Roxane

Roxana was Alexander's wife and the mother of his posthumous son, and both of them were murdered by his successors. She was the daughter of Oxyartes, a Bactrian noble, and was captured around 327 BC when Alexander stormed the Sogdian Rock — a fortress on a crag whose defenders had told him he would need soldiers with wings, and which he took by sending three hundred experienced climbers up the cliff face at night. Ancient writers agree she was strikingly beautiful and that Alexander married her for love, which was also convenient: the marriage secured Bactria and Sogdiana, the hardest region of the empire to hold, and turned her father into an ally and a satrap. His Macedonian officers disliked it. She was not Greek, and a marriage to a captive from the far east was not what they had come for, and it fed the same resentment as the Persian dress and the proskynesis. She was pregnant when he died at Babylon in June 323 BC. Her son Alexander IV was born that August and made joint king with Alexander's disabled half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus, under a regent — which meant he was a prize rather than a ruler. Plutarch reports that she had Alexander's other wife Stateira killed immediately. She and the child were taken to Macedonia, held by Olympias, besieged at Pydna, and passed to Cassander when it fell in 316 BC. He kept them at Amphipolis and had both killed around 310 BC, as the boy approached the age of majority.

• Lived: 340 BCE – 310 BCE
• Nationality: Bactrian
• Roles: royalty