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Chapter One - Engendering Dynasty

Monumental Women and Public Sculpture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2025

Patricia Eunji Kim
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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  • Engendering Dynasty
  • Patricia Eunji Kim, New York University
  • Book: The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World
  • Online publication: 11 July 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009502160.003
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  • Engendering Dynasty
  • Patricia Eunji Kim, New York University
  • Book: The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World
  • Online publication: 11 July 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009502160.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Engendering Dynasty
  • Patricia Eunji Kim, New York University
  • Book: The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World
  • Online publication: 11 July 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009502160.003
Available formats
×