purely chronological point of view, it is possible that Olympias’

  could have been Alexander’s first inspiration for the views that became public at Siwah. Although one cannot establish exactly when Alexander first became convinced privately that he was the son of Zeus, it must have preceded his extraordinary trip to consult the oracle of Zeus Ammon at Siwah in 331: the visit apparently confirmed rather than suggested divine sonship.143 Moreover, his understanding of his birth clearly derived from Greek not Egyptian concepts144 and thus likely originated in his early years in Macedonia. Public references to his conviction (often in the nature of objections to it) are comparatively frequent after this.145

  In the absence of strong evidence, one can only assess what is plausible.

  Those who believe that Olympias was the likely instigator of her son’s conviction that his father was a divinity adduce a variety of reasons or (frequently) none at all: Olympias’ intense religiosity, her dislike of Philip, her belief that the snake in question was Dionysus (Zeus Ammon presumably later being

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  substituted), her ambition for herself and for her son.146 Majority opinion these days sees Alexander as fervently religious and genuinely convinced, first, of his divine paternity and, later, of his own divinity, all based on his unprecedented victories and wealth.147 Obviously, if we conclude that Alexander believed that he was the son of a god, it becomes more likely that Olympias did as well, or, minimally, that she did not deny it. While one can comparatively easily imagine that her sensibilities were such that she became convinced that a god in the form of a snake had impregnated her with Alexander, it is far less likely that Olympias originated the idea, especially early in Alexander’s reign or late in Philip’s. Greek women, especially elite or royal Greek women, could not risk the cha
rge of adulterous behavior, whether with a man or a divine snake. In the light of Attalus’ charges in 338 or 337, Olympias would have been particularly cautious about anything that seemed to justify his remarks.148 Over time Alexander came to believe not so much that Philip was not his father, but rather that he was the son of both Zeus and Philip.149 This view, political benefits aside (this was a more acceptable story for those many loyal Macedonian partisans of Philip), may have developed in part to avoid scandalous remarks about Olympias. Tales of Olympias’ pseudo-serpent lover in the Alexander Romance (see Chapter 6) point to the risks inherent in asserting that anyone other than Philip sired Alexander. Olympias doubtless supported Alexander’s claims of divine sonship and divinity, but she was not their inventor.150

  Olympias’ personal religiosity has proved virtually impossible to define, but those aspects of her religious life that involved public action are not.

  On the one hand, much of her religious activity was typical, on a grand scale, of Hellenic female religious activity. On the other, her involvement, though probably entirely passive or reactive, in the early development of individual and dynastic ruler cult was anything but conventional, although it set a precedent for royal women in the subsequent Hellenistic period.

  6

  Olympias’ afterlife

  Olympias’ afterlife, that is to say popular tradition and memory of Olympias, her reception, proved surprisingly happy but also surprisingly conventional for a woman so controversial during her actual life time. She even had a better sex life in her afterlife. As we consider the impact of her career and the fortunes of her reputation throughout the rest of the ancient period, it will become clear that the main reason the posthumous image of Olympias quickly became so much blander than the complex and sometimes frightening historical woman is that, serious historical writing apart, little memory of her individual acts and ambitions survived. The disappearance of the Argead dynasty happened shortly after her own death and the demise of the Aeacid dynasty (at least as a ruling family) followed within less than a century. After that, apart from a few obscure surviving Aeacids (see below), she had no descendants and so could be no one’s distinguished ancestor whose deeds could be celebrated.1 She was recalled largely because she was the mother of Alexander. Her reputation rose, fell, and altered with Alexander’s.