Arsino of Egypt and Macedon

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 401 concept of the hero. Over a period of two centuries, Medea remains the most popular tragedy for the American stage. The earliest professional production that Foley unearthed was a pantomime from the late eighteenth century. Foley traces Medea’s curious history, from her early incarnations in which, as an act of maternal devotion, she kills her children to protect them and then commits suicide. She is subsequently rendered as a practitioner of voodoo, a lesbian Chicana, a Kabuki character, and a bearded nude male, to name but a few specimens in her inventory. Foley identifies themes of race, isolation, and displacement that characterize her various reconfigurations and relates them to the diversity of the American population Among the great merits of this volume are detailed discussions of the manifestations of Americanized tragedy. These include versions of Sophocles’ Electra, ranging from Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), set in the civil war, to Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad (2003) located in contemporary Los Angeles amidst hip-hop culture and gang warfare. Foley has been in the audience for many of these productions, as her vivid descriptions indicate: for example The Rockae, Peter Mills’s rock opera of Euripides’ Bacchae (New York 2007). This book will be invaluable for all who study and teach Greek drama. It should also interest non-specialists, who will find short synopses of most of the plays under discussion and detailed explanations of their production elements, all in the context of American social and political history. Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage is of course further evidence of Foley’s superb skill as a researcher, but ultimately it attests to the enduring vitality and brilliance of Greek tragedy itself, which is infinitely adaptable and forever relevant. Wilfrid Laurier University Judith Fletcher ArsinoÈ e of Egypt and Macedon: A Royal Life. By Elizabeth Donnelly Carney. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xvii, 215. It is probably safe to say that the name “Arsinoë” is a familiar one to most classicists, but also that most outside the select community of hellenistic specialists have only the haziest notion of who she actually was, and will be likely to confuse Arsinoë ii, the subject of this book, with the very much later half-sister (and victim) of the last Cleopatra. Elizabeth Carney has sought to rectify this sad state of affairs with this fine volume in the “Women in Antiquity” series. She certainly faced a challenge. The lives of the ancients, especially women, are notoriously ill-documented. When in the case of Arsinoë we add the particular complexity of the sources for the hellenistic period, sources often much later and preserving only “court gossip or the propaganda of rivals” (5), and add to the brew a context of three different cultures, Hellenic, Macedonian, and pharaonic Egyptian, the enormity of the challenge is palpable. “Virtually every date in Arsinoë’s career . . . is uncertain or disputed; even the order of events is often unknown,” she ruefully observes (142). Carney has met the challenge admirably in a study of the “life and times” of a woman who emerges as a remarkable personality living in a remarkable age. Although, unsurprisingly , this is not a true biography in the modern sense, the form and structure follow a traditional biographical scheme. An Introduction, itself prefaced by a timeline, a genealogical table, and a map, is followed by chapters arranged in chronological sequence. Chapter One covers Arsinoë ii’s family background and early years, as the daughter of 402 PHOENIX Ptolemy i, first ruler of Egypt after Alexander’s death. Most of this material is of necessity background or speculative, since we have no direct information whatsoever on her before her first marriage, whose approximate date is used to conjecture a birth-date around 316 b.c. Chapter Two deals with that marriage, to Lysimachus of Thrace, a union “not of erotic passion but high politics” (310) which produced three sons. Carney emphasises the difficulty of assessing just how influential Arsinoë was in her Lysimachan phase. On the infamous execution of Lysimachus’ son Agathocles, some sources claim that she engineered the death and that her husband was a

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