Women were interwoven into the politics of Alexander’s itinerant court. Alexander’s mother Olympias and his full sister Cleopatra played the most important and enduring roles at court, even though they remained in the Greek peninsula and never saw Alexander again. His half-sisters Cynnane and Thessalonice and his niece Adea-Eurydice (also all resident in the Greek peninsula during Alexander’s reign) only grew to some level of importance after his death. His first wife, the Bactrian Roxane, mother of Alexander IV, played more of a role, though a still limited one, than his two Achaemenid wives. Though he never married the half-Persian Barsine, he fathered a son by her. Men and women worked together, not infrequently for violent ends. Women’s access to information, their participation in information networks covering great distances, their attempts to influence events and decisions, and their ability to exercise patronage to their own ends is striking. The violent deaths of all the female Argeads (by birth or marriage) resemble those of male Argeads and many of the Successors. All these women were, in the end, killed because they somehow constituted a problem, a threat to others, just as the men did.

This chapter is concerned with Alexander in Egypt in both life and legend. Subjects discussed include his foundation of Alexandria, which became a new capital for Egypt on the Mediterranean coast, his expedition through the Libyan desert to Siwah, where the oracle’s recognition of the conqueror as son of Zeus-Ammon resonated in both Greek and Egyptian cultic terms, his acceptance as the pharaoh of Egypt, and finally, after his death in Babylon, his return for burial to Egypt, where his embalmed corpse and tomb in Alexandria became the centre of Ptolemaic ruler cult, a focal point for later visits of Roman emperors, and where the question of its actual location remains a source of continuing fascination and debate. In the accounts of classical historians, Alexander in Egypt is already variously presented; the historiography is as important as the history. From the start some specifically local legendary elements may be seen and over time the Romance or Legend of Alexander in its many different forms overshadows and surpasses any strictly historical account.