Ain’t it the truth. Passion, scandal, marriage, remarriage, divorce, murder: Sometimes you can find them all in one famous relationship. What’s missing today, however, is the poetry. I mean, Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries: Not exactly worthy of the Bard, are they? Can you just hear her announcing to him, à la Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to Marc Antony, “I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved”? I don’t think dear Kim would know a bourn’s identity.
Having said that, we decided to comb the tomes, tabloids and tweets of history to give you a little Cook’s tour of amour:
Greek to us
When it comes to epic passion, we moderns have nothing on the ancient Greeks and their rustic cousins, the Macedonians.
Philip II, king of Macedon, was a kind of ancient Henry VIII – a lusty, larger-than-life figure who loved much but none too well. Among the women he took to wife was Olympias, a virginal captive teen princess from the northern Greek kingdom of Epirus whom he met at a religious rite on the island of Samothrace. She bore him two children – Alexander, the future conqueror of the Persian Empire, and Cleopatra, who would become queen of Epirus.
The virile Philip was used to having his way with any number of wives, mistresses and male lovers. Unfortunately for him, Olympias – a cross between Princess Diana and Medea – was not the kind of woman to be gainsaid. As long as her precious boy remained heir presumptive to the throne of Macedon, the hegemony of Greece and Philip’s dream of Persian conquest, Olympias was willing to tolerate the other wives, the trophy mistresses and the boy toys. But when Philip decided to divorce Olympias and take a nice Macedonian girl to wife to make nice, pure-blooded Macedonian babies – thereby jeopardizing Alexander’s claim to the throne and her own dynastic ambitions – well, that was too much.
In a scene dramatized in Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” that would’ve been equally at home in “The Godfather,” Olympias waited until daughter Cleopatra’s wedding day, which Philip staged as a PR event for his achievements. No sooner did he arrive with the bridegroom and son Alexander than he was met by Pausanias, a former lover with an ax to grind and a knife to wield. While Alexander – who would soon ride off to Persia and into history – mopped up the mess left by Dad’s assassination, Mom made sure that her ex-hubby’s young wifey hanged herself and for good measure, crowned the corpse of the assassin, which was hung on a cross, with a laurel wreath, kissing it on the lips.
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