by Ober, Josiah
Macedon can best be understood as a basic “natural state,” centered on a ruler and his elite coalition, in which rents were distributed according to the potential for violence. Although “Macedonian” was a recognized status and some Macedonians were citizens of poleis, Macedon as a state certainly had no pretentions to being a citizen-centered order. Any movement in the direction of more open access was carefully controlled. The authority of a king of Macedon was not based on a formal constitutional system but on the king’s personal capacity to mobilize an army and to command the loyalty of other powerful Macedonian families. Although there had been occasional strong Macedonian rulers—notably Archelaus I (417–399: Thucydides 2.100.2), most kings before Philip II had been relatively ineffective. The king’s authority was often undercut by bloody dynastic struggles. Plato (Gorgias 471a–d) offers a colorful account of how Archelaus I murdered his way to the throne. Royal authority was further undercut by the independence of the barons of Upper Macedonia and by strategic meddling by major poleis of central Greece.
In the earlier decades of the fourth century, both Athens and Thebes maneuvered to place their own chosen pretenders on the Macedonian throne. The resources of Macedonia, especially its abundant stands of timber, were highly valuable, and those resources were more accessible when Macedonian central authority was weak enough to be readily manipulated. The Macedonian state was, moreover, periodically threatened by Persia to the east, and by Illyrian, Triballian, and Paeonian tribes to the west and north. In the early fourth century, there were new threats to Macedon’s standing: the emergence to the south of the Chalkidike confederation, led by the great polis of Olynthos (i588: size 5); the consolidation of independent kingdoms in Thrace and Scythia; and the growing ambitions of the Thessalian dynasts, Jason and Alexander.8
PHILIP AND THE RISE OF MACEDON (359–346 BCE)
In 359 BCE, King Perdiccas III was killed on the western Macedonian frontier in a battle against Illyrian tribes. His brother, Philip II, took over as king. The new king faced challenges on multiple fronts. He bought time: first by paying off the Illyrians and Paeonians (presumably using reserves from timber sales and harbor dues, see the section in this chapter on “explaining Philip’s success”), and then by diplomatically false-footing Athens with vague assurances about his support for their claim to Amphipolis. Meanwhile, Philip took his first steps in the program of military reform that would, within a decade, fundamentally realign the power structure of the Greek world. before Philip, the Macedonian king had only limited military forces on which he could dependably rely: perhaps a small body of infantry and the “mounted companions”—an elite unit of light cavalry. Given the weaponry and tactics of the classical era, light cavalry was trumped by heavy infantry—especially when the infantrymen were well trained and backed up by light-armed slingers, archers, javelin throwers, and accompanied by their own light cavalry. Having been fostered to Thebes as a teenager, Philip knew all that. He recognized that without an army capable of taking on a sizable phalanx of Greek hoplites, Macedon would always be forced to serve the interests of better-organized states.9
Building a bigger, better trained, and more loyal army was the essential prerequisite to Philip’s ambitious plans for Macedon. The key to expanding the army was, first, more secure frontiers, and then successful imperial expansion into territories with fertile agricultural land. Spear-won land could be distributed to Macedonian families from the hardscrabble uplands in the form of grants of real estate contingent on the provision of young men for military service. Since conquered land belonged to the king, implementing this strategy made Philip the patron of a growing body of clients, thus bypassing the feudal relations that had bound ordinary Macedonians to local chiefs. When the barons realized that they could be end-run and thus made socially redundant, they chose to join the king’s coalition as their best remaining option.
The dynamic of growing royal power, driven by the imperative to recruit and train more armed men, and to distribute more land to them, meant that a logic of continuous territorial expansion underlay Philip’s reign. The king’s capacity to keep most of the barons in his coalition, working with him rather than plotting against him, depended on continuously growing the army, which in turn depended on building a Greater Macedonia. And build he did.10
Within a year of coming to power, Philip had recruited and trained an infantry force of 10,000 men. He used this force, in close coordination with several hundred cavalry, to win a major battle against the Illyrian tribes. That victory stabilized Macedonia’s western frontier and thereby helped Philip to lay the groundwork for at least somewhat greater royal control over Upper Macedonia. That in turn gave Philip access to a substantially increased population, from which he could recruit more soldiers—assuming he could pay them. Paying recruits with land (or promises of land) meant expanding to the east and south, where there were fertile agricultural tracts that might be distributed to Macedonian families who provided the king with soldiers. Those fertile lands were, however, controlled or claimed by powerful poleis.
In 357, in a surprise move, Philip besieged Amphipolis, the big (size 5), strategically located former Athenian colony that dominated the Strymon River valley—the region that lay immediately to the east of Lower Macedonia. The Athenians, who had never given up their claims to a city that had been independent for two generations, were shocked and outraged. But, as Philip must have known, they were tied up with their Social War against their former allies (who were being backed by Mausolus of Caria) in the north Aegean and unable to respond effectively to Philip’s gambit. Amphipolis fell; Philip took the Strymon valley and over the next three years systematically extended Greater Macedonia south and further east.
To the south, on the eastern and western shores of the Thermaic Gulf, Philip took, among other places, the cities of Pydna (i544: size 3), Potidaia (i598: size 2), and Methone (i454: size 1). In the east, on the south Thracian coast, he seized Apollonia (i627), Abdera (i640: size 5), and Maroneia (i646: size 5). In addition to his military victories, Philip also made strategic alliances, often cemented with dynastic marriages: In Illyria (wife Audata), in Epirus (wife Olympias), in Thessaly (wives Nikesipolis and Philinna), with the Chalkidikean League, and with certain of the Thracian kings (wife Meda). As we have seen (ch. 9), in the later 350s Philip campaigned against the Delphi-robbing Phocians in support of his allies in Thessaly. Philip beat the Phocians at the Battle of the Crocus Field in 352 but was turned back at the pass of Thermopylae by the Athenians when he sought to move south in order to consolidate his victory. This was, as events soon showed, only a temporary setback.11
In 356, Philip had made one of the most fiscally significant territorial acquisitions of his reign. The town of Krenides (i632), located 45 km east of Amphipolis and 15 km inland from the Thracian coast, between Mt. Pangaion to the west and a southern spur of the Rhodopian range, was the primary processing center of a productive gold- and silver-mining region. Control of the mines had been hotly contested since the sixth century by Athens, Thasos, and various Thracian dynasts. Philip refounded the town a few kilometers to the east and renamed it Philippi (i637: size 2)—among the first known instances in the extended Greek world of a founder naming a city for himself. According to Diodorus (16.6.6–7) Philip’s control of the Pangaion mining region substantially enriched the Macedonian king, increasing his revenues by more than 1,000 talents per annum—a sum equivalent to Athens’ annual revenues in the high imperial era preceding the Peloponnesian War.
The main part of the new mineral resource revenue stream may not have come on line immediately, but in the mid-340s Philip was minting silver tetradrachms on a large scale. Instead of the Athenian weight standard (tetradrachm weight 17.15 g), Philip used the weight standard that had previously been employed by the Chalkidikean League and Amphipolis (tetradrachm weight 14.5 g). Philip’s silver coinage circulated within Greater Macedonia and northward into inland Europe. But Alexander, Philip’s successor, switched to the Athenian
weight standard, and within a generation, Macedonian coinage had overtaken Athenian coinage as the dominant form of exchange in the eastern Mediterranean world. Philip added to his repertoire by minting gold staters (weight 9.5 g). Greeks associated gold coins with the mints of the Great King, a fact that is unlikely to have been lost on Philip. Philip’s gold coinage was both voluminous and popular; it soon became the dominant gold coinage in the Aegean. Philip and Alexander were, in effect, at once emulating and competing with the minting practices of the Athenians and the Great King alike.12
Philip’s coins, both silver and gold, were produced to high standards; they were reliable in weight and precious metal content. They were also superb examples of the engraver’s art and must have made a splash when they first appeared in northern Aegean markets. Philip’s coins portray a god (Zeus or Apollo) on the obverse, and a mounted rider (generally believed to be Philip himself) on the reverse. They resemble the finest Greek coins in fabric, iconography, and craftsmanship. Yet unlike any of the coins issued by the city-states, even those minted under the auspices of the grandiose tyrants of Syracuse, Philip’s coins advertised the ruler’s own name: each was stamped Philippou—belonging to (i.e., minted by) Philip. Greek coins were typically stamped with an abbreviated form of the name of the minting state (e.g., ΑΘΕ: Athe[nians]). By the age of Philip, if not before, the Macedonian state was the king. Philip’s style of silver and gold royal coinage set the standard for the gigantic coinages of Alexander and later Hellenistic kings. In his coinage, as in other ways, Philip both built upon classical Greek practice and introduced innovations pointing toward the postclassical era of Greek history.
By 352, just eight years after Philip’s accession to the kingship, Macedon had moved out of the shadows and had joined the ranks of the greatest powers of the extended Greek world. Over the next six years, Philip consolidated and extended his position. After the collapse of his alliance of convenience with the cities of Chalkidike, he besieged and, in 348, captured Olynthos, giving him effective control of the entire peninsula. The surviving population of Olynthos was enslaved or expelled; the city itself was looted and sacked. Because the site was never substantially reoccupied, excavations at the ancient site of Olynthos have provided archaeologists an extraordinarily comprehensive example of fourth century Greek domestic architecture and assemblages. Prominent among the small finds are Macedonian arrowheads and sling bullets engraved with Philip’s name.13
Having failed to relieve either Amphipolis in 357 or Olynthos in 348, the Athenians now faced up to the new reality of Macedonian power, signing a treaty with Philip in 346 that is traditionally called the “Peace of Philocrates,” after one of the Athenian ambassadors. In the course of the protracted negotiations, the cities of Phocis surrendered to Philip. Although allied with Athens, they had been excluded from the truce at Philip’s insistence. The population of the cities of Phocis, like that of Mantinea earlier in the century (ch. 9), was dispersed to villages—thus angering the Thebans who had thought Phocis would be theirs to plunder.
Macedon was, by the mid-340s, the most powerful state in the Greek world—comparable to Athens in the 430s or Sparta in the 380s. Eight years later, at Chaeronea, when the Macedonian army proved superior to the united forces of Athens and Thebes, it would be clear that Macedon had exceeded all earlier city-state-based hegemonies. But in the immediate aftermath of the truce of 346 and the humbling of the Phocians, Philip focused on expanding his empire west, north, and east and on diplomacy aimed at preventing (or at least delaying) the formation of a potentially dangerous Athens–Thebes alliance.14
TO CHAERONEA (346–336 BCE)
In the eight years between the Peace of Philocrates and the battle of Chaeronea, Philip was busy consolidating the Macedonian Empire and extending it on several fronts. After suppressing restive poleis in Thessaly, he reorganized that large region under Macedonian-appointed governors. He campaigned in the north against the Illyrians and Paeonians. In the southwest, he extended his influence south of Epirus. In the east, he deposed Thracian and Scythian kings and incorporated much of inland Thrace into his empire. By early 338, as king of Greater Macedonia and archon of Thessaly, Philip ruled perhaps 1.25 to 2 million subjects.15
Meanwhile, Macedonian relations with Athens had worsened after the signing of the Peace of Philocrates. Some Athenian leaders, notably the orator Demosthenes, were never reconciled to Philip’s incorporation of Amphipolis into Greater Macedonia or with treating Macedon as Athens’ peer polity. Rightly or wrongly, Demosthenes and other Athenian hawks interpreted Philip’s ongoing campaigns in Thrace and his conquest of the small north Aegean island of Halonessos—a notorious pirate lair that lay about 30 km south of the Athenian-controlled island of Lemnos—as deliberate provocations. Philip offered to give Halonessos to Athens and proposed an expedition against Aegean pirates, to be carried out by the Athenian navy and financed by Macedon. Ambassadors went back and forth, but negotiations bogged down over, among other things, the question of whether Philip would be “giving” or “giving back” (as the Athenians insisted) Halonessos.
Philip sought to build alliances with leading central and southern Greek states—activity that Demosthenes interpreted in the worst possible light. In fact, Philip’s diplomatic successes in Greece south and east of Phocis were limited: For a short time in the late 340s, it appeared that Philip would bring the poleis of Euboea, the big island off Athens’ east coast, into his sphere. But Athenian diplomacy and military intervention turned the situation around, with the result that an independent Euboean League was formed that was friendly toward, if not formally allied with, Athens. Philip found some friends among the Peloponnesians, but there was no Peloponnesian state on which he could rely for military aid.
Exactly what Philip was aiming at in his “Greek policy” during this period has been much debated. It has been argued that he was already focused on the invasion of the Anatolian provinces of the Persian Empire, which offered the prospect of rich booty and fertile lands. Under this interpretation, his goal in central and southern Greece was stable peace rather than conquest, given that the cost of the conquest of Greece was likely to be higher than any possible payoff and that the payoff for invading Asia was likely to be high. This interpretation suggests that Philip’s negotiations with Athens were sincere and that the breakdown of the treaty was primarily due to warmongering Athenian leaders.
The alternative view is that Philip could not afford to contemplate an expedition into Asia until he had definitively eliminated the endemic and serious danger to Macedonian security represented by the independent states of central Greece, especially Athens and Thebes. The Peace of Philocrates had been a delicate balancing act that, from Philip’s perspective, avoided the unhappy prospect of Athens and Thebes uniting against Macedon. But that danger would remain until both great poleis had been defeated in battle. according to this latter interpretation, Philip was biding his time with insincere negotiations, waiting for the opportunity to crush his Greek rivals militarily. On the whole, this second interpretation makes more sense. Assuming that Philip did plan to invade Persia, and that such an invasion would take the Macedonian army a long way from Macedon and Greece, it is hard to see how the undefeated Greek states could have credibly committed not to exploit the situation.16
In the event, Philip’s imperial expansion eastward across Thrace and toward the Hellespont, along with Athenian determination to retain a strong presence in exactly this region, precipitated the final collapse of the Peace of Philocrates. By 341, Athenian generals stationed in the Thracian Chersonese on the west shore of the Hellespont were raiding Macedonian shipping and fighting what amounted to a proxy war against Thracian poleis allied with Philip. In 340 BCE, continuing his drive to the east, Philip threw an army of 30,000 into a siege of Perinthus (i678: size 5) on the south shore of Propontic Thrace. When Perinthus held out, he split his forces and extended his siege operations to nearby Byzantion (i674: size 5), thereby threatening to take contro
l of the Bosphorus straits. If Philip took Byzantion, he would control the entrance to the Black Sea and could deny Athens access to its primary source of imported grain.
Athens now dispatched a fleet to reinforce Byzantion. The Great King independently sent aid to the two besieged cities, as did Chios, Rhodes, and Cos—the Aegean island states that had been Athens’ primary foes in the recent Social War. In the face of massive fortification walls, determined resistance, and substantial external support, both of Philip’s sieges failed. But in autumn of the year, his navy, still too small to engage the Athenian fleet in battle, managed to capture a big convoy of mostly Athenian grain ships. The transport ships were mustering at the Bosphorus, awaiting an Athenian military escort to take them, down the Propontis, through the Hellespont, into the Aegean, and onward to Piraeus. Philip appropriated the timber and grain from 180 Athenian ships. He let free the other 50 ships, bound for non-Athenian ports.
Athens and Macedon were by this point unquestionably at war.
The question now was which central and southern Greek states would join Athens against Philip—or vice versa. For his part, Philip found no new allies. Demosthenes led the Athenian diplomatic effort. Most Greek states chose to stay on the fence. The anti-Philip alliance included the Achaean League, Corinth, Megara, the Ionian Sea island states of Corcyra and Leukas (i126), and some of the poleis of Euboea and Acarnania (Demosthenes 18.237). But by far the most important addition to the Athenian alliance was Thebes. Philip had reportedly offered the Thebans the right to plunder Athens if they joined him. Demosthenes claimed that the Theban alliance was his own doing, the product of his persuasive skills. No doubt the initiative was his. But Thebes had a long and troubled history with Macedon. The Theban leadership must have realized that if Philip defeated Athens, Thebes would be left without significant allies. Philip would have little incentive to fulfill his promises and ample incentive to take down the last of the great independent states of mainland Greece.
