Doomed queens, p.2
Doomed Queens, page 2
Artemisia I
480 BCE
rtemisia became the sole regent of Halicarnassus, a city on the coast of Caria (part of modern-day Turkey), after the death of her husband in the fifth century BCE. Her husband was evidently not as intriguing as she was—his name has been lost by time. However, their union did bring forth a son, Pisindelis, who joined Artemisia in battle as an adult.
As queen, Artemisia was denounced as a tyrant because she brown-nosed King Xerxes I of Persia despite the wishes of her people. In her defense, Halicarnassus was a client city of Persia, so it was good politics to keep the big kids on the block happy.
Toward that end, Artemisia promised aid when Xerxes went to war with Greece. She also advised the king: “Do not fight at sea, for the Greeks are infinitely superior to us in naval matters.” He ignored her warning and lost the water-based Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. Artemisia participated in the battle and commanded five large ships. But when the fight turned against her, the queen attacked and sank an ally ship, thus convincing the Greeks she had defected to their side. After she escaped to safety, the Greeks were peeved at her deception and offered ten thousand drachmas for her capture.
Was Artemisia a prudent warrior seeking to limit casualties on her side? Or was she a coward trying to save her derriere? It depends on how you look at it. One rumor claimed that the queen conveniently carried two different flags into battle; she raised the Persian flag on her ship while chasing Greeks but substituted the Greek flag when they sailed too close for comfort.
Yet the historian Herodotus thought highly of Artemisia. He wrote in his Histories: “I must speak of a certain leader named Artemisia, whose participation in the attack upon Greece, notwithstanding that she was a woman, moves my special wonder…. [Her] brave spirit and manly daring sent her forth to the war, when no need required her to adventure.” He concluded by praising the advice she offered Xerxes. Nor does Xerxes appear to have held a grudge against her. Or maybe he did not identify her as the naval force who sunk his battleship—after all, dead sailors can’t squeal. In any event, the king requested her counsel again. This time he listened and won victory.
Protected by Persia, Halicarnassus prospered under Artemisia’s rule. However, one story claims that Xerxes could not protect the queen from her emotions. Later in life, Artemisia fell hard for a boy toy named Dardanus. Alas, her affections were not reciprocated. After gouging out Dardanus’s eyes while he slept, Artemisia ended her reign by jumping into the sea.
* * *
Drowning
Throughout the ages, drowning was more often deployed to torture witches than to rid a nation of an unloved monarch. However, as a suicide method, drowning wields a romantic spell, all the way from heartbroken Artemisia’s final plunge to Virginia Woolf’s stroll with rock-filled pockets into the River Ouse. This attraction can be partly traced to a belief that drowning was a painless way to die; once the struggle for life ceased, the victim was thought to exit the world surrounded by serene visions and heavenly choirs.
No doubt this belief has roots in physical reality: When a person drowns to death, her brain becomes deprived of oxygen. And brains deprived of oxygen typically hallucinate, whether there’s religion involved or not.
* * *
CAUTIONARY MORAL
Don’t let your heart
overrule your head.
Olympias
316 BCE
ithout Olympias, Alexander the Great could never have existed—and without Alexander, the civilizing force of Hellenism would not have flapped its great wings over Western culture. Olympias was queen to Philip II of Macedon; their only issue was a son who grew up to be known as Alexander the Great. For this, one must grant Olympias thanks. History would be far less interesting without him.
The birth of Alexander the Great was one of Olympias’s few contributions to society. Beyond this, she was known for her affection for snakes and violence. The queen was never one to avoid dispatching a rival, real or imagined, to the great beyond. She approached murder with a ghoulish creativity that appalled even her devoted son, who loved her beyond all others except for one other person—but that’s Roxane’s story, still to come.
When Olympias met Philip, Philip was yet another Greek warrior king accustomed to marrying his enemies’ daughters to ensure peace; a joke from that time claimed that he took on a new wife after each battle campaign. Olympias was wife number four. On top of this, Philip also enjoyed the company of men as more than friends.
After three docile war brides, Olympias was a walk on the wild side. An orphaned princess hailing from Epirus, Olympias’s first loyalty was to the god Dionysus and his ecstatic mysteries, which involved dancing, snake handling, and much alcohol consumption. Plutarch writes that she “was wont in the dances proper to these ceremonies to have great tame serpents about her, which…made a spectacle which men could not look upon without terror.” Amazingly enough, the Macedonian king fell in love with Olympias while participating in these rituals.
Their marriage was filled with portents from the start. The night before the wedding, Olympias dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body and kindled a great fire that spread over the land before it was extinguished. Soon after, Philip dreamed that he sealed her genitals with a wax seal imprinted with a lion’s image. A wise man assured the king that this vision meant that the queen was pregnant with a boy as courageous as a lion.
* * *
or
When Empire Building
Is a Bad Thing
Olympias was the daughter of Neoptolemus, the king of the Molossians; the Molossians were a tribe in Epirus, a region located in what is now northwest Greece. Though Philip had other wives, none could compare to—or survive after—Olympias.
Alexander did not name an heir to his empire. When asked on his deathbed, he cryptically replied, “To the strongest.” Chaos ensued. Alexander’s wife Roxane gave birth to a son after his death, whom she named after his father. In the meantime, the throne was kept warm for Alex Junior by Alex Senior’s older half brother Philip, who was mentally impaired; many believed Olympias had poisoned him for fun and profit. The empire became mired in civil war, aided and abetted by Olympias’s scheming.
After much strife, an eventual victor emerged in the form of Cassander, the son of Alexander’s most trusted deputy Antipater. He married Alexander’s half sister, Thessalonike, thus continuing Alexander’s bloodline.
* * *
Divine omens or no, it was clear from the start that Alexander was meant for great things. To place him on the fast track for world domination, Olympias went far beyond what even the most devoted Texas cheerleader mom would consider. Philip grew uncomfortable with her zeal and cut off marital relations after he found her sleeping next to a serpent. He decided that the queen was either an enchantress or making whoopie with the god Zeus, who often took on animal forms to seduce mortal women.
In either case, Philip felt threatened. To protect himself, the king chose to dump Olympias as queen, disinherit Alexander, and take yet another wife, Cleopatra Eurydice, who was of pure Macedonian blood. The results were incendiary. Olympias insinuated that Alexander was indeed the son of Zeus and the divine superior of Philip. Soon Philip was stabbed to death by a jealous male lover. Not surprisingly, Olympias’s fingerprints were all over the plot. One rumor claimed that she plied the murderer with words to inflame his anger. She even placed a gold crown upon the executed murderer’s corpse—hardly the act of a mourning widow. To ensure Alexander’s reign would be unimpeded, Olympias assassinated Cleopatra Eurydice and her two small children by Philip. In a scenario out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, the children were roasted to death, their mother forced to hang herself.
From here, there was no stopping Alexander—or Olympias. After he took off to conquer the world, she never saw him again. Nonetheless, she wrote him frequently. He bore her advice patiently, though he rarely took it. In turn she, too, did as she wished. When Antipater, his governor in Macedon, wrote Alexander to complain about Olympias’s meddling, Alexander remarked, “Antipater does not realize that one tear of a mother erases ten thousand letters like this.”
As predicted, Alexander was as brave as a lion—but even lions are vulnerable. After conquering much of the world, Alexander died in 323 BCE from a suspiciously sudden illness. He was only thirty-three.
Without Alexander’s protection, Olympias knew her days were numbered. She returned to Epirus to plot her return to power but met her match in Antipater’s son Cassander, who inherited Alexander’s throne. He arranged for the queen’s execution in 316 BCE. As a final insult, he denied her the rites of burial.
CAUTIONARY MORAL
Religion can take you only so far.
Roxane
309 BCE
ne has to feel compassion for Roxane, queen to Alexander the Great. Though her beauty made her the toast of the ancient world, she simply couldn’t compete with Alexander’s number one love. Surprisingly, this all-encompassing passion wasn’t his mother, Olympias (though the king certainly loved her best of all women). Nor was it world domination (though he slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliad by his side). Nope, it was a man, Hephaestion. And when Hephaestion died, Roxane’s life went to hell in a handbasket.
Hephaestion was Alexander’s favorite childhood friend. When they came of age, evidence suggests that their friendship became a friendship with benefits. Olympias did everything she could to discourage their intense attachment. She even sent her son a famed courtesan, to ease him into heterosexuality. But Alexander refused to do the deed with her—the courtesan could not compare to his beloved Hephaestion.
Had Alexander not conquered Persia, Roxane would probably have been married off to some minor warlord, hopefully to live and die in peaceful obscurity. Instead, she became enmeshed in a dynastic struggle that brought the lives of herself and her son to premature ends.
Coin of the realm featuring the emperor himself.
Roxane was the daughter of Oxyartes, king of Bactria, a region in what is now Afghanistan. Her name translates as “Little Star,” presumably in reference to her luminous beauty. The royalty of Bactria used the fortress of Sogdian Rock as a refuge when threatened; Sogdian Rock was surrounded by a sheer cliff no one could surmount—until Alexander. In 327 BCE Alexander sent three hundred of his best climbers to scale the cliff in the middle of the night. Come morning, they greeted Oxyartes and company with pancakes and mimosas. The Bactrian king was so unnerved by Alexander’s success that he surrendered without a fight. He also surrendered Roxane’s hand to Alexander. Hephaestion served as best man.
Though Plutarch claimed that it was love at first sight, this seems unlikely: Alexander had eyes only for Hephaestion. Marrying Roxane was a savvy political move to solidify alliances. To his credit, Alexander wed Roxane using the ceremonies of her people, which won him much respect—he didn’t just invade, he assimilated. It was for similar reasons that three years later Alexander married Stateira, the daughter of the Persian king Darius III, after he conquered that land. Their union was part of a mass Moonie-style wedding that Alexander insisted his soldiers partake in—the ultimate consolidation of power.
Roxane’s life with Alexander was one long military slog. Legend claims that she traveled with him to India, which was feared as an exotic realm no one could conquer. Alexander could not resist the challenge but emerged unvictorious. However, even the toughest campaign was a cinch compared to the queen’s life after Hephaestion’s unexpected death in 324 BCE. Alexander was never the same. He died several months later, also of a sudden illness—some believe he and Hephaestion were poisoned—but not before knocking up Roxane a mere six years after their wedding.
Fate might have been kinder had Roxane given birth to a girl—but she didn’t. It is surprising that Roxane and Alexander Junior survived as long as they did, given the chaos after Alexander Senior’s demise. To save their skins, Roxane behaved accordingly. She arranged for the murder of Alexander’s other wife, Stateira. She also gained the protection of Olympias from Cassander, the warrior most likely to succeed in Alexander’s empire. But this was not enough to save their lives, especially after Olympias was sent to her eternal reward.
Roxane and her twelve-year-old son were poisoned by Cassander in 309 BCE, thus marking the end of Alexander’s bloodline.
CAUTIONARY MORAL
Don’t marry a man in love with another man.
Thessalonike
295 BCE
fter the demise of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, most of his surviving relatives lost their lives as they scrambled after the crumbs of his empire. One notable exception was Alexander’s half sister Thessalonike.
How did Thessalonike escape being served death on a platter when so many others could not? Perhaps it was because she hardly knew Alexander—Thessalonike was only a small child when her big brother took off to conquer the world. It could also be because she was the daughter of Philip II’s mistress Nicesipolis. Nicesipolis died soon after Thessalonike’s birth in 342 BCE, leaving the girl to be raised by Olympias. As incredible as it sounds, Alexander’s mother felt affection for Thessalonike and taught her the ways of Dionysus. At the very least, Olympias did not judge the girl an impediment to her worldly ambitions.
However, though Thessalonike made it past the first round of eliminations, she did not survive the second.
Upon Alexander’s death, Thessalonike took refuge with her stepmother, Olympias, against Cassander, who grabbed Alexander’s throne. Several years later, Cassander finally had the cojones to dispatch Olympias, but he granted a different fate to Thessalonike: He married her. Their union in 315 BCE gave the new king’s reign a legitimacy it previously lacked.
After going through so much, you would think that Thessalonike had it made. From an illegitimate birth, she had climbed the ladder of royal success to become queen of it all. Presumably the couple got along well enough, since three sons—Philip, Antipater, and Alexander—soon arrived. Cassander even named a city after Thessalonike, granting her great honor. But these ties of blood and bed were unable to prevent the queen from participating in a Macedonian version of King Lear.
When it comes to ruling a kingdom, three sons are two too many. After Cassander succumbed to dropsy in 297 BCE, Thessalonike used the teachings of her wily stepmother to manipulate Philip, Antipater, and Alexander to her advantage. But the queen was no Olympias—death soon visited them all.
Philip, the eldest son, wasted away from a mysterious illness not long after taking charge. Two years later, middle son, Antipater, became jealous of Thessalonike’s attentions to Alexander and murdered his mother in 295 BCE. Not one to be left out of a family squabble, Alexander bumped off Antipater but was then assassinated himself by a pretender to the throne.
Though Thessalonike’s mortal remains are long gone, she is remembered within the annals of Greek folklore. One legend claims that upon her death, the queen was transformed into a mermaid who lives still in the Aegean Sea.
CAUTIONARY MORAL
When it comes to succession,
one heir is plenty.
A BRIEF DIGRESSION
Stories about mermaids date from about 1000 BCE, some 700 years before Thessalonike. Even then, mermaids were associated with disappointing relationships. The first known mermaid legend tells of the ancient Assyrian goddess Atargatis, who drowned herself after a disastrous love affair. Though she hoped to be transformed into a fish, her divine nature would not cooperate—she retained her human form above the waist.
Amastris
284 BCE
he deaths of Thessalonike and her family brought the annihilation of the descendants of Alexander the Great to a close. However, aftershocks from his legacy rocked the ancient world for some years. One victim they eventually claimed was Amastris, the queen of Heraclea Pontica, a Greek colony on the coast of what is now Turkey.
Amastris was the daughter of Oxyathres, the brother of the Persian king Darius III. Remember that mass wedding staged by Alexander to commemorate grabbing Persia from King Darius? Amastris was one of the reluctant war brides; she was married to Craterus, Alexander’s favorite bachelor general. As it turned out, Craterus was just the start of the princess’s complicated matrimonial career. She would have two more opportunities to register for royal china before breathing her last.
A BRIEF DIGRESSION
Modern dictionaries define a tyrant as a ruler who wields power through cruel or oppressive means. However, in ancient Greece a tyrant was someone who had seized the right to rule. While their reigns weren’t sanctioned by law or birthright, they usually won popular support from local businesses and workers—think corporate takeover rather than military coup. The truth was that the tyrant Dionysius was loved by his subjects—they even gave him the nickname of “the Good.”
One year later in 323 BCE, Amastris’s Alexander-inspired nuptials were history. When the big guy bit the dust, Craterus abandoned the princess to return to the sweetheart he’d left behind in Macedon. Before he departed, he gave his blessing to Amastris’s next groom, Dionysius, the tyrant ruler of Heraclea Pontica.
Rumor held that Dionysius was so overjoyed by the death of Alexander that he abandoned himself to endless luxury and gluttony. With Alexander gone, life at the tyrant’s court was a nonstop banquet, much of which was funded by Amastris, who had brought a considerable dowry. But too much of a good thing is too much: Dionysius grew morbidly obese. Nonetheless, his heft did not prevent him from gifting his consort with three children—Clearchus, Oxyathres, and a daughter named after herself—over a short period of time. Dionysius died by choking on his own fat in 306 BCE, leaving his queen to rule in trust for their sons.
