Philip II of Macedon
Modern analysis

Some modern historians have claimed that none of the accounts are probable: They say that in the case of Pausanias, the purported motive for the crime hardly seems adequate. Furthermore they claim that implicating Alexander and Olympias in the plot seems specious, to act as they did would have required them to act with an improbable degree of brazen effrontery in the face of a military whose members were personally loyal to Philip. What seems to have been recorded, rather, are simply suspicions that were naturally directed towards the chief beneficiaries of the assassination; however, their actions in response to the murder are hardly evidence of their guilt with respect to the crime itself, regardless of how sympathetic they might have seemed afterward.

Scholar Daniel Ogden has noted that if there was a sexual side to the murder, "then it can be contextualized in this regard against known homosexual relationships in and around the Macedonian court" and that according to Aristotle, the regicide of Archelaus I of Macedon was by his former eromenoi, Crateuas and Hellenocrates of Larissa.

Whatever the actual background to the assassination, it may have had an enormous effect on later world events, far beyond what any conspirators could have predicted. As asserted by some modern historians, had the older and more settled Philip been the one in charge of the war against Persia, he might have been content to make relatively moderate conquests, e.g., making Anatolia into a Macedonian province, and, unlike his son Alexander, not have wanted to push further into an overall conquest of Persia and further campaigns in India.
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