Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [142]
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