y after married her. We know nothing of the
first few years of their married life, but the union seems never to have
been a happy one. Both were of too decided individuality to blend well
together. Says President Wheeler: "Both were preeminently ambitious,
energetic, and aggressive; but while Philip's ambition was guided by a
cool, crafty sagacity, that of his queen manifested itself in impetuous
outbreaks of almost barbaric emotion. In her, joined a marvellous
compound of the mother, the queen, the shrew, and the witch. The
passionate ardor of her nature found its fullest expression in the wild
ecstasies and crude superstitions of her native religious rites."

Plutarch gives a graphic account of the religious intensity of
Olympias's nature: "Another account is that all the women of this
country, having always been addicted to the Orphic and Dionysiac mystery
rites, imitated largely the practices of the Edonian and Thracian women
about Mount Haemus, and that Olympias, in her abnormal zeal to surround
these states of trance and inspiration with more barbaric dread, was
wont in the sacred dances to have about her great tame serpents, which,
sometimes creeping out of the ivy and the mystic fans, and sometimes
winding themselves about the staffs and the chaplets which the women
bore, presented a sight of horror to the men who beheld."

In Olympias we find all the traits of character which selfishness and
love of power, combined with intense religious fervor, could engender;
and her devotion to weird religious rites makes more ghastly the story
of her life. With a different husband she might have been a good woman,
but when two such natures clash much evil is bound to result. To her
young son, Alexander, she was ardently attached, and she expected great
things of him. Just before her marriage with Philip she dreamed that a
thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose
divided flames dispersed themselves all about and then were
extinguished. This was later regarded as a presage of the rapid spread
of Alexander's empire and its ultimate breaking-up among the Diadochi.

Philip's numerous infidelities and marriages caused an estrangement
between him and Olympias that was far-reaching in its consequences. They
reached their culmination when Philip with great ceremony wedded
Cleopatra, a niece of his general, Attalus. At the wedding banquet,
Attalus, the uncle of the bride, heated with wine, cried out:

"Mac