Plutarch. The Life of Alexander the Great. Translated by John Dryden. New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2004.
Sappho. The Poems of Sappho. Translated by John Myers O’Hara. Portland, ME: Smith and Sale, 1910.
Stoneman, Richard, translator. The Greek Alexander Romance. London: Penguin Classics, 1991.
Wood, Michael. In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
FICTION
Renault, Mary. Fire from Heaven. New York: Vintage, 1969.
———. Funeral Games. New York: Vintage, 1981.
———. The Persian Boy. New York: Vintage, 1972
A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHANIE THORNTON
Q. In your previous three novels, you’ve written about many forgotten women of ancient history. What inspired you to turn to the women associated with Alexander the Great?
A. I had just finished writing The Tiger Queens, a novel about Genghis Khan’s wife and daughters, when my editor suggested that I might focus next on an ancient Persian woman. I stumbled upon Roxana while I was researching and discovered that, as with Genghis Khan, incredibly strong women also supported Alexander. It was a natural jump to go from writing about one conqueror’s women to the next!
Q. Alexander was highly educated for the time—by the great Aristotle no less—yet he chose a path of violent conquest that included the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people. As a Macedonian, did he have an unconscious need to prove his superiority to the Greeks, who tended to think very highly of themselves? What do you think drove his quest for power and heroic stature?
A. Alexander’s driving force for his conquests was quite likely his father’s earlier subjugation of Greece. Philip II of Macedon consolidated his rule over virtually the entire Peloponnese, to the point where Alexander once commented that there would be nothing left for him to conquer. Of course, Alexander wouldn’t tolerate the many rebellions in Greece after Philip’s death, and seeking to subdue the Achaemenid Empire was likely a natural inclination after the Persian War. From there it’s no great leap to consider vanquishing India and thus becoming the conqueror of the largest empire the world had ever known.
Q. You suggest that many of Alexander’s military tactics were truly inventive. Can you tell us more about that?
A. It’s impossible to argue that Alexander wasn’t a tactical genius. He inherited a well-trained army from his father, but shaped them into a truly formidable, and creative, fighting machine. For example, Alexander really did order the building of a mile-long mole, or causeway, in order to better position his siege weaponry at Tyre and he also scaled what was believed to be an impassable wall in order to reach Sogdian Rock. (Which may well have been to spite the commander of the fortress after he taunted Alexander that he’d need men with wings to take the rock.) He was often willing to chance the impossible, and was rewarded for his daring.
Q. You also suggest that Hephaestion played an essential role in both assisting Alexander’s conquests and tempering his excesses. What does the historical record tell us about Hephaestion and their relationship?
A. Hephaestion served as Alexander’s second-in-command, and both ancient and modern sources compare the men’s relationship to that of Achilles and Patroclus during the Trojan War. Their closeness seems to have been public knowledge, considering that Aristotle claimed they shared one soul abiding in two bodies and the historian Curtius wrote that Hephaestion was Alexander’s “sharer of secrets.” Most telling is perhaps Alexander’s reaction to Hephaestion’s death, in which he flung himself on the body and ordered a period of mourning for the entire empire. The temple’s sacred fire was extinguished and a massive funeral pyre built, followed by an extravagant show of funeral games. One modern estimate places the cost of Hephaestion’s funeral at more than two billion dollars by today’s standards. I’d say that means Alexander and Hephaestion were fairly close!
Q. I love Drypetis’ interest in how things work. How unusual would her interest in engineering have been for a woman of her time? Can you expand on what the historical record tells us about her?
A. Very little is known about Drypetis, only that she was captured at Issus along with the rest of her family and traveled with Alexander until he left her in Susa. She did marry Hephaestion at the massive Susa weddings, and some sources claim that Roxana murdered her alongside Stateira. However, it’s likely that Plutarch misidentified Drypetis as her cousin Parysatis in reporting Roxana’s victims.
As for Drypetis’ love of tinkering, I know of no documentation of ancient women with a similar hobby, but there were a number of intriguing Greek and Persian inventions near this time, including the Baghdad Battery and the Antikythera Mechanism. Obviously people were experimenting with many new ideas, and it didn’t seem a far stretch that a Persian princess with time on her hands would mind getting those same hands dirty in the name of knowledge.
Q. Thessalonike’s antipathy for Cassander is an entertaining refrain throughout the book. Do we know if their marriage was ultimately a happy one? How long did they rule together?
A. I assumed that their union was mostly happy, considering that Cassander did rename the ancient city of Therma in her honor, but sadly, the two didn’t have long to enjoy their marriage. Cassander died of edema in 297 BCE, only eight years after proclaiming himself king of Macedon. Much like the events after Alexander the Great’s death, a fight for Macedon’s throne broke out once again, this time among Cassander’s sons. Thessalonike supported her third son, Alexander, a choice that led her eldest son, Antipater, to eventually order her put to death.
Q. How typical a queen was Olympias, especially with regard to her ruthless support of Alexander? How did her membership in the cult of Dionysus shape her moral code? Or can you tell us more about the mysterious cult of Dionysus?
A. Olympias was definitely not a typical queen, especially considering that Greek wives were expected to live out their lives in the women’s quarters. There’s no doubt that she was ambitious, and as sister to one king, wife to another, and mother to a third, she was in a unique position to wield her power. That said, as with many formidable ancient women, such ambition spawned stories that she copulated with snakes and possibly even arranged her husband’s assassination.
The cult of Dionysus is still shrouded in mystery, but we do know that women were welcomed into its ranks and allowed to shed society’s expectations during the rites: drinking, fighting, and engaging in orgiastic revels. One can only guess whether initiation into such a group might have shaped Olympias’ beliefs, but I suspect her ambition for herself and her son was the main motivating force in the brutalities she committed.
Q. The Greeks and Persians fought each other off and on over many centuries, in wars that have come down to us in epic poems and ancient histories. Alexander is described as adopting many Persian ways, and being criticized for it by his own men. Can you expand on the relationship between the Greeks/Macedonians and Persians?
A. The Greeks and the Persians fought against each other in the Persian Wars and again during Alexander’s conquests. And while Alexander did torch Persepolis and fight several bloody battles against Darius, he spared many other cities, adopted the proskynesis and Persian dress, and allowed thousands of Persian youths to join his army. Perhaps the most telling example of Alexander’s aims toward Persia is his benevolent treatment of Darius’ female family members after their capture and his later marriages to Stateira and Parysatis. While he had subdued Persia’s lands, he sought to assimilate its people into his new empire.
Q. Do we know what happened to Barsine? Was her son by Alexander, Heracles, his only surviving offspring?
A. According to several ancient accounts, Barsine and her son managed to escape the worst of the initial bloodshed after Alexander’s death, only for both to be put to death by Cassander’s orders in 309 BCE. Thus, Alexander would have had no known surviving o
ffspring; a child with his blood would have been too dangerous a contender for any other man trying to secure one of Alexander’s many thrones.
Q. What do scholars now consider to have been Alexander’s lasting legacy? Who was most responsible for shaping that legacy?
A. Alexander conquered roughly three thousand square miles in only thirteen years, but his legacy was most assuredly his spreading of Hellenistic culture beyond Greece’s borders. His destruction of the Achaemenid Empire and conquest of the known world meant that it was Greek customs, philosophy, and language that influenced later Rome, Byzantium, and much of the Western world. Alexander has the rare honor of being one of the few people who truly changed history and he did it mostly through his military innovations and the force of his own personality.
Q. Was there any material that you wanted to include, but ended up cutting?
A. There were actually several battle scenes that were trimmed away, including one after Susa where the wily Persians catapulted boulders into a ravine on top of the Greeks, complete with exposed brains and all sorts of other gore. However, in a book fraught with battle scenes, not all of them made it into the final manuscript!
Q. Your author bio says you’ve been obsessed with the women of ancient history since the age of twelve. What happened to get you hooked?
A. My junior high social studies teacher assigned research reports on famous people in history and since I’d always been a huge fan of ancient Egypt (what kid isn’t?), I raced to sign up for Cleopatra. Sadly, she was already taken, but I found an encyclopedia entry for Hatshepsut—a lone, meager paragraph—and knew there was more to her story. Since then I’ve found all sorts of ancient women whose lives have been relegated to historical footnotes, and have decided that their stories need to be told.
Q. You travel extensively during school vacations. Do you travel to the places where your novels are set? How do your trips enrich your work, and inspire new ideas?
A. I’ve been fortunate to have traveled to Turkey, Egypt, and Greece for three of my four novels. Being able to immerse myself in the culture and history of those countries certainly helps me infuse into my writing more accurate details about daily life as it might have been lived thousands of years ago: seeing animal-hide-wrapped cheeses for sale in the Grand Bazaar, children splashing in the Nile, or a herd of shaggy goats in Crete. However, sometimes I travel just to travel!
Q. Do you have a new writing project lined up?
A. I’ve actually made a time jump and am currently doing my own tinkering on a novel set in twentieth-century America. I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for a certain presidential family and one of its wild-child daughters in particular!
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Which characters did you most like and which did you dislike? Whom will you remember?
2. At first glance the title, The Conqueror’s Wife, seems to belong to Roxana, but several characters could actually lay claim to such a title. Who do you think is best described as “the conqueror’s wife”?
3. Many of the main characters—Roxana, Drypetis, and Thessalonike—have siblings who support them in various ways, while Hephaestion and Alexander consider themselves as close as brothers. Discuss how these siblings both support and hinder one another throughout the novel.
4. Alexander’s character is associated with fire throughout much of the story. Discuss who and what temper that fire, and to what extent they also fan his flames.
5. Were you familiar with the history before reading the book? What did you find particularly interesting or surprising about it?
6. What do you think of Roxana and Olympias, two women who kill to get what they want? Do you find them sympathetic? How do they differ from each other?
7. Alexander conquers the world with the expectation that he’ll become heroic and live forever in memory, song, and lore. Compare ancient and modern understandings of immortality, and how it can be achieved. Is Alexander like someone today who commits mass murder with the intention of becoming famous?
8. Many of the characters suffer gruesome deaths. Discuss ancient and modern capacities for violence.
9. What are some of the strategies the women characters use to stay one step ahead of events that threaten to turn against them?
10. Discuss Hephaestion’s comment: “After a battle, you bed a woman to forget what has happened. You bed a man because he knows exactly what you’re trying to forget.”
11. What do you consider to be Alexander’s lasting legacy?
READY FOR MORE FROM STEPHANIE THORNTON?
READ ON FOR A LOOK AT
THE SECRET HISTORY
A Novel of Empress Theodora
AVAILABLE FROM NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
Twenty-sixth year of the reign of Emperor Anastasius
My life began the night death visited our house.
I lay on the straw pallet with my sisters and listened to Comito grinding her teeth and Anastasia breathing evenly in the dark. An animal snorted in the distance—probably the scraggly new bear Father had acquired to train for the Greens, a beast scarcely fit for the spectacle of the Hippodrome. I scratched my stomach and poked Comito, none too gently. The fleas were bad tonight, and Constantinople’s sticky heat made the stench of the nearby garbage heap especially pungent. I missed our old home in Cyprus, the salty smell of the Mediterranean, and the cicadas buzzing amidst the olive trees. Our ramshackle house near Constantinople’s amphitheater could hardly compare.
There was a shuffle in the dark—possibly a rat—but then my father grunted.
“Quiet, Acacius.” My mother giggled. “You’ll wake the girls.”
She gave a little moan as I snuggled into Anastasia’s bare back, hoping for more dreams like last night’s fantasy of roasted goat with mint yogurt. Comito claimed I had made cow eyes at the butcher’s son when Mother sent us to collect our monthly grain ration earlier today, but in truth I was more impressed with the fresh leg of goat hanging from his stall than the cut of his calves under his tunica. It seemed like years since we’d had meat.
“Acacius.” My mother’s voice woke me, the same tone she used when my father came home after too much wine at the Boar’s Eye. There was another sound, a thud like a sack of flour hitting the ground. “Acacius!”
“Mama?” I opened my eyes. My father was facedown on their pallet, arms crumpled like twigs under his bulk.
My mother struggled to move him. “Help me, Theodora.”
The chipped mosaic blossoms scraped my knee as I helped shove him to his back. Anastasia whimpered in the moonlight.
Cold sweat covered my father’s skin as he opened and closed his mouth like a mackerel freshly pulled from the Bosphorus, fingers plucking the neck of his tunica. My mother clutched his hand to her chest. “You stay right here, Acacius.”
She rifled through a little cedar box with her free hand, the one with our scant supply of spices and medicines. Willow bark and chamomile filled my nose as Comito rubbed her eyes and Anastasia crawled into my lap, thumb in her mouth and her wooden doll tucked tight under her arm. It squinted at me through its charcoal smudge of an eye. My father looked from me to Mama to my sisters, and his tongue lurched in his mouth, as if he were trying to speak. Death has many sounds, the shrieks of men crushed by a chariot in the Hippodrome, the final rattle of ancient lungs, or the gentle sigh of a child ravaged by creeping sickness. My giant of a father only gurgled like an infant and then went still.
We sat in silence for a moment. Then my mother screamed and pummeled my father with tiny fists, dusting his chest with the yellow ash of crushed herbs. “No!” Tears streamed down her face. “No! Get up!”
She collapsed to his chest, golden curls covering him like a burial shroud as her body heaved with sobs. Departing this life in the throes of passion is as good a way to go as any, but I could not fathom my father greeting Saint Peter now. I clung to Anastasia
as my tears fell into her hair.
“Don’t be sad, Dora.” She traced my cheeks with fingers still sticky from the honeyed kopton we’d eaten before bed, but her chin wobbled as my mother wailed louder. My little sister slid from my lap and touched Mama’s shoulder, but she jerked back as Comito added her voice to the howls.
I pulled Anastasia to me and tucked us into the crook of my father’s arm, savoring his fleeting warmth.
My father was dead.
Never again would he carry Anastasia on his shoulders to see the zebras before a show, or tease Comito until the tips of her ears turned red. He would never wrap me in an elephant hug that smelled of the wild rosemary he constantly chewed and the ever-present animal musk that clung to his skin, even after he’d just come home from the baths.
I don’t know how long we listened to one another’s tears, but his body grew stiff and clammy before I could rouse myself. He would have to be buried soon, before his flesh began to decay.
I touched my mother’s back, but she jerked away as if stung, still draped over my father. “The sun will rise soon.” I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. “We have to purify him.”
She stumbled to her feet, hair veiling her eyes. “No. I won’t.” Her hands fluttered in the air. “I can’t.”
She slammed the door behind her, followed by a surly thump on our ceiling from the Syrian neighbors above. Raucous laughter from a nearby taverna floated to our apartment, the high trill of a woman and throaty baritone of the man who had likely paid for her services for the night. I stared at the shaft of silvery light that had swallowed my mother, torn between the urge to follow her or stay with my father’s body.
“What should we do?” Comito wiped her puffy eyes. She was older than me by two years but looked far younger in the moonlight. Anastasia sucked her thumb and reached out to touch our father’s cheek with her little hand. It was more than I could bear.
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