Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Women were interwoven into the politics of Alexander’s itinerant court. Alexander’s mother Olympias and his full sister Cleopatra played the most important and enduring roles at court, even though they remained in the Greek peninsula and never saw Alexander again. His half-sisters Cynnane and Thessalonice and his niece Adea-Eurydice (also all resident in the Greek peninsula during Alexander’s reign) only grew to some level of importance after his death. His first wife, the Bactrian Roxane, mother of Alexander IV, played more of a role, though a still limited one, than his two Achaemenid wives. Though he never married the half-Persian Barsine, he fathered a son by her. Men and women worked together, not infrequently for violent ends. Women’s access to information, their participation in information networks covering great distances, their attempts to influence events and decisions, and their ability to exercise patronage to their own ends is striking. The violent deaths of all the female Argeads (by birth or marriage) resemble those of male Argeads and many of the Successors. All these women were, in the end, killed because they somehow constituted a problem, a threat to others, just as the men did.

The gorgeous surface of Vergil’s didactic poem on farming lulls the reader into a sense of false security – by the end of the poem, scenes of plague, crop failure, and the collapse of an allegorical society of bees brings vividness to the contemporary context of civil war. Analogy invites us to see the bees as Romans, but plausible deniability keeps the similarities from cutting too close. Although Aristaeus, the beekeeper, manages to restore his hive, the fantastical bugonia, which brings rebirth from an abject, rotting corpse of a bludgeoned calf, alienates. Out of Egypt, it offers an illusory salvation. Technology and sacrifice, in parallel registers, each fail to achieve the task at hand. Aristaeus is being punished for threatening to rape Orpheus’ wife Eurydice and causing her death. What is needed is not just to bring the dead back to life, but to placate the spirit of Eurydice, whose etymology, “broad justice,” reveals the real need as social restoration. The bees’ tendency to faction and to adore an autocratic monarch, on the model of Egypt, warns that the price of restoration for Rome after civil war is an oriental empire.