The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  Some of the skilled experts recruited by Philip were talented Macedonians, but others were Greek. The availability of Greek expertise is not a sufficient explanation for the rise of Macedon or the political fall of Greece. As noted above, there were in the fourth century any number of states at the margins of the Greek world, ruled by aggressive “opportunists” who were eager and able employers of Greek expertise. In the end, of course, it was Macedon alone that posed an existential threat to the independence of the great poleis of the Greek world. Although the ready availability of Greek expertise cannot be sufficient to explain Philip’s success, it is entirely plausible to suppose that it was a necessary condition for it. Pushing the argument one step further, the availability of Greek expertise and a recognition of how to use it to advantage may be regarded not only as the key similarity between Philip and the other fourth century opportunists, but also as the key differentiator between imperial Macedon in the fourth century BCE and imperial Persia in the fifth.

  Unlike Xerxes, who took on an alliance of Greek states at the head of military forces (at least insofar as the land army is concerned) organized and armed in the tradition of multiethnic Persian armies, Philip led a state that was, in various ways, Greek-like in its financial and military organization. When Greek armed forces confronted Macedonians in the mid-fourth century, they had none of the advantages in arms, armor, unit cohesion, training, maneuver, or morale that their ancestors had enjoyed relative to the armies of Darius and Xerxes in the fifth century. In a meaningful sense, when they faced Philip’s Macedonians, Greek soldiers were confronted with more experienced, better-armed, better-trained, and better-led versions of themselves.

  I suggest that the two key areas in which Philip’s Macedon benefited from Greek expertise were financial administration and military organization and technology. But those specific areas were developed against a general background of Greeks in Macedonian service and the related phenomenon of elite Macedonian uptake of Greek culture. There is no doubt that Greek language, literature, art, and architecture were increasingly incorporated into elite Macedonian society during Philip’s reign. Elite Macedonians in the king’s court spoke Greek and were at home in the greater Greek world. While we know regrettably little about Philip’s civil administration, we do know that he employed Greeks as ambassadors (e.g., Python of Byzantion) and at least one Greek secretary: the ferociously competent Eumenes, a citizen of Kardia (i665), a small (size 2) but important (fame rank 3) polis on the northern shore of the Thracian Chersonese. Eumenes’ role in Philip’s administration is unknown, but under Alexander he became a principal secretary. After Alexander’s death Eumenes became a first-tier military commander in an age otherwise dominated by ethnically Macedonian warlords and soldiers.29

  Perhaps most telling is Philip’s selection of Aristotle as tutor to his son, and presumptive heir. Aristotle, the son of a Greek physician who had attended Philip’s father, Amyntas III, was born in 384 BCE in Stageira (i613), then a prominent (size 4, fame 3) polis on the northeast coast of the Chalkidike Peninsula. Stageira was probably destroyed by Philip, in or around 348 when the Chalkidike was absorbed into the Macedonian empire, although the city may later have been refounded by him. Since about 366 BCE Aristotle had lived in Athens, as a member of Plato’s Academy. He left Athens after Plato’s death in 347. After a few years in Atarneus on the northwestern coast of Anatolia, as the guest of the local dynast/Persian governor Hermias, and then in nearby Mytiline on Lesbos, Aristotle was invited by Philip to Macedon to be Alexander’s tutor. Plutarch mentions instruction in Homeric poetry, but he also supposed that Aristotle offered his pupil political counsel.

  The canonical list of Aristotle’s writings includes two lost treatises that were said to have been specifically written for Alexander, one “on behalf of colonists” and another “on kingship.” I have suggested elsewhere that the treatise on behalf of colonists should be understood in light of Aristotle’s development in book 7 of the Politics of a design for a “best practically achievable” polis. The lost treatise may have specified the sort of men Aristotle believed should be recruited for at least one of the new colonial foundations that he knew Philip and Alexander were planning. While Philip’s aims in hiring Aristotle as a tutor were certainly very far from Dion of Syracuse’s specious plan for having Plato transform the tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher-king (ch. 9), Philip must have believed that immersion in aspects of Greek rational thought, including Greek political theory, would be of value to his heir (see further, below). Alexander himself presumably agreed on the value; in any event when he set off to conquer Asia, he brought with him Aristotle’s nephew, the historian Callisthenes, who had been born in Olynthos before its sack by Philip, along with other Greek experts in various aspects of science and administration.30

  We may readily imagine that Philip recruited useful Greek experts both from free Greeks willing to be paid for their services, like Aristotle, and from enslaved Greek populations; Callisthenes may not have been the only talented Greek from Olynthos in Philip’s employ. There was, in any event, no lack of accomplished Greeks eager to bring themselves to Philip’s attention. Our fragmentary literary record includes genuine letters addressed to Philip by the Athenian orator Isocrates and by the Athenian philosopher Speusippos, as well as spurious letters to Alexander by Aristotle. At any given time, there would be a number of Greeks resident in the court; Speusippos’ letter implies, for example, that the historian and rhetorician, Theopompus, had made himself unpopular at Philip’s court.31 Philip had, as it were, a number of Greek resumes in hand from which he could pick and choose if and when he sought to recruit new talent. Among the Greeks he would have been particularly eager to recruit were individuals with deep experience in taxation and state finance, and in the related areas of mining, coinage, and minting. As we have seen (ch. 9) there is good reason to think that such individuals existed at Athens (and probably in other major poleis) and that the employment of experts by the Athenian state was a key element in sustaining Athens’ economy and influence in the fourth century.32

  Philip was certainly well aware of the power of money. He was as famous in the Greek world for his clever use of money for diplomatic purposes as he was for his military innovations and victories. He was believed to have used his money freely to bring individuals and communities over to his side and was said to have quipped that there was no citadel to which one could not “send up a little donkey laden with gold” (Cicero ad Atticum 1.16.12). Although according to the historian Theopompus, Philip was a poor manager of state funds, this is contradicted by the evidence of his accomplishments and is probably the result of a polemical tradition conjoined with ignorance of how late-classical-era state finances actually worked.33 There is some reason to believe that the Macedonian state was, in the age of Philip, able to raise money through the mechanism of sovereign debt. The Macedonian treasury was thought to be in the red when Alexander took over as king, and Alexander was said to have borrowed heavily before embarking for Asia. If these reports have a basis in truth, they would account for Philip’s reputation as a bad manager among historians who failed to grasp the value of deficit financing. The same reports likewise point to the sophistication of Macedonian state finances.34

  While Philip probably made especially good use of Greek experts, he was not the first Macedonian king to recognize that Macedon needed the kind of fiscal expertise that the Greek world could readily supply. We get a hint of the use of Athenian financial experts by a Macedonian king shortly before the reign of Philip from a late fourth century text wrongly attributed to Aristotle:

  Callistratus, when in Macedonia, caused the harbor-dues, which were usually sold for twenty talents, to produce twice as much. For noticing that only the wealthier men [among the Macedonians] were accustomed to buy them because the sureties for the twenty talents were obliged to show [provide collateral] talent for talent, he issued a proclamation that anyone might buy the dues on furnishing securities for one-third
of the amount, or as much more as could be procured in each case.

  —Pseudo-Aristotle, Economics 2.1350a, trans. Armstrong (Loeb) adapted

  Callistratus of the Athenian deme of Aphidna was a prominent politician who was in exile from Athens in the mid-360s. He was apparently employed as a sort of financial consultant by Perdiccas III, Philip’s immediate predeceessor, and was set to work on the problem of how to increase royal revenues. Callistratus’ innovation, allowing tax farmers to leverage their collateral, evidently broke the monopoly of a few extremely wealthy Macedonians. Once the tax auction was opened to men outside the superwealthy few able to put up twenty talents of collateral, the resulting competition drove up the bidding for the right to farm the relevant taxes to what we may guess was closer to its market price (i.e., just below the amount that could prospectively be realized by the tax farmer).35

  Assuming that the story is true, it is a vivid example of opening access in ways that benefited the state—i.e., the king. The opening of access was done in a carefully controlled and limited way that appears calculated to expand the king’s revenues without upsetting his coalition: The very rich now could participate in an institution formerly monopolized by the super-rich. It is tempting (albeit entirely speculative) to link the passage in the Economics concerning Callistratus to Philip’s success in buying off the Illyrian tribes upon the death of Perdiccas III. A recent increase in the revenues from farming the export taxes could have left enough in the state treasury to give Philip, as incoming king, the means to purchase the time he needed in order to recruit and drill his first substantial army—and thus to begin the process that led to the rise of Greater Macedonia.

  As we have seen, Macedon became a major gold- and silver-minting state after Philip’s takeover of the Pangaion mines in 356. The production and distribution of coinage—including the mining and refining of precious metals, minting of high quality (standard weight, high purity, iconographically distinctive) coins in large quantities, and circulating them through northern Aegean markets—required specialized knowledge at each stage. When recruiting experts to operate his mining and minting operations, Philip could have looked to Athens, the state that had, since the mid-fifth century, been the leading silver-coin producer of the Mediterranean. Athens, like Macedon, controlled rich silver mines. The fourth century was a period of innovation in Athenian practices of mining and refining silver ores. In the middle decades of the century the production of the Laurion mines increased substantially, a result both of new technology and legislation that encouraged mineral exploration. The Athenian mint produced great numbers of high quality coins, which circulated at a premium in Aegean markets (ch. 9). As we have seen, Philip adopted the tetradrachm form (although at a different weight standard) as a standard large-denomination coin. Although we lack direct evidence that Philip brought in Greek experts in mining, processing ores, and minting, it is altogether likely that he did, perhaps, as at Athens, acquiring experienced slaves for some of the work.36

  Along with state finance and resource management, the military is the most obvious area in which Philip’s reforms catapulted Macedon to preeminence in the mid-fourth century. Here, Philip’s innovations not only resemble, but ultimately transcend, the state of the art in the leading Greek poleis of the era. And once again, there is reason to think that Philip self-consciously and selectively employed Greek expertise in achieving his own ends. As his revenues increased, Philip augmented his Macedonian army with Greek mercenaries, but, unlike the armies of the Sicilian tyrants, there is no reason to believe that Macedonian forces were ever predominantly mercenary, nor did Philip hire Greek mercenary generals to command his armies. The most prominent military commanders who fought for Philip were native Macedonians. Yet, as suggested above, the principles on which Philip’s military was organized—heavy infantry, in massed ranks, supported by cavalry and other arms—was adapted from techniques developed in fourth century Greece, and especially Thebes, where Philip had spent several years as a privileged hostage.

  Philip’s ability to build on and ultimately to transcend Greek military practices is demonstrated by the development of a new offensive infantry weapon: the sarissa. The standard heavy infantry weapon of the Greek world had long been the thrusting spear: about 8 feet (2.4 m) long, with wood shaft, iron point and butt spike, weighing about 2.2 lbs (1 kg). The Greek spear was wielded in the hoplite’s right hand; his left hand and arm carried a heavy round shield. Under Philip, the Macedonian infantry began using a much longer and heavier thrusting spear, 15 to 18 feet (4.6–5.5 m) long, weighing about 12–14.5 lb (5.5–6.5 kg), and wielded with both hands. A light shield that could be slung over one shoulder replaced the heavy hoplite shield, leaving both hands free to manage the heavy sarissa. The sarissa was at some point, perhaps as early as the reign of Philip, adopted by Macedonian cavalrymen. As shown by the famous Alexander mosaic, the Macedonian cavarlyman held his long pike low over his horse’s withers, employing an underhand thrust that used the horse’s forward momentum, rather than the rider’s strength, to deliver the blow.

  The sarissa reform involved a rethinking of long-canonical approaches to warfare. Far from a simple incremental improvement (“long spear good, longer spear better”), incorporating the sarissa into military operations involved fundamental changes in armor, shield, battlefield formation, and training methods, for infantry and cavalry alike. The idea of a long thrusting spear may have been borrowed from the equipment of light-armed Thracian peltasts.37 Yet the new approach was based solidly on the fundamentals of Greek land warfare as they had been modified in the course of the later fifth and fourth centuries: a deep and maneuverable phalanx of trained and reliable heavy infantrymen, each armed with a thrusting spear and shield, closely supported by smaller numbers of trained and reliable light arms and cavalry.

  While the inventor of the sarissa is not preserved in the ancient tradition, we may imagine the sarissa reform as the product of a self-conscious project of military innovation driven by Philip and carried out by experts in arms, armor, and training. Given that the sarissa reform was a direct development of the contemporary Greek approach to warfare—as opposed to, for example, being based on masses of bowmen and cavalry supported by light infantry (as in fifth century Persia), or mounted archers, backed up by warriors armed with long swords and battle axes (as in Scythia)—it is reasonable to suppose that Philip employed Greek military experts in designing and implementing the reforms.38

  By the 340s Philip was able to deploy a small navy of triremes. The Macedonian navy under Philip remained too small to challenge even a modest, 20-ship Athenian naval squadron, but it was sufficient to capture an Athenian grain fleet at the Bosphorus in 340. Since there was no Macedonian navy before Philip, he was required to build from scratch. Thus, there is circumstantial reason to suppose that Philip enlisted expert advice in ship construction and naval operations. The most obvious source of that advice would be from within the Greek world, although the Phoenicians and Carthaginians were also highly experienced in trireme construction and operations.39

  We lack direct evidence to show that Philip hired Greek experts to restructure the Macedonian infantry and cavalry, or to build the Macedonian navy. We are on firmer footing with siegecraft. Philip clearly saw, from the very beginning, that having an effective siege train was essential to his plans: The successful siege of Amphipolis in 357 was the essential first step in the expansion of Greater Macedonia. Philip was not always successful in taking walled cities. In 340, as we have seen, he failed in his assaults of Perinthus and Byzantion (both size 5). But Philip did successfully take a number of Greek cities by storm, including Potidaia (size 2) and Methone (size 3). By his sieges of Amphipolis and Olynthos, he demonstrated that the Macedonian forces were sufficiently disciplined and determined to take very large (size 5) and well-fortified Greek cities.

  Part of Philip’s success in siegecraft, but also in open-field battle, can be attributed to technological and operational innovations in a
rtillery. Philip certainly made use of the nontorsion (crossbow-type) catapults that were probably invented in Syracuse at the beginning of the fourth century (ch. 9). It is, moreover, very likely that the torsion (hair- or sinew-spring-type) catapult was invented, around mid-century, by engineers in Philip’s pay. Torsion springs allowed for a major advance in the power of ancient artillery, and pointed to the potential for further advances. Torsion catapults proved to be a big factor in Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Asia. Increasingly tall and massive, yet mobile, siege towers were a related development. Siege towers allowed artillery to be used to maximum advantage, and enabled soldiers to gain access to circuit walls without resorting to flimsy ladders.

  Philip is known to have employed several Greek designers of siege machinery. Like Xenophon and Aeneas the Tactician earlier in the fourth century (ch. 9), at least three of Philip’s poliorcetic experts wrote technical manuals. Polyidus, a Thessalian, the author of On Machines, was with Philip at the siege of Byzantion in 340, where he reportedly devised a huge mobile siege tower that was (somewhat prematurely) dubbed the “city-taker” (helepolis). At the siege of Perinthus, in 340, one Macedonian siege tower is reported to have reached a height of 37 meters. Polyidus had at least two Greek students who were also associated with Philip: Charias and Diades, another Thessalian. Like their teacher, each wrote a treatise on siege machines and both of these men accompanied Alexander to Asia.40

  In addition to the marquee developments in artillery and siege towers, Philip’s siege engineers may be responsible for more subtle innovations: Not only are the catapult javelin heads, from bolts shot from Macedonian catapults and found in the ruins of Olynthos, heavier than earlier javelin heads, but Macedonian arrow heads and sling bullets are somewhat heavier than those used by the Olynthians. It is possible that Macedonian siege troops were using projectiles specifically designed for siege warfare.