17. Seleukid Marriage Alliances

Despite Daniel Ogden’s and Alex McAuley’s work in collecting, organizing, and rationalizing the often contradictory information delivered by the ancient sources, the Seleukid genealogy still appears to be the most complex and chaotic maze of marital relations in the Hellenistic world. This chapter offers a fresh look at the matter by approaching the royal dynasty holistically as an ensemble of familial forces, which fluidly interacted with diverse geographical and chronological contexts, rather than as a line of rulers hypothetically matched with concurrent consorts. In so doing, I will use the term dynastic politics as embracing the alliances— and ruptures— created through marriage and all that royal marriage implies: inheritance, legitimation, regency, interdynastic blood relationships, and dynastic continuity.