Alexander the Great by Norman F. Cantor Read Free Book Online Page B

royal heirs, Alexander was openly showing too much impatience about gaining the throne from the long-lived Philip.
    When the new queen, Cleopatra, was delivered of her child some months later, however, it was a girl. Philip must have believed that he could not leave the country without an heir in place and with Alexander dangerous and discontented in exile. On her part Olympias was fomenting rebellion at her brother’s court in Epirus, so Philip, always a pragmatist, recalled Alexander from his exile and reinstated him as his heir, but by then Cleopatra was pregnant a second time.
    Receiving the news that his brother-in-law in Epirus was planning an invasion of Macedonia, Philip, in his usual fashion, proposed a marriage between Olympias’s brother and her daughter, also named Cleopatra. Although this was an incestuous relationship, it was approved nevertheless, and the wedding was set to take place in June.
    Shortly before the wedding, Philip’s wife, Cleopatra, again gave birth, this time to a son. If Olympias and Alexander were going to do anything about the succession, now was the time.
    Philip and his court were celebrating the wedding of one of his daughters when he was attacked with a short sword by a minor courtier. Green describes the assassination:
    Philip himself appeared, clad in a white ceremonial cloak, and walking alone between the two Alexanders—his son and his new son-in-law…. Ashe paused by the entrance to the arena a young man—a member of the Bodyguard itself—drew a short broad-bladed …sword from beneath his cloak, darted forward, and thrust it through Philip’s ribs up to the hilt, killing him instantly. He then made off in the direction of the city-gate, where he had horses waiting. There was a second’s stunned silence. Then a group of young Macedonian noblemen hurried after the assassin. He caught his foot in a vine-root, tripped, and fell. As he was scrambling up his pursuers overtook him, and ran him through with their javelins. 10
    Philip’s assassin was a man named Pausanias, who according to some sources had been Philip’s lover several years before. Philip had broken off the relationship and had turned to another lover. There was a great scandal in the court about this sordid affair, and Attalus, whose niece Philip had married, decided to take matters into his own hands. He invited Pausanias to a banquet, got him drunk, and then he and his guests gang-raped the young man. Pausanias went to Philip asking for his help, but because of the alliance with Attalus, Philip was slow to do anything about it, so the brooding courtier exacted his revenge by killing the king. The other explanation is that the murder was arranged by Philip’s wife—Alexander’s mother, Olympias—and by Alexander himself because they were concerned about whether Alexander would actually gain the throne before Philip disinherited him.
    The two scenarios of Philip’s death—assassination by an aggrieved ex-lover and complicity by Olympias and Alexander in a plot to kill him—are not mutually exclusive. The sexually abused courtier who did the terrible deed could have been put up to it by Olympias and Alexander. The three courtiers who assaulted Pausanias were friends of Alexander’s and could easily have been enticed to kill Philip, through bribes of either money or position in Alexander’s new government. That they were responsible for Pausanias’s death gives credence to the idea that they put him up to the murder and then killed him so that he could not talk.
     
    Alexander’s relationship with his father and mother involved the classic paradigm of an Oedipus complex. His father was a bold, aggressive, successful, and sexy man. His mother was equally bold, aggressive, and sexy, and she doted on her son. Lest it be thought that Freud’s Oedipus complex was unknown in the ancient world, Sophocles sketched the essential Oedipal paradigm in his play Oedipus the King, from which tragedy Freud derived both