Alexander’s family life adds a fascinating soap opera featuring relationships all tangled up in a dramatic way. The Macedonian royal family, unlike other ancient Greeks, practiced polygamy. This is what led to Alexander’s mother rivalry with Philip’s new, younger, Macedonian wife Eurydice (Olympias was Molossian, another Greek kingdom). Alexander himself held a mass wedding in Persia after his conquest where he and several of his officers all married Persian wives at the same time, and Alexander may have married two at once.
Not only did Alexander continue this practice, marrying three wives overall, he also had extra-marital relationships, possibly with a woman called Barsine, possibly with Queen Stateira, and almost certainly with his companion Hephaestion. It was common for older Greek men in this period to have sexual and/or romantic relationships with younger men, referring to the older partner as the “lover” (erastes in Greek) and the younger as the “beloved” (eromenos). It was assumed by Greek writers like Plato during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE that the mythic heroes Achilles and Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad were a romantic couple, though there were a number of arguments about which was which (as Patroclus was older, but Achilles was the better warrior). Homer, who wrote centuries earlier, says nothing specific either way but the custom was so common that later Greeks just assumed it was obvious.
Alexander was a big fan of the Iliad and of Achilles. According to the Greek historian Arrian, while they were at Troy, Alexander decorated the tomb of Achilles with a garland, and Hephaestion did the same for the tomb of Patroclus. This would be a pretty clear signal of their relationship to other Greeks at that time. Alexander and Hephaestion were childhood friends rather than being one older and one younger lover, but Alexander’s higher status may have compensated for that, or the age issue may not have been as important in Macedonia as in Plato’s Athens. Between their actions at Troy, their closeness, Alexander’s great grief at Hephaestion’s death, and how common openly male homosexual relationships were in ancient Greece, there is no reason to think their relationship was anything other than romantic.
Romanticised as a Hero
Every version of Alexander’s life we have has already been romanticised before we in the 21st century got anywhere near it. We are told from the earliest surviving texts that Alexander was a great hero, and so we believe it. And on top of all that he also takes on the persona of a god, or at least of the son of a god. He is an almost mythic character, who fascinates people in the same way as his own hero Achilles fascinated him.
Put it all together and you have a compelling story, but only one problem – the lead character is not very sympathetic. And so we shift blame to Olympias, we focus on his romantic relationships, we emphasise his skill and cleverness. We brush over his murderous temper, alcoholism, and disregard for others as some kind of necessary baggage that comes with “greatness”, and we ignore the fact he was a colonizing, imperialist conqueror who made a show of adopting some cultural practices from the places he conquered (like his infamous attempt to get Greeks and Macedonians to bow to him in the Persian way, which for them was supposed to be reserved for gods), but in fact he spread the Greek language and Greek cultural practices across the Middle East and into India.
And on top of all that, Alexander’s mysterious death left the areas he had conquered to fall into absolute political chaos because he conquered too much land to control and died too young for his heir, who was not even born at the time, to be able to protect himself. Only Egypt stayed fairly stable, which was taken over by Alexander’s general Ptolemy, the ancestor of the famous Cleopatra VII. Ptolemy ruled for years and started a dynasty that lasted three centuries. We should really be making films and TV shows about him…
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