Artemisia II of Caria

Anyone asking who was Artemisia II of Caria must begin with her family, the Hecatomnids, a native Carian dynasty that governed southwestern Anatolia on behalf of the Persian kings during the fourth century BCE. Her father was Hecatomnus of Mylasa, who received the satrapy of Caria from the Persian crown around 392 BCE and founded a line that would rule the region for two generations ^[1]. The date of Artemisia's birth is unknown, and almost nothing survives about her childhood.

Hecatomnus left five children: three sons, Mausolus, Idrieus, and Pixodarus, and two daughters, Artemisia and Ada. Following a practice attested within the dynasty, the siblings married one another. Artemisia became the wife of her eldest brother Mausolus, while her sister Ada later married Idrieus ^[2]. Sibling marriage kept power and property concentrated within the family and had parallels in other Anatolian and Near Eastern ruling houses, though it struck Greek observers as remarkable.

She shared her name with an earlier and equally famous Carian queen, Artemisia I, who had commanded ships for Xerxes at the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. The two women are often confused, but they lived more than a century apart. The younger Artemisia belonged to a court that was culturally mixed: Carian in origin, Persian in political allegiance, and increasingly Greek in language, art, and taste ^[3].

Mausolus succeeded Hecatomnus around 377 BCE and ruled Caria for roughly a quarter of a century. During those years Artemisia was more than a consort. Inscriptions from the region name her alongside her husband in official acts, which suggests that the couple exercised authority jointly, a pattern the dynasty repeated when Idrieus and Ada later ruled together ^[2]. This documented partnership is one of the more secure Artemisia II of Caria facts, since it rests on contemporary stone rather than later anecdote.

Mausolus moved the Carian capital from inland Mylasa to the coastal city of Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum in Turkey, rebuilding it on a grand scale with new walls, a protected harbor, a palace, and a theater ^[1]. He expanded Carian influence over neighboring Lycia and several Greek islands, and he played a decisive part in the Social War of 357 to 355 BCE, encouraging Rhodes, Chios, and Cos to break away from the Second Athenian League ^[4]. Artemisia lived at the center of this ambitious court and inherited both its resources and its enemies.

When Mausolus died in 353 BCE, the couple had no children. Power passed to Artemisia, who ruled Caria in her own right for about two years, the interval that defines any Artemisia II of Caria biography ^[1].

No ancient ruler was more famous for mourning. Greek and Roman authors reported that Artemisia's sorrow at the death of Mausolus went beyond all customary bounds. According to a tradition repeated by Cicero, Aulus Gellius, and Valerius Maximus, she had her husband's cremated remains ground and mixed a portion of the ashes into her drink each day, making her own body, in Gellius's telling, a living tomb for the man she had lost ^[5]. Cicero used her in the Tusculan Disputations as an example of grief that consumes the mourner, claiming she wasted away under its weight ^[6].

Modern historians treat the ash-drinking story with caution. It appears only in sources written centuries after her death, and it fits a well-worn ancient genre of exemplary tales about devoted wives. Whether or not the detail is literally true, it shows how quickly Artemisia became a moral symbol, cited wherever writers wanted an image of loyalty carried to its furthest point ^[3].

Her mourning also took a public and verifiable form. She organized a funeral contest at Halicarnassus, inviting the most celebrated Greek orators to compete in delivering a eulogy for Mausolus. Ancient tradition names the historian Theopompus of Chios, a pupil of Isocrates, as the winner, with figures such as Naucrates and possibly Isocrates himself among the competitors ^[5]. The contest turned private loss into an international cultural event and advertised Carian wealth across the Greek world.

The most lasting of all Artemisia II of Caria achievements was architectural. She pressed forward the construction of an enormous tomb for Mausolus at Halicarnassus, a monument so famous that it entered the canonical list of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and gave every later language the word mausoleum ^[7]. Planning probably began during Mausolus's lifetime, but ancient writers credited Artemisia with driving the project during her reign, and work continued after her own death until the artists completed it, according to Pliny the Elder, for the sake of their own renown ^[8].

Pliny's Natural History preserves the fullest ancient description. The tomb combined a high podium, a colonnade of thirty-six columns, and a stepped pyramidal roof crowned by a marble four-horse chariot, rising to a total height he gives as 140 feet ^[8]. Four of the most admired sculptors of the age, Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus, and Leochares, were each assigned one side of the building, an arrangement that made the monument a gallery of contemporary Greek art as much as a dynastic tomb.

The Mausoleum stood for some sixteen centuries before earthquakes brought it down in the medieval period, and the Knights of St John later quarried its stones for their castle at Bodrum. Excavations led by Charles Newton in the 1850s recovered colossal statues, friezes of Greeks fighting Amazons, and fragments of the chariot group, which are now displayed in the British Museum in London ^[7].

Artemisia's reign was not spent only in mourning. The island republic of Rhodes, which lay within the Carian sphere of influence, judged that a woman's rule offered an opening and sent a fleet against Halicarnassus. The Roman architectural writer Vitruvius, who described the city's defenses, records what happened next ^[9].

According to his account, Halicarnassus possessed a small hidden harbor connected to the main basin, screened from view. Artemisia concealed her ships and crews there, ordered the townspeople to welcome the Rhodians from the walls as if surrendering, and waited. When the invaders left their vessels and pushed into the city, her fleet slipped out of the concealed anchorage, entered the larger harbor behind them, and carried off the enemy ships. The stranded Rhodian marines were cut down in the marketplace ^[9].

Vitruvius adds a bolder sequel: Artemisia manned the captured ships with her own sailors and sailed them to Rhodes, where the citizens, seeing their own vessels returning garlanded as if in victory, admitted the fleet and lost their city. He reports that she set up a bronze trophy of her victory there, a monument the Rhodians could not remove because religious scruple forbade destroying a dedicated trophy ^[9]. Historians debate how much of this vivid narrative to accept, since no contemporary Greek source confirms the details, but Carian control over Rhodes in this period fits the wider evidence for Hecatomnid power in the southeastern Aegean ^[4].

Artemisia ruled for about two years and died in 351 or 350 BCE at Halicarnassus. Ancient moralists, following Cicero, liked to say that grief itself killed her, an explanation that suited the legend more than it rested on medical evidence ^[6]. She left no children, and the satrapy passed smoothly to her brother Idrieus, who ruled jointly with their sister Ada, continuing the family's pattern of sibling partnership ^[2].

The dynasty she belonged to did not long outlast her. Idrieus died in 344 BCE, Ada was pushed aside by the youngest brother Pixodarus, and after further upheavals Alexander the Great arrived in 334 BCE. Alexander besieged Halicarnassus, restored the elderly Ada, and was formally adopted by her, an arrangement that ended Caria's independence in all but name ^[1].

The Mausoleum outlived them all. Ancient tradition holds that Mausolus and Artemisia were both interred within it, and when Danish archaeologists reexamined the site at Bodrum in the twentieth century they found the tomb chamber long since plundered, though traces of a lavish burial remained ^[7].

Few rulers of a two-year reign have been remembered for twenty-three centuries. Artemisia became a fixture of Roman and later European literature as the archetype of the grieving widow, invoked by Cicero, Valerius Maximus, and Aulus Gellius, and painted repeatedly during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, most famously in a large canvas begun by Rembrandt in 1634 that is usually identified as Artemisia receiving her husband's ashes, now in the Prado in Madrid ^[10]. Sculptors and dramatists returned to her story whenever royal widowhood needed a classical model.

Her name also entered science. The botanical genus Artemisia, which includes wormwood, mugwort, and sagebrush, has been linked since antiquity to her memory as well as to the goddess Artemis; Pliny the Elder already noted the tradition that the plant was named for the queen of Caria, who was said to have an interest in medicinal herbs ^[8].

For modern historians, the more interesting legacy is political. Together with her sister Ada and her namesake Artemisia I, she demonstrates that Caria repeatedly accepted women as legitimate sovereigns at a time when most Greek states excluded women from public power entirely. Simon Hornblower's standard study of the dynasty treats her reign as evidence of how thoroughly the Hecatomnids fused Persian administrative practice, Carian custom, and Greek culture ^[4]. The word mausoleum, spoken today in dozens of languages, is the quiet monument of her determination that her husband, and by extension her house, would not be forgotten.