Axiothea of Paphos

This article is about the 4th-century BCE Cyprian queen. For the 4th-century BCE philosopher, see Axiothea of Phlius.

Axiothea (Ancient Greek: Ἀξιοθέα) was a woman of ancient Greece who lived in the 4th century BCE, and was queen of Paphos on the island of Cyprus. She was the wife of king Nicocles of Paphos.^[1]

In a fragment of a play by the New Comedy playwright Machon, we learn that the musician Stratonicus of Athens composed some satirical verses about Nicocles and Axiothea's sons that so incensed Axiothea, she insisted her husband have the musician put to death, a request which the king obliged.^[2]

Death

After Ptolemy I Soter, a successor general to Alexander the Great, besieged the city and ordered Nicocles to commit suicide, Nicocles hanged himself. Axiothea then killed her own daughters, to prevent their falling into the hands of their enemies, and then, together with a group of sisters, mothers, and wives, committed mass suicide.^[3][4] The women went up to the roof of the palace, in full public view, killed the children, and then, according to Polyaenus, set the building ablaze and died in the fire, though Axiothea is said to have stabbed herself with a dagger before succumbing to the flames. In Diodorus Siculus's telling of the same event, the women still commit suicide, despite Ptolemy wishing no harm on them, and after the women killed themselves, the palace fire was set by Nicocles's male relatives so that the women's bodies might not fall into enemy hands.^[2][5][6]

Debate

The anecdote of Axiothea's death is chiefly relayed to us by the writers Diodorus Siculus and Polyaenus -- writing 400 and 600 years, respectively, after the supposed events of the story -- but some modern scholars believe that both of these were mistaken, and that this story may have happened to another royal house on Cyprus around the same time.

The Parian Chronicle suggests this may actually have been an episode in the history of Salamis, and happened to king Nicocreon of Salamis, not king Nicocles of Paphos. The writing of Athenaeus even identifies Axiothea as the wife of Nicocreon, though some modern scholars believe this an error.^[7][6] These attributions are debated however, and there is no clear consensus among scholars that these events happened in Salamis.^[2]