by Ober, Josiah
Athens’ diplomatic efforts had resulted in an alliance of states with a total estimated population of something under 1 million people.17 As we have seen, Philip now probably controlled a population of 1.25–2 million. At least as important as total population, however, was the strategy dictated by the alliance. Athens’ success in creating a multistate alliance that included Thebes meant that the showdown with Philip would take the form of a land battle—rather than a war of attrition in which protracted sieges and naval maneuvers might play a major role in the outcome: Unlike Athens, Thebes’ strength lay in its heavy infantry rather than in its fortification walls or navy; the defense line must now be drawn in northwestern Boeotia, in advance of the city of Thebes. Demosthenes’ approach to alliance building either forced or enabled Philip to risk a major land battle against a substantial coalition—a battle that Philip might have lost but was probably quite confident that he could win.18
The Athens–Thebes axis meant that Philip was denied the option of continuing to pursue the incremental strategy of capacity building and imperial expansion that he had employed successfully since the early 350s. But on the other hand, a protracted war of attrition and maneuver might have made things more difficult for Philip: His last two major sieges had failed, and his navy was vastly inferior to that of Athens. Counterfactually, Athens might have chosen to employ against Philip a variant of Pericles’ strategy in the Peloponnesian War—that is, trusting to the walled city–Piraeus circuit to keep Philip at bay while seeking allies to help fund large-scale naval operations against his imperial assets in the north. Such a strategy would mean that, in the place of Thebes, Athens would have sought as its main allies the major poleis of the northern Aegean and the Great King—i.e., the states that had rallied against Philip during the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantion. It is impossible to predict what would have happened had that strategy been pursued; the point is that the breakdown of the Peace of Philocrates by 340 did not necessarily mean that the fate of the independent poleis of Greece would be decided by a set-piece land battle.
In the event, the showdown came in August 338. After a barrage of charges and countercharges of impious state behavior (reminiscent, mutatis mutandis, of the religious charges leveled by both Athens and Sparta before the Peloponnesian War: Thucydides 1.126–128), Philip was summoned to march in arms into central Greece by the Amphyctions of Delphi—the sanctuary’s managing board that Philip had effectively controlled since becoming master of Thessaly. Once south of Thessaly, Philip diverted his forces from his ostensible target (Locrian Amphissa: i158, accused of having impiously built on sacred lands) and seized the strategic Phocian town of Elateia (i180). The way into the Boeotian plain now lay open.
The anti-Macedonian allies responded quickly, mustering in the narrows of the plain, near the small Boeotian town of Chaeronea (i201: size 2). The opposing forces were similar in size, and each was primarily composed of heavy infantry and cavalry: Philip fielded some 24,000 Macedonian infantry, 6,000 allied infantry, and 2,000 cavalry. On the Greek side there were 12,000 Thebans, 6,000 Athenians, and 12,000 allied infantry, along with 3,800 cavalry. Altogether, there were on the order of 65,000 combatants on the field, certainly more than any in any land battle ever contested between Greek city-states.19
The battle was hard fought but never in doubt. The Macedonians were better led, well trained, armed with novel weapons (the sarissa), and battle-hardened. Thousands of allied troops were captured or killed—the dead included 1,000 Athenians and the entire Theban Sacred Band of 300 picked men. The surviving allied soldiers (including Demosthenes, who fought as an ordinary hoplite) fled the field. In stark contrast to the confused aftermath of the battle of Mantinea in 362 (ch. 9), Philip’s victory was decisive. As the historian Justin (9.3.71) put it, “For the whole of Greece, this day marked the end of its glorious supremacy and its ancient independence.”20
LEAGUE OF CORINTH
Thebes was forced to accept a Macedonian garrison, a narrowly oligarchic pro-Macedonian government, and the reconstitution of the Boeotian League on genuinely federal (rather than Thebes-dominated) lines. Corinth also surrendered and was garrisoned. The Athenians, by contrast, prepared for a siege. But Philip had little to gain from a protracted siege of a huge and heavily fortified city: We may assume that the 30,000 infantry he had brought to Chaeronea was as large an army as he could safely muster while leaving Macedon and Thrace properly garrisoned. A Macedonian army of similar size had failed to take Perinthus. Besieging Athens would be a more daunting undertaking than Perinthus and Byzantion combined—and all the more so if the Great King saw it in his own interest to support the besieged city, as he had two years before. It is hardly surprising, then, that Philip offered to negotiate a truce with Athens on reasonable terms: There would be no garrison or new government. Athens would cede control of the cleruchies on the Thracian Chersonese but would retain the strategic and productive islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, along with Delos and the cleruchy on Samos. Athens accepted the terms.21
That winter (338–337 BCE), all major Greek mainland states, other than the now-irrelevant Spartans, sent representatives to meet with Philip at the headquarters he had established at Corinth. Here the Greeks agreed to a common peace, reminiscent of the King’s Peace of 387 (ch. 9). They also joined a Macedonian-led Hellenic federation known to history as the League of Corinth. Philip’s new arrangements borrowed freely from earlier and contemporary Greek practices, conjoining mechanisms familiar from Sparta’s fifth century Peloponnesian League, from the fourth century Athenian naval league, and from the central Greek federal leagues that had emerged in the late fifth and fourth centuries.
The peace and federation agreement signed by the member states specified that no state would act so as to harm the interests of Philip, or his descendants, or any of the other league states. Moreover, interstate constitutional meddling was strictly forbidden: Each state was to continue indefinitely with the constitutional arrangements it currently enjoyed—whether oligarchy or democracy. As had been the case in Sparta’s consistent support of Peloponnesian oligarchies in the fifth century, this entrenchment of existing regimes gave the ruling coalition in every member state a strong reason to prefer the Macedonian-guaranteed status quo. The league was to be headed by a leader (hegemon), but like the Athenian fourth century naval league, its council (sunedrion), made up of representatives from each of the constituent states, excluded the hegemon. Like contemporary federal leagues, the decrees of the league’s council regarding war, peace, and interstate relations were binding on its member states, but each state retained its autonomy in local affairs. As in these other successful federalized systems, the member states of the League of Corinth agreed, jointly, to punish defectors. Those who failed in the duty of punishment could expect to be treated in their turn as defectors by the other member states and, when necessary, by the hegemon.22
In its first formal meeting, in spring of 337, to no one’s surprise, the Council of the League of Corinth elected Philip as its hegemon, and he announced his plan for invading the Persian Empire. The ideological justification offered for the proposed attack was, first, borrowing from the Athenian playbook of the early fifth century, vengeance for Persian sacrilege and destruction during the Persian Wars. Next, borrowing from the Spartan playbook of the later Peloponnesian War, Philip proposed to liberate the poleis of western Anatolia from Persian domination.
There can have been little doubt in anyone’s mind that the actual purpose of the invasion was booty and land for Macedonians: The imperative to continuous imperial expansion, the dynamic Philip had set in train in the early 350s, had not changed. But expansion had been stalled during the last few years, while Philip had been settling affairs in Greece—whatever Philip’s true motives after 346, it was true that the cost of pacifying Greece exceeded any immediate material gains. Macedon needed to resume the full-throated imperialism that had been interrupted, at considerable expense to the king’s treasury, by the relatively m
uted (and not lucrative) imperialism represented by the League of Corinth.23
In spring of 336, Philip, who now controlled the Thracian Chersonese, established an Asian base of operations by moving 10,000 men across the Hellespont to Abydos (i765) in northwestern Anatolia. Several Anatolian poleis, including Ephesus (i844), some 260 km (straight line) to the south, broke with the Great King and declared for Philip. But the Great King had hired his own highly competent Greek military expert, Memnon of Rhodes, who defeated Philip’s lieutenants in several engagements.
Then, in July of 336, Philip himself was assassinated by a member of his bodyguard while officiating at his daughter’s wedding in the theater at Aegeai. The Athenians cheerfully passed a resolution honoring the assassin but otherwise stood pat: Having grasped the fact that their best hope for striking a favorable bargain was an impregnable city, they had spent the two years following Chaeronea modernizing their fortifications and building warships. The Thebans were bolder, expelling the Macedonian garrison and deposing the pro-Macedonian government.
Philip’s heir was up to the challenge. Upon being acclaimed as king of Macedon, Alexander moved quickly south to Corinth, where the council of the league duly declared him hegemon. In 335, after a lightning campaign in the northern empire against restive Illyrian tribes, he returned to central Greece, where he successfully besieged and then eliminated Thebes. The resident population of the polis was killed or enslaved. As with the destruction of Eretria and Miletus by the Great King in the early fifth century (ch. 7), Alexander demonstrated that he had no qualms about destroying one of the greatest of the Greek poleis if and when he was defied.
The next year, at the head of a large army that included substantial contingents from the states of the League of Corinth, Alexander crossed the Hellespont into Asia, declaring the continent to be his spear-won domain. Within three years, and after as many battles, the Persian Empire had fallen and the Greek world was about to be transformed. The classical era was ending; the Hellenistic about to begin.24
EXPLAINING PHILIP’S SUCCESS
How are we to explain the political fall of Greece? Appeal to Hellenic decline, in the form either of the putative weakness of individual Greek states or of divisions among them, does not get us far. It is certainly true that individually each of the greatest of the eastern Greek states—Sparta, Athens, and Thebes—was in 338 less militarily powerful than it had been at its historical peak: Sparta after Leuctra was a shadow of its sixth–fifth century self. Thebes had suffered in the wars of the 360s and 350s but still commanded a very large army as the dominant state of the Boeotian League. Athens, with a citizen population of about 30,000, was less populous than it had been a hundred years earlier, and state income was probably still well below that of the imperial peak. But Athens’ finances had recovered substantially from the Social War era low, and there were as many triremes in the shipsheds as there had been in the mid-fifth century. Overall, as we have seen (ch. 4), the population of mainland Greece appears to have reached all-time highs, and Hellas was remarkably wealthy by historical standards.
It is also true that Greece was far from united in 338: As we have seen, the states in the anti-Philip alliance had a total population of under a million; something on the order of 1.5 million Greeks in central and southern mainland Greece and the islands stood aloof.25 But division among the Greek states was nothing new. As we have seen in previous chapters, Greece had always been divided, insofar as there was never a “Leviathan” central authority capable of coercively coordinating the actions of “the Greeks” at scale and over time. Cooperative action among coalitions of Greek states was always predicated on shared interests, not obedience. After the Persian Wars, some 29 other Greek states had their names inscribed on the Serpent Column at Delphi as having joined Sparta and Athens in opposing the invasion. That coalition represented only a fraction of the total manpower of the mainland Greek world. In 338, the anti-Macedonian coalition put an army into the field that was equal in size to that of the invaders—something that the Greek allies had certainly not managed to do when faced with the Persian invasion. There is no reason to believe that the Greek soldiers in 338 fought any less well than their ancestors had done when facing the Persians at Thermopylae, Marathon, and Plataea. In brief, in seeking to explain the “political fall of Greece,” it is more informative to ask what Philip did right, rather than what his Greek opponents did wrong.
Philip took Macedon from relative weakness to greatness in a very short time. By defeating a coalition of leading Greek poleis, and then by bringing all of mainland Greece, along with Thrace, under a coherent hegemonic order, Philip succeeded where a sequence of empire-building city-states, with imperial populations roughly comparable to that of imperial Macedon before Chaeronea (table 2.3), had failed (chs. 8 and 9). Many details of how he accomplished all that remain murky, due to the fragmentary nature of our sources. But we can dispel much of the fog by making informed guesses based on the evidence we do have.
In many particulars Philip must be seen as a ruler of a continental (as opposed to coastal), resource-rich autocratic state (as opposed to a human capital rich, citizen-centered state). As such, he took an approach to empire-building that differed markedly from that taken by any Greek polis. Philip saw the possibilities offered by his world in different terms than did his southern neighbors. Unlike the polis-dwelling Greeks, Philip was not bound, culturally or otherwise, to a coastal littoral (ch. 2). He exploited inland natural resources (especially timber and, later, minerals), and he founded cities deep inland in Thrace—some 150–200 km inland from the coast—in order to promote overland trade.26
Once he had built a strong coalition that included the formerly independent barons of Upper Macedonia and an army of soldiers bound to him by patronage and grants of land, Philip possessed a degree of centralized control over state policy that no government of a citizen-centered state could hope to match. Philip’s authority, unlike a democratic or oligarchic polis government, was in principle indefinitely scalable, at least insofar as social cooperation was based on obedience and hierarchy (ch. 3). Unlike the natives of the Greek city-states, Macedonians were not used to thinking of themselves as citizens; the centralization of Philip’s authority does not seem to have been a problem for his Macedonian subjects. Philip certainly needed to attend to the concerns of the barons and soldiers in his extensive coalition. Like Alexander after him, Philip participated in the social-capital-building rituals of the Macedonian symposium and the military camp—joining in the dangers and pleasures of the men he led. He surrounded himself with talented individuals and depended on loyal lieutenants. But he did not need to clear his policy plans with a representative council, nor did he have to move legislation through a large assembly of independent and critical-minded citizens.
Philip’s position as Argead king gave him a degree of legitimacy as sole ruler that no Greek leader could aspire to. Since the king effectively was the Macedonian state, he was able to act more quickly and with less advance publicity than was conceivable in the world of the city-states. This was, as his polis-based opponents realized at the time, a substantial advantage in war and diplomacy. While he devoted a great deal of time and energy to military affairs, Philip was famous for his diplomatic acumen and was said to prefer a victory won by ruse to one gained by open combat. Moreover, the king was not bound by the rules that constrained the social behavior of ordinary mortals. Royal polygamy enabled him to cement political alliances through marriage alliances with other dynasts and to display his affinity for other regions. Unlike Greek leaders of citizen-centered states, or even Greek tyrants who ruled over men accustomed to citizenship, Philip could advantageously adopt some of the ideological apparatus of godlike kingship. While it is debatable how far he went in portraying himself as godlike, and exactly who were the intended audiences for his performances of divinity or near-divinity, there is no doubt that he went further in this direction than any Greek leader had ever dared.27
The
se various deviations from polis norms help to explain certain of Philip’s advantages in pursuing his imperial project—advantages that were denied to Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Syracuse. But these deviations do not adequately answer a second question: Why did Philip succeed in the conquest of central and southern Greece, when the Great Kings of Persia, who would seem to have similar advantages and vastly greater resources, had failed? This question is more pointed insofar as once-popular explanations, based on the discredited assumption that the fourth century Greek poleis were impoverished or somehow degenerate, must be rejected in light of the evidence for classical efflorescence.
In order to answer the question of why Philip succeeded where Darius and Xerxes had failed, we need to look at the other side of the comparative coin—that is, how Philip’s Macedon was like an advanced fourth century Greek polis. The core similarity lay in a capacity to identify and recruit specialized expertise that could be useful for state purposes. Given the thinness of our sources for Philip’s reign, this claim rests as much on inference as it does on evidence. But there seems good reason to infer that Philip employed Greek expertise and that it was important to his success. The Liverpool historian, John K. Davies, has shown that in the Hellenistic period Macedonian dynasts borrowed extensively from fourth century Athenian fiscal institutions, especially in the area of taxation. This is especially clear in Egypt, where the documentary record is exceptionally rich (thanks to a climate that preserves scraps of papyrus). I suggest that the Macedonian adaptation of useful Greek expertise began earlier. Philip, who anticipated the practices and methods of his royal Macedonian successors in so many areas, was also a leader in the essential domain of opportunistic emulation. As we will see, however, in this domain Philip was himself anticipated by Perdiccas III, his royal predecessor.28
