by David Grant
In 359 BCE Philip, at the young age of twenty-three, was ‘forced by the people to take on the kingship’, as his nephew Amyntas IV, the son of his older brother Perdiccas III, was just a child; Philip, who had already administered a region of Macedonia in Perdiccas’ reign, may have initially acted as Amyntas’ regent, but he soon declared himself king in his own right.21 At this point he was threatened on all fronts and by five ‘would-be usurpers’ that included three half-brothers.22 Paeonians were pillaging in the north, and Illyrian forces, which had recently killed Perdiccas III along with 4,000 of his men, occupied Upper Macedonia with a history of installing puppet kings at Pella. Both Philip’s father and his brother had been expelled by the Illyrians (Philip was once their hostage at around the age of twelve) and the still independent upper cantons could form an alliance against him at any time, spurred on by foreign interference or funded by the Persian purse.
Thessaly had already thrown out her Macedonian garrisons thanks to the Theban general-statesman Pelopidas, and King Berisades of Thrace was supporting the claim of the pretender Pausanias (of unknown royal connections) to the Macedonian throne, until blocked by the intervention of the Athenian general, Iphicrates. Not long before, and even closer to home, Ptolemy of Alorus (from another branch of the Argead house), allegedly had Philip’s second brother, Alexander II, assassinated and installed himself as regent (some say king) with a complicit Queen Eurydice (Philip’s mother), until Perdiccas III had him murdered in 365 BCE. The Argead house was as precariously placed as King Perdiccas II had been back in the 430s-420s BCE when similarly beset by enemies on all sides, and when the formidable young Illyrian king, Bardylis, had first appeared.23 Even Philip’s own father, the calculating King Amyntas III, had started paying tribute to stave off invasion in 390s BCE.
The Greek city-states dominated the coastal cities of Macedonia and Thrace, and Athens desperately wanted to regain control of the Macedonian-garrisoned Amphipolis (they would try to by installing the elderly compliant Argaeus on the throne – his second attempt). The strongly walled Amphipolis, founded as Ennea-Hodoi (‘Nine Ways’) by Athens in 465 BCE, bridged the Strymon River, control of which provided access to valuable timber resources and pitch extraction. The city had been deemed impregnable, that is until Philip began his siege in 357 BCE in the guise of reclaiming a once Heraclean – thus an Argead – possession, as the legendary family line traced itself back to the hero.24 Philip proclaimed it ‘independent’ but in his own style: the pro-Athenian leaders were banished and it became a key Macedonian stronghold thereafter.
It was this challenging environment, in which the previous three Macedonian kings had died in just ten years, which forced Philip to resort to consorting for survival. He immediately commenced what would become a ‘longstanding practice of fighting war through marriage’, as Satyrus put it.25 Six of Philip’s seven wives we know of, ‘a harem for political purposes’, were all of noble families or from royalty dynasties surrounding the Macedonian state: Audata of the Dardanian Illyrian line of Bardylis (we assume she was his daughter or niece), Meda of the Getae line of King Cothelas in Thrace, Philinna and Nicesipolis of noble Thessalian lines (possibly of the Aleuadae and of Jason of Pherae), Phila of the Elimeote royal family, Alexander’s mother Olympias of the Molossian royal family of Epirus, and a possible wife from the line of King Ataias of the Danube-region Scythians.26 Philip’s final marriage to Cleopatra, the niece of the Macedonian baron Attalus, would have been similarly calculated to provide political stability at home before he set off to campaign in Asia, though a true ‘love match’ was mentioned by Plutarch and Athenaeus.27
Philip would frequently display the unique political astuteness that was epitomised by these marriages, as well as his guile and understanding of men and their superstitions. He had, for example, once marched a coalition army to war by ‘… ordering all his soldiers to assume crowns of laurel as if under the leadership of a god.’28 In his calculated dealings with Greece, Philip had manipulated affairs so that he was operating under the auspices of the Amphyctionic Council in the Third Sacred War against the Phocian defilers of Apollo’s sanctuary and was eventually given Phocis’ two seats on the council. The Macedonian hegemon was now representing the justice of thirteen Greek peoples and under the blessing of a god, a cause possibly aided by Theopompus’ publishing of On the Funds Plundered from Delphi.29
Although branded a slayer of Greek democracy after his victory at Chaeronea in 338 BCE, Philip had, nevertheless, become the archon of Thessaly for life, protector of shrines for the Hellenic and Amphictionic Leagues, and he was voted promanteia (broadly ‘privilege of priority at ceremonies’) in 346 BCE by the Delphians who erected a statue in the sanctuary of Apollo where he also presided over the Pythian Games; Philip was truly the consummate politician.30 The Macedonian king’s manipulative arsenal of weapons had included, to quote Fredericksmeyer, ‘… diplomacy, bribery, intimidation, deceit, subversion, sabotage, assassination, marriage, betrayal, war – and on occasion, he even scrupulously kept his promise.’31
Philip’s success was well epitomised in Isocrates’ call to him, rather than Spartan leadership, to head the Panhellenic invasion of Persia in his Address to Philip. His evidently clear intention to accept Isocrates’ challenge spurred Artaxerxes III Ochus to arms and his invasion of Phoenicia and Egypt followed (345-343 BCE) providing immediate employment for many Greek mercenaries. Philip agreed to a non-aggression pact with the Persian Great King, apparently to buy himself time. But by the early 340s Philip had already more than trebled the size of his realm, ruling over the ‘old’ and ‘new’ kingdoms he would successfully integrate; the self-governing cantons of Orestis, Lyncestis, Tymphaea and Elimea came into the Pellan fold, and a fair degree of autonomy was at first permitted.32 Although ‘the possessions of the Macedonian kings were always more extensive than the lands inhabited by Macedonian citizens’,33 Philip now controlled everything to the immediate north of Hellas in a domain described as ‘the first large land-empire in the history of Europe’.34 It was a state of affairs that saw Athens align with Artaxerxes: gold crossed the Aegean and the city-states armed themselves; the battle at Chaeronea was one of the inevitable bloody results.
In 336 BCE Philip arranged the marriage of Alexander’s sister, Cleopatra, to King Alexander Molossus of Epirus, the brother of Olympias who had been elevated and ‘housed’ by Philip at Pella for eight years. It was another political bond following Molossus’ informal ‘hostageship’, though this time it had been arranged to outmanoeuvre Olympias herself, for she appears to have repudiated him in some way after his recent marriage to the niece of Attalus.35
Cleopatra’s wedding festival, possibly coinciding with the annual panegyris that marked the beginning of the Macedonian New Year (autumn equinox), was to be a grand media event before the assembled (and now humbled) Greek world, and it was clearly designed to showcase Macedonia’s newly acquired wealth and rapidly extending power. A statue of Philip was paraded after those of the twelve Olympian gods, a statement that at the least suggested he had their divine approval. Perhaps it implied still more; gone were the days following battle at Chaeronea when he had a slave call out thrice every morning, ‘Philip you are human’, to bring him down to earth.36 But human enough he was and Philip was stabbed to death.
What Alexander inherited from his father was a formidable war machine and a network of alliances, even if continued border threats and treasury limitations restricted the size of any army that could be immediately transported to Asia. Philip had to rewrite the rules of engagement to avoid the fate of his predecessors and complete the military reforms that were probably initiated by his elder brothers.37 At the head of his command chain was Antipater, veteran general and the leading statesman in Macedonia in the king’s absence; he would become Alexander ‘general over Europe’.38 Left in Macedonia with a modest force of 1,500 cavalry and 12,000 infantry, probably from the more predictable Lower Macedonian cantons (Pieria and Bottiaea), he was variou
sly referred to as the ‘regent’ (though neither Greek nor Latin have direct equivalents for that role) and strategos, thus a military administrator who was the caretaker, epimeletes, of the kingdom.39
Elsewhere Antipater is cited as holding a hegemonia, a regional or league command, whilst Plutarch suggested he, and the young Alexander before him, shared authority as a kurios, or one of the guardians of power, when Philip was on campaign.40 In fact it seems more likely that Antipater shared power with Olympias while Alexander was in Asia – Antipater in a military capacity and she administratively as figurehead of the Argead royal house – before an irrevocable rift between them saw her take up residence in Epirus once more.41 The title of Alexander’s widowed mother is never specifically stated, though her basileia, regal authority, required little explanation; even Athens had shuddered to open captured correspondence between her and her king.42
Operating under Antipater were lesser governors and officers or hyparchoi, though this title later became a utility word denoting a variety of positions.43 The terms relating to the relative authoritas attached to the Macedonian court nobles were employed less than clinically by the secondary sources, because Polybius, Diodorus, Livy, Curtius, and Arrian after them, were employing the phraseology associated with the ‘class orders’ at the Hellenistic courts and command structure of the Roman armies of their day.44 The frequent use of the almost interchangeable titles of strategos, prostates (protector), epimeletes and epitropos (guardian or steward) that are peppered through the accounts of the Macedonian campaigns, still pose a challenge to definitive judgments on hierarchy.45
The Successor Wars are even less easily deciphered as self-elevations and unauthorised titular proclamations added further speculation to the legitimacy of roles, most visibly post-315 BCE when the ‘royalists’ who had sided with Perdiccas had finally been wiped out. Some of the ambiguity dissipated, however, once Alexander’s line was all but terminated (ca. 309/308 BCE), and when the title ‘king’, basileus, an honorific inherited from obscure and possibly non-Indo-European origins adopted by Bronze-Age Greeks, was formally assumed by the dominant Diadokhoi (ca. 307 BCE onwards).46
THE PEZHETAIROI AND THE ARGEAD ANVIL
The ‘Macedonian revolution’ was perhaps the most comprehensive modernisation and development of Hellenic warfare since Mycenaean times. The archaic soldiers of Homeric days, who wore boar-teeth-and-tusk helmets and loose bronze panoply as exhibited in the Dendra find, were protected by the body-sized ox-hide figure-of-eight shields, or the later dipylon that adorned the pottery from the period – that is, when warriors were not depicted in ‘heroic nudity’.47 Shaft-grave finds at Mycenae dating to the so-called ‘Palace period’ (roughly 1450-1350 BCE) reveal elaborate Minoan-influenced weaponry with flint and obsidian blades from Egypt and Cycladian Melos; this represented an attempt to improve on softer bronze when iron was still rare and its production a Hittite monopoly.48
Defensive armour plating was found in a single warrior chamber tomb in May 1960 at Dendra close to Mycenae. It dates to the Mycenaean Palace period (1450-1350 BCE). The elaborate cuirass consisted of front and rear plate with neck guard, shoulder and arm guards. The plates are strung together with the widest at the bottom to facilitate leg movement. It has been compared to armour made for Louis XIV over 3,000 years late. A boar-tooth-and-tusk helmet is partially intact.49
At Mycenae we see the first signs of the armour of the Late Helladic period (1550-1050 BCE) including the heavy ‘bell’ corselet or the cuirasses of bronze plates joined at the sides, out of which would eventually emerge the classical hoplites.
Hoplites were armed with a spear (or two), short-sword (xiphos), a lighter ‘muscle-cuirass’ with pteryges (forming a protective skirt for the thighs) and a hardy bronze helmet, commonly of the menacing Corinthian design; this was a panoply apparently ‘codified’ between 725 BCE and 675 BCE.50 For defence they carried the robust 3-foot-wide Argive wood-core shield (hoplon, though the plural, hopla, was often used for ‘arms’ in general), typically adorned with tribe-denoting letters or the symbols of their patron deity. This was now wielded more firmly by a rigid armband (the porpax) and leather grip (antilabe).51
The advances in Greek metalworking that enabled the more widespread production of hammered bronze helmets, which were increasingly lightened towards the pilos type, also led to the ‘mass production’ of bronze for facing the protective hopla. As a result, on the battlefield individual duels were superseded by the phalanx in which warriors advanced as an almost impenetrable wall of shields and spears. Hoplite warfare followed an extraordinary rigid framework that lasted for more than 300 years during which cavalry were never used as a shock weapon but were largely marginalised to guarding flanks and for harassing manoeuvres.
A Greek hoplite fighting a Persian on an Attic terracotta amphora dating to ca. 480-470 BCE. The porpax and antilabe of the Argive shield are clearly visible. Spears were thrust both underhand and overhand at shoulder height when in phalanx formation. The hoplite wears a thorax rather than a muscle cuirass, bronze greaves and horsehair-crested helmet with brim suggesting some Thracian or Phrygian influence. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund 1906, online collection. www.metmuseum.org.
The formerly ‘rigid’ hoplite battle order had certainly started to evolve in Greece in the generation of Philip II which witnessed Epaminondas’ victory at Leuctra in July 371 BCE when a reinforced fifty-deep infantry ‘wedge’, headed by the Sacred Band under Pelopidas, broke through the ‘invincible’ Spartan crescent phalanx. Until then Sparta had dominated set-piece battles with its hoplite formation that had mastered complex battleground manoeuvres such as the ‘forward-bend’ (epikampe), ‘counter-march’ (exeligmos) and ‘back-wheel’ (anastrophe). The era also saw Iphicrates’ reforms which adopted a more unified approach to employing the different elements of a fighting force; he likened the phalanx to the ‘chest and breastplate’ of the whole ‘body’ of the army, with the cavalry representing the feet and the light-armed troops the hands.52 But Philip’s Macedonian war machine was about to revolutionise things further.53
A Corinthian bronze hoplite helmet dating to ca. 700-500 BCE. The nose-guard and cheekpieces of the undecorated crestless helmet left only the eyes and mouth of its wearer exposed. The small holes around the edge anchored a leather lining that would have been sewn inside. Each close-fitting helmet of this type had to be custom made. Some finds have been ‘killed’ or rendered unusable by bending the cheekpieces outward, a distortion common among helmets found dedicated in sanctuaries, including those at Aegae.
Thucydides and Xenophon provided a picture of the early composition of the Macedonian army in the reign of Perdiccas II (which overlapped with the years of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict which had itself shaken up tactical thought) and in the era of Amyntas III: it comprised a small accomplished corps of heavy cavalry (who were nevertheless principally used as skirmishers, not in shock tactics), a modest number of hoplites, and a more numerous force of light troops from domestic tribes or client princes, and still organised by tribe as Nestor advised in the Iliad.54 Between their reigns, King Archelaus I had intensified the reforms by building strongholds, defensive walls and new roads that carried both cavalry and infantry across an increasingly urbanised state.55
Philip’s innovation saw a major change in the tactics of both foot soldiers and horsemen, lethal when working in unison, with the cavalry contingent increased five-fold compared to its strength under his predecessors.56 His understanding of the techne of war had created a new cohesion that linked all parts of Iphicrates’ ‘body’ together; the result was that the sum of the whole assaulting army was greater than the sum of those specialist parts. This became the ‘blueprint’ of Hellenistic warfare, which, together with his particular style of metis, his martial savvy and military cunning, was irrepressible.57
Philip’s brigades of ‘upper class’ Companion Cavalry, perhaps originally some 600 in number, were later organised into eight terr
itorially identified squadrons (ilai) of usually 200 horsemen, the most prestigious of which was the purple-cloaked and double-strength king’s royal squadron (later capped at 300), the ile basilike; this was the vanguard agema which held a position of honour in the battle formation; the 1,800 cavalry that Alexander crossed to Asia with are thought to have been sectioned more or less this way, though Alexander later employed a command rotation that saw relative positions move.58
The unit numbers increased in Asia when two or more ilai, each commanded by an ilarches, formed a hipparchiai under the command of a hipparchos, with the larger squadrons later divided into two lochoi (companies) as new recruits arrived and units were amalgamated. However, vaguer references to ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ cavalry and to unit depth makes definitive cavalry assessments tricky, when, for example, the administrative infantry unit of one hundred, the hekatostyes, became interchangeable with lochoi after Darius fell in 331 BCE; it was a term Arrian seems to have used for an ‘undifferentiated mass’ that included non-Macedonians as well. Anaximenes’ Philippika used a similar identification for unspecified infantry units.59
The Companion Cavalry and their manoeuvrable spear (xyston), and no doubt the sarissophoroi – the mounted lancers with longer thrusting spears – were by now practising flying wedges; Aelian Tacticus (2nd century CE) suggested a 200-man ile was comprised of four forty-nine-men tetrarchiai that rode in these formations, each under the command of a tetrarchos.60 The Thessalian cavalry’s versatile diamond (rhomboid) developed by Jason of Pherae may have played a part in its refinement, though Thracian and Scythian horsemen also reportedly deployed in wedges.61 The wedged front (embolon) was a disposition which, according to Arrian, could uniquely penetrate a hoplite phalanx, defying the belief that cavalry were unable to attack organised infantry head on; Alexander may have spearheaded such a charge to penetrate the Theban Sacred Band at Chaeronea. But despite Arrian’s claims, it remains more reasonable that wedges exploited weak points or gaps in an infantry line.62