OLYMPIAS, the wife of Philip II., king of Macedon, and mother of Alexander the great. She was the daughter of Neoptolemus I., king of Epirus. She possessed a vig orous understanding, but was of a most passionate, jealous, and ambitious character. Philip having, on account of disagreements, separated from her and married Cleopatra, niece of Attains (337 n.c.), she went to reside with her brother Alexander, king of Epirus, where she incessantly fomented intrigues against her former husband, and is believed to have taken part in his assassination by Pausanias, 337 B.C. On the accession of her son Alexander to the throne, she returned to Macedonia, where she contributed 1.0 bring about the murder of Cleopatra and her daughter. Alexander was filled with indig nation, but Olympiiis was his mother, and be could not obey the dictates of justice. During his brief but magnificent career he always treated her with the utmost reverence and esteem, though he never allowed her to meddle with his political schemes. After
his death she endeavored to get possession of the vacant throne, and obtained the sup port of Polysperchon in her designs. In 317 the two defeated Arrhidmus, the weak minded step-brother and successor of Alexander, and his wife Eurydice, whom she caused to be put to death in the same year. She now began to glut her revenge on such of the Macedonian nobles as had shown themselves hostile to her; but her cruelties soon alienated the minds of the people from her, even though she was the mother of their heroic king, whereupon Cassander (q.v.), her principal adversary, marched n. from the Peloponnesus, besieged her in Pydna, and forced her to surrender in the spring of 316 B.C. She was immediately afterward put to death. Olympias was a woman of heroic spirit, but of fierce and uncontrollable passions, and in the perpetration of crime, when she reckoned it necessary, displayed an unscrupulousness peculiarly feminine.