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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Olympias and the Murder of Europa

We don’t know when Olympias killed Kleopatra and baby Europa. Probably sooner rather than later; that is, on Alexander’s initial trip to south Greece, after he took the throne. By all accounts (and there aren’t many) he wasn’t in Pella when it happened. Plutarch tells us he was furious upon his return. He probably was, but not just because of the cruelty.

Tim Howe has an interesting theory in “Cleopatra-Eurydike, Olympias and a ‘Weak’ Alexander,” which suggests he’d intended to marry Kleopatra himself. This wouldn’t be the first example of a Macedonian king marrying the young widow of the prior king. Same thing happened with Archelaos who married the widow of his father Perdikkas II. (Ironically, she was also a Kleopatra.) Archelaos then killed his (unnamed) seven-year-old rival half-brother by Kleopatra. Although we can’t be 100% certain it’s the same woman, the likelihood is very high. We don’t know if the marriage occurred before or after he killed the boy. He then had a child himself by Kleopatra (which child, in turn, was murdered after Archelaos’s death and never took the throne).

Welcome to Macedonian politics.

In Alexander’s case, he wouldn’t have needed to kill the infant girl, as she was no threat. But by marrying his father’s widow, he could actively ‘perform’ his announced, “Only the name of the king has changed,” and secure political alliances before marching for Persia.

Yet a potential marriage on the horizon would be a very good explanation for Olympias’s action. On the face of it, the murder seems unduly vicious. An infant girl was, again, no threat—nor was Kleopatra herself. Perhaps Olympias did it purely for retribution, but she rarely acted for “mean” reasons. Killing Kleopatra suggests she was somehow still a threat. Why? Her uncle, Attalos, couldn’t be king (not an Argead), and her child was female. Why kill the widow?

Unless Alexander intended to marry her. What Alexander may have seen as good policy for him was a serious threat to Olympias’s own status. So she eliminated that option.

That would also explain Alexander’s apparent fury. Yes, he probably was horrified by the murder of an infant, but children under a year old already occupied liminal status, waiting to see whether they’d survive to their first birthday. I don’t mean that to be dismissive, but Europa’s life, or death, didn’t impact him much, politically. He may have seen her only a handful of times, so she was probably “nebulous” to him, his emotional reaction generic rather than specific.

His mother being responsible for the death of his father’s widow, however, DID impact him politically, upending any decision to marry her, plus requiring him to eliminate Attalos, who now had a blood feud with him. Supposedly, Attalos tried to tender an olive branch, but probably before he had news of his niece’s murder. So Alexander’s choice to have him assassinated (with Parmenion’s acquiescence) was a political choice necessitated by Olympias’s actions.

It would have been quite a mess, from a diplomatic POV. Olympias acted to safeguard her own security at court. But that, in turn, upset Alexander’s own plans, forcing him to reposition himself, leaving him desperate for Parmenion’s support, leading to high appointments for both Parmenion’s elder sons. It may have been the first serious (political) clash between mother and son. If normally, a mother’s fortunes in polygamous situations depended on her son’s, not always. Here, we see Olympias securing her own position by eliminating a rival…even if that then complicated her son’s political options.

The end result is that Alexander didn’t marry anybody before leaving for Asia.