The fate of Olympias proved harder to resolve. In two recent cases where royal women had been killed—Alcetas’ murder of Cynnane, and the suicide forced on Adea by Olympias—their murderers had paid a steep political price. Cassander was determined to get a jury to condemn Olympias rather than execute her outright. But he took the precaution of arranging the trial such that Olympias could not speak in her own defense; the relatives of her victims were allowed to address the jury unanswered. Even then, a guilty verdict did not seem assured. In the midst of the proceedings Cassander grew anxious and tried to lure Olympias into an escape attempt, hoping the queen could be killed while fleeing. Olympias, however, did not take the bait.

Finally, after a second trial, or perhaps a resumption of the first, Cassander obtained the death sentence he sought. The question now was how to enforce it. Cassander sent no fewer than two hundred armed troops to the royal residence where Olympias was under house arrest. But the queen put on her finest attire and appeared before them in regal splendor, seemingly unafraid. The men were so awed by the grandeur of the mother of Alexander that they were unable to use their weapons. Cassander found a more hardened crew of assassins, as Justin reports, to run her through with their swords, or else, according to Diodorus, turned her over to the families of her victims for punishment. A third source concurs with Diodorus’ version and adds the chilling detail that Olympias was stoned to death.

Olympias died at age fifty-six or fifty-seven. She had exercised more power than any woman in Europe up to her time, with the possible exception of her rival and victim Adea. It was power attained through her son and grandson but exercised, in the final chapter of her life, in her own name and by her own adamantine will. Her hatred of Antipater and his sons had driven her to grotesque acts of violence. In the end her nemeses had won. Cassander took a final revenge on her corpse, casting it out unburied to be ravaged by carrion beasts.

4.

RHOXANE, THE YOUNG ALEXANDER, AND CASSANDER (MACEDONIA, SPRING 316 B.C.)

The death of his grandmother meant that the young Alexander was entirely without guardians. His mother, Rhoxane, now his fellow prisoner, could provide nurture but no protection, for she was powerless, as much a hostage to Fortune as her ill-fated son. They were now in custody of Cassander, and we can only guess at how these two regarded him, or he them, during their brief time together. To him, they embodied the most perverse and dangerous tendencies of Alexander the Great: acceptance of things Asian and alien, mixing of races and cultures. To them, he was the murderer of a husband and father, the man who had brought Antipater’s poison to Babylon contained in a mule’s hoof. It is hard to say which side felt greater hatred for the other.

If it had been risky for Cassander to act against Olympias, the young Alexander was an even more delicate case, a helpless boy and the last slender thread on which the future of the monarchy hung. Apart from the high political cost of killing him, Cassander had reasons for wanting him alive. He did not yet know the outcome of the battle in the East between Antigonus and Eumenes. If Eumenes had won, Cassander would need a hostage to deter an invasion of Europe, or a pawn to trade in some grand, transcontinental power-sharing deal. So for the moment Cassander kept the boy and his mother safe, but stripped them of their entourage and privileges and sent them to Amphipolis under guard of a man named Glaucias. He ordered Glaucias not to treat them as royalty and hoped that his countrymen would cease to so regard them. He had his own plans for the continuation of the Argead house.

Among the prisoners brought out of the devastation at Pydna, Cassander had found Thessalonice, a half sister of Alexander the Great, a daughter of Philip by a Greek woman named Nicesipolis. Somehow Thessalonice had thus far stayed invisible during the succession struggle, despite being unwed and still of childbearing age. Cassander seized on this windfall and immediately married Thessalonice. The match could hardly have brought joy to a woman who, in the siege of Pydna, had stuck by Olympias to the last, but Thessalonice’s wishes did not enter into the equation. Olympias’ exposed corpse showed that Macedonia’s brief experiment with female power was at an end.

Cassander set about begetting heirs. He was determined the monarchy would continue through him, not through the line of his father’s hated rival Olympias and that of his own great enemy, the man whose portrait bust reportedly caused him to tremble with fear even twenty years later, Alexander the Great.

Cassander’s long winning streak held. Thessalonice would bear him three sons in years to come, boys who were at least marginally Argeads and are sometimes shown in the dynasty’s genealogical table (more often they are excluded). With the obvious goal of merging his own line with that of his country’s most renowned kings, Cassander named these boys Philip, Alexander, and Antipater. Meanwhile, he used his wife’s name to christen a city he had founded on Macedonian soil, a token of gratitude for her passivity and her fertility. Today it is the thriving city of Thessaloniki, in northern Greece.

5. PHILIP ARRHIDAEUS AND ADEA EURYDICE (

AEGAE)

The Macedonian civil war had ended, for a time. Cassander had eliminated his enemies and secured control of Europe; his ally Antigonus had likewise attained sole sovereignty in Asia. In just a year or two, old patterns of rivalry would reemerge, and these two would go to war with each other, but in the brief calm that followed the cataclysmic violence in the winter of 316, it seemed possible the post-Alexander world might stabilize and begin to heal.

During this hiatus, Cassander honored the dead monarchs Philip and Adea with a lavish royal burial. Olympias, their killer, had denied them proper rites and perhaps (our sources are unclear) had even exposed their corpses. Cassander now cremated their bodies, or what was left of them, according to time-honored rituals and had the ashes interred in a magnificent tomb in the royal cemetery at Aegae. According to one report, he reburied with them Cynnane, the mother of Adea, whose body must also have lacked royal honors following her murder years earlier. Cassander staged funeral games to honor the dead, including single combats between armed soldiers. He had sacrifices performed atop the sealed tomb, then covered it over with earth.

Many believe it is this tomb that the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos found in November 1977, buried at the center of the Great Tumulus in the Greek village of Vergina. With unintended ambiguity, Andronikos called his discovery “Philip’s Tomb,” thinking it belonged to Philip II, father of Alexander the Great; the young woman in the antechamber he identified as the last of that king’s seven wives. But others soon tried to correlate the tomb with a different Philip, Philip III, and his wife, Adea. They claim that the bones in the tomb had undergone “dry” cremation, after the collagen inside had already broken down—that is, after Cassander recovered the bodies from wherever Olympias had stowed them.

The attribution of the tomb to Philip III is far from certain. To accept it is to believe that Cassander buried awesome symbols of power with a king who, in life, was utterly powerless. For in Tomb 2 were found a silver diadem and a scepter, perhaps the very ones once used by Alexander the Great, and magnificent armor and weaponry of every kind—gear that Philip III could have wielded only in hollow mimicry. Indeed this very incongruity helped convince Andronikos that “Philip’s Tomb” could not belong to Philip III but must be that of his glorious father, Philip II. It strained credulity that a nonentity, a mentally disabled man who was the mere tool of Alexander’s generals and of his own wife, had received the most lavish burial ever uncovered in the Aegean world.