Olympias of Epirus

Daughter of King Neoptolemus I of the Molossians of Epirus — the royal house that traced its descent from Achilles through Neoptolemus-Pyrrhus — and fourth of Philip II's seven wives (married c. 357 BC). An initiate of the Samothracian and Dionysiac mysteries with what Plutarch (*Alex.* 2.5–9) calls a taste for keeping serpents about the house, she raised Alexander alongside his sister Cleopatra of Macedon in a court increasingly fraught after Philip's 337 marriage to the Macedonian noble Cleopatra Eurydice. Exiled after that marriage, she returned after Philip's assassination in 336 and is often named in antiquity as one of the suspects in it. After Alexander's death in 323 she was the last effective leader of the Argead cause against the Diadochi; she had Philip III Arrhidaeus and his wife Eurydice killed in 317, was herself taken by Cassander in 316, and executed by stoning at the hands of the relatives of those she had killed (Diod. 19.11 + 19.35 + 19.51).

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