The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Perdikkas, who was no fool, waited until he had reached the age of accession and then, with the support of the Macedonian noblemen who disliked Ptolemy, had his mother’s lover dragged off and executed. (What happened to Eurydice is not recorded.) He then took the throne himself and did what he could to restore the royal family: he negotiated Philip’s release from Thebes, married, and fathered a baby son. He then turned to face the Illyrians, who were once more threatening invasion.

  In the sixth year of his reign, he made his younger brother Philip regent for his son and led the Macedonian army into war against the Illyrians. The battle was a disaster. Perdikkas was killed, along with four thousand Macedonian soldiers.22 Philip, at twenty-four, was left to defend the kingdom against this northwestern threat.

  He took command of the army as regent for the baby, but (Justin says) “dangerous wars threatened, and it was too long to wait for the cooperation of a prince who was yet so young, [so] he was forced by the people to take the government himself.”23 This may be accurate, or it may shield a more ominous appropriation of power. In any case, Philip’s leadership was much needed. The Illyrians were not the only threat on the horizon; the Athenians were now making an attempt to put a candidate of their own on the Macedonian throne so that they could add Macedonia to the territory ruled by Athens.

  Philip, unable to take on both Illyria and Athens, put off the Athenian threat by surrendering a border city to Athenian control. He then reorganized the Macedonian army by teaching the wild semi-savage Macedonian soldiers how to fight in a Greek phalanx, something he had learned during his years in Thebes.24 The following year, the Macedonian army triumphed against the Illyrians.

  By this point, the Macedonians were clearly too strong for Athenian invasion. Rather than fighting defensive wars, Philip was able to begin empire-building on his own account. He fought, and married (five different times), his way into alliance or dominance with the territories along the Thermaic Gulf, the border between Macedonia and Thrace, and the north and northwest borders of Macedonia. His third wife, the seventeen-year-old Olympias, was the daughter of the king of Epirus. Olympias, according to ancient accounts, was startlingly beautiful, but prone to frightening storms of temper and eccentric in her habits; she kept large snakes as pets and allowed them to crawl all over her bedchamber. Her father thought that he was protecting Epirus with the match; when he died, Philip simply annexed it.

  In 356, Olympias gave birth to Philip’s first son and heir. The baby was named Alexander, after Philip’s dead brother.

  68.1. Philip of Macedonia. This marble head of Philip II shows his drooping eye, the result of an arrow wound. Photo credit Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS

  Now Philip began to look south. When the ruler of the Greek city of Pherae was assassinated, Philip went down, restored order, and then kept control of the city. He campaigned into Thrace and seized the gold and silver mines around Mount Pangaeus, which would allow him to finance more campaigns. He took back the city he had yielded to Athens at his accession, and fought his way still farther south and east. During one of these campaigns an arrow went through his right eye; the missing eye can be seen in his statues.

  There was, to all this, no organized Greek response. Sparta was too far south to be troubled, and Athens, which protested, was suffering from severe famine and could not mount another war. Philip went right on swallowing bits of Greece. His push southwards was not so much against a Greece that he wanted to conquer, as a Greece that he wanted to absorb.

  His infantry, his cavalry, his very court were salted with Greeks.

  It was a Greek horse—a stallion from Thessaly named Bucephalas—that brought his son Alexander’s precocious intelligence into public view. Plutarch says that Philip had paid a tremendous amount of money for this horse but found it to be completely unmanageable. He ordered it sent back, but Alexander protested; Philip told him to back up the protest by showing that he could ride the horse himself: “Alexander ran over to the horse,” Plutarch writes, “took hold of the reins and turned him to face the sun—apparently because he had noticed that the horse was made jittery by the sight of his shadow stretching out and jerking about in front of him.”25 This allowed him to mount the horse, an incident which became famous throughout Macedonia (and, later, Greece). Even so early, Alexander was a strategist.

  He continued to be Philip’s only legitimate son. One of Philip’s mistresses had given birth to a son a little younger than Alexander, also named Philip; but the unfortunate child was feebleminded. (Plutarch says that Olympias was responsible for this, having given the child a drug to damage his mind; but there is no other proof to support this.)

  The Macedonian court was hazardous enough to suggest that Philip would have done well to produce a backup heir, but apparently he had started to avoid Olympias at all costs (local rumor said that the snakes in her bed had something to do with this: “A snake was once seen stretched out alongside Olympias’s body while she was asleep,” Plutarch writes, “and they say that it was this incident more than anything that cooled Philip’s passion and affection”).26 He was pinning his hopes for an heir on Alexander. In 343, he invited the Greek philosopher Aristotle to come north into Macedonia to act as Alexander’s tutor, a well-paid post which Aristotle accepted.

  By 340, Philip was strong enough to declare war on Athens.

  His invasion of Greece was made easier by the fact that more than one Greek city felt ambivalent about fighting back. The Greek philosopher Isocrates, now ninety, had given up on his hopes for willing Greek cooperation; he had followed up his Panegyricus with a speech called To Philip, asking the Macedonian king to take the lead. “You have obtained wealth and power such as no other Greek has,” he announced, “and these alone are naturally suited both for persuading and for compelling. What I am about to suggest will require, I believe, both of these, for I am about to advise you to stand at the head of a Greek alliance and lead a Greek campaign against the barbarians.”27

  The association of Greek cities that looked after the shrine of Delphi followed Isocrates’s advice, and invited Philip into Greece. Athens asked Sparta for help against the invasion, but Sparta declined to have anything to do with its old enemy. So when Philip’s army finally marched down from the north, Athens had managed to round up only a few allied troops, mainly from Thebes and from the cities in Boeotia.

  The armies met, in the hot summer of 338, on the plain of Chaeronea. The most complete account of the battle that remains is preserved in Diodorus Siculus’s history:

  Both armies were now ready to engage; they were equal indeed in courage and personal valor, but in numbers and military experience a great advantage lay with [Philip]. For he had fought many battles, gained most of them, and so learned much about war, but the best Athenian generals were now dead…. About sunrise the two armies arrayed themselves for battle. The king ordered his son Alexander, who had just become of age…to lead one wing, though joined to him were some of the best of his generals. Philip himself, with a picked corps, led the other wing, and arranged the various brigades at such posts as the occasion demanded. The Athenians drew up their army…. At length the hosts engaged, and the battle was fierce and bloody. It continued long with fearful slaughter, but victory was uncertain, until Alexander, anxious to give his father proof of his valor—and followed by a courageous band—was the first to break through the main body of the enemy, directly opposing him, slaying many; and bore down all before him. His men, pressing on closely, cut to pieces the lines of the enemy; and after the ground had been piled with the dead, put the wing resisting him in flight.28

  The Battle of Chaeronea, with relatively few casualties (a thousand Athenians dead, a large number for a single battle but minor compared to the toll of the war years), was remarkable for two things: this was Alexander’s first try at major military command, and it marked the end of an era. The Greek city-states would never again be free from the bonds of empire.

  Philip, who undoubtedly realized that he c
ould not fight his way into the allegiance of the rest of the Greek cities, now switched ground. He treated Athens with great respect, releasing his prisoners and even putting together an honor guard to accompany the Athenian dead back to the city.29 The Athenians, making the best of a bad situation, chose to pretend that Philip was now the friend of Athens.

  The following year, Philip made a speech at Corinth, suggesting that Greek submission to his kingship would be good for Greece.30 Sparta still refused to have anything to do with Philip’s plans. But the rest of the Greek cities agreed (with Philip’s army standing nearby, naturally) to join together in yet another Greek league. This was called the Corinthian League, and like the old Delian League of Athens, it was formed with the intent of attacking the Persians. Unlike the Delian League, it had the king of Macedonia as its supreme commander.

  Persia was vulnerable, right in the middle of yet another chaotic change of command. Artaxerxes III had been on the throne for nineteen years; the greatest achievement of his reign was the retaking of Egypt, which he had done in 343 (six years earlier) by defeating the last native pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II. Now Egypt was again under the control of a Persian satrap, and was ruled by the Persian king (Manetho calls this Dynasty Thirty-One).

  And then, in the same year as the Battle of Chaeronea, Artaxerxes died. Details were sketchy, but although the king had been sick for a little while before his death, it seems almost certain that he did not die from illness but from poison, given to him under the pretext of medication by a eunuch named Bagoas. Bagoas had been one of Artaxerxes III’s commanders in the victory over Egypt, and had grown pleased with his power.

  With Artaxerxes III dead, Bagoas began running the kingdom himself as vizier. Two of the young princes also died, unexpectedly, from stomach troubles (Bagoas had been busy with his cups). Only one prince survived, a young man named Arses. Likely Bagoas planned to make him the puppet-king; when Arses showed signs of independence, Bagoas poisoned him too.

  PHILIP was plotting his attack on the eunuch-led empire when catastrophe overtook him.

  The catastrophe was mostly of his own making. Right after the Corinthian League meeting of 337, Philip decided to get married again. This had absolutely no political advantage for him, and was apparently impelled by lust; the girl was a native Macedonian, the beautiful niece of a courtier named Attalus. At the wedding feast, all of the Macedonians got staggering drunk (a tradition at Macedonian festivities) and Attalus proposed a toast: he waved his cup in the air and announced that the gods could now send Macedonia a legitimate heir to the throne.

  Alexander was, of course, technically legitimate, but since his mother Olympias was Greek, he was only half Macedonian. Attalus’s toast was a direct challenge to his position as crown prince, a suggestion that Macedonia’s throne should only belong to full-blooded Macedonians (and a clear indication that Philip’s love for all things Greek was not shared by all Macedonians).

  Alexander, who was also drunk, threw a cup at Attalus and called him scum. Philip, probably the drunkest of all, drew his sword to attack Alexander and then fell flat on his face. “Gentlemen,” Alexander said, standing over his father in scorn, “there lies the man who was getting ready to cross over from Europe to Asia, but who trips up on his way over to one couch from another!”31

  Worse was about to come, and Attalus too was in this up to his neck. According to Diodorus, Philip had picked as his lover, some time before, a beautiful young man who was also a friend of Attalus. (Macedonians, like Greeks, tended to pay more attention to the mechanics of the sex act than to the gender of the partner involved; whether you were the penetrated or the penetrator was important, but who was on the other end was less relevant.) This beautiful young man unfortunately displaced Philip’s previous lover, a member of his bodyguard named Pausanias. Pausanias, lovesick, insulted his replacement in public by calling him a “hermaphrodite,” no true man. Shamed, the young man threw himself in front of Philip during a battle, intending to be killed, and died on an enemy sword.

  Attalus, in revenge for his friend’s suicide, invited Pausanias to dinner, got him thoroughly drunk, and then handed him over to be gang-raped by a group of cooperative friends, a punishment which fit the crime; to be penetrated was submissive, femalelike, the very qualities that Pausanias had used to slander his rival. Pausanias, when he sobered up, went to Philip in furious humiliation and complained, but Philip declined to punish Attalus, who was a trusted and valuable general. Instead he tried to pacify Pausanias by promoting him and giving him presents.

  But he refused to love him again, and Pausanias nursed his rejection and humiliation until 336. Philip had organized a huge festival to celebrate the beginning of his attack on Persia; it was to begin with an opening parade, led by Philip, into a theater filled with cheering Macedonians. As Philip stepped over the threshold of the theater, Pausanias came up from behind him and put a knife into his ribs.

  Pausanias ran for his horse. He tripped and fell, and was immediately stabbed multiple times by the rest of the bodyguard.32 But Philip was already dead.

  There were plenty of people who suspected that Alexander, who despised his father, had somehow been involved: “Alexander did not come out of the affair spotless,” Plutarch says, although he gives no damning details.33 But with Pausanias murdered and no proof of any treason, no one dared make any accusation. In any case Alexander was popular with the army, which acclaimed him as king the very next day.

  He inherited, Plutarch says, a kingdom “surrounded on all sides by bitter resentment, deep hatred, and danger.” The conquered territories to the north were unhappy under Macedonian rule; the Greeks, to the south, were not so fully resigned to their Corinthian League membership that Alexander could afford to rely on them; and the Persians were waiting for the Macedonians to attack.

  But Alexander had one piece of business to take care of. Attalus had been sent on ahead into Asia Minor, to prepare the route that the Macedonian invasion force would follow into Persia. Alexander never forgot an insult; he sent an assassin after Attalus, and had him murdered.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Rome Tightens Its Grasp

  Between 367 and 290 BC,

  Carthage fights Syracuse,

  and Rome fights everyone within marching distance

  WHILE THE GREEKS had been making useless stabs at unity—the Peloponnesian League, the Hellenic League, the Delian League, and the travesty of the Corinthian League—the cities in the old territory of Latium were also coalescing into an alliance: the “Latin League.” The Romans called this league the Nomen Latium, and while they had been reasonably friendly with the Latin League cities for over a century (the first peace treaty between Rome and the League was probably signed around 490 BC), Rome never joined. The city was not inclined to become one among equals.

  In the thirty-odd years since the Gauls had burned Rome, the Romans had rebuilt their walls, fought off various attacks from their neighbors, sent troops east to the Anio river to battle with more Gauls (the Roman soldiers approached the campaign in “great terror,” Livy says, but “many thousands of barbarians were killed in battle,”)1 and suffered through yet another patrician-plebian standoff. This one ended in 367 with a patrician concession: the consulship would be formally opened to plebians, and the first plebian consul was installed that same year.

  The Senate announced that this compromise needed to be celebrated with an extra festival day, and Livy himself calls it a “noteworthy” year, in which, “after their long dispute, the two orders were reconciled and in agreement at last.”2 “In agreement” is a bit strong, since patricians and plebians continued to aggravate each other, but the new arrangement does seem to have acted as grease in the squeaky relationship between the two classes. In the next decades there was enough peace within Rome’s walls for the city to turn renewed attention to empire-building.

  In 358, Rome convinced the Latin League to renew the old peace treaty.192 As before, the two sides were obliged to de
fend each other in attack. But from now on, all booty from joint campaigns would be divided equally between the two sides; Rome would get as much out of any victory as all the cities of the League combined.3 Rome was no longer simply another city on the peninsula; it was a power as great as the League itself.

  In 348, the Romans updated another treaty, this one with Carthage. Roman ships still weren’t supposed to sail farther west than Fair Promontory, and the Carthaginians still promised not to build any forts in the territory of the Latins. But a new condition turned the peace treaty into something slightly different: “If the Carthaginians capture any city in Latium which is not subject to Rome,” the treaty specified, “they shall keep the goods and the men, but deliver up the city.”4 The Carthaginians were now partners in conquest; Rome was laying plans to control the countryside, even as its leaders swore friendship with the Latin League.

  In the next fifty years, Rome’s aggression would lead it into four wars and a revolt, and a fifth war would swirl just off its shores.

  JUST ACROSS the Liri river lay an alliance of tribes known, collectively, as the Samnites. They came from the southern Apennines, and lived in a mesh of farms and villages below Rome and east of the coastal area of Campania.5 Farms aside, they were known as an alarming set of fighters, “strong both in resources and in arms,” as Livy puts it.6

  Despite an earlier agreement that the Liri would serve as a boundary between them, Rome went to war against the Samnites in 343. Roman accounts put the best possible light on this; the Romans, Livy says, were simply responding to a desperate appeal for help, because the Samnites had “unjustly attacked” the people who lived in the region of Campania, on the southwestern coast. But the city’s ambitions come out in Livy’s version of events: “‘We have reached the point…when Campania will have to be absorbed by her friends or by her enemies,” his Campanian ambassadors plead. “You, Romans, must occupy it yourselves rather than let [the Samnites] take it, a good deed on your part, an evil one of theirs…. Romans, the shadow of your help is enough to protect us, and whatever we have…we shall consider all yours.”7