Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  The king’s companions, although loyal in battle, intrigued against him. They resented many a king for being a sexual omnivore. The king could keep concubines as well as a wife, and often seduced young men at court. Sometimes a discarded youth would kill him. The century before Philip came to power repeatedly illustrated this pattern of courtly homosexuality, murder, and revenge.20

  The leading powers in the region, Persia and the Greek states, had sometimes trifled with wretched Macedon. The Persians had passed through when they invaded Greece in 480. They asked the Macedonian king to submit, and he agreed. He and his chums could neither resist nor rebel. They failed to join the Persians because the invaders did not want them. During the Peloponnesian War, Athens punished Macedon for sometimes supporting Sparta, and Sparta punished Macedon for sometimes supporting Athens.21

  Early in the fourth century, the brigands of nearby Illyria attacked Macedon. The first Illyrian king, Bardylis, had taught his bravos to fight like Greeks. They used standard equipment, mainly spears, and they drilled, lined up, and obeyed rudimentary orders. Macedonians were still fighting like Homeric individualists. When Philip was thirteen, Bardylis killed the Macedonian king in battle and annexed territory. The surviving members of the royal family and the companions bribed Bardylis to make peace, partly by offering Philip and thirty others as hostages. Philip ended up in Thebes, where he saw good troops drill and met their officers.22

  He was far better off than he would have been in Macedon. A brother of his had got the throne, only to be assassinated within a year or so at a war dance held at court. A second brother of Philip’s became king, but he died in battle against Bardylis. The companions then decided to give the throne to a child, perhaps to suit themselves, but perhaps at the behest of princes who were raising troops abroad. Needing a guardian for the child, they sent for Philip.23

  The Thebans gladly let Philip go home to this disastrous situation. Not long after returning to Macedon, he became regent. Neither the Thebans nor Bardylis realized this twenty-two-year-old novice ruler carried an entire army in his head.24

  to survive, the new regent of Macedon needed to turn the companions into military leaders. Philip had no school for them to attend, and so he could not assign them a curriculum. He did have religion, and so he gave them a cult.

  The Macedonian word “companion” had a rustic, Homeric flavor. The Macedonian companions worshipped together, hunted together, and fought together. Common worship taught them that they shared the same god; the hunt taught them that they shared spoils; war taught them that they shared command. Their leader, the king, was priest, master of the hunt, and commander. There was no procedure for admission to this circle, save that the candidate had to be acceptable to the king and had to kill a boar without a net. Until then, he wore a halter instead of a belt. Afterward, he could join the sword dances performed at court.25

  Even more than war, hunting revealed the ethos of the companions. This ethos was to preserve one’s fellows at all costs. The best description of it appears in the Iliad. In this poem, men are companions to one another because they are in imminent danger, as they would be when hunting big game. Social ties do not matter. In the heat of combat, even strangers can be companions. Just as hunters would rally around a wounded member of their party, Homeric warriors fight harder because their companions are wounded. Just as hunters may feel vengeful toward an animal that has killed one of them, Homeric warriors take vengeance because a companion has been killed. A great warrior would be indomitable in revenge, just as Achilles is indomitable once his companion Patroclus has been killed.26

  In a hunt, neither the king nor anybody else gave many orders. They made suggestions or acted spontaneously. Homeric companions did not give orders to one another, either. That made fighting in formation impossible. Warriors did not maneuver or even line up.27

  Philip needed to instill a different ethos in his men. Loyalty must be irrevocable. Companions must obey orders, yet be free to modify them. They must belong to an institution, and belong for life. On his authority as king, Philip brought his men into a cult in which they pledged themselves to Zeus, the patron of companions. Since the king was the cult leader, they also pledged themselves to him as well. This pledge was the most sacred possible oath. If the companions were in his company, they would join him in daily offerings to the gods.28

  Before, companions had been courtiers, just as they had been comrades in arms in Homer. Philip made companionship both formal and portable. It was not revocable. A companion in a military post might be sacked, but he could not lose his status. He would remain senior or junior according to his service and reputation.29

  Companions were no longer mostly landlords or chieftains of the original Macedonian cantons. More and more of them were outsiders and even Greek immigrants. One companion was a dancer; another had been a serf in Thessaly.30 Philip’s Greek biographer, Theopompus (not a companion himself), complained, “His companions had been scarfed up from everywhere. … Any sexpot, wretch, or arriviste from Greece or abroad would do. Practically everybody like that gathered in Macedon so that they could be addressed as companions of Philip.” To the Greeks, a “companion” was not typically a military officer. He was a member of an oligarchic political club or a prostitute. So Philip had to teach the new arrivals companionship, or, as Theopompus saw it, teach them to be immoral: “If a man wasn't like that when he came, Macedonian life and manners made him the same as everybody else.”

  In the course of Philip’s reign, the number of companions increased from several dozen to 800. An entourage became an organization. A tradition of worship and fellowship turned into something more adaptable but better controlled, a sort of religious guild for military officers.31

  Where did Philip get this idea? Perhaps from the Spartans and Cretans. All Spartan infantrymen banded together with those in the same platoon and swore an oath. The commander of the platoon conducted the ceremony. The words of the oath have not survived, but the recruits likely pledged to obey their superiors and especially the king of Sparta. Members of the platoon may have dined together in civilian life. Like Philip’s companions, they did not all come from the same family or neighborhood. These social aspects would have appealed to Philip, as would the pledge to the king.32

  Some Cretan cities enrolled future soldiers into a cult. A magistrate rather than a king performed the rite, and the troops pledged to be loyal to the city instead of an individual. Zeus was the patron god, and all citizens of military age belonged. The religious ceremony gave companionship a touch of mystery lacking in Sparta. Although Philip could not have known exactly what happened in this ceremony, he had joined a cult on the island of Samothrace. The gods there promised to protect voyagers. In Philip’s rite, Zeus would protect soldiers who followed Philip’s orders.

  Greek cult ceremonies sometimes culminated in an epiphany, but no one would expect Zeus to appear in person amid the participants in Philip’s cult. The king thus would not find himself upstaged. Greek ceremonies also conferred the blessing of a happy afterlife, another irrelevant feature. The afterlife was not Zeus’s business, and it was not Philip’s, either, once he buried the dead.33

  The formalization of companionship did not deprive the king of any traditional privileges. At the annual purification of the army, the king still cut a sheep in half, put the remains on both sides of a road, and marched his men between them. To found a city, he would circumambulate the site, making offerings to welcome the gods and ward off demons. He celebrated victories by sacrificing animals, and he received suppliants. He still had the duty of burying his dead comrades—burning the body on a pyre, pouring offerings, and building a tomb.34

  After formalizing and enlarging the cult, Philip assigned military tasks to the companions. Many became officers in the heavy infantry. The most important of them commanded regiments of about 1,500. Philip named each regiment after its commander, like Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian Wars, or Merrill’s Marauders in World War II.
He (or perhaps it was Alexander) gave them purple cloaks, the same color as the king’s. The color that marked social rank in the Near East marked military rank in Macedon.35

  Philip turned the royal pages, so tempting or dangerous for earlier kings, into companions-in-training. Many would become infantry or cavalry officers or hold other high posts. Some of Alexander’s childhood friends may have been pages. Because they served the king at table and in his bedchamber, they may have seen Philip more than Alexander did.36

  When companions did wrong, who would punish them? Sometimes the king did. At other times he asked the senior companions to. Deferring to these veterans was not mere politesse on the king’s part. To wield power, he sometimes had to share it. In the same spirit, he rarely killed political opponents except when he took power. He apparently never killed any of the companions. So, although Philip made the use of force his main business, he did not make slaughter his business. Philip behaved professionally (not that he used that word), and he expected his officers to do the same.37

  How would Philip bind his companions to the mass of Macedonian shepherds, vagabonds, and peasants serving in the infantry regiments? He acknowledged them as “foot companions.” He inducted them into the cult of the companions, ordered them to attend some offerings to this god, and to make a pledge. He also gave them eighteen-foot cherrywood pikes to keep men and horses at bay and drilled them ceaselessly. Alexander would later promote some “foot companions” to the rank of officer.38

  By establishing “foot companions,” Philip spread a new military ethos throughout his Macedonian forces, and to spread it farther, to allied troops, he sometimes put Macedonians in command. The entire force counted as a kind of elite, like the special forces of the twenty-first century. Philip, though, was not creating helicopter-borne squads of experts. He was assembling the largest as well as the best army in Greek history. Yet he was not megalomaniacal. He shared operational control with his companions.

  Through companionship, Philip offered his men a career open to talents, but not on a democratic, secular basis. For new companions who were immigrants, he was the best available employer. For old companions, raised in Macedon, he was a mixed blessing. Before Philip, the Macedonian elite had dominated royal councils. Some princes and their relatives cosigned treaties with foreign powers. Now that they had more money, higher commands, and bigger reputations, but Philip alone signed the treaties. Philip had done to the companions what Louis XIV did to the French nobility: they left their estates and came to Versailles, where they lived better but less freely. Philip had replaced the quasi-Homeric world of family and friendship with a bigger world of institutions.39

  For the females surrounding him, Philip had a simpler but no less radical idea. Before, Macedonian rulers had had one wife at a time. Eager to form diplomatic ties with his neighbors, especially those with good armies, Philip turned polygamous. He married seven times, and most of his wives may have been alive at the time of his death. Against the odds, he had only two sons, one of whom was militarily incompetent and thus ineligible for the throne. Alexander, who served in the army from the time he was a teenager, was the other.40

  philip commenced his reforms as soon as he became regent. The Illyrian brigand Bardylis refused to return all the territory he had taken from Philip’s predecessors, and Philip picked a fight with him. As soon as Philip reorganized and reequipped his army, he led it against Bardylis, now ninety years old but still vigorous after half a century of success against the Macedonians and other neighbors. In 358 Philip prevailed in a clash in a remote valley between the two kingdoms. His new army had won its first victory against an opponent fighting in the modern, Greek manner. Rather than humiliate Bardylis, he made him an ally and married his daughter—the first of his seven wives.41

  Philip fought in all directions, including eastward, at the port town of Olynthus. His siege engines and slingers rained terror on the city. Some of the troops inscribed messages on the lead shot they were firing—Philip’s sort of message, imperious but good-humored: “Here’s one, swallow it,” “It rained,” and “Ouch.” And, in case of a prospective female captive: “Conceive.” Olynthus retaliated with artillery fire of its own. As Philip was inspecting his catapults, a bolt shot from the city walls put out one of his eyes. The city fell after a siege of only two months—something of a military record. Thanks to immigrant companions, Philip had built the best siege train in the Greek world.42

  To the south, Philip struck a bargain with the neighboring Thessalians, and married two of them. This important Greek region made him their chief military magistrate and gave him use of their cavalry. Unlike the Macedonians, who rode in a wedge-shaped formation, the Thessalians rode in a diamond, and they were even better trained. Although not companions, they let Philip conduct religious ceremonies on their behalf. Even as his army grew, Philip maintained his religious primacy.43

  Next, Philip married the daughter of the king of Epirus, to the southwest. This princess, Polyxena, became his fifth wife—a more prestigious consort than the other four, for the Epirote royal family claimed descent from Achilles. She may have met Philip at a cult ceremony. In their different ways, both of them were keen about cult membership. She also had the recommendation of being able to read and write (Philip’s mother had not learned to read until late in life). Polyxena bore Philip’s first healthy son, Alexander, in 356.44

  Alexander became Philip’s next project, albeit one that he and Polyxena both neglected at first. Female slaves largely raised the infant Alexander, and they told him his first religious stories, about monsters as well as gods or heroes. Alexander’s chief nurse, Lanica, was the Macedonian daughter of a herdsman rich enough to own horses. Her brother, a cavalry officer, later saved Alexander’s life. A horse was the one gift Alexander’s parents are said to have given him. They did not give him a saddle or stirrups, two conveniences that did not yet exist. Good riders guided their horses with their knees, leaving both hands free to hold a spear. Alexander soon mastered these equestrian skills.45

  By the time Alexander was eight or ten, Philip assigned to him some male slaves who taught him Greek. One tutor flattered the boy by calling him Achilles, the hero of the Iliad. Alexander memorized the whole poem. Unlike the monsters evoked by the slaves, some of Homer’s characters were ancestors—Achilles, Heracles, and collaterally the god Dionysus. Like Heracles, Alexander descended from Zeus.46

  By age thirteen he needed a better tutor, and Philip gave this post to the son of a physician to the royal family. It may seem that Philip was now taking his son much more seriously, for the tutor was Aristotle. Yet the Aristotle of Alexander’s youth was not the fountainhead of knowledge that posterity would admire. Athens, where Aristotle had studied under Plato, had become unfriendly toward him, and his income was flagging, so he came home to Macedon to tutor a pupil whose father would pay on time. He taught other pupils, too, including a son of Antipater, Philip’s senior subordinate.

  Alexander may have learned some geography from Aristotle, but not much warfare or religion. Aristotle contributed most by stimulating his pupil’s curiosity. Much of Aristotle’s work depended on gathering and classifying specimens, some of which were political, not natural, such as his collection of hundreds of constitutions from the Greek world and elsewhere. Alexander would eventually collect political specimens, too, but as subjects to rule and not texts to study. Whereas Aristotle studied large bodies of water to learn what was in them, Alexander would want to know how to appease them, cross them, and if necessary move them.47

  Alexander learned ritual from his parents. Since his mother was a priestess of Dionysus, he could watch her as well as Philip make offerings, and he made some himself amidst his friends. (A tutor told him to sacrifice modestly, and he resented it.) Soon he knew some of the tricks of the trade: when the tail of a sacrificial animal was cut off and thrown on the altar, it would curl the wrong way, downward, before it straightened up and curled upward as the fire got hotter. Watching it wa
s like dialing a familiar phone number. One surely would get through, but would the god answer, and if he did, what would he say? That was an advanced religious subject.48

  Alexander learned to be exacting. One day as he was sacrificing and an assistant—a Macedonian noble’s son—was swinging a thurible full of hot coals, the youth dropped a coal on his arm. The boy did not dare cry out. That would irritate the god, and Alexander, too. Alexander did not know what had happened until he smelled the boy’s burning flesh. Rather than stop, he continued the ceremony. He wanted to test the boy.49

  Alexander was always one to raise standards. Tradition required dozens of cattle be given to Zeus annually at Dium, but Alexander set one hundred dining couches for a banquet in honor of Zeus’s daughters, the Muses. That would show Zeus, and show his future Macedonian subjects, too.50

  Alexander learned more about Zeus from his mother. Her family were the patrons of the important shrine to Zeus at Dodona in her native Epirus. Rather than a temple, it was a grove, where the priestesses of the god received oracles by listening to the breeze in the oak trees. Sometimes the priestesses, called doves, received messages from the god without having to listen. Sometimes a clinking sound made by bronze tripods, a common Greek religious object, replaced the breeze. However the god spoke, the priestesses delivered his message to those who had come to obtain an oracle. This method of communicating with Zeus had supposedly come to Dodona from an African shrine sacred to Amon, the Zeus of the Egyptians. Thus did the Zeus at Dodona become the Zeus-Amon known to Macedonians.51