#cynnane

Kynnane‘s plan was to marry her daughter Adea to Philip Arrhidaios. No doubt she had learned of the army forcing the generals to appoint Arrhidaios as joint-king with Alexander IV and planned to exploit this. Adea was doubly Argead, through her mother who was daughter of Philip, and from her father Amyntas who had been the son of Philip's brother. In addition Kynnane had personally given her daughter a martial education, just like she had received from her own mother. These two in combination should in theory make her the perfect queen in the eyes of the Macedonian soldiery; a royal Argead through and through as well as trained in the ways of war. The fact that she was actually able to swiftly recruit at least enough troops to force her way out of Macedonia, whether this was an "army" or just a sizeable escort, says a lot of the Macedonians‘ loyalty to their royal family.

However, Kynnane's bold scheme threatened virtually everyone in the faction-riddled Macedonian power politics at this stage. It threatened Perdikkas, who would lose control over Philip Arrhidaios if either Adea or Kynnane, or both in tandem, started to pull the strings using mentally challenged Arrhidaios as a mouthpiece. It threatened Kleopatra and Olympias because a son by Adea and Arrhidaios would automatically move further up the line of succession, ahead of any child by Kleopatra. It also threatened Antipater and his control over Macedon and Greece since he had already made an enemy of Kynnane by trying to stop her, and only a year later Adea and Antipater would be at loggerheads. Kynnane had support from none of the generals, so she intended to do like Alexander and cut straight through this Gordian knot of political factions. Kynnane must have known the dangers of this course of action and despite outmanoeuvring Antipater and Kleopatra she paid for it with her life. As she and Adea and their troops reached Sardeis they were met with a substantial force from the royal army led by Perdikkas‘ brother Alketas. Alketas ordered her to turn back, acting on orders from his brother the regent, but when Kynnane refused Alketas had her killed in front of the two armies. The soldiers of both armies, horrified at the sight of Kynnane's death, mutinied and demanded Adea be allowed to marry Philip Arrhidaios as Kynnane had wanted. Perdikkas, suddenly finding himself at the wrong end of an irate and unruly Macedonian army again, relented and the marriage took place at Sardeis in 321.

Polyainos might be overly dramatic in his brief account of Kynnane‘s actions, possibly aimed at making her seem like an exotic warrior-princess rather than a proper Hellenistic woman. Yet there is no doubt about Kynnane being a clever politician and knew she and her daughter were outsiders in the dynastic struggle, yet managed to strong-arm the Successors sufficiently to place her daughter on the throne as queen. It did however cost Kynnane her life but it was a strategy of dynastic survival, and she must have been aware of the very real danger of her mission to Asia Minor. That is not to say she expected to be killed, she likely imaged she would remain in a role similar to what Olympias tried to do, be the queen's main advisor and see to it that everything went according to plan. She did not take into account Alketas' and Perdikkas' lack of touch with the Macedonian rank-and-file in the royal army. Perhaps more so than her sister Kleopatra, Kynnane had her ears to the ground and recognized the most effective route to power would be the direct one; military support and strength without the intermediary of a Perdikkas or a Leonnatos, and knew the Macedonian soldiers would remain loyal to the Argead family. It was a wholly untraditional choice of strategy for a woman in the Greco-Macedonian world, but it worked, and Adea, who became Eurydike on her marriage to Arrhidaios, learned from her mother's example and would use the same strategy over and over again in her brief but spectacular career as queen.

On reflection, however, the very fact that a long dynasty was coming to an end should have meant that the sisters of the last king would have a better chance of survival than the minor male heirs of that king. After all, once the father is dead, the heirs are for practical purposes (assuming they are well below the age of maturity) no man's sons, and can do no would-be dynast any more than short-term good, whereas the king's sisters can be married and thus legitimize the seizure of royal or quasi-royal power. Better yet, a king's sister may produce children of the blood of the old royal house, as well as the new.

But two of Alexander's sisters did not realize the potential advantage seemingly inherent in their situation and ultimately all three died exactly because they were Philip II's daughters and Alexander's sisters. This failure to realize the potential to be the bridge between two dynasties is most surprising in the case of Alexander's full sister, Cleopatra. Analysis of the careers of Alexander's relatively obscure sisters, worthwhile as an end, in itself, should answer the question of why the Successors proved to prefer murder to marriage (in two of the cases) as well as produce important information about the nature of Macedonian monarchy in a period of great and rapid change. The significance of the similarity in ultimate fate of the three sisters and their nephews has been ignored for too long.  

“...   Calling Alexander's sisters his "relicts" is meant to convey two truths about  them: their similarity to the other relics of Alexander (his corpse, his tent, and,  of course, his empire) and their manipulation by various of the Successors  and (by means of allusion to the older meaning of "relict" as a female survivor  of some related and now departed male, with its implication of the lack of a  separate existence for such women) their peculiarly property-like quality in the  period after the death of Alexander. The answer to the question posed initially - why did Alexander's sisters fare so poorly and so similarly to their nephews - should now be clear. Alexander had no successor. Even Antigonus, although interested in the same land area as Alexander, was not a true successor to the curious monarchy Alexander had invented - a traditional national monarchy onto which a curious sort of personal monarchy had been grafted - Antigonus was, like the other generals, on the way to creating a personal monarchy. Thus even he did not really need Cleopatra. Cassander, with his marriage to Thessalonice and at least superficial attempt to imitate the traditions of Macedonian monarchy, could not really be Philip's heir because he could not be an Argead; he had murdered Argeads and would probably have liked to murder more. Until the death of Alexander, Macedonian kingship had been tied to one dynasty. This was so much the case that the kings used no title, but simply signed themselves as so and so, son of an Argead. Trying to decide whether Philip's or Alexander's reputation was greater after 323 is ultimately devoid of any real political meaning; neither had any real successors and thus Alexander's sisters and Philip's daughters, representing as they necessarily did continuity with what had come before, could have no future.  

Cynnane died in an ill-advised attempt to take royal power by military and quasi-military means; the army did not save her. Thessalonice died in the death throes of the pseudo-dynasty Cassander had fabricated, her death demonstrating that even her son did not need to see himself as the heir to the  Argeads. Cleopatra died making one last attempt to function as a symbol of continuity, and for that she was murdered. The sisters were expendable because continuity was neither needed nor genuinely desired.”

Elizabeth Carney, “The Sisters of Alexander the Great: Royal Relicts”

We've all heard about the soap opera-style drama and collapse of the empire following Alexander the Great's death, but I at least was never told about the stories of the amazing women who engaged in the political and even military struggles for power. We always hear about the struggle between the male generals and leaders of the time, but I can never get enough of these strong women fighting to get power in their own right.

Olympias, mother of Alexander, and her daughter Cleopatra both used their political wiles to gain and maintain power in the chaos after Alexander's death. But while they played the political games with the resources open to them as women during their time, searching for marriage alliances and hoping to produce a male heir, other women turned towards the battlefield.

Instead of searching for a man to form an alliance in the political fallout Cynnane, an Illyrian princess and sister to Alexander, and her daughter Adea, who she had trained in military skills since Alexander had her husband murdered to solidify his reign, led a campaign to try and force a marriage between her young daughter and one of the puppet kings, Arrhidaeus who was deemed mentally challenged and unable to rule without a regent. The other king was Alexander's young son, further necessitating a regent. This move would have defied pretty much every faction. But Cynnane was known as a warrior, as Polyaenus writes she led armies and charged ahead of them into battle, even killing a rival warrior queen in combat when she accompanied her father on campaign.

The current regent sent out a force to try and stop her from coming to court. Cynnane was killed in battle but the army was so furious about the death of Phillip's daughter that they forced the arrangement of Adea's marriage to Arrhidaeus, bringing about exactly what the regent had feared. Adea, who took the name Eurydice, continued to raise hell after her mother's death by trying to turn support from the Macedonian army away from the current leaders, and even going as far as trying to bring about the deaths of major generals. She publicly spoke to the army urging them to turn against Antipater, one of Alexander the Great's generals. She was probably in her teens when all of this occurred.