Olympias, born around 373 bc, was the daughter of Neoptolemus the king of Molossia, a rural, inland, and not-so-important place in Epirus in north-western Greece. The region lacked the old established city-state culture of other parts of Greece, but the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, by tradition the oldest oracle in Greece, did give it some cachet and ensured ongoing contact with the rest of the Hellenic world.1 The royal house, the Aeacids, claimed descent from the Greek hero Aeacus and from his more famous grandson Achilles – a family connection that Olympias’ son Alexander (the Great) certainly took seriously.2 Despite her origins on the periphery of the Greek world, Olympias occupied a central place in the history of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean – and farther afield – in the second half of the fourth century bc because of her marriage to Philip II of Macedonia and her son Alexander the Great.

In the first few hours of a new digging season in Athens, 14 June 1967, archaeologists started to excavate the area to the north of the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares, which lies to the northwest of the Acropolis.1 Just 15 cm down, Evelyn Lord Smithson wrote shortly afterwards in an article in the journal Hesperia, the earth began to reveal a new burial – the upper rims of several pots appearing through the dirt. As the archaeologists explored further, they uncovered the whole burial pit with a large belly-handled amphora some 71 cm in height with various other smaller items of pottery in it. The type of amphora indicated that the burial was that of a woman, designated AA 302, who had been cremated around 850 bc. She has become known to archaeologists as the ‘Rich Athenian Lady’.

Some of the best-known images from Bronze Age Greece are of Minoan women and goddesses portrayed on palace frescoes and on gold rings that often show religious scenes. The enigmatic Isopata gold ring, for example, shows a number of female figures in flounced skirts, with bare breasts, who appear to be dancing outside amongst the flowers – their arms gesticulating and bodies swaying.1 Other evidence certainly suggests the importance of dance for Minoan women – terracotta models from Palaikastro, for example, show women dancing in circles accompanied by a lyre player.2 These images conjure up a vivid picture of life on Crete, beliefs, and practices.

Neaira was supposedly a prostitute who sold her body for sex; she was also, in our single source for her life, a courtesan, a concubine, or ‘that sort of woman’.1 These labels are pejorative ones, carrying the moral and social judgements of the male-authored ancient Greek sources – no prostitute from classical Greece has left us her own testimony. But we could also choose other terms for Neaira that would fit her at various points in her life: she was a child, a girl, a woman, a sex slave, a victim, a partner, a lover, an opportunist, a mother, and above all, perhaps, a survivor.2 Whilst all those labels we can apply may fit, she herself, her character and emotions, her aspirations and motivations remain elusive; some are given to us by a man, Apollodorus, who is using her story for his own ends – hardly a disinterested source. Even though we lack her own words and her physical remains, her story, shadowy as it is, is still worth exploring as a life as valuable as any other and therefore worthy of remembrance and sympathy.

The name Cleopatra has an immense resonance in western culture, conjuring up images of romance, intrigue, actress Elizabeth Taylor, and the clash between ancient Egypt and the rising power of Rome.1 She is indelibly linked with some of Rome’s most powerful men: Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian, who would become Rome’s first emperor. We might think of a young, exotic, and beautiful queen being rolled out of a carpet in Caesar’s presence, or clutching an asp to her breast to take her own life. That Cleopatra is rightly famous, occupying the Egyptian throne at what in hindsight was a pivotal point in Mediterranean history – if she and Antony had defeated Octavian then things might have turned out very differently indeed. A Hellenistic-style monarchy would have continued to rule in the east and, if Antony had consolidated himself in Rome as well, the two states may have been combined: Antony and Cleopatra’s empire. The ‘what ifs’ are intriguing. Less famous but no less interesting in terms of her position and the life she lived is that of Cleopatra’s daughter with Antony, Cleopatra Selene (Figure 24).2

The Hittite state started small, as one of a number of competing kingdoms in Anatolia.1 Under a series of rulers from the early king Hattusili I, around 1650 bc, it grew to become a regional superpower, expanding from its north-central Anatolian heartland, with political and economic interests drawing its attention southeast to the Mediterranean coast, Syria, and the older kingdoms in the area, and also westward to the Aegean.2 Its capital at Hattusa, the fortified residence of the Hittite kings, modern Boğazköy, became a splendid city of temples, testament to the rulers’ commitment to the gods and the rituals necessary to win their favour and avoid incurring their displeasure.3

Theodora is a woman about whom we are supposed to believe the worst. She has the misfortune to have become one of the main subjects, alongside her husband, the emperor Justinian, of one of the most famous, accessible, and lurid texts from antiquity: The Secret History, by Procopius. The Secret History is a book that has defied classification; it is not exactly a history and not exactly a biography – in Byzantine times, the writer of the Suda labelled it both a comedy and an invective. Peter Sarris, in his introduction to one translation, rightly calls it ‘vitriolic’ – with ‘carefully calibrated pieces of character assassination aimed at the Emperor and his wife’.1 ‘Our’ Theodora is fundamentally entangled with Procopius’ own vision of his times revealed in The Secret History and to approach her we must approach him too.2

In the third year of pharaoh Ramesses V, c. 1145 bc, an Egyptian woman called Naunakhte, who lived in the workers’ village of Deir el-Medina (Figure 12), went to her local court to explain her final will.1 It was her express wish to disinherit some of her eight surviving children, sons and daughters, because they had failed in their duty to care for her in her old age. In her words:

Marc Van de Mieroop has written that ‘human agency … defines the limits of the Mediterranean world’.1 Thus whilst not Mediterranean in a geographical sense, Iron Age Vix, in Burgundy, France, was certainly connected to the Mediterranean and to its diverse peoples and cultures. Vix is located strategically at the southern end of the northwest-flowing Seine and the northern reaches of the Saone/Rhone that flows south to the sea at Arles, near Marseilles, the site of a major Greek colony from 600 bc.2 It is around this time that archaeologists note the adoption by many Celtic elites of the accoutrements of Greek drinking culture – the symposion – with its attendant cups and craters. Greek and Etruscan goods are found in greater numbers and Vix had contacts with both cultures and quite possibly Greek and Etruscan craftspeople were at work in Celtic lands.3 Celtic mercenaries were active in the Mediterranean and Celtic people were intermarrying with Etruscans and possibly Greeks too.4

Whilst not especially well known in Anglophone culture,1 the Early-Middle Bronze Age Spanish Argaric culture has long been regarded as important, sometimes even ‘the most important Bronze Age culture in Western Europe’, on a par with the better known Aegean cultures such as the Minoans, who were busy on Crete at the same time.2 Discovered in Victorian times by the Belgian Siret brothers, Louis and Henri, and named for the site at El Argar (in Antas, Almeria), the culture has perhaps suffered from the lack of a classical connection – unlike the Minoans and Mycenaeans there is no hint of them in later sources. Developing from around 2200 bc, the Argaric culture came to comprise several state-level polities that collapsed c. 1550 bc; this ending might have been welcomed by many, as Argaric society is thought to have been quite hierarchical and extractive, and the socio-political system it developed gladly and totally forgotten.3

Around eight or nine thousand years ago in southern Anatolia a young woman lived and died in the place now known as Çatalhöyük, southeast of the modern city of Konya. She was buried in a building, Building 17 of the South Area, Space 620, along with several other bodies, and found, with seventy-six other bodies across the site, by archaeologists in 2017 (Figure 2).1 Since we have no way of knowing her name, she is known simply as F.8018 Sk (21884). It is a specific yet also anonymous memorial to the lived life of a woman who was at the very least a daughter, a neighbour, and a friend.