Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/272

 2i>0 HISTORY OF GREECE. near the Thermaic Gulf. He was making war both against Ptolemy and against the remaining family of Amyrtas. Eury- dike, the widow of that prince, was now left with her two younger children, Perdikkas, a young man, and Philip, yet a youth. She was in the same interest with Ptolemy, the successful conspi- rator against her son Alexander, and there Avas even a tale which represented her as his accomplice in the deed. Ptolemy was regent, administering her affairs and those of her minor children, against Pausanias. 1 Deserted by many of their most powerful friends, Eurydike and Ptolemy would have been forced to yield the country to Pau- sanias, had they not found by accident a foreign auxiliary near at hand. The Athenian admiral Iphikrates, with a squadron of moderate force, was then on the coast of Macedonia. He had been sent thither by his countrymen (369 B. c.) (soon after his partial conflict near Corinth with the retreating army of Epami- nondas, on its way from Peloponnesus to Boeotia), for the purpose of generally surveying the maritime region of Macedonia and Thrace, opening negotiations with parties in the country, and lay- ing his plans for future military operations. At the period when Alexander was slain, and when Pausanias was carrying on his invasion, Iphikrates happened to be on the Macedonian coast. He was there visited by Eurydike with her two sons Perdikkas and Philip ; the latter seemingly about thirteen or fourteen years of age, the former somewhat older. She urgently implored him 1 JEschines, Fals. Legat. c. 13, 14, p. 249, 250 ; Justin, vii, 6. JEschines mentions Ptolemy as regent, on behalf of Eurydike and her younger sons. JEschines also mentions Alexander as having recently died, but says nothing about his assassination. Nevertheless there is no reason to doubt that he was assassinated, which we know both from Demosthenes and Diodorus ; and assassinated by Ptolemy, which we know from Plu- tarch (Pelop. c. 27), Marsyas (ap. Athenaeum, xiv. p. 629), and Diodorus, Justin states that Eurydike conspired both against her husband Amyntas, and against her children, in concert with a paramour. The statements of _3schines rather tend to disprove the charge of her having been concerned in the death of Amyntas, but to support that of her having been accom- plice with Ptolemy in the murder of Alexander. Assassination was a fate which frequently befel the Macedonian kings, When we come to the history of Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, it will be seen that Macedonian queens were capable cf greater crimes than those impntoi to Eurydik.