This settlement of the place of burial brought on a conflict with the regent who came to Egypt, bringing King Philip and his wife Euridike and Alexander IV and his mother Roxane, perhaps her first visit to a land where she had been nominally queen. Perdikhas acted in his treatment of soldiers and enemies with great cruelty, Ptolemy with a marked clemency, and the cavalry of the former rose up and murdered him. Ptolemy was then offered the regency and the charge of the royal princes. But he was a cautious and far-seeing man and content with what he had already secured—the mastership of Egypt—firmly declined so dangerous a responsibility. The regency was then conferred upon or seized by Antipator, and new distributions and divisions of ownership ensued.
A mother and sister of Alexander, Olympias and Cleopatra, had raised a faction against Antipator and divided the government between them. A firm believer in “women’s rights” were these ancient and warlike dames; rights in which there should be no distinction of sex, yet as ever the weaker went to the wall. Cleopatra, it is said, lived a royal widow at Sardis, wooed by all the world—a woman doubtless of beauty, as she showed herself of vigor and capacity. She would have married Perdikhas or Leonatus, who had died, but spurned the rest. Like England’s Queen Elizabeth, she had many suitors. At last to escape Antigonas she agreed to marry Ptolemy, and thereby secured her own destruction, for Antigonas could not contemplate a union which might prove so injurious to himself and had her secretly murdered. Some one seems always to have stood ready for the commission of such deadly crimes. But to throw dust in the eyes of the people Antigonas gave her a magnificent funeral and proceeded against the woman who had been instrumental in her murder.
Time passed on and Antipater was succeeded by his son Cassander, more ruthless, cruel and self-seeking, if possible, than his predecessor, and he determined to rid himself of a charge become useless to him and assume full regal power. Olympias had meanwhile secured the death of Philip Arridaeus and his wife and carried off the young king and his mother to Pydna. Cassander besieged and took them, and Olympias was cited to appear before a public assembly of the Macedonians and answer for the murders she had committed. Trusting in her own power and influence she haughtily complied, but was condemned to death and secretly executed by the relatives of those she had injured.
The young king and his mother were shut up in the castle of Amphipolis, where they were treated rather as captives than as royal personages, and finally put to death. It seems almost strange that Roxane, still young and probably beautiful, was not forcibly married by one of the contestants, and the question settled in this way rather than by such tragic means, but it was not to be, and the son of Alexander must needs die or others could not grasp the power which should have descended to him.
Ptolemy, if not directly accessory, at least connived at this murder, and thus secured himself in his new kingdom. It is said that the restoration of the outward shrine of the great temple at Luxor, built by Thothmes III and ruined by the Persians, took place during the nominal sovereignty of Philip Arridaeus and Alexander IV, and therefore quite early in Ptolemy’s satrapy. This restoration of the inner cella was in the name of the boy king Alexander. A statue of the young king is in the Gizeh Museum. It is of granite and about nine feet in height. The gentle and melancholy expression seems well suited to the youth’s tragic fate, but he is represented as much older than when he died, and it is probably a conventional likeness, with a mingling of the Egyptian and Greek in type and attributes. A certain inscription in Egypt mentions Ptolemy in the seventh year of the absent Alexander. His destroyer kept up the fiction of his authority, thus Ptolemy granted lands in the name of Alexander and Philip after their decease.
We can almost imagine the unfortunate Queen Roxane ready to lay down her harassed and weary life, but such is the natural clinging to the known and visible that doubtless she had occasional periods of pleasure and even of reviving hope for her child and herself. She had committed or been accessory to the blackest crime to secure his succession. Surely it could not be in vain?
Alexander the Great was born in 355 B. C. and died in 323. His son Alexander IV was born 323 B. C. and died 310, but his name appears as king till 305. Thus all the family of Alexander the Great perished by violent deaths. First his mother, then his wife and child, and lastly in 309 B. C. his sister and his natural son Herakles or Hercules.