Who was in Tomb II?
James Romm
- Heracles to Alexander the Great: Treasures from the Royal Capital of Macedon, a Hellenic Kingdom in the Age of Democracy by Angeliki Kottaridi et al
Ashmolean, 264 pp, £25.00, April 2011, ISBN 978 1 85444 254 3 - A Companion to Ancient Macedonia edited by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington
Wiley-Blackwell, 668 pp, £110.00, November 2010, ISBN 978 1 4051 7936 2 - Brill’s Companion to Ancient Macedon: Studies in the Archaeology and History of Macedon, 650 BC–300 AD edited by Robin Lane Fox
Brill, 642 pp, €184.00, June 2011, ISBN 978 90 04 20650 2
Almost 35 years ago, the Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos opened a large, unplundered chamber tomb in the northern Greek village of Vergina, and a great controversy began. The tomb housed the cremated remains of a man aged between 35 and 55 and of a younger woman, a pair Andronikos soon identified as the Macedonian king Philip II – father of Alexander the Great, builder of the army and the European empire that gave his son the means to conquer the world – and one of his seven wives. But it was not long before different candidates were proposed, as experts started to examine the evidence. Today the debate over Tomb II, one of three large chamber tombs excavated by Andronikos at Vergina, is more contentious than ever. The tomb is now the focal point for a Greek nationalist mythology built around the figure of Philip II, as revealed by the efforts of Vergina’s current excavators to turn the Macedonian military chief into a Hellenic philosopher-king.
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[*] As editor of The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, I included an appendix on the Vergina tombs by Eugene Borza that inclines strongly towards the Philip III attribution. Jonathan Hall, in a thorough and balanced review of the evidence in his forthcoming Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian, thinks Philip III is the more likely of the two candidates. Hall also advances the intriguing idea that Tomb II was originally intended for Alexander the Great, which would explain some of its anomalous features.
Vol. 33 No. 19 · 6 October 2011 » James Romm » Who was in Tomb II?
pages 27-28 | 3330 words