2 - The Crises Leading up to Alexander’s Accession

Summary

This chapter discusses the crises Alexander faced leading up to his succession to his father, Philip II: his dispute with Attalus at Philip’s wedding to Cleopatra, its causes, significance and aftermath; and the Pixodarus affair. It then turns to the crisis of the succession itself: the circumstances of Philip’s assassination at the hands of Pausanias, Alexander’s movements at the time of it, and the steps by which he secured the throne himself and legitimated himself as Philip’s successor.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, in the 338 BC Battle of Chaeronea against the Thebans and the Athenians the young Alexander had commanded the left wing, balancing Philip on the right, and played the decisive role with his successful strike against the most elite unit amongst the opposing forces, the Thebans’ Sacred Band. He then went on, titularly at any rate, to take the lead role in negotiating peace terms with Athens. In the eyes of most Macedonians he must have seemed at this point to be in pole position to succeed his father. That succession would come a mere two years later, but not before Alexander had had to negotiate a pair of crises that threatened to undermine his suit. The tradition – for what it is worth – leaves us with the impression that these crises were largely of his own making, and that the prince’s impetuousness and hot-headedness had much to answer for.

Philip’s Wedding to Cleopatra, Niece of Attalus, and Its Aftermath (337 BC)

Two major dynastic disputes between Alexander and Philip are recorded for the period shortly prior to the latter’s assassination, namely the Attalus affair and the Pixodarus affair. Both are founded in the competitive free-for-all of the Macedonian court’s polygamous culture.¹

As to the first, Plutarch tells of a rift between Philip and Alexander shortly after the Battle of Chaeronea, in which the lad had so distinguished himself, this being fuelled by the jealousy and difficulty of Alexander’s mother Olympias.² The rift occurred during the feasting after Philip’s marriage to what was to be his final wife, the Macedonian noblewoman Cleopatra, niece of the increasingly powerful Attalus, probably in early 337 BC.³ Attalus, in an advanced state of drunkenness, bade the Macedonians ask the gods to produce a legitimate successor to the kingdom from Philip and Cleopatra. An infuriated Alexander challenged Attalus with the defiant question, ‘Do you consider us to be bastards [nothoi], evil head?’⁴ and threw a cup at him. Philip in turn now lunged at Alexander with his sword, but fell over owing to a combination of fury and drunkenness. Alexander mocked him with the observation that the man that was preparing to cross from Europe to Asia could not even cross from one couch to another (Figure 2.1). As a result of this Alexander took Olympias off to stay with her birth family in Epirus, whilst he occupied himself in Illyria. (The Alexandrists dispute whether or not Alexander was formally exiled as a result of this fight – whatever ‘formally’ might mean in such a context.)⁵ Philip was in due course persuaded to summon Alexander home by a sharp observation of Demaratus of Corinth. When Philip had asked him how well the Greeks were getting on with each other (inevitably in the context of the League of Corinth), Demaratus chided him for taking an interest in such an issue, when he had filled his own house with dissent.

2.1 Donato Creti, Alexander the Great Threatened by His Father (c. 1700–5).

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection: 1961.9.6.

The same story is briefly recounted in an important fragment of Satyrus. After a careful exposition of Philip’s total of seven wives and his system of polygamy with them, he tells that Philip threw his household into turmoil by bringing Attalus’ niece Cleopatra in on top of Olympias. According to him, Attalus’ quip ran, ‘So now legitimate kings instead of bastard ones will be produced.’ Alexander then threw his cup at Attalus and Attalus threw his cup in turn. There is no mention of Philip, but again Olympias is said to have fled to the Molossians and Alexander to the Illyrians.⁶

Attalus’ agenda is self-evident. In order to enhance his niece’s – that is to say his own – influence at court, he was tendentiously attempting to assert a principle of legitimacy and succession that had evidently never held any purchase with the Argeads previously: namely that, just as, notoriously, in Classical Athens, a condition of legitimacy should be that both of one’s parents were citizens of the state (whatever ‘citizen’ might mean in a Macedonian context at this point). Had Alexander bothered to articulate a reply, he could of course have made appeal: (a) to the fact that he was of higher birth, being born not merely of a noblewoman but of an Epirote princess; (b) to the fact that he had already served as regent (we cannot know whether any formal role of ‘crown prince’ existed, nor, if so, whether it had been conferred upon him); (c) to the fact that he had served with distinction as Philip’s deputy at Chaeronea; and (d) to the fact that in the light of his (elder?) half-brother Arrhidaeus’ incapacity (for which see below), he was the only child of Philip capable of taking on the kingship until, at least, any male child of Cleopatra’s should approach an age of majority.⁷

It is too easy, from the cosy vantage-point of hindsight, to view, as Satyrus did, Philip’s marriage to Cleopatra as reckless and irresponsible. Given his own – and now also Alexander’s – intense and unremitting involvement in warfare, it was imperative for him to produce more sons to secure his line and indeed, from one perspective, the stability of Macedon. Had, for instance, Chaeronea gone the other way, both he and Alexander would have been wiped out. It remains unclear whether Philip got as far as producing from Cleopatra the male child for which Attalus hoped. The Satyrus fragment tells that she gave birth to daughter, Europe, whilst Justin has Alexander have an (unnamed) little daughter killed on her lap upon his accession.⁸ However, Justin also mentions Alexander butchering a son from this marriage, one Caranus.⁹

Arrhidaeus and the Pixodarus Affair (336 BC)

A distinctive effect of the polygamous system was to render a king’s wives not merely rivals but actually enemies of each other, as they fought to secure the succession for one of their own sons: at stake, typically, was not just the prize of kingship, but also that of survival, given that the elimination of his half-brothers and their mothers was often, quite understandably, the privilege and courtesy of a newly established king. Macedonian princes appear to have enjoyed much tighter bonds of loyalty with their mothers, upon whom they could always depend, than they did actually with their fathers, upon whom they could not. We note that, when Alexander fled from Macedon in the aftermath of the Attalus affair, his mother did too.¹⁰

According to the final words of Plutarch’s Alexander, the competition between, on the one side, Alexander and his mother Olympias and, on the other side, Arrhidaeus and his Thessalian-noblewoman mother Philinna became established at an early point. As a child Arrhidaeus had displayed an accomplished, charming and noble nature, and so Olympias had deployed ‘drugs’, ‘poisons’ or ‘spells’ (the term pharmaka can mean all three of these) to destroy his mind.¹¹ The supposed result of this was that when, in 323 BC, the Macedonians were compelled, in default of able candidates, to elevate him to the throne after Alexander’s death (together with his newborn nephew Alexander IV), they could only do so by placing him in the care of a guardian (prostatēs), Craterus, and under the power of a regent, Perdiccas.¹² Olympias’ antipathy towards Arrhidaeus was only to be sated when she acquired control of him herself in 317 BC and put him to death.¹³ The tale of Olympias corrupting the boy Arrhidaeus’ mind with drugs is too extravagant to be trustworthy. I have argued previously that it should be combined with a tradition found in the Greek Magical Papyri of a charm credited to a Thessalian Philinna for the cure of headaches (the papyrus in question is dateable to the first century BC). Thereby we are able to reconstruct an even more extravagant tale of a ‘war of witches’ at Philip’s court, as Olympias strove to deploy witchcraft against Arrhidaeus, whilst his mother Philinna strove to deploy it in protection of him.¹⁴

A more tangibly historical demonstration of the rivalry between Alexander and Arrhidaeus and indeed their respective mothers is provided by the Pixodarus affair, for which once again Plutarch is our sole source. He locates the episode just after the point at which Philip had persuaded Alexander home from Illyria.¹⁵ Pixodarus, the satrap of Caria, wanted to construct a military alliance with Philip and sent one Aristocritus to Macedonia with the proposal that Philip’s son Arrhidaeus should marry his eldest daughter, Ada. Olympias and Alexander’s friends persuaded Alexander that Philip was trying to line Arrhidaeus up to succeed himself by arranging this brilliant match for him. So Alexander sent the tragic actor Thessalus in turn to Pixodarus, to tell him to ignore Arrhidaeus, who, he said, was a bastard and an idiot (nothos, ou phrenērēs), and to choose himself instead. Pixodarus was delighted by the prospect of such an upgrade. But when Philip got wind of what was afoot, he took Alexander’s friend Philotas along with him to Alexander’s chamber and told him off: he was ignoble and unworthy of his rank, he said, if he wanted to become son-in-law to a mere Carian and a slave of a barbarian king. Philip had the Corinthians return Thessalus to him in chains (why was he in Corinth?), though seemingly without further consequence, and banished some of Alexander’s companions, evidently regarding them as a poor influence. These included Harpalus, Nearchus, Erigyius and Ptolemy. After his accession Alexander would recall them all and bestow upon them the highest offices in his regime.¹⁶ Arrian too speaks of Philip’s banishment and Alexander’s retrieval of these same men, together with Erigyius’ brother Laomedon, but he makes no mention of Pixodarus. Rather, he tightly aligns the banishment with the former dispute, asserting that Philip banished the men for being adherents of Alexander when the prince fell under suspicion with the king after he humiliated Olympias with his marriage to Eurydice (i.e. Cleopatra).¹⁷

Why was a satrap of the Persian empire trying to make a military alliance with Philip? According to Heckel, his messenger Aristocritus arrived in Macedon shortly after Philip’s advance forces under Parmenion, Attalus and Amyntas had crossed over into Asia in the spring of 336 with the explicit mission to liberate the Greek cities there.¹⁸ If so, the move looks like a protective insurance policy. Philip’s anger is to be explained, concomitantly, by the fact that the fiasco cost him a potential ally in his Asian campaign, since Pixodarus then chose to consolidate his loyalty to the Persian king Darius by giving Ada rather to the distinguished Persian Orontopates.¹⁹ Ruzicka holds that the initiative for the marriage-alliance came rather from a Philip eager to gain a strategic ally for his Persian campaign and that Alexander – supposedly in exile still at the relevant point – intervened in order to beat a path back into the Macedonian court for himself.²⁰

The Assassination of Philip (336 BC): Pausanias of Orestis

There was much speculation in antiquity about the ultimate culprit behind Philip’s assassination, and indeed people continue to speculate about it today. However, the truth of the matter is clear, being adumbrated for us by the best of all possible contemporary sources, Aristotle, tutor to Alexander, and then being laid out by Diodorus in uncharacteristically rich, compelling and persuasive detail (albeit not without error or detectable accretion), with Justin’s briefer account supplying some extra details but probably inventing at least some of them.²¹ The interest of alternative ancient accounts of the assassination therefore lies in the determination of the reasons for their concoction, whilst alternative modern accounts of the assassination are merely idle.²²

As Diodorus and Justin tell, Philip was assassinated by his former lover, Pausanias of Orestis, who considered that the king had insufficiently avenged and compensated him for a gang rape organized by the ever-baleful Attalus with the help of his muleteers. He planned his attack for the magnificent wedding Philip held at Aegae for his daughter Cleopatra, Alexander’s full sister, and her uncle and Olympias’ brother, Alexander of Epirus: a timely match, since Justin tells us that the disaffected and fugitive Olympias had been egging her brother on to declare war on Philip. On the second day of the festivities, Philip, clad in a striking white cloak, sent his entourage ahead and asked his bodyguards to stand back, seemingly so that he could give his adoring audience a clear and uninterrupted view of his entrance as he emerged, through a narrow passageway, into the theatre, where competitions were to be held. Pausanias seized his moment, rushed at Philip in the passageway and stabbed him in the ribs with a dagger of the sort later termed ‘Celtic’. The bodyguards ran the assassin through with their javelins before he could make it to the horses he had stationed for his escape.

Justin tells that, as he walked, Philip was flanked by the two Alexanders, his son and the bridegroom. But this does not fit at all with Diodorus’ more detailed account, and the claim would appear to be a rhetorical embellishment. However, the embellishment does indeed prompt us to ask where our Alexander actually was at the time of the deed. We can only infer that he was somewhere in the offing. If we discount Justin, it is Arrian that gives us our first glimpse of Alexander in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. He tells that the suspect Alexander of Lyncestis was amongst the first of the prince’s friends to come to him after the assassination, and that he helped him put his breastplate on and escorted him to the palace. The donning of the breastplate was presumably for safety – who knew what other conspirators might lurk? But why to the palace? Was the palace regarded as a place of safety? The place at which Alexander could be calmly united with the recovered body of his father? Or did he rather make a dash to the physical centre of royal power in order, a greater priority, to establish his claim to the succession?²³

Over-determination gives the lie to Justin’s striking and wonderfully elaborate claim that Pausanias was encouraged in his work by Olympias with the complicity of Alexander. She it was, he tells, that provided the horses for Pausanias’ getaway. After the killing she hastened back to Aegae, and on the night of her arrival put a golden crown on the head of the body of the dead Pausanias, which had been crucified. She subsequently had Pausanias’ remains burned on Philip’s own funeral pyre and made a tomb for him in the same place as Philip’s. Her revenge upon Attalus’ niece Cleopatra was savage: she had her little daughter killed in her lap before having the woman forced into a noose, before her own eyes. Finally, she dedicated the sword with which Pausanias had killed Philip to Apollo, under her childhood name of Myrtale. All, these things, Justin asserts, Olympias did not merely publicly but openly, as if she feared that it might not be clear to all that she had been the sponsor of the deed.²⁴ Our own Plutarch accepts that Pausanias acted alone, but nonetheless reports some entertaining rumours associated with the climate of suspicion that had looked to Alexander and Olympias, such as the rumour that Alexander had encouraged Pausanias to the deed by quoting a line of Euripides’ Medea that referred darkly to the planned murder of the giver of the bride (i.e. Creon/Attalus), the bridegroom (i.e. Jason/Philip) and the bride herself (i.e. Glauce/Cleopatra).²⁵

Arrian offers another theory. For him, three Lyncestian brothers, Heromenes, Arrhabaeus and Alexander, the sons of Aeropus, had been involved in the murder. Upon becoming king Alexander had executed the former two, but he spared the third, despite accusations against him, because he was amongst the first of his friends to come to him after the assassination (as just noted).²⁶ It is hard to see how these brothers can have been involved in the assassination if the protestations of Aristotle and Diodorus about the motives of the assassin Pausanias are accepted.²⁷ On the other hand, it is easy to see how one might have put Pausanias of Orestis together with the three Lyncestian brothers to construct the notion of a grand Upper Macedonian conspiracy against Philip, fuelled by resentment at the emasculation of the principalities under him. And so too perhaps Amyntas the son of Perdiccas, also executed by Alexander soon after his accession, the former baby king whose throne Philip had usurped, and who might have been imagined to consider that it should now revert to him.²⁸ Hammond and Griffith see the creation of the notion of the involvement of the Lyncestian brothers not merely as an opportunist move on Alexander’s part to unburden himself of rivals, but also as an act of rationalization of the killing on the part of the Macedonian establishment as a whole, which could not come to terms with the actual circumstances: the great man deserved better assassins with more dignified motivations. One suspects this says more of the values and perspectives of Cambridge in the AD 1970s than it does of those of Macedon in the 330s BC. They further protest that the brothers cannot themselves have been candidates for the throne – but that is to view the Macedonian succession from a quaintly constitutionalist perspective.²⁹

The Stages by Which Alexander Secured the Succession

What were the stages by which Alexander secured the throne, given that all was up for grabs on the death of an Argead king, and that we must not be misled by hindsight into assuming that Alexander’s succession was inevitable?

1. Step 1: Arrian, as we have seen, tells that Alexander spared one of Pausanias’ supposed conspirators, Alexander of Lyncestis, because he had been one of the first to come to Alexander after the killing. Justin more pointedly declares that Alexander of Lyncestis had been the very first after the killing to hail Alexander as king. Whether specifically true or not, this perhaps gives us a hint that the first step on the journey to recognition lay precisely in receiving hails from the Companions.³⁰

2. Step 2: Arrian further tells us that Alexander made a bee-line for the royal palace; if occupancy of the palace was a token of kingship, clearly no rival claimant could be permitted to get there first.

3. Step 3: Diodorus, Justin and the Alexander Romance tell that the twenty-year-old Alexander held an immediate public assembly in which he reassured and encouraged the Macedonians. Diodorus and Justin agree that Alexander made a stabilizing claim to the effect that the king had changed in name only. For Diodorus, Alexander proclaimed that he would run the state in the same way as his father had done; for Justin, he proclaimed relief from all taxes and impositions for the Macedonians, beyond that of service in the army. Diodorus adds that Alexander also addressed himself to the embassies of the Greeks present in Macedon – presumably the ones that had come for the wedding and stayed on for the funeral – and bade them to transfer their loyalty to him.³¹ It should be made clear that the notion, which has found acceptance in the most respectable scholarship, that Alexander was presented to the assembly for its endorsement by Antipater – a winning vignette – is effectively a myth. The only authority for it is the fifteenth-century Leiden MS (L) of the Alexander Romance, which preserves a version of the (fifth-century AD?) β recension, modified at some point prior to the eighth century; it does not appear in the remainder of the β recension, which, we may assume, was the only basis for L’s treatment of this episode.³²

4. Step 4: Justin also tells of Alexander’s conducting of his father’s funeral. This was a critical point. The conducting of the funeral was an important, graphic means of declaring oneself the dead man’s successor. Justin further specifies that Alexander killed all those that had been complicit in the murder and that they were put to death at Philip’s place of burial, again with the exception of Alexander of Lyncestis (whom Justin mistakenly identifies as the brother of Pausanias).³³

5. Step 5: Justin next tells of Alexander’s disposal of his potential rival for the throne, Caranus, the little son of Cleopatra (as noted above). This looks like a doublet of Justin’s own account of Olympias having Cleopatra’s little daughter killed on her knee, but perhaps there could have been two children already, with Alexander killing the male and Olympias the female. Plutarch tells that Olympias killed Cleopatra herself during Alexander’s absence, and that he was angry with her for this. Perhaps, specifically, he had wanted to marry her for quasi-levirate purposes, given that it seems to have been a practice among the polygamous Argead kings to legitimate their rule by marrying one of their father’s later and younger widows (and thereby also mitigate the potential for conflict between the rival lines).³⁴

6. Step 6: The final stage was to secure the acceptance of the wider Greek community, building on his work with the ambassadors in Step 3. Justin again tells how Alexander summoned the Greeks to Corinth and had them appoint him their leader in the League of Corinth in Philip’s place. Also for the consumption of the wider Greek community was Alexander’s reorganization of the Philippeum monument that his father had started to construct at Olympia in the wake of Chaeronea. Whatever his father had planned for it, the circular building was now to enshrine and virtually divinize five figures: in the centre stood that of Philip himself; on the right side he was flanked by those of his parents, Amyntas and Eurydice; on the left he was flanked by those of his son Alexander and Alexander’s mother Olympias. Here the exotic polygamy and associated successional chaos of the Macedonian court was discreetly occluded, to be replaced by a cosy tableau of three loving generations of a respectable nuclear family, and of a crown passingly seamlessly, unproblematically, uncontestedly and inevitably from grandfather to father to son.³⁵

Guide to Further Reading

The material discussed in this chapter is chewed over in every modern biography of Philip and Alexander alike, for example Lane Fox 1973: 17–27; Hammond and Griffith 1979: 675–698; O’Brien 1992: 28–42; Hammond 1997b: 21–31; Squillace 2022: 197–203. Useful prosopographical biographies of all minor players can be found in Heckel 2021. For Attalus and the fiasco at Cleopatra’s wedding, see Heckel 1979, 1981a. For the Pixodarus affair, see Hatzopoulos 1982; French and Dixon 1986a; 1986b; Ruzicka 2010; for Arrhidaeus more specifically, see Carney 2001; Ogden 2007a. For the polygamous context of both of these disputes, see Greenwalt 1989; Carney 1992, 2000: 51–81, 2006: 19–41, Ogden 1999 passim especially 3–40. For the assassination of Philip and its sundry controversies, the item of first resort is now Heckel, Howe and Müller 2017; see also Badian 1963, 2000, 2007; Ellis 1971, 1981; Fears 1975; Carney 1980; Develin 1981; Kapetanopoulos 1996; Hatzopoulos 2005; Antela-Bernárdez 2012. For the Philippeum, see Carney 2007; Schultz 2007, 2009; Palagia 2010.