Olympias

Olympias was a princess of Epirus, wife of Philip II of Macedon and mother of Alexander the Great. She maintained strong religious and dynastic identities and became involved in the violent politics surrounding Philip’s later marriage and assassination. After Alexander’s death she supported her grandson Alexander IV and fought against rival successors. In 317 BC she returned to Macedonia and executed opponents, but Cassander captured and killed her the following year.

Olympias is a major character in Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven and Funeral Games. Historical fiction often presents her as mystical, possessive and murderous, drawing on ancient stories about snakes and ecstatic religion. Those accounts were shaped by hostility towards a powerful woman, but her later actions show that she was also an active and ruthless participant in the successor wars.

In non-fiction, Olympias is discussed in Diodorus Siculus’s The Library, Books 16-20 and Quintus Curtius Rufus’s The History of Alexander. In Diodorus Siculus’s The Library, Books 16-20, the settlement at Babylon, the Lamian War, the regencies of Perdiccas and Antipater, the campaigns of Eumenes and Antigonus, the struggles involving Olympias and Cassander.