ANCIENT ASSASSINS?
BARRY BALDWIN sifts through the evidence at a pair of classical crime scenes in an attempt to figure out who done what to whom in a saga of political conspiracy and family plots that makes Game of Thrones look like The Waltons...
BARRY BALDWIN sifts through the evidence at a pair of classical crime scenes in an attempt to figure out who done what to whom in a saga of political conspiracy and family plots that makes Game of Thrones look like The Waltons...
At sunrise, one day in June 336 BC, watched by a huge crowd on the theatre of the old capital city of Aegæ, Philip II, King of Macedon, marched into the arena behind a ceremonial parade of statues of the 12 Olympian gods, plus an unlucky 13th, an image of himself.
His bodyguard followed at a distance: Philip wished to demonstrate that he was protected by universal goodwill and needed no weapons. Arrayed in a white ceremonial robe, he walked between two young Alexanders, his 21-yearold son, the future ‘Great One’, and the King of Epirus, his new son-in-law.
These festivities were part of the ritual attending the dynastically arranged and justconcluded nuptials between his daughter Cleopatra (Alexander the Great’s sister) and Alexander of Epirus, brother of Philip’s currently estranged wife Olympias, and one-time lover of Philip himself: in effect, the bride was also her bridegroom’s niece – compare the marital tangles of ex-Stone Bill Wyman – and the marriage incestuous.
As Philip paused by the arena entrance, a young member of his Bodyguard rushed forward and stabbed the King with his sword – shades of Indira Ghandi. The 46-year-old monarch lay dead in the dust. The assassin attempted to flee – there was a horse waiting at the city gate – but tripped and fell, rather like John Wilkes Booth breaking his leg after shooting Lincoln in the Ford Theatre. A gaggle of Macedonian noblemen who had begun a pursuit caught up, but instead of seizing him for arrest, they (Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby leap to mind) butchered him with their weapons.
An impulsive act of revenge? Or the calculated finale to a conspiracy? Did someone want to shut a hired sword’s mouth before he could betray his paymaster? If so, who was he or (remembering the Manchurian Candidate) she? No mystery about the killer. He was Pausanias, himself of aristocratic if not royal blood, famous for his good looks. Attracted by these, Philip had earlier made this youth his lover before switching his fickle affections to another. The jilted Pausanias made a huge scene, crudely insulting his replacement, who, however, soon proved his manhood and devotion by sacrificing his own life in battle to save Philip’s. Another tangle of relationships is darkly relevant: this gallant catamite was a ‘good friend’ of Attalus, one of Philip’s crack generals, and whose niece, Cleopatra, just happened to be one of the king’s five wives.
To teach Pausanias a lesson, Attalus invited him to dinner, got him drunk (never difficult with Macedonians), then along with other guests took it in turns to rape him while onlookers cheered and jeered, and then handed him over to his stable-boys for more of the same. When able to walk again, Pausanias sought audience with the King and laid charges against Attalus. Though not unsympathetic to his ex-lover, Philip could not afford to lose his general’s military services, whilst his other ear was commandeered by wife Cleopatra on her
uncle’s behalf. So, first he temporised, then affected to treat the incident as a prank, dismissing the charges out of hand.
Motive enough here, you’d think, for Pausanias. Indeed, Aristotle agrees, a single sentence in his Politics 1 flatly stating that Pausanias did what he did because of what Attalus had done to him. This remark, often overlooked by modern writers, might seem to undermine their more lurid scenarios. But, as we’ll see, Aristotle may himself have been accomplice to another Macedonian regicide, hence could be thought to have his own agenda.
Wouldn’t Attalus have been a more logical target than Philip? Well, reason does not always rule a person’s actions, and Attalus was not then available to be killed, being away from Macedonia. There’s also a crucial question of timing. A couple of ancient sources place the rape eight years before the murder, making Pausanias’s revenge a very cold dish – it’s hardly likely he’d had no previous opportunity. Other writers, though, including Plutarch in his Life of Alexander2, imply the outrage was a recent one, thus explaining the choice of victim and occasion of his death.
Philip’s body had hardly been removed when his senior general Antipater presented Alexander to the Macedonian army to be duly hailed and installed as their new king. A wave of executions followed. By no coincidence, the victims were inconvenient royal relatives, real or imagined threats to Alexander’s position – as Gibbon unimprovably said of the pogrom of princes after Constantine the Great’s death, “a precautionary massacre”.
Official propaganda strove to explain his father’s murder as a foreign plot, involving the new King of Persia who wanted to force a postponement if not cancellation of Philip’s much-trumpeted impending attack upon his empire. There might be something in this. But it was not enough for Macedonian rumour or Plutarch3 who asserts: “When Pausanias slew Philip, most of the blame devolved upon Olympias who had added her exhortations to the young man’s anger and incited him to do the deed, although a certain amount of accusation attached itself also to Alexander.”
Beyond appending that Alexander had turned as deaf an ear as Philip to Pausanias’s demand for Attalus’s punishment – although he did quote a verse from Euripides’s Medea (“The giver of the bride, the groom, the bride”) which could have been taken to suggest a triple murder of Attalus, Philip, and Cleopatra, Plutarch does not pursue the guilt of either party. He and other biographers (Arrian and Quintus Curtius Rufus) were writing centuries after the event, 4 hence at the mercy of their own sources, albeit they had enough independence of judgement to contradict the authority of Aristotle.
Whatever the truth, there is one indisputable and highly material fact: the three noblemen who had silenced Pausanias before he could betray anything or anyone were all close friends of Alexander.
Both Olympias and Alexander had ample cause to wish Philip permanently out of their way.
KISS OF THE ALBANIAN SPIDER WOMAN
Olympias ( FT302:27) was not Macedonian but from Epirus, that savage ancient land which is now the equally ferocious Albania – its 1985 Communist National Encyclopaedia’s ( Fjalori Enciklopedik Shqiptar, p773) admiring notice credits her with complicity. Thus she was resented at court as a barbarian outsider. Plutarch’s “a jealous and sullen woman” is one of the great understatements of all time. Apart from ordering over 100 political executions, Olympias herself committed at least five murders, including roasting a royal baby and its mother alive whilst enjoying their agony – compare Albanian stories that make Nexhmije Hoxha even more cruel than dictator-husband Enver.
Not a woman to cross. But Philip had done so repeatedly, both by marrying at least four other women and by largely giving up sleeping with her. By 336, they were effectively separated, maritally and geographically: she was back in Epirus.
Her outsider status also damaged Alexander’s prospects. Not regarded as a true full-blooded Macedonian, he stood to lose his position as first in line to the throne if his father’s then-pregnant wife Cleopatra should produce a son: in the event it was a girl, but that’s immaterial to the present story.
At the Philip-Cleopatra wedding banquet, when everyone was in their cups (normal at any macho Macedonian party), Attalus (now the King’s relative) rose to propose a toast: “To a legitimate heir to the throne.” An ambiguous insult, referring either to Alexander’s half-foreign origin or to gossip that said Philip was not his actual father. Whatever its meaning and intent, Alexander jumped up, threw his goblet into Attalus’s face shouting: “Do you dare call me a bastard?” A well-soused Philip struggled to his feet, furious with Alexander, and tried to attack him with drawn sword, only to trip and fall flat on his face. Alexander was sober enough to toss off an appropriate sarcasm: “Look at the man who plans to cross from Europe to Asia – he can’t even get from couch to couch!” All this was delightfully rendered in the 1955 film with an (ironically) pre-alcoholic Richard Burton (Fredric March played Philip, Stanley Baker Attalus, Danielle Darieux Olympias).
Leaving the banquet, Alexander ensured Olympias was safe with her brother the King of Epirus before going north to campaign against some barbarian tribes. Father and son subsequently patched things up, though everyone knew it was an uneasy truce, and
OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA DESCRIBED THE MURDER AS A FOREIGN PLOT