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The first of three videos on the murder of Philip that explains my own take on it. I'll release them across the next week or so.

Minimiza los riesgos evitando actividades para las que no estas cualificado o para las que no dispones del equipamiento necesario.

Incluso tareas tan aparentemente sencillas como cambiar una bombilla pueden desembocar en accidente si se hacen de forma inadecuada.

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Did Alexander Mean to Marry Kleopatra Eurydike?

Okay, first, I believe we have a confusion/conflation of Eurydikes. The one from the Philippion is Philip’s mother, wife of Amyntas III. Her statue was never removed out by Alexander, so I’m unsure what the asker is referring to? The statues were lost over time, but we have the statue bases, and descriptions of the monument. See especially Elizabeth D. Carney, “The Philippeum, Women, and the Formation of Dynastic Image,” in W. Heckel, L. Tritle, and P. Wheatley (eds.) Alexander’s Empire: Formulation to Decay (Claremont, CA, 2007) 27-70. For Eurydike herself, see Olga Palagia, “Philip's Eurydice in the Philippeum at Olympia,” in E. Carney and D. Ogden (eds.), Philip II and Alexander the Great (Oxford 2010) 33-41.

“Eurydike” became a dynastic name, so it keeps popping up among Argeads (and later). Philip’s mother was Eurydike, as was his daughter, wife of Philip III Arrhidaios: (Hadea) Eurydike. Also Kleopatra, niece of Attalos, took the name Eurydike when she married Philip. But she was never in the Philippeon. Philip’s only wife represented there was Olympias, mother of his heir, Alexander. Amyntas III and Eurydike appeared as his parents.

We have no idea if Alexander shared more than a few words with Attalos’s neice. Given her uncle’s hostility towards him, he would likely have minimized contact. Also, timing was against it. Alexander left on the heels of the marriage, was gone 6 months to a year, then likely kept his distance after his return. While Macedonian women were not as sequestered as in Athens, men and (respectable) unrelated women still didn’t mingle freely. If he did interact with her, it would have been when visiting the women’s rooms to see his sisters, with plenty of women present. If marrying a dead father’s widow had precedent, an affair with the wife of one’s living father was another thing. Alexander knew his mythology, and would’ve had no desire to be Hippolytos.* After he took the throne, he had to leave relatively quickly to settle affairs in the south…and she was (likely) dead before he returned.

As for the marriage… this was suggested by my colleague, Tim Howe: “The Giver of the Bride, the Bridegroom, and the Bride,” in T. Howe, S. Müller, and R. Stoneman, Ancient Historiography on War and Empire (Oxbow, 2017) 92-124. Nothing in the ancient sources says Alexander planned such a marriage BUT marrying the wife (especially if young) of the former king wasn’t novel in Macedonia; Archelaos did the same. It was accepted practice generally.

The titbit that might suggest Alexander did plan to wed Kleopatra-Eurydike … Olympias murdered her.

Now, ignoring Justin’s account of a son Karanos, which is wrong (for reasons I don’t have time to go into), Kleopatra-Eurydike’s child was a girl (Europa). That means Kleopatra had no power in the women’s rooms after Philip’s assassination. So why the hell would Olympias kill the infant (and her, by extension)? Revenge alone?

Possibly. Revenge, especially for a slight to timē (personal honor), was a perfectly respectable reason to kill someone. “Turn the other cheek,” or “When they go low, we go high,” is a very Christianized view. But an even better revenge would have been to let her live to raise an extra daughter under the king her uncle had insulted and schemed to replace. Philip had 3 prior adult/almost adult daughters. A 4th, well over a decade from marriageability, was a day late and a dollar short. She could expect a miserable existence in the Pella palace where she was no threat to Olympias.

Unless Alexander planned to marry her in a diplomatic solution to suppress Attalos’s faction, and secure Parmenion’s support. (Attalos had married Parmenion’s daughter.) I strongly suspect Philip’s final marriage was not the midlife-crisis love match Plutarch/Diodoros present, but an attempt to deal with push back in his latter years. Alexander may have decided that marrying the girl was the best way to deal with it too.

And if Alexander did plan to marry her, she was a threat to Olympias’ influence. This isn’t necessarily jealousy. Olympias may have decided that wooing the snake wasn’t sound policy. Remember that Alexander was barely twenty and Olympias would have been between 36 and 38, with oodles more political experience. While sure, her move was self-serving, it also may have been sound policy to keep her son from the match. (Two things can be true at once.)

Alexander need not have publicly declared an intention to marry his father’s widow; he had bigger fish to fry in the immediate aftermath. Yet if he’d discussed it privately, his mother may have moved to eliminate the possibility while he was out of the country. The brutality of the murder certainly suggests a vengeance theme.

Incidentally, while the death of Europa at Olympias’s hands (and Eurydike’s subsequent suicide) is not securely dated in our sources—except that Alexander wasn’t in Pella—it almost certainly occurred in the first months after Philip’s death, during Alexander’s first trip into the Greek south, to shore up support for the Persian invasion and re-ratify the Corinthian League.

As for how their marriage may have changed things…it would almost certainly have put Alexander under the thumb of Attalos-Parmenion. We can see, in the appointments of his two sons, that Parmenion alone held great sway in Alexander’s early years—but at least he wasn’t an in-law. For once, Olympias and Antipatros were likely on the same side. (Antipatros and Parmenion weren’t precisely friendly.) If, as I suspect, Philip made that marriage for political reasons, it suggests the Attalos faction—whatever that entailed—was strong enough to force Philip’s hand before leaving on a probable long-term campaign. That means Attalos was powerful. And a 20-year-old Alexander was no match for him, even if adolescent arrogance may have made him think he was. Olympias may also have decided/suspected that the Attalos-Parmenion tie wasn’t as strong as Alexander feared—which proved to be true. When push came to shove, Parmenion allowed Attalos to be eliminated on Alexander’s order.

Arrian glosses over all this. I wish we had the first two books of Curtius, who likely covered the story of Alexander’s accession in more detail. It would provide more clues. Attalos sorta comes out of nowhere at the end of Philip’s life. Although Diodoros’ account of his reign is so truncated we don’t know the marshals under Philip well, so he may have been around longer than it seems.

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I believe that Pausanias was not from a high ranking family otherwise Philip would have had political pressure to actually punish Attalus and the other attackers rather than send him up the latter but the next continent over. Because of this, Pausanias probably gained his rank and influence in court by pleasung Philip. If he had been doing it starting when he was 14, that’s a young age to learn your worth comes from sexually pleasing an older man. When he was replaced by the younger Pausanias, his reaction shows that Philip did not prepare him for moving on and Pausanias was desperate to regain favor in a very immature way, getting rid of who replaced him. Pausanias the younger seemed to try to regain honor by fighting to protect Philip, but got himself killed due to inexperienced. After this shock of how fragile life is, he’s beaten and gang raped. Pausanias goes to Philip to ask for him to avenge his honor, maybe a bit hypocritically after what happened when Pausanias the young tried to regain honor, but instead he send Attalus away with a promotion. Kind of a big insult to Pausanias that his attacker doesn’t deserve punishment but a raise and a new person place to work. Not only that but because Philip is his king and ex-lover, he had responsibility to protect Pausanias and punish Attalus because an attack on Pausanias was an attack on Philip. So why after reaching the lowest point in his life did Pausanias wait to kill Philip for 8 years? I would love to hear your input.

Sorry if this is really long and rambling, I just have fallen in a rabbit hole and want to know an over 2300 year dead man better

First, a couple clarifications/corrections.

Pausanias was almost certainly from a high-ranking family, given the army positions he held. We think him related to the ruling family in Orestis, which means he and Perdikkas were cousins at some remove. Attalos not being exiled doesn’t mean Pausanias came from a low family, it just means (at that point in time) Attalos had more clout. Had Pausanias really been a commoner, he’d have been executed as soon as the incriminating letter came to light.

Also, TIMING is very important. Diodoros tends to abbreviate, which can make his accounts confusing, especially where we don’t have another, longer version to compare it to. Plutarch confirms that Pausanias did it but gives even less detail about the “outrage.” Justin confuses who was the lover of the younger boy. (It’s typical of Justin’s conflations and blunders.) Aristotle’s Politics (5.1311b) says only that Attalos and his friends insulted Pausanias, as part of a long list of kings who were assassinated for “personal” reasons.

Last, and while what happened to Pausanias was horrible, we must also recall that he bullied a boy to death. Maybe he regretted it afterwards, maybe he didn’t. Macedonian society could be vicious. But bullies are still bullies, and Pausanias was one. I’m not inclined to let him off that hook.

When I was writing Becoming, and even more in Rise, I had to work my way through what I think actually happened. So my theories are laid out in the novels. Ergo, what’s below contains spoilers, especially for Rise. Then again, I doubt anyone reading this is unfamiliar with events surrounding Philip’s murder, the wedding, etc., and my “spoilers” are largely historical events.

Returning to my remark about TIMING… only two possible dates exist for the original incident: 345, when Philip was wounded in Illyria (ATG would have been around 11), or 337/6 (when ATG exiled himself to Illyria). Some scholars are inclined to go for the later date because it was after Attalos became Philip’s uncle-in-law, and we don’t hear of Attalos before at court. Yet Diodoros will mention prior events when someone rises to prominence in his narrative. He does the same with Hephaistion at the time of his death, framing who Hephaistion was that Alexander went ballistic when he died. (We get, for instance, his reply to a letter from Olympias, with no idea when that exchange actually occurred.)

Same thing here. Pausanias suddenly matters in the narrative, so Diodoros stops to explain why, with the story about the other Pausanias, and Attalos. I’m inclined (as are many) to believe the original incident occurred in 345, although even Diodoros makes it sound as if the rape followed quickly on the original offense. It’s too bad we don’t have a more reliable, less abbreviated account.

My other reason for thinking 345 a more likely date is because I’m unsure the younger boy was named Pausanias. Diodoros is guilty of name confusion, and this may be what we call a doublet.

During the ferocious fighting 345, which wounded Philp, we’re told an Hegelochos died fighting beside him. Kleopatra’s father’s name—Attalos’s older brother—was Hegelochos. But it may not have been the father who died in 345…maybe it was his son. E.g., Kleopatra’s older brother, Attalos’s nephew and ward, was Philip’s new boytoy…who Pausanias bullied into sacrificing himself to save the king.

WOAH.

But it would explain some things, wouldn’t it? Not least Attalos’s rage. Justin says the younger boy was Attalos’s lover, not Philip’s, to try to explain Attalos’s interest. Yet Diodoros makes it clear this was a battle for the king’s favor in the bedchamber, and I’m going with Diodoros here.

The timing of the rape also isn’t clear, but I’m inclined to put it LATER, after Attalos became uncle-in-law to Philip. Justin, and even Diodoros, write as if that’s when it happened. And if they were confused by their sources, or their attempt to epitomize their sources, conflating the original insult with Attalos’s Medea-level revenge explains confusion.

Remember that Greece had a history of blood feuds. We get a sense of it in Homer, but also in early Greek history of the early iron age and archaic age. Aeschylus’s play about Agamemnon and Orestes is all about blood feuds and the creation of the Athenian Areopagus to decide murder cases…to stop blood feuds from disrupting the polis.

Macedonia had a more Homeric sensibility in that respect. And the thing about blood feuds is that they escalate. It’s not an eye-for-an-eye but BOTH-eyes-for-an-eye. (Hammurabi’s Code, which seems so brutal now, was also an attempt to avoid constant inter-family escalation.) This is why the S. Greece city-states tried to halt such feuds…and why Philip tried to be the voice of reason in the Attalos-Pausanias fight. To his own demise.

Yet why would Attalos seek vengeance so many years after his nephew died (assuming it was his nephew)?

His circumstances had changed. We also see him try his power against Alexander himself, essentially calling ATG a bastard at Kleopatra’s wedding. That takes some cojones. And/or some serious leverage against Philip…the kind he didn’t have in 345.

Also, Pausanias would have been enormously foolish to accept a dinner invitation from Attalos not long after Attalos had asked for him to be exiled or executed. Makes a lot more sense if it occurred 8-9 years later.

But why does Attalos suddenly act as if he holds all the cards—even against the crown prince? Is he just deluded and full of himself, or is more going on?

In Rise, I propose that a lowland faction claim there’s a highland plot to depose Philip in favor of his nephew Amyntas. In our histories, Philip often seems as if he were in total control, beloved by his Macedonians. That’s a product of later complaints concerning Alexander’s “Persianizing.” Philip beatified!

In truth, Philip spent his first 5-10 years integrating highlands and lowlands. He gave farmers land so they could fight in his army, which in turn meant removing them as feudal tenant farmers of wealthy Hetairoi (Companons). Likewise, positions once open only to lowlanders now must be shared with highlanders. Both Archelaos & Alexander II (Phil’s elder brother) had attempted similar social updates, and were assassinated. Philip got away with it because ½ the army (including many wealthy landowners) died on an Illyrian battlefield with Perdikkas II in 359.

The silver lining of that stupendous loss was less opposition to Philip’s socio-military changes. Yet we shouldn’t assume resentment didn’t linger. The symbolic sword-crossing with Airopos of Lynkestis either right before or right after Chaironeia is proof of that. Philip exiled the Prince of Lynkestis for bringing dancing girls into camp. Hmmm. It wasn’t about the girls. It was about a challenge to Philip’s authority.

Anyway, SOMEthing was going on. It’s typically assumed that Attalos was a lowlander (and so I portrayed him in the novels: archon [governor] of Pireia), but we don’t actually know where he was from. In any case, Philip married for politics. The notion that he fell in love with the girl and married her is a little too midlife-crisis. He married her for a reason, perhaps to appease the lowland faction.

That’s my theory anyway. But what’s clear is Attalos’s increased confidence, enough to insult the prince, gave him hutzpah to get back at Pausanias too. And as noted, it makes more sense for Pausanias to accept a dinner invitation almost a decade later. All this occurred at Attalos’s home. In Rise, I have Attalos invite Pausanias there supposedly to make peace. Far from it, he gets the kid stupid-drunk then lets his grooms (e.g., slaves) rape him.

When Attalos goes to Philip, Philip is caught between Scylla and Charybdis. But being Philip, and clever, he decides to promote Pausanias to the “bodyguard” (e.g., the Pezhetairoi, later Royal Hypaspists), the most prestigious non-cavalry unit in the army.

Then he kicks Attalos upstairs. He sent him with Parmenion to take the strike force into Asia. It’s not like Parmenion had ever needed “help” before. Poor guy was stuck babysitting Attalos. (Although Parmenion was also his father-in-law. Doncha love “As the Macedonian World Turns?”)

Problem solved!, Philip thought. But Pausanias didn’t see it that way, and with Attalos out of reach in Asia, Pausanias decided to kill the unjust judge. There is precedent for such a thing (Absalom’s rebellion against King David of Israel, in fact).

As Pausanias’s timē, or social standing, had been smeared, his revenge had to be public, as well.

You’re not the first to have questions. I’ve discussed Pausanias before HERE, HERE, and HERE.

There are really two parts to this: 1) Was Alexander involved/behind the plot, and 2) did Hephaistion know? I’ll answer 2) first.

If Alexander knew, Hephaistion knew because Hephaistion knew all of Alexander’s secrets (so Curtius). That’s probably the thought behind whatever you read.

The REAL question is: did Alexander know? And was he involved?

As you might expect, a range of opinion slides from arguments that he (and his “terrible mother”) were behind the whole thing ... to he knew but wasn’t involved ... to he may have suspected something ... to he had no idea.

And all of that hinges on whether one sees Philip’s murder as a conspiracy and assassination (e.g., a political act), or an honor killing (e.g., a personal act)—or a bit of both.

Some years back now, Beth Carney wrote two great articles, "Regicide in Macedonia," PdP 38 (1983): 260-72 (not available on JSTOR, sorry!), and followed it up with “The Politics of Polygamy: Olympias, Alexander and the Murder of Philip,” Historia 41.2 (1992): 169-89, in which she argued that Pausanias acted alone as an honor killing to regain his lost timē (e.g., public standing) after he was raped by Attalos’s grooms. (The grooms would likely have been slaves: so a highborn Macedonian youth raped by slaves...you don’t get much worse.)

Why are her articles seminal? Carney recontextualizes king-murder to the shame-culture of ancient Macedon (and Greece), which was quite different from modern Western guilt cultures. She also repositions motives by pointing out the gut-wrenching and lasting emotional cost of rape. While it’s not impossible a man could have written these articles, honestly, this is the sort of insight that the voice of a woman brings to historical study. It also explained the very public nature of the murder despite the fact Pausanias would have had opportunity to kill him privately with a better chance of getting away alive.

If you’ve read Dancing with the Lion, you know I used Beth’s theory behind the death of Philip.

Where I diverge a bit is whether anybody else was involved. We’re told that immediately after stabbing the king, Pausanias raced across the theatre to exit the other parados tunnel, headed for the road running along the city wall, out of town. Two horses were waiting. Having two horses doesn’t mean two people; it means Pausanias had a relief horse in order to ride as fast as possible somewhere else. If killing the king in public meant he might die immediately after (as happened), that didn’t mean he had no plan to get away. He’d also have needed a place to stay after his flight—someplace willing to harbor a regicide.

This is why I think Pausanias may have had assistance. One obvious name floats to the top: Demosthenes (in Athens), perhaps funded by the Persian Great King. Demosthenes was accused, even at the time, of taking Persian gold to work against Macedon, yet bribery was a standard political accusation so we can’t make too much of it. That said, if one intended to kill the uber-powerful King of Macedon, the only place nearby strong enough to offer sanctuary would be Persia. We know other Macedonian malcontents found their way to the court there, so it’s probable Persia was Pausanias’s ultimate destination. But was it his next destination? Hard to know. He probably intended to race for the port of Pydna, which was close to Aigai. There, he could have hired passage anywhere.

Did he intend to go to Athens on the way to Persia? Maybe. An odd tale (which again, could be slander) says Demosthenes supposedly left his house wearing a wreath/crown of rejoicing a day or so after Philip’s demise, although he should still have been in mourning for his daughter’s recent death. The implication is that he knew Philip was dead before word had reached Athens because he was in on the plot.

Make of all of that what you want, but without question both Demosthenes and Persia would have been happy to see the end of Philip, especially if all they had to do was convey money to the assassin, help him on his way, then provide him sanctuary later. Having a secure place to run to, Pausanias may have been willing to act.

Ergo, I think involvement by Persia and maybe Demosthenes as a go-between is possible.

One point frequently raised is, if an honor killing, why Philip and not Attalos? And why wait so long, if the rape had been years earlier? These are valid questions.

First, the original bullying incident occurred in Illyria, which limits when it could’ve happened. The last time Philip was personally in Illyria on campaign was about six years prior. So did Attalos have Pausanias raped shortly after, or did he wait six years to do it? If it was shortly after, why would Pausanias then wait six years to take revenge?

Carney points out that the trauma of rape doesn’t just go away. Pausanias may have bided his time. Many prior male writers had assumed that the rape had to have shortly preceded the murder of Philip. While Beth is right (one reason her article is important), I personally think the delay was between the incident of bullying/death of the younger boy, and the rape. Why?

The status of Attalos changed in the meantime; he became uncle-in-law to the king. We don’t know the earlier position of either man, but almost certainly both belonged to the Hetairos class, and perhaps to the ruling family of their canton: Orestis for Pausanias, and (maybe?) Pieria for Attalos. That would have put them on an equal social level, and among Philip’s more admirable balancing acts was keeping the peace between these touchy noble families.

After Philip’s last marriage, however, Attalos felt secure enough to question the crown prince’s paternity in public at the wedding, and get away with it. Alexander, not Attalos, fled, if briefly. So if Attalos succeeded there, why not go after the man who’d bullied his nephew/ward into committing suicide? That’s my reason for assuming a delay, but I’m not opposed to the notion that Attalos had the rape committed earlier.

 Attalos’s attack on first Alexander, then Pausanias, is another reason I think historians can fall prey to assumptions that the two colluded against the king, who didn’t protect them/right their redress.

Here, the comparison collapses because Philip did recall Alexander and did reinstate him as heir. If Alexander got into trouble again shortly after for the Pixodaros Affair, I suspect the original overture to Pixodaros occurred while he was in exile. So whatever Attalos may have hoped, he found himself schlepped off to Asia to be babysat by Parmenion away from his home, and with limited access to allies. He hadn’t reckoned on Philip recognizing the difference between a talented but hotheaded teen (probably not unlike Philip at that age), and a quarrelsome aristocrat getting above himself.

In short, Attalos was kicked upstairs, and Alexander was back.

By contrast, Pausanias had been put back in the Hypaspists, but he might well have viewed Attalos’s “promotion” as a slap in the face. Philip had become the “unjust judge.”

If one wants a cui bono for Philip’s murder, it’s not found with Alexander. His star was back on the rise, but not secure. Waldemar Heckel, Tim Howe, and Sabine Müller point out in, “‘The giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride.’ A study of the murder of Philip II and its aftermath” (2017) that Alexander’s hold on the kingship was fairly weak in those first couple years. If I don’t buy all their arguments, I think they’re right on that score.

To pick that moment to kill Daddy would have been a colossally stupid choice. Alexander was arrogant and ambitious, but rarely stupid. He almost lost the kingdom. If murder had been on his mind, waiting till the army was in Asia would have been smarter. The same could be said for Olympias, who may not even have been in the kingdom to coordinate anything until the wedding of her daughter. Remember Greek misogyny would have made her an attractive scapegoat. Justin and Plutarch paint her as about one step up from Medea.

In short, there was no good reason (at least that we know of) for Alexander to get involved in an assassination right then—or even to look the other way. If he’d known about it, going to Philip to spill the beans would have further cemented his father’s trust, and his own status.

So no, Alexander probably didn’t know, and neither did Mommy. (Nor Hephaistion.)

If one needs to find someone at court suspicious—beyond promised assistance from Persia and/or Demosthenes—the figure poised to LOSE the most would have been Amyntas Perdikka, e.g., Philip’s nephew. While Alexander was out of favor, Amyntas was temporarily in: Philip married him to his oldest daughter, who may (probably was) pregnant at the time of Philip’s murder. This is not to say Amyntas was involved either, but he had more reason to be than Alexander. He may also have had ties to the Lynkestian brothers (who were later accused by Alexander). Lynkestis is right next to Orestis and had a long history of conflict with lowland Macedonia, including the support of alternative Argeads claiming the throne.

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