Philip created his army, he subdued and united Macedonia, and then he was ready to turn to Greece. Athens, Sparta and Thebes were now all weak. The power of the city-state was passing away and was to yield in time to the new idea of national unity, but it was not to yield without a conflict. The struggle between Philip and the Greek states was more than a struggle between a strong state and several weak ones; it was a conflict of ideas. On the one side was Athens and the states who sided with her, the last representatives of the independent city-state who still jealously guarded their political freedom; on the other side was Philip, who represented this new idea of national unity. He determined to subdue most of Greece by force, but he would have liked Athens to yield to him of her own free will. The power of her fleet and her armies had been broken, but her thought, her art and her culture remained. Could Philip have been received by Athens with good-will, and been recognized by her as the leader of all Greece; he would have held it of greater importance than any military victory. He wrote letters to her statesmen, sent special envoys to Athens to plead his cause, he tried to prove to her that her fears of him were groundless, and he treated the very soil of Attica as if it were sacred. It is a striking picture: Philip, the warrior, at the head of a powerful army, lowering his sword before the politically weak little state, because of the might of her spirit. And that spirit was not dead. One more flash of the old Athenian independence flamed out in the defiance she hurled at Philip.
Philip advanced. He seized and held Thermopylae, the gateway into Greece; he upheld the rights of Delphi against a neighbouring state and was recognized by the Oracle as the defender of Apollo. Then he marched into Boeotia, where Athens and Thebes made a last tremendous stand against him. In 338 B.C. one of the decisive battles of the world was fought at Chaeronea. On one side was an army of the last representatives of the old city-state, a confused array of men, some of them citizen-soldiers serving without pay, some of them hired mercenaries; and on the other side, the first great army of one united nation. The battle was fought on a hot summer's day, and it was fierce and long, but at length the Greeks gave way and Philip was victorious. He had little mercy for Thebes, and she drank the cup of bitterness to the dregs. Some of her leaders were banished, others were put to death, a Macedonian garrison was placed in the city and all Theban lands were confiscated.
Athens was treated with greater mercy. On the day of the victory over her, Philip
did not laugh at table, or mix any amusements with the entertainment; he had no chaplets or perfumes; and as far as was in his power, he conquered in such a way that nobody might think of him as a conqueror. And neither did he call himself the King; but the general of Greece. To the Athenians, who had been his bitterest enemies, he sent back their prisoners without ransom, and restored the bodies of those that were slain in battle for burial, and he sent Alexander his son to make peace and an alliance with them.[[1]]
Underlying all his ambition, all his reliance on military power, was yet the feeling, partly unconscious yet there, that, after all, the things of the spirit were greater than those of pomp and power, and he longed for recognition from Athens. But Athens, though forced to recognize his supremacy, never accepted him willingly.
Philip's next move was to organize an expedition into Asia, in order to crush the power of Persia, and as such an expedition would take Philip out of Greece, most of the Greek states agreed to join it. But first he returned to Macedonia, where enemies were always to be found stirring up hostility to him. A royal marriage gave a good excuse for a great public festivity, and a procession was planned, in which Philip, robed in white, was to walk in state. It must have been a moment of great triumph. His ambitions were fulfilled. The Macedonian army was the greatest in the world, he had united the hostile elements in his kingdom and made of them a nation, he had conquered Greece and been recognized as the chief general of all the Greek armies, and now he was about to set forth to conquer Persia. He was still young, and there seemed nothing to prevent the fulfilment of every further ambition. But suddenly, as the stately procession moved forward, a man darted out from the crowd of spectators, buried his dagger deep in the heart of the King, and Philip fell dead.
He was succeeded by his son Alexander, who in a speech to the Macedonians summed up the achievements of his father. He said to them:
My father found you, vagabond and poor, most of you clad only in skins, tending a few sheep on the mountain sides, and to protect them you had to fight against the border tribes, often with small success. Instead of the skins, my father gave you cloaks to wear and he led you down from the hills into the plains and made you the equal in battle of the neighbouring barbarians, so that your safety depended no longer on the inaccessibility of your mountain strongholds, but on your own valour. He taught you to live in cities, and he gave you good laws and customs, and instead of being the slaves and subjects of those barbarians by whom you and your possessions had long been harried, he made you lords over them. He also added the greater part of Thrace to Macedonia, and by seizing the most conveniently situated places on the sea-coast, he threw open your country to commerce. He made it possible for you to work your mines in safety. He made you rulers over the Thessalonians, of whom you had formerly been in mortal fear, and by humbling the Phocians he gave you, instead of a narrow and difficult road into Greece, a broad and easy one. To such a degree did he humble the Athenians and Thebans, who had ever been ready to fall upon Macedonia, that instead of your paying tribute to the former and being vassals to the latter, both states turned to us for protection. He marched into the Peloponnesus and after setting affairs there in order, he was publicly declared commander-in-chief of the whole of Greece in the expedition against the Persian. And he considered this great distinction not as personal honour to himself, but as a glory for Macedonia.[[2]]
The new King was only twenty years old. It seemed as if his father had been cut off at the height of his career, and that his death could mean nothing but disaster to the power of Macedonia. But what seems like a tragedy and the failure of human hopes, is sometimes the door through which an individual or a nation passes to greater things. Philip had done his work. He was a great soldier and had made great conquests, but he inspired no love and he lacked the imagination which would have made him see with the eyes of the conquered, and so rule them that they would have become real parts of a mighty whole. His son was young, but he had this gift, and so the tragedy of his father's death was the beginning of new and greater opportunities for him, and the door through which Greece was to pass from the old order into the new.