Power, royal agency, and elite women in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds

This special issue of Ancient History Bulletin presents some of the fruits of the Power, Royal Agency, and Elite Women in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds project whose sessions ran from September 2021 to May 2022. There was a tendency to describe the power of women rather than to define it, and so this project was launched in order to examine the nature and understanding of elite female power directly. In the same vein, the evolution of female power and responses to it beyond the Hellenistic Period and into the Roman Republic and later Empire was needed to maintain a broader perspective. The tie that binds the contributions that follow is the question of how the power of elite women in a given place, time, literary genre, document, or institution can be understood, and how it relates to broader structures of power. By moving beyond the biographical mode they begin to create a more conceptual approach to female influence in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.