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Olympias realized she needed a male protector, and there were few to be found. Her brother Alexander, king of the Molossians, was dead, leaving her daughter, Cleopatra, a young widow (at her husband Philip’s behest, uncle had married niece), with two fatherless young children, a boy and a girl. Back in Macedonia, old man Antipater and his son Cassander had become her mortal enemies, foreclosing any hope of a safe haven there. She needed an alliance with one of the generals in Asia, those who controlled her son’s invincible army, if she were to survive long enough to get one of her two grandsons onto a throne.
Marriage and fertility were what had brought her power to begin with; now she needed to tap these resources again, through a surrogate this time, her daughter, Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s ability to bear children might rescue all three generations of royals. Mother and daughter together hatched a plan: Cleopatra would offer herself as bride to Leo
A letter was sent to Leo
3. LEONNATUS AND EUMENES (
NORTHWESTERN ANATOLIA, WINTER, EARLY 322 B.C.)
Olympias was not alone in hoping to lure Leo
As the siege wore on, Antipater sent a second message to Leo
Hecataeus found Leo
For Leo
Leo
Having resolved on this plan, Leo
Stymied in his first approach, Leo
When Leo
4. ARISTOTLE (CHALCIS, 322 B.C.)
While this fissure was opening in the ranks of Alexander’s Bodyguards, the philosopher Aristotle died in his adopted home on the island of Euboea. Throughout his life he had suffered from a stomach ailment, and this had grown more severe after his departure from Athens. Perhaps the change of diet and routine hastened his demise. He was sixty-two years old.
Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, had died long before, while the family was in Athens. Thereafter, Aristotle had shared his bed with Herpyllis, a former slave to whom he had given freedom. Perhaps it was Herpyllis who bore his son, Nicomachus, still a youth at the time Aristotle died; his daughter, Pythias, was also young, not yet in her teens. In his will—a document that survives complete, quoted by the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius—Aristotle placed both children in the care of his adopted son, Nicanor, the man who had read aloud the Exiles’ Decree to the Greeks at Olympia. The will instructs Nicanor to look after Aristotle’s children as though he were both their father and their brother, but, in a shift of roles not uncommon in the Greek world, to marry Pythias as soon as she came of age.