Harper's Round Table, August 6, 1895

by Various

It was a beautiful spot in which that old town of Pydna was built; it stood three miles from the sea, in a fair and fertile region, and almost in the shadow of that grand old hill Mount Olympus, the home of the gods of Greece.

It was anything but a beautiful home for little King Alexander, however, when he found himself locked behind its thick walls. For Cassander, the Macedonian, marched his soldiers against it, and dug a great trench all around it, and set up all the dreadful old-time war-engines about it, and determined either to batter down its walls or starve out its inhabitants.

It was a terrible siege. Provisions gave out, and poor little Alexander went to bed hungry many a night. The horses, the mules, and the dogs were killed for food. The great war-elephants, having nothing to eat but sawdust, grew too weak to be of any use, and, with their useless drivers, were killed and eaten by the soldiers.

One dark night, through a secret doorway in the city wall, a little party crept softly out of Pydna and went down toward the port. It was the Princess Olympias, with the little King and his mother, accompanied by a few followers. Grown desperate by failure and famine, they had planned to escape on a swift galley which was waiting for them in the harbor. Silently they moved forward, but before they had gone a mile a breathless messenger met them. "Back, back to the city," he cried; "back ere you are all made prisoners! Cassander has discovered your plan. The galley is captured, and men lie in wait at the port to seize and slay you all."

Hurriedly the fugitives returned to the city. Then, unable longer to stand the horrors and privations of a besieged town, Olympias the Princess and little King Alexander, her grandson, surrendered to Cassander, after getting him to promise to do them no harm.

But those were days when such promises did not amount to much. For the lying Cassander speedily went back upon all his promises. He had the ambitious old Princess killed, and he imprisoned Alexander and his mother in the gloomy old citadel at Amphipolis, an important city of Macedon, on the river Strymon, three miles back from the sea, at the head of what is now called, on your map of Turkey in Europe, the Gulf of Orfani.

Here in this massive and gloomy old citadel of Amphipolis ("the city surrounded by water"), where the boy was kept close prisoner for five years, we get our last glimpse of the son of Alexander. For when Cassander learned that there was a movement on foot to set the young King free and make him King indeed, he sent to Glaucius, the commander of the citadel, a swift messenger bearing a fearful message. It was an order to make away with Alexander and his mother as speedily and as secretly as possible.

The dreadful work was done. How, when, or where none knows to this day. The "taking off" of the thirteen-year-old King of Macedon was as great a tragedy and as complete a mystery as was the murder of the English Princes in the Tower of London eighteen hundred years later.

So the last of the race of Alexander was cut off. Cassander and the generals made themselves kings, and the Macedonians held sway in the East until the growing power of Rome overshadowed and absorbed all that was left of the once mighty empire of Alexander the Great.

It is evident that the son of the conqueror possessed little of the pluck and spirit of his famous father, who was a governor at fourteen, a general at sixteen, a king at eighteen, a conqueror at twenty. The strength of his father's name was great, and had the little Alexander been of equal valor he might have changed the history of the world.