Philip II OF Macedonia: Sometimes the Bastard Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree (382–336 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week, King Philip II of Macedonia, the father and role model of that most terrifying of ancient conquerors, Alexander the Great!

*     *.    *

O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.

—Philip II of Macedonia 

The hard-bitten, ambitious, and ruthless youngest son of an undistinguished royal house, Philip II of Macedonia was a usurper and military genius who reorganized the army of his backward mountain kingdom and in so doing changed the course of history. He also fathered and trained the most successful conqueror the ancient world ever knew. 

Born in 382 B.C., Philip had two older brothers and was deemed so expendable that he was used as a hostage (a political practice during ancient times in which two sides in any given conflict exchanged Very or Semi Important Persons after the signing of a peace treaty, as guarantee of their future good behavior towards each other). Thus, he spent years in the Greek city-state of Thebes while still a boy, and carefully studied the organization of the Theban army. 

After his return to Macedonia, a Greek-speaking kingdom situated in the mountains and plains north of Greece itself, Philip soon found himself regent for his nephew Amyntas IV, infant son of his older brother Perdiccas II. In 359 B.C., Philip took the throne for himself, setting aside the young king and declaring himself the rightful king. It was a naked exercise of power and nothing else. 

The Macedonian Phalanx

Moving quickly to modernize his army, Philip arranged to pay his soldiers, drilling them incessantly and converting what had previously been feudal levies into the first truly professional nonmercenary fighting force in the ancient world. For the next two decades, he campaigned every year, gradually expanding Macedonia’s territory in all four directions, but especially to the south, toward mainland Greece. 

In 349 B.C., Philip captured the city of Olynthus (in northwestern Greece), whose leaders had made the twin mistake of opposing him and housing two rival claimants to the Macedonian throne. In a preview of what his famous son would later do to those who defied him, Philip destroyed the city utterly and sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery. 

The ruins of ancient Olynthus–destroyed by Philip II in 349 B.C.

By 338 B.C., Philip had conquered all of Greece and the rest of the Balkan peninsula besides. Then he got himself “elected” leader of the so-called “Hellenic League”(a loose collection of Greek city-states that banded together against the Persians). He announced his intention to invade the Persian Empire as revenge for the Persian burning of Athens 150 years previous. 

Philip assassinated at his daughter's wedding

But problems at home distracted him. He quarreled with his son and heir Alexander, who fled along with his mother, Philip’s first wife, Olympias. Recently married (Macedonian kings habitually took more than a single wife) to a much younger woman who quickly bore him another son, Philip disinherited Alexander, making his newborn son his heir. Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C. (allegedly with the complicity of both Alexander and his wild, scheming mother), leaving his infant youngest son as “king” for all of about ten seconds before Alexander, echoing his own father's move against his own brother's son, set aside the baby king and took the throne.