"The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men."~ Pericles

       The study of civilizations, with their rise and fall in world history, can be done through the lens of many different schools of thought. The transition of Greece from its influential Classical period through the dominance of Macedonia and Alexander the Great and then spread of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean yields a ripe field of study for the disciplines of military history, political history, and even art and cultural history. One field of study that has lagged behind is the history of women and their lives as the Greek civilization changed. While it is true the influence of the classical Greek culture has shaped the political and cultural development of the Western world it is in the age of Hellenism that the role women played in society became not just subject of literary drama but real life drama as well.  During the Hellenistic period the identity of “woman” could, for the first time, become more than what they had been relegated to previously, housewife or "hetaira" (Pomeroy 89).
       To understand how the status of Greek women may have shifted from the Classical period it is necessary to first address the lives of women in the center of Greek culture, Athens. Gomme describes the view of women during this period, thus: "...legally, socially, and in general estimation women occupied a low place in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries.."(Gomme, 2). During this period Athenian culture had been influenced by its Ionian neighbors. As Katz explains,"...under the influence of neighboring peoples of Asia Minor, [Ionians] inaugurated the exclusion of women from the public sphere and their confinement to the home and to the company of female friends. The Athenians adopted the practice from their fellow Ionians...Prostitution...sprang up as the inevitable corollary to the seclusion of well-born women..."(Katz, 73). This seclusion of women to their homes became a way of dividing and subordinating the female population to either a possession of men as a wife to bear children and maintain their households or the possession of men as a “female companion”, or hetaira. The division of men and women into quite different spheres created a society where men had the freedom of engaging in the public space while women’s space became more limited and less significant. As Pomeroy points out “While men spent most of their day in public arenas such as the marketplace and the gymnasium, respectable women remained at home...residential quarters were dark, squalid, and unsanitary" (Pomeroy, 79).

          The few women who managed to claim the attention and respect of Athenian men were usually hetaira, “escorts” of not only remarkable beauty but talent and intelligence as well. Plutarch writes of one such woman, Aspasia. Consort to the great Athenian ruler Pericles, Plutarch characterizes her influence in this way:

… some say that Pericles resorted unto her, because she was a wise woman, and had great understanding in matters of state and government. For Socrates himself went to see her sometimes with his friends: and those that used her company also brought their wives with them many times to hear her talk ... And to Plato’s book entitled Menexenus … this story is written truly: that this Aspasia was repaired unto by divers of Athenians, to learn the art of rhetoric from her. (Plutarch, 161)

While women like Aspasia had great freedom to interact with a variety of Athenian men, and sometimes even their wives, and held great influence in her social circle this freedom was not one afforded to the Athenian housewife.
            The “free women” of Athens were restricted to an inner life, lived for the most part within the inner walls of their home to prevent them from coming into contact with men with whom they were not related (Pomeroy, 81). There was no liberal education and engagement in political and intellectual debate, like might have been seen in Aspasia’s world. For the wives of Athens seclusion became codified as a signifier of status. As Pomeroy explains

Women stayed home not only because their work did not allow them much chance to get out but because of the influence of public opinion. Many families were likely to own at least one female slave, but even a woman with slaves was tied down by the demands of her household....Wealthier women were most likely to stay home and send their slaves on errands. But poor women, lacking slaves, could not be kept in seclusion ... (Pomeroy, 79-80)

The poorer a female was the more range of freedom she had by sheer necessity to run her home and survive economically, though the only women with any economic independence in Athenian society were those who made their money through prostitution (Pomeroy, 91).

The irony of seclusion lies in its inverse relationship to the political structure of Athens during the fifth century BCE. Katz notes that it actually became a growing social norm “at just the time when democratic ideals of liberty were institutionalized....Athenian men now turned to the company of hetairas ("female companions") for the female intellectual stimulation [they could not find at home]" (Katz, 73). As men were establishing democratic principles and engaging in political and philosophical debates that would greatly influence the future of not just Athens but eventually the Western world their wives were often being pushed inside and out of public engagement. But political change in the mid fourth century will impact the lives of women in an unexpected way, with the development of what will be known as “Hellenistic queens”. These royal women would become major players in political battles and intrigues often becoming both perpetrator and victim.

            While Athenians were crafting more democratic government their Macedonian neighbors to the north were, “ hardly more than a geographical expression, ...The kings of Macedon sat on uneasy thrones, their hold on power and the unity of the kingdom itself repeatedly threatened by … invasions and the intervention of various Greek states on behalf of rival Macedonian dynasts” (www.historians.org).  It was under the leadership of Philip II from 359 to 336 BCE that Macedonian power consolidated and began to expand across Greece (www.historians.org). This shift in power brings with it a new type of power player to the political scene: the mother who would be Queen.

One such queen was Philip II’s wife and the mother of Alexander the Great, Olympias. When Philip II was assassinated at his daughter’s wedding in 336 BCE it was rumored that Olympias had been behind it. Because the assassin was captured and killed there is no way to know for certain. However, “... She does seem to have been responsible for killing Philip's last wife, Cleopatra and their newborn baby... “as means of insuring her son, Alexander’s succession to the throne as well as her own continued political security (Salisbury, 256). When Alexander sets out to defeat the Persians and expand Macedonian power in the Mediterranean in 338 BCE it is Olympias who “presided over the court in Macedonia” in direct competition with Alexander’s “viceroy”, Antipater (Pomeroy, 122).

In a similar vein, Philip II’s daughter and Alexander’s half-sister, Cynane had thoughts of who would succeed her half-brother, Alexander, upon his demise. Having been raised to understand the "art" of battle she taught her daughter, Eurydice, to seek power and they set their sights on a union for Eurydice with one of Alexander’s “weak-minded” half-brothers who would most likely be designated his successor.  While their marriage goal was attained Cynane was seen as a potential problem for her son-in-law and was killed by one of his general’s. Meanwhile, Olympias viewed Eurydice’s power play as a threat to her own security and eventually had both Eurydice and her husband executed. In an ironic, if not self-perpetuated twist, Olympias was also seen as a political threat by her opponent, Antipater’s son, and she too would be put to death. (Sergeant, 16-17).

These two examples are just a few in a long line of Macedonian royal women who battle for personal and political control, a unique development in a world where men had been the political players up to this point.  As Sanford illustrates in regards to the Hellenistic queens following the death of Alexander the Great, “Though they seldom ruled in their own right, they were often interested in dynastic affairs and in Egypt sometimes ruled jointly with their husbands...Greek women of the upper and middle classes naturally gained in freedom through the example of courts, and their opportunity for education increased. (Sanford, 308).

Some of this freedom was a result of the shift away from the city-state and local political power to the hegemony of Macedonian rule. As the identity of citizenship and polis were reshaped by the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the Hellenistic world the privilege gap between men and women also evolved.  Dillon and James explain this age, spanning from the rise of Macedonian power to the conquest of the Mediterranean by Rome, as period which gave rise to a new opportunity for Greek women with a burgeoning ability to obtain and use economic power:

A new phenomenon appeared in this period, namely the political and public prominence of specific elite women who exercised power in a number of ways ...These women need not have been royal and they perceived themselves as having a right to take an active role in the lives, politics, and even wars of their cities...Female public patronage began in this period, on many levels, from helping individual citizens to paying public debts to providing important public buildings. This pattern of female prominence and participation in public life appeared throughout this cosmopolitan period. (Dillon, 229).

The era of political transition of Greek city-state to Macedonian empire became a transition period for Greek women as well. While full gender equality would not be a result of this age of cosmopolitan attitudes the opportunity for women to hold power, political or economic. and to use it was a great step forward from the life of seclusion they were generally expected to live during the Classical period of Greece.