Just saw the cat publication and it came to my attention that Polyxena/ Myrtatle/Olympia/ Stratonike and Hephaistion had similar personalities I need to know more!
I should be more forthright. This is my reading of them, for the novels, as we don’t know a lot about the real Hephaistion, personality-wise.
In Dancing with the Lion: Becoming, part of why Alexandros latches onto Hephaistion so quickly owes to the fact he feels vaguely familiar. I don’t mean that in a creepy way, and specify as much because Oliver Stone has said, in interviews, that he cast Rosario Dawson as Roxana because she resembled Angelina Jolie in certain respects, and he wanted the Oedipal Thing.
I manifestly do NOT, nor do I think it applicable (see this post for an explanation of why).
Even so, we are drawn to people who remind us of those we love (and understand).
My Hephaistion and Myrtalē are both FIERCE in their devotion to those they love. They’re also intense and so, a bit scary. And they both have a jealous bone. Also like Hephaistion, Myrtalē as I envision her got on very well with and cares deeply about her siblings. I think readers can pick up a sense of that between the sisters at least, when Myrtalē is exiled in Epiros in DwtL: Rise.
I also see Myrtalē and Hephaistion as having similar styles of psychological manipulation (of those they perceive to be enemies). That was what I had a little fun with in the short story, “Two Scorpions.” Myrtalē/Olympias goes after him because she sees him as a threat to Alexandros. He tries to fight back, but is essentially dealing with an older, more experienced version of himself. So, we see her drop him to the (virtual) mat a few times. In the end, he “kinda” wins, but only because he walks out before she can get in a retort. LOL The confrontation is written in his POV, but I hope it’s still evident she is (overall) getting the better of him.
In “Two Scorpions,” both act out of love for Alexandros, and what they perceive as the best for him. Myrtalē/Olympias isn’t jealous of nor “hates” Hephaistion. She tells him, quite bluntly, that she didn’t really have much of an opinion about him until he made himself Alexandros’s lover. And she explains why (she perceives) that to be dangerous. She’s brutal, but she’s completely transparent—and knows how to use that honesty to undermine her opponent, just as she has a knack for guessing her opponent’s weak spots. Hephaistion often employs the same tactics. And both pair that with an apparently unflappable façade. But she’s better at it than he is. 😉 Because she’s almost fifteen years older than he is.
Too often, Olympias in literature is portrayed as irrational, vindictive, and jealous. But that’s an ancient Greek male projection of what drives “meddling” women who get above themselves by trying to “do” politics. How dare they?!
I hope that explains why I, at least, see the two as quite similar, at least in the novels. Again, we don’t know enough about the real Hephaistion to say what he was like, although I did build my fictional character on what seemed to me a feasible extrapolation from the source material.