Roxana

Roxana was a Bactrian noblewoman and wife of Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death, she and her son Alexander IV became pawns in the violent dynastic struggles among the Successors.

Roxana was the daughter of the Bactrian or Sogdian noble Oxyartes and married Alexander in 327 BCE after his campaigns in Central Asia, a union that also helped bind local elites to the Macedonian conqueror. She accompanied Alexander during the later campaigns and was pregnant when he died at Babylon in 323. Her son Alexander IV was born after his father’s death and became a nominal joint king, but neither mother nor child controlled the empire; both were eventually confined by Cassander and killed in Macedonia around 310–309 BCE.

Mary Renault’s Funeral Games makes Roxana one of the most dangerous players after Alexander’s death: pregnant with Alexander IV, she eliminates rival wives while Perdiccas and the generals struggle to control the royal succession. Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Ends of the Earth shows her earlier, marrying Alexander during the Central Asian campaigns as he tries to fuse Macedonian and eastern elites. In Renault’s The Persian Boy, Roxana is seen through Bagoas, whose devotion to Alexander makes the marriage a source of jealousy as well as dynastic consequence. Quintus Curtius Rufus’s The History of Alexander supplies the ancient narrative for the marriage and the succession crisis that follows Alexander’s death. Robert Fabbri’s An Empty Throne returns to Roxana and her son as vulnerable symbols of legitimacy in wars increasingly controlled by the Successor generals.