The horror was that she was a woman doing it. Yet as Beth points out in her articles, she didn’t do anything her husband and son didn’t also do. And yes, she committed a number of murders (although she got blamed for some I’m pretty sure she didn’t commit, too). One might argue that negatively portraying Olympias doesn’t equal misogyny, which is true. (There’s another female voice that will appear in Rise, but I can’t say who, or it’s a spoiler.) In Dancing with the Lion, not only did I try to write a powerful Olympias, but his full-sister Kleopatra is a POV character and even has her own coming-of-age arc, especially in book 2, Rise. It’s not only in how Olympias is portrayed, but in how Alexander’s sisters are overlooked. Misogyny is THICK in a lot of Alexander fiction, perhaps unconsciously imbibed from the primary sources. This is why I use Myrtalē instead of Olympias, to detach her from all that baggage, much as I use Alexandros to detach him from “Alexander the Great” baggage. This doesn’t mean she was nice, but she absolutely must be viewed in the full context of a polygamous court, her obvious intelligence, her Epirote ancestry, and the need simply to survive. I stand with Beth’s picture: her reputation got a hatchet-job. With that said, let’s jump back into the interview.Īlexander’s mother, Olympias, is represented very negatively by the Alexander historians what is your assessment of her character, and how does it inform the way you look at her in Dancing with the Lion ? You can find Dancing With The Lion: Becoming on Amazon in the U.K. Part Two, Rise, will be published this October. The first part Becoming just just been published. Jeanne has written Dancing With The Lion, a two part novel about the early years of Alexander, or, how he became the man we know as ‘the Great’. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, an adventure that Alexander would surely have approved of, I continue my conversation with Jeanne Reames.

Rise by Jeanne Reames