Philip II and the Rise of Macedon

 For most of early Macedonian history, kings struggled constantly to maintain their independence while simultaneously striving to assert their preeminence over the local dynasts. Macedonia consisted of two distinct geographical regions: Lower Macedonia, which supported a large agricultural population, and Upper Macedonia, mountainous hinterlands which held extensive forests and rich mineral deposits.

In antiquity, neither Macedonians nor Greeks considered the Macedonians to be Greek. Macedonian and Greek culture had little in common. Most Macedonians were farmers or seminomadic pastoralists living in scattered villages. War and hunting were central to the life of a Macedonian noble. The monarchy was the central institution of Macedonian society. Macedonian kings were autocrats, but they were not all-powerful.

In the late sixth century BC, Amyntas I made an alliance with Persia and the kingdom was shielded from attack by its neighbors. In the fifth century, Alexander I, Perdiccas II, and Archelaus extended their territory, making the kingdom the strongest power in the region. But when Philip II came to power in 360 BC, Macedon was vulnerable to threats from both Greek and non-Greek enemies.

Philip II was born about 382 BC. Exiled as a hostage in Thebes from 369 to 367 BC, he learned about contemporary Greek politics and military tactics. In 360 BC Philip took power as the sole surviving adult Argead. After neutralizing the Thracians and Athenians through diplomacy, he regained control of western and northwestern Macedonia. Then he seized the Greek cities on the coasts of Macedon and the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus.

Philip reorganized the Macedonian infantry by creating a new phalanx equipped with new weapons like a sarissa, an enormous pike that could be as much as 18 feet long. He also strengthened the bonds between the army and the king by sharing its hardships and dangers. He replenished the royal companions with Greeks and non-Greeks who flocked to Macedon in search of opportunity and wealth. Members of the old nobility received commands in Philip's new army, and their sons became royal pages.

When Phocis and Pherae allied, Larisa and Thebes sought Philip's help. He crushed them in 352 BC and was appointed archon of Thessaly. This allowed him to unite Thessaly and Macedon and to double his military forces.

Meanwhile, the Third Sacred War broke out in 357 BC. Thebes had the Phocians fined for cultivating sacred land. The Phocians seized Delphi and used Apollo's treasures to recruit mercenaries and subdue much of central Greece. In 347 BC, Philip secretly negotiated surrender terms with Phocis. The Phocians agreed to repay Delphi at a rate of sixty talents per year. Philip gained Phocis' votes in the Delphic Amphictyony, giving him a voting majority on the Amphictyonic Council.

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Early in his reign, Philip bought Athenian neutrality by promising to restore Amphipolis, but then seized it. Athens delayed responding to Philip's actions because of the economic devastation caused by the Peloponnesian War and the establishment of the Theoric Fund. Eubulus (c. 405-c. 335 BC), Athens' leading politician, persuaded the Athenians to pass a law assigning all fiscal surpluses to the Theoric Fund, which funded public benefits. It encouraged a pacifist foreign policy by increasing the Athenians' concern that surplus funds would be redirected to military expenditures and their benefits reduced should war break out. But in 352 BC, with a Macedonian invasion of Attica imminent, the Athenians dispatched an expeditionary force to occupy Thermopylae.

The Athenian politician Philocrates, seeing the need for peace, made a treaty with Macedonia in 346 BC on Philip's terms. Athens abandoned its claim to Amphipolis and agreed that the city and the Second Athenian League would become allies of Philip and his descendants. Philip's diplomatic triumph was short-lived. As the likelihood of war with Macedon receded, support for the treaty dissipated.

In 340 BC, when Athens joined Persia to frustrate his siege of the city of Perinthus, Philip declared war. He captured the entire Black Sea grain fleet, thereby threatening Athens with starvation.

Philip's opportunity to strike directly at Athens came in 339 BC, when he accepted the Delphic Amphictyony's invitation to lead a sacred war against the city of Amphissa. By the end of the year the Macedonian army was in Phocis, within easy striking distance of Athens. Few Peloponnesian cities had heeded the Athenians' appeal to join in resisting Philip, who came out victorious at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC.

Philip's two principal enemies received different treatment. Theban prisoners were released after payment of a heavy ransom. Thebes' political leaders were either executed or exiled. A Macedonian garrison was installed on the city's acropolis. Athenian prisoners were returned without ransom, and the Athenian dead were escorted back to the city by an honor guard. Athens, for its part, made Alexander an Athenian citizen and established a cult in Philip's honor. The Athenians offered no further resistance to Macedonian preeminence in Greece and agreed to send representatives to the general meeting of Greek states at Corinth that Philip called in 337 BC.

An alliance of all the major Greek states except Sparta, the Corinthian League, was created to maintain a common peace in Greece and to avenge the Persian aggression against the Greeks. Member states received pledges of mutual nonaggression and support against attack or internal subversion. Philip was appointed leader of the alliance and commander of the war against Persia.

The League of Corinth reflected important trends in contemporary Greek thought. Some pragmatic thinkers denounced wars between Greeks as civil wars while insisting that wars against barbarians were inherently just or even desirable as a way of reducing internal tensions in Greece. The most prominent just-war theorist was the Athenian educator Isocrates. He argued that the solution to Greece's problems was conquering a portion of the Persian Empire to which economically deprived and potentially dangerous segments of Greek society then could emigrate.

The 330s were a time of severe crisis for Persia. Philip exploited that by sending an expeditionary force across the Hellespont in early 336 BC. The Macedonian army's march south along the Anatolian coast incited revolts in various Greek cities against their pro-Persian tyrants.

But in the summer, Philip was  assassinated by Pausanias, a member of his own bodyguard. Philip's assassination climaxed a political crisis that had begun with his seventh marriage in 338 BC to a Macedonian woman, Cleopatra. His fourth wife, the Epirote princess Olympias, the mother of his designated heir, Alexander, and Alexander fell from favor amidst talk that Philip intended to supplant his son with a "Macedonian" heir. When Cleopatra bore Philip a daughter he had to reconcile with Alexander. Philip's marriage to Cleopatra proved his undoing. He became embroiled in the enmities  of her family, and one of them involved his assassin, Pausanias.

During the twenty-four years of his reign, Philip transformed Macedon from a kingdom on the verge of dissolution to a unified state, ruling an empire that extended from the Danube to southern Greece. Without Philip's legacy of a united, powerful Macedon the achievements of Alexander and his successors would have been impossible.

This text is an excerpt, specifically Chapter 10, from "A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture" by Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, David W. Tandy, and Georgia Tsouvala. The work mentioned is a short version of the extensive "Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History, Third Edition", published by Oxford University Press.