The Fourth-Century Crisis · Theban Hegemony · The Sarissa & Companion Cavalry · Chaeronea · The League of Corinth · Demosthenes
The Peloponnesian War left Greece drained and divided. Sparta, the victor, attempted to impose its hegemony over the whole Greek world, but its harsh rule bred resentment. Its brutal occupation of Athens by the Thirty Tyrants (404–403 BC) was quickly overthrown and democracy restored. Sparta’s campaigns — including the high-risk march of 10,000 Greek mercenaries into Persia recorded by Xenophon in his Anabasis (“the March of the Ten Thousand,” 401–399 BC) — exposed both Persian weakness and Greek mercenary skill. Sparta then crushed its rival cities: in the Corinthian War (395–387 BC) it fought a coalition of Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Argos, and by the King’s Peace (387 BC) Persia dictated terms — a humiliating reminder that Greek freedom now depended on Persian favour (World History Encyclopedia, "Theban Hegemony," worldhistory.org/Theban_Hegemony/).
Sparta’s oppressive rule — it illegally seized the Cadmea (the citadel of Thebes) in 382 BC and garrisoned it — finally provoked resistance. In 379 BC a band of Theban exiles, led by Pelopidas, liberated Thebes, and the city rebuilt itself as the champion of Greek freedom, creating the famous elite Sacred Band, a corps of 300 paired lovers (“150 pairs”) who, in the words of Plutarch, fought so that each might shame the other’s eyes. For a generation Thebes would be the greatest power in Greece (World History Encyclopedia, "Theban Hegemony," worldhistory.org/Theban_Hegemony/).
The architect of Theban greatness was Epaminondas (c. 418–362 BC), a general and statesman of genius. In 371 BC, at the Battle of Leuctra, he wrecked the invincible reputation of the Spartan army. Sparta had never lost a pitched battle against hoplites; Epaminondas defeated them by an invention — the oblique order. Instead of lining up his forces evenly, he concentrated his best troops, the Sacred Band and a fifty-rank-deep column, on his left wing, and drove it like a spear through the Spartan right, killing the Spartan king Cleombrotus and routing the rest. Sparta suffered losses on a scale it had not known for centuries and never fully recovered (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Leuctra," worldhistory.org/leuctra/).
Epaminondas followed victory with statesmanship: he invaded the Peloponnese and, in 370–369 BC, founded the city of Messene at the foot of Mount Ithome, liberating the Messenian helots who had laboured under Sparta for centuries. He also built the city of Megalopolis as the capital of a new Arcadian League to counterbalance Sparta. His death at the Battle of Mantinea (362 BC), where the Thebans won a hollow victory, ended the Theban moment; the battle was, in Xenophon’s words, so indecisive that "there was even more confusion and disorder in Greece after the battle than before." Into the resulting vacuum stepped a northern kingdom long dismissed as a backward land of barbarians: Macedon (World History Encyclopedia, "Epaminondas," worldhistory.org/Epaminondas/).
Philip II was born c. 383 BC, the youngest son of Amyntas III, king of the Argead house which traced descent from Heracles by way of Argos. As a youth (c. 367 BC) he had been a hostage in Thebes, where he studied under the master Epaminondas and learned the new tactics and the discipline of the Sacred Band first-hand — an education that would remake his own kingdom. On his accession in 359 BC, aged about 24, he inherited a weak, threatened, semi-barbarous country beset by Illyrian, Paeonian and Thracian enemies and torn by dynastic strife. He immediately safeguarded his borders, defeating the Illyrians in 359 BC, and then set about the task for which he is justly famed: the transformation of the Macedonian army (World History Encyclopedia, "Philip II of Macedon," worldhistory.org/philip_ii_of_macedon/).
Philip’s genius was to combine the best of two worlds: the disciplined close-order infantry of the Greek phalanx (learned at Thebes) and the mounted shock cavalry of his native northern aristocracy. His infantry, the pezhetairoi (“foot companions”), were armed with the sarissa — a pike of 18 to 20 feet (roughly 5.5–6.5 metres), far longer than the traditional hoplite spear of about 2–3 metres. Ranged in a deep phalanx of compact ranks, with the pikes of the front ranks lowered and the rear ranks angled upward, the sarissa phalanx presented an impenetrable hedge of iron — men in rear ranks could not be reached by enemy swords at all. The phalanx thus became a moving fortress of long pikes, able to hold and grind down any opponent in frontal combat. Each soldier carried, in addition, a shorter sword (the xiphos) for the moment of closing (World History Encyclopedia, "Sarissa," worldhistory.org/Sarissa/).
Complementing the phalanx was the heavy mounted elite, the Companion cavalry (hetairoi), recruited from the Macedonian nobility and armed with the xyston (a long thrusting lance) for shock charges. In Philip’s (and later Alexander’s) system, the decisive instrument of victory was usually the Companion charge on the flank, while the sarissa phalanx pinned the enemy’s centre. Philip also created the hypaspists (“shield-bearers”), a flexible elite infantry used as a link between the heavy phalanx and the cavalry, and developed siege warfare — torsion artillery (catapults firing bolts and stones), siege towers and rams — that conquered walled cities no Greek army had been able to take by assault — as at the sieges of Olynthus (348 BC) and Byzantium (World History Encyclopedia, "Companion Cavalry," worldhistory.org/Companion_Cavalry/).
The other half of Philip’s greatness was political and diplomatic. He won as many cities with gold and alliance as with the sword, and his own coinage — struck from the gold and silver mines of Mount Pangaeum in Thrace, which he seized in 357–356 BC — gave him the wealth to pay professional soldiers and buy Greek loyalties. He founded the cities of Philippi (named for himself, on the site of the old Crenides) and Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv) after defeating the Thracians.
Philip spent the 350s and 340s consolidating his northern empire and then pushing into the Greek world. The catalyst was Greek self-destruction. In 355 BC the Third Sacred War broke out — a bitter conflict over control of the sanctuary and treasury of Delphi between the Amphictyonic League and the Phocians, who had plundered the Delphic treasure to pay an army of mercenaries. Philip intervened as the avenger of Apollo’s sanctuary, defeating the Phocians at the Battle of the Crocus Field in Thessaly (c. 353 BC) and, in 346 BC, ending the war — a move that won him a seat on the Amphictyonic Council and the moral high ground in Greece. Meanwhile, in 348 BC, he took by siege the great city of Olynthus on the Chalcidic peninsula, a rival centre of power, and destroyed it (the occasion of the touching pleas of the orator Demosthenes for Athens to act). By the mid-340s Philip commanded Macedonia, Thessaly, Thrace and much of northern Greece, and Athens watched him with mounting alarm (World History Encyclopedia, "Philip II of Macedon," worldhistory.org/philip_ii_of_macedon/).
The great voice against Philip was the Athenian orator Demosthenes (384–322 BC), whose fiery speeches — the Philippics (351, 344, 341 BC) and the Olynthiacs (349 BC) — denounced Philip as a cunning tyrant and urged Athens to arm and resist. Demosthenes is regarded as the greatest of the Greek orators, and his speeches are models of rhetoric; his warnings, however, came too late, for the divided Greek cities could not unite. Where his rival Isocrates urged the Greeks to unite under Philip for a war of revenge against Persia (the idea Philip would adopt), Demosthenes insisted on Athenian and Greek liberty at all costs. His foreboding would prove tragically justified at Chaeronea (World History Encyclopedia, "Demosthenes," worldhistory.org/Demosthenes/).
In 338 BC the long-avoided clash came. Athens and Thebes at last combined their forces — some 35,000 men — and met Philip’s Macedonians on the plain of Chaeronea in Boeotia. It was a hard-fought battle. On the Macedonian left, the young prince Alexander, aged about 18 and commanding the Companion cavalry, tore through the Sacred Band of Thebes, which fought to the last man (all 300 were slain and buried under a colossal stone lion whose base still stands). The rest of the allied line broke, and the Greek resistance to Macedonian conquest was finished. The scale of the defeat — it ended the independence of the great city-states — was such that some Athenians preferred to believe, on the false rumour that Philip had been killed, and celebrated before the truth arrived. With Chaeronea, the era of the independent, dominant polis was over (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Chaeronea," worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Chaeronea/).
Philip was magnanimous in victory — he treated Athens with surprising leniency, returned its prisoners without ransom out of respect for its culture, and installed a garrison only at Thebes (his old city of bonds). He then organised a new order for Greece: in 337 BC he created the League of Corinth (the "Hellenic League"), a federation of the Greek states, each autonomous in its internal affairs but sworn to common peace and sworn not to attack one another. Membership was effectively compulsory, and at its head stood Philip himself as hegemon (leader) and strategos autokrator (commander-in-chief). Sparta alone refused to join. The League’s declared great project was a bold one: a pan-Hellenic war of revenge against Persia, to avenge the burning of the Greek temples by Xerxes in 480 BC. In 336 BC the advance force of about 10,000 men crossed into Asia Minor under the generals Parmenion and Attalus to begin the conquest.
It was at this moment of triumph that Philip’s life ended. In the autumn of 336 BC, at the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra in the theatre at Aegae, he was stabbed to death by Pausanias, one of his own bodyguards, in what appears to have been a private revenge (the motives are murky; some ancient sources hint at the involvement of Philip’s divorced wife Olympias, the mother of Alexander, or of the Persians). He was about 47. He had turned a poor, weak backwater into the master of Greece and had prepared the greatest conquest the world had yet seen — a conquest that his son Alexander would carry out in a single decade (World History Encyclopedia, "Philip II of Macedon," worldhistory.org/philip_ii_of_macedon/).
The turbulent fourth century was also the greatest age of Greek philosophy and science. Plato (c. 428–348 BC), pupil of Socrates, founded the Academy in Athens c. 387 BC, the first institution of higher learning in the western world, and wrote the Republic, Phaedo, Symposium and Timaeus, works that established the forms, the theory of knowledge and the model of the ideal state — he even attempted, twice and disastrously, to advise the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse. His greatest student was Aristotle (384–322 BC), who studied at the Academy for twenty years, was summoned by Philip c. 343 BC to tutor the young Alexander, and later founded his own Lyceum in Athens, where he wrote on logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics, poetry and metaphysics — the most influential thinker of antiquity. The professional teacher Isocrates (436–338 BC) perfected the new art of oratory and wrote his famous Panegyricus urging Greek unity against Persia. It was a civilisation at the peak of its intellectual genius that handed itself over, exhausted, to the kings of Macedon (World History Encyclopedia, "Aristotle," worldhistory.org/aristotle/).
To understand Philip’s rise one must understand what Macedon was and how the rest of Greece regarded it. Macedonia (Makedonia), in the north of the Greek peninsula between the mountains of Epirus and the Aegean coast, was a land of rich plains, timber and pasture, ruled by kings of the Argead dynasty, who traced their descent from Argos and from Heracles. The Macedonians spoke a Greek dialect, and the Argeads had competed (through their kings Alexander I and Archelaus) at the Olympic Games and patronised Greek culture — Euripides died in Macedon at the court of Archelaus. Yet to the southern Greeks — Athenians above all — Macedon was a semi-barbarous backwater of brawling nobles, mountain clans and a monarchy’s absolute rule, very different from the democratic and oligarchic poleis: the great orator Demosthenes routinely dismissed Philip as a "barbarian" and a "wolf." This prejudice blinded the Greeks to the danger. Philip was a Greek-speaker who admired Greek culture (he employed Aristotle as tutor to his son and built at Olympia the Philippeion, a monument of his dynasty) — yet at the same time he commanded a different world: a military monarchy, unconstrained by assemblies, free to wage continuous war and to draw on the manpower and resources of the north. It was this combination — the discipline and tactics he had learned in the civilised south (at Thebes) harnessed to the raw power of a northern kingdom — that made Macedon unstoppable (World History Encyclopedia, "Macedon," worldhistory.org/macedon/).
Philip’s first task, on taking the throne in 359 BC, was simply to survive: on three sides threatening neighbours pressed on Macedon. To the west were the Illyrians, a warlike people who had killed his brother Perdiccas III and overrun parts of Macedonia; to the east and north-east were the Thracians and Paeonians and the Greek cities of the Chalcidice; to the south the Thessalians. Philip dealt with each in turn: he bought off the Paeonians and Thracians with gifts, defeated the Illyrians in 358 BC, and won a decisive victory over the Thracians in 356 BC at Philippi (the city he founded on the site of Crenides, named for himself), thereby seizing the gold and silver mines of Mount Pangaeum. The revenue — traditionally some 1,000 talents a year — was the foundation of his power: it paid for his professional army (citizens and mercenaries), for the siege machinery and ships, and for the diplomacy with which he attached allies and bought off enemies across Greece ("a donkey laden with gold can storm any citadel," he is said to have remarked on bribing the city of Olynthus, though the story is later and probably invented). He secured the northern frontiers — founding Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv) in Thrace after campaign in 342 BC — and by the 340s commanded a compact, wealthy, professional kingdom poised to descend upon the divided city-states of the south (World History Encyclopedia, "Philip II of Macedon," worldhistory.org/philip_ii_of_macedon/).
Philip was as skilled a diplomat as a soldier — his motto, it was said, was to win with gold any city he could not take with the sword. After Chaeronea (338 BC) he treated his Greek enemies with calculated moderation: he returned Athenian prisoners without ransom, left Athens its democratic institutions, and imposed a garrison only on Thebes, the old enemy that had humiliated him as a hostage. In 337 BC he convened at Corinth the congress that created the League of Corinth (the "Hellenic League"). Its members, the Greek states (essentially all except Sparta), swore a common peace, promising not to make war on one another, to respect each other’s existing constitutions, and to fight as "allies" under the hegemon Philip, who was appointed strategos autokrator (commander-in-chief) for the planned war against Persia. The League’s declared purpose was the great pan-Hellenic expedition of revenge — to avenge the burning of the temples of Hellas by Xerxes in 480 BC. This was, in effect, a Greek national war under Macedonian leadership, and it provided the constitutional frame within which Alexander would make his conquests. Philip’s assassination in 336 BC, on the eve of the expedition, left the great project to his son — but it was Philip, the supposed backwater king, who had conceived, unified and prepared it (World History Encyclopedia, "Philip II of Macedon," worldhistory.org/philip_ii_of_macedon/).
https://www.worldhistory.org/philip_ii_of_macedon/https://www.worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Chaeronea/https://www.worldhistory.org/Theban_Hegemony/https://www.worldhistory.org/leuctra/https://www.worldhistory.org/Epaminondas/https://www.worldhistory.org/Sarissa/https://www.worldhistory.org/Companion_Cavalry/https://www.worldhistory.org/Demosthenes/https://www.worldhistory.org/aristotle/The gods grant this favour to none other, to join a quarrel with their enemies, and by their own hands to stain the enemy’s spoils; yours the gain, the song your hands have won is sung for all.— Greek victory song for Philip II of Macedon after Chaeronea (as recorded in Pausanias)