When Philip II was born, about 382 BCE, Macedonians were “wandering about without resources, many of them clothed in sheepskins and pasturing small flocks in the mountains, defending them with difficulty against the Illyrians, Triballians and neighboring Thracians” (according to Arrian of Nicomedia). This is exaggerated, but Philip’s father Amyntas III had difficulty defending his country, a client state of Illyria.
As a young man, Phillip spent 3 years as a hostage to Thebes, which had the most powerful army in Greece. Phillip studied the tactics of its renowned commanders, and studied the famous ‘Theban wedge’ could be used in a mass attack over open ground by a phalanx at pace, to drive an enemy from the battlefield. Deeply impressed by the Theban elite force the ‘Sacred Band’, he later modeled his own elite forces on it. The earlier army had had a capable, aristocratic cavalry alongside a light infantry of peasants, but after becoming regent of Macedonia, Philip quickly re-molded it into a superb fighting unit, with expert heavy infantry. He increased the size of the army from 10,000 to 24,000, greatly expanded the cavalry (from 600 to 3,500) and trained troops in the latest Theban tactics. He supervised drills and discipline, made sure that the army was regularly paid and received other benefits, including uniforms. Soldiers were no longer loyal to a particular town or province but faithful only to the king, and not citizen-soldiers but professionals. Philip soon made the phalanx more flexible, with a better system for communications. He introduced a very long spear, 14 to 20 feet in length, so that the phalanx could reach the enemy before themselves coming within reach of enemy spears. He equipped every soldier with a short sword, ideal for close combat, a new helmet, and a redesigned shield. He also established a corps of engineers which soon proved adept at siege warfare, using towers and catapults.
Forced by Athens to cooperate in attempt to conquer the city of Amphipolis, once it had been captured, he kept it for himself and broke off the collaboration. Amphipolis was important as it controlled the Strymon River, which passed along strategically important forests with high trees ideal for building ships. The city also controlled the road from Macedonia to Thrace, but most importantly: there were gold mines there, at Mount Pangeon. As long as Macedonia had Amphipolis, it had resources to build up its army, and could also blackmail neighboring sea powers.
At Chaeronea in 338, Philip’s army feigned a retreat that created openings for his cavalry, and won a great victory over the Greeks. 18-year-old Alexander led heavy cavalry against the Athenian Sacred Band, an extraordinarily responsible position as it was to deliver the knock-out blow. The Sacred Band was wiped out, and as a result, Phillip was able to form the League of Corinth (337), bringing almost all Greek city-states into alliance. Once appointed as leader of the Greeks, confident in his superior military, he inaugurated war against Persia by sending an army to free the Greek cities of Asia (Anatolia, today Turkey). Already hoping to establish a cult of divinity for himself and his family, he built a circular edifice he named the Philippeum, with gold and ivory statues of him, his wife, his parents and Alexander. Alexander was appointed an ambassador extraordinary to Athens, which went well, but suddenly father and son were at odds. To leave on his Asiatic campaign involved risk of a plot back home for a usurping coup, Phillip knew, and initiated precautions.
Alexander felt deprived of glory from Chaeronea, felt destined from birth to, like Achilles, win glory and renown fighting barbarians in Asia, and felt that his virtue and accomplishments mandated his quick elevation. Philip had made the tool (his army), but it seemed to his son his right to prove what it could do. He’d been, after all, raised to the task. Phillip, naturally having some problems with this, exiled the haughty prince and his mother. Preparations for the invasion went ahead with 10,000 men, including 1000 cavalry, sent over to ‘liberate the Greek cities’.
During his conquest of Greece, Philip took time away from the battlefield to marry seven times, ‘though by the end the once-handsome man carried many scars of war. After two decades of fighting, he had a fractured collar and mutilated hand, was missing an eye, and walked with a limp thanks to a lance wound to his leg. His 7th wife first had a daughter, but then a son, who, unlike Alexander, was fully Macedonian. Phillip performed magnificent sacrifices to the gods to celebrate the birth and also the wedding of a daughter to the king of the Epirots. He invited friends from all over Greece, and instructed his friends to bring as many of their acquaintances as they could. Provided were music contests, public games and rich, sumptuous feasts for those bound to him by ties of guest friendship.
When people flocked to the festival, not only was Philip awarded crowns of gold but among processional statues of the twelve Olympian gods (including Dionysus) extravagantly fashioned with the most magnificent workmanship and wondrously adorned with the gleam of precious metal, a thirteenth was carried, a statue fit for a god, one of Philip enthroned with the twelve Olympians. Who was being haughty now?
Years earlier, a Macedonian named Pausanias became a bodyguard of Philip, who loved him for his good looks. On observing another man of the same name becoming the object of the king’s affections, he made a great jealous scene, abusing the second Pausanias by calling him a hermaphrodite and promiscuous little tart willing to submit to the erotic advances of anyone who desired to initiate them. The humiliated replacement killed himself for shame (in battle, it’s told, protecting Phillip). A friend then invited the first to dinner, plied him with unwatered wine until he was dead drunk, and with his other guests raped the wretched youth by turns until, when done, gave him over to the grooms and muleteers from his stable, to further sexually abuse and drunkenly rape. On sobering up from his intoxication, Pausanias was extremely bitter about the physical abuse he’d suffered and complained to Phillip, who did nothing but offer some gifts and a higher place among his bodyguards. Pausanias nursed wrath against one who had demeaned him by failing to extract vengeance, until opportunity came to kill him. That the victim was also one who had accomplished much and so would be remembered, as then also would be his slayer, mattered too. He was, though, unlikely to have done it without encouragement and help from others.
As part of the celebrations, Philip ordered his bodyguards to leave him for a time (as a leader, not a tyrant, it would have sent the wrong signal for him to attend a public celebration, in the royal theater, surrounded by armed men). Pausanias disobeyed those orders, lingered behind, unnoticed, and when no-one was near plunged a Celtic dagger into Philip’s heart.
This happened at a crucial moment for Alexander, who quickly took over. Some hold that the murder was instigated by Olympias, Alexander’s mother, and that Alexander himself knew his father was to be killed. Olympias was resentful at having been divorced, and feared the new son would supplant her own. Both are thought to have encouraged Pausanias; Olympias had horses prepared for the escape of the assassin. A few days later, she burnt his body upon the remains of her ex-husband, made him a tomb in the same place, and provided that yearly sacrifices should be performed for him. She tortured Cleopatra, for whose sake she had been divorced from Philip. After killing her daughter in her lap, she fored her to hang herself. She consecrated the Celtic knife with which the king had been killed, to Apollo, under the name of Myrtale, which was Olympias’s own name when a child. All these things were done publicly, and none dared voice a breath of criticism.
Philip, in the course of a reign of 24 years, had been the greatest of the kings of Europe of his day. Found in his tomb were the remains of his last wife, and of the son born a few days before his assassination, also killed soon after Philip’s murder.
At the age of only twenty, Alexander, through a virtual paracide, became king of Macedonia. To throw into disarray any potential accuser, he directed towards Persians suspicion of having arranged the plot. A letter from him to Persian King Darius purportedly states that: “My father was killed by conspirators whom you instigated as you have yourself boasted to all in your letters.”