Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  The Thebans too were ready. They mobilized an army in excess of eight thousand men and marched out under the command of Epaminondas to face the Spartans. The two armies met at a small town in Theban territory named Leuctra, and there occurred one of the most shocking upsets in military history. For more than two hundred years the Spartans had been invincible in any large-scale infantry battle: their expertise, prowess, indomitable courage, and unbeatable determination to conquer or die were legendary. Yet at the battle of Leuctra the Spartans were decisively defeated by Epaminondas’ Thebans, to the stunned surprise of the Greek world. After the battle, about seven hundred of the fifteen hundred Spartiate (that is, full Spartan citizen) warriors present lay dead, which was shocking enough. But far more shocking was that nearly eight hundred of them survived the battle, defeated and in flight. Spartans were not supposed to flee, to survive defeat: everyone knew the tale of the Spartan wives and mothers who handed their men, as they left for war, their shields with the words “come back with this, or on it”. Returning with one’s shield meant victorious; returning on one’s shield meant dead: the laconic words meant “conquer or die”.

  What was the Spartan state to do with eight hundred men who had saved themselves in defeat by flight? According to Spartan law, they were now non-persons, stripped of citizen rights, denied access to their lands, their homes, to the sacred spaces of the Spartan communities, to be rejected and ignored by their families. But these eight hundred now represented more than half of all surviving Spartiates, for the number of Spartiates had dwindled over a hundred years of non-stop war to little more than two thousand before the disaster of Leuctra. The Spartan authorities were in a quandary: to follow the law would reduce the number of full Spartiates to just over than five hundred, not enough to think of sustaining the Spartan system and Spartan power; but how could they ignore the law they had lived by for two centuries and more? King Agesilaus, appealed to for his advice, solved the problem: the law was to remain in effect, from the next day. The disgraced eight hundred got a one-day moratorium, and were saved, to themselves and to the Spartan state. But Spartan power had taken a hammer-blow: the mystique of Spartan invincibility, of Spartan refusal to survive defeat, was gone. Over the next few years, the victorious Thebans, led by Epaminondas, dismantled Spartan power in the Peloponnese, reducing Sparta to second-rate status and making themselves the dominant military power in Greece.

  It was in the midst of this radical upheaval, then, that Amyntas died, and his son Alexander, about twenty years old at this time, succeeded as Alexander II. He took up the rulership of Macedonia apparently peacefully and without opposition, evidently backed by the powerful barons who had supported his father, including perhaps Derdas and Ptolemy. Like his father, Alexander was obliged to buy off the threat of the Illyrians with tribute payments. Nonetheless, he was full of confidence in himself. The young ruler soon received an appeal from his father’s old allies, the Aleuadae clan of Larissa: there was trouble in Thessaly after the assassination of the great tyrant Jason of Pherae, and the Aleuadae had been driven from their Larissan base and were in danger of losing their dominant position in northern Thessaly. Alexander gladly mobilized a Macedonian force and entered Thessaly, quickly capturing Larissa and surrounding towns. But he did not restore the Aleuadae to power: instead he sought to retain control of northern Thessaly for himself. That proved a grave error of judgment.

  Just as many Peloponnesian cities, long oppressed by the Spartans, had appealed to the Thebans, as the new power in Greece, for help, so the Aleuadae and their allies in Thessaly now appealed to Thebes too. And just as Epaminondas led a large Theban force into the Peloponnese to dismantle Spartan power there, so Pelopidas—the other great Theban leader of this time—led a substantial Theban force north, to intervene in Thessaly. Pelopidas’ force was far too strong for Alexander to tangle with: his Macedonian forces were sent back to Macedonia like naughty children, the Aleuadae were restored to power in northern Thessaly, Jason’s successor in Pherae—another Alexander—was confined to his home city, and Thessaly was brought under Theban patronage.

  This episode seems to have fatally damaged young Alexander’s standing: when he returned to Macedonia he had to face a rebellion of powerful aristocratic interests led by his own brother-in-law Ptolemy, who rumor had it was conducting an affair with Alexander’s mother (and his own mother-in-law) Eurydice. One party or the other, perhaps in fact Alexander himself, appealed to the Theban Pelopidas to arbitrate, and in 368 Pelopidas entered Macedonia with a substantial entourage and settled the dispute. Alexander was to retain the throne; Ptolemy’s position as powerful baron and adviser to the king was likewise assured; the Macedonians were to be clients of the Thebans; and to assure their future good behavior a number of prominent Macedonians were secured and sent to Thebes as hostages. Among these hostages was Alexander’s youngest full brother, Philip. Aged about fourteen at this time, the young Philip thus came to live in Thebes for three formative years in his mid-teens. In a highly romanticized account, Diodorus has Philip lodge at the house of Epaminondas’ father, there to be educated along with the future star Epaminondas himself. In reality, of course, Epaminondas was at this time already a mature adult, the victor of Leuctra, and was away in the Peloponnesos combating the Spartans. Plutarch tells us that Philip lodged at the house of Pammenes, an associate of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, and a notable leader in his own right.

  The point of Diodorus’ fictionalized account of Philip’s time in Thebes is to emphasize the notion that Philip learned about military leadership and governing from and with the great Thebans who dominated Greece in the 360s, and though his details are not true, the general point is universally conceded. Philip certainly absorbed some of the key ideas and strategies of the great Theban leaders during his years as a hostage at Thebes, which were thus a crucial turning point in his life and career.

  Epaminondas, Pelopidas, and their associates had begun a revolution in Greek warfare, which Philip was to complete. The standard and dominant style of Greek warfare, that of the heavy infantry hoplite stationed in a phalanx formation several thousand strong, had been developed in the seventh and sixth centuries, and had remained largely unchanged since. The hoplite was a citizen militia soldier, who served in his free time and at his own expense. Most importantly, he provided his own military equipment at his own expense: the standard hoplite panoply included bronze greaves, or shin protectors; a cuirass or corslet to protect the torso; a large bronze helmet covering the entire head, with cut-outs for the eyes and mouth; and a large, heavy, round shield, about one meter in diameter, made of solid wood with extensive bronze reinforcement on the rim and outer face (see ill. 3). This equipment made the hoplite relatively invulnerable to frontal attack, but slow and cumbersome. Several thousand such hoplites drawn up in neat lines and files—usually about eight lines made a standard phalanx—created a fearsome formation. In the narrow plains and valleys of Greece, it was easy to position such a phalanx in a place where its flanks could not be turned: an enemy had to confront it frontally, and try to push it backwards and force it into flight by sheer pressure.

  The Spartans had made themselves the undisputed masters of this style of warfare by devoting themselves exclusively to hoplite training and pursuits emphasizing physical fitness: sports and hunting, mostly. The full Spartiate owned an estate worked by helot serfs which provided a living. Freed from such concerns, the Spartiate entered the appalling Spartan training system—the agoge—at the age of seven, and spent his life from then on as a hoplite warrior pure and simple. In essence, the Spartiates were professional soldiers, while the citizen militia warriors of the rest of Greece were amateurs. A Spartan army would normally consist of thousands of allied soldiers, and an elite force of Spartiates generally no more than two or three thousand strong. By the early fourth century, as we have seen, demographic decline had reduced the Spartiate caste to only a little over two thousand, but they were still able to dominate the battlefields of Greece.
The elite Spartiate unit would be drawn up, in battle, on the right flank of the army, their allies making up the center and left. As they marched forward to engage, the Spartiates, fitter and better disciplined than their allies, would invariably draw slightly ahead and be the first to engage. Their unique skill and discipline in the art of hoplite infighting and concerted shoving would enable them to drive back the force opposing them on the enemy left very rapidly, whereupon they would turn leftwards and proceed to roll up the rest of the enemy formation from left to right.

  In this simple and effective way, the Spartans ruled Greek battlefields for over two hundred years, and the usually so inventive Greeks accepted the traditional way of fighting, accepted the advantage this gave to Spartan collective training and discipline, and let a few thousand Spartiates dominate Greece. The Thebans under Epaminondas and Pelopidas did not end this Spartan dominance by trying to beat the Spartans at their own game, as numerous Greek leaders and armies had failed to do. Epaminondas re-thought the basic strategy and formation of Greek warfare. Normally the best troops in any army were stationed on the right, and the aim when confronted by the Spartans was to use one’s superior right wing to drive away the allies on the Spartans’ left before the Spartiates could win the battle from their own right wing. No one ever succeeded: the Spartans were too good and too quick at their task of driving back their opponents. Epaminondas decided to confront the Spartans head-on, stationing his best troops on his left, opposite the Spartiates, at Leuctra. But he realized that even his best troops could not match the iron discipline and cohesion of the Spartiates, the fruit of their decades of training. He had to find a solution to this, and he found it in a tactical formation of remarkable simplicity. Instead of drawing up his phalanx a standard and uniform eight ranks deep, he thinned out and held back the part of his formation facing Sparta’s allies, and vastly increased the depth of his formation on the left, facing the Spartiates: he knew that if the Spartans themselves were beaten, the Spartan allies would not stay to fight. Forming up his left wing some thirty lines deep, he created a weight of troops that the Spartans simply could not overcome. Though they fought with their usual determination and discipline, the Spartiates were inevitably driven backwards, and Epaminondas used cavalry to harass them from the right as they gave ground. And seeing the Spartiates, to their wonder, being driven back, the rest of the Spartan army gave ground too and turned to flight.

  Thus, by applying some careful rational analysis to the process of hoplite fighting, and the reasons for Spartan dominance, Epaminondas and his associates found a simple and elegant solution that ended the myth of Spartan invincibility. During Philip’s stay in Thebes, Epaminondas was mostly away in the Peloponnese, where he dismantled Sparta’s age-old alliance system, known as the Peloponnesian League, whereby the Spartans had successfully kept the Peloponnese subordinated; and he ringed Sparta with two newly created and inherently hostile city-states: Messenia and Megalopolis. Meanwhile Pelopidas was busy during these years campaigning in Thessaly and building Theban dominance in northern Greece. Witnessing this from within Thebes, staying at the house of one of the most important associates of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, Philip too was brought to reflect on the nature of warfare, the weakness of his father and brother as rulers, the inability of Macedonia to compete in hoplite warfare with her southern Greek neighbors, and what might be done to create a military system that would enable the Macedonians to do what the Thebans were doing: break the balance of power in Greece and change it to Macedonia’s advantage. For Philip, when his time came, did not attempt merely to copy what the great Theban leaders had done: he went much further and invented a whole new style of warfare, as we shall see.

  In Macedonia, while Philip was at Thebes, things went from bad to worse for Alexander II. Ptolemy had gauged his real weakness, and not long after the agreement brokered by Pelopidas, Alexander was killed—still in the year 368 it seems—while watching a performance of a Macedonian war dance called the telesias. The assassination was evidently carried out on Ptolemy’s orders, and it was he who seized power, ruling nominally as regent for Perdiccas, the next son of Amyntas, and jointly with the queen mother Eurydice. But Ptolemy proved no stronger than Alexander. His power was at once challenged by a rival claimant to the throne, an Argead pretender named Pausanias. It is not clear who this Pausanias was: at a guess perhaps a son of the Pausanias son of Aeropus who had ruled briefly in 393. Such a son would have been in his mid-twenties in 368: an appropriate age to seek power. He apparently enjoyed considerable support in Macedonia, and it was only thanks to a fortuitous intervention by the Athenian commander Iphicrates, old friend and ally (and adopted son) of Amyntas, who happened to be in the northern Aegean with a force on Athenian business, that the challenge of Pausanias was seen off. In 367, however, Pelopidas invaded Macedonia again: he was angered by the upsetting of the settlement he had proposed, and Ptolemy had to buy him off with presents, reassurances, and the handing over of further hostages.

  Perceiving Ptolemy’s weakness, Perdiccas began to lay plans to assert himself, take power, and rule in his own right. Born by 384 at the latest, and likely a year or two earlier, he was now at least eighteen years old, and naturally impatient of having a regent ruling for him, particularly perhaps since the regent was co-habiting with his (Perdiccas’) mother. In 366 or early 365 Ptolemy was assassinated and Perdiccas became the ruler of Macedonia as Perdiccas III. Like his older brother Alexander, he felt full confidence in his abilities as ruler and took a number of steps to bolster his position in preparation for a major move to end Macedonia’s humiliating subordination to the Illyrians. Perdiccas re-affirmed Macedonia’s relationship with Thebes, and negotiated the return of his bother Philip after three years. Epaminondas was planning to develop a Theban fleet and challenge the Athenians at sea, and for that he would need Macedonian ship-building timber. Athenian power in the north Aegean, especially her control of the Macedonian ports Pydna and Methone, was irksome, and Perdiccas sought ways to counter this. Athenian pressure on her rebellious former colony Amphipolis provided this: appealed to by the Amphipolitans for help, Perdiccas established a Macedonian garrison in Amphipolis, keeping that crucial city out of Athenian hands and in the Macedonian orbit.

  To further shore up his power within Macedonia, Perdiccas established young Philip, in his late teens now, in control of some substantial territory within Macedonia. Unfortunately, our sources do not specify where, nor whether this amounted merely to some estates for Philip to manage, or to governorship of some province or region. But there are some grounds on which to speculate. Philip, notoriously, married many times during his reign, in the usual polygamous manner of Argead rulers. One of his first wives, probably in fact his first, was named Phila and came from the dynastic house of the south-western “canton” in upper Macedonia named Elimea: she was the daughter of Amyntas’ old ally Derdas, and sister of his like-named son, the younger Derdas. It has been speculated that the older Derdas had died, and that in effect, through this marriage, Philip was made by Perdiccas the governor of Elimea, displacing the younger Derdas, who is later met with living in exile. Elimea was an important region, which could be a crucial source of support to an ambitious Macedonian king if it was loyally governed. And its position in the south-west meant it was far enough away from the major barbarian threats to Macedonian security—from the Illyrians, Paeonians, and Thracians in the north—to serve as a secure source of supplies and support to a Macedonian ruler combating those threats.

  It is evident that Perdiccas had spent his years as ruler down to 360 building up the Macedonian army. Exactly how he went about this is unclear, though revenues from timber sales to the Thebans and Athenians will likely have helped. What we know is that by 360 he had at his disposal an infantry force many thousands strong, substantially more than four thousand in fact, likely on the order of seven or eight thousand at least. No previous Macedonian ruler is attested to have commanded an infantry force of this size: it was clearly
a new development in Macedonia, an infantry force raised by means on which we can only speculate, armed and trained in a manner of which we know nothing. But its purpose at least was clear. Perdiccas ended the tribute payments to the Illyrians, who were still ruled by old Bardylis. When Bardylis responded by leading a major Illyrian invasion of northern Macedonia, Perdiccas marched forth to meet him with his large new infantry army, leaving Philip behind in control of his province—likely, as we have suggested, Elimea.

  The outcome of this campaign was disastrous for Perdiccas and Macedonia. In a great battle fought somewhere in north-west Macedonia, likely in Pelagonia, and perhaps not far from Lake Ohrid, Perdiccas and his army were disastrously defeated. The young king Perdiccas III was killed in the fighting, along with, we are told, some four thousand of his men: it is this number of dead that reveals how large Perdiccas’ army had been. Much of the army must certainly have survived: it is rare in warfare for as much as half of an army to die in battle. But the thousands of survivors, leaderless and defeated, could do nothing but flee. Many of them were no doubt captured, but many likely got away, to disperse back to their homes or to whatever other refuge they could find. The Macedonian army effectively ceased to exist, and northwest Macedonia lay wide open to the invading Illyrians, who occupied a large portion of it, the cantons of Pelagonia and Lyncus at the least.