to lead the main invasion force over to Asia the next year, but, wanting to make certain of divine
approval, he stayed behind to inquire of the Pythia (the priestess of Apollo at Delphi) whether he
would conquer the king of the Persians. The Pythia gave the following answer:
“Wreathed in the bull. All is done. There is also one who will smite him.”
Philip understood this response as ambiguous, but finally decided to take it in a sense favorable to
himself: namely, that the Persian king would be slaughtered like a sacrificial victim. Like many a
Greek king before him, Philip had fatally misinterpreted the utterance of the god.
In the summer of 336, on the very eve of his departure for Asia with the main expeditionary force,
Philip arranged a marriage between Olympias’ and his own daughter Kleopatra, and Alexander, king
of Epirus (Olympias’ brother and thus the bride’s uncle). Olympias already had been replaced in
Philip’s bed by Attalus’ niece Kleopatra. Now, her brother Alexander—Philip’s new son-in-law—
would replace her as Philip’s political link to Epirus. Her brother’s wedding was Olympias’
political funeral.
THE WEDDING OF KLEOPATRA AND ALEXANDER OF EPIRUS
Philip had invited his personal guest-friends from throughout the Greek world to the wedding of his
daughter in Aegae and had ordered the members of his court to bring as many of their acquaintances
from abroad as they could. He planned brilliant musical contests and lavish banquets, too, determined
as he was to show himself an amiable man and worthy of the honors conferred on him when he was
appointed commander of the war against Persia.
From all directions, crowds flocked to the festival in Aegae. Notable persons and representatives
of important cities such as Athens came bearing golden crowns to honor Philip. When the herald
announced the Athenian award, he declared that if anyone plotted against Philip and fled to Athens for
refuge he would be delivered up for trial.
At the state banquet, the actor Neoptolemus sang an ode appropriate to Philip’s imminent crossing
to Asia. The song mocked the wealth of the Persian king, great and famous as it was, suggesting that
fortune could someday overturn it. Addressing his song directly to Darius, Neoptolemus intoned:
Your thoughts reach higher than the air:
You dream of wide fields’ cultivation.
The homes you plan surpass the homes
That men have known, but you do err,
Guiding your life from afar.
But one there is who’ll catch the swift,
Who goes a way obscured in gloom,
And suddenly, unseen, overtakes
And robs us of our distant hopes—
Death, mortals’ source of many woes.
Finally the drinking was over; the start of the games was set for the following day. While it was
still dark, the spectators hastened into the small theater at Aegae for the opening ceremonies. The
theater was set below the royal palace, and from their seats the guests had a beautiful view of the
broad fields of Lower Macedon. As the sun rose, the parade formed. In the procession Philip
included statues of the twelve gods of Olympus, along with a thirteenth—of himself.
Philip appeared near the entryway to the orchestra, dressed in a white cloak. Once the theater was
full, his bodyguard stood away from him by his order and followed only at a distance: the leader of
the pan-Hellenic alliance wanted to show publicly that he was protected by the goodwill of all the
Greeks and had no need of a guard of spearmen. Philip walked between his son Alexander III (the
Great) and his new son-in-law, Alexander of Epirus.
Just as Philip was directing his attendant friends to precede him into the theater, one of the guards,
a certain Pausanias from Orestis, seeing the king alone, darted forward and pierced him through the
ribs with a Celtic dagger. Philip died on the spot.
Pausanias ran for the gates and the horses that had been prepared for his flight. One group of
pursued the assassin. As Pausanias leaped for his horse, his boot caught on a vine, and he fell. His
pursuers slew him with their javelins. Alexander III, meanwhile, was rushed into the safety of the
royal palace by another Alexander, the son of a man named Aeropus, from the Upper Macedonian
canton of Lyncestis.
Remains of the theater at Aegae, in which Philip II of Macedon was assassinated by the bodyguard Pausanias in October 336 B.C.E.
Author’s collection
PAUSANIAS THE ASSASSIN
Once the assassin’s identity was revealed, his motive was soon surmised. At one time, Pausanias had
been beloved of Philip, because of his beauty. But Philip then had become enamored of another
Pausanias. Pausanias the guard then insulted his replacement, calling him a hermaphrodite, quick “to
accept the amorous advances of anyone.”
Unable to endure such insults, the second Pausanias, having confided to his friend Attalus what he
proposed to do, determined to bring about his own death in a spectacular fashion. A few days later,
when Philip was fighting a battle against Pleurias, king of the Illyrians, Pausanias stepped in front of
Philip and received the fatal blows meant for him.
The dead Pausanias’ friend Attalus, though, was the uncle of Philip’s Macedonian wife Kleopatra
(and the general later sent to Asia with the Macedonian advance force). Attalus invited the first
Pausanias, the guard, to dinner. When his guest was thoroughly drunk, Attalus handed him over to his
muleteers to abuse—that is, to be gang-raped. Attalus thus avenged his friend.
Pausanias charged Attalus before Philip; but, needing Attalus’ services, Philip did not punish him.
Instead he gave Pausanias presents and advanced him in honor among the guards. Pausanias accepted
the gifts and the promotion but, encouraged by a sophist named Hermocrates, he apparently still
yearned to revenge himself both on the one who had done him wrong and also on the one who had not
avenged him.
At first glance, the story of Pausanias’ dishonor and ultimate revenge seems far-fetched. The gang
rape took place in 344, eight years before Pausanias assassinated Philip. If Pausanias was nursing a
grudge, he certainly nursed it for a very long time.
However, there is also the testimony of Aristotle to consider. In his Politics Aristotle cites
Pausanias’ attack on Philip as an example of revenge for hubris—meaning, in this case, insolence,
violence, or rape. While it is not certain that Aristotle witnessed Philip’s murder, he certainly knew
Philip, Alexander, and the Macedonian court exceptionally well. Aristotle, who was in a position to
know, believed that a gang rape, even one that had taken place eight years before, was motivation
enough for Pausanias. But if thinking men believed that Pausanias’ motive was plausible, they also
believed in a wider conspiracy. Who were the supposed conspirators?
One was the very man (Alexander of Lyncestis) who had led Alexander into the palace after the
assassination. He was the brother of two other men (Heromenes and Arrabaeus), “both of whom had a
part in the murder of Philip” and who, with the three sons of Pausanias, were executed at the tumulus
of Philip. (It was standard Macedonian practice to execute the close male relatives of tho
se who had
plotted against the king.) Perhaps because he was the first to hail Alexander as king, Alexander of
Lyncestis escaped his brothers’ fate. But later, when Alexander was in Asia Minor, he received a
report that the surviving Lyncestian brother was plotting against him, and the brother was placed
under arrest.
At least one other person was considered culpable in some way. A tantalizing fragment of a
papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, indicates that someone, possibly a soothsayer ( mantis), was
crucified following the assassination. The soothsayer may have been crucified for pronouncing it safe
for Philip to enter the theater in Aegae on that fateful October morning. But the papyrus text is
unfortunately too fragmentary to allow us to understand clearly why the soothsayer was executed.
Sparse and vague though the evidence is, it does make clear that the Macedonians believed that
there had been a wider conspiracy. We have no explicit information about what the conspirators’
motives were thought to be. It is at least possible, though, that the Lyncestian brothers were planning a
coup d’état, either on their own behalf or in the interests of the Persians.
THE PERSIAN THEORY
Later, at any rate, in a letter to Darius after the battle of Issos in 333, Alexander accused the Persian
king of organizing the murder of his father. Philip, Alexander claimed, was murdered “by assassins
whom, as you openly boasted in your letters, you yourselves had hired to commit the crime.”
Although scholars usually have dismissed Alexander’s letter as propaganda, the accusation is not
intrinsically implausible, especially since, by the spring of 336, the Persians were already feeling the
military and political effects of the Macedonian expeditionary force under Parmenio and Attalus.
Darius had very good reasons for wanting Philip II dead. But no independent evidence supports
Alexander’s allegation.
OLYMPIAS AND ALEXANDER?
Others suspected that the conspiracy had been hatched much closer to home. Plutarch reports that
Olympias was chiefly blamed, because she encouraged Pausanias and incited him to his revenge. It
also was implied that Alexander knew of this incitement or shared in it: when Pausanias met him and
complained about the injustice he had suffered, Alexander quoted the lines from Euripides’ Medea in
which Medea threatened “the giver of the bride, the bride, and the bridegroom”—Creon, Creusa, and
Jason, that is. Plutarch’s classical readers would have understood what Alexander was trying to
suggest: that Pausanias should follow Medea’s example.
The historian Justin supports and expands upon the case against Olympias and Alexander.
Olympias was grieved at her divorce and at Kleopatra, who was preferred to her, more deeply than
Pausanias was at his disgrace. Alexander also feared that his brother, supported by his stepmother,
had designs on the kingship; hence the quarrel at Philip’s wedding banquet.
Furthermore, Justin alleges, Olympias had pressed her brother Alexander, the king of Epirus, to go
to war against Philip; she would have succeeded had not Philip married his daughter to him and
(thereby) gained control of his son-in-law. It was Olympias, too, who had the horses prepared in
advance for the fleeing assassin, Justin claims, and when she hastened to the funeral under the pretext
of paying her last respects, she placed a golden crown on the head of the crucified Pausanias. A few
days later, she cremated the murderer’s body and made a sepulchral mound for him, which she took
care of every year. And there was more: Olympias forced Philip’s young Macedonian widow to hang
herself, but not before killing Kleopatra’s daughter at her mother’s breast. The dagger with which the
king had been stabbed she consecrated to Apollo under the name Myrtales, the name she herself had
borne in youth. All these things were done so openly, Justin says, that Olympias seemed to fear being
proven innocent.
Independent of Justin’s bald assertions, however, there is no proof whatsoever that Olympias either
incited Pausanias or provided logistical help for the assassination. That Pausanias was killed as he
fled toward “horses” (plural, in the Greek text of Diodorus) does suggest either a co-conspirator or
more likely a change of mounts; minimally, “horses” proves that Pausanias planned to flee; he did not
intend Philip’s murder to be a suicide mission.
But Justin offers no proof that it was Olympias who arranged for the horses to be waiting, and no
other source corroborates this assertion. Nor can any of Olympias’ actions after Philip’s death be
used to convict her of the crime. She had every reason to celebrate Philip’s death; but her joy,
however unseemly, cannot be used as evidence of guilt.
Much the same applies to Alexander; indeed, it is implausible that he knew of the plot. Alexander
would have been well aware that he and his mother would be suspects, given what had occurred
among father, mother, and son in the years before Philip’s death. Had credible evidence existed that
Alexander was involved, surely he would have shared the fate of the Lyncestian brothers. Although he
(and others) greatly benefited from Philip’s death, Alexander has, by the vast majority of scholars,
been judged not guilty.
CUI BONO?
The army at Aegae proclaimed Alexander king the day after Philip’s death. As so often in
Macedonian history, the transfer of power led to further bloodshed and a new political order.
Olympias, as we have seen, had the pleasure of supervising the deaths of Kleopatra and her infant.
Attalus was assassinated on the instructions of Alexander; a single toast had cost him his life.
Parmenio, placed in the position of having to choose between protecting his own son-in-law and
fellow commander in Asia (Attalus) or risking his own life by opposing Alexander’s assassins, chose
life. Years later, he perished in circumstances eerily similar to those in which Attalus had died.
Amyntas, the rightful heir to the throne, promptly disappeared, never to be heard from again. With the
help of his noble patron Antipater, one of Macedon’s most experienced soldiers, Alexander emerged
in October 336 as the sole descendant of the Argead kings mentally and physically capable of leading
the alliance against the Persians.
Philip’s assassination had left Alexander in a position to show the world something great and
spectacular, just as he had told the other boys he would. Now, as ruler, Alexander immediately sent
for the close friends whom Philip had exiled after the Pixodarus fiasco: Ptolemy, son of Lagos, from
Eordaia in Macedonia; Harpalus, the son of Machatas, possibly from Elimiotis in Macedonia;
Erigyius, son of Larichos, a Mytilenaian by birth; Laomedon, son of Larichos, from Mytilene; and
Nearchus, son of Androtimos, from Crete. Subsequently, Alexander advanced them to some of the
highest positions in the Macedonian army and administration. What bound these men together was not
Alexander’s devotion to a multi-ethnic ruling class, of course, but their loyalty to Alexander.
Nevertheless, Alexander’s inner circle always included men who were not purely Macedonians.
Eventually Alexander’s inclusion of “barbarians” into that circle would lead him into further conflicts
with Attalus’ ideological heirs.
ALEXANDER’S ACCESSION AND THE DEST
RUCTION OF THEBES
In Athens, the news of Philip’s assassination was greeted with public rejoicing. Elsewhere, the
Aetolians recalled those who had been exiled because of Philip. The Ambraciots and the Thebans
expelled Philip’s garrisons. In the Peloponnese, the Argives, the Eleians, and the Spartans “moved to
recover their independence.” As for the new king of Macedon, now twenty years old, he was not so
much underestimated as ignored.
Alexander’s first response to the situation was diplomatic. He won over the Thessalians, then the
Amphictyons, and the Ambraciots with reminders of ancient kinship and with flattery. The Athenians
prepared for war but also sent envoys, asking Alexander’s forgiveness for their “tardy recognition of
his leadership.”
Alexander then called Greek envoys and delegates to another meeting in Corinth, where he
persuaded them to declare him chief general of Greece and to join in an expedition against Persia.
Alexander thus officially took over the leadership of the pan-Hellenic campaign of revenge that his
father had planned.
While he was in Corinth, Alexander also reportedly met the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope.
Diogenes was famous among the Greeks for living in accordance with the supposedly natural life of
primitive man or even animals. Diogenes’ “natural” lifestyle entailed dressing in a simple cloak,
begging for food, and urinating in public. It was from such dog-like behavior that his followers, who
even copulated in public, acquired the name “Cynics,” after the Greek word for dog ( kuon).
Most Greeks were scandalized by Diogenes; Alexander was curious, especially because, while
many philosophers and politicians came to congratulate him on becoming head of the pan-Hellenic
alliance, Diogenes remained aloof. So Alexander decided to pay a visit to the “dog” philosopher.
Alexander and a group of his friends found Diogenes in a suburb of Corinth, lying out in the open,
sunning himself. Hovering over the philosopher, Alexander asked if Diogenes wanted anything. The
philosopher asked Alexander only if he could stand a little out of the sun. The king was reported to
have said to his friends who were mocking Diogenes, “If I were not Alexander, I would be