Roxana
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, a book by Daniel Defoe
Roxana or Rukhsana (Persian: رخسانه ) is a female given name.
History
Roxana (Bactrian, Persian: Roshanak; Bactrian definition literally "luminous beauty" Persian definition "the dawn"), was a Bactrian noble and a wife of Alexander the Great. She was born earlier than the year 341 BC, though the precise date remains uncertain. She was the daughter of a Bactrian named Oxyartes of Balkh in Bactria (then eastern Persia, now northern Afghanistan), and married Alexander in 327 BC after he visited the fortress of Sogdian Rock. Balkh was the last of the Persian Empire's provinces to fall to Alexander, and the marriage was an attempt to reconcile the Bactrian satrapies to Alexander's rule, although ancient sources describe Alexander's professed love for her. Roxana accompanied him on his campaign in India in 326 BC. She bore him a posthumous son called Alexander IV Aegus, after Alexander's sudden death at Babylon in 323 BC. With the king's death, Roxana and her son became victims of the political intrigues of the collapse of the Alexandrian empire. Roxana murdered Alexander's other widow, Stateira II, and Stateira's sister Drypteis (Pl. Alex. 77.4). Roxana and her son were protected by Alexander's mother, Olympias, in Macedon, but her assassination in 316 BC allowed Cassander to seek kingship. Since Alexander IV Aegus was the legitimate heir to the Alexandrian empire, Cassander ordered him and Roxana assassinated around 309 BC.
