Philip II of Macedonia

Macedonian king (r. 359-336 b.c.e.)

• Born: 382 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Macedonia (now in Greece)
• Died: 336 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Aegae, Macedonia (now in Greece)

Philip inherited a backward kingdom on the verge of collapse and made it a powerful state. His military innovations revolutionized warfare and created the army that would conquer the Persian Empire.

Early Life

Situated on the northern frontier of the Greek world, Macedonia had long remained a kingdom without real unity. From their capitals of Aegae and Pella near the Aegean coast, the ancestors of Philip (FIHL-ihp) had ruled the eastern area of lower Macedonia since the seventh century b.c.e. They exercised only a tenuous rule inland over upper Macedonia, however, and suffered repeated invasions and interference from their neighbors, barbarian and Greek alike. Philip’s direct experience of these problems during the reigns of his father and two older brothers helps explain his determination as king to reverse Macedonia’s precarious position.

In 393, Philip’s father, Amyntas, suffered his first expulsion at the hands of the Illyrians, his neighbors to the west. Amyntas soon regained his throne, but he secured peace with the Illyrians only by paying tribute. As part of the settlement, he also married an Illyrian princess, Eurydice—the future mother of Philip. Ten years later a second Illyrian invasion forced Amyntas to entrust a portion of this kingdom to the Chalcidian Greeks, who refused to relinquish it. By 382, the year of Philip’s birth, they had extended their control westward to include Amyntas’s capital, Pella. An intervention by Sparta, then the most powerful of the Greek states, restored Amyntas to his capital in 379, but the Spartans demanded Macedonia’s subservience to Sparta.

When Philip’s older brother Alexander II assumed the throne in 370, the now-adolescent Philip went as a hostage to the Illyrians, who also demanded tribute as the price of peace. The boy returned home to find Alexander in a civil war that invited intervention by Thebes, the ascendant Greek city-state since the defeat of Sparta in 371. In 368, after the Thebans resolved the conflict in favor of Alexander, Philip and thirty other sons of Macedonian nobles were sent to Thebes as a guarantee of Macedonian obedience to Theban wishes.

For three years Philip observed Thebes at the peak of its diplomatic and military power. Later accounts of the military lessons of this visit are probably exaggerated, but this experience must have influenced Philip. At the very least it allowed him to understand how the Greeks conducted their affairs, and it may explain his later severe treatment of Thebes. Following the assassination of Alexander, a second Theban intervention saved the throne for Philip’s other brother, Perdiccas III, and brought more hostages to Thebes.

Back in Macedonia after 365, Philip received a district of his own and witnessed seizures of Macedonian coastal territory by the Athenians. In 359 he may have taken part in the disastrous Illyrian expedition that resulted in the death of Perdiccas and four thousand Macedonian soldiers. After the death of his brother, Philip—at age twenty-three—became the eighteenth king of Macedonia.

Life’s Work

Philip inherited a kingdom on the verge of disintegration. Rival heirs challenged his right to the throne, the army threatened to collapse, and enemies menaced on all sides. Fortunately, the Illyrians did not choose to follow their victory with an invasion. To the north, however, the Paeonians began to raid Macedonian territory, while a Thracian king supported a pretender who claimed the kingship. Diplomacy and bribery forestalled these threats, while Philip dealt with a more immediate danger: Another pretender, backed by the Athenians, marched on the ancestral capital, Aegae, with three thousand mercenaries. After ensuring the loyalty of the capital, the young king trapped and disposed of his rival. Wisely, he then made conciliatory gestures to the Athenians in order to neutralize them while he returned his attention to the barbarians.

The opportune death of the Paeonian king allowed Philip to force an alliance on his weaker successor, and by 358 Philip felt secure enough to lead a revitalized Macedonian army west against his most dangerous foes, the Illyrians. The details of his first major battle remain unclear, but Philip won a decisive victory and inflicted unusually severe casualties on his defeated enemy—three-quarters of the Illyrian army reportedly died. Followed by his marriage to an Illyrian princess, this victory secured his western frontier and allowed him to consolidate his position in Macedonia. As part of that consolidation, Philip began the transformation of Macedonia from a largely pastoral society to a more agriculturally based and urbanized state. Less visible than his military activities, these internal changes were equally important to the rise of Macedonia.

His dramatic victory over the Illyrians indicates that Philip had already begun the reorganization of the Macedonian army that would revolutionize warfare and make Macedonia the supreme military power in the Mediterranean region. One year after his unfortunate brother had lost four thousand men to the Illyrians, Philip fielded a force of ten thousand foot soldiers and six hundred horsemen. (By the time of Philip’s death, the Macedonian army would comprise at least twenty-four thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry, with numerous supporting troops.) As important as the increase in manpower was Philip’s use of heavy cavalry as a primary instrument of attack against infantry, a tactic that explains the remarkably high rate of casualties among his foes. Equally significant was his redesign of the traditional Greek phalanx infantry formation, which he used in expert combination with his horsemen. Superbly trained to fight as a unit, Philip’s phalangites used a novel fifteen-foot pike, the sarissa, and wore minimal defensive armor. Their success depended on careful coordination with cavalry and lighter armed infantry. Philip’s army also included specialists in siege techniques, who introduced the torsion catapult and tall siege towers. The evolution of this fighting force is obscure, but Philip clearly began his military reform early—he suffered only one defeat in his entire career.

With his kingdom more or less secure from barbarian threats, Philip abandoned his conciliatory posture toward the Athenians and moved to eliminate their presence on his eastern frontier. In 357 he seized the strategic city of Amphipolis, founded by the Athenians eighty years previously. This move gave Philip access to the rich gold and silver mines of neighboring Mount Pangaeus, which eventually rendered him an annual revenue of one thousand talents. Philip next took Pydna, one of two Athenian-controlled cities on the lower Macedonian coast. In 354 his successful siege of Methone eliminated the last Athenian base in Macedonia but at a considerable cost to Philip: During the assault on the city an arrow destroyed his right eye.

Once he had placed Athens on the defensive, Philip moved against two nearby Greek districts that had threatened Macedonia during his youth: Thessaly to the south, Chalcidice to the east. His venture into Thessaly in 353 produced the only serious defeat of his career, but Philip came back the next year to win the Battle of the Crocus Plain, in which six thousand enemy soldiers died. This victory, followed by his election as president of the Thessalian League and his marriage to a Thessalian princess, brought Thessaly, with its renowned supply of horses, securely under Macedonian control. In 349 Philip began his move against the thirty-odd cities of the Chalcidian League, which he subdued one by one. Olynthus, the most important city of the league and the last holdout, fell after a two-month siege in 348. Philip razed the city and enslaved its inhabitants. Having eliminated most threats in the north, Philip now turned his attention to the city-states of central and southern Greece. The former victim of Greek interventions had become the intervener.

In 346, after obtaining a peace with Athens recognizing his right to Amphipolis, Philip in a surprise move came south and forced an end to the so-called Sacred War, which had been waged for nearly a decade. By intervening against the Phocians, whose sacrilegious seizure of the international sanctuary at Delphi had brought them almost universal condemnation, he cleverly played to Greek public opinion. Moreover, his refusal to punish the Athenians, despite their aid to the Phocians, suggests that already Philip had decided to attack Persia and hoped to use the Athenian navy in that effort. Philip withdrew from Greece late in 346 to continue his work of consolidation in Macedonia.

A shattered shinbone in 345 kept Philip out of military action for a few years, but in 342 he began a systematic attack on Thrace and in 340 laid siege to the strategic cities of Perinthus and Byzantium, which overlooked the sea lane through the Bosporus. This move threatened the grain supply of the Athenians, who responded with aid to Byzantium. When the sieges of these well-fortified cities proved more difficult than expected, Philip abandoned them, declared war on Athens, and in 339 invaded Greece. At Chaeronea in August of 338 Philip faced a Greek army headed by Athens and Thebes. The battle was long, and Philip appears to have won through a controlled retreat of his right wing that created a break in the Greek line. Philip’s son Alexander, who would be known later as Alexander the Great, struck through this gap with the cavalry against the Theban contingent, while Philip with his infantry crushed the Athenian wing. The elite Sacred Band of Thebes was completely destroyed, and half the Athenian participants were killed or captured. Greece lay at Philip’s mercy, and many city-states anxiously expected the worst.

Philip sought their compliance, however, not their destruction, and with the exception of Thebes and Sparta he treated them leniently. He summoned representatives from all the Greek states to a congress at Corinth, where they swore to a common peace and formed what modern historians call the League of Corinth. Its members accepted Philip as their leader and agreed to provide troops for a common armed force. Early in 337, at Philip’s request, the council of the league declared war on Persia and named Philip the supreme commander for the anticipated conflict.

Returning home in triumph, Philip began final preparations for the attack on Persia and took as his seventh wife a young Macedonian noblewoman named Cleopatra. His previous marriages had all shown political shrewdness, but this one was most impolitic and alienated Philip’s primary wife-queen, Olympias, and her son, the crown prince Alexander. After a drunken encounter in which Philip drew his sword against Alexander, both mother and prince fled Macedonia.

With advance units of the Persian expedition already in Asia, military and political necessities forced him to arrange a reconciliation of sorts with Alexander, but Philip did not live to lead the invasion. In the summer of 336, as he attended the wedding festival of his daughter, one of his bodyguards, Pausanias, stabbed him to death. Although the murderer was almost certainly driven by a private grievance, the rift within the royal family brought suspicion on Alexander and Olympias, who were the primary beneficiaries of Philip’s untimely death. Whatever the truth of this matter, Alexander succeeded Philip as king of Macedonia at a most opportune moment. Using Philip’s army, he would make himself the most famous conqueror in history.

Significance

Philip II of Macedonia inherited a backward, largely pastoral kingdom on the verge of disintegration and in his twenty-three-year reign transformed it into a major power. Less visible than his military endeavors, his domestic reforms were no less important. By bringing new areas under cultivation, founding new towns, and resettling upland populations, he made Macedonia a more advanced and cohesive kingdom. His military innovations revolutionized warfare and produced the best army the world had yet seen. With it he won three major pitched battles, suffered only one significant defeat, and successfully besieged nine cities. A general of great bravery and energy, Philip also possessed good strategic sense and never lost sight of his objectives. He saw war as an instrument of policy, not an end in itself, and used it along with diplomacy to achieve realistic ends.

Unfortunately for Greece, Philip’s success meant the end of Greek independence, and his victory at Chaeronea effectively ended the era of the autonomous city-state. Philip created the army that Alexander would employ to destroy the Persian Empire. Had he lived, it is likely that Philip would have used it in a more restrained and constructive fashion than did his brilliant son.

Bibliography

Adcock, Frank E. The Greek and Macedonian Art of War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. This small volume provides an excellent brief introduction to Greek warfare, with appropriate references to Philip’s innovations.

Bradford, Alfred S. Philip II of Macedon: A Life from the Ancient Sources. New York: Praeger, 1992. Compiled from fragments of ancient writings, epitomies, and passages from the orators, this volume integrates all the significant classical writings about Philip. Includes maps and illustrations based on ancient artifacts.

Bury, J. B., S. A. Cook, and Frank E. Adcock, eds. The Cambridge Ancient History. 12 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Chapters 8 and 9 in volume 6 describe Philip’s rise to power with emphasis on his relations with the Greeks, especially the Athenians.

Cawkwell, George. Philip of Macedon. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. An excellent—though brief—biography, with outstanding maps. References to secondary works are minimal, but the notes contain a full record of the primary sources. The discussion of Greek military practices and Philip’s part in their evolution is especially good.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily. Translated by C. H. Oldfather et al. 12 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962-1983. Book 16 in volumes 7 and 8 provides the only surviving ancient narrative of Philip’s reign, interspersed with descriptions of activities in other parts of the Greek world. Diodorus must be used with care, because his account is sometimes inconsistent and chronologically confused.

Hammond, N. G. L., and G. T. Griffith. A History of Macedonia. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972-1988. Volume 2, chapter 4 (by Hammond) provides a fine picture of Macedonia’s weak condition in the forty years before Philip’s accession. Chapters 5 through 20 (by Griffith) form the fullest, most authoritative biography of Philip available, with complete discussion of sources and chronological problems.

Hatzopoulos, Miltiades B., and Louisa D. Loukopoulos, eds. Philip of Macedon. London: Heinemann, 1981. A collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars of Macedonian history. Included are chapters on Philip’s personality, his generalship, his coinage, his foreign policy, his achievement in Macedonia, his death, and the royal tombs at Vergina. This volume is beautifully illustrated and includes excellent maps, a chronological table, and a bibliography.