Queens of Egypt Ruled the World
For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.
Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political... See more
Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political... See more
Edmund White • The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus
And so we have the critical attributes of the archetypal heroic feminine:
1. The hero challenges the external threat and the heroine challenges the hero. The inverse of that is a figure we're all familiar with, namely Lady MacBeth who rather than challenging the hero to virtue, goads him into evil. A positive example would be Elizabeth Bennet from
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