Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  With this siege technology and the highly trained and disciplined soldiers of his army, Philip captured a string of well fortified cities with relative ease and quickness: Amphipolis in 357, Pydna and Potidaea in 356, Abdera, Maroneia, and Methone in 354, Heraeon Teichos in 352, Olynthos in 348, to name a few. The list is a long one, and one might add Alexander’s capture of Thebes in 335, the year after Philip’s death. Not all of Philip’s sieges were successful: he failed to capture Perinthus and Byzantium in 340 thanks to the arrival of significant outside help for those cities’ defenses. But the principle is clear. As in every aspect of his warfare, Philip gave careful attention to his siege train, made it the most up-to-date and effective it could be, and achieved startling successes in his sieges as a result, enabling him to conquer territories and spread his control without being constantly stymied by strongly fortified cities and guard posts.

  6. THE OFFICER CORPS

  The point of all of the above was the creation of a new style of warfare: more elaborate, more disciplined, based on more thorough and effective training, aimed at creating swift and decisive successes through the controlled use of varied kinds of soldiers, with different armaments and specialties, operating together in a unified scheme of campaign and battle that not only won victories, but made them decisive, and not only occupied territories, but conquered them thoroughly and brought them firmly under control. But this kind of warfare, in which different specialized units of soldiers had to co-operate together in complex schemes of campaign and battle, was demanding. It did not only require a highly skilled commander who understood the potentialities of different types of soldiers and varieties of terrain, and could create and bring into effect plans that made the most of them. For varied units to co-operate together effectively in war, and especially in battle, each unit had to be led by a unit commander who understood the overall plan of campaign and battle, grasped the precise role of his own unit in it and its relation to other units, and could lead his unit in a disciplined way within the plan of battle, while having enough initiative to adapt his orders to the vagaries of battle and still stay within the overall battle plan. Where to find such skilled officers? Such officers are, of course, not so much found as trained. And in the course of his twenty-four-year rule, Philip trained one of the great officer corps in the annals of warfare, without whom Philip could not have achieved half of what he did achieve; and without whom Alexander—himself trained in the art of war by Philip—could not have conquered the vast empire he did conquer.

  The full ability and expertise of this officer corps trained by Philip became apparent after the death of Alexander when, given free rein to operate on their own behalf, many of them carved out empires for themselves in two decades of extraordinary warfare (see Chapter 6 below). Men like Antigonus the One-Eyed, Eumenes of Cardia, Craterus and Perdiccas, Ptolemy and Cassander, Seleucus and Lysimachus, all in various ways showed military skills and leadership abilities of a very high order, in the case of Antigonus and Seleucus perhaps the highest. These skills and abilities did not come out of nowhere: they were developed and honed in decades of training and service under Philip, and then further honed assisting Alexander in conquering western Asia. The noted Hellenistic historian William Tarn, in the third chapter of his very adulatory biography of Alexander the Great (1948), says of these men:

  Here was an assembly of kings, with passions, ambitions, abilities beyond those of most men; and, while he (Alexander) lived, all we see is that Perdiccas and Ptolemy were good brigade leaders, Antigonus an obedient satrap, Lysimachus and Peithon little-noticed members of the staff …

  It seems to me that Tarn draws entirely the wrong lesson. The real point is not that Alexander dominated these men; it is that Alexander had, thanks to his father’s work, officers of such outstanding quality to work with. Alexander did not conquer the Persian Empire on his own. He had a group of brilliantly trained and highly professional officers to carry out and make effective his plans of battle, to co-operate with him in his campaigns and smooth out any problems, to carry out independent operations on his behalf when needed. Men who thoroughly understood the business of warfare and military leadership because they had learned their business in the same school as Alexander: Philip’s school.

  Philip did not create his new army and officer corps on his own; he was fortunate enough to find two older men of outstanding ability to co-operate with him: Parmenio and Antipater. Both born a year or two either side of the year 400, they were around twenty years older than Philip, in their mid-forties already when he came to rule Macedonia at the age of twenty-four. It says a great deal for Philip that he very quickly identified these two men to be his key aides and supporters, and that he gained their loyalty and held it throughout his reign. Their importance to Philip is well illustrated by a couple of anecdotes recorded by Plutarch which show how they were viewed. Parmenio was throughout Philip’s career, and indeed most of the reign of Alexander, the senior officer after the ruler himself, in effect second-in-command of the Macedonian army and often trusted with independent commands: it was Parmenio, for example, who commanded a Macedonian army against the Illyrians under Grabus, and won a notable victory in 356. Of him Plutarch reports (Moralia 177C): “He (Philip) said that he counted the Athenians fortunate indeed, in that every year they could find ten men to select as generals (strategoi); for he himself in many years had only ever found one general, Parmenio.” The point being that the ten strategoi whom the Athenians elected every year were magistrates, who often had little real military skill; whereas Parmenio was a superb general on whom Philip could and did wholly rely. Antipater was also a very competent general, often trusted by Philip and Alexander with important commands; but he was above all the officer on whom Philip relied in diplomatic and administrative matters, usually serving as regent of Macedonia when the king was away on campaign. Plutarch reports (Moralia 179B): “Once having slept very late while on a campaign, he (Philip) said upon awaking ‘I slept safely, for Antipater was awake’.” In Antipater, that is to say, as in Parmenio, Philip had a senior officer in whom he reposed complete trust to be able and to do whatever was right and needed in his own absence.

  These two, then, were the right-hand men who stood at the apex of Philip’s officer corps, considerably older than Philip himself and presumably assisting him in the recruitment and training of the rest of his officers. It may well be suggested, indeed, that they were to some degree co-inventors of the new army and military system with Philip, and so co-creators of Philip’s new Macedonian state. Besides these two very senior and crucial officers, there were also a number of important officers who were more or less Philip’s contemporaries, Antigonus the One-Eyed and Polyperchon being the best known of them. These men presumably learned Philip’s system of warfare by serving with and under Philip, as Philip himself created it and instituted it. They learned by doing, under Philip’s command; and perhaps also had some input into the process of developing the new army and military system. Most significant, however, in terms of numbers were the younger officers who were trained up by Philip from the inception of their military careers: such men as Craterus, Perdiccas, Philotas, Ptolemy, Leonnatus, Cassander, Lysimachus, Seleucus, Hephaestion, and—most crucially—Alexander himself. The ancient Greek term for education and training is paideia, and the young men, in their late teens, who were being trained by Philip in the business of warfare and officering, were known as his paides—often translated into English, via a medieval metaphor, as Philip’s “pages,” but in effect his trainees.

  The paides of Macedonia have been assumed at times to be an old and traditional part of the Macedonian monarchy, a way for the sons of the king’s hetairoi to learn and show loyalty to the ruler, as noted in Chapter 1. But they are first attested under Philip, and seem more likely—as some scholars note—to be one of Philip’s many innovations. Young men in their late teens, around seventeen to nineteen years old, from the hetairos class would be taken into Philip’s service to learn to
be a man, a Macedonian, and a leader. They attended the king at all times: at court, in the hunt, at the symposium, and on campaign, fighting as part of his entourage in battle. At court and at the symposium, they served as guards, messengers, and servers of food and wine. They learned the etiquette of the court and the symposium, and the business of the ruler. At the hunt, they served the king, ensured as best they could his safety, and participated in the stalking and killing of game while deferring to the king as principal hunter. Most importantly, on campaign and in battle they guarded the king and his tent, witnessing in that capacity the planning of marches and battles and the giving of orders. They might serve as messengers from the king to various units of the army and their officers, and they fought around the king in battle. In this way, they learned by observing and participating all the business of the army and the state, of leadership and command, of organizing and fighting. When they “graduated” from this paideia, the young men of whom the king approved might be appointed to the command of sub-units within the army, whether infantry or cavalry, and gradually progress into the command of larger units: taxeis of pikemen, ilai of cavalry, or specialized units of more lightly equipped soldiers, whether Macedonian, allied, or mercenary.

  The result was that by the end of his reign, Philip had an officer corps of men who had thoroughly learned the structure of the army and its units, the system of warfare Philip had devised, and the business of commanding units of the army in accordance with the overall structure of the army and the plans of campaign and battle. Having been trained and selected by Philip himself, with the aid of his most senior officers as noted above, the king reposed full confidence in their ability to do what was required of them and their units in any military contingency, and they displayed their outstanding quality and capacities in the campaigns and battles of Alexander, and especially in the wars of the succession which followed on Alexander’s untimely death. It was officers of Philip who eventually took control of the lands conquered by the Macedonians under Philip and Alexander, and organized those lands into the great Hellenistic empires which dominated the near east for two centuries, and provided the setting for the establishment of Hellenistic civilization and culture.

  7. THE SYSTEM OF BATTLE

  Key to the success of the warfare of Philip and especially of Alexander was an advanced system of battle, invented by Philip, which used an army of combined arms in a smooth interlocking process to pin the enemy forces down, force them into battle, create disruptions in the enemy formation, and then exploit those disruptions to bring about victory, driving the enemy into flight and pursuing vigorously to make the victory decisive. Unfortunately our sources on Philip’s battles are for the most part completely inadequate, merely reporting the battles and Philip’s victories rather than describing them. But it is possible to reconstruct Philip’s last and most important battle and victory: the Battle of Chaeroneia in 338, whereby Philip secured his position as leader of the Greek world and set the groundwork in motion for the Macedonian invasion of western Asia. This battle illustrates Philip’s system of battle in its fully developed form, and was the model, I shall argue, for the great battles and victories of Alexander.

  The Battle of Chaeroneia was fought in northern Boeotia, where the small town of Chaeroneia sits in a rather narrow pass between the River Cephisus and Lake Copais to the east and the foothills of Mounts Parnassus and Helicon to the west, athwart the main road from Phocis into Boeotia and beyond. Philip commanded a large Macedonian force of some thirty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. Opposing him was a combined southern Greek force made up of large contingents from Thebes and Athens, along with smaller allied forces from a number of other Greek states (Achaea, Corinth, Chalcis, Megara, Epidaurus, and Troizen). The allied southern Greek force had most likely about the same number of men as Philip, though Justin (9.3) suggested that the southern Greeks had far more men. Stationed astride the road facing north, the southern Greeks deployed with the Thebans on the right, their flank protected by the River Cephisus, and the Athenians on the left with their flank resting against the slopes of Mount Thurion, a projection from Mount Parnassus. Philip placed his pezetairoi on his right opposite the Athenians, with himself in command. Opposite the Thebans on Philip’s left were several phalanx battalions with, most likely, Parmenio in overall command, having Alexander with him sharing in the command in some way. We can only assume that the other southern Greek forces, unmentioned in actual accounts of the battle, were stationed in the center of the southern Greek line, between the Thebans and the Athenians.

  Establishing exactly what happened during the Battle of Chaeroneia is not easy. Our main source, Diodorus the Sicilian (16.86.1–6), recounts the battle in a distinctly Homeric manner, focusing on the individual bravery of Philip himself and his son Alexander, and presenting the battle as a rivalry between the two of them to attain the victory by their personal efforts. What we can take from his account is that Alexander held an important command on one wing of the battle, facing the Theban contingent of the opposing army, while Philip commanded the other wing opposite the Athenians. On Alexander’s wing were stationed also “the most worthy commanders,” which must certainly include Parmenio. A force led by Alexander first succeeded in breaking through the enemy line, leading to a rout of the Thebans. Philip at that point, with his “picked men” (that is, his pezetairoi) around him, forced back the Athenians and routed them, over a thousand Athenians being killed and more than two thousand captured, which secured the victory. Thus far Diodorus’ account, which offers little detail on troop dispositions or the actual course of the fighting, while giving the impression that Philip and Alexander fought like Ajax and Achilles of old.

  A number of other sources supplement Diodorus’ inadequate account, adding important details that flesh out what really happened. The second-century CE compiler of military “stratagems” Polyaenus tells us that Philip and his troops withdrew from the Athenians in a staged retreat, drawing the Athenians forward (Polyaenus 4.2.2); and that when the relatively raw Athenians grew tired, Philip had his more seasoned men attack and drive the Athenians back in rout (Polyaenus 4.2.7; also Frontinus Stratagems 2.1.9). Plutarch in his Life of Pelopidas (18) says that the Theban Sacred Band (an elite unit of three hundred soldiers), stationed on the far right of the Theban line, met the Macedonian phalanx face on and died heroically; in his Life of Alexander (9) Plutarch reports that Alexander was the first to “break the line of” the Sacred Band. The widely known story that the 300 men of the Sacred Band all died where they stood, which Plutarch affirms, surely indicates that this famous unit was surrounded. It’s worth noting here that the famous “lion of Chaeroneia” (ill. 12) which traditionally marked the grave of the Sacred Band has been excavated, and under it were found 254 corpses, which seems to confirm that the Sacred Band was indeed surrounded and annihilated.

  12. The Lion Monument at Chaeronea

  (Wikimedia Commons photo by Philipp Pilhofer)

  Putting all of this together, the most widely accepted account of the battle goes as follows. In Philip’s system of battle it was the heavy cavalry who were the strike force charged with penetrating through gaps in the enemy line to attack the enemy from the rear. Though our inadequate accounts don’t specifically mention cavalry in the battle, it seems likely that Alexander—who first broke through the enemy line followed by companions (parastatai)—was in command of the bulk of Philip’s cavalry, evidently stationed on the left. Philip’s problem in this battle was that both flanks of the opposing army were protected by natural obstacles—the River Cephisus on his left, Mount Thurion on his right—and so could not be out-flanked. In order to break through the enemy formation, it would be necessary to create a significant gap, therefore. The disparate units making up the opposing line of battle offered an opportunity. By staging a retreat on his right, with his highly disciplined and reliable pezetairoi, Philip drew the Athenians forward. As the allied troops in the southern Greek center strove to maintain conta
ct with the advancing Athenians, and the troops on the left of the Theban force moved forward to maintain contact with the Greek center, the southern Greek line became stretched. Since the main Theban force, confronted by the unmoving Macedonian pike phalanx under Parmenio, could not advance, a gap eventually opened in the Theban line. This was the moment Alexander had been ordered to exploit: when he saw the gap, he and his cavalry charged through it and turned to attack the Theban right wing from behind. Most of the Theban force fled, while the surrounded Sacred Band made their heroic stand and died. When Philip saw that his stratagem had worked and that the southern Greek right was in flight, he stopped the retreat of his forces and led them in a relentless attack on the tired Athenians, which routed them and secured the Macedonian victory.