The Historians' History of the World 04

But finally, while we are endeavouring to be judicial, it is appropriate to think of the better side of King Philip. He, too, had obstacles to overcome, and he suffers from the pathetic consequences of success; for we forgive the weaknesses and vices and the underhand measures of the one who fails, but we are prone to impute the success of the man who succeeds, purely to the evil of his ways. Once more we may quote Prévost-Paradold:

“Philip had closely observed Greece, with its incurable and daily augmenting weaknesses, and he had foreseen, as a magnificent future, the reunion of these powerless and divided people, under his sovereign authority. He had understood that the Grecian empire, defended by mercenaries and void of citizens, belonged to those who could put in the ranks the greatest number of trained soldiers, and that patriotism had no longer any part to play in this supreme struggle. The instinct and passion of craftiness, patience, the art of bribery, made him eminently suitable for those corrupting and lying manœuvres, which divide the enemy and prepare victory. And to these precious gifts were added an unrestrained ambition, sufficiently strong so as not to draw back in the face of any danger, sufficiently enlightened only to seek opportune contests, and to become great only through success. It is because Philip always saw ahead of his actions, and hoped for great things, that they were always appropriate and useful, and that he did them with such terrible activity. He gave himself up entirely to intrigues, to battles, to the formation of his army, to the subjection of Greece, and to vast hopes.

“It is with a sort of terror that Demosthenes saw and described him as being consumed by desires always greater, and carried away by a hidden strength from enterprise to enterprise. ‘I saw Philip with one eye put out, one shoulder broken, a crippled hand, a wounded thigh, abandon to fortune without ceremony or hesitation all that it wished to take of his body, provided the rest remained powerful and honoured.’ Who does not see that his unchecked activity followed a more elevated aim than the submission of Greece and that this great man, in a hurry to have finished, was afraid of seeing life suddenly fail his ambition? What could Greece do to such a genius, sustained by such a character?”

Ruins of the Gate of the Propylea of Athens

Professor Buryf is even more direct in Philip’s praise and in blame for Demosthenes: “To none of the world’s great rulers has history done less justice than to Philip. The overwhelming greatness of a son greater than himself has overshadowed him and drawn men’s eyes to achievements which could never have been wrought but for Philip’s life of toil.” He also notes that we have no information of Philip’s stupendous conquest of Thrace, and that what we know of him at all has come through Athenian mouths and chiefly from “the malignant eloquence” of Demosthenes, on which account the Greek history of Philip’s time has often been regarded “as little more than a biography of Demosthenes,” whose policy Professor Bury finds retrograde and retarding, unrelieved by any new ideas. The time needed an Athenian statesman of adaptability and judgment. In the long look, Æschines was more nearly that man than Demosthenes.a

THE SACRED WAR

[359-351 B.C.]

Alexander, the tyrant of Pheræ, was assassinated in 359 by his brothers-in-law, at the instigation of his wife, Thebe, she having taken care to deprive him of his sword while he slept and to remove the dogs which guarded the entrance to his chamber. She then introduced her brothers, and on their hesitating to deal the blow she threatened to awake her husband. The murderers assumed Alexander’s tyranny, and one of them, Lycophron, was on the throne when Philip was summoned to oppose him by the powerful family of the Aleuadæ of Larissa, who, like the Macedonian kings, pretended to descend from Hercules. Philip was then besieging Methone, the only city of the Thermaic Gulf which still formed part of the Athenian federation. After having received a wound which cost him one eye, he took the city, razed it to the ground, and seized the occasion which then offered to enter Thessaly. Lycophron having made an alliance with the Phocians, Phayllus, brother of Onomarchus, came to his aid with seven thousand men. Philip defeated Phayllus, but was himself defeated by Onomarchus, who forced him back into Macedonia while he, Onomarchus, returned to Bœotia to gain possession of Coronea. But Philip reappeared shortly with a new army: his forces united to those of Thessaly amounted to twenty thousand men and three thousand horses. Against the Phocians, who had stolen the treasure of the temple of Delphi, he appeared as an avenger of Apollo, and all his soldiers wore crowns made of laurel leaves from Tempe.