3. The chief strength of the army, as he constituted it, was in the phalanx, a body of sixteen thousand foot soldiers, fully armed in the Greek fashion, with spears twenty-four feet long. When drawn up in order of battle, the four front ranks held their spears pointing outward, and stood at such a space apart, that the foremost line had four spear-points between each man and the enemy, or on occasion they marched with their shields touching, so as to form an almost impenetrable wall.
4. As soon as Philip's designs against Greece were apparent, a strong spirit of resistance showed itself, and chiefly at Athens, where the great orator, Demosthenes, never ceased to rouse his countrymen to maintain their freedom. Demosthenes had trained himself in eloquence under great difficulties; he naturally either stammered, or had an indistinct pronunciation—a defect which he cured by speaking with pebbles in his mouth, and he used to rehearse his speeches to the roaring sea, in order to nerve himself against the clamors of a tumultuous assembly. He so far succeeded, that he often swayed the minds of the Athenians; his name stands as the first of orators, and his Philippics, as his discourses against Philip are called, are considered as models of rhetoric.
5. At Cheronæa, in 338, a battle was fought by Philip against the allied forces of the Athenians and Thebans. At one time the Athenians gained some advantage, but they used it so ill, that Philip, calling out to his troops, "They do not know how to conquer," made a sudden charge, and routed them with great slaughter. The battle of Cheronæa was the end of the independence of Greece, which from that time forward became subject to Macedon, in spite of its many struggles to shake off the yoke, and recover the liberty which had been lost for want of a firm, united, settled government.
6. The King of Macedon next commenced his arrangements for his other favorite scheme—the invasion of Asia; but in the year 336, in the midst of the feasts in honor of his daughter's marriage, he was murdered by a young Macedonian noble, who was slain in the first anger of the surrounding guards, without having time to disclose the motive of his crime.
7. Alexander, son of Philip and his Epirot queen Olympias, was twenty years of age when he came to the throne. On the night of his birth the temple of Diana, at Ephesus, was burned to the ground by a man named Erostratus, in the foolish desire of making himself notorious, and this Alexander liked to consider as an omen that he should himself kindle a flame in Asia.
8. He traced his descent from his father's side from Hercules, and by his mother's from Achilles, and throughout his boyhood he seems to have lived in a world of the old Greek poetry, sleeping with Homer's works under his pillow, and dreaming of deeds in which he should rival the fame of the victors of Troy. He was placed under the care of Aristotle, the great philosopher of Stagira, to whom, when Philip had written to announce Alexander's birth, he had said that he knew not whether most to rejoice at having a son, or that his son would have such a teacher as Aristotle.
9. From him the young Alexander learned to think deeply, to resolve firmly, and devise plans of government; by others he was instructed in all the graceful accomplishments of the Greeks, and under his father he was trained to act promptly. At fourteen he tamed the noble horse Bucephalus, which no one else dared to mount; two years later he rescued his father in a battle with the Scythians, and he commanded the cavalry at Cheronæa, but he was so young at the time of his accession, that the Greeks thought they had nothing to fear from him.
Battle on the Granicus.