Birth
Alexander IV was Alexander the Great's son and Philip II of Macedonia's grandson. Because Roxana was pregnant when her husband died and the sex of the baby was unknown, there was dissension in the Macedonian army regarding the order of succession. While the infantry supported the baby's uncle, Philip III (who was both feeble-minded and illegitimate), the chiliarch Perdiccas, commander of the elite Companion cavalry, persuaded them to wait in the hope that Roxana's unborn child would be male. The factions compromised, deciding that Perdiccas would rule the Empire as regent while Philip would reign, but only as a figurehead with no real power. If the child was male, then he would be king. Alexander IV was born in August, 323 BC.
Read more about this topic: Alexander IV Of Macedon
Famous quotes containing the word birth:
“The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, forseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)