Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [144]
An artist’s rendering of Tomb 2 inside the Great Tumulus, Aegae (Illustration credit 10.1)
6. RHOXANE AND THE YOUNG ALEXANDER (MACEDONIA AND AMPHIPOLIS, 316–308 B.C.)
The Greek city of Amphipolis, in the wintry land of Thrace, was the last home Rhoxane and her son would occupy. Together this tempest-tossed pair had been conveyed through the whole of western Asia, into Egypt, across the Hellespont to Europe, and through many parts of Greece and the Balkan lands, in the care of seven successive guardians. In the end they became all too settled. For six years or more, they did not leave their castle keep. Under the fiction that they were merely sequestered until Alexander came of age, they had become Cassander’s prisoners.
Nothing is known of their life in Amphipolis, except that they were denied royal privileges. One would hope they enjoyed a peaceful and companionable retreat from the world, like that which Lear envisions for himself and Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.” Perhaps they were glad to be out of the power struggle, though the power struggle would not leave them be. Only a year after their sequestration, Antigonus One-eye, already at odds with Cassander and his other former allies, swore he would cross over from Asia to Europe, release the pair from Amphipolis, and restore their royal rights. Whether he really planned to champion the monarchy, or was only seeking a pretext for invasion, his vows came to nothing. Rhoxane and Alexander went on as before, living as private citizens rather than royalty, their guard Glaucias their closest companion.
Alexander grew up and reached puberty. The idea that he was king and would someday rule was still widely promoted, though how widely believed is hard to know. Four leading generals signed a treaty in 311, when Alexander was twelve, agreeing to give up power as soon as the young king took the throne. Scribes across Asia dated documents by the year of Alexander’s reign (though they sometimes shifted over to Antigonus, or later to Seleucus, as their reference points). Coins in certain Greek cities were minted bearing the legend “BASILEOS ALEXANDROU,” “King Alexander’s” currency.
What was Cassander waiting for? Or what prompted him finally to act? There were no known pressures on him, except that Alexander was getting ever closer to majority. Probably that alone was enough. An order was sent to Glaucias to do away with the mother and son but not to let their deaths or their bodies be discovered. Glaucias preserved his mission’s secrecy so well that the date of Alexander’s and Rhoxane’s deaths is not even known. The boy was either thirteen or fourteen at the time, Rhoxane perhaps thirty. According to a report, they were poisoned.
Cassander did not desecrate the remains of Alexander, as he had earlier done the body of Olympias, and as Olympias had done the remains of Cassander’s brother Iolaus. The enmity between the two most powerful families in Europe had at last run its course, though only after the total destruction of one by the other. Enough stability had returned to Macedonia that civilized norms could resume. After the death of the young king became common knowledge, Cassander prepared a fine chamber tomb in Aegae for his victim, the structure discovered by Andronikos in 1979 and labeled by him the Prince’s Tomb. An illustrated frieze, now entirely lost, was placed over the entrance, and a colorful scene of racing chariots was painted all around the walls of the antechamber. It was an apt motif, for what teenage boy does not love the sight of racing chariots?
The body of Alexander was cremated and the ashes placed in a silver vessel, a hydria, typically used for pouring water—an unusual ossuary, more modest than the two gold boxes in Philip’s Tomb. A purple