An even more ludicrous faux pas which Alexander committed about this time came as a timely reminder of the vast gap which still existed between upper-class Persian and Macedonian customs. Olympias [Alexander’s mother] had sent her son, as a present, a large quantity of purple cloth, together with the women who wove it.
Alexander offered both to the Persian queen mother, Sisygambis. If she liked the material, he informed her, these women would teach her granddaughters how to make it for themselves. This kindly, if someone naïve, offer was construed by Sisygambis as a calculated insult of the most deadly sort. The mere idea of any royal lady performing so menial a task almost gave the old Achaemenid matriarch apoplexy [incapacity or speechlessness caused by extreme anger]. The king, she thought, must be sneering at her servile status: it took a great deal of explanation and many elaborate apologies before good relations were restored between them. Alexander assured her that his own sisters had helped to weave the bale, but Sisygambis is unlikely to have regarded this claim as anything more than gallant fiction.
Source:
Green, Peter. “The Lord of Asia.” Alexander of Macedon: 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography. Univ. of California Press, 2005. 307-8. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Diod. 17.66.3-7, with Welles’s important note, pp. 306-7.
QC 5.2.13-15.
Plut. Alex. 37.4, cf. 56, Moral. 329D. For Alexander’s faux pas with Sisygambis see QC 5.2.18-22, cf. Diod. 17.67.
Further Reading:
Alexander III of Macedon / Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας (Alexander the Great)
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This is a typo I assume?