Philip II

Philip II (born 382 bce—died 336, Aegae [now Vergina, Greece]) was the 18th king of Macedonia (359–336 bce), who restored internal peace to his country and by 339 had gained domination over all of Greece by military and diplomatic means, thus laying the foundations for its expansion under his son Alexander III the Great.

Early life and accession

Philip was a son of Amyntas III. In his boyhood he saw the Macedonian kingdom disintegrating while his elder brothers Alexander II and Perdiccas III, who each reigned for a few years, strove unsuccessfully against insubordination of their regional vassal princes, intervention of the strong Greek city Thebes, and invasion by the Illyrians of the northwest frontier.

Philip himself spent some time as a hostage at Thebes, the leading city (with Athens) of this decade (370–360 bce), where the great Epaminondas, the most inventive tactician of all Greek generals until then, was in charge of the best army in Greece. These were probably the most formative years of Philip’s education. When he returned to Macedonia his brother Perdiccas soon found him ready for a command.

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Philip came to the throne suddenly and unexpectedly in 359, when Perdiccas was killed meeting an Illyrian invasion. The Illyrians prepared to close in; the Paeonians were raiding from the north, and two claimants to the throne were supported by foreign powers. In this crisis Philip showed a good sense of priorities by buying off his dangerous neighbours and, with a treaty, ceding Amphipolis to Athens. He used the time gained in military preparations. The army that later conquered Persia was developed all through his reign, but the decisive innovations in arms—the sarissa, a pike nearly one and a half times as long as the spear of the Greeks—tactics, and training belong probably to this first year.

Macedonian expansion

In 358 he invaded Paeonia, and then he defeated the Illyrians decisively, in a battle that already suggests a master of war. The next year his marriage with Olympias, the Molossian princess of Epirus (the mother of Alexander the Great), helped to stabilize his western frontier. Now he ventured to antagonize Athens by recapturing Amphipolis, the strategic key securing the eastern frontier and giving access into Thrace; and in 356 he took the west Thracian Crenides (renamed by him Philippi), a place newly founded to exploit new finds of silver and gold in Mount Pangaeum. These successes frightened his neighbours into forming a coalition against him, which was joined by Athens; but it achieved nothing.

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The 10-year “war for Amphipolis” with Athens showed that the Athenians, with all their naval power, were quite unable to damage the continental and military power of Macedonia or even to save their own allies from Philip’s attacks. Meanwhile he twice penetrated deeply into Thrace. And in the south a Thessaly divided against itself gave him an entry into Greece. These same 10 years saw central Greece immersed in the Sacred War to liberate Delphi from its occupation by the Phocians, enabling Philip to intervene as the ally of Thebes and the Thessalian League of city states. His only great defeat in the field came in Thessaly in 353, owing (it seems) to overconfidence and failure of reconnaissance. The next year he retrieved it with a spectacular victory, which forced the Athenians to occupy Thermopylae and bar his path to the south.

Presidency of the Thessalian League

Characteristically, Philip declined the trial of strength, prepared to wait for six years until he could gain Thermopylae by negotiation and without striking a blow. Meanwhile his Thessalian victory earned him election as president (archōn) of the Thessalian League (probably 352), a position unique for a foreigner in a Greek confederation and one that was to bind Thessaly to the kings of Macedonia for 150 years and more.

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Philip’s capture of Olynthus and annexation of Chalcidice in 348, enslaving the Olynthians and other of the Chalcidians, was disquieting to many. The Greeks themselves occasionally were brutal to small cities, but Olynthus was a large city. Philip’s enemies could affect a high moral tone and contempt for a barbarous Macedonian, but even his friends might have wondered whether he ought to be allowed into the heart of Greece with an army. Yet there were many ways in which he could serve them. Particularly, he could finish the Sacred War, which the Thessalians, Thebans, and others still could not finish for themselves. Athens could not prevent this now and had reason to fear that Philip’s next campaign in Thrace (346) might challenge its own control of the sea route to southern Russia, its main source for imported grain. Significantly, however, it was Philip, and not Athens, who made the first overtures for peace, though all the military initiatives lay in his own hand. His plans for the future, in Greece and farther afield, included Athens as a willing ally, not as a defeated enemy.

Even before the peace with Athens was ratified (346), the Athenian publicist Isocrates was inviting Philip to reconcile the four leading cities of Greece and to lead a united Greek alliance in a war of expansion against Persia. A step in this direction was Philip’s intervention now to end the Sacred War, in recognition of which he was admitted to membership of the Delphic Amphictyony—an association of neighbouring states. The votes of the Thessalians and their clients gave him a control of its council, which could be used on occasion for political and diplomatic ends.

He lost no opportunity in the next years (346–343) of penetrating Greece without war, by winning and buying friends among the politicians of the smaller cities and intervening occasionally with subsidies or a force of mercenaries in their local disturbances. This policy made him some enemies, too, and it played into the hands of the great orator Demosthenes and others at Athens. Demosthenes saw Philip now as a bar to Athenian greatness and a threat to its freedom and existence; he talked tirelessly to warn the Athenians of the danger and to convince the Greeks in general that it was their danger too. Philip in these years conciliated Athens in small ways even under provocation, but he came to see that Demosthenes and the anti-Macedonians were beyond conciliation (343–342). Meanwhile, he reasserted his suzerainty over the neighbouring Illyrians, tightened his grip on Thessaly, and in 342 began the series of campaigns in Thrace that enabled him in two years to annex great parts of it as a province, and finally to demonstrate his power against the Scythians settled on the southern banks of the Danube Delta. The events in Thrace caused two of his Greek allies, the cities of Perinthus (later called Heraclea, present-day Marmaraereğlisi) and Byzantium, to review their position, and his coercion of them led to the two great sieges that showed the development of his artillery and allied arms, of which his son Alexander was to make greater use in Asia.

The declaration of war by Athens in 340 enabled him to raise the two sieges without undue loss of face, though he had failed to establish a threat to the Athenian grain route to southern Russia. Athens was to be intimidated now by invasion of its territory through central Greece, where the key position was held by Thebes, his ally hitherto, but of late a dissatisfied and recalcitrant one. His services to it in the Sacred War had been more than offset by his new position as its successful rival for leadership in and through the Amphictyony, and his moves toward hegemony in Greece could be seen in Thebes as encroachments.