Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [60]
Despite the huge setback of the loss of Leosthenes, Hyperides continued to show his old bravado in the Assembly. He even proposed state honors for Iolaus, Antipater’s son, once Alexander’s wine pourer at Babylon, thought by some to have poisoned the king’s drinking cup. It was a roguish move, designed to show confidence about the outcome of the war, for such a motion, which both spat on the memory of Alexander and implicated Antipater’s family in regicide, would incur the gravest retribution, were the city’s revolt to fail.
2. OLYMPIAS (EPIRUS, AUTUMN 323 B.C.)
Among those watching the Hellenic War with interest, from her ancestral home in the far northern reaches of the Greek world, was Olympias, Alexander’s mother.
Her feelings at this moment must have been intense and complex. On the one hand, she despised Antipater, the Macedonian general. She had fought over turf with him for years after Alexander’s departure for Asia, and now she blamed him as well for poisoning her son in Babylon, using (as she supposed) his own sons Cassander and Iolaus as henchmen. But she also resented the Athenians. Their freethinking, upstart ways had given many slights to her son’s authority and her own. Once, when the Athenians had sent beautiful carved hands and a face, made of gold and ivory, to adorn a statue in nearby Dodona, Olympias had bridled, claiming they had no right to meddle in her territory. Her letters to Hyperides on the subject were filled with what the orator called “tragedies and accusations”—the shrill rhetoric of what today might be called a drama queen.
More recently, when the Athenians had taken in the renegade Harpalus and his embezzled money, both Olympias and Antipater had sent envoys to Athens demanding them back. The dowager queen and the aging soldier-statesman had briefly been on the same side, aligned against Athenian intransigence, even though they were bitter rivals. Now that the Athenians and Antipater were at war, it was unclear which side Olympias was on.
By birth Olympias was a princess of the Molossians, a Greek people inhabiting the region of Epirus (now largely in southern Albania). Her royal family claimed descent from heroes of the Trojan War, Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, and his captive bride, Hector’s widow, Andromache. The family advertised this heroic lineage with its choices of names: Olympias’ father was another Neoptolemus, and she herself was called Polyxena (among other names) up to the time of her marriage, after a Trojan princess famous for her sufferings. Her brother was called Alexander, after the fair-haired Trojan prince, also known as Paris, who stole Helen to start the legendary war. Later she was to give her son the same name.
Taking mythic names was more than just an affectation for the Molossian royals. Their lives and their culture resembled those of their Homeric namesakes. Unlike that of the urbanized Greeks to their south, theirs was a rural and tribal society, still under the ancient system of hereditary monarchy. Progressive government, literacy, free trade, and walled city-states, the achievements that had transformed the lives of their southern brethren, had passed them by. The Athenians and their ilk regarded the Molossians as throwbacks to an earlier age. They sneered at the lawlessness of these Northerners, who still carried daggers in public places, and shrank from their weird religious rites, especially those involving the god of ecstasy and abandon, Dionysus.
In her teens Polyxena, soon to become Olympias, was married off to the king of her powerful eastern neighbor, Macedonia. Philip was then just beginning