One day, while Greek troops were digging the trench that formed part of the siege perimeter, a squad of Macedonians had rushed out from the walls and attacked. The digging crew had been overwhelmed, and Leosthenes, informed of the skirmish, rode up with reinforcements. As he came within range of the walls, he had been struck on the head by a catapulted stone and knocked unconscious. Carried back to the camp for treatment, he died two days later, the victim of a moment’s heedlessness and a fantastically lucky shot. The great mercenary captain and staunch Macedonian hater, the man who had given Athens its first battlefield triumph in a generation, was gone.

The Greeks still held the upper hand at Lamia, but their confidence was shaken. Through the rigors of a winter siege in open country, Leosthenes had inspired them with resolve as no one else could. Back in Athens, Hyperides mourned the loss of a friend and a huge political asset. He and Leosthenes had seen eye to eye on the need to destroy Macedonian power for good. With Leosthenes at his side in the Assembly, he had been able to face down even Phocion, the elder statesman whose long military career made him practically unassailable in discussions of strategy.

With Leosthenes dead, Hyperides feared the Athenians would choose Phocion, their most experienced general, to take command of the Lamia siege. But Phocion had opposed the war and had been skeptical of its chances. If given command, he might well come to terms with Antipater and let the Macedonians slip out of the Greek choke hold. To head off this danger, Hyperides and his party used a devious tactic in the Assembly. They hired an ordinary citizen, someone unknown in political circles, to stand up and claim he was a friend of Phocion’s and to urge the city not to send to Lamia a leader whose talents were needed at home. The crowd seemed to approve, when Phocion himself, who was unexpectedly on the scene that day, rose to speak. “That man is notmy friend,” he said, “and I have never seen him before today; but,” he added, turning to the man who had spoken, “from this day I shall makeyou my friend, for the advice you have given is much to my benefit.” Hyperides and his partisans drew a sigh of relief. Phocion didn’t want the command, which went instead to a much younger general, Antiphilus.

Despite the huge setback of the loss of Leosthenes, Hyperides continued to show his old bravado in the Assembly. He even proposed state honors for Iolaus, Antipater’s son, once Alexander’s wine pourer at Babylon, thought by some to have poisoned the king’s drinking cup. It was a roguish move, designed to show confidence about the outcome of the war, for such a motion, which both spat on the memory of Alexander and implicated Antipater’s family in regicide, would incur the gravest retribution, were the city’s revolt to fail.

2. OLYMPIAS (EPIRUS, AUTUMN 323 B.C.)

Among those watching the Hellenic War with interest, from her ancestral home in the far northern reaches of the Greek world, was Olympias, Alexander’s mother.

Her feelings at this moment must have been intense and complex. On the one hand, she despised Antipater, the Macedonian general. She had fought over turf with him for years after Alexander’s departure for Asia, and now she blamed him as well for poisoning her son in Babylon, using (as she supposed) his own sons Cassander and Iolaus as henchmen. But she also resented the Athenians. Their freethinking, upstart ways had given many slights to her son’s authority and her own. Once, when the Athenians had sent beautiful carved hands and a face, made of gold and ivory, to adorn a statue in nearby Dodona, Olympias had bridled, claiming they had no right to meddle in herterritory. Her letters to Hyperides on the subject were filled with what the orator called “tragedies and accusations”—the shrill rhetoric of what today might be called a drama queen.

More recently, when the Athenians had taken in the renegade Harpalus and his embezzled money, both Olympias and Antipater had sent envoys to Athens demanding them back. The dowager queen and the aging soldier-statesman had briefly been on the same side, aligned against Athenian intransigence, even though they were bitter rivals. Now that the Athenians and Antipater were at war, it was unclear which side Olympias was on.

By birth Olympias was a princess of the Molossians, a Greek people inhabiting the region of Epirus (now largely in southern Albania). Her royal family claimed descent from heroes of the Trojan War, Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, and his captive bride, Hector’s widow, Andromache. The family advertised this heroic lineage with its choices of names: Olympias’ father was another Neoptolemus, and she herself was called Polyxena (among other names) up to the time of her marriage, after a Trojan princess famous for her sufferings. Her brother was called Alexander, after the fair-haired Trojan prince, also known as Paris, who stole Helen to start the legendary war. Later she was to give her son the same name.

Taking mythic names was more than just an affectation for the Molossian royals. Their lives and their culture resembled those of their Homeric namesakes. Unlike that of the urbanized Greeks to their south, theirs was a rural and tribal society, still under the ancient system of hereditary monarchy. Progressive government, literacy, free trade, and walled city-states, the achievements that had transformed the lives of their southern brethren, had passed them by. The Athenians and their ilk regarded the Molossians as throwbacks to an earlier age. They sneered at the lawlessness of these Northerners, who still carried daggers in public places, and shrank from their weird religious rites, especially those involving the god of ecstasy and abandon, Dionysus.

In her teens Polyxena, soon to become Olympias, was married off to the king of her powerful eastern neighbor, Macedonia. Philip was then just beginning his reign and was building power through marriage alliances; this was his fifth bride in three years’ time, and his palace was becoming crowded. Olympias quickly distinguished herself by bearing Philip a son, Alexander. The king had already sired a son by an earlier wife—Arrhidaeus, later to be called Philip—but somehow Olympias’ boy was considered heir apparent, perhaps after Arrhidaeus’ mental infirmity was recognized. As presumptive queen mother, Olympias gained great stature at court, as well as making great enemies, for she did not carry herself with the humility befitting a woman and a foreigner. Among those inclined to dislike her was Antipater. Two decades her senior, long Philip’s right-hand man, he was a natural rival for a woman who dared, as she did, to involve herself in politics.

As her son, Alexander, matured, Olympias saw to his upbringing and jealously guarded his succession rights. Rumors circulated that she had fed Arrhidaeus poisons that destroyed his mind. Other rumors, still believed by some today, made her complicit in the assassination of her husband in 336, when Alexander was just old enough to assume the throne. Whether or not she colluded in that murder, she soon afterward arranged the killing of Philip’s latest wife and baby girl, Europa, then only a few days old. There would be no new royal line that might someday, even decades hence, rival the claims of her son.

Now Alexander was dead, and the son he had left behind, another Alexander, was just as defenseless as the baby girl she had killed thirteen years before. Olympias knew dynastic politics well enough to know that her grandson was in grave danger. And if the child were not to survive, her own life, and that of her daughter, Cleopatra, would also be forfeit. By the stern code of Macedonian law, the relatives of those killed by the state were likely to be killed as well, to prevent their seeking revenge. Olympias’ passionate temper and iron will would make such a precaution essential.