Of all the princesses of this stormy period, the one who ranks as the noblest and most virtuous woman of her age was Phila, daughter of Antipater and wife of Demetrius the Besieger, son of Antigonus--the Alcibiades among the princes of the Succession. She shared with her brilliant husband his various vicissitudes of fortune; and she bore uncomplainingly his many infidelities, his disgraces, and his misfortunes. When, after an erratic career of successes and failures, he was made King of Macedon, she no doubt attained the height of her desires. But his ambition soared higher, and he endeavored to organize a movement to reconquer and embrace under his exclusive rule the whole extent of the empire of Alexander. He was unsuccessful; and after seven years of power as King of Macedon, he was expelled from his kingdom and was compelled to flee for his life to the Peloponnesus. The blow was too severe for his noble-hearted wife, and Phila poisoned herself when she thought his ruin inevitable. She left two children by Demetrius who became prominent in the politics of the times--Antigonus Gonatas, who stood nobly by his father in his misfortunes, and who finally became King of Macedon and was the first of that famous line of kings which became extinct only at the hands of the Romans; and Stratonice, who at the tender age of seventeen was married to the aged Seleucus, King of Syria. Plutarch tells an interesting story of this princess. Antiochus, son of Seleucus, fell violently ill, and it was difficult for the royal physicians to discover the nature of the malady. Finally, the cleverest of them observed that when Stratonice, the prince's young stepmother, was present, he exhibited all the symptoms mentioned by Sappho in her famous ode,--"his ears rang, sweat poured down his forehead, a trembling seized his body, he became paler than grass." The physician at once perceived that Antiochus was sick for love of the queen. The wily physician, however, in explaining to Seleucus the nature of the malady, pretended at first that it was his own wife with whom the prince was in love; but, so soon as he fully ascertained the king's mind, he told him that his son was dying for love of his stepmother, the beautiful Stratonice. Without a moment's hesitation, the old king resigned his wife to his son and gave them an independent kingdom as a wedding present. It is rather a remarkable society of queens and princesses to which the court of Macedon admits us,--the licentious and cruel Eurydice the Elder, mother of Philip; the gloomy and violent Olympias; the brilliant and versatile Cleopatra; the valiant and eloquent Cynane and her warlike and ambitious daughter Eurydice; the rather colorless and ill-fated wives of Alexander the Great; the kind-hearted Cratesipolis; the unselfish and noble Phila; and her beautiful daughter Stratonice.