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‘Our epitaph for the intelligent infant, Alcimachus, son of Neoptolemus, proves that by the first century BC there resided at the ancient site near the modern village Makriyialos a family which claimed descent from the Aeacid kings of Epirus and thus, as is specifically asserted in the poem, from Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great. This is indeed an extraordinary claim, and one is at first tempted to dismiss it as an unjustified and pretentious imposture. But the ancient site at Makriyialos was either Pydna itself or in the near vicinity of Pydna, and it was at Pydna in 3116BC that Cassander besieged Olympias, starved her forces into submission, caused her to be condemned by the Macedonian ‘army assembly’ and executed by the relatives of those Macedonians whom she herself had so recently put to death.* It can hardly be fortuitous that Alcimachus’ family, which claimed descent from the Aeacidae and from Olympias, lived at or very near the place where the most celebrated of Aeacid princesses met her death…’
The note* reads ‘Diodoros, XIX, 50-51. From Diodoros’ account there can be no doubt whatsoever that Olympias died in Pydna.’
It is only your theory that has even raised the possibility and it is an argument from silence, i.e. it is only that Diodoros does not specify a scene which permits any thought that it is not still at Pydna. The idea still has to be allowed but impugning Edson’s scholarship because he had no crystal ball to foresee a skeleton of Olympias’ rough age and sex turning up in a monument that lay undiscovered is hardly a sensible position.
Just who are these mysterious ’relatives’ of Olympias about whom you so often speak? The boy king shorn of royal trappings and kept in protective custody at Amphipolis? Aeacides, whose support for his cousin had seen the Molossians expel him and establish a koinon allied with Kassandros? If Kassandros was allowing a funeral why not allow the customary cremation? Half measures are not typical of his methods. You require a dangerous woman to be shipped around an unsettled country and not reported, not fatal by itself, then a murder to be committed but to escape report in a context of reporting Kassandros’ crimes (Monimos), the only reason being to explain two male uncremated corpses. Further whilst one was murdered with a blade the other was what, poisoned? There is no reported weapon trauma on the second skeleton. Then you have to have the wrong funeral rites for the men but a nice cist tomb for the female. There seems little foundation to any of these ‘ifs’.
