Philip II of Macedon

Philip was born around 385 BCE, the youngest son of King Amyntas III of Macedon and his wife Eurydice ^[1]. Macedon in those years was a precarious kingdom. Illyrian raiders pressed from the west, Thracian tribes from the east, and the Greek cities of the Chalcidice meddled in dynastic quarrels. Amyntas held his throne partly through payments and shifting alliances, and his sons grew up understanding that survival required both diplomacy and force.

As a teenager Philip spent roughly three years as a hostage in Thebes, then the leading military power in Greece ^[2]. The arrangement, common in Greek interstate politics, placed him in the city during the years when the generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas were refining infantry tactics and the use of concentrated force at a decisive point. Ancient writers, including Plutarch, connected Philip's later military ideas to this Theban education, and modern historians generally accept that the experience shaped him ^[2].

He returned to a kingdom in crisis. His eldest brother Alexander II had been murdered, and the second, Perdiccas III, died in battle against the Illyrians in 360 or 359 BCE along with some four thousand Macedonian soldiers ^[1]. Perdiccas left an infant heir, Amyntas IV. Philip, in his mid twenties, first acted as regent and then took the kingship outright, facing invaders on several frontiers and at least three rival claimants to the throne ^[3].

The opening years of the reign showed the pattern that defined Philip II of Macedon's career: buy time with gifts and promises, then strike when ready. He paid off the Paeonians, bribed the Thracian king to abandon one pretender, and persuaded Athens to drop another by renouncing Macedonian claims to the coastal city of Amphipolis ^[3]. With his borders quiet for a season, he rebuilt the army.

Philip's military reforms were the foundation of everything that followed. He equipped his infantry with the sarissa, a pike of roughly five to six meters, far longer than the spear of a Greek hoplite, and drilled them to fight in a deep, disciplined phalanx ^[4]. He kept troops under arms year round rather than for a summer campaigning season, developed siege machinery, and coordinated the phalanx with the aristocratic Companion cavalry, which delivered the decisive charge while the pikemen pinned the enemy line ^[4]. The result was arguably the first professional national army in European history.

In 358 BCE he crushed the Illyrians under Bardylis, avenging his brother and recovering upper Macedonia ^[3]. The next year he took Amphipolis after all, gaining access to the gold and silver mines of Mount Pangaeus, which soon yielded, according to Diodorus Siculus, a thousand talents a year ^[5]. That revenue paid soldiers, financed sieges, and funded the bribery for which Philip became notorious. He captured Pydna, Potidaea, and in 354 BCE Methone, where an arrow or bolt cost him his right eye during the siege ^[1].

Any account of Philip II of Macedon achievements begins with Thessaly and the Sacred War. Invited to intervene in a Thessalian dispute, he suffered two rare defeats against the Phocian general Onomarchus in 353 BCE, then returned the following year and destroyed the Phocian army at the Battle of Crocus Field, one of the bloodiest battles ever fought between Greeks ^[5]. The Thessalians elected him archon of their league, giving him legitimate authority inside Greece and command of the finest cavalry in the peninsula ^[3].

His expansion continued east and north. In 348 BCE he captured and razed Olynthus, the chief city of the Chalcidice, selling its population into slavery, a act that shocked Greek opinion and sharpened the warnings of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whose speeches against Philip gave the language the word philippic ^[6]. Campaigns in Thrace through the 340s carried Macedonian control toward the Black Sea, and Philip founded the city of Philippopolis, modern Plovdiv in Bulgaria, as an anchor of that conquest ^[1].

The decisive confrontation came when Athens and Thebes, old rivals, finally combined against him. At Chaeronea in Boeotia in August 338 BCE, Philip's army defeated the allied Greek forces. The eighteen year old Alexander commanded the cavalry wing that broke the famous Theban Sacred Band ^[2]. Victory made Philip master of Greece. Rather than garrison every city, he summoned representatives to Corinth in 337 BCE and organized the League of Corinth, a common peace under Macedonian leadership. The league promptly elected him commander of a planned war against the Persian Empire, framed as retribution for Xerxes' invasion of Greece nearly 150 years earlier ^[3].

Philip practiced polygamy in the traditional manner of Macedonian kings, and his marriages were instruments of policy. Ancient sources credit him with seven wives, including the Illyrian Audata, the Thessalian Philinna (mother of his son Arrhidaeus), and most consequentially Olympias, a princess of the Molossians of Epirus, whom he married around 357 BCE and who bore Alexander in 356 ^[7]. The satirist Satyrus, quoted by Athenaeus, remarked that Philip made war by marriage.

The royal household was combustible. In 337 BCE Philip took a final wife, Cleopatra, ward of his general Attalus and, unlike Olympias, a Macedonian noblewoman. At the wedding feast Attalus reportedly toasted the prospect of a legitimate heir, provoking a violent quarrel between Philip and Alexander. Olympias and Alexander withdrew from court for a time before a formal reconciliation ^[7]. The episode, recorded by Plutarch, left lasting suspicion between father and son.

Philip's body carried the record of his campaigns. Besides the lost eye at Methone, he suffered a shattered collarbone and a leg wound from a Thracian spear that left him lame ^[1]. Excavations at Vergina in northern Greece, ancient Aigai, uncovered royal tombs in 1977, and many archaeologists, following Manolis Andronikos, have argued that one of them held Philip's remains, though scholars continue to debate which occupant of the tombs he was ^[8].

By 336 BCE preparations for the Persian expedition were under way. Philip sent an advance force of about ten thousand men under his generals Parmenion and Attalus across the Hellespont into Asia Minor to secure a bridgehead and win over Greek cities on the coast ^[3]. The main army was to follow under the king himself.

He never sailed. In October 336 BCE, at Aigai, the old royal capital, Philip staged lavish festivities for the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra to Alexander I of Epirus, the brother of Olympias. As he entered the theater, deliberately unaccompanied by his bodyguards to display confidence before the assembled Greeks, a young member of his own guard named Pausanias stabbed him to death ^[5]. The assassin fled toward waiting horses but tripped and was killed on the spot by pursuing guardsmen.

Diodorus and other ancient writers explain the murder as personal revenge: Pausanias had been brutally abused in an episode involving Attalus and had received no justice from Philip ^[5]. From antiquity onward, however, suspicion has also fallen on Olympias, whose position the new marriage threatened, and even on Alexander himself. No ancient source settles the question, and historians treat the deeper motives behind the assassination as unresolved ^[7]. Alexander was acclaimed king by the army within days.

Philip's twenty three year reign changed the political map of the ancient Mediterranean. He inherited a kingdom that neighbors invaded almost at will and left a state controlling the southern Balkans from the Adriatic approaches to the Black Sea, with the Greek city states bound into a league under his command ^[1]. The battle of Chaeronea is conventionally treated as the end of the classical era of independent Greek poleis.

His institutional legacy proved even larger than his conquests. The army Alexander led to the Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela was Philip's creation: its pike phalanx, its Companion cavalry, its engineers and siege train, its core of veteran officers such as Parmenion and Antipater ^[4]. The Persian war itself was Philip's project, adopted and vastly expanded by his son. The ancient historian Theopompus, no admirer of Philip's character, still wrote that Europe had never produced such a man ^[6].

Among the basic Philip II of Macedon facts that endure in modern memory: the city of Philippi bore his name and later gave its name to a battle of the Roman civil wars and a letter of Saint Paul, Plovdiv continues a foundation of his, and the gold philippeioi coins he struck circulated far beyond his borders ^[1]. Modern biographies and the museum built over the Vergina tombs have kept Philip from being remembered only as Alexander's father. Any serious Philip II of Macedon biography now presents him as the architect whose work made the conquests of the next generation possible ^[8].