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Hi Marcus, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk have now gone to "Ships in 24 hours" for Alexander's Lovers. Amazon started with ultra long delivery quotes for The Lost Tomb of Alexander the Great too, then soon went to 24 hours. Glad you got your copy quickly anyway. Happy reading at the weekend. ...

Thanks Ruthaki, Rjones and Jan. One of the things that motivated me to write Alexander's Lovers was that theirs are really terrific stories with the added piquancy of being true. Their lives are full of triumph, splendour and adventure against the backdrop of Alexander's conquests and yet they mostl...

Thanks Marcus. This is indeed the book previously mentioned. I hope you enjoy it.

Best wishes,

Andrew

Dear Fellow Pothos Members, I thought you might like to know that my second book, AlexanderGÇÖs Lovers, has just been published and (literally in the past couple of days) has become available from various online bookstores, including Amazon.com and Amazon UK. This is in fact the first announcement a...

Another example would be Olympias the daughter of Pyrrhus, who seems to have married her (half?) brother, Alexander the son of Pyrrhus (Justin 28.1). I think there were other similar cases, if you would like to track them down, but this is getting a little bit "What have the Romans done for us?...

Zeus & Hera

Ptolemy wasn't at Ipsus. He controlled lots of areas as well as Egypt - the islands, for example and Cyrene. Of course Hieronymus wrote in the early third century BC - I didn't say otherwise. Ptolemy was far richer than Seleucus to judge by the surviving magnitudes of their coinages. To get back to ...

Diodorus was probably using Hieronymus of Cardia as his source for this part of his history. Hieronymus probably published at the time that Ptolemy was the most powerful king in the world. It is therefore hardly surprising if he was careful to avoid calling Ptolemy the son of a whore!

Just in case anyone doesn't know, it is a matter of historical fact that Ptolemy's son, Philadelphus, married his full sister, so it isn't all that surprising or shocking that Ptolemy contemplated marrying a woman who was thought to be his half-sister. The entire Ptolemaic dynasty embraced the Egypt...

I don't disagree, Marcus. I am saying that Arrian et al could mean adoptive son or true son and therefore it is not evidence in favour of either, so is not relevant to the argument.

At the risk of opening up another dispute, which I don't plan to pursue: Arrhidaeus had to be acknowledged as Philip's son to be useful as a political pawn, e.g. as a bridegroom for Pixodarus' daughter. You see what I mean - everything makes sense in surprising ways when you believe the ancient evid...

There is no dispute that Ptolemy was the adoptive son of Lagos. He had no other acknowledged father, so Arrian and others are perfectly correct to call him Ptolemy the son of Lagos. This is not relevant to the issue of Ptolemy's natural parentage. For another example, Demetrios Poliorketes was calle...

My problem remains that you are re-writing history on the basis of no evidence and in doing so you are rejecting the thrust of all the ancient evidence. You are saying that your judgement of the way Philip, Alexander and Ptolemy would have behaved and your judgement of the reliability of the rumours...

There is no dispute that Ptolemy did not claim to be Philip's son. He could not do so without impugning the honour of his beloved mother Arsinoe. For that reason also, it is most unlikely that he encouraged the rumour privately. My point is that ALL the ancient commentators that discuss the matter o...

Pausanius 1.6.2, Curtius 9.8.22 and the Alexander Romance all say that Ptolemy was the illegitimate natural son of Philip II by Arsinoe and only the adoptive son of Lagos (see also Aelian in the Suda sv. Lagos). No ancient source says otherwise. It seems to be an entirely modern fiction that he was ...