Master of Amphipolis, Philip crossed the Strymon with the intention of possessing himself of the mining region of Mount Pangea. He founded there upon the site of the ancient Thasian city Crenides, a new town which he called Philippi, upon the money of which was imprinted the head of Hercules, ancestor of the Macedonian kings. The city of Philippi was at once a military post, the entrance to Thrace, and a centre of exploitation for the mines of Mount Pangea. These mines, far better operated than they had been by the Thasians and Athenians, furnished Philip with an annual revenue of a thousand talents, [£200,000 or $1,000,000] out of which he made the handsome gold coins which bear his name. This source of riches which enabled him to support his army and to buy traitors in the Greek cities, contributed to his greatness at least as much as the phalanx. He declared that no city was impregnable into which could be driven a mule laden with gold pieces.[c]
Greek Masks
Fragment of Sculpture, showing Oarsmen in Galley
CHAPTER XLIX. THE TRIUMPHS OF PHILIP
DEMOSTHENES, THE ORATOR
The trite proverb that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” like all other proverbs, expresses hardly half the truth. Never was there a more definite combat between the two sharp instruments than in the history of Greece at this period, for that history becomes hardly more than a pitched battle between a splendid organiser of armies and a splendid captain of arguments, and the parallel is the closer inasmuch as Demosthenes, though commonly thought of as an orator, was much more distinctly a writer; for he was decidedly inferior as a speaker to his great rival Æschines, and his orations are chiefly valuable for their logic and their cautious reasoning. Unlike the perishable glories of the art of oratory pure and simple, the art of Demosthenes has come down to us in considerable completeness, and forms a text-book whose eloquence is little appreciated by the students that reluctantly unravel its close-knit fabric.