The Macedonians

As the Greek city-states jostled for position and power, new threats from the north were forming. Philip II of Macedon was adding other northern kingdoms to his own and had already gained territory in central Greece.

Macedon was a neighboring kingdom whose people spoke a Greek dialect and considered themselves to be of Greek ancestry. Macedon’s Aegean coastline had been colonized by the Greeks in previous centuries. The Macedonians were a tough people from a rugged country whose aristocracy were constantly at war among themselves. In 359 B. C.E., ambitious 18-year-old Philip II, an able warrior, assumed power.

Philip had a year-round professional army, and the only way to pay for it was to conquer more territory. He gained a foothold into Greece in the 350s B. C.E. when the ruling aristocracy of Thessaly, the prosperous region north of Boeotia and south of Macedon, allowed Philip, whom they considered a fellow Greek, to assume command of their coalition. By the end of the 340s b. c.e., Philip had consolidated his power in north and central Greece.

The most notable leader of Athens in Philip’s era was the orator Demosthenes (384-322 B. C.E.). Robbed of his inheritance by corrupt guardians after his father died, Demosthenes ended up writing court speeches to make a living. He overcame his initial awkwardness in public

Speaking by intensely practicing declamation (making formal speeches), and he earned lasting fame for his stirring addresses warning Athens about Philip’s aggressive intentions.

Man of Words

Demosthenes is remembered as one of the great orators of Classical Greece, but his skills did not come naturally. He had a weak voice and tended to stutter, and had to work hard to overcome his defects. To strengthen his voice, he recited speeches and poems while running or going up steps. To lose his stutter, Demosthenes practiced by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. Today, these stories of how he improved his speech are well known. He is held up as a model for how a person can overcome personal shortcomings, and his speeches are still read as examples of powerful oration.

Although the Macedonians considered themselves to be Greek, Hellenes such as Demosthenes regarded them as uncouth barbarians. Philip, for example, had 3,000 captured Phocians (Phocia was another kingdom north of Greece) thrown into the sea to drown. Demosthenes scorned the Macedonians as men “who always have their hands on their weapons” (as quoted in Victor Hanson’s The Wars of the Ancient Greeks).

Demosthenes mobilized support for a Greek coalition to head off a Macedonian invasion into southern Greece, but when the Greeks allied against Philip, they faced a professional army that fought year-round. Philip took the fifth century’s Greek hoplite phalanx and made it deadlier by using longer spears that weighed about 15 pounds; shields became smaller to hang from the neck or shoulders, so both hands could wield the longer spear. Philip gave the cavalry the important role of leading off the battle by charging into enemy lines. The infantry followed, aided by archers and other light-armed soldiers. And those soldiers could move quickly; they traveled light, with no entourage of servants and carrying few supplies, and they could reach any city-state on the Greek mainland within a few days.

Siege technology, used to attack walled cities, traditionally used simple ladders and battering rams. Philip’s military engineers designed wheeled towers that could be rolled up to walls and complex catapults that hurled increasingly large objects to damage walls from up to 300 yards away. Philip was therefore able to conquer a walled city in a matter of weeks, whereas fifth-century B. C.E. Athens might spend months or even years trying to do so.

But despite all this technology, Philip’s preferred method of taking a city was bribery-paying off city leaders in exchange for handing over the city. It was a style of warfare that had Demosthenes longing for the good old days, when there was plenty of “invading and ravaging” but “fighting was fair and open” (as quoted in The Wars of the Ancient Greeks).

Using both military tactics and bribery, Philip hoped to have a large empire with tax-paying members whose mines and harbors would be under his control. And his military advances proved to be extremely effective. As Hanson points out in The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, 30,000 Macedonian soldiers proved “far more dangerous to Greek liberty than half

A million Persians.” Demosthenes’s coalition was defeated by Philip’s army at Chaeronea in Boeotia in 338 B. C.E. Philip then formed a Greek-Macedonian league (which historians call the League of Corinth), and proposed that a combined army invade the Persian Empire.

Great Conquerer

This statue of Alexander the Great dates from the Hellenistic Period. Alexander’s extensive conquests spread Greek culture throughout much of the world.

With Philip II came the end of the independent Greek polis. Although a limited form of democracy continued in Athens, it and the other city-states would always be subject to other rulers. Within the next century the cultural capital of the Greek world would be centered in a city that had not even been founded yet-Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt.