TheBlackWolf@thewolvenhour
Alexander treated Darius' family like his own!
After the Persian rout at Issus in November 333 BC, the Greek scouts rode back at dusk with word that the Great King had fled so fast he had abandoned his own mother, wife, and children on the battlefield.
When Alexander entered the royal tent that night, the air was still heavy with incense and the scent of terror. Sisygambis, white-haired and rigid with dread, mistook Hephaestion for the conqueror and fell at his feet. Alexander lifted her himself, gently, and spoke the words that would be repeated across two empires: “You were not mistaken, mother; this man too is Alexander.” From that moment he called the old queen “Mother,” and she, who had lost a son on the field that day, accepted the title without irony.
Politically it would make ABSOLUTE sense for him to marry one off them and symbolically be "the man" of Asia; but he did not, even if he liked them - a lot. He even said that those "Persian women are so beautiful it's a burden/torture for the eyes to even look at them".
But he gave those women his personal oath that no harm, no insult, no violation would touch them. When Stateira the wife sickened and died two years later, somewhere on the road to Susa, Alexander halted the entire column, put on mourning, and paid for a funeral more splendid than many kings receive in victory. When Darius learnt of that he was sure she was having an affair with Alexander; he could not explain this level of respect.
At the great weddings in Susa in 324 BC Alexander took Stateira the daughter as his second queen, placed the diadem on her head with his own hands, and gave Drypetis to Hephaestion, saying openly that he wished their children to be cousins of his own.
Sisygambis, now stooped and nearly blind, was carried into the banqueting hall on a litter and set at the place of highest honour, above even the King’s Companions. When the news of Alexander’s death reached her a year later, the old woman turned her face to the wall, refused bread and water, and starved herself in four days. In an age when captured princesses were paraded in chains or worse, Alexander kept his word so completely that the vanquished queen chose to follow him into death rather than live in a world where he was no longer king.
