The system of battle thus revealed is a classic example of what is known as “sword and shield” tactics. The phalanx—large, formidable, and relatively slow moving—functioned as the “shield” in battle. It formed a massive front which the enemy had to confront, since they could not risk exposing their flank or rear to the Macedonian pikes, and thus it pinned the enemy in place. Special units, under special tactical plans, operated to try to disrupt the enemy line and create a gap. The heavy cavalry functioned as the “sword”, driving through the gap created in the enemy line and turning to overwhelm the enemy, under concerted attack by the pike phalanx in front, by striking them from the side and from behind. The battalions of the phalanx had to operate together in unison, maintaining a solid front and asserting pressure on the enemy line at the opportune moment. Units detailed with special roles in the battle had to carry out those roles effectively and at the right time, to cause the disruptions in the enemy formation that the cavalry needed. And the cavalry, finally, had to charge at the right moment, when a suitable gap in the enemy formation had appeared; and having charged, it had to remember not to over pursue, but to turn against the main enemy formation from behind and secure the victory. This is a complex but highly effective system of battle, that relied above all on the different units and specialists in the army carrying out their different roles efficiently and with the right timing; that is, it relied on the commanders of the various units understanding the plan and ensuring that their units fulfilled their assigned tasks.
When we examine the battles of Alexander, we see that he followed his father’s system of battle in each case. At the Granicus in 334, at Issus in 333, and at Gaugamela in 331, though with special adjustments to meet the needs of each location and occasion, Alexander’s army operated according to Philip’s design. The pike phalanx confronted the enemy and forced them to maintain their line opposed to the phalanx. Specialized units swept forward and harassed the enemy line, seeking to create disruptions and gaps in it between enemy units. And when such a gap had occurred, Alexander in command of the Macedonian cavalry would charge forward and through the gap, to turn and roll up the enemy line from the flank and rear. Alexander’s battles thus confirm what we learn from our inadequate sources about Philip’s system of battle, and illustrate the crucial importance of Philip’s training system both for his soldiers and for their officers. It was Philip’s army and officers which conquered the Persian Empire, though Alexander provided the charismatic leadership that was required to make the system work.
8. THE MACEDONIAN ARMY AND THE MACEDONIAN STATE
At the beginning of this chapter I asserted that the Macedonian army in effect owned or was the Macedonian state, and that Philip’s army-building was therefore at the same time a state-building endeavor. It used to be widely believed, as noted in Chapter 1 and contrary to this, that there was a definable Macedonian state before the time of Philip, with a similarly definable constitution, of sorts. The idea was that the Macedonian state consisted of a “people under arms,” that is that “the Macedonians” meant all the men of military age and status (capable of arming themselves and functioning as warriors); and that this “people under arms” functioned constitutionally as the selectors of their rulers via a process of assembly and acclamation, and as a kind of “supreme court,” trying and adjudicating cases of high treason prosecuted by the king. Over the past few decades this notion of a Macedonian constitution before the time of Philip has been subjected to devastating critiques, and few historians now accept it. The plain fact is that there is no evidence of any Macedonian ruler being selected by his “people under arms” through a process of acclamation: the nearest example is the establishment of Alexander’s half-brother Arrhidaeus as titular king in 323, with the throne name Philip after his father; but that happened under unique circumstances. In fact several Macedonian rulers came to power by violent usurpation, as we have seen. Nor is there any documented example of the “people under arms” trying cases of treason: the nearest example here is of Alexander the Great conducting several treason trials of very highly placed and popular officers before the assembled army, as a way of assuring the army of their guilt.
For the Macedonian people to function in some constitutional manner by assembling under arms, there had to be a unified Macedonian people with a common sense of identity and purpose; and there had to be a large mass of men who had arms and functioned as warriors; that is, there had to be a Macedonian army. As shown in Chapters 1 and 2, neither of these things existed before Philip: it was Philip who, as ruler, created a true Macedonian army including a disciplined infantry force, and it was Philip who unified Macedonia and created a strong sense of common identity and unity of purpose. In short, Philip created the Macedonian state.
Of course, there was before the time of Philip a Macedonian identity, a population who were referred to as Macedonians and who in some sense identified themselves as Macedonians; but that does not mean there was a Macedonian state. One might think of the German and Italian peoples before the mid-nineteenth century and their respective unifications into nation states; one might think of the Kurdish people today, sharing a common identity and language but divided up between four different states. Who exactly thought of themselves as Macedonians and/or were thought of as such by outsiders is very unclear before Philip’s time, such was the disunity of Macedonia and its proneness to subdivision into multiple entities—e.g. Lyncus, Orestis, or Elimea as separate and independent entities—and such was Macedonia’s openness to invasion by neighboring powers who occupied slices of what had been Macedonian territory. Macedonian identity was therefor mutable and insubstantial. There was a region called Macedonia whose exact extent varied considerably over time; and there were people called Macedonians at one time but not at another, and whose sense of Macedonian identity was not expressed by the kind of common social and political institutions that would permit us to refer to a Macedonian state.
Philip changed all this by creating the first large, well organized, well trained and disciplined, and thus truly effective Macedonian infantry army. It is from Philip’s time on that there was a distinctly Macedonian armament—the small Macedonian shield and the long Macedonian sarissa—and a distinctly Macedonian style of warfare that went with it. And it was thus from Philip’s time on that the Macedonian shield and sarissa became symbols of Macedonian identity and pride. Philip, that is, created the Macedonian “people under arms” in the act of creating the Macedonian pike phalanx. It was successful service, year after year, in Philip’s phalanx that fostered in the Macedonian warrior class developed by Philip a sense of unity, identity, and common purpose sufficient to form the basis of a national state. In addition his improvement and enlargement of the Macedonian cavalry made that cavalry for the first time a truly Macedonian force, rather than an agglomeration of personal followings of landed aristocrats. Finally, it was of course the victories won by this national Macedonian army that finally established a secure Macedonian territory, fully unified and able to form the territorial basis of a Macedonian state.
The institutions and governing systems of the Macedonian state were military. The districts of Macedonia were military recruitment districts; Macedonian citizenship was expressed through military service; the Macedonian ruler was a military monarch who expressed his leadership above all through successful command of the army; and the elite class of the new Macedonian state, the old aristocracy and the new members added by Philip, was an officer class trained through an education system (paideia) that emphasized military and leadership skills and loyalty to the military monarch. Under Philip and his successors then, just as with Prussia under its Hohenzollern rulers, Macedonia was an army that had a state, rather than a state that had an army.
A Byzantine encyclopedia of sorts, known as the Suda, preserves a definition of basileia (kingship), clearly taken from a late fourth- or early third-century BCE source, which is often quoted in reference to Alexander’s Successors:
It i
s not descent (phusis) or legitimacy (to dikaion) which makes a king; it is the ability to lead armies well and handle affairs competently; this is seen by the examples of Philip and Alexander’s Successors.
Oddly, though this passage directly references Philip, it is too rarely brought up in connection with him. As the passage indicates, it was by creating and leading an army successfully that Philip established his kingship and his claim to the loyalty of the Macedonian people, a people to whom he gave unity, stability, security, and prosperity by creating for them a successful military state. This is why, at Alexander’s feast in Samarkand at the height of his power and success, the older officers like Cleitus the Black insisted that Philip was a greater ruler than his son; this is why, after Alexander’s death, the Macedonian soldiery insisted on having Philip’s other son Arrhidaeus, mentally deficient though he was, as their new king, and on re-naming him Philip to remind them of his great father. Philip was truly the father of his country.
CHAPTER 5
The Reign of Alexander
IN SPRING 336, PHILIP WAS AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POWER AND SUCCESS. Everything he had hoped and planned for at the start of his rule in the winter of 360/59 had been achieved, and more. Macedonia was strong, stable, prosperous, and greatly enlarged; cities were growing, the Macedonian people were thriving, and the economy had developed greatly under his rule. The Balkan peninsula and its peoples, south of the River Danube, were either directly subordinated to Macedonian rule, or effectively under Macedonian domination, thus posing no threat to Macedonian security. And the cities and peoples of northern, central, and southern Greece had either been brought under Macedonian rule (Chalcidians and Thessalians), or brought into a grand alliance system with Macedonia as the dominant partner and Philip as acknowledged Hegemon (leader). The Macedonian army, through which all of this had been achieved, was larger and stronger than ever: the largest army by far in all of the Balkan and Greek world, and the most effectively armed, trained, and led. Philip was ready to transition to a new and even grander set of goals, a new phase of his career as ruler: he was ready to take on the Persian Empire and seek to expand Macedonian power and the Greek culture and language into western Asia. At the beginning of the spring, an advance force of some ten thousand men, predominantly mercenaries and commanded by Parmenio, had crossed the Hellespont into north-western Asia Minor and begun the process of establishing a bridgehead there for the crossing of the main Macedonian army led by Philip himself, planned to take place early enough in the summer to give Philip a sufficient campaigning season in Asia Minor.
While Parmenio was campaigning, winning the allegiance of the Greek coastal cities in Asia Minor as far south as Ephesus, Philip marked the success of his endeavors and transition to a new field of operations with a grand festival at the old Macedonian capital of Aegae, centered around the marriage of his and Olympias’ daughter Cleopatra to the girl’s uncle Alexander of Molossia. Part of the ceremony was a grand procession of part of Philip’s army and statues of the gods to the theater of Aegae, where celebratory performances were to be staged. Philip marched at the end of the procession, flanked by his son Alexander and new son-in-law (and brother-in-law) Alexander. At the entrance to the theater, the two Alexanders preceded Philip inside, so the latter could make a splendid solo entrance as the leader and champion of the entire Greek world. Famously, as Philip finally moved forward alone, a disgruntled officer in his royal bodyguard named Pausanias, in pursuit of a personal grievance against Philip, dashed forward and stabbed him to death. So died Philip, the greatest ruler Macedonia had seen, at the very peak of his powers and at the relatively young age of about forty-seven (born around 383, died in early July 336). The assassin Pausanias was immediately pursued by others of Philip’s royal guard, caught, and killed, making it impossible to learn whether he had acted alone or had confederates in some sort of conspiracy.
Naturally, conspiracy theories swirled around this abrupt assassination, and have continued to swirl ever since. The apparently official account—retailed by the historian Diodorus and in a more abbreviated version by Aristotle—is of a rather sordid homoerotic intrigue between Philip and two young men in his entourage, both named Pausanias. The story is, perhaps, a little too detailed and sordid to convince. Not unsurprisingly, since Alexander benefited by becoming king, rumors arose suggesting that he and/or his mother Olympias were behind Pausanias. On the other hand, Alexander himself arrested and executed two scions of the dynastic house of Lyncus—Arrhabaeus and Heromenes—as conspirators; but he may simply have been using the charge of complicity in Philip’s death as an excuse to rid himself of two over-powerful aristocrats. The truth is, despite rivers of ink spilled discussing the issue, we shall never know more about Philip’s death than that Pausanias killed him. With that we must rest content.
1. THE SUCCESSION OF ALEXANDER
In the chaotic upset at the great ruler’s assassination, one man conspicuously kept his head: Philip’s senior officer and right-hand man Antipater. He immediately grasped that the succession to the throne was now the most important matter and, gathering up Philip’s bodyguards, he placed them protectively around Alexander and had him escorted to the safety of the nearby palace. There he summoned the chief Macedonian aristocrats who were present and presided over a meeting at which they proclaimed Alexander as the new ruler. Letters were despatched to Parmenio in Asia Minor, alerting him to the news, and Parmenio responded endorsing Alexander’s succession to the throne. Thus, at the age of twenty, Alexander became the ruler of the Macedonians in succession to his great father Philip. This can have come as no surprise to anyone: Philip had been visibly and publicly grooming Alexander for the succession for at least the past seven years. When Alexander was thirteen, Philip hired the great philosopher Aristotle to come to Macedonia and undertake the education of Alexander and a chosen group of companions of Alexander’s age; the princely sum Aristotle received for this three-year task enabled him to return to Athens and set up his famous school, the Lyceum (Lykeion) there. At sixteen, in 340, Alexander was appointed regent of Macedonia and placed in charge of the royal seal (that is, empowered to make official decisions) while Philip and his senior officers were absent campaigning at the Hellespont and Bosporus. In 338, when Alexander was eighteen, he was placed in command of the crucial Macedonian heavy cavalry at the battle of Chaeroneia, which cemented Philip’s leadership of Greece: it was the charge of the Macedonian heavy cavalry led by Alexander which secured victory in this battle, as argued in Chapter 4 above. And at the great ceremony in 336 at which Philip was assassinated, finally, it was Alexander who—along with Philip’s new son-in-law Alexander of Molossia—walked beside Philip in the grand procession, as we have just seen. All of this designated Alexander as Philip’s chosen heir beyond question.
There had, it is true, beeen tensions between Philip and Alexander in the years leading up to 336. Our sources love to play up these tensions, usually to Alexander’s credit and with a great deal of circumstantial detail that, if anything, undermines the credibility of the stories rather than enhancing it. These tensions first appeared, we are told, when Philip decided late in 338 to take a new young wife, his seventh. Unlike his previous six wives, all non-Macedonian ladies married to cement alliances of various sorts, this new wife—named either Cleopatra or Eurydice, in different sources—was a native Macedonian from the high aristocracy: her uncle and guardian was one of Philip’s senior officers named Attalus. Romantic stories insist that the marriage was a love match between the aging king (he was in fact only about forty-five) and a pretty young girl. At the wedding feast there was a great deal of drinking, as was usual at Macedonian feasts, and at some point Attalus offered a toast wishing that the new bride might bear Philip legitimate children. Alexander apparently took exception to this toast and attempted to assault Attalus, with others including Philip drunkenly intervening.
A great deal has been made by some scholars of this event. Supposedly the Macedonian aristocracy despised Alexan
der for his half-Epirote birth (through his Molossian mother Olympias) and regarded only an heir born of a Macedonian mother as well as father as legitimate. This notion, however, runs foul of the fact that Philip himself was only half Macedonian: his mother Eurydice had been of Illyrian birth. Exactly how did Attalus and his aristocratic friends explain to Philip that only a prince of Macedonian birth on both sides could be a legitimate heir? This is nonsense. Others have suggested that Attalus was literally impugning Alexander’s legitimacy: suggesting that Philip was not truly his father, Olympias having been unfaithful. But if that were so, why was Philip so visibly grooming Alexander for the succession? One must in fact recall what marriage in antiquity was about: not love and romance, but the begetting of children. As an anonymous Athenian orator famously put it (Ps. Demosthenes 59.122): “we keep courtesans (hetairai) for pleasure, concubines to take care of our daily physical needs, and wives to bear us legitimate children.” Expressing the wish that the bride would bear her husband legitimate children was a completely normal and standard part of ancient Greek weddings: it was the wife’s primary role. Philip had only two sons: Alexander himself and the mentally deficient Arrhidaeus. About to embark on a dangerous military campaign in which he himself and/or Alexander might easily die, Philip could certainly have used another son or two to help secure a legitimate line of succession.
The problem, that is to say, lay not with Attalus’ toast, but with Alexander’s reception of it. Exactly why Alexander flew into a violent rage at Attalus’ words can only be conjectured: no doubt excessive drinking was in part to blame. Alexander was well known, like his father and the Macedonian aristocracy generally, for heavy drinking at symposia. And Alexander was extremely touchy about his personal honor, and prone to fly into violent rages if he felt slighted. The most infamous example of this came at a feast held at Samarkand in 327: a senior officer named Cleitus the Black, who had saved Alexander’s life at the Battle of the Granicus, made some remarks to the effect that Philip was a greater ruler than Alexander, at which Alexander became so enraged that he snatched a spear from one of his bodyguards and murdered Cleitus with it on the spot. In the present case Alexander, doubtless very drunk, perceived some slight in Attalus’ perfectly standard toast and flew at him; Philip understandably intervened to protect Attalus; and at this Alexander became so furious that he took his mother Olympias and decamped with her from Macedonia altogether. After a few weeks, or perhaps months, calmer heads prevailed: Alexander and Olympias were invited back to Macedonia, and Alexander’s position as Philip’s heir apparent was not affected.
Before and After Alexander Page 16
