OLYMPIAS, MOTHER OF ALEXANDER
[359-336 B.C.]
In striking contrast to that of Philip was the character of Olympias, his wife. She was the daughter of Neoptolemus, the Epirot king, and having known her in his youth at Samothrace, Philip had married her with the consent of her uncle and guardian, Arymbas. Beautiful, reserved, passionate, Olympias was a devotee of the secret rites of Orpheus and Bacchus, and practised in the magical arts of Thracian women. During nocturnal orgies, it is related, she was frequently to be seen rushing through mountain paths with the thyrsus and winding serpents in her hand; and in her dreams were repeated the fantastic pictures with which her brain was filled. The night before her marriage she dreamed, according to tradition, that she was exposed to the fury of a terrific storm, during which a burning thunderbolt fell into her lap which, flaming up ever higher and higher, finally disappeared in its own wild blaze.
Bronze Model of a Grecian Boat
When tradition further relates that among other signs given on the night of Alexander’s birth the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, which, with Megabyzus and his eunuchs and the hieroduli of the Hellenes formed a striking example of true oriental heathenism, was burned to the ground; and that simultaneously with the information of the birth of his son, Philip received the news of a triple victory—it simply expresses in popular form the significance of a hero’s entrance into the world, and the great thoughts associated with such an event.
Theopompus says of Philip, “Everything considered, Europe has never produced a man that could equal the son of Amyntas.” Yet the work that he had set as the aim of his existence was not accomplished by the scheming, resolute, tenacious king. He may have used this aspiration, it having root in the very nature of Greece’s history and culture, to bring into union the whole Greek world; but he was compelled rather by the exigencies of the situation in which he was placed than by the inherent power of the inspiration itself, and failed to follow it out to full fruition. Beyond the sea was the land wherein lay greatness and the future of Macedonia; but the glance that he strained towards this land would often become dimmed, and the solid structure of his plans be obscured under the airy figures of his desire. Philip’s ambition to accomplish a great work was shared by all about him, both the aristocracy and the common people; it was the undertone that was heard through every phrase of Macedonian life, the alluring possibility that was continually beckoning out of the future. The Macedonian armies fought against the Thracians and gained victories over the Greeks; but the Orient was the real object for which they fought and conquered.[b]