Truth, Saga
& Legend

Adea’s mother was Cynane, a daughter of Philip II by the Illyrian princess Audata, which made her Alexander the Great’s half-sister. Her father was Amyntas IV, son of Philip’s elder brother Perdiccas III — the child who should have been king in 359 BC, set aside by his uncle Philip and killed after Philip’s death in 336 BC.

So Adea was Alexander’s niece and carried the royal Argead blood twice over. That is why her marriage mattered, and why, when she was killed, Cassander bothered to bury her as a queen.

Cynane’s Daughter takes its chorus from this: Philip’s blood and a soldier’s hands.

After Alexander died in 323 BC, Cynane crossed to Asia with her daughter to marry her to the new king, Philip III Arrhidaeus. The regent Perdiccas, who did not want a royal woman of Cynane’s ability at the king’s side, sent his brother Alcetas to stop her. Alcetas’s force met her on the march and Cynane was killed, probably in 322 or 321 BC.

The killing is secure. How it happened is not: Polyaenus has her facing Alcetas’s soldiers and choosing to die rather than retreat, and the details are lost. Over My Mother’s Body names nobody — a regent’s order, a brother sent to do it — which is exactly what the record supports.

Arrian, in the summary Photius preserves, says the Macedonian soldiers were furious that a daughter of Philip had been killed, and that Perdiccas had to give way: Adea was married to Philip III and took the royal name Eurydice, the name of Philip II’s mother.

The marriage that her mother’s killers meant to stop was made by her mother’s killing. That reversal is the engine of Over My Mother’s Body — the blade you sent is mine — and it is the record’s, not the album’s.

When the generals met at Triparadisus in Syria in 321 or 320 BC to redivide the empire, Eurydice worked the soldiers directly, pressing the king’s claims and her own and contesting the new regent Antipater’s authority. Arrian says the troops grew so dangerous that Antipater nearly lost his life and was rescued by Antigonus and Seleucus. She lost the argument; Antipater took the regency.

She was perhaps sixteen or seventeen. The ancient writers present it as a girl’s presumption. The album’s Act II — They Answer to Me — reads it as the first time she moved an army with her voice.

In 317 BC Olympias returned to Macedon from Epirus with the regent Polyperchon and the Epirote king Aeacides. Eurydice, who had taken power in her husband’s name, raised an army and met them at Euia. Diodorus says that as soon as the armies faced each other, the Macedonians changed sides, out of respect for Olympias and gratitude to Alexander. Eurydice fled toward Amphipolis with a few companions and was captured.

There was no battle. That is the centre of the album: not beaten — abandoned.

Diodorus says Olympias kept Eurydice and Philip III under guard and mistreated them, walling them into a small space and passing in what they needed through a single narrow opening. When the Macedonians began to pity them, she had Thracians stab Philip to death. He had been king for six years and four months.

Walled In Alive is this paragraph. The record gives the size of the room and the gap; the album gives the dark.

Cassander besieged Olympias in Pydna through the winter of 317–316 BC. When the city fell she surrendered, was condemned by an assembly of Macedonians, and was killed by the relatives of those she had executed. It was less than a year after Eurydice’s death.

Nobody in antiquity says the curse caused it. The album is free to hear it that way; the dates are the record’s.

After he had disposed of Olympias in 316 BC, Cassander buried Eurydice and Philip III at Aegae, the old royal burial-place of Macedon, as was customary for kings, and honoured Cynane with them. Athenaeus, citing the historian Diyllus, adds that he held funeral games, with single combats among the soldiers.

Cassander had his own reasons: he had just married another of Philip II’s daughters and wanted to be seen as the guardian of the old royal house. But the girl who lost her army got a queen’s tomb, and the woman who killed her did not.

Polyaenus, a second-century AD collector of military anecdotes, says Cynane was trained in war in the Illyrian manner, fought at the head of an army against the Illyrians, and killed their queen with her own hand. Later writers give the queen the name Caeria; Polyaenus’s text is uncertain on the name.

Nothing contradicts it, and Cynane’s later march to Asia at the head of her own force fits the picture of a fighting princess. But it comes from one writer, five hundred years later, whose book exists to collect striking deeds.

Cynane’s Daughter opens on it as fact: My mother killed a queen in the open field. The album takes the anecdote at its word; this page marks where it comes from.

Duris of Samos, a historian of the generation after Alexander whose work is lost, called the clash between Olympias and Eurydice the first war waged by two women. Athenaeus preserves the line, with Duris’s picture of Olympias advancing like a Bacchant to the sound of drums, and Eurydice armed in the Macedonian manner.

It is a striking phrase and an unprovable claim, and Duris was known in antiquity for dramatic writing. The two images in it — the drum and the armour — are the two halves of the Dynasty Fallen diptych: Vol. XV takes the drum, Vol. XX the armour.

Diodorus says Olympias sent Eurydice a sword, a noose and some hemlock, and ordered her to use whichever she liked. It is the most famous detail of her death and the one most often repeated.

It rests on Diodorus alone. His source, Hieronymus of Cardia, was a contemporary with access to the court of the successors, which counts for a lot; but the triple choice also reads like a tragic set piece, and some modern historians treat it with caution. The album stages it in Three Gifts, and Vol. XV stages Olympias sending it.

Diodorus’s account of her end is unusually detailed. She laid out her husband’s body and cleaned his wounds as well as she could; then, without weeping for herself or giving way to her misfortune, she hanged herself with her own girdle. Before she died, in front of the attendant, she prayed that Olympias would one day receive gifts like these.

It is the strongest thing in the record and the hero image of the album. It is also one source. The Same to You takes its title from her prayer, and Rei sings it as the record has it.

Polyaenus says Cynane trained her daughter in war as she had been trained herself, and Duris describes Eurydice at Euia armed in the Macedonian fashion, opposite Olympias with her drums. The two together are the album’s portrait of her: the sword before the loom, the bronze on the field.

Neither writer is a close witness, and nobody says she ever fought. The record gives her an army and a cuirass; it does not give her a battle.

In 1977 Manolis Andronikos excavated an unplundered royal tomb at Vergina, the site of ancient Aegae, holding the cremated remains of a man and a younger woman, with arms and gold. He identified it as the tomb of Philip II. Other scholars have argued that it is the tomb of Philip III Arrhidaeus and Eurydice, buried by Cassander — the young woman and the armour have both been used in the argument.

It has not been settled, and new studies of the bones keep arriving on both sides. The album stages a royal tomb of the type at the close of The Same to You, and claims no identification.

Everything Adea says on this album is the album’s except the curse, which Diodorus reports. Specific inventions: her drawing her sword alone on the empty field at Euia (I Drew It Alone) — the record has her fleeing; the drill-ground and the sword put in her hand before the loom; her burying her mother dry-eyed; the words she speaks to the army; and the spears turning away from her in the video, which mirror the spears kneeling to Olympias on the Vol. XV cover.

Rei and the band are not in the record either. They are the witnesses the album adds, on the edge of the camp, watching an army change sides.