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The sources of these difficulties were two: first, the uncertainty of the line of succession, there being two branches of the royal family, each claiming the throne, which state of things was produced, in a great measure, by the interposition of Olympias in the affairs of Epirus some years before; and, secondly, the act of Olympias in inducing Æacides to come to Macedonia, to embark in her quarrel against Cassander there.

However, he took care to find out and punish the accomplices of the conspiracy severely, and was very angry with Olympias for treating Cleopatra inhumanly in his absence. Alexander was but twenty years old when his father was murdered, and succeeded to a kingdom beset on all sides with great dangers, and rancorous enemies.

But a diseased habit of body, caused by drugs which Olympias gave him, had ruined not only his health, but his understanding. After Sylla became master of Rome, he wished to make Caesar put away his wife Cornelia, daughter of Cinna, the late sole ruler of the commonwealth, but was unable to effect it either by promises or intimidation, and so contented himself with confiscating her dowry.

Perdiccas so far acceded to these views that he sent a messenger to Sardis to visit Cleopatra in his name, and to make her a present. Olympias and Cleopatra accordingly considered the arrangement a settled affair. In the mean time, however, Antipater, who seems to have been more in earnest in his plans, sent off his daughter Nicæa herself to Babylon, to be offered directly to Perdiccas there.

From hence he sent great part of the spoils to Olympias, Cleopatra, and the rest of his friends, not omitting his preceptor Leonidas, on whom he bestowed five hundred talents weight of frankincense, and a hundred of myrrh, in remembrance of the hopes he had once expressed of him when he was but a child.

The Gulf of Tarentum. Oracle of Dodona. The equivocal prediction. Pandosia. The unexpected inundation. Effects of it. Bridge carried away. The River of Sorrow. Alexander killed. His body falls into the river. A woman rescues the remains. Olympias. Æacides marches to relieve Pydna. The flight of the family with Pyrrhus. The party meet with a narrow escape. Ingenious mode of sending a letter.

Olympias was a woman of a very passionate and ungovernable temper, and of a very determined will; and as Philip was himself as impetuous and as resolute as she, the domestic life of this distinguished pair was a constant succession of storms. At the commencement of her married life, Olympias was, of course, generally successful in accomplishing her purposes.

The very birds seemed excited, and a starling, which had sat moping since the screen had shut the sun out, now cried out, "Olympias!" Melissa rose, and after a swift glance round the room she went to the door, come who might.

He was imbecile in intellect, and wholly insignificant as a political personage, except so far as he was by birth the next heir to Alexander in the Macedonian line. He was not the son of Olympias, but of another mother, and his imbecility was caused, it was said, by an attempt of Olympias to poison him in his youth.

When she stormed at this decision of his, he patiently endured her anger; and once when Antipater wrote a long letter to him full of abuse of Olympias, he observed, after reading it, that Antipater did not know that one tear of his mother's eye would outweigh ten thousand such letters.