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Power Couples in Antiquity: Transversal Perspectives ed. by Anne Bielman Sánchez

2021; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bio.2021.0045

1529-1456

Daniel E. Harris-McCoy,

Marriage and Sexual Relationships

Reviewed by: Power Couples in Antiquity: Transversal Perspectives ed. by Anne Bielman Sánchez Daniel Harris-McCoy (bio) Power Couples in Antiquity: Transversal Perspectives Anne Bielman Sánchez, editor Routledge, Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies, 2019, 226 pp. ISBN 9781138575264, $160 hardcover. ISBN 9781032093291, $48.95 paperback. Brangelina. Kimye. Tomkat. Billary. Power couples occupy such a potent space in today's hypersonic, pop- and politics-obsessed scrolling culture that the best of them have acquired their own poetics, the portmanteau. For students of contemporary society, power couples—typically celebrity or political couples whose carefully manicured identities appeal to our fascination with elite unions while also, we assume, serving the personal ambitions of the couples themselves—can tell us something about love, family, fame, and power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But is the concept of the power couple equally applicable to more distant time periods? Can it be used to better understand the history of the Ancient Mediterranean, for example? Anne Bielman Sánchez, editor of Power Couples in Antiquity, emphasizes from the start that the power couple is, in some sense, a modern idea (1). The term only recently began to appear in dictionaries and is evidently traceable to the soap opera [End Page 635] General Hospital, where it was used to describe the TV couple Luke and Laura Spencer (5–6). There are, however, good reasons to establish a framework for thinking about ancient power couples, not least because studies of ancient power figures have tended to focus on individuals (3). Furthermore, by identifying a complex set of variables to help us think about the self-presentation and actions of power couples in antiquity, Bielman Sánchez has created something helpful for the study of gender and social history both in antiquity and beyond. Power Couples grew, first, out of a team research project based at the University of Lausanne and then a workshop at which specialists in gender studies were invited to respond to preestablished questions relating to ancient power couples viewed from a diachronic perspective (1, 4). What emerged was a relatively slim book of 214 pages not including front matter. It is comprised of an introduction, nine chapters on power couples from the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, and a closing "initial survey" that synthesizes observations made in the individual chapters. On this basis, the book establishes the titular "transversal" sense of how power couples worked in antiquity, or rather the variables that governed their existence and informed their choices. Apart from the introductory and closing essays, the chapters are organized chronologically. In addition to focusing on specific couples, these chapters are often presented as emblematic of periods or themes (e.g., Ch. 1 "An exceptional Argead couple: Philip II and Olympias"; Ch. 2 "Looking for the Seleucid couple"; Ch. 7 "The exceptional and eternal couple: Augustus and Livia"). Cumulatively, the individual chapters establish a sufficient set of period-specific observations to allow a more dynamic, diachronic sense of the ancient power couple to emerge. The book's criteria for an ancient power couple are fairly strict: an adult man and woman involved in a stable relationship that produces children (the childless relationship of Augustus and Livia is an exception). One or both members of the power couple must also be a head of state, thus privileging Hellenistic queens and kings, and Roman triumvirs and imperial couples (2). For this reason, and to maintain a sense of historical contiguity and interconnection, the individual chapters examine couples from the Hellenistic Period (Philip II and Olympias; the "Seleucid Couple"; Cleopatra Thea and her husbands; Ptolemy IV and Arsinoe III; Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II) to the Late Roman Republic (Antony and his many wives and women, including Cleopatra) and Early Empire (Augustus and Livia; the poet Propertius on Augustus' stepdaughter Cornelia and her husband, Aemilius Lepidus Paullus; Claudius and his wives, Valeria Messalina and Julia Agrippina). Bielman Sánchez recognizes that limiting the power couples to heads of state may "seem surprising," especially when so many modern power couples come from the arts or society (2). I would have preferred a broader selection of couples included in the book. To me, identifying power couples is a...