The story
Fourth century BC
Epirus, Macedon, and Pydna
The mother of Alexander against the men who feared her
Olympias (c. 375–316 BC) was a princess of Epirus, a priestess of Dionysus, and the mother of Alexander the Great. She married Philip II of Macedon in a dynastic match, bore the conqueror, and raised him on Homer and the claim that the blood of Achilles — and perhaps a god — ran in him. When Philip discarded her for a younger wife and Alexander’s succession was threatened, she was pushed aside; when Philip was murdered and Alexander took the throne, she returned. And when Alexander died far away and his empire broke among his generals, she made herself the guardian of his bloodline and went to war for it.
Every surviving account of her was written by men — Greek and Roman, all later, most hostile — who needed her as a cautionary monster: the jealous poisoner, the snake-handling witch, the unnatural mother. Vol. XV reads against that record, the way the catalogue reads against Rome for Zenobia and against the chroniclers for Sigrid. The events are largely documented; the witch is editorial. The album’s wager is that the men who feared her wrote her down, and it still could not make her cry out.
Her engine is the bare-blade inverse. The catalogue’s warrior queens win with the blade; Olympias wins by keeping it sheathed. At the “first war between women” in 317 BC, two armies took the field under women commanders — the only time in Greek history — and when Olympias came forward, the enemy army laid down its arms and defected to her without a blow struck. Her weapons were legitimacy and the god: the mother of the conqueror, the blood of Achilles, the drum of Dionysus. She is destroyed precisely because she cannot be struck like a soldier — the men sent to execute her cannot lift the blade.
“I never drew a sword — the army knelt to a name.”
Eight tracks in three acts: The God’s Bride, the cult and the myth she built into a son; Three Kings Buried, the purge that guarded his line; and Pydna, the winter siege and the death that no ordinary sword could carry out. The cautious history and the album’s first-person version stand side by side — this page, and the one beside it, are so you can hold both at once.
Album in active production. 4 of 4 tracks released.