Alexander the Great

But Greeks and Greek opinion were not Philip's only concern. Uneasy memories stirred nearer home, recalling his own last wedding in Macedonia more than a year ago and how it had split the royal family by its sudden implications. On the verge of middle age, Philip had fallen in love with Eurydice, a girl from a noble Macedonian family, and had decided to marry her, perhaps because she was found to be bearing his child, perhaps, too, because her relations were powerful in the court and army. His five other wives had watched the affair with indifference, but his queen Olympias could not dismiss it as another triviality among the many of the past. As mother of Alexander, Philip's only competent son, and as princess of neighbouring Epirus, she had deserved her recognition as queen of Macedonia for the past twenty years. But Eurydice was a Macedonian, and an affair of the heart; children from a Macedonian girl, not a foreign Epirote princess, could upset Olympias's plans for her own son's succession, and as soon as the two wives' families had met for the wedding banquet, that very suggestion had been voiced by Eurydice's uncle. A brawl had begun, and Alexander had drawn his sword on Philip; he and Olympias had fled the court, and although he had soon returned, she had gone to her native Epirus, and stayed there. Eurydice, meanwhile, had borne a daughter whom Philip had given the name of Europe; in the autumn, she had conceived again. Now, days before Philip's farewell for Asia, she had delivered him a son, and as Philip's foreign guests arrived for his wedding celebrations, the court and royal family were alive to a shift in the balance of favour. The baby had capped it all: it seemed impossible now for Olympias to return to her old authority.

Even in her absence Olympias had retained two claims on Philip's respect; her son Alexander and her kinship with neighbouring Epirus, One, her son, was no longer unique, and the other, her Epirote kinship, was about to be confounded by Philip's farewell wedding. It was a neat but complicated matter. Olympias was mother of the bride and elder sister to the bridegroom, but their marriage went flatly against her interests; that was why Philip had promoted it. Her brother, the bridegroom, was also the king of Epirus to whom she had fled for revenge on Philip's remarriage; she found no help, for he had spent his youth at the Macedonian court, where gossip suggested that Philip had once been his lover, and he owed his kingdom to Philip's intrigues only five years before. By agreeing to marry his niece and become Philip's son-in-law, he had compounded Olympias's injury. Political custom required that Philip should be linked by marriage to his neighbouring subjects in Epirus and Olympias had met this need for the past twenty years as an Epirote princess. But if her brother, the King of Epirus, were to marry into Philip's family she would not be required for Philip's politics or private life. At the celebrations in Macedonia's old royal capital, the wedding guests were to witness more than their Leader's farewell. They were assisting at the last rejection of his queen Olympias, pla

They had come to Aigai, the oldest palace in Macedon and a site which has long eluded its modem searchers. The palace, in fact, has long been discovered and only the name has been misapplied. Aigai is not to be found on the steep green hillside of modern Edessa beside the mountain ranges of Bermion and Bamous, where the waterfalls plunge far into the orchards below and where no archaeologist has found any more proof than a city wall of the Aigai placed there by modern Greek maps; it is the long-known palace of Vergina away to the south, where the Macedonian tombs begin a thousand years before Philip and the northern foothills of mount Olympus still turn back the clouds from the brown plain of lower Macedonia, a trick of the weather which a Greek visitor to Philip's Aigai observed as a local peculiarity. Vergina's palace now shows the mosaics and ground plan of later kings, but Philip's ancestral palace must have lain beside it, easily reached from the Greek frontier to which his wedding guests had travelled by boat and horse; a brief ride inland would have brought them to the edge of Macedonia's first flat plain, and they would have seen no further into this land which they knew for its silver-fir forests, free-ranging horses and kings who broke their word and never died a peaceful death.

The wedding that brought them was pla

At dawn the images of the twelve Greek gods of Olympus, worked by the finest Greek craftsmen, would be escorted before the audience; in the city life of the classical world, few occasions would prove more lasting than the long slow procession in honour of the gods, and it was only natural that Philip remained true to this deep tradition. But he had added a less familiar feature, for a statue of himself was to be enthroned among those of the immortals: it was a bold comparison, and it would not have seemed odious to his chosen guests. Greeks had received honours equal to those of the gods before and already in Greek cities there were hints that Philip would be worshipped in his lifetime for his powers of benefaction. Grateful subjects believed him to be specially protected by Zeus, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and it was easy to liken his black-bearded portrait to that of the king of the gods or to display it prominently in local temples. The sacred enthronement of his statute may have been Philip's own i

As the images were carried into the arena, Philip ordered his bodyguards to leave him, for it would not be proper to appear in public among armed men, the mark of a tyrant, not an allied leader. Only two young princes were to accompany him, Alexander his son by Olympias and Alexander king of Epirus, whose wedding had just been celebrated: between his son and son-in-law, King Philip began to walk forwards, settling his white cloak about a body which showed the many wounds of twenty years' fighting, one-eyed, black-bearded, a man whom Greek visitors had praised for his beauty scarcely ten years before.

He was never to reach his audience. By the theatre entrance, a young bodyguard had disobeyed his orders and lingered, u