Philip II of Macedon

Philip II was king of Macedon from 359 BCE until his assassination in 336 BCE. He took over a weak, divided kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world, rebuilt its army, expanded its territory and, after defeating Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BCE, became the master of mainland Greece. He is often overshadowed by his son, Alexander the Great, but the army, the wealth and the plan for a war against Persia that Alexander inherited were all Philip's.

Philip was born in 382 BCE, the youngest son of King Amyntas III and Eurydice, a noblewoman from the hill region of Lynkestis. Macedon was then a loose, largely rural kingdom, rich in timber and horses but pressed on all sides by Illyrians, Thracians and Paeonians, and repeatedly drawn into the quarrels of the southern Greek cities. Its kings claimed Greek descent and took part in the Olympic Games, but many southern Greeks regarded Macedonians as semi-barbarian.

As a teenager, around 368 to 365 BCE, Philip was held as a hostage in Thebes, then the strongest power in Greece. He lived in the house of a leading citizen and is said to have studied the methods of the Theban generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas, whose army had broken Spartan power at Leuctra in 371 BCE. How much he learned there is impossible to measure, but later writers saw it as the origin of his military reforms.

His brothers Alexander II and Perdiccas III each reigned briefly. In 359 BCE Perdiccas was killed in battle against the Illyrians along with thousands of his men, leaving a young son as heir. Philip, then about twenty-three, took control, at first possibly as regent for his nephew and soon as king. He faced several rival claimants backed by Athens and other powers, as well as invading neighbours. Through a mix of bribery, diplomacy and quick military action he dealt with them one by one, and in 358 BCE he decisively defeated the Illyrian king Bardylis.

Philip's lasting achievement was the Macedonian army. He turned the kingdom's farmers into a professional infantry phalanx armed with the sarissa, a pike around five or six metres long, much longer than the spears of Greek hoplites, so that several rows of points projected in front of the formation. The infantry held the enemy in place while the heavy cavalry, the Companions, drawn from the nobility, struck at the flanks. He added light troops, engineers and siege equipment, drilled the men hard and kept them in the field year-round. The army was paid for by expansion, especially by the gold and silver mines around Mount Pangaion, which he seized in 356 BCE, refounding the town of Krenides as Philippi.

Over the next two decades Philip pushed Macedon's borders outward. He captured Amphipolis, an important Athenian interest, in 357 BCE, and then Pydna and Potidaea. He lost his right eye to an arrow at the siege of Methone in 354 BCE. Intervening in Thessaly during the Third Sacred War, a conflict over control of the shrine at Delphi, he suffered two defeats in 353 but crushed the Phocians at the Battle of the Crocus Field in 352 BCE and became the effective ruler of Thessaly. In 348 he took Olynthus, the leading city of the Chalcidice, razed it and sold its people into slavery. The Peace of Philocrates with Athens in 346 BCE left him in a dominant position in central Greece. He also campaigned repeatedly in Thrace, in what is now Bulgaria, and founded the city of Philippopolis, modern Plovdiv.

In Athens, opinion was split. The orator Demosthenes, in a series of speeches known as the Philippics, warned that Philip aimed to destroy Greek freedom, while others, such as Isocrates, hoped he might unite the Greeks against Persia. Philip's sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium in 340 BCE, which threatened Athens' grain supply from the Black Sea, led to open war. In August 338 BCE, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, his army defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes. His son Alexander, then eighteen, commanded the cavalry on the left wing. Philip garrisoned Thebes but treated Athens leniently.

In 337 BCE Philip gathered representatives of the Greek states, except Sparta, which refused, at Corinth. They formed an alliance, known today as the League of Corinth, with Philip as its leader; members swore to keep the peace among themselves and to support a war against the Persian Achaemenid Empire, presented as revenge for the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. In the spring of 336 BCE an advance force under his general Parmenion crossed into Asia Minor.

Philip married at least seven times, often to seal alliances. His wives included Olympias, a princess of Epirus and mother of Alexander and a daughter, Cleopatra. In 343 BCE he brought the philosopher Aristotle to Macedon to tutor Alexander. In 337 BCE he married Cleopatra, a young Macedonian noblewoman, niece of his general Attalus. At the wedding feast Attalus is said to have prayed for a legitimate heir, and a furious quarrel followed; Olympias and Alexander left the court for a time, though Alexander was soon reconciled with his father.

In October 336 BCE, at Aegae, the old royal capital, Philip was celebrating the marriage of his daughter Cleopatra to Alexander, king of Epirus. As he entered the theatre he was stabbed to death by Pausanias, a member of his own bodyguard. Ancient writers explain the murder as private revenge for an insult that Philip had failed to punish, but rumours from the start implicated Olympias, Alexander or even the Persian king. No evidence settles the question. Alexander succeeded him and moved swiftly against rivals.

In 1977 the Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos excavated a group of royal tombs at Vergina, the site of Aegae, including an unlooted tomb with a gold casket containing cremated bones and rich grave goods. He identified it as Philip's tomb. Others have argued that it belonged to Philip III Arrhidaeus, Alexander's half-brother, and that Philip II lies in a neighbouring tomb; the identification is still debated.

Philip turned Macedon into the strongest military power in the Greek world and ended the age in which independent city-states shaped Greek politics. His conquests laid the base of the Macedonian Empire that Alexander carried to Egypt and India, and opened the way to the Hellenistic period. The ancient kingdom lay mostly in what is now northern Greece, and its legacy is claimed in both the History of Greece and the History of North Macedonia.