Alexander the Great Failure

by John D Grainger

  off Athens a decade or so earlier. 32

  The acquisition of Krenides had opened up a new set of problems. The city

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  was founded a few years earlier by the Thasians on the suggestion of Kallistratos, who had assisted Perdikkas over his fi nances. No doubt one reason for the city’s needing help had been its very newness. It was founded to provide access to the rich metal resources of Mount Pangaios nearby, hence its attraction for all its neighbours. Philip followed up his acquisition by reinforcing it with Macedonian settlers, fortifying it, and renaming it Philippi. He also gathered into it the people of several nearby villages and towns. His capture of Amphipolis – also partly

  colonized by Macedonians at this time – and the settlement of Philippi meant

  that the whole area became fi rmly Macedonian, loyal to him personally, and a

  producer of great wealth for his kingdom. 33

  Philippi was close to an Athenian ally, the port city of Neapolis, and between Neapolis and Amphipolis there were three small coastal cities, Apollonia, Galepsos and Oisyme. These were later either inhabited by Macedonians or desolate;34 it

  may well be that this was another result of Philip’s Krenides operation. Neapolis was worried, and two of its citizens visited Athens about the time Philip was

  operating there; their precise message is not known, but can hardly have been

  anything other than a warning of what Philip was doing, and an appeal for

  Athenian help. 35 Nothing was provided, at least immediately, perhaps because Philip was not actively threatening the place.

  The colonization of Amphipolis and Philippi established a fi rm and powerful

  anchor on the east of the kingdom, which could be used either as a defence

  against attacks or as a base for further advances; the removal of Athens from

  Pydna and Methone eliminated a standing threat to the heart of the kingdom; the Illyrians and Paeonians had been beaten and pushed out on the north and north-east. Philip by 354 could claim that the kingdom was secure from any immediate danger. The old enemies had been beaten, Thessaly had been neutralized. He

  must also have realized that in dealing with all these close-by enemies he had failed to attend seriously to the most important enemy of all, Athens.

  3

  The defence of the kingdom, 354–346 bc

  By 354 Philip had enlarged the kingdom he had inherited to the greatest extent of earlier reigns and further to include Amphipolis and Philippi, and its military power was greater and more effi cient. Internally, Philip used the existing local institutions while tightening his overall control. Most local communities were self-governing through local assemblies. A development of Philip’s reign was

  the growth of towns and cities, by natural expansion, thanks to peace and

  increas ing prosperity, or new foundations by the king. The whole kingdom was

  a complex mixture of jurisdictions, not all of which had the same powers. From a Machiavellian point of view one might see this as a deliberate process of ruling by division; in fact it has more the marks of a natural intermittent growth; Philip does not seem to have attempted to impose uniformity.

  The kingships of the Upper Macedonian states – Elimaia, Lynkos, Orestis,

  and so on – were abolished, and the local barons incorporated into his court,

  the royal families becoming courtiers and Companions. The districts were left

  to run their own affairs through local assemblies and aristocracies with no

  attempt to create uniformity; they contributed men to the forces and money to

  the treasury. They were, that is, reduced from a precarious independence to a

  secure provincial status. 1

  In some areas of particular sensitivity, notably newly conquered and frontier

  areas, Philip appointed governors. Border areas such as Philippi and Amphipolis and the area around Damastion in the north-west were sensitive because they

  could be objects of an enemy attack. Macedonian garrisons were presumably

  installed in these places, for both defence and control. The title of a governor might be strategos, which would imply a military function, or epistates, certainly attested at Amphipolis in the 350s. It is a title whose duties varied with time and place, but usually implied appointment by the king as his representative at a

  particular place. 2 Both Amphipolis and Damastion had mineral resources, which belonged to the king; no doubt one responsibility of these offi cials was to ensure that the king’s share of the product of the mine reached him.

  Large parts of the kingdom belonged directly to the king; epimeletai managed groups of his estates. Forests were royal preserves; managers of these forests were surely required, particularly since the sale of timber had long been one of the prime sources of royal revenue.3 Taxes and customs duties collected at cities

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  and ports were farmed out: fi nancial offi cials were clearly required to supervise the process. 4

  None of this was unusual or innovative: essentially the same system can be

  seen in the Roman and Akhaimenid empires. Philip was simply applying the

  normal systems of the ancient world, but the expansion of his kingdom required the administrative system also to expand, hence governors for certain areas. The usual variations in effi ciency, and the usual instances of corruption and oppression of any bureaucracy, surely existed; one of Philip’s duties as king was to rein in managers when such problems became too visible. The bureaucracy remained

  fairly undeveloped, though the epimeletai were assigned to duties other than supervising the royal estates. This was a start, but it was not Philip’s priority once he had survived the early crises by means of the development of his new army.

  For the general population, Philip’s primary responsibility, apart from security, was administration of justice. Philip was the chief judge and fi nal court of appeal of the kingdom, but day-to-day justice was administered by magistrates in the

  towns and cities, or by judges appointed by the king. 5

  Judges and epimeletai were appointed from among the king’s Companions, men who lived at court, accompanied him, acted as his bodyguard, fought with

  him, drank and ate at his table. These were barons from rural areas, former

  royals from the hill states, Greeks from the cities or from abroad, all known to Philip personally, men whose capacities he judged with a shrewd eye. They might be appointed to any or all of the tasks Philip required of them: guards, judges, diplomats, admirals, administrators, governors, epimeletai. He also collected together the younger sons of barons, making them Royal Pages, another existing institution Philip enlarged and increased in importance: it was from the pages that the later Companions were recruited. The kings of the kingdoms after

  Alexander were all pages as youths.

  For all the enlargement and innovation, this was still a personal government,

  in which the king was involved at all levels. The numbers of Companions

  available for these administrative and command duties was only a few hundred.

  Administration was largely informal, with little in the way of detailed record keeping: the number of inscriptions on stone for the period is few, for instance.

  Athens with a smaller population used more bureaucrats than all Philip’s

  Macedon; it is one reason Athens and Thebes were as powerful as the much larger kingdom. Macedon had, that is, no institutionalized government system above

  the local level. Philip, whose energy was prodigious, ran the whole show. One

  result of this under-development is that when Alexander needed to organize an

  imperial governing system, he failed.

  The frontiers were strengthened with colonies of Macedonians planted

  at strategic po
ints: Krenides/Philippi and Amphipolis were two examples,

  Damastion another; the people of Balla in Pieria were moved to a site called

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  Pytheion in part of Perrhaebia. 6 In Lynkos, Herakleia controlled the upper valley of the Erigon River and the route used by invading Illyrians. 7 Philippopolis was placed to overlook the middle Strymon Valley.8 At the centre, Pella was enlarged, becoming wealthier and more frequented as a result of Philip’s work. 9 Philip moved ‘peoples and cities … even as shepherds move their fl ocks’, so that ‘from many tribes and races he formed one kingdom and one people’. 10

  By these colonies and urban developments Philip was, perhaps unintentionally,

  developing a new type of city. The normal Greek city was independent, or

  sub ordinate by some sort of agreement to another. The Macedonian version

  was never potentially independent, though it did have the usual institutions of self-government, magistrates, priesthoods, assemblies, and so on.11 These cities were directly subject to the king, and often answerable to a governor appointed by him. This pattern became the usual method applied in the later kingdoms to

  the huge number of new cities founded and developed there.

  The central factor in Philip’s actions between 354 and 346 was his war with

  Athens. Neither power could seriously attack the other directly, but only through associates. Athens, now without the major allies of her second league, did not have the military strength to tackle the newly potent Macedonian army; Philip, supreme on land in the north, was never willing to build ships to challenge Athens by sea. So Athens’ policy was to threaten Philip through alliances, in Thrace or the Chalkidike, while Philip developed his diplomatic contacts in Greece so as to threaten Athens. Each side accused the other of underhand tricks, and both used them. Athens was generally able to keep Philip at a distance, but Philip gradually eliminated the allies of Athens who were close to his kingdom. Direct hostilities were few, at least until nearly the end.

  The contest was complicated by a simultaneous war in central Greece.

  Originating in a quarrel between Thebes, which claimed to control Boiotia, and Phokis, its next-but-one neighbour to the north, this war became internationalized when the Phokians seized control of Delphi and used the treasures there to hire an army of mercenaries. The Delphic Amphiktyony, the committee of local

  com mu nities which governed the sanctuary, appealed for help to recover its lost riches and to punish the sacrilegious perpetrator, and this involved all Greece, in the ‘Sacred’ war. Operating along the political fault lines of Greek affairs, the war allied Athens and Sparta unenthusiastically with Phokis, and Thebes found itself struggling. In Thessaly the tyrants of Pherai were keen to use the crisis to extend their control over other parts of Thessaly. The Pheraians allied with Phokis;

  threatened Thessalian cities appealed to Philip for help. 12 Only four years after the Common Peace of 360, all Greece was involved in war again.

  Macedonian kings had intervened in Thessaly several times, always in the

  interest of blocking the growth of Pheraian power. It was not in Macedon’s

  interest to see Thessaly under one ruler, for that would constitute a major threat;

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  and Pherai was aligned, through Phokis, with Athens, with which Philip was

  already at war. Macedon was thus aligned with Thebes, and early in 353, after a Theban victory, a Theban army marched through Macedon to assist the Persian

  satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, Artabazos, who was in revolt. The commander

  of the Thebans was Pammenes, Philip’s old host, and Philip brought up a

  Macedonian force to escort the Thebans through Thrace. 13

  Philip used this expedition to assert his power in Thrace, though the result

  was to alert the Thracian kings to the threat he posed. He had clashed already with several kings, Ketriporis, Kersobleptes, even Amadokos in the east. Now

  they began diplomatic explorations. Philip had negotiated with them to ensure

  a safe passage to the Hellespont for Pammenes and his troops, in the process

  apparently agreeing to fi ght Amadokos in alliance with Kersobleptes. Philip’s army also ravaged the territories of two Athenian allies, Abdera and Maroneia, but neither city was seriously assaulted.

  Philip was accompanied by a fl eet of supply ships, convoyed by ships of the

  small Macedonian navy. On his return his ships were threatened by an Athenian

  force commanded by Chares. Athens was now willing to pay attention to the

  problems of its northern allies. Amphipolis, Methone, Pydna and the small

  cities west of Neapolis had been lost to Macedon, and those left became the

  more valuable. Since the joint Theban-Macedonian march took place in the

  spring, Chares would seem to have been sent north to intercept Philip’s fl eet, and perhaps to help defend Neapolis, Abdera and Maroneia. Philip detected the

  waiting Athenian ships, sent four of his fastest warships to distract them, and then got his cargo ships past Neapolis in safety. 14

  This Thracian march, as with many of Philip’s actions, had several aspects: the war with Athens, the immediate position in Thrace, relations with Thebes and

  the Sacred War. Pammenes’ march shows Thebes and Macedon in active alliance;

  later in the year this would affect Philip’s actions in Thessaly.

  It is also the fi rst sign of Philip’s interest in Persian affairs. The Great King could note that both Thebes and Macedon were assisting the rebel satrap; a

  year or so later, when Artabazos was fi nally defeated, he escaped to take refuge at Pella with Philip, bringing with him a number of associates, including his

  brother-in-law, the mercenary captain Memnon of Rhodes. Thus Persia came to

  Philip’s attention and Macedon to Artaxerxes’. The refugees’ presence at Philip’s court was a constant reminder of the possibilities available in Asia. But it would take more than Pammenes and his 5,000 men to make an effect.

  Philip went to Thessaly to help his friends there. The Phokian general,

  Onomarchos, collected a new army, and this revived the hopes of the Pheraian

  tyrants. Philip took only a part of the Macedonian army with him, intending

  only to tip the balance in a confl ict in which the two sides were roughly equal. In reply Lykophron, the joint-tyrant of Pherai, appealed to Onomarchos, who sent

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  a Phokian force north under his brother Phayllos. This was defeated in battle by Philip. 15 Escalation continued: Onomarchos brought the main Phokian army north; and Philip his own main force south. Philip was outnumbered to some

  degree and was defeated in two major battles. Philip retired to Macedon, leaving garrisons in some cities, and Onomarchos set about besieging and capturing

  them. Philip was determined to return the following year. 16

  Philip’s defeat was the fi rst he had suffered in six years of fi ghting and campaigning. It was his new army’s fi rst encounter with a large and well-commanded

  Greek hoplite army; until then, the enemies had been less well organized and

  less disciplined and, in many cases, less numerous. Some of the Macedonians

  deserted, blaming Philip, and considerable numbers had died. Philip’s comment, that he withdrew to butt the harder, argued his own determination, but the army may well have been apprehensive at further fi ghting on this scale. One must

  assume that Philip spent the winter working hard to convince his men that they could win.

  Thessaly was a complication inherited from his predecessors. It was a country

  similar to Macedon in many ways, ruled by an elite baronage but including

&
nbsp; a substantial urban element, rich in resources, about the same size as the old Macedon without the hill kingdoms. Under the rule of one man it was potentially dangerous to all its neighbours, and the intervention of Onomarchos established an alliance between Phokis, enriched by the Delphic treasure, and Pherai and its tyrants. This enemy alliance was far too much of a threat to be ignored. For the sake of his army Philip had to fi ght again; for the sake of his kingdom he had to break the enemy alliance.

  Philip’s allies in Thessaly were the cities of the Thessalian League threatened by Pherai’s ambition. Being more or less equal in strength, the two Thessalian groups were each able to fi eld a substantial army, and Thessaly was good cavalry country. In 352 Philip returned south, with his full army, collected the forces of his allies, and set about taking back the cities which Onomarchos had captured the year before: in particular he attacked Pagasai, only 10 km south of Pherai.

  An Athenian fl eet under Chares had also been directed there as naval support

  for Lykophron and Pherai.

  Onomarchos came north in full strength. The subsequent fi ghting took place

  in the south of Thessaly, so Onomarchos had few Thessalian forces with him.

  The battle at the Crocus Fields, near the southern border of Thessaly, was thus fought on Philip’s terms. His cavalry, outnumbering that of Onomarchos by

  six to one, was overwhelmingly effective, and when the Phokian army broke in

  defeat, 6,000 died and 3,000 became prisoners. Onomarchos either died in the

  rout or by execution; the prisoners were drowned, this being the punishment

  for temple robbers. 17

  Philip stayed in Thessaly for some time. Lykophron and his brother Peitholaos

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  gave up the tyranny of Pherai in exchange for safe conduct out of Thessaly for them and their supporters; the other cities they had controlled fell quickly to Philip. A new political dispensation was now organized: Philip was elected archon of the Thessalian League, a position less than royal but more than honorary,

  giving him a powerful infl uence in Thessalian affairs. It was probably as such that he kept control of Pagasai, which his forces had conquered, and Magnesia, the