Podcast Season 3, Episode 11: Beyond the Battlefield: Women and Warfare in the Ancient Greek World with Elizabeth D. Carney

In this instalment of the Peopling the Past Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Elizabeth D. Carney is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities, Emerita, at Clemson University. Her focus has been on Macedonian and Hellenistic monarchy and the role of royal women in ancient monarchy. She has written Women and Monarchy in Ancient Macedonia (2000), Olympias, Mother of Alexander the Great (2006), Arsinoë of Egypt and Macedon: A Royal Life (2013) and Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power (2019). Some of her articles dealing with monarchy are collected in King and Court in Ancient Macedonia: Rivalry, Treason and Conspiracy (2015). She has coedited Philip II and Alexander the Great (2010) with Daniel Ogden, Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty (2018) with Caroline Dun, and The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World (2020) with Sabine Müller.

Read along, as Dr. Carney tells us all about her research on the nature of ancient warfare in Macedonia, and the ways in which women, both elite and non-elite, participated in and experienced these conflicts.

Interested in learning more? Check out these related works by Dr. Carney:

Carney, E.D. (2004) “Women and Military Leadership in Macedonia.” AncW 35: 184-195.

Carney, E.D. 2021. “Women and War in the Greek World” In Wiley Companion to Greek Warfare, in A Companion to Greek Warfare, edited by W. Heckel, F. Naiden, E. E. Garvin, and J. Vanderspoel. John Wiley and Sons: London, 2021, 329-338.

The following is a transcript of a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Carney that we originally recorded for Season 3 of the Peopling the Past Podcast on women in the ancient Mediterranean. The audio file was too corrupted for use, so we have chosen to present a transcript of our conversation instead.

Chelsea Gardner: [Hello, all of you out there, and welcome again to Peopling the Past, a podcast about real people and the ancient world. Every week we chat with academics, professionals and enthusiasts to bring you real stories and current research about the everyday folk who lived in antiquity. My name is Chelsea Gardner.

Melissa Funke: And I’m Melissa Funke.

Chelsea Gardner: On today’s episode, we’re going to travel to the world of ancient women warriors and warfare in Macedonia. So Melissa, who is our guest today?

Melissa Funke: Our guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Carney. She is professor emerita at Clemson University, where she taught for over 30 years, and she continues to work on women and power in ancient Macedon. She has presented and published extensively on this topic. Most recently, she has co-edited The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World with Sabine Müller. She is currently at work on a chapter for Brill’s Companion to the Campaigns of Philip II and Alexander the Third that will examine women’s contributions to these military campaigns. She has also contributed a great deal to the position of women in the field of classical studies, having served as co-chair of the Women’s Classical Caucus and on the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, of what used to be known as the American Philological Association, now known as the Society for Classical Studies. So welcome, Beth, to Peopling the Past. How are you today?

Elizabeth Carney: Good, good.

Melissa Funke: We’re very excited to speak with you today about women and war. Could you start by explaining some of the ways that women in the ancient world were connected to, or perhaps affected by, war?

Elizabeth Carney: Well, since we’ve had the Ukraine war going on in the last week or so, I find myself thinking pretty much in the same ways they still are. They experienced war as victims of it, refugees, they experienced more indirectly in terms of how social life, the economy was affected, even if they weren’t directly victims of war, indirectly they still did. And some of them fought, some women, very much in the context of helping to defend a besieged city and others…it’s hard to tell exactly, but kind of played being warriors, whether or not they actually were sometimes hard to tell, but they constructed a public persona that was warlike.

Chelsea Gardner: But so it sounds like we don’t necessarily have a lot of evidence for like an official formal role for women in war, right? It seems like it’s more adaptive and reactive to certain situations. Is that right?

Elizabeth Carney: So royal women, there are accounts, the further you go down in ancient history more so. More for Roman than Greek. There’s archaeology and then there are narratives. The narratives either talk about famous women or they may, in passing, refer to women in groups like when Thebes is captured and all the women are enslaved, things like that. So there’s evidence, but there’s not a lot. 

Chelsea Gardner: Right.

Elizabeth Carney: And you kind of have to read against what the author’s agenda is, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Chelsea Gardner: Right. So trying to figure out what the truth is, that’s the tricky task of the historian. Are there any other kinds of information available to us that would reveal women’s role in war?

Elizabeth Carney: There are some inscriptions. So things like grave inscriptions, maybe a poetic text that say a woman killed herself rather than be raped.

Chelsea Gardner: Right.

Elizabeth Carney: I think there are some inscriptions from later in the Hellenistic period that relate to the ransoming of captives, but then you are really stuck primarily with narratives. And in terms of archeology, if it’s people who accompanied an army, mercenaries, wives and children, for instance, but also the Roman army, sometimes you’ve got what looks like a mass grave from some kind of war. They’ve found a grave with the bodies of men, women and children and some animals that appeared to have happened at the time of Roman conquest.

Melissa Funke: So the theme that I’m hearing from these answers is really that we have evidence of women as this really nasty collateral damage in war, women who are harmed.

Elizabeth Carney: Absolutely.

Melissa Funke: I’m just wondering if you can kind of expand on that. Even if women aren’t on the battlefield, what are the ways that we see in these sources of them being affected by what’s happening on the battlefield?

Elizabeth Carney: Well, most obviously, when a city is under siege. You do have texts that talk about women helping with defense, whether it’s a wall has been breached and they bring things for that. They bring food, supplies to the men who are fighting. There’s the classic throwing roof tiles story, which is also one that is told about enslaved people. So famously, Pyrrhus, the great warrior king, is put in a situation which leads to his death because an angry mother throws a roof tile on him. But I think it is only because I got asked to do this chapter, that I really started thinking this through. There’s what happens on the home front when men are gone for prolonged periods. Obviously it affects people economically. It’s not like their husbands can go put money in their charge accounts. I mean that’s not an option.

Chelsea Gardner: Right. 

Elizabeth Carney: So even if ultimately there is profit to be made, there have to be long periods of time when the people they have left at home, not just women, but children and the elderly, have somehow to support themselves and exactly how they do that. You have to ask yourself the question and think through what might be the answer to those questions.

Melissa Funke: Yeah.

Elizabeth Carney: And so quickly, the modern conveniences disappear in the face of something like what the Ukrainians are going through right now. I mean, it doesn’t seem to matter what century you’re in. You’re walking down a road with no way to feed the people who are with you, and you may be being attacked as you walk down that road.

Chelsea Gardner: The fascinating thing about this, and, you know, the inherent tragic thing about this, is that these are questions that are very relevant, as you mentioned today, right? These are issues that have to be reckoned with over and over and over again. You work specifically and especially on Macedonia, and it’s such a unique place and situation. How does the role of women in Macedonia differ from somewhere like the rest of Greece, or, you know, any of these neighboring cultures in such a way that the women in Macedonia might have a different involvement in war?

Elizabeth Carney: Well, that is a question that’s very hard to answer, because until late in the Hellenistic period, there’s very little evidence about ordinary women. So we think, based on, you know, an inscription and a half, that it is possible that women in Macedonia and in Epirus, so northern Greece, had a little bit more legal independence in certain circumstances than women in some other parts of Greece, specifically in terms of property ownership for widows. There are some inscriptions that seem to show a woman acting with a son, not necessarily an adult son, but in control of property. So again, all of this is very iffy. So I don’t want to make a lot of it. But there is that possibility for ordinary women. And then just as a practicality, you look, for instance, at what happened in the 20th century during the First and Second World Wars, that women who had not previously been allowed to do certain things, at least for the duration of the war, did them, and as a practicality. So in Britain, what did they call them? The “land girls”. Well, they were young women. They weren’t married women with children, but they were certainly doing tasks. And, you know, obviously industrial tasks too. But it made a big difference. And I see no reason to think that there wouldn’t have been some accommodations like that. But I feel it’s true for the Greek world in general that it is more important to know what actually happened in families in terms of who did what and who decided things as opposed to what their formal legal rights were.

I feel reasonably confident that for women in the Macedonian elite, not just the royal family but past that, that even before we can prove it, by the age of Alexander’s reign and maybe Philip’s, there’s a more public role, a somewhat more aggressive role than maybe elsewhere in the Greek world. But I wouldn’t want to go very far down that path. But, for instance, when Philip is a teenager, he had two older brothers. The first was assassinated. So there’s this dicey moment: he and his next older brother are neither of them adults. And Philip, in fact, is probably busy being a hostage in Thebes at the time. And the people who killed the brother, they’re Macedonians. This is an internal thing. Philip’s mother Eurydice steps in. She summons Iphicrates, who had been adopted by her husband. So this is a philia relationship, and she asks Iphicrates to save rule for her sons. There are Athenians at this meeting and Macedonians are there. She supposedly puts her two boys on his lap, and there are different versions of this. But she does seem publicly to have done that. And he did what she asked. She may have been forced or may not, to marry the guy who’d assassinated her son. He may briefly have been king, or he may just have been regent. And soon enough, Philip’s surviving older brother offed this guy.

Chelsea Gardner: Of course. This is how it goes, right?

Elizabeth Carney: There’s one version that has Eurydice helping to kill the son. I don’t particularly buy into that one, but in any case, she clearly acted in a public way. She is referred to in this speech, as later Olympias will be, just by her first name.

Chelsea Gardner: Interesting! 

Elizabeth Carney: But she’s named, so it’s not like being an Athenian citizen woman, right? Where you would do everything to avoid being named.

Chelsea Gardner: Right.

Elizabeth Carney: She isn’t even given a patronymic or an identifier. Everybody knows who she is. There isn’t a title for women yet. In fact, Macedonian kings only started using a title themselves basically in the reign of Alexander. But they have a public persona that’s clear. She makes dedications. She may have founded a sanctuary, but she certainly makes dedications.

Chelsea Gardner: Definitely. 

Melissa Funke: Now that we’ve been talking about some of the more powerful women in the Macedonian context, I was hoping that you could start to tell us about some of the women who took part in war more directly, and maybe were possibly even right on the battlefield.

Elizabeth Carney: Okay, so one of Philip’s wives, Audata, was what the Macedonians called Illyrian, which basically means the guys north of us. It’s not their own ethnic construct, but odds are she herself fought in war. But in any case, she had a daughter, Cynnane, who supposedly did go into battle, in fact against the Illyrians, confronted another woman warrior and had been trained in military matters. Cynnane was married late in Philip’s reign to, you might say, the secondary heir, Alexander’s cousin. And then Philip died and Alexander offed Cynnane’s husband, the cousin, because Alexander was afraid he was trying for the throne himself. Alexander did try to marry Cynane off to somebody he considered barbaric, but an ally. But that guy just happened to die.

Melissa Funke: Okay.

Elizabeth Carney: So Cynane was left with a daughter and Alexander goes off to Asia. And I think we should assume that she didn’t like Alexander.

Melissa Funke: Oh, some sibling rivalry.

Elizabeth Carney: So she brings up her daughter Adea Eurydice, trains her in military matters, and then, presumably happily for Cynane, Alexander dies. Not good news for him, but for Cynane absolutely. So she’s still in Macedonia. Macedonia is in control of the old general of both Philip and Alexander Antipater, and Cynane decides to head out for the army in Asia. Antipater doesn’t want her to do it and tries twice militarily to have her stopped and fails. She seems to have a military force. How big is it? Were they Macedonians? Were they Illyrians? Were they mercenaries? We don’t know. Anyway, the reason she wants to go is she wants to have her daughter, who is maybe not even a teenager, marry one of the kings after Alexander. Philip Arrhidaeus. Now that’s Cynnane’s half brother. And needless to say, Alexander’s generals don’t want to have that happen. And so she dies. And probably there’s some kind of battle when she arrives with the Macedonian forces. It could be just a murder, but it sounds like a bit more. Perdiccas’ brother kills her, Perdiccas being regent at the time. But the Macedonian army is quite upset that they have just killed the sister of Alexander.

Chelsea Gardner: And their leader? 

Elizabeth Carney: Yeah! So the daughter of Philip and the sister of Alexander has been killed, and they are not happy, and the end result is that Perdiccas has to let the marriage go forward. So her daughter now takes a new name, Eurydice (we call her Adea Eurydice). And again, we don’t know exactly how old she was, but early teens, max. She begins to try to get control of the army. Now, in her case, we don’t know that she went into battle. We know for sure she gave speeches on numerous occasions to the army and she dressed like a soldier. In any case, depending a bit on account, she nearly succeeds in getting control. But in the end, Antipater comes east and is able to establish control. So she’s sort of closed down and he takes the two co-kings, Alexander the fourth’s mother, and Adea Eurydice, back to the Greek peninsula, and then he dies. At that point, two branches of the royal family come to the fore. Olympias is still alive, has gone back to her homeland. She wants, obviously, to have some chance that her grandson will rule. In fact, he is by this point 5 or 6. And the new regent, Polyperchon, asks her to come back to Macedonia, have some official position, and take care of her grandson.

And meanwhile, Adea Eurydice doesn’t like this at all, so she allies herself with Antipater’s son. And coming into Macedonia is an army led, maybe kind of a bit, by Olympias. She’s certainly there in person, Polyperchon the regent, and her nephew is now the king of Epirus. Adea Eurydice and her husband lead the whole Macedonian army out against them. So the two armies see each other and the whole Macedonian army, they see the wife of Philip, the mother of Alexander, and they go over to her, abandoning Adea Eurydice and Philip Arrhidaeus, whom Olympias imprisons and kills along with a few other people. Cassander, Antipater’s son, comes back over the mountains and says, “they were my allies. I’m going after you.” And he’s a very good general. And Olympias has no training, and neither her nephew nor Polyperchon, for various reasons, can get to her. So she is besieged in Pydna, and so effectively she is administering the siege. And at first there was hope for them to be relieved, but that faded. So Cassander offered terms that would supposedly enable her to go free. But he didn’t let her go, so she surrenders. She asks for a trial, which she may or may not have gotten, but in any case, it takes some doing to get her killed, but he gets her killed.

Melissa Funke: Wow. I’m having a hard time deciding whether this should be an HBO miniseries like Rome, or if it should be like The Real Housewives of Macedonia. Either one is great. It’s unbelievable that more people don’t know these stories.

So it’s so clear that women are such a powerful image to be used on the battlefield, especially these prominent women. They use their own image to affect the way that battle goes. But I wanted to swing back a little bit to some of our earlier conversation when we talked about women who are not voluntarily on the battlefield. They’re women who are part of a besieged city or their family members. And I wanted to talk about a woman who has become a really famous symbol of women being besieged. And that’s Timoclea of Thebes. So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about her story and why she’s such an important symbol to so many people.

Elizabeth Carney: So Timoclea is a member of an elite family at Thebes, and her brother Theagenes was killed fighting against Philip and Alexander at the Battle of Chaeronea. And then after Philip was assassinated and Alexander becomes king,  everybody is trying to get out from under the Macedonian thumb, there are a lot of different military efforts going on. So Alexander fights in the North, Thebes rises in revolt, and everybody else in the Greek peninsula is waiting to see what will happen. Alexander marches his army back to Thebes from what today would be Bulgaria. Alexander completely defeats the Thebans. They refuse to take terms. And the general account is that the men were all killed, and the women and children all enslaved. So Timoclea is living in Thebes, which has now been captured by Alexander’s forces. She has children, presumably servants too. The leader of some Thracian troops under Alexander’s command  comes to her house and rapes her. He and his men loot the house, but he is convinced there’s still more treasure, so he asks her to show him where it is, and she says that she has hidden it in a well. And in the most striking version of this story, as he looks down I, she flips him in and then throws stones on him. So the Thracian troops take her to Alexander, and Alexander pardons her, and in some versions of this, the rest of her family. Why does Alexander do that, granted that women are being raped and carried off all over the place? Well, first of all, because she is the sister of Theagenes, and in some versions of the story, not only does he pardon the rest of her household, but he tells the troops that they shouldn’t do this to upper class women. Now, mind you, she’s still completely without property, she has been raped, and they have no funds, but she lives to tell the tale. In our written accounts, it’s told very much from the point of view of Alexander, and Alexander is a moderate king and maybe a respecter of women’s virtues up to a point. And in art, the most famous painting about it, Domenichino’s, from early in the 17th century, is all about Alexander really. He’s doing the grand gesture. You see Timoclea, who’s tall, and a bunch of crying children, and this painting belonged to Louis the XIV. There’s a painting by Elisabetta Sirani that is from the point of view of the woman, so that Sirani’s version of the scene, of Timocleia pushing him in the well, is about that. There’s no Alexander in the picture. There’s nobody else. There’s her shoving him in.

Melissa Funke: That’s awesome.

Elizabeth Carney: It is quite compelling. Showing it from the point of view of the woman really changes things. Even though there’s nothing in Sirani’s painting that would contradict Plutarch.

Melissa Funke: Right. Of course. I love your research so much because, again, it puts agency back into not only, you know, the most famous Macedonian women, but also the everyday woman. I just have to say, you know, we talked a lot today about reframing this and thinking about it from the woman’s point of view and telling these stories. But I have to plug your article that also analyzes the archaeological remains on their own standing and exactly what you were saying about Timoclea constantly being framed within the context of Alexander’s actions. This is the same thing that’s been done with the physical remains of the woman in the tomb at Vergina that you publish an excellent article on. For so long, debates were made about her identity based on the male body, as opposed to looking at the remains that were directly related to that female body.

Elizabeth Carney: We should explain this is a tomb with two rooms and there is a male burial, a king almost certainly, in the main chamber, and in the antechamber a woman is buried. And there are military items in this separate room, the main room having been sealed. So when the tomb was first found, the presumption was that those military items belonged to the male in the main chamber. First of all, it wasn’t clear how many of the burial items were military. Nobody knew yet that there was an awful lot of military material that was part of the funeral pyre of the man. It took a while for people to take seriously the possibility that military material in the ante chamber of the tomb belonged to the woman, and some of the items  only gradually got understood as military. So there’s like the remains of a corselet. And it wasn’t really understood as such but as the remains of a piece of furniture. Even for people of different views of who the man was and therefore who the woman could be, I think there is an increasing assumption that whatever this woman actually did, the person who buried her created a partially military identity for her. And burials in tombs are always constructs. In this case, it’s almost certainly somebody royal burying somebody royal and claiming continuity with some of the last members of the original ruling family.

So it doesn’t necessarily tell you that the woman in question was a warrior, but that whoever was creating this burial chose to construct it that way. And the most recent examination of the human remains argues that her bones show evidence of being a habitual rider of horses. It is presumed that this is unusual. I am not so sure that’s true. One of the problems is just as some burials were assumed to be male but turn out to be female, it all depends on whether there’s been analysis of the human remains  and if the assorted anthropologists agree on that analysis, which in my experience, they rarely do. I think the question had probably not even often been asked. But it is interesting. And I’ve got to say, if you’re Olympias and you’ve been back and forth over the Pindus 4 or 5 times in your life, and you’re doing it with an army, I have a hard time picturing her in a sedan chair.

Melissa Funke: Your career of research is so important and so valuable to the field, and you shouldn’t have had to undo all of these years of preconceived notions of what a woman could be in the ancient world. But we sure appreciate that you did do it. And we love your research.

Elizabeth Carney: A lot of the stuff that did happen was happening not just because of views about women, but a lack of interest in monarchy, a presumption that there was an Athenian norm that was a very straightforward norm. And what’s happened, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, is people are taking dynastic rule and the role of women in monarchy much, much more seriously. I actually had two online meetings the same day at the end of last summer that had to do with women and monarchy in the ancient world. I had to choose which one to do. So I think that that has really changed things a lot.

Chelsea Gardner: Amazing. Okay, we still do have one more question for you. Now, this is a question that we ask all of our podcast guests, and it may or may not be related to your research or to what we’ve talked about today. But the question we ask everyone is, what do you identify with from the ancient world? And this can be anything. This can be an actual person, a mythological figure, a place, a monument, a set of objects, a text, anything. But what do you, Beth Carney, identify with from the ancient world?

Elizabeth Carney: I am fascinated with the work of two Greek archaeologists who worked under Chrysoula Saatsoglou-Paliadeli, Athanasia Kyriakou and Alexander Tourtas, who are now doing stuff on their own about the long history of Vergina, where the royal tombs are. They work particularly at the sanctuary where Eurydice (mother of Philip II) did dedications, but their work has also kind of given you the history of the site and to some degree, Eurydice. There isn’t total agreement about whether the very well-preserved statue, now reconstituted, that was found in the sanctuary area and was ritually buried, was originally intended as a portrait of Eurydice, or whether it was intended as a portrait of the goddess Eucleia, to whom it was certainly dedicated. Often statues of women, the face and maybe the hands were made of different material, which makes it particularly easy to alter them. And some, but not all, art historians and archaeologists think the face was altered, and there are lines around the mouth, which doesn’t seem super realistic in the context of the modern artistic tradition, but in terms of how generic images of women were, it’s clearly meant to indicate age. The statue was also moved. This is long after the end of the Argead dynasty, the death of Alexander. Pretty soon before Roman conquest, and the sanctuary gets altered, but the statue was apparently moved inside and then there’s this ritual burial early in Roman imperial times, at a period when, on the whole, the town is abandoned. People stayed around to do that 4 or 5 centuries after she had died, and that this statue got moved is fascinating to me.

Melissa Funke: That’s a fantastic answer, and I just want to say thank you so much. This was fascinating.

Elizabeth Carney: Oh, it’s been fun to talk to you guys.

Chelsea Gardner: Amazing. Well, yeah, this was absolutely wonderful. And thank you for sharing your time with us. Thanks. Thank you everyone for listening. Thanks again for listening and we will see you next time.

Melissa Funke: Thank you.