Philip II, the Father of Alexander the Great

Themes and Issues

Edward M. Anson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350103955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Philip II was not only the father of Alexander the Great, but in many respects was also the father of his son's incredible career. It was the father who unified Macedonia into the first European nation and who created the army with which his son conquered the Persian Empire and inaugurated the Hellenistic Age. This volume is not the standard biography, but rather an examination of the major controversies concerning his life and reign. How did Philip in roughly twenty years transform a divided territory and little more than a geographical conception into a national state? How did he change the very nature of ancient Western warfare? How did he transform this formerly exploited region into the master of the Greek world? Each chapter discusses one of the major academic controversies surrounding this transformative figure, bringing new clarity to the career of a man whose reputation has been so overshadowed by his illustrious son.

1

Macedonia before Philip

As noted previously, prior to the reigns of Macedonia’s two most famous kings, Philip II and his son Alexander III, the Great, the term Macedonian had not achieved a national status. The terms used by the Greek historians referred to little more than a politically disunited geographic expression. The region was a diverse land stretching from the Strymon in the east (Hdt. 5.17.2; 7.25),¹ Thessaly and the Vale of Tempe to the south (Hdt. 7.173.1), to the north mostly south of the Erigon River, and to the west the Lakes Kastoria and Lyncus (Thuc. 2.99.1–5). By the fifth century, Herodotus and Thucydides both speak of the plain as Lower Macedonia and the surrounding plateau as Upper Macedonia. One modern commentator has described Macedonia as having ‘an inner core and an outer rind’.² The term Macedon itself probably derives from a Greek word for highlander,³ the name possibly arising from a tribal origin in the mountainous area of western Pieria.⁴

Macedonia possessed the largest alluvial plain in the Greek peninsula, formed by the Haliacmon, Loudias and Axios rivers, and was also blessed with large mineral deposits, including lead, copper, silver, gold and iron, and the finest timber in the Greek world.⁵ The Athenians in particular used the timber from Macedonia to build their warships, the triremes.⁶ Macedonia’s overall population exceeded that of any of the powerful city-states to the south. Estimates of the population of the region of Macedonia range from 500,000 (Ellis 1976: 34) to Richard Billows’ (1995: 203) estimate of between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000.

Yet, despite all of these resources, Macedonia was not a major player in Greek history until the second half of the fourth century BC. For one thing, Upper Macedonia was a land of the independent kingdoms of Orestis, Elimeia, Lyncus, Eordaia and Tymphaia, each typically with its own ruling family (Thuc. 2.99.2). It was only during the reign of Philip II that Upper Macedonia was permanently joined to Lower Macedonia.⁷ Prior to this time, although the peoples of Upper Macedonia may have been brought briefly under the control of the Lower Macedonian king during the period of Persian domination (c. 513–479), after the retreat of the Persians in 479, they re-established their full independence, paying at most lip service allegiance to the Lower Macedonian king (Thuc. 2.99.2; IG I³89). Many of the Upper Macedonians maintained their independence by armed conflict and alliances with the Lower Macedonian king’s enemies. In 433, Derdas I, king of Elimeia, allied himself with the Athenians and a pretender to the throne of Lower Macedonia (Thuc. 1.57.3). Derdas II likewise ruled an independent Elimeia and formed an alliance with the Spartans in 383/382 against the Olynthians (Xen. Hell. 5.2.38).⁸ In the late 420s, Arrhabaeus, the king of Lyncestis, was openly hostile to the Lower ‘Macedonian’ kings.⁹ Making the weakness of the Lower Macedonian kingdom even more peculiar was that the government was theoretically an autocracy, with a king unchecked by serious constitutional limitations. However, a closer examination reveals that the availability of resources and a centralized government structure were potentialities only. The apparent paradox in part is the result of the diverse history of ‘Macedonia’. The earliest tradition holds that the original Macedonians were a group of related tribes, part of which moved from the western mountains down into the central plain during the period from c. 650 to 550 (Thuc. 2.99.1–3; cf. Thuc. 4.83.1).¹⁰ The Macedonian tribes displaced most of those they encountered from their lands, but not all of these populations. Many Bisaltians and Crestonians are later found living in Pieria (Thuc. 4.109.4), suggesting that the evacuations and expulsions were not as complete as indicated by the sources, with many of these peoples, perhaps, remaining in their original homelands. This may also have been the case with the other peoples who are listed as having been expelled. These included the original Pierians, Bottiaeans, Edonians, Eordaeans and Almopians (Thuc. 2.99.2–6; cf. Ellis 1976: 36).

Moreover, while the Macedonian king was in theory an autocrat, Macedonia was not a bureaucratic state. In fact, there was virtually no bureaucracy at all until the reigns of Philip and Alexander. Foreign Hetairoi, like their Macedonian counterparts, would be given large tracts of land by the king (cf. Athen. 6.261a). The king ruled through his Hetairoi, his companions. These individuals were mostly members of the powerful landed Macedonian aristocracy, although some were from different lands who owed their status to their appointment by the king ([Theopompus] BNJ 115 F-224). Of the eighty-four individuals identified as members of Alexander the Great’s Hetairoi, nine were Greeks (Stagakis 1962: 79–87). These Hetairoi, primarily those native Macedonian aristocrats who owed their status to their birth, were in a very real sense the government (Stagakis 1962: 53–67; 1970: 86–102). They acted as the king’s ambassadors, military commanders, governors, religious representatives and personal advisors. Their relationship with the king, however, was regarded by them as personal, not institutional. The Hetairoi were formally tied to the monarch by religious and social bonds; they sacrificed to the gods, hunted and drank with the king and fought alongside him. There was even a religious festival, the Hetairideia, honouring Zeus Hetairides, celebrating the relationship between the king and his Hetairoi (Athen. 13.572d–e). While there are a number of difficulties with the oft-repeated statement that the Macedonian kingship was Homeric,¹¹ in the particular case of the Hetairoi there are clear parallels. The Myrmidons were the ‘Hetairoi’ of Achilles (Hom. Il. 2.179; 16.168–70, 269), and the Trojan Aeneas had his own ‘Hetairoi’ (Il. 13.489–92). With these individuals the respective hero enjoyed a close personal relationship. The hero and his Hetairoi, like their Macedonian counterparts, fought and shared their leisure activities, and the interaction of the Macedonian king with his companions could be as fractious as that of the Greek champions in the epic. It was not unusual, in fact fairly common, for Macedonian kings to lose their lives at the hands of disgruntled Macedonian Hetairoi.

Land and booty were the means by which a monarch cemented his relationship with his Hetairoi (Samuel 1988: 1276; cf. Billows 1995: 137; Borza 1990: 215). This was certainly part of the traditional Hetairos relationship. Macedonian kings gave their aristocratic ‘cavalry companions’ vast tracts of land ([Theopompus] BNJ 115F–225b; Plut. Alex. 15.3–6). Most of these companions were already the holders of large tracts of land, but the king was expected to share with them whatever new lands might come into his possession. Regarding his other companions, especially his foreign companions, their status as landholders was created by the king. Philip II granted all of the land north of Agora to one Apollonides of Cardia ([Dem.] 7.39; cf. 7.44; Dem. 8.64). Nearchus, Alexander’s fleet commander from Crete, and Laomedon, the Mytilenian, are listed as Macedonians from Amphipolis (Arr. Ind. 18.4). These foreign Hetairoi obviously were the recipients of royal land. Even though the earliest reference to a Macedonian Hetairos dates from the reign of Archelaus I (413–399) (Ael. VH 13.4) and that it has been claimed that the institution derives from Persian antecedents (Kienast 1973: 248–67), the relationship likely dates back to the Bronze Age (Hammond and Griffith 1979: 158–9).

In Macedonia, then, power was shared between the king, who exercised royal patronage, and his Hetairoi, who exercised regional authority. The traditional Macedonian royal court bore a striking resemblance to those depicted in the Iliad. For example, there was heavy drinking mingled with feasting: a way to strengthen the ties between the Macedonian king and his Hetairoi (Pownall 2010: 55–65). In this environment of drinking and feasting the companions deferred to the king as something akin to the master of ceremonies, the ruler of the feast. Camaraderie ruled the feast. There was little deference paid to their host as sovereign lord with its attendant ceremony (cf. Polyb. 5.27.5–7). As Charles Edson said in 1970 (24), ‘It is little wonder that to Greeks of the old Greek city-states this archaic society with its stolid peasantry, boisterous nobles and patriarchal king should seem alien, un-Hellenic …’

While the ‘Greeks’ generally regarded the Macedonians as barbarians, Macedonia at least from the fifth century was part of the Greek cultural milieu. Macedonia and the southern Greeks shared most of the same gods, and the Greek alphabet and language were employed at the very least for written communication.¹² Of the roughly 6,300 inscriptions recovered within the confines of what was ancient Macedonia, approximately 99 per cent were written in Greek (Panayotou 2007: 436), and the legends on all currently discovered Macedonian coins are in Greek (Price 1974). The evidence also suggests that the language spoken by most Macedonians was a dialect of Greek (Voutiras 1996: 678–82; Masson 1996: 905–6; Anson 2009B: 5–30). Yet, even during the reigns of Philip and Alexander and despite the sharing of language, religion and other cultural aspects, Macedonians were not, as noted in the Introduction, seen as true Greeks. That the Greeks generally acknowledged a distinction between themselves and the Macedonians was due primarily to the lack of cities and city-state culture that characterized the more urbanized southern Greek city-states. Macedonia was primarily an agricultural society which lacked much urban development (Millett 2010: 480). Moreover, the region was ruled by kings and powerful aristocrats, not by the assemblies that characterized the governments of the city-states, the poleis. There were also significant differences in their respective cultures based on these two very different concepts of government. Macedonian elite society was not tempered by what could be called the middle-class values of the Greek city-states. This was in many ways a warrior society that still possessed many of the attributes of a more tribal society. Even in the fourth century BC, traces of blood feuds still existed (Diod. 19.51.1, 5; Curt. 5.11.20). The major occupation of the Macedonian elite was hunting, and a noble who failed to spear a wild boar without using a net was required to sit, not recline, at table (Athen. 1.18a). A close second to hunting was feasting and drinking. The aristocratic lifestyle that typified upper-class Macedonian society is clearly found in the elaborate tombs of these individuals that have been excavated throughout Macedonia.¹³

Another significant difference between the southern Greek culture of the city-states and that of Macedonia, deriving from the rural, not urban, nature of Macedonian society, was the lack of heavy infantry in the Macedonian armies.¹⁴ Thanks to their broad plain, both Macedonia and Thessaly to the south had excellent cavalries, and the infantries tended to be lightly armed and ill trained. The basic soldier of the city-state was a heavily armed hoplite. Hoplites by and large represented these communities’ middle class. Typically, these heavy infantrymen had to supply their own equipment – the round, three-foot-in-diameter shield, the seven- to eight-foot stabbing spear, greaves and breastplate – since the cities themselves were seldom wealthy enough to do so. Macedonia, although a wealthy region (Millett 2010), with certain products even seen as royal monopolies, especially timber and minerals,¹⁵ possessed few hoplites due to its lack of cities and a middle class. With few cities and hardly any middle class, the Macedonian state would have had to supply each soldier with the hoplite panoply and hence Macedonia until the reign of Philip II was incapable of producing native heavy infantry (see Chapter 2). This lack of a tradition of heavy infantry meant ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Map of Ancient Greece
• Map of the Peloponnesus
• Map of Asia Minor
• Map of Ancient Macedonia
• List of Abbreviations
• Philip II: A Chronology
• Philip the Great: An Introduction
• 1 Macedonia before Philip
• 2 Philip II and the New Model Army
• 3 Philip and the Creation of the Macedonian Nation
• 4 Philip II and the Safeguarding of Macedonia
• 5 The Creation of Macedonian Hegemony in the Wider World
• Appendix 1 Philip’s Ambitions
• Appendix 2 Philip a God?
• Appendix 3 The Death of a King
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright