We could have wished to learn from some person actually present, the immediate effect produced upon the great miscellaneous crowd in the theatre, when the sudden murder of Philip first became known. Among the Greeks present, there were doubtless many who welcomed it with silent satisfaction, as seeming to reopen for them the door of freedom. One person alone dared to manifest satisfaction; and that one was Olympias.[1161]
Thus perished the destroyer of freedom and independence in the Hellenic world, at the age of forty-six or forty-seven, after a reign of twenty-three years.[1162] Our information about him is signally defective. Neither his means, nor his plans, nor the difficulties which he overcame, nor his interior government, are known to us with exactness or upon contemporary historical authority. But the great results of his reign, and the main lines of his character, stand out incontestably. At his accession, the Macedonian kingdom was a narrow territory round Pella, excluded partially, by independent and powerful Grecian cities, even from the neighboring sea-coast. At his death, Macedonian ascendency was established from the coasts of the Propontis to those of the Ionian Sea, and the Ambrakian, Messenian, and Saronic Gulfs. Within these boundaries, all the cities recognized the supremacy of Philip; except only Sparta, and mountaineers like the Ætolians and others, defended by a rugged home. Good fortune had waited on Philip’s steps, with a few rare interruptions;[1163] but it was good fortune crowning the efforts of a rare talent, political and military. Indeed the restless ambition, the indefatigable personal activity and endurance, and the adventurous courage, of Philip, were such as, in a king, suffice almost of themselves to guarantee success, even with abilities much inferior to his. That among the causes of Philip’s conquests, one was corruption, employed abundantly to foment discord and purchase partisans among neighbors and enemies—that with winning and agreeable manners, he combined recklessness in false promises, deceit and extortion even towards allies, and unscrupulous perjury when it suited his purpose—this we find affirmed, and there is no reason for disbelieving it.[1164] Such dissolving forces smoothed the way for an efficient and admirable army, organized, and usually commanded, by himself. Its organization adopted and enlarged the best processes of scientific warfare employed by Epaminondas and Iphikrates.[1165] Begun as well as completed by Philip, and bequeathed as an engine ready-made for the conquests of Alexander, it constitutes an epoch in military history. But the more we extol the genius of Philip as a conqueror, formed for successful encroachment and aggrandizement at the expense of all his neighbors—the less can we find room for that mildness and moderation which some authors discover in his character. If, on some occasions of his life, such attributes may fairly be recognized, we have to set against them the destruction of the thirty-two Greek cities in Chalkidikê and the wholesale transportation of reluctant and miserable families from one inhabitancy to another.
Besides his skill as a general and a politician, Philip was no mean proficient in the Grecian accomplishments of rhetoric and letters. The testimony of Æschines as to his effective powers of speaking, though requiring some allowance, is not to be rejected. Isokrates addresses him as a friend of letters and philosophy; a reputation which his choice of Aristotle as instructor of his son Alexander, tends to bear out. Yet in Philip, as in the two Dionysii of Syracuse and other despots, these tastes were not found inconsistent either with the crimes of ambition, or the licenses of inordinate appetite. The contemporary historian Theopompus, a warm admirer of Philip’s genius, stigmatizes not only the perfidy, of his public dealings, but also the drunkenness, gambling, and excesses of all kinds in which he indulged—encouraging the like in those around him. His Macedonian and Grecian body-guard, eight hundred in number, was a troop in which no decent man could live; distinguished indeed for military bravery and aptitude, but sated with plunder, and stained with such shameless treachery, sanguinary rapacity, and unbridled lust, as befitted only Centaurs and Læstrygons.[1166] The number of Philip’s mistresses and wives was almost on an Oriental scale;[1167] and the dissensions thus introduced into his court through his offspring by different mothers, were fraught with mischievous consequences.
In appreciating the genius of Philip, we have to appreciate also the parties to whom he stood opposed. His good fortune was nowhere more conspicuous than in the fact, that he fell upon those days of disunion and backwardness in Greece (indicated in the last sentence of Xenophon’s Hellenica) when there was neither leading city prepared to keep watch, nor leading general to take command, nor citizen-soldiers willing and ready to endure the hardships of steady service. Philip combated no opponents like Epaminondas, or Agesilaus, or Iphikrates. How different might have been his career, had Epaminondas survived the victory of Mantineia, gained only two years before Philip’s accession! To oppose Philip, there needed a man like himself, competent not only to advise and project, but to command in person, to stimulate the zeal of citizen-soldiers, and to set the example of braving danger and fatigue. Unfortunately for Greece, no such leader stood forward. In counsel and speech Demosthenes sufficed for the emergency. Twice before the battle of Chæroneia—at Byzantium and at Thebes—did he signally frustrate Philip’s combinations. But he was not formed to take the lead in action, nor was there any one near him to supply the defect. In the field, Philip encountered only that “public inefficiency,” at Athens and elsewhere in Greece, of which even Æschines complains;[1168] and to this decay of Grecian energy, not less than to his own distinguished attributes, the unparalleled success of his reign was owing. We shall find during the reign of his son Alexander (to be described in our next volume) the like genius and vigor exhibited on a still larger scale, and achieving still more wonderful results; while the once stirring politics of Greece, after one feeble effort, sink yet lower, into the nullity of a subject-province.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Diodor. xiii. 86-114; xiv. 70; xv. 24. Another pestilence is alluded to by Diodorus in 368 B. C. (Diodor. xv. 73).
Movers notices the intense and frequent sufferings of the ancient Phœnicians, in their own country, from pestilence; and the fearful expiations to which these sufferings gave rise (Die Phönizier, vol. ii. part ii. p. 9).
[2] Diodor. xiv. 78.
[3] Diodor. xiv. 78. Διονύσιος δ᾽ εἰς Μεσσήνην κατῴκισε χιλίους μὲν Λοκροὺς, τετρακισχιλίους δὲ Μεδιμναίους, ἑξακοσίους δὲ τῶν ἐκ Πελοποννήσου Μεσσηνίων, ἔκ τε Ζακύνθου καὶ Ναυπάκτου φευγόντων.