Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [143]
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.
Perhaps, though, it was the monarchy itself that Cassander was burying, not merely the remains of a monarch. Scepters and diadems, after all, are normally not interred with their owners but passed on as dynastic emblems. Indeed this particular diadem was designed so that its diameter could be adjusted, as though a series of kings, each with a differently sized head, was destined to wear it. But Cassander did not want such continuities, or links to Alexander the Great. Objects that evoked that dreaded specter were