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At the town gates, horses and helpers were waiting by arrangement, and Pausanias seemed certain to escape. Only a few strides more and he would have been among them, but he overreached in his haste to jump astride; tripping, he fell, for his boot had caught in the trailing stem of a vine. At once three of his pursuers were on him, all of them highland nobles, one from his own kingdom. But familiarity meant nothing and they killed him, some said, then and there; others claimed more plausibly that they dragged him back to the theatre where he could be questioned for accomplices and then condemned to death. By a usual Greek punishment for robbers and murderers, five iron clamps were fixed to a wooden board round his neck, arms and legs and he was left to starve in public before his corpse was taken down for burial.
'Wreathed is the bull; the end is near, the sacrificer is at hand': Philip's sudden murder seemed a mystery to his guests and in mysteries the Delphic oracle was believed once more to have told the only truth. The oracle, men later said, had given this response to Philip in the spring before his murder; the bull, he thought, meant the Persian king, the sacrificer himself, and the oracle's verse confirmed that his invasion of Asia would succeed. To Apollo, god of the oracle, the bull was Philip, wreathed for his daughter's wedding, and the sacrificer was Pausanias; the response came true, but an oracle is not an explanation, and in history, especially the history of a murder, it is not only important to know what will happen. It is also important to know why.
Amid much gossip and confusion, only one contemporary account survives of Pausanias's motives. Philip's murder, wrote Aristotle the philosopher, was a personal affair, and as Aristotle had lived at the Macedonian court where he tutored the royal family, his judgement deserves to be considered: Pausanias killed the king 'because he had been abused by the followers of Attalus', uncle of Philip's new wife Eurydice and therefore high in Philip's esteem. Others knew the story more fully, and some fifty years later, it had grown and gained implausibilities: Pausanias, they said, had been Philip's lover, until jealousy involved him in a quarrel with Attalus, not a nobleman to be affronted lightly. Attalus invited Pausanias to di
Pausanias's grievance may perhaps be true, but the story which Aristotle sponsored is not a full or sufficient explanation. He mentions it in passing, in a philosophical book where Philip's murder is only one of a series of contemporary events which he can otherwise be shown to have judged too shallowly for history; he knew Macedonia well, though only as a court official, and in the matter of Pausanias it is not hard to criticize his judgement. Even if Pausanias was as unbalanced as most assassins, it was strange that he should have picked on Philip when avenging a sexual outrage allegedly sustained many weeks before from another man; too many crimes have been wrongly explained by Greek gossip as due to homosexuality for one more example to carry much conviction. There was cause, perhaps, for the story's origin; within weeks of Philip's death, Attalus would be murdered in Asia on the orders of Alexander, Philip's heir and Aristotle's former pupil. Possibly the new king's friends had blamed Pausanias's crime on the arrogance of an enemy who could no longer answer back; officially, they may have put it about that Attalus had raped Pausanias, and Aristotle believed them, involving Attalus in a murder for which he was not responsible; other enemies of the king can be proved to have been similarly defamed, and there was no name more hateful to Alexander's friends than that of Attalus.
A different approach is possible, taken from the murder's timing and its beneficiaries, both of them broad arguments but backed by facts in Pausanias's background which owe nothing to Attalus or tales of unrequited love. Pausanias was a nobleman from the far western marches of Macedonia whose tribes had only been added to the kingdom during Philip's reign; he was not a true Macedonian at all, for his tribesmen had previously paid allegiance to Epirus beyond the border and called themselves by an Epirote name. But Epirus was Olympias's home and place of refuge: she could claim past kinship with Pausanias's people, accessible even in her exile, and she might not have found it hard to work on a nobleman whom Philip had recruited away from his local friendships. The puzzle was the timing of the murder, for a Macedonian seeking revenge would not naturally wait to kill Philip at a family wedding festival, in full view of a foreign public; Pausanias, some said, was one of the seven Royal Bodyguards, and if so, he would have had many chances of a murder in private. But for Olympias, the murder had been timed and pla
On the same night that she returned to Macedonia, she placed a golden crown on Pausanias's head, though he was still hanging on his murderer's stake: a few days later, she took down his body and burnt it over the remains of her dead husband. She built a mound there for Pausanias and saw that the people offered yearly sacrifices at it, having drummed them full of superstition. Under her maiden name, she dedicated to Apollo the sword with which Philip had been stabbed: all this was done so openly that she seemed to be afraid that the crime might not be agreed to have been her work.
This may be exaggerated, but there is no reason to dismiss all its detail as false or as malicious rumour; its source ca
These generalities can be extended. Pausanias had evidently been assisted, not least by the men who waited with his other horses, and if Olympias had been his adviser, she could not have rested content with the mere fact of the crime. She was plotting for her return, and only her son, Philip's probable heir, could have guaranteed it. If she had reason to turn to Pausanias, she had reason to turn to her son Alexander, and though no remotely reliable evidence was ever cited against him, it is proper to consider his position too.
A year before, when Philip had married Eurydice, Alexander had quarrelled sharply with his father and followed his mother into retreat; he had soon been reconciled and restored to favour, as his presence at Philip's side on the day of the murder confirms, but he had not lived securely through the months since his return. Despite his age, ability still marked him out as Philip's probable successor, but he was living under the disgrace of Olympias's dismissal; too anxious for his own inheritance, he had recently caused his closest friends to be exiled, and when Eurydice bore a son his fears can only have gained in urgency. It had already been said by Attalus that Eurydice's son would be more legitimate than those by other wives and though the boy was only an infant, he had powerful relations to help him to a throne which had never passed on principle to the eldest son. He was a threat, though perhaps not an immediate one, but when Philip was murdered, Attalus was conveniently far away in Asia and the boy was only a few weeks old. No sooner was Alexander king than the baby was killed and Attalus assassinated as a traitor too far from court to rally his friends.