Axiothea

Axiothea was a woman of ancient Greece who lived in the 4th century BCE, and was queen of Paphos on the island of Cyprus. She was the wife of king Nicocles of Paphos.

In a fragment of a play by the New Comedy playwright Machon, we learn that the musician Stratonicus of Athens composed some satirical verses about Nicocles and Axiothea's sons that angered Axiothea to such a degree, that she insisted her husband have the musician put to death, which the king obliged. The women went up to the roof of the palace, in full public view, killed the children, and then, according to Polyaenus, set the building ablaze and died in the fire, though Axiothea is said to have stabbed herself with a dagger before succumbing to the flames. In Diodorus Siculus's telling of the same event, the women still commit suicide, despite Ptolemy wishing no harm on them, and after the women killed themselves, the palace fire was set by Nicocles's male relatives so that the women's bodies might not fall into enemy hands. These attributions are debated, and there is no clear consensus among scholars that these events happened in Salamis.