The Iliad and Homer's Heroic Traditions

Olympias believed herself to be a linear descendant of both Achilles and Priam. The heroic tradition gave her a model for how she ought to die, and she may well have followed it. Olympias did not die the private appropriately gendered death that she had granted her female enemies. Men killed her with swords, perhaps even in public. She died the death of a male hero.