Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power (Women in Antiquity) by Elizabeth Donnelly Carney

Author:Elizabeth Donnelly Carney [Carney, Elizabeth Donnelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-05-06T22:00:00+00:00

6

Eurydice’s Public Image after Her Death

This is a chapter about the remembrance of the life of Eurydice in Macedonia and elsewhere in Greece. My focus is on her public memory, though much of what became public experience originated in private, within Eurydice’s family group, among those who knew her, and among her descendants. Almost certainly, initially, her son Philip crafted her posthumous public image, but gradually other members of the family had a role and, as the specifics of her life grew dimmer with the passage of time and the end of the Argead dynasty, Eurydice became part of a remembered greater Macedonian past.

Whatever the original intent of the statue that she had dedicated in front of the Eucleia sanctuary (see Chapter 5), the passing of time may well have transformed it, in the public mind, into an image of Eurydice herself; ordinary people, many not literate, may not have made much distinction between the actual portrait statue whose base was found at Palatitsia and the image from the Eucleia sanctuary. Sometime after the Roman defeat of Macedonia and the end of the kingdom, people at Vergina buried, with great care, the statue and others from the sanctuary Eurydice had patronized (see Chapter 5). In addition, another image, this one certainly a portrait statue of Eurydice (the one in the Philippeum at Olympia), has a history of its own; this statue traveled, if not very far. Personal names have much to do with memory; this is particularly so in the case of Eurydice. Being named after someone (or in this particular case, naming yourself after someone) powerfully recalls and reanimates their memory. Eurydice’s young great-granddaughter chose, as an adult, to rename herself after Eurydice. In a peculiar way, the choice of the famous archaeologist Manolis Andronikos to attribute an idiosyncratic tomb at Vergina to Eurydice has generated another, a modern sort of public image and memory of Eurydice. I suspect the name of the tomb will endure even if a time comes when we know in some fairly absolute way that it cannot have been hers. The tomb suits our reconstructed memory of Eurydice, whoever actually was the original occupant of the tomb.

No written source tells us when Eurydice died or specifically speaks of her death, but a collection of factors imply that she was dead by 346 or 343 at the latest. She likely made her Eucleia dedications in the 350s (see Chapter 5), and we know of no other later public action or gesture of hers apart from those dedications (though, of course, there may have been many, given the limited nature of our information). As I have noted, Eurydice’s birth date probably fell in the last decade of the fifth century, so a death in the 340s would mean she had lived a long life by ancient standards. She was probably dead by the time Aeschines, participating in an embassy to the Macedonian court, delivered his speech to Philip in 346 and even more likely by the

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