In the late fourth and early third centuries, Alexander III’s generals and philoi established new Hellenistic dynasties, several of which included the daughters of the most noble families of the former Achaemenid world throughout western Asia as their new dynastic wives. In addition to their diplomatic significance, these women were important in visual and material articulations of dynastic identity and dynastic rule. The public honors, coinage, and luxury portable objects associated with these women not only provide evidence for their physical movement across continents but also give us a glimpse into their roles in the making of Hellenistic queenship. This chapter examines select assemblages left by Roxane, Apama, and Amastris – all of whom were born into royal or noble families in Iran or central Asia, married Macedonian dynasts, and moved westward – as well as Stratonice, the daughter of a Macedonian king who moved eastward after marrying into the Seleucid dynasty. These case studies offer an art-historical and materially focused examination of Macedonian encounters with western Asia while demonstrating the ways that non-Macedonian and non-Greek women of the late fourth and early third centuries contributed to public expressions of imperial power and dynastic consolidation via objects of queenship across the Hellenistic world.

Hellenistic queenship was richly represented across the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE. From luxury portable objects to large-scale monuments, public ceremonies to sacred spaces, extant material and visual culture show us that royal women were central to the articulation of dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Queens were important subjects of representation (that were sometimes objects of contemplation) as well as patrons of art and architecture. The art history of Hellenistic queenship comprises an eclectic array of representational strategies in different settings, across a range of materials and media, from the colossal to the miniature. As such, this volume has explored a variety of different case studies from various regions and kingdoms: Hecatomnid Caria, Lycia, Sparta, Argead Macedon, Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Asia, and Attalid Anatolia.

In the third century BCE, Ptolemy II, together with the architect Timochares, imagined a new kind of representation to commemorate his deceased sister and wife, Arsinoe II. The Elder Pliny explains how Timochares put his special knowledge of materials to work: he planned to construct the vaulting of Arsinoe’s Alexandrian temple out of lodestone – a dark mineral with magnetic properties – to suspend her partially iron portrait statue above the heads of viewers, achieving the effect of a levitating deity. Had the plans come to fruition, the visual experience would have, perhaps, filled the king’s subjects with terror and wonder.

The Ptolemaic basilissa’s body was a significant subject in royal art, appearing across various kinds of visual and material culture. In this chapter, I explore the different ways that Ptolemaic royal women “wore” the female body in their representations. By attending to how the royal female body was conceptualized, visualized, and materialized, I examine the importance of corporeality to Ptolemaic queenship. By the first quarter of the third century, figural representations of Ptolemaic royal women were proliferated via objects that circulated across the waterscapes and landscapes of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean and were carved onto surfaces of colossal architecture for various viewing communities. One of the most striking aspects of the material record for the Ptolemaic dynasty is the relatively large number of extant figural representations of royal women – consisting of temple reliefs, statues in the round, mosaics, glyptic arts, and other luxury portable objects – compared to that of other Hellenistic dynasties.

The fourth century was a time of sweeping political, cultural, and social transformations, including profound changes in dynastic art. One such major change was that dynastic women began to appear in public art throughout the eastern Mediterranean, just before the military conquests of Alexander III. Fourth-century dynastic women were publicly active and could take on politically important roles, usually alongside their husbands or kings: they quelled arguments, arranged marriages for the poor, helped facilitate cases of manumission, and participated in royal spectacles, to name only a handful of examples. But what can their representations in public art tell us about the conceptual and political contours of dynastic femininity in the early fourth century? In this chapter, I examine the ways in which dynastic women from Lycia, Sparta, Caria, and Macedon figured as both subjects and patrons in monuments, using sculptural fragments, bases, inscriptions, and surviving textual records. Each of the select monuments under analysis illuminates how different communities represented the idealized dynastic woman – that is, a woman in close proximity to networks of power through marriage or by blood. As such, my examination of these examples will contribute to our understanding of the strategies that rulers developed to express dynastic legitimacy and continuity on the one hand and the ways in which non-dynastic people perceived queenship and its political contours via their own dedications of and engagements with representations of dynastic women on the other.

Representations of royal and dynastic women were not limited to honorific portrait statues in the Hellenistic world. In different regions of the vast Seleucid Empire, dynasts and subjects could evoke the presence of royal women through highly choreographed ephemeral spectacles and ritualized performances. Moreover, figural representations of queenly faces cannot easily or exclusively be interpreted as portraits of specific Seleucid queens. Rather, my analyses approach these queenly faces as potent symbols that communicated information about the Seleucid dynasty and ideas about Seleucid queenship. Here, I turn my focus to these diverse representational practices, as well as to images of queenly faces on crowns, coins, and sealings.

For the Attalid dynasty, royal mothers were central figures in royal monuments and public honors. While other dynasties I have discussed thus far – the Argeads, Ptolemies, and Seleucids – likewise stressed the importance of maternal qualities in queens through their emphasis on fertility, continuity of a dynastic line, and care for subjects and communities, much of the Attalid kingdom’s dynastic monument-building stressed the queen’s role as a mother, and all that entailed. So much so that the Attalid queen’s maternal qualities were even highlighted in monuments commemorating military victory and dynastic kingship. This emphasis not only augmented Attalid themes of “self-conscious filial, fraternal, and conjugal ‘values’” of monarchy, as scholars have already explored, but also articulated key notions of Attalid queenship. In this chapter, I build on this robust scholarship by considering how the Attalid royal mother (as well as other queenly and maternal figures) fit into visual narratives and monument landscapes of divine and dynastic triumph, and how this figure shaped cultic life and commemorative practices.