Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [28]
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Having literally stomped on the spirit of sedition in the army, Perdiccas plotted a second purge of a very different kind. We know almost nothing about this plot because only one ancient chronicler, Plutarch, mentions it, and only in a single, short, confusing paragraph. But there is no reason to doubt that it took place. In this case Perdiccas had an unusual collaborator, a woman unaccustomed to political murders: Alexander’s pregnant young widow, Rhoxane.
Rhoxane must have realized, during the days after Alexander’s death, that she had become presumptive queen mother. But she also knew that her lofty status was a fragile thing. Alexander’s two other widows, Stateira and Parysatis, were daughters of the two most recent Persian kings. Alexander had intended to beget children by them, children who, with both European and Asian royal blood, would be ideal rulers of the Perso-Macedonian empire. Now these two Persian princesses offered an opportunity for someone else, one of Alexander’s generals presumably, to sire sons who were royal at least on their mother’s side. In the new political landscape, with Europe and Asia forced together by Alexander’s titanic will, it was unclear whether such children could become candidates for the throne. A more confusing possibility was that one or both princesses were already pregnant by Alexander or would claim to be—a claim that would pose great perils for Rhoxane and her unborn child.
So Perdiccas and Rhoxane, acting together, resolved to murder at least one, more likely both, of the Persian princesses. A letter, tricked up to look as though it came from Alexander, was brought to Stateira. Since Perdiccas had control of Alexander’s signet ring, it is tempting to think he used it to seal the forged letter. Whatever Stateira read in that letter drew her to a spot where Rhoxane was waiting for her, and where Rhoxane had her killed, together with another woman, probably Parysatis. Then the bodies were secretly cast down a well and the well was filled in with earth. Rhoxane and Perdiccas meant no one to learn what had happened; they simply made the two women disappear. If not for a single sentence in Plutarch, derived from some unknown informant, the crime would have remained hushed up to this day.
There is a verb, phthanō, in ancient Greek that denotes the taking of preemptive action, especially where one harms an enemy to prevent that enemy from doing harm. When Alexander had a high-ranking officer named Philotas tried and executed, on thin evidence of collusion in an assassination plot, he named the city founded at the trial’s site Prophthasia, the place where he had gotten the jump on danger. Prophthasia had always been the prerogative of Macedonian kings. The safety of the monarch justified the elimination even of anticipated threats. But the murder of the Persian princesses by Rhoxane and Perdiccas took this logic to a new extreme. Heirs to the throne had been rubbed out before, but killing women to prevent them from bearing heirs was unprecedented.
Once this logic of prophthasia was invoked, it was hard to limit how it was applied. The violence it seemed to license would, in years to come, claim the lives of all the women who shared Alexander’s blood or who had shared his bed. Somehow one unlikely survivor would escape the carnage to help beget a new royal line.
In either July or September—our sources are divided on the chronology—Rhoxane gave birth to a boy. Never before or since, one imagines, was the gender of an infant anticipated so keenly by so many. Most were no doubt relieved, but none more so than Perdiccas. The settlement he had masterminded was secure. His plan for the future of the empire, which, like Alexander’s, called for a center of power at Babylon rather than in Europe, could go forward.
The baby was named for his father, as was inevitable given that his counterpart had been renamed