The Sacred War

by H A CULLEY

  He sighed. She was going to be trouble whatever he did with her.

  Chapter Thirteen – Last Throw of the Dice

  346 BC

  With the arrival of spring Philip decided that the time had come at long last to strike against Phocis and Athens, and to strike hard.

  ‘Parmenion, I want you to take your army over the route that Iphitos reconnoitred a month ago and attack the Phocian fort at Thermopylae from the rear. Meanwhile I, with Attalus’ army, will besiege it from the west. There is already unrest in Phocis, mainly because they have run out of money to pay their mercenaries, so I expect the fall of the Gates of Fire to persuade them to sue for peace.’

  Iphitos raised his hand and the other senior officers present at the briefing turned to look at him. Ignoring them, the young chief engineer got to his feet when Philip nodded to him.

  ‘Basileus, I have received a report from Athens that has a bearing on your plans. I apologise for the fact that I haven’t had the time to brief you about this yet, but the messenger only arrived just before this meeting was called.’

  ‘What’s so important that you needed to interrupt my briefing, Iphitos?’

  ‘The Athenians have called a general muster for next month and the Spartans are sending a force to join them. They have apparently got wind of the Phocians problems and plan to forestall their attempts to make a separate peace with you and Thessaly by capturing and holding the Gates of Fire themselves. They are naturally worried that, if we seize the pass, we can flood down into Attica and threaten Athens itself.’

  ‘Thank you. You were quite right to interrupt. That means we will have to move swiftly if we are to forestall the Athenians and the Spartans. Did your agent give any indication as to how long it will take Athens to mobilise?’

  ‘No, but judging by past experience, about two or three weeks. It will take the Spartans that long to march up through the Peloponnese, along the Isthmus of Corinth and across to Athens. However, it is twice as far as that from Pella to Thermopylae.’

  ‘Very well, the cavalry will depart tomorrow and the infantry and the rest will have to follow on at as fast a pace as they can manage. Send messages to Thessaly now for them to muster as many infantry and peltasts as they can and tell them to meet us on the northern shore of the Gulf of Malis . Iphitos, all our artillery is to be ferried to Malis by the fleet. Put Lysis in command. I want you, Georgios and Enya to travel with Parmenion’s army and guide them over the mountain. We must all be in place before Athens and Sparta can get there. Right; what are you waiting for? Get moving.’

  Iphitos was used to long hours in the saddle; Georgios and Enya weren’t. In fact they had only had a few riding lessons since arriving in Pella and, whilst they managed to stay on, travelling at speed on a horse for a long period was beyond them. The solution was for the two of them to double up with an experienced rider and, as the horses tired more quickly with a double load, to alternate horses throughout the day. As he had brought his aide and his skeuphorus with him, Callimarcos doubled with Georgios and, much to their delight, Enya did the same with Timandros as her riding partner.

  They reached the Thessalian border without incident, though finding enough food for the men and fodder for the horses was proving a problem. Normally the horses could eat enough by grazing but there was no time for that during the day and there wasn’t always enough good pasture available where they camped. It cost Philip money, but the only answer was to purchase fodder at each Thessalian city and carry it on the back of the horses.

  Iphitos was less than delighted to find that the food problem was solved by issuing each man with dried meat and hard biscuits for him to break his teeth on. After two days he got fed up with it and sent Callimarcos out with a bow to forage whilst Georgios rode his own horse for a while. From then on his small party ate much better.

  When they got to the Thessalian port from where they had departed six weeks previously they found the artillery waiting for them. They had passed units of infantry along the road for the past few days and some four thousand hoplites and two thousand peltasts were already assembled at the coast.

  The next day Parmenion’s weary army set out again. Philip gave him all the infantry who had already arrived but only one hipparchia of cavalry. They also took one disassembled lithobolos carried on several pack horses.

  With Georgios, Enya and Iphitos in the lead, accompanied by a lochus of peltasts for protection, the army started the climb up the slopes of Mount Callidromus at dawn the next day. The goat trails were narrow and, at times, they went past outcrops of rock with a drop of several hundred feet on the other side. It was slow going and the army stretched out along the mountainside for nearly five miles. Their passage must have been obvious to those in the fort below, even at such a distance, but, if they were spotted, no-one tried to do anything about it.

  Inevitably Parmenion suffered a few casualties along the more difficult stretches of the trail when some lost their footing and fell to their deaths; however, he was relieved that he had only lost six men and three horses by the time that they reached the relatively easy going beside the stream which led down to the coast.

  He let his men rest and drink before the final leg. He was anxious to reach the area beside the sea where he proposed to set up camp by dark but it took two hours before the last man joined him and by that time the sun was sinking in the west. Consequently many men had to sleep where they stood and make do with dried goat’s meat and biscuits again.

  The next day his officers set about laying out a defensive perimeter and organising the interior of the camp. Parmenion was mindful of the fact that the Athenians and the Spartans might arrive at any moment, and there was no guarantee that the Phocians, in whose country they now were, wouldn’t attack him, however convinced Philip was that they were dithering about suing for peace.

  He therefore spent two days digging a defensive ditch topped with a rough dry stone wall. It wasn’t ideal but there was no timber nearby for a palisade. What timber they did manage to find was needed for fires on which to cook. There were stumps where a wood had been cut down sometime previously, presumably for the Phocian fort’s palisade. However, there was plenty of stone and Iphitos and his engineers managed to construct a wall six feet thick and ten high with a walkway behind it.

  Once the camp was finished Parmenion turned his attention towards the fort. He had heard the sounds of his artillery pounding away at the far side and now he brought his lithoboloi forward to attack the palisade. He ignored the gate and concentrated instead on the palisade to the right of it.

  As he had correctly assumed, the palisade itself was weaker than the reinforced gates. It consisted of tree trunks sunk into the sandy soil and then lashed together in three places. The ground into which the timbers were sunk became increasingly sandy as it neared the beach. The length on the beach itself was supported at the base by rocks piled against it. Iphitos found that he had to explain everything to his newly adopted and curious children.

  ‘Why have you chosen that spot to attack, rather than anywhere else?’ Enya asked once he had explained to them how the lithobolos worked.

  ‘The rocks piled against both sides of the bottom of the palisade are heavy enough to keep the palisade upright so the only way of breaking into the fort at that point would be to break the timbers. Even then the broken off bit at the bottom would provide an obstacle. Further along, near the mountainside the ground is firmer and so the timbers are more securely retained in the earth. However, at the point where we are attacking the palisade the ground is softer because the soil is mixed with sand. The rocks were are firing at it will loosen the base and break the bindings holding the palisade together,’ Iphitos told them.

  Shortly after he had explained this to them the palisade started to sag at one point and half an hour later the first few timber had been smashed flat. It was at that point that the gates opened and four riders rode towards Parmenion’s camp. The strategos had been sitting on his horse talking to Iph
itos and his two charges at the time and, summoning his taxiarch, Emyntor , he rode forward with them and his personal escort to meet them.

  It was all over. The fort’s commander had the sense to see that it was only a matter of hours, if that, before the breech was big enough for Parmenion to send in his thousands of men and, as he had less than a thousand to defend it, the outcome was inevitable. All he asked was that they be allowed to march out with their weapons and families and return to Phocis.

  Parmenion had no wish to slaughter men, women and children needlessly, and if Phocis was indeed on the point of negotiating peace, freeing a chiliarchy of hoplites to re-join their army would make little difference, so he agreed.

  An hour later the fort was his and he opened the far gates so that he could go and inform Philip.

  -o0o-

  The Athenian assembly was in uproar. The Pnyx Hill, the normal meeting place for the male citizens, all of whom had a say in the democratic rule of the city-state - at least in theory - could hold six thousand people; today it seems that most of the forty thousand men who had a vote were attempting to get onto the hill. Demosthenes was trying to make himself heard but the crowd was vociferously demanding that their leaders respond to their panic at the imminent threat of a combined Macedonian and Thessalian invasion. Demosthenes gave up and sat down, muttering in frustration, between two other pre-eminent Athenians, Philiocrates and Aeschines .

  Eventually the crowd settled down and Demosthenes got to his feet again.

  ‘Men of Athens, the barbarians are at our gates and the Spartans have fled back into the Peloponnese with their tails between their legs.’

  This wasn’t entirely true. The Spartans had been attacked by Argos and other Macedonian allies in the Peloponnese and had never left Laconia at the southern tip of the peninsula. He paused for effect whilst the crowd howled their dismay. His use of the term barbarians referred to the Macedonians whose adherence to a monarchy was anathema to the democracies and oligarchies of Greece proper. In the past they had been despised as uncouth goat herders but that stereotype was not one that most Athenians would now use to describe them. Philp’s military prowess had earned him the respect of his fellow Greek-speakers and his country was now regarded with fear rather than contempt.

  ‘We can muster perhaps twenty thousand men between eighteen and forty years of age whilst Philip is reported to have at least thirty thousand at Thermopylae. Thebes and the rest of Boeotia are neutral and Phocis is ready to surrender to him.’

  ‘What of Corinth?’ one man shouted into the silence which had greeted Demosthenes’ opening remarks.

  ‘Pah , the Corinthians think themselves safe on their isthmus and won’t stir off it.’

  Having set the scene Demosthenes sat down and Philiocrates took over.

  ‘Do you want to see your wives and children sold as slaves by the Macedonians and this city raised to the ground, as the barbarian king has done with Olynthus and Potidaea?’ he asked.

  It was a rhetorical question as there could only be one answer. Nevertheless the crowd howled out their negative response.

  ‘They we must negotiate with this man, much as it sickens me to suggest it.’

  The crowd roared their agreement. Like Demosthenes, he knew that they had gambled and lost because they were too slow to mobilise. The Sacred War was all but over. All that remained now was to negotiate as favourable a peace as possible.

  ‘Who will you trust with this vital task? Who will form your embassy to meet Philip of Macedon?’

  Various suggestions were put forward but eventually the delegation chosen consisted of Philiocrates , Demosthenes and Aeschines .

  However, when they got to Pella they found that they were not alone in sending an embassy. Representatives from Phocis, Thebes, Corinth, and even Thessaly had beaten them to it.

  It didn’t matter though. Philip wasn’t there. Having negotiated a truce with Phocis whereby the Boeotian cities they had captured were freed, he left a force of Thessalians to garrison the fort and Parmenion’s camp at Thermopylae, and rushed back to Pella. He didn’t tarry their long but set off for the east once more; the Thracians had invaded his territory yet again.

  Chapter Fourteen – Into Illyria Again

  346 BC

  Philip had left Attalus and his army to watch his eastern border and he now called upon his allies in Chalkidike to send a sizeable contingent to help the Macedonians throw the Thracians back across the border. Once this had been achieved he rushed back to Pella again to consolidate the peace with Phocis and Athens. He fully intended to return and exact a harsh revenge on Thrace, but he needed to secure the Greek heartland first.

  ‘You ask what my terms for concluding a lasting peace with you are. It’s quite simple. Greece has been bled dry by civil war after civil war. This so-called Sacred War was only the last of long line of struggles for power between various city-states: Athens against Sparta, Athens against Thebes, Thebes against Thessaly, Phocis and Athens against everyone else and so on. It is time that we put a stop to it and united against our one true enemy – Persia.’

  Philip was addressing the meeting of all the ambassadors that had come to Pella. With the one exception – Thrace – every state in Greece now wanted peace, so in many ways he was preaching to the converted.

  ‘Obviously it’s impossible for Phocis to remain a member of the Delphic Amphictyonic Council and I claim their two seats on that council for Macedon. Phocis must never be in a position to inflict the damage on others that she has done over the past ten years. I was minded to destroy every Phocian city in reprisal.’

  There was a collective gasp at this suggestion. Even Thebes and the other Boeotian cities, who had suffered most at the hands of the Phocians, didn’t want to see the country destroyed.

  ‘However, I’ve decided against that, but they must repay what they have stolen. Obviously this will take time so I suggest they repay the enormous sums that they stole from Delphi at the rate of sixty talents per year.’

  There were some members of the Amphictyonic Council who had advocated that those responsible for robbing the temple and the treasuries at Delphi should suffer the traditional punishment by being hurled from the Phaidriadai Rocks, but most thought that this was too drastic. They were also worried that, if most of the leading citizens of Phocis were killed, they would never get their money back. Philip’s suggestion therefore met with general approval.

  Much to their surprise, Philip didn’t propose reprisals against Athens and Sparta, despite the fact that they had joined Phocis, if somewhat half-heartedly, during the penultimate stages of the war. Athens reluctantly accepted Philip’s leadership of Greece whilst Sparta retired to its far corner of the Peloponnese and avoided any further involvement in Pan-Hellenic affairs, at least for now.

  After the treaty had been signed, Philip was free to campaign against Thrace and he set off with Parmenion’s army, leaving Antigonus and his men in Pella. With Attalus’ men and the levies from Chalkidike and Amphipolis, he would have an army of nearly thirty thousand with which to invade the three Thracian kingdoms in turn.

  However, just when Philip thought that his plan to unite all of Greece was coming together, Illyria erupted again. Pleuratus had taken the throne of the Taulantii twelve years ago after Philip had destroyed their army in a previous campaign. It had taken Pleuratus all the intervening time, but at last he had built up another army and had started to raid into Dardania , another part of Illyria and one which was allied to Macedon. The Dardanians had lost battle after battle against the Taulantii and had now asked Philip to come to their aid.

  He left Attalus to start the campaign in Thrace with eighteen thousand men and rushed east to confront Pleuratus with Parmenion’s ten thousand and his own companions. Linking up with Antigonus and his army on the northern border of Macedon, he crossed into Dardania , picking up five thousand more men from his allies there and then another three thousand from Epirus. The Taulantii kingdom was centred on the Drin Ri
ver and ran along the Adriatic coast and lay to the north of Epirus and to the west of Dardania . Pleuratus was reputed to have an army fifty thousand strong, but they were mainly lightly armed spearmen and peltasts. Against this Philip had just over half that number, but sixteen thousand were hoplites and he also had four thousand cavalry. The remaining eight thousand were divided almost equally between lightly armed spearmen and peltasts.

  The Taulantii were tribesmen who lived in rural villages and small towns. Their main means of livelihood were farming and, along the coast, fishing. There were no big cities and so Philip had left his lithoboloi with Attalus. However, he had brought Iphitos and his gryphettes and katapeltikons with him.

  At first Pleuratus avoided battle with Philip and contented himself with raiding his opponent’s supply lines, attacking the foraging parties and making the odd pin-prick attack on the Macedonian army whilst it was on the march. Philip responded by setting fire to every village and town he came across and scorching the earth. Not a vineyard, olive grove or wheat field was left unscathed.

  Eventually Pleuratus decided in despair that he had to face Philip and try and destroy his rampaging army. The spot he chose was where the Drin widened out into a lake. Between this and the hills to the north was a level area which sloped upwards towards a plateau. Pleuratus anchored his right flank on the edge of the lake and his left on the lower slopes of the hills. It was a good position as the ground fell away to his front and his reserve would be in dead ground to the Macedonians.

  He had chosen his time well. Philip had decided to try and trap him between two armies and he had sent Antigonus off with ten thousand men to the coast. He was then to travel up the valley of the River Drin whilst Philip moved down it from the other direction. Unfortunately, by the time that he had discovered that Pleuratus was offering battle it was too late to recall Antigonus .