[3]

From a View to a Death

ALEXANDER'S schooldays were over. From now on the young crown prince was to be trained in a harder school, and with greater responsibilities, than even Isocrates would have dared to prescribe. This may well have been a deliberate ‘hardening’ policy on Philip'spart. Both he and Olympias (according to Theophrastus)¹ were worried by, among other things, the boy's lack of heterosexual interests. They feared he might be turning out a girlish invert (gynnis), and even went so far as to procure a beautiful Thessalian courtesan named Callixeina to help develop his manly nature. Olympias herself, we are told, frequently begged him to have intercourse with this woman — which does not suggest any great enthusiasm on his part; but then, what son would take kindly to a maternally selected mistress?

On the other hand, there was nothing effeminate about Alexander's conduct as regent. No sooner had Philip left on his Byzantine campaign (sailing, in the first instance, against Perinthus) than rebellion broke out among the Maedi, a powerful and warlike tribe on the borders of Thrace and Paeonia. Alexander took a flying expedition up north, defeated the rebels, captured their city, and turned it into a Macedonian military outpost. This new settlement he renamed Alexandropolis, in imitation of Philip's similar outpost, Philippopolis. Where his father was concerned, Alexander never lacked the competitive spirit. It is often argued that to have named a polis, a civic foundation, after himself would have been open lèse-majesté, tantamount to an act of rebellion. On the other hand he was regent, and the possession of the Great Seal reveals the extent of his powers. Besides, with a mere military colony he may have been technically within his rights. But even so his act was a danger-signal which Philip surely recognized. Alexander's appetite for royal power, long fostered by Olympias, would not long content itself with a temporary regency; and Philip himself was still a vigorous man in the prime of life. Sooner or later there was bound to be trouble between them.²

But for the moment they remained on close and friendly terms. During his absence abroad Philip kept up a regular correspondence with the young regent, and such fragments from his letters as have survived are as full of solid parental advice as those ofLord Chesterfield. Alexander must cultivate friends among the Macedonian nobility while he could (few of the boy's close friends seem, in fact, to have belonged to the higher aristocracy, a significant pointer: perhaps his half-Epirot blood was responsible). As crown prince he was also in a position to win favour with the masses, since he could, like Shakespeare's Prince Hal, still afford to be easy-going. For a reigning monarch it was quite another matter. ‘He also advised him,’ says Plutarch, ‘that, among the men of influence in the cities, he should make friends of both the good and the bad, and that later he should use the former and abuse the latter.’ But a report that Alexander had been trying to secure the allegiance of certain Macedonians by bribes brought down a stinging rebuke on the young regent's head. Since Philip was a past master at the art of bribery himself, his comment is worth noting: ‘What on earth,’ he inquired, ‘gave you the deluded idea that you would ever make faithful friends out of those whose affections you had bought?’ ³

Philip's campaign, meanwhile, was not going at all well. He had been forced to raise the siege of Perinthus after three months. His seizure of 230 Athenian merchantmen provoked some acrimonious diplomatic exchanges, which culminated in Athens declaring war on Macedonia. In the late autumn he switched his attack against Byzantium; but the city was strongly held (Athens had sent a naval contingent to help in its defence), and his final assault was betrayed by inopportunely barking dogs. Once again he had to pull out, and it was only by a somewhat desperate ruse that he extricated his fleet from the Black Sea. By now he was in a decidedly awkward position. Athenian privateers were harassing his shipping and supplies. Persia had declared against him, and this might well impress a city like Thebes, which could cut his land-communications to the south. The last straw was a disastrous raid which he conducted into the Thracian Dobrudja (spring 339). On his way home he was ambushed and defeated by the Triballi, a hairy and primitive tribe which had provided Aristophanes with some of his best music-hall jokes. He lost all his booty, and received a nasty spear-thrust through one thigh, which left him permanently lame (see below, p. 89).⁵

By the summer of 339 — though his opponents never seem fully to have appreciated this — Philip's position was highly critical. For years he had successfully played the divide-and-rule game with the Greek states; now there was an all-too-real danger oftheir combining against him. He had looked forward to leading a Persian invasion under the flag of Panhellenism, with Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, cowed or cooperative, marching at his side. Now it seemed more likely that the boot would be on the other foot: the Greeks had done a deal with Artaxerxes, and if Philip did not move fast it would be they who invaded his territory, not he theirs. In the event, he moved faster than anyone could have predicted.

While the Macedonian army was actually on the march south into central Greece, Philip still kept up a smoke-screen of diplomatic blarney to lull the Greeks' suspicions. His ambassadors went ahead of him to Athens and Thebes, carrying letters that cleverly played on the traditional enmity between these two powerful city-states: a last-minute détente between them was something he had every intention of avoiding if he could. Even at this late stage in the game he still seems to have hoped for a peaceful settlement, especially with Athens. His admiration for the ‘violet-crowned city’ was genuine enough; but there were other more practical factors influencing him. The sooner he came to grips with Artaxerxes, clearly, the better. But to cross the Dardanelles before he had all Greece secure behind him would be political and military suicide. An Athenian alliance would bring him great prestige; it might also swing a number of undecided states into line at the same time. Nor had Philip any intention of wasting precious months battering away at the immensely powerful naval defences of Piraeus.⁶ If Athens would not come over of her own free will, an Athenian army must be brought to battle and defeated by land, for all the world to see. Somehow or other Philip must provoke the Athenians and their allies into fighting on his terms — not at sea, where they enjoyed every advantage, but against the superbly trained infantrymen of the Macedonian phalanx. By one of Fate's more bitter ironies, it was Demosthenes who finally gave him what he wanted.

Late one September evening, a horrified Athenian assembly heard the news that Philip, far from marching on south-west to Amphissa (his declared objective), had turned east at Cytinium in Doris — as momentous a decision in its way as Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon — and occupied Elatea, a key-point on the main road through to Thebes and Attica. Demosthenes now emerged as the patriotic hero of the hour, the impassioned champion of Athenian liberty. Hitherto, he informed his fellow-citizens with withering sarcasm, they had been ‘lucky enough to enjoy the fruits of that factitious humanity in which [Philip] clothed himself with an eye to the future’. But now they could no longer rely on his calculated forbearance. By sheer vehemence and conviction the great orator brought about what Philip had most feared — a defensive coalition between Athens and Thebes. Isocrates, still holding out for alliance with Philip, found himself dismissed as a mere senile collabo.⁸

An Athenian army marched into Boeotia, and the two new allies promptly set about fortifying the north-west passes. A force of 10,000 mercenaries was also sent westward towards Amphissa. If Philip captured Naupactus, he could cross the Corinthian Gulf at its narrowest point, link up with his Peloponnesian allies, and march on Athens by way of the Isthmus. These dispositions blocked both his possible lines of advance. During the winter of 339/8 Philip made no move, and the Athenians congratulated themselves on their foresight. In March 338 Demosthenes was once more awarded a gold crown at the Greater Dionysia for distinguished public service. Patriotism, unfortunately, does not of itself guarantee strategic common sense. Demosthenes has often been condemned for destroying Athenian freedom when Isocrates' policy could have preserved it; but his real and fatal error was to implement a military policy which played straight into Philip's hands.

Despite Themistocles' strategy at Salamis, despite the endless costly lessons of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian statesmen were still, in moments of national crisis, bedazzled by the conservative legend of the Marathonian hoplite. They neglected the fact that for over a century Athens had ceased to be a land-power, and that her once-formidable citizen-hoplites were now largely replaced by mercenaries. Athens' real strength and expertise lay in her still-formidable navy. At this period she had over 300 triremes available for active service. Athenian operations in the Hellespont, and during the siege of Byzantium, had shown just how vulnerable Philip was at sea. If, immediately after the occupation of Elatea, Athens had mobilized her naval reserves and sent a strong fleetnorth to the Thermaic Gulf, Philip would almost certainly have pulled his army out of central Greece. Yet here was Demosthenes, with what can only be termed self-destructive bravado, proposing to block his advance by land. Nothing could have suited the king's plans better.⁹

Now his only remaining task was to lure the Greek forces out of their defensive positions and force an engagement. Once this had been done, Macedonia's formidable cavalry and the trained regiments of the phalanx would do the rest. In the event everything proved absurdly easy. Philip arranged for a bogus dispatch to be captured by the task-force guarding Amphissa. This informed them that the king was withdrawing his army to deal with an uprising in Thrace. Thinking the enemy had gone, the Greek mercenariesbecame careless. Philip launched a night-attack in strength, and annihilated them.¹⁰ His column swept through Amphissa and Delphi, thus turning the flank of the troops holding north-west Boeotia, and debouched in the plain a little way south of them, nearLebadea.

The Greeks did the only thing possible in the circumstances: they abandoned the passes, and established a shorter line of defence at Chaeronea, between the Cephisus River and the citadel. This put them in a very strong position. To west, east and south they were protected by mountains. In the south they had the further advantage of controlling the Kérata pass to Lebadea, so that Philip could not force them into a reversed-front engagement. Their communications were excellent: as things stood they could, with luck, hold the Macedonians till winter. If Philip bypassed them and marched on Attica, they were in his rear. His only chance was to make a direct frontal assault on their lines from the north, with what — despite later Greek propaganda claims — was in fact a somewhat smaller force. In cavalry they were about equally matched, with 2,000 on either side; but the Greeks had mustered some 35,000 infantry to Philip's 30,000, and the latter probably represented the full field strength of the Macedonian army. On the other hand, Philip had the advantage of experience and professionalism. Athens' best generals were now dead, and her present commander-in-chief, Chares, something of a mediocrity.¹¹

Nevertheless, Philip was sufficiently impressed to make one last attempt at negotiating a peaceful settlement with Athens and Thebes. The Athenian commander Phocion, back from a minor and ineffectual naval sortie to the North Aegean, recommended accepting his proposals; but Demosthenes, tireless and adamant, blocked all attempts to reach a solution through diplomatic channels. The Delphic Oracle made gloomy pronouncements; these he brushed aside as mere propaganda, asserting — what may well have been true — that the Pythia had become no more than Philip's paid mouthpiece. The king, seeing that diplomacy would get him nowhere, now prepared for a final show-down. He captured Naupactus, as the Athenians had anticipated, left a small holding force atDelphi, and deployed the rest of his troops across the plain north of Chaeronea. It was here, on 4 August 338, that the two armies met, in one of the most decisive encounters of all Greek history.¹²

The battle took place at dawn. On the allied right wing were the Boeotians, some 12,000 strong, led by the famous Theban Sacred Band, which in 371 had broken Sparta's hitherto invincible army at Leuctra. On the left wing were stationed Athens' 10,000hoplites. The centre was made up from the remaining allied contingents, with a stiffening of 5,000 mercenaries. On the extreme left, a screen of light-armed troops linked the main force with the citadel. The cavalry was held in reserve. The Greek commanders had drawn up their line of battle slantwise across the plain, from west-south-west to east-north-east. If Philip's attack ran into trouble, a left-wing advance by the Athenians could press him back across open country to the river — a pivotal movement not unlike the closing of a fan. If, on the other hand, he succeeded in breaking through, they would still be able to retreat in good order over the Kérata pass to Lebadea. It was an ingenious plan, and under better commanders — or against a less brilliant and professional opponent — it might well have succeeded.

Phase I Macedonians advance; Greeks stationary.

Phase II Philip retreats, his centre and left advancing; Athenians, Centre and Boeotians advance to left front, but Sacred Band stands firm.

Phase III Alexander charges, the centres engage, and Philip drives the Athenian wing up the Haemon valley.

Philip knew that any serious opposition he got would come from the Thebans. Since they had been technically allied to him when they threw in their lot with Athens, they had the most to fear at his hands in the event of a defeat. Philip was a man who gave traitors very short shrift. Furthermore, their troops were experienced veterans, as well trained as his own: Philip knew, better than anyone, just how much Macedonian discipline owed to Theban methods (see above, pp. 15-16). The Athenians, on the other hand, were citizen-volunteers, without any real combat experience. It had been well over twenty years since Athens had put an army into the field, and then only for a month's campaigning. Philip saw that his main objective must, inevitably, be the annihilation of the Sacred Band. He also realized that Athenian impetuosity and lack of discipline could materially help him to achieve this end.¹³

His tactical dispositions were made accordingly. He himself commanded the right wing, at the head of his Guards Brigade, the Hypaspists, with a strong light-armed force to protect his flank. In the centre he placed the regiments of the phalanx. The command of the heavy cavalry on the extreme left wing, opposite the Sacred Band, went to Alexander — an extraordinarily responsible appointment for a boy of eighteen, since it was he who had to deliver the knock-out blow that would, if successful, clinch Philip's victory. (Over four hundred years later Plutarch, himself a native of Chaeronea, was shown a tree by the Cephisus still known as ‘Alexander's Oak’, under which, it was said, he had pitched his tent on the night before the battle.) This battle-plan was, in essence, a replica of that which Philip had employed against the Illyrians at Lake Okhrida (see above, pp. 24-6).

When battle was joined, Philip's right wing slightly out-flanked the Athenian left, while his own centre and left were echeloned back at an angle from the Greek line — ‘refused’ is the technical military term. Thus when he and the Guards Brigade engaged the Athenians, the rest of the Macedonian army was still advancing. More important still, these tactics produced an inevitable — and probably unconscious — drift to the left among the Athenians, followed by the allied and mercenary troops of the Greek centre. At the first onset the Athenians — as Philip had probably anticipated — launched a wildly enthusiastic charge. Their general Stratocles, seeing the Guards Brigade give way, completely lost his head, and began shouting: ‘Come on, let's drive them back to Macedonia!’

But Philip's withdrawal (as Stratocles should have seen) was anything but disorderly. Step by well-drilled step the Guards Brigade moved back, still facing to their front, a hedgehog bristle of sarissas holding the pursuit at bay. On rushed the Athenians, yelling and cheering, the Greek centre stretching ever more perilously as they pressed forward. Presently two things happened for which Philip had been waiting. The Macedonians backed up on to rising ground by the banks of a small stream, the Haemus (Blood River); and that fatal gap at last opened between the Greek centre and the Theban brigades on their right. Superior discipline, ironically, had sealed the fate of the Sacred Band. They held their formation; the troops in the centre did not. Into the gap thus opened, at the head of Macedonia's finest cavalry division, thundered the young crown prince (the only recorded occasion on which he held a left-flank position), while a second mounted brigade attacked the Sacred Band from the flank. Very soon the Thebans were completely surrounded. At the same time Philip, away on the right, halted his retreat, and launched a downhill counter-charge — ‘not’, as Diodorus says, ‘conceding credit for the victory even to Alexander’ (see below, pp. 91-2, 361).

The Athenians had become badly disorganized during their advance, and now they were to pay the price for Stratocles' amateurish hot-headedness. The Macedonians drove them headlong into the foothills, killed a thousand of them, and took twice that number prisoner. The remainder managed to get away over the Kérata pass. Among the fugitives was Demosthenes. ‘As he was running away,’ Plutarch tells us, ‘a bramble-bush caught his cloak, whereupon he turned round and said "Take me alive!"’ Even a defeat has its moments of incidental comedy. But for the most part this rout was a grim enough business. What the cavalry had begun, the phalanx completed. They poured through the broken lines in Alexander's wake, and engaged the Greek centre front and flank simultaneously. After a last desperate struggle the entire allied army broke and fled — with the exception of the Sacred Band. Like Leonidas' Spartans at Thermopylae, these 300 Thebans fought and died where they stood, as though on parade, amid piles of corpses. Only forty-six of them were taken alive. The remaining 254 were buried on the site of their last heroic stand. There they lie to this day, in seven soldierly rows, as the excavator's spade revealed them; and close by their common grave the Lion of Chaeronea still stands guard, weathered and brooding, over that melancholy plain.¹⁴

When the battle was over, Philip called off his cavalry pursuit, raised a victory trophy, made sacrifice to the gods, and decorated a number of his officers and men for conspicuous gallantry. (We do not know whether Alexander was included among them; he certainly deserved to be.) In due course there followed a great celebratory banquet, at which the king, with characteristic Macedonian abandon, drank a quite inordinate amount of strong wine. Garlanded and tipsy, he then went out on a post-prandial tour of the battlefield, his senior officers accompanying him. He laughed raucously — and perhaps in nervous relief — over the piles of enemy dead, disparaging their valour, and hurling coarse insults at them. (Some say, on the other hand, that he wept over the annihilation of the Sacred Band: that, too, would be in character.) He took childish pleasure in repeating, over and over again, the official preamble to Demosthenes' motions in the Athenian assembly, which accidentally formed a catchy metrical jingle: ‘Demosthenes, Demosthenes' son, Paeonian, proposes —’ The future of Greece lay, at long last, in Philip's strong and capable hands. But he knew, better than anyone, how close-run a fight Chaeronea had been.

In this exhausted and exultant mood he was even prepared to dismiss the Greek herald who presently arrived from Lebadea, asking permission to remove and bury the bodies of the allied dead. But one of his prisoners, the Athenian orator Demades, sobered him up sharply. ‘King Philip,’ he said, ‘Fortune has cast you as Agamemnon; but you seem determined to act the part of Thersites.’ The flattery implicit in this censure had its effect. Yet it remains a tribute to Philip's character that he at once shrugged off his drunkenness — more than one anecdote suggests his ability to do this at need — and expressed warm admiration for the man who had dared to criticize him so boldly. Indeed, he afterwards released Demades from captivity, and henceforth treated him as an honoured guest.¹⁵

There was, however, a sound practical reason for Philip's apparently quixotic behaviour. He may — as we shall see — have found Demades a congenial boon-companion; but he also needed an Athenian of good standing to present his peace terms before the assembly: someone, for choice, who would sincerely urge their acceptance, and report the King of Macedonia as a civilized, generous victor. Athens could still cause Philip a great deal of trouble, and he knew it. Indeed, the following day the battle news reachedChaeronea that the Athenians were arming their slaves and resident aliens, and making ready to defend their city to the death. We are told — and there is no reason to disbelieve such a report — that Philip was thoroughly alarmed by this reaction. The Athenian fleet remained intact; so did the harbour and arsenals of Piraeus. Unless Philip breached those monumental defences, the Athenians could maintain supplies and communications by sea more or less indefinitely.

In the circumstances, however complete his triumph at Chaeronea, there was every reason for the king to show himself conciliatory. The last thing he wanted at this point was a repetition of his prolonged and abortive assault on Byzantium, for which he certainly had not the time, and perhaps not the resources either. Besides, from now on he would be mainly concerned with building up a Panhellenic expeditionary force for the invasion of Asia. There was little sense in destroying Athenian installations and warships — or, indeed, any chance of Athenian goodwill — when he would soon need both these valuable commodities for himself.¹⁶

Demades is a fascinating character: one of those quirky and colourful rogues who crowd the margins of fourth-century Greek history, yet seldom get the attention they deserve from historians. His anti-Macedonian enemies described him as vulgar, treacherous, and corrupt. Plutarch says he was the ‘shipwreck of his country’, a phrase in all likelihood borrowed from some fourth-century pamphlet or speech. He made no secret of his venality. When he heard a playwright boast of having earned a talent by giving recitations, Demades remarked: ‘That's nothing; I was once paid ten by the king to keep quiet.’ Pot-bellied and gluttonous, he spent money as fast as he made it; Antipater said of him, in his old age, that he was ‘nothing but tongue and stomach’. The tongue, however, wagged to some effect. No one could deny his abilities as an off-the-cuff orator, or his gift for memorable invective — Demosthenes he once described as ‘ a little man made up of syllables and a tongue’. When he got back to Athens with the king's peace terms he found the city, he said, ‘like an old woman dragging her sandals and swallowing soothing drinks’, and his words to the assembly were brutally frank: ‘It is with peace, not argument, that we must counter the Macedonian phalanx; for argument lacks power to take effect when urged by men whose strength is less than their desire.’¹⁷

Philip had timed his psychological volte-face well. Reaction against the war-party in Athens had already begun to make itself felt, and the terms which Demades now read out before an astonished assembly were better than anyone had dared to hope. The Athenian dead — or rather their ashes, it still being the hot season — would, after all, be given up. All 2,000 prisoners would be released without ransom. Philip guaranteed not to send Macedonian troops across the frontiers of Attica, or Macedonian warships intoPiraeus. Athens was to keep a nucleus of Aegean islands, including Delos and Samos. She also received Oropus, on the overland route to Euboea, a stronghold previously occupied by Thebes. In return for these favours, however, she was required to abandon all other territorial claims, to dissolve the Athenian maritime league, and to become Macedonia's ally — a step which, as things turned out, involved her in rather more than her leaders had anticipated. Their immediate relief, however, was so great that they accepted Philip's terms en bloc, without argument. They even went so far, out of sheer gratitude, as to confer Athenian citizenship on Philip and Alexander, and to vote the king a statue in the Agora.

Three envoys — Aeschines, Phocion, and Demades himself — were dispatched north to implement the treaty, and found themselves doing so at dawn, bleary-eyed after one of Philip's all-night drinking-parties.¹⁸ They were in no position to object. Any privileges which Athens might henceforth be granted were an arbitrary favour from the Macedonian king, reversible at will. All the same, the Athenians could at least take comfort from the fact that they had received incomparably better treatment than Thebes. Once again, Philip had good reason for behaving as he did: if he was to hold central Greece, Thebes' very considerable power must be systematically broken up. Her leaders had ignored their treaty obligations once, and might well do so again. They must be taught a sharp lesson — and one calculated to discourage similar ambitions elsewhere. Since they had no fleet worth the name, they, unlike the Athenians, could be coerced with impunity.

Philip therefore began by abolishing the Boeotian League, which was, in effect, an embryo Theban empire. Its member-cities, including Plataea, were given back their independence — a very shrewd stroke of diplomacy. The Thebans themselves were forced to recall all political exiles (a move hardly calculated to stabilize their domestic affairs), and a puppet government was set up, with a Macedonian garrison to watch over it from the Cadmea. Former democratic leaders were liquidated or sent into banishment. Theban prisoners, unlike their Athenian counterparts, had to be ransomed, and at a good price: otherwise they were sold as slaves. At the same time Philip could be magnanimous enough when it suited him. He had no objection to the Thebans raising a great monument atChaeronea in memory of the Sacred Band: a fine soldier himself, he appreciated truly valorous opponents. He refrained from imposing garrisons on most — though not all — of the leading Greek cities, saying that he ‘preferred to be called a good man for a long time rather than a master for a short time’. But despite such fits of jovial generosity, there could be little doubt where the real power now lay. The Greek states retained no more than a pale shadow of their former freedom.¹⁹

To commemorate his great victory, Philip built and dedicated at Olympia a circular edifice known as the Philippeum, somewhat similar to the famous tholos at Delphi (itself possibly also commissioned by Philip, and for an identical purpose).²⁰ This building was made of fired brick, with an outer and inner ring of enclosing columns. The roof-beams were tied together by a central bronze clamp, shaped like a gigantic poppy. The Philippeum contained various gold and ivory portrait statues, specially executed by the sculptor Leochares: of Philip himself, of Olympias, of Alexander, of Philip's parents Eurydice and Amyntas. In general appearance it must have resembled nothing so much as a Shinto shrine. What, we well may ask, was Philip's real object in creating so outré a monument?

The conclusion seems inescapable: he hoped to establish a quasi-divine cult of himself and his family. (This is by no means the only occasion on which we find one of Alexander's more idiosyncratic actions anticipated by his father.) Other evidence confirms such a hypothesis (see below, pp. 98, 104). That so pragmatic a hedonist ever seriously believed in his own godhead seems unlikely, to say the least of it; at all events, he was very quick to ridicule divine pretensions in others. But he may well have been working towards the essentially political device of a divine ruler-cult. For the Greeks, the gap between men and gods was not so wide as it is for us, and very largely bridged by the ‘heroes’, semi-mythical champions assimilated to divine status. Here, of course, Philip had good precedent in his own ancestor Heracles. There was also the more recent and intriguing case of Lysander, the Spartan general, in whose honour the Samians appear to have instituted a regular cult, complete with chapel, feast-day, and official sacrifices. On the island of Paros, perhaps somewhat later, we find a parallel cult of the poet Archilochus: his shrine was, similarly, known as the Archilocheum. As we shall see, the citizens of Ephesus encouraged Philip's pretensions to divine status, and it is unlikely, to say the least, that they did so on a mere casual impulse. If, as seems possible, the king was planning his own assimilation to the Olympic pantheon, this fact would have been widely known.²¹

Such a device undoubtedly had great advantages: its subsequent use in Hellenistic and Roman times offers clear proof of this. Philip's fast-expanding power was creating as many problems as it solved, not least as regards his personal status. Like Augustusafter him, he was much preoccupied with the problem of converting imperium into auctoritas, and the policy implicit in the Philippeum constituted an initial step towards this goal. It may also have received some indirect encouragement from Isocrates' last letter to him, written after Chaeronea. The aged pamphleteer — he was now ninety-eight, and died a few weeks later — declared that if Philip subjugated Persia to the Greeks, nothing would be left for him but to become a god.²²

One thing, however, the statue-group of the Philippeum makes abundantly clear. At the time of its dedication — that is, in or about September 338 — Philip's dynastic plans, now of nearly twenty years' standing, remained firm and unaltered. Olympias was still his wife, and Alexander his legitimate successor, by royal favour no less than by right of primogeniture. Regent at sixteen, and a fully-blooded cavalry general two years later, Alexander could not be taken for anything but the heir-apparent. Indeed, his entire upbringing hitherto had been directed towards that end. No one doubted that he would, in due course, succeed to the throne. If there were any objections lodged against him during those two decades, our sources do not record them. Yet, only a month or two afterChaeronea, the king was to repudiate Olympias as an adulteress, cast open doubts on Alexander's legitimacy (which suggests that the two charges were linked), and marry, as his fifth wife, a blue-blooded Macedonian aristocrat, with the clear object of siring a new male heir. What happened that autumn to produce so sudden and violent a change in Philip's long-matured intentions?

About the same time as Philip's great victory, Artaxerxes Ochus was assassinated by his grand vizier, Bagoas — ‘a eunuch in fact but a militant rogue in disposition’, as Diodorus pleasantly puts it. Persia remained in a state of near-anarchy until November, while Susa boiled with cut-throat palace intrigue. After all rival claimants had been successfully eliminated, Bagoas placed Ochus' youngest son Arses on the throne, and settled back into his favourite role of puppet-master.²³ These developments are unlikely to have escaped Philip's vigilant eye. Ochus had been a formidable ruler in his own right, whereas Arses was no more than the grand vizier's creature. Between August and November, then, with Greece effectively brought to heel, and Persian leadership seriously weakened, the prospects for an invasion of Asia had improved out of all recognition. Nor was there any need to search around for a formula that would swing the Greek states into line behind Macedonia: Isocrates had provided one ready-made.

Panhellenism now became Philip's watch-word, and the war was projected as a religious crusade, to avenge Greece for Xerxes' invasion a century and a half before. All that remained was to work out the administrative details and logistics, and see how far each individual state was willing to collaborate. Philip's first concern, as always, was with Athens. Immediately after the armistice he sent an official embassy to escort the ashes of Athens' dead home to their last resting-place. In the atmosphere of goodwill which such a gesture would generate, profitable diplomatic exchanges could be expected.²⁴ As ambassadors extraordinary Philip appointed Antipater, Alcimachus,^a and Alexander. This, we may note, was the last occasion on which the crown prince was entrusted with any responsible task befitting his rank — a state of affairs which continued until Philip's death. Alexander's visit to the city of Athens — the only time, so far as we know, that he ever set foot within its gates — seems to have coincided in some way with his fall from official grace.

The embassy itself went off very well, with much exchange of ceremonial courtesies. Philip's statue was officially unveiled; honorary citizenship was conferred both on him — by proxy — and on Alexander. Antipater had useful talks with various influential citizens, including the nonagenarian Isocrates, an old personal friend. (By now Isocrates was tactfully crediting Philip with the whole idea of a Persian invasion: he himself, he said, had merely fallen in with the king's desires.) On the face of it, Athens' leaders must have struck the envoys as cooperative, grateful, and eager to please. At the same time this public conformism clearly had its limits: civility was not allowed to degenerate into mere subservience. When the urns containing the ashes of the fallen were handed over, it was not some safe pro-Macedonian lickspittle who was chosen to deliver the official funeral oration over them, but the die-hard Demosthenes, Philip's most intransigent opponent. What he said on that occasion has not survived; but we still possess the moving epitaph composed for their common tomb:²⁵

Time, whose o'erseeing eye records all human actions,
   Bear word to mankind what fate we suffered, how
Striving to safeguard the holy soil of Hellas
   Upon Boeotia's famous plain we died.

The ambassadors had been well briefed before they left for Athens. One of their most important duties was to discuss Philip's future plans, informally, with leading statesmen such as Phocion and Lycurgus, and assess their reactions. The main points they stressed were the establishment of a ‘general peace’ (koiné eirené) between all Greek states; the formation of a new Hellenic League; and the vigorous promotion, under Macedonian leadership, of a Panhellenic campaign against Persia. Thus Alexander had special and privileged knowledge of all his father's top-secret projects from the moment of their inception. More important, he was familiar with the time-schedule to which they were geared. We know little of his activities in Athens, but that little is interesting. His hosts, having heard of his prowess as a runner, flatteringly matched him against a first-class Olympic athlete. When the latter ‘appeared to slacken his pace deliberately, Alexander was very indignant’. It may have been on this occasion that he made his famous remark about only running in the games if he had kings for competitors. He also asked Xenocrates — now head of the Academy, and renowned for his moral pragmatism — to draw him up ‘rules of royal government’. How soon, one wonders, did he think he was going to need them?²⁶

Meanwhile Philip, who never believed in wasting time, had moved his forces down from central Greece into the Peloponnese. He wrote to the Spartans asking whether he should come as friend or foe, and got the characteristically Laconic response: ‘Neither’. On the other hand Sparta's traditional enemies, such as Argos, welcomed him with open arms. Despite his much-publicized disclaimers (see above, p. 80), he left a garrison on Acrocorinth, and probably at several other key-points as well. He parcelled out much of Laconia to anti-Spartan cities, and liberated the serf-state of Messenia. One Spartan official inquired, sourly, whether he had left the Messenians a strong enough fighting force to hold what they had been given.²⁷

With each state he made a separate treaty: the maxim of ‘divide and rule’ had by now become second nature to him. Only Sparta, with defiant stubbornness, refused to negotiate, and here Philip did not force the issue. He may well have felt that an independent Sparta would act as a useful check on those new Peloponnesian allies of his who had acquired slices of Spartan territory. The dedication of the Philippeum was a salutary reminder that from now on, whatever democratic forms might be employed as a salve to the Greeks' self-respect, it was Philip who led and they who followed. When the king announced a general peace conference, to be held at Corinth, Sparta alone abstained.²⁸

The delegates assembled about the first week of October; Philip was at great pains to charm them and to soothe their wounded susceptibilities. He needed the Greeks' support for his Persian venture, and was determined to get it. First, he read out a draft manifesto (diagramma) of his proposals, which had already been circulated privately through various diplomatic channels. This manifesto formed the basis for all subsequent discussion, and was adopted more or less without change.²⁹ In essence, it boiled down to the following points. The Greek states were to make a common peace and alliance with one another, and constitute themselves into a federal Hellenic League. This league would take joint decisions by means of a federal council (Synhedrion), on which each state would be represented according to its size and military importance. A permanent steering committee of five presidents (prohedroi) would sit at Corinth, while the council itself would hold general meetings during the four Panhellenic festivals — at Olympia, Delphi,Nemea, and the Isthmus — in rotation.

Simultaneously, the league was to form a separate alliance with Macedonia, though Macedonia itself would not be a league member. This treaty was to be made with ‘Philip and his descendants’ in perpetuity. The king would act as ‘leader’ (hegemon) of the league's joint forces, a combined civil and military post designed to provide for the general security of Greece. It was, technically at least, the council that would pass resolutions, which the hegemon then executed. If the Greeks were involved in a war, they could call on Macedonia to support them. Equally, if Philip needed military aid, he was entitled to requisition contingents from the league. In such a case he acquired a second, more purely military role. As well as hegemon he became strategos autokrator — that is, general plenipotentiary or supreme commander-in-chief of all Macedonian or league forces in the field, for as long as a state of hostilities might last.

Despite Philip's careful dressing up of his authority in this elaborate quasi-federal disguise, there could be little doubt as to who took the real decisions. One function of the hegemon, for example, was to assess each state's military liabilities in lieu of cash taxation. (The latter would have tarnished the image of freedom and autonomy which Philip was anxious to maintain: besides, at present he needed men rather more than money.) Everyone knew — though for obvious security reasons the topic was not yet discussed openly — that this clause had been inserted for the benefit of Philip's projected Persian crusade. It was an eloquent hint at the king's virtually unlimited de facto executive powers that he could thus, at will, dictate the whole future course of Greek foreign policy. Philip's Panhellenism was no more than a convenient placebo to keep his allies quiet, a cloak for further Macedonian aggrandizement.

Most Greek statesmen recognized this only too well. To them, their self-styled hegemon was still a semi-barbarian autocrat, whose wishes had been imposed on them by right of conquest; and when Alexander succeeded Philip, he inherited the same bitter legacy of hatred and resentment — which his own policies did little to dispel. The brutal truth of the matter was that the Greeks, for the most part, knuckled under because, after Chaeronea, they had no alternative. Nor was Philip deceived by their specious professions of loyalty. The military contingents they supplied were, in reality, so many hostages for their good behaviour. As we shall see, whenever they saw the slightest chance of throwing off the Macedonian yoke, they took it. This stubborn, unswerving resentment was something which neither Philip nor Alexander ever managed to overcome. It was always there in the background, a constant threat to their more daring ambitions.³⁰

Having thus set the stage for the peace conference, Philip returned to Pella.³¹ At this critical point in his career, it might reasonably be assumed, the one thing he had to avoid at all costs was any kind of internal or domestic upheaval. There was far too much at stake abroad to risk a barons' war at home. Yet it was now — and with every appearance of deliberation — that the king embarked on a course of action which split the Macedonian royal house into two bitterly hostile camps, stirred up a whole wasps'-nest of aristocratic intrigue, and drove the hitherto highly favoured crown prince into exile, at a time when his special, indeed unique, talents could ill be spared. To any unprejudiced outside observer it must have seemed as though Philip had suddenly taken leave of his senses.

The public facts are well known, and not in dispute. Philip announced his intention of marrying Cleopatra, daughter of an aristocratic lowland family; such a move must have caused considerable alarm among the out-kingdom barons, who were bound to assume that this match was aimed, among other things, at undermining their influence in Pella. Cleopatra's uncle, Attalus, a brave and popular general,³² had himself recently married one of Parmenio's daughters: between them the two families looked like establishing a formidable junta at court. Nevertheless, Alexander was, indisputably, Philip's first-born son, and the acknowledged heir-apparent. His claim to the succession remained beyond challenge — until, that is, Philip threw a new light on his marriage-plans by repudiating Olympias on the grounds of suspected adultery, and encouraging rumours that Alexander himself might well be illegitimate.³³

At this point no one could fail to see what the king's true intentions were. His long-matured plans for the succession had been scrapped, literally overnight. The cooperative integration of lowlands and highlands represented by his marriage to Olympias was similarly being abandoned: with Cleopatra as his regnant queen, the royal house of Macedonia would be ‘no longer a blend between east and west but a dynasty of the plain’.³⁴ That Philip really believed Alexander to be illegitimate is out of the question. Such charges, as we have seen, were a regular weapon in the dynastic power-game, and recognized as such: both Philip himself and his immediate ancestors had, at one time or another, been smeared in this way.³⁵ The true problem at issue is why he suddenly chose to adopt such tactics, not least when — on the face of it — he had no apparent justification for what he did, and indeed everything to lose as a result.

The wedding-feast, as might be expected, was a tense occasion. When Alexander walked in, and took the place of honour which was his by right — opposite his father — he said to Philip: ‘When my mother remarries I'll invite you to her wedding’ — not a remark calculated to improve anyone's temper. During the evening, in true Macedonian fashion, a great deal of wine was drunk. At last Attalus rose, swaying, and proposed a toast, in which he ‘called upon the Macedonians to ask of the gods that from Philip and Cleopatra there might be born a legitimate successor to the kingdom’. The truth was finally out, and made public in a way which no one — least of all Alexander — could ignore.

Infuriated, the crown prince sprang to his feet. ‘Are you calling me a bastard?’ he shouted, and flung his goblet in Attalus' face. Attalus retaliated in kind. Philip, more drunk than either of them, drew his sword and lurched forward, bent on cutting down not Attalus (who had, after all, insulted his son and heir) but Alexander himself — a revealing detail. However, the drink he had taken, combined with his lame leg (see above, p. 69), made Philip trip over a stool and crash headlong to the floor. ‘That, gentlemen,’ said Alexander, with icy contempt, ‘is the man who's been preparing to cross from Europe into Asia — and he can't even make it from one couch to the next!’ Each of them, in that moment of crisis, had revealed what lay uppermost in his mind. Alexander thereupon flung out into the night, and by next morning both he and Olympias were over the frontier. After escorting his mother home to her relations in Epirus, the crown prince himself moved on into Illyria, probably staying with his friend King Langarus of the Agrianians, who afterwards supplied some of his toughest and most reliable light-armed troops (see below, p. 130). These movements are revealing. It seems clear enough that from now on both Alexander and Olympias were actively plotting against Philip, and doing their best to stir up trouble for Macedonia from all the tribes along the western marches.³⁶

Philip's behaviour is, at first sight, very hard to explain in rational terms. Our ancient sources, realizing this, assume that he fell so wildly in love with Cleopatra as to more or less take leave of his senses. But Philip, as we have seen, was never the man to confuse marriage with mere casual concupiscence. Even if Cleopatra, like Anne Boleyn, held out for marriage or nothing, there was still no conceivable reason why Philip should repudiate Olympias (he had not done so when he married his fourth wife),³⁷ much less Alexander, whom he had spent nearly twenty years in training as his chosen successor. Such a step was bound to have the most serious repercussions, and nothing but the direst necessity — some yet greater threat, which it was specifically designed to avert — could ever have driven him to it.

But what could this threat be? Most modern historians fail to suggest any remotely adequate motive. It has been alleged that Philip's turbulent barons were determined to have a pure-blooded Macedonian heir to the throne, and therefore forced the king's hand. This simply will not do. No one had objected to Alexander as the heir-apparent before; why should they suddenly do so now? In any case, succession to the Macedonian throne went exclusively through the male line (see above, p. 28); and, most important, Philip II was not the kind of man to let his hand be forced by anyone, least of all on so personal and politically explosive a matter. Another suggestion put forward has even less to recommend it. If (the argument runs) both Philip and Alexander were to be killed during the Asiatic campaign, no competent successor would exist, Amyntas being a nonentity and Philip Arrhidaeus half-witted. Thus a second heir had to be produced before the expedition sailed. In that case, we may ask, why begin by wantonly discarding the best available candidate before a replacement was even conceived?³⁸

In fact there is one motive, and one only, which could have driven Philip to act as he did: the belief, justified or not, that Alexander and Olympias were engaged in a treasonable plot to bring about his overthrow. Nothing else even begins to make sense. If this is what was in the king's mind, his conduct at once becomes intelligible. He could not possibly set out against the Great King leaving Macedonia in the hands of a potential usurper. Equally, he could not entrust his elite cavalry corps to the command of a man whose loyalty had been called in question. Even without proof positive — and proof positive, of a sort, may even have existed — the risk was too great. Alexander would have to be sacrificed, and Olympias with him.

So much seems clear. But the crucial point for a modern reader is whether or not Philip's suspicions were in fact justified, and here the only possible verdict is ‘non-proven’. At the same time, it is not hard to see how such suspicions could have been aroused. From the very beginning, Olympias had encouraged Alexander to think of himself as king in his own right, rather than as Philip's eventual successor. This, we need not doubt, was the main source of those ‘great quarrels’³⁹ between father and son, which the queen's jealous temper actively encouraged, and in which she invariably took Alexander's side.

The natural rivalry between Alexander and his father was still further exacerbated by Chaeronea. It could well be argued that it was Alexander who had won Philip's victory for him — a claim which we find Philip going out of his way to deny. Perhaps the king had some grounds for annoyance: Alexander later boasted that ‘the famous victory of Chaeronea had been his work, but that the glory of so great a battle had been taken from him by the grudgingness and jealousy of his father’.⁴⁰ On the other hand, Philip himself had advanced Alexander to high civil and military office as a matter of deliberate policy. He could hardly complain if the boy discharged his duties with something more than credit. But between jealousy and sedition there is a sharp dividing line. Have we any reason to suppose that Philip's heir crossed it? And if he did, why now rather than at any other time?

We have seen how Alexander thought of himself as the young Achilles, destined from birth to win glory and renown in battle against the barbarians of Asia. His attitude to war was fundamentally Homeric: for him it remained, first and last, the royal road to personal areté. He slept with two things beneath his pillow: a dagger, and a well-thumbed copy of the Iliad. Olympias had taught him from childhood to regard kingship as his destiny. Aristotle had implanted in his mind the conviction that only through pre-eminentareté could that kingship be justified — and by his emphasis on a legitimate war against Persia had shown him how such areté might be achieved. But between Alexander and the throne which he held to be his by divine right there still stood one seemingly insurmountable obstacle: his father.

Philip bore a charmed life. For over twenty years he had exposed himself recklessly in every battle he fought. Yet he still survived, lame, scarred, minus one eye, with a fractured collar-bone and a mutilated hand,⁴¹ full of rude and jovial energy, no whit less ambitious than his son, and far more experienced, a veteran still only in his mid forties. When Alexander complained that his father would leave him no great or brilliant gestes to achieve, he was very far from joking. After Chaeronea, there was an all too real likelihood that his worst fears might be justified — that he would find himself saying, like Achilles: ‘You are all witnesses to this thing, that my prize goes elsewhere.’⁴²

It was Philip, not Alexander, who was now preparing to launch the great Panhellenic crusade against Persia. It was Philip, not Alexander, who would reap the immortal renown that such an enterprise, if successful, must surely confer upon its victor. Unless some chance blow struck the king down, Alexander could expect no more than the lesser glory which falls to a second-in-command — perhaps not even that, since on so crucial an expedition Philip might well turn to his old and trusted lieutenant, Parmenio. Worse still, Alexander might once again be left behind as Regent of Macedonia, and thus play no part at all in the undertaking which he regarded as his birthright. No one could deny that he had powerful and urgent motives for wishing Philip out of the way.

After Chaeronea, it is said, the Macedonians began to speak of Philip as their general, but of Alexander as their king.⁴³ It is not hard to guess who started that rumour — or who put it about that Philip was ‘delighted’ by such a compliment to his heir. We also have certain cameos — copies, it is thought, of fourth-century originals — which probably show Alexander and Olympias together (the ascription is not proven beyond doubt), rather in the manner of certain Roman emperors and their consorts.⁴⁴ Could these have formed part of a propaganda campaign, designed to promote the joint rule of mother and son? After his actual accession Alexander was at some pains to keep Olympias in the background; but at this early stage (and bearing her Epirot connections in mind) he might well have found it politic to encourage her ambitions.

The truth of the matter can never be known for certain. If we apply the cui bono principle, then Alexander undoubtedly had everything to gain by staging a coup before the expedition was launched. On the other hand, there was a powerful faction at court — including Attalus and Parmenio — which detested this haughty prince and his domineering foreign mother, was actively working to cut the Argead dynasty loose from out-kingdom influence, and would probably stick at nothing to keep Alexander off the throne. Philip's marriage to Cleopatra, and, even more important, his repudiation of Olympias provide eloquent testimony to the degree of success this faction had already achieved. A whispering campaign, hinting at sedition in high places, would have been the most obvious and effective way of undermining Philip's trust in them both.

At all events, by the late autumn of 338 Alexander's hitherto ascendant star seemed in total eclipse. While he and Olympia fumed and plotted in exile, their enemies at home established themselves ever more securely. Preparations for the invasion went ahead, and soon it became known that Philip's new wife was with child. The future now looked clear: few could have seen, at the time, the unexpected turn events were shortly to take.

Throughout the winter of 338/7 the peace conference continued its deliberations at Corinth. In the spring the delegates finally ratified their ‘common peace’, and formed a Hellenic League along the lines that Philip had suggested in his manifesto. No sooner had the league's representatives been sworn in than they held their first official plenary session. An alliance with ‘Philip and his descendants’ was thereupon voted, and Philip himself was unanimously elected hegemon — which made him, among other things, ex officio chairman of the federal council. In this capacity he proposed a formal motion that the league declare war on Persia, to exact vengeance for those sacrilegious crimes which Xerxes had committed against the temples of the Greek gods.⁴⁵

This proposal too was carried; but then the league had little choice in the matter. Nor could it very well object to appointing Philip supreme field-commander, ‘with unlimited powers’, of the expedition itself. Another revealing (and very necessary) decree provided that any Greek who henceforth chose to serve the Great King would be treated as a traitor. Some 15,000 Greek mercenaries, not to mention numerous doctors, engineers, technicians and professional diplomats, were already on the Persian pay-roll; more than twice as many men, in fact, as the league ultimately contributed for the supposedly Panhellenic crusade against Darius. The Greek cities of Asia Minor had become more than a little disillusioned with so-called ‘wars of liberation’, especially when these were conducted by mainland powers like Athens and Sparta. Their main object, it seemed, was to acquire wealthy subject-allies at Persia's expense — though they were ready enough to trade them back to the Great King when they needed Persian support. TheAchaemenid regime at least offered mild rule and long-term stability; many Ionian cities actively preferred it, and one can see why.⁴⁶

Philip returned home from Corinth to Pella feeling very pleased with himself, all the more so since there were rumours of a new revolt brewing in Egypt.⁴⁷ Anything calculated to keep the Great King's hands full at this point was doubly welcome. His satisfaction, however, was short-lived. About midsummer Cleopatra's child was born, and proved to be not the male heir on which Philip had been counting, but a girl.⁴⁸ The king was fundamentally a realistic statesman; he knew, better than anyone, just what this meant. He could not afford to leave Macedonia, during his absence, without a recognized heir to the throne. Nor could he sail for Asia while a dangerous and discontented claimant was stirring up trouble among the Illyrians, and his own discarded wife was similarly employed at her brother's court in Epirus.⁴⁹ There was nothing for it: Alexander would have to be brought home and reinstated.

The question was, would he come? While Philip was pondering this problem he received a visit from old Demaratus of Corinth, who was also a close friend of Alexander's (see above, p. 44). After the initial courtesies had been exchanged Philip got down to business. How, he inquired, were the Greek states agreeing with each other now? ‘Much right have you to talk of the harmony of the Greeks,’ Demaratus replied, ‘when the dearest of your household feel so towards you!’ Philip, far from being put out, instantly saw that in Demaratus he had an ideal go-between. Even so, the Corinthian would need all his tact and diplomacy to resolve so prickly a situation.⁵⁰

Somehow Demaratus accomplished his mission successfully (just how, none of our sources reveal), and Alexander came back to Pella with him. The least Philip can have offered was the reassurance that — appearances to the contrary — Alexander remained his chosen successor. On the other hand, the king was determined not to let the boy fall under his mother's pernicious influence again. He therefore left Olympias in Epirus, calculating that any embarrassment she could cause from this distance was negligible in comparison with the havoc she was capable of wreaking at court. Nor, in fact, did he restore Alexander to anything like his old position of trust; and as though to emphasize the fact, he lost no time after Cleopatra's accouchement in getting her pregnant for the second time.

During the winter of 337/6 an uneasy peace reigned in the palace. Philip was busy training his forces for an advance expedition into Asia Minor, designed to secure bridgeheads for the main army. He was also running through his reserve funds at an alarming speed. The troops' pay — always an early casualty on such occasions — had fallen badly into arrears. One day when Philip was boxing in the gymnasium, a group of soldiers cornered him, complaining loudly. Philip, dusty and sweating, grinned at them with cheerful effrontery. ‘Quite right, boys,’ he said. ‘But don't bother me just now — I'm in training against the barbarian, so as to pay you off ten times over on the proceeds.’ With that he clapped his hands, charged through them, and plunged into the pool, where he splashed around with his sparring-partner until the soldiers got bored with waiting and took themselves off.⁵¹

This story well illustrates the easy, informal relationship which existed between Philip and his subjects. But it also suggests how badly pressed he was for time and money. At this stage he could not afford to be sidetracked into any minor campaign. Therefore when news came that Olympias had talked her brother into declaring war on Macedonia, he used diplomacy rather than force: not that he underestimated the man with whom he had to deal. Alexander of Epirus was an independent and ambitious youth. The fact that he owed his throne to Philip weighed not at all with him; he probably regarded this as no more than a fair return for having to put up with his brother-in-law's homosexual attentions at an impressionable age. But Philip, pragmatic as always, refused to be discouraged. Though this recalcitrant young man was, it seemed, impervious to the claims of nepotism and paederasty, he might still find some attraction in an incestuous marriage — especially if it carried political advantages.

Philip therefore wrote offering the Epirot king the hand of Cleopatra,^b his daughter by Olympias — which meant, of course, that she was also her prospective bridegroom's niece. The offer — for whatever reason — was accepted with alacrity, and the wedding set for June, in the old Macedonian capital of Aegae. What Cleopatra herself thought about this odd match our sources do not relate. As might be expected of Alexander's sister, she was a tough-minded and passionate girl. She also — unlike her brother — seems to have enjoyed sex. Alexander took a tolerant view of her peccadilloes. Once, when it was reported to him that she had taken some attractive young man as a lover, his only comment was: ‘I see no reason why she shouldn't get some advantage from her royal status, too.’⁵²

In the early spring of 336 an advance force of 10,000 men, including a thousand cavalry, crossed over to Asia Minor. Its task was to secure the Hellespont, to stockpile supplies, and, in Philip's pleasantly cynical phrase, to ‘liberate the Greek cities’. This force was led by Parmenio, his son-in-law Attalus, and Amyntas, son of Arrhabaeus. Here we glimpse one of Philip's more intractable dilemmas, the clash between military and home-front priorities. He had to send out commanders whom he could trust; at the same time, the absence of Parmenio and Attalus meant that two of his strongest supporters were away from Pella when he most needed them. This was a weak point which any would-be usurper — especially a Macedonian — could hardly fail to exploit.

At first Parmenio's campaign went from one success to another. After crossing the Hellespont his army struck south along the Ionian seaboard. Chios came over to him, and so did Erythrae; there were probably other conquests, above all in the Troad and around the Gulf of Adramyttium, which our fragmentary sources do not record. When Parmenio approached Ephesus the inhabitants rose spontaneously, threw out their pro-Persian tyrant, and gave the Macedonians an enthusiastic welcome. They also set up Philip'sstatue in the temple of Artemis, side by side with the goddess's own image. Whether so curious a tribute was their own idea, or carried out in accordance with Philip's known wishes, remains problematical. One can only say that it fits in uncommonly well with his known ruler-cult propaganda (see above, p. 81). The man who dedicated the Philippeum, and later made a disastrous attempt to have himself enthroned among the twelve Olympians, would scarcely shrink from sharing a pedestal with Ephesian Artemis if he felt political advantage might accrue as a result.

There can be no doubt that he was genuinely anxious to get divine endorsement for his projected invasion. He sent a representative to Delphi (where he was honoured as a benefactor) and with uncompromising directness asked the Pythia whether or not he would conquer the Great King. The priestess took this blunt approach in her stride. Centuries of experience had made it clear that those who consulted the oracle were quite content with an outrageously ambiguous response — always provided they could read into it what they hoped to find there. The answer Philip got was no exception. ‘The bull is garlanded,’ he read. ‘All is done. The sacrificer is ready.’ Philip intrepreted this to mean that the Persian monarch would be slaughtered like a victim at the altar. The actual course of events showed that Delphi (as so often in retrospect) had meant something rather different. Meanwhile Philip ‘was very happy to think that Asia would be made captive under the hands of the Macedonians’.⁵³

Others, it is clear, shared his conviction, amongst them the various local dynasts of Asia Minor, all anxious to be on the winning side when it came to a show-down. One of these, Pixodarus, a Carian prince, now sent his ambassador to Pella, offering his eldest daughter in marriage to Alexander's half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus. What Pixodarus in fact wanted, of course, was a military alliance with Macedonia. He had usurped the throne by banishing his sister Ada from Halicarnassus, and his relationship with Persia was, to say the least of it, uneasy. Nor did he overrate his eligibility as a potential ally. Though he could claim descent from the great Mausolus,^c to Philip he was a mere backwoods baron: none so snobbish as those who have been labelled barbarians themselves. At the same time, with his Persian invasion imminent, the king would find an ally in Caria extremely useful. Besides, Pixodarus must have known very well that Philip Arrhidaeus was a mental defective, and that the king would therefore jump at any chance of marrying the boy off to his own political advantage.

Alexander, however, whose sense of insecurity was by now showing a somewhat paranoid streak, had managed to convince himself that Philip's real aim, ‘by means of a brilliant marriage and a great connection’, was to establish young Arrhidaeus as his heir. If Alexander genuinely believed that this local Carian dynast offered a ‘great connection’, let alone that Philip would ever bequeath the Macedonian throne to an imbecile, he was clearly in no state to think rationally at all. What he did assume, beyond a doubt, was that Pixodarus, having sized up Macedonia's dynastic factions, regarded even Arrhidaeus as a more promising son-in-law, politically speaking, than Alexander himself.

This inference could not but confirm all his worst suspicions. It may also explain why he now sent his friend Thessalus the actor⁵⁴ on a secret mission to Halicarnassus, with an alternative proposition. Pixodarus, he suggested, should disregard the feeble-minded Arrhidaeus, and take him, Alexander, as a son-in-law instead. On the very kindest interpretation, this was a flagrant case of lèse-majesté, and could well have been interpreted as treason. Besides, in the event of Pixodarus accepting Alexander's offer, their secret negotiations were bound, sooner rather than later, to become public knowledge. What did Alexander plan on doing then? And how did he expect his father to react to the news? With a fond parental blessing?

Pixodarus, clearly convinced that he had misjudged the situation at Pella, accepted this new offer with some enthusiasm, on the obvious assumption that it was made with Philip's knowledge and approval. By any reckoning Alexander was a far better catch than his half-brother. But one of Alexander's friends who was privy to these negotiations, Philotas, also happened to be Parmenio's son, and told his father of Alexander's plans. Parmenio, whose personal loyalty to Philip has never been called in question, at once informed Philip what was afoot. The king, seething with fury, took Philotas along as his witness,⁵⁵ and had a stormy interview with Alexander. He ‘upbraided his son severely,’ says Plutarch, ‘and bitterly reviled him as ignoble and unworthy of his high estate, in that he desired to become the son-in-law of a barbarian king’. Alexander prudently said nothing; and Philip seems to have taken no direct personal action against him at the time.

Alexander's friends and associates, however, he dealt with very summarily indeed, in a way which suggests that he smelt conspiracy in the air and needed to safeguard his own position. Thessalus the actor had fled to Corinth. Philip, as captain-general of the league, demanded his immediate extradition, and the unfortunate actor was sent back to Macedonia in chains. (Alexander subsequently released him and made good use of his services.) At the same time, a group of men who all afterwards rose to fame and fortune under Alexander — they included Harpalus, his imperial treasurer, Ptolemy, son of Lagus (rumoured to be Philip's bastard), Nearchus the Cretan, Erigyius of Mytilene and his Persian-speaking brother Laomedon — found themselves banished.⁵⁶ Behind the illogicalities and tantalizing half-truths of the Pixodarus affair one senses an abortive coup d'état. If this is the truth of the matter, Philip's only possible motive for leniency to his son at such a juncture was personal affection — which arguably cost him his throne and his life.

What Philip did, it would seem, was to compromise. He did not execute Alexander's friends; he did not lay a finger on Alexander himself. Perhaps he felt that with the Persian crusade imminent, and a precarious balance of power established at Pella, he dared not yet risk a major purge. Purges, in any case, had never much appealed to him. He would, on occasion, execute known rebels who constituted a direct personal threat to him, like his half-brothers; but the reign of terror, used as a specific instrument of power-politics, was not Philip's style. On the other hand, the most momentous consequence of this episode was, inevitably, to make the king show his hand openly over the succession. There could no longer be any question of endorsing Alexander's claims. Rumours about the crown prince's illegitimacy began to circulate once more, with Philip's encouragement and approval. More ominous still, the king now arranged a marriage between his brother's son — the amiable but unambitious Amyntas — and Cynane, his own daughter byAudata (see above, p. 27). The ranks were once more closing against Alexander; with Cleopatra due to give birth to her second child in a month or so, his future looked decidedly unhopeful.⁵⁷

The month of June 336 B.C. could hardly, on the face of it, have opened more auspiciously for Philip. First there came encouraging news from Persia, where a fresh outbreak of palace intrigue had culminated in the assassination of the Great King. Once againBagoas the grand vizier had been responsible: the puppet monarch Arses, it appeared, had threatened to develop a mind of his own. This latest murder finally extinguished the direct Achaemenid line; it looked as though Persia was in for yet another period of anarchy and civil war, with no strong central government, and little will or coordination to resist a determined attack. Such a view, as events turned out, was a trifle optimistic. Bagoas, looking around for some suitably pliable successor, settled on Codoman, a collateral member of the royal house, who now ascended the throne as Darius III. But for once the wily old eunuch had fatally misjudged his man. The new monarch had a good military record (at Issus, as we shall see, he gave Alexander something worse than amauvais quart d'heure), and was clearly made of sterner stuff than the wretched Arses. At all events, his first act on accession was to make Bagoas himself drink the poison he had administered to so many others — a disconcerting gambit which (for the time being at least) put paid to any further court intrigue. Darius III, despite the harsh verdict of posterity, was not an opponent to underestimate.⁵⁸

Meanwhile in Aegae, the old Macedonian capital, preparations were going ahead for the wedding of Alexander's sister Cleopatra to her maternal uncle and Philip's former minion, King Alexander of Epirus. Philip planned to make this state occasion the excuse for much lavish — not to say ostentatious — display and propaganda. Above all, he wanted to impress the Greeks. He felt he owed them appropriate entertainment as some return for ‘the honours conferred when he was appointed to the supreme command’. But even more than this, he was anxious to convince them of his goodwill, to win their genuine support. He had to make it clear that he was no mere military despot, but a civilized and generous statesman.

The most important thing, of course, was to pack Aegae with distinguished visitors. Philip summoned all his own guest-friends from Greece, and ordered the Macedonian barons to do likewise. Once the guests were assembled, Philip felt, his munificent entertainment would do the rest.⁵⁹ He had organized a non-stop round of rich banquets, public games, musical festivals, and ‘gorgeous sacrifices to the gods’. No expense was spared to make this a really impressive and memorable occasion. It was, in fact, to prove more memorable than anyone could have foreseen.⁶⁰

In the midst of these preparations an event took place which, from Philip's point of view, could not have been more opportune: with impeccable timing, the king's young wife gave birth to a son. As though to emphasize the child's future status as his successor, Philip named him Caranus, after the mythical founder of the Argead dynasty.⁶¹ Alexander's reaction to this gesture can all too easily be imagined. His isolation at court was now almost complete. Among the old guard barons only Antipater, ‘disgruntled at his own influence diminishing before that of Parmenio and Attalus, and filled with dislike for Philip's pretensions to divinity’,⁶² could still be regarded as a potential ally. If Alexander did not act soon, it would be too late. However, with the arrival of the bridegroom's party from Epirus, Alexander gained one supporter who, in his eyes, was worth all the rest put together. During these critical months Philip had contrived to keep Alexander beyond the range of his mother's direct influence. But he could hardly preventOlympias returning to Macedonia as a guest at her own brother's wedding.⁶³ Alexander, Antipater and the ex-queen must have found a good deal to discuss when they finally met again.

The first day's celebrations went off without a hitch. There was as great a concourse of guests as even Philip could have desired. Not only private individuals but also ambassadors from many important Greek city-states — including Athens — presented the king with ceremonial gold crowns. The Athenian herald announced that ‘if anyone plotted against King Philip and fled to Athens for refuge, he would be delivered up’. It was a time-honoured formula; but in retrospect it acquired ominous and prophetic overtones. So did the performance of the tragic actor Neoptolemus, during the great post-prandial state banquet. Philip had instructed him to recite various pieces appropriate to the occasion, especially with reference to the Persian crusade, and the hoped-for downfall of theGreat King. Neoptolemus chose one extract (perhaps from a lost play by Aeschylus) which illustrated the fate in store for excessive wealth and overvaulting ambition. ‘Your thoughts reach higher than the air,’ he sang. ‘You dream of wide fields' cultivation … But one there is who … robs us of our distant hopes — Death, mortals' source of many woes.’ Like the Pythian oracle, these lines were capable of more than one application.⁶⁴

The second day had been set aside for the games. Before dawn every seat in the theatre was taken, and as the sun rose a magnificent ceremonial procession formed up and came slowly marching in. It was headed by ‘statues of the twelve gods wrought with great artistry and adorned with a dazzling show of wealth to strike awe in the beholder’. These were accompanied by Philip's own image, ‘suitable for a god’, an intrusive and unlucky thirteenth. The king's Greek guests began to see that his propaganda had other purposes besides flattery. Whose, it might well be asked, was thehubris now? No one there, it is safe to say, had forgotten the Philippeum at Olympia; many would also recall the setting up of Philip's image in the temple of Ephesian Artemis. The implications of this latest gesture were disconcerting.

Finally, Philip himself appeared, clad in a white ceremonial cloak, and walking alone between the two Alexanders — his son and his new son-in-law. He had ordered the Gentlemen of the Bodyguard to follow at a distance, ‘since he wanted to show publicly that he was protected by the goodwill of all the Greeks, and had no need of a guard of spearmen’. As he paused by the entrance to the arena a young man — a member of the Bodyguard itself — drew a short broad-bladed Celtic sword from beneath his cloak, darted forward, and thrust it through Philip's ribs up to the hilt, killing him instantly. He then made off in the direction of the city-gate, where he had horses waiting. There was a second's stunned silence. Then a group of young Macedonian noblemen hurried after the assassin. He caught his foot in a vine-root, tripped, and fell. As he was scrambling up his pursuers overtook him, and ran him through with their javelins.⁶⁵

Those who drew the sword from Philip's side saw that its ivory hilt bore the carved image of a chariot, and some remembered a warning to ‘beware the chariot’ that he had received from the oracle of Trophonius. Perhaps this was why he had entered the theatre on foot; Philip had his superstitious moments. If so, the oracle — as so often — had brought him little good. Now he sprawled there in the dust, white cloak spattered with blood, his splendid dream broken and forgotten; while beyond him, abandoned now, his statue still stood with those of the other gods, a mute ironic witness to the vanity of human wishes.⁶⁶

Philip's murderer was a King's Bodyguard called Pausanias, from the out-kingdom of Orestis: an aristocrat, if not of royal blood. A year or two before,⁶⁷ Philip, attracted by his remarkable youthful beauty, had taken him as a lover. Later, however, the king transferred his homosexual attentions elsewhere, upon which Pausanias made a great jealous scene with the new favourite, calling him, among other things, a hermaphrodite and a promiscuous little tart. However, the other boy (also, to confuse matters, named Pausanias) proved his manhood by saving Philip's life at the expense of his own, in battle against the Illyrians (? 337). This Pausanias was also a friend of Attalus, whose niece Philip had married.

The incident caused a great scandal in court circles, and Attalus decided to revenge himself on its instigator. The method he chose, though both brutal and revolting, had a certain poetic aptness about it. He invited Pausanias to dinner, and got him dead drunk. Then he himself, and all his guests, took turns to rape the wretched youth, while the rest of the company looked on, laughing and jeering. Finally, Pausanias was turned over to Attalus' grooms and muleteers, who subjected him to the same treatment, and then beat him up for good measure. When Pausanias recovered, he went straight to Philip and laid charges against Attalus. This placed the king in a very awkward position. We are told that he ‘shared [Pausanias'] anger at the barbarity of the act’, which may well be true. At the same time he could not possibly afford to alienate Attalus, who was not only his father-in-law, but had also just been appointed joint-commander of the advance expedition into Asia Minor (spring 336; see above, p. 98). Cleopatra also pleaded forcefully with Philip on her uncle's behalf. So Philip kept putting Pausanias off, making one excuse after another, or (if we can trust Justin) treating the incident as a joke, until finally he dismissed the charges altogether. The whole affair, he hoped, would soon be forgotten. It was not.⁶⁸

This sordid tale of homosexual intrigue and revenge does not, at first sight, provide sufficient motive in itself for Pausanias' murderous assault on Philip — nor, indeed, do our ancient sources think so. The grudge he bore the king was legitimate, but secondary. His real enemy was Attalus; but Attalus, luckily for himself, was out of the country. Philip, after all, had merely failed to see justice done for his ex-lover; and though Pausanias did, in the event, kill him for personal motives, he is unlikely to have done so without active help and encouragement from others. His burning and notorious sense of grievance would at once suggest him as the perfect instrument for a political assassination — nor is there any doubt as to who had the strongest motive, now if ever, for wishing Philip out of the way.⁶⁹ ‘Most of the blame,’ Plutarch says, ‘devolved upon Olympias, on the ground that she had added her exhortations to the young man's anger and incited him to the deed.’ It was she (‘beyond any question,’ Justin asserts) who arranged for horses to be ready for the assassin, so that he could make a quick get-away. Her subsequent behaviour, indeed, suggests that she not only planned her husband's death but openly gloried in it^d — perhaps as a means of diverting suspicion from Alexander himself, who, after all, stood to gain more by Pausanias' action than anyone.

The murderer's corpse was nailed to a public gibbet, and that very same night Olympias placed a gold crown on its head. A few days later she had the body taken down, burnt it over Philip's ashes, and buried it in a nearby grave. Every year she poured libations there on the anniversary of the murder. She obtained the sword which Pausanias had used, and dedicated it to Apollo — under her maiden name of Myrtale. No one, at the time, dared voice a breath of criticism.

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Like mother, like son: Olympias, too, never forgave an insult — least of all one directed at Alexander — and when she exacted vengeance it was with a ferocity seldom equalled except in the gorier pages of the Old Testament.⁷⁰ Alexander himself also, inevitably, incurred wide suspicion at the time. Cleopatra's new-born son, as everyone knew, represented a dire threat to his succession. Pausanias, moreover, after failing to obtain satisfaction from Philip, had taken his tale of outrage to the crown prince. Alexander heard him out, and then quoted an enigmatic line from Euripides — ‘The giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride’ — which could be construed as incitement to the murder of Attalus, Philip and Cleopatra.⁷¹

Modern research can add one or two further details. If Alexander was planning a coup (aided and abetted by his formidable mother) he chose the best possible time for it. Parmenio and Attalus, with many of their feudal adherents, were away in Asia. Furthermore, ambassadors from all the leading Greek states had conveniently assembled in Aegae for the wedding celebrations. If Philip died, it was vital that his successor should win immediate recognition, not only in Macedonia but also abroad, since the supreme command against Asia would devolve upon him as hegemon of the league. Here was the ideal opportunity to gain such an endorsement.⁷² The part played by Antipater in stage-managing the succession suggests that he too was deeply involved.

The assassination itself presents some interesting features. The three young noblemen who pursued and killed Pausanias — Perdiccas, Leonnatus, and Attalus, son of Andromenes — were all close and trusted friends of Alexander. Leonnatus and Perdiccas belonged (as did Pausanias himself) to the aristocracy of Orestis, while Attalus was Perdiccas' brother-in-law. It has lately been argued⁷³ that Philip's murder was in fact (as Alexander subsequently claimed) the work of disgruntled out-kingdom conspirators, alarmed lest the king's new marriage meant a complete elimination of their own influence at court. The evidence as a whole (not least Alexander's close personal connection with this group of Orestis noblemen) suggests rather that whoever did plan the murder cleverly exploited out-kingdom resentment for ulterior motives of their own. Safer to use agents with a known grievance against the Argead dynasty, who could afterwards be identified with some real or imaginary highland attempt to usurp the throne. The best propagandais that which sticks closest to the truth. Nor would suitable individuals be hard to find: Alexander, as the discarded — and half-Epirot — heir to Philip's kingdom offered a natural figurehead for any such would-be rebels.

From these facts we may perhaps form a hypothesis as to how Philip's murder was planned and carried out.⁷⁴ Pausanias — still hot with resentment at the abominable way he had been treated — was approached, probably by Olympias, and promised high rewards and honours if he would join with his three kinsmen from Orestis in assassinating the king. Olympias undertook to have horses⁷⁵ ready for all four of them afterwards. But what Pausanias clearly did not know was the real role assigned to his fellow-conspirators, those trusted intimates of Alexander. Their business was not the removal of Philip; it was to silence him. He knew too much; once he had served his purpose he was expendable. After his death, the propaganda machine could go smoothly into action. The elimination of Pausanias was an essential stage in the plot.⁷⁶

Circumstantial evidence does not amount to proof positive; but men have been hanged on weaker cumulative testimony than that assembled here. The motive was overwhelming, the opportunity ideal. There can be little doubt, in fact, that Alexander ‘became king by becoming a parricide’.⁷⁷Once he was established on the throne, of course, all speculation as to his guilt quickly faded away. It is not hard to see why. Nothing, as they say, succeeds likes success; and nothing, now, could bring Philip back again. Most people preferred to keep quiet about what they knew, or suspected, and cast their lot in with the new regime. The King is dead; long live the King.