The Historians' History of the World 04

He possessed wit, sagacity, and eloquence, and made use of them. He was insinuating and condescending when it was a question of winning or deluding; merciful when he hated; irritating when he loved; compassionate when he himself had dealt the wounds; ready to comfort, when he had decided to strike the heart more deeply; poor, so as to soften the rage of the plundered rich, so as to reward his helpers; liberal with promises when he saw the people were credulous; full of respect for the gods only when he had a mind to; unconcerned as to the lawfulness of the means, provided they led to the end.

“Philip,” says Pausanias, “accomplished the greatest deeds of all the Macedonian kings who reigned before and after him, and also broke more oaths and violated more covenants.”

The new politics which Philip established, arose entirely out of his genius, and the master understood his work and knew how to use it. When Philip as a statesman formed something new with cleverness and vigour, the old must therefore have succumbed to it. The old methods were no longer suitable; the means failed the end, the roads no longer led to the goal; danger then took another form, and was threatened on another side. That which could have saved the Greeks from imitating the new methods of the opponent, and of seizing the spirit of them, and throwing themselves quickly into another kind of transaction, they were no longer capable of. By the side of politics he placed an improved war department, but one spirit drifted into both. Philip possessed the talents especially required by a general. In the greatest danger, full of presence of mind, he never doubted his safety; his most terrible deliberation in the field was quiet deliberation and stratagem. The Bœotians learned this when they had cut him off and already thought him caught, and the Chalcidonians whose cleverly contrived perfidy was wrecked by his cunning. He anticipated all his enemies; they admitted that on this account he always had advantage over them.

Demosthenes says to the Athenians: “You wage war with Philip in the same way as the barbarians carry on a boxing match; when some one is hit he tries to protect the place, and if he is struck on another part his hands go to it; but to prevent the blow or to foresee it, they cannot and will not. It is thus with you; when you hear Philip is in Chæronea, you decide to send an army there, when in Pydna, also there, so that he is truly your commanding officer.” He maintained a standing army and was therefore always ready to strike; this gave him a great superiority, because as monarch he could at once use his fighting forces, without losing time in consultation.

When he attacked the Greeks, his army had already been trained through fighting the surrounding barbarians; it had to learn how useful and necessary it was, and realise to what purpose he made them persevere in peace. He often made them march three hundred stadia encumbered with their weapons, with helmet, shield, and splints, and in addition to this, food and clothing and utensils. They had to observe the strictest discipline. A distinguished Tarentine was dismissed from the service because he had helped himself to a warm bath; Æropus and Damasippus were dismissed because they brought singers into the camp. In the same manner as Epaminondas, in whose school Philip had learned, beat the Lacedæmonian mora by a new formation of the army and deprived them of the efficiency of their firm, quiet movements—so Philip formed the Macedonian phalanx.

Even Æmilius Paulus acknowledged that nothing ever terrified them. They stood the test at Chæronea, where the sacred troops of the Thebans were defeated, and the Athenians, also in the last fight for their freedom, did not prevail against them.j

GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF PHILIP

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. 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 neighbouring sea coast. At his death Macedonian ascendency was established from the coasts of the Propontis to those of the Ionian Sea, and the Ambracian, Messenian, and Saronic gulfs. Within these boundaries, all the cities recognised the supremacy of Philip; except only Sparta, and mountaineers like the Ætolians and others defended by a rugged home.