Violent Women and Rape in the Histories of Alexander

Despite the omnipresence of violence in the histories of Alexander, Timocleia’s murder of her rapist at Thebes, the unnamed wife of Spitamenes’s murder of her husband, and Thaîs’s incitement of the destruction of Persepolis, have received little attention as three examples of female violence. This paper juxtaposes these three incidents against the evidence for widespread sexual assault that likely accompanied Alexander’s campaigns, arguing that these episodes rhetorically divorce Alexander from that violence by making him the arbiter of good kingship even as they underscore the types of violence of which these women were victims.