Philip II of Macedon: the maker of an army

Philip II is often overshadowed by his son, but it was Philip who built the machine. He turned the weak, divided kingdom of Macedon into the greatest military power in Greece, forging a new kind of army around the long pike, and by war and diplomacy he mastered the Greek city-states, leaving Alexander one of the most formidable armies of its day.¹

Early life: a hostage in Thebes

Philip was born in 382 BC, the youngest of the three sons of King Amyntas III. As a boy he watched the kingdom come apart: his elder brothers Alexander II and Perdiccas III each reigned for a few years and fought in vain against rebellious regional princes, the interference of Thebes and Illyrian invasions from the northwest.²

The decisive years of his education came as a hostage. Diodorus tells how the Illyrians, who had defeated Amyntas, took the young Philip as a hostage and placed him with the Thebans, who lodged him with the father of Epaminondas. Thebes was then the leading power in Greece, and Britannica calls Epaminondas the most inventive tactician of all Greek generals until then, in charge of the best army in Greece.³

Rise: the crisis of 359 BC

Philip came to the throne suddenly in 359 BC, when Perdiccas was killed fighting an Illyrian invasion. The Illyrians were closing in, the Paeonians were raiding from the north, and two pretenders had foreign backing. Philip, then about 23, bought off his dangerous neighbors, ceded Amphipolis to Athens by treaty and used the time he had gained to prepare. Britannica judges that the decisive innovations in arms, tactics and training probably belong to this first year.⁴

Coming to the throne of a threatened kingdom in 359 BC, Philip rebuilt its army from the ground up. He armed his infantry with the sarissa, a pike far longer than any Greek spear, and drilled them into a deep, bristling phalanx, then combined it with heavy cavalry, siege engines and light troops into a single professional force, one of the most effective armies the ancient world had seen. Diodorus says he held constant maneuvers and competitive drills.⁵

Campaigns

In 358 he invaded Paeonia and then crushed the Illyrians in a battle that, in Britannica's words, already suggests a master of war. His marriage in 357 to Olympias, a princess of Epirus and the future mother of Alexander, secured his western frontier. That year he took back Amphipolis, the key to Thrace, and in 356 he seized Crenides, which he renamed Philippi; Diodorus says he raised the output of its gold mines so far that they brought in more than a thousand talents a year, money that paid for mercenaries and bought friends across Greece.⁶

War brought wounds as well as gains. At the siege of Methone in 354, Diodorus records, he was struck in the eye by an arrow and lost the sight of it. In Thessaly he suffered his only great defeat in the field, against the Phocian general Onomarchus in 353, which Britannica puts down to overconfidence and poor reconnaissance; the next year he won a spectacular victory on the Crocus Field, which made him head of the Thessalian League. He then took Olynthus and annexed the Chalcidice in 348, ended the Sacred War and in 346 made peace with Athens.⁷

In Athens the orator Demosthenes saw him as a mortal threat and spent years trying to rouse the Greeks against him. From 342 Philip annexed much of Thrace, and his sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium in 340 showed how far his siege engineering had come, though Athens declared war and both cities held out. With this army Philip expanded in every direction, and in 338 BC he crushed the combined armies of Athens, Thebes and their allies at Chaeronea, breaking the independence of the southern Greek states, Sparta apart.⁸

Diodorus puts his army at Chaeronea at more than 30,000 infantry and at least 2,000 cavalry. Philip took one wing himself and gave the other to his eighteen-year-old son Alexander, flanked by his most experienced generals, and Alexander was first to break the enemy line. Britannica sees Philip's own skill in a controlled retreat meant to draw the Greeks forward and open gaps for his cavalry. The Athenian orator Lycurgus, quoted by Diodorus, counted a thousand citizens dead and two thousand taken prisoner. In 337 BC he bound the Greeks into the League of Corinth under his leadership and prepared a great war against the Persian Empire.⁹

The peace he imposed was shrewder than the victory. Thebes had to accept a Macedonian garrison and a pro-Macedonian government, but Athens, Britannica notes, suffered no invasion, kept its democracy, its walls and its fleet, because Philip needed the Athenian navy for a war in which the Persians had to be denied the Aegean. At Corinth in 337 the delegates of every Greek state except Sparta swore to a common peace, with a council of representatives that voted on action against any breaker of the peace and Philip as its leader (hegemon), entitled to call on the states for troops and ships. Corinth itself, as Britannica dryly observes, was one of only three Greek cities with a Macedonian garrison. Early in 336 an advance force of the Macedonian army crossed into Asia Minor.¹⁰

Character and command style

Britannica's portrait is of a subtle, pliant, patient and calculating diplomat, a master of timing in politics and war, who was willing to wait six years to gain the pass of Thermopylae by negotiation rather than fight for it. He preferred to buy, persuade or divide before he struck, and even with all the military initiative in his hands it was he who first offered Athens peace in 346. Diodorus, writing centuries later, judged that he excelled in shrewdness in the art of war, courage and brilliance of personality.¹¹

His enemies saw another man. The historian Theopompus, who knew him at close quarters, made much of his drinking, debauchery and wild extravagance, and Britannica allows that, even discounting a faultfinding witness, his character had real ambiguities. His many marriages were mostly political, but his last, in 338 according to Britannica, to the Macedonian Cleopatra drove Olympias and Alexander from court, a misjudgment that Philip took pains to repair with his son.¹²

Death and legacy

Philip never launched his Persian war. In 336 BC, at Aegae, during the festival for the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra to Alexander of Epirus, he was stabbed to death by Pausanias, one of his own bodyguards, for reasons still debated. The official account blamed a private grievance against Attalus, the young queen's uncle, and against Philip for denying him justice; Pausanias was killed on the spot, and suspicion fell on Olympias and Alexander, though Aristotle treated the murder as a crime of private motive. The throne, and the army he had built, passed to his twenty-year-old son, Alexander.¹³

Alexander's genius is famous, but he inherited the instrument of his conquests. Philip was the reformer and organizer who made Macedon the leading power in Greece, and without his army the conquest of Persia would have been unthinkable. Diodorus observes that he left armies so numerous and powerful that his son had no need to look for allies.¹⁴

His grave may survive. UNESCO, describing the royal tombs of Aigai at modern Vergina, identifies one of the unlooted tombs discovered in the Great Tumulus in 1977 and 1978 as that of Philip II, a sensation of modern archaeology, though the attribution of that tomb is still argued over, some scholars preferring Philip III.¹⁵

Meet his son Alexander the Great, or explore the other great commanders of ancient Greece.