The Story in Themes

It is not difficult to overlay on the story of Olympias the wisdom of the lesser-known goddesses of the ancient Greeks, The Fates, the Furies, Dionysus, and others. (See John Sanford.) She does not seem to have been careful in the Olympian practice so much as that of the lesser-known deities who really ran the show.

Olympias was a woman, high-born wife, mother, and daughter of kings, with the constraining ties of blood, relationship, and clan. Her fate, the facts and circumstances beyond her control, was being born a woman, a queen, a daughter of kings, the wife of a king, a mother of kings, with the legend of being a descendant of gods, in a patriarchal society, and into a lifetime of the social customs and practices of male monarchs. That was her heritage and, presumably, her upbringing. Where would she have acquired the virtues of right and correct order for her life (Themis)?

The Fates spun a thread for this royal person with knots of circumstance from the capricious male monarchical behaviors of the day, and that would prove to be the source of Ate’s intrusion into the course of her life. The absolute power of her husband, Philip, to rule by the terrors of murder, intrigue, assassination, executions, warfare, polygamy, and unstable alliances and to perpetrate numerous infidelities set an extremely unusual pattern for her character. (Monogamy was not the required practice for monarchs.) In her early years, before Philip’s assassination and Alexander’s accession, Olympias would have had much leisure time for pursuit of the pleasures of the privileged. Just and temperate action was not learned in the pleasures of leisure and in the worship of Dionysus.

Philip died and Alexander marched to Asia. She was left to quarrel with the appointed regent, Antipater, who warned on his deathbed that a woman should not have first place in the land, meaning Olympias. But she, a queen with an excess of Dionysian passion and a defect of Apollonian reason in her character, came into the full powers of monarchy under Polyperchon. Without Alexander to mother, or a king to be queen to, she indulged in wine, dance, Dionysiac frenzies, and, furious and frustrated, political quarrels. Olympias, given her circumstance, her “lot”, channeled her energy into the spiritual frenzies, into the snake and wine cult, burning her energies in dancing and intrigue, sniping at targets of her emotional frustration. Her worship of Dionysus, emphasizing the aspects leading to opportunities for harm, provided a huge assist in her prejudging her son’s death as murder. (It was Salmonella typhi, the intestinal bug that causes typhoid fever.)

Olympias, lacking the true political power that men enjoyed, succumbed to the only power she had seen work: acts of rule by murder, which, to her, was an effective application of political power, for a man. Unfortunately for her, she ignored the “right order” for a woman, in the double standard of the day. She thought her being the mother of Alexander would exempt her from that role. Her judgment was wholly swayed by emotion.

In her experience with husband Philip, Aphrodite’s necessity to love was lost; his promiscuity and lethal expressions of political power perverted her love. The maternal love for her son was lost to his daimon to explore and make war. Her father,
Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, led her into a kinship with, and the legend of divine birth. Thus she was encumbered by her frustrated motherhood, divine lineage, and man-hating. She was bereft of Alexander’s filial care and companionship. He lacked an heir, whom he did not want to leave in his mother’s care, and she lamented that.

Her wayward spirit was eventually empowered to wield the “pleasurable” instrument of retribution, the mock-justice of retaliation. She made the house of Antipater suffer for its “murderous” ways, (just as she was rumored to have made Philip suffer assassination for his infidelities.) She found it natural to commit murder to avenge murder.

Deceived and possessed, Olympias lost all powers of reasoned discrimination, sound judgment, and enlightened self interest. At¯e* entered into her acts with a plague of mistaken convictions, implemented by reckless impulse, and hubris. Some who were witnesses at Alexander’s death returned to tell her the truth about the death, but she would have none of it. She naturally accepted another version of the story, with the blessings of At¯e and projected the blame onto her enemies.

She had ignored the justice of “all things considered”. She had ignored the spirit and voice of the ancient mother, Gaia. Themis, that which is Right and Correct, was disregarded and offended; the gods were dishonored. Boundaries and limits were overstepped. Disregarding Themis and taking moira into her own hands, the Furies, dread deities of divine vengeance, descended on her.

*I cannot make the macron go over the “e” to make the sound “ah-tay”.