The Historians' History of the World 04

The Spartans had created a system of tactics, that is, a military ordnance, which was adopted by all the other Greeks. The Thebans added to it the system of compact masses, the advantage of which was demonstrated by the victory of Leuctra. Philip, formed in the school of Epaminondas, perfected this system and made of it the Macedonian phalanx, which Plutarch compared to a monstrous beast bristling with iron. It was a mass of hoplites, sixteen files deep, pressed close against each other and armed with a sort of pike seven yards long, called sarissa. The men in the first five ranks held this weapon in both hands, their faces turned to the enemy. The pikes of the first rank extended five yards beyond the line of battle, those of the second, four, and so on to the fifth, whose lance ends were also a yard beyond the breasts of the men next behind. The remaining ranks pressed forward against the first and prevented their retreating, holding their

sarissæ with the points upward, resting upon the shoulders of the men in front, and this wilderness of spears effectually warded off the darts of the enemy. Irresistible on level ground, but without ability to make a quick change of front or a rapid evolution, this cumbersome body of infantry was supported in the rear and on the flanks by the light infantry of peltasts, who commenced the conflict.

Before and at the sides ran the archers and frondeurs, an irregular troop composed of strangers, who, when need came, closed in behind the wings. The cavalry of the hetæria, or companions of the king, armed with a javelin and a sabre and formed of young men belonging to the highest nobility, constituted, with the phalanx, the principal force of the Macedonian armies. There was further a body of light cavalry and a corps of engineers attached to the service of the siege artillery, which consisted of balists and catapults, recently invented machines for the purpose of firing darts at the enemy and boulders against the ramparts of towns. The establishment of a permanent army was Philip’s most important military innovation. Under Philip’s weak predecessors the multiplicity of pretenders to the throne had rendered the nobles fractious and virtually independent; but they had under them neither penestæ as in Thessaly, nor a helot as in Sparta.

Without openly abolishing the ancient privileges, Philip contrived to make them inoffensive by transferring them to the army, where there was always a military and political council. The nobles were little by little induced to leave their estates, and were held permanently at court by the attraction of pleasure and high appointments. It was held an honour among them to have their sons received in the corps of the hetæria, and these young members of the king’s bodyguard, fulfilling domestic offices about his person, were in reality hostages delivered over into his hands. “Never,” says Titus Livius, “were seen slaves so servile in the presence of the master, so arrogant elsewhere.”

As regards the common people, nothing whatever was changed in their condition. They had never, as in Greece, formed a political body, and there was no Macedonian city. Apparently everything took place by popular consent, but the army was the Macedonian people. Philip frequently harangued his troops; a proceeding that offered no danger, since the soldiers of a bellicose chief never withhold from him their approbation. Macedonia was a nation of soldiers; hence its government, maintaining a permanent army and engaged in perpetual wars, could be none other than a military monarchy.

THE WAXING OF PHILIP