COUPLES AND POWER RELATIONS

The politics of power and the power of the political are strikingly enduring concerns. The clear tilt of western democracies towards demagoguery and familial rule in recent years makes a study of power couples through history a compelling topic. The collection is positioned by Bielman Sánchez as a propaedeutic examination of the application of the phrase ‘power couple’ to ancient marriages and offers the intriguing thesis that power couples are an enduring thread that transverses time and connects us with past milieux. This edited collection is the result of a 2017 workshop ‘Regards croisés sur les couples exceptionnels dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine’ held at the University of Lausanne. The workshop is part of a broader research project emerging from the same university entitled ‘Regards croisés sur les couples dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine, IV siècle av. J.-C. – II siècle ap. J.-C.’. The papers are organised chronologically, allowing the reader to consider the way in which couples have navigated their representation from the fourth century BC to the first century AD. The scope of the papers reveals the importance of familial power throughout the ancient Mediterranean. The collection includes papers on various Seleucids, Ptolemies and Julio-Claudians, each a clear politico-familial entity whose recognition through their name alone is an impressive reminder of just how much influence they wielded. The explicit desire to draw connections between the contemporary and the ancient worlds places this work in some relationship with reception studies, except that it reverses the dynamic. Rather than approaching reception over time, this study retrojects a modern concept to an ancient context. Bielman Sánchez examines contemporary definitions of the power couple in the introduction, and this provides the framework for the papers that follow. The idea at the heart of the collection is an interesting one: can we learn more about power and the couples that wielded it in the Graeco-Roman world by first thinking about how couples wield power today? Some of the modern examples drawn out in the course of the study include: Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Brangelina, the Obamas, the Clintons and the Windsors. Even from this short list, the semantic terrain of ‘power couple’ is hazy, extending from constitutional monarchy through democratic politics to outright celebrity. It is this conceptual texture that allows the contemporary phrase so much porosity and makes it an attractive analogy for ancient frameworks of power, which blended dynastic legitimacy with easy access to the apparatus of propaganda. In Chapter 1 E. Carney examines the politics at play in the reigns of the Argead couples Philip II and Olympias as well as Philip III and Adea Eurydice. Carney explores the various ways that the women in these relationships make claims to power through patrilineal, conjugal or filial connections. In both cases Carney emphasises the exceptional qualities of these unions on account of the fact that monarchy was viewed as ‘series of reigning males’ rather than royal couples. M. Widmer situates the discussion of Seleucid power as a test against the concept of ‘the couple’ in Chapter 2. This test is complicated by the polygamous practices of the court. Widmer notes that the titles of basileus and basilissa cannot be taken as synonymous with the modern phrase the ‘power couple’. What is most important for the Seleucids is the THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 147