The Classical World (30 page)

After major campaigns in Thrace on his eastern borders from 342 onwards, Philip was brought back into central Greece by local political quarrelling in 339/8. Alarmingly, his previous ally, the Thebans, had finally broken their alignment and turned to the Athenians; since 346 Philip’s cautious retention of several forts near Thermopylae had helped to disillusion Theban opinion and in 340 his attack on a Theban ally, Byzantium, had hardened opinion against him. All along, a Theban–Athenian alliance was the outcome which Philip had feared. However, at the battle of Chaeronea, in August 338, he won his most famous victory, ‘fatal to liberty’, over the combined Theban and Athenian troops.

The diplomacy and conflicts of these years 348–338 have an enduring fascination and their consequences were a turning point for Greek civic life and its setting, Greek freedom. After his victory in 338 Philip ostentatiously respected Athens (the city still had the impregnable Long Walls) but was much harsher to Thebes. War was then declared on the Persian Empire which had been Philip’s long-term aim at least since the late 350s. Supposedly, this war was to ‘punish the Persian wrongs of 480’, especially the burning of Athens’ temples, and to ‘free’ the Greek cities in Asia. In 338/7, Philip imposed a peace and alliance, offering ‘freedom’, on his Greek allies prior to going east, although many of them were reluctant, or sceptical, about his true aims.

For his Asian campaign, Philip’s publicity cleverly recalled the history of the great Panhellenic years from 478 to 465; he formed a second ‘Hellenic Alliance’ which was based, like its predecessor, at Corinth. This time, Sparta was excluded, much to the glee of her enemies in southern Greece. In their eyes, Philip’s supervised ‘freedom’
was far preferable to the risk of a Spartan resurgence. From an Athenian viewpoint, this sort of local calculation was close to treachery. For Philip’s Hellenic Alliance was far harsher than the one in the 470s which Athens had led by sea and Sparta by land. In the member-cities, changes to the political system and the radical menaces of a redistribution of land and an abolition of debts were strictly prohibited. A council of deputies was to arbitrate disputes between member-states, thus enshrining in a sworn treaty the old Greek practice of public arbitration. But there were also to be people ‘appointed for the common safety’, a carefully vague euphemism for Philip’s own men: probably, they were his generals and the army which he left in Greece.
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Rebel states, meanwhile, were to be punished at the Macedonian leader’s own whim.

Throughout, Philip’s remarkable successes in Greece had owed much to bluff and promises, artfully dressed up as diplomacy. He addressed letters repeatedly to the Athenians which were full of vague promises, misleading self-justification and, eventually, tendentious history. Never before had one Greek state communicated so much to another by unsolicited communiqués. Behind the fine words, Philip increasingly had the greater manpower; he had widened Macedon’s frontiers, and so he drew on the resources of a newly united kingdom whose military numbers were so much greater than that of the Athenians. He also multiplied the kingdom’s horsepower by settling Macedonians, his future cavalrymen, on lush new pastures in the wetlands which he conquered on his eastern border. He even improved the strength of his warhorses by bringing new breeding-stock back to his kingdom’s stables. By the end of his reign his cavalry (charging with long lances) numbered more than 5,000, more than five times greater than the numbers which are attested at its beginning. On his north-western and eastern borders, Philip also annexed accessible mines of gold and silver. Archaeologically, finds in Macedon are conspicuous even before Philip’s reign for their quantity of gold objects, a luxury which far exceeds the gold found elsewhere in Greece. The new mines intensified this splendour and transformed the kingdom’s economic base. Their effects were soon seen in Philip’s superb coinage, as for the first time, gold pieces circulated from a Greek monarch. They proved to be one of Philip’s lasting memorials: they
lived on in second-hand copies among European barbarians and continued to be used long after his death as far west as Gaul.

Philip’s other memorials were his new towns and his changes to the social and military order of the Macedonians. Various ‘towns of Philip’ were founded on the kingdom’s borders, the forerunners of his son’s Alexandrias. A cluster of them lay on river-sites in modern Bulgaria where Plovdiv still commemorates Philip’s name. The new towns strengthened his frontiers and conquests, while new units, based on a new social order, bound his newly balanced army closer to the king. A large unit of 3,000 ‘Royal Shield-bearers’, Philip’s invention, linked a trained unit of ‘Royal Foot Companions’ to the enlarged Companion Cavalry who rode on the wings of the flexible army-line. These new titles of distinction honoured recruits in the royal service and although their units were still led by their local nobles, they were now trained and merged into a single royal force. The Foot Companions’ symbol was the long pike, or
sarissa
, which was made from cornel wood and weighted with a butt-spike; held by two hands, it extended to a length of more than sixteen feet. Philip had plainly thought hard about military tactics and so he devised a new model army which was an unusually varied and balanced unity.

Remarkably, Philip bound this new army to himself as king without surrendering any of the monarchy’s powers. Neighbouring kings, by contrast, had become restricted by fixed councils and magistrates; Philip remained an autocrat who was swept along by his success and his ability to make gifts and to bestow grants of conquered land on his soldiers. A Macedonian king had to be a man of prowess and achievement. His people were solidly loyal to monarchy (it lasted far longer than Athens’ democracy), but at any time his nobles might well prefer another king for the job. Behind the charm and the diplomacy, Philip had to be a great warrior and a great hunter, a generous giver and a great drinker. These sides to a man were what formed a Macedonian leader and what the court admired. So Philip fought personally in the front line and after battle would lead a tireless pursuit on horseback against the enemy’s fugitive leaders. His other known skills can even be illustrated now by archaeology. On the double royal tomb at Vergina, a superb fresco shows scenes of hunting in which he, his young Royal Pages and (surely) Alexander attack a lion (lions
still lived in and near his Macedon). Even the hunting-dogs are shown with terrifying jaws. Deer, bears and boar are all represented as the Macedonians’ prey, face to face. The superb ceremonial shield and couch in Philip’s tomb-chamber were also decorated with vigorous scenes of hunting on horseback. The grave-goods included a gold arrow-case of a type known in barbarian Scythia: it was a gift to Philip, no doubt, like the gifts he himself liked to give. An array of silver drinking-cups and big jugs and containers, often beautifully decorated, attest the prominence of bold drinking in the parties, on couches, in Philip’s palace rooms.

Philip gained loyalty by excelling at all these arts. Within Macedon, he had advisers, especially his Companion nobles, but there was no formal ‘constitution’: within the kingdom, it was still he as king who dispensed personal justice, in answer to appeals and petitions. This pattern of personal justice would become prominent in the next three centuries under succeeding monarchies; then it would be practised for more than five centuries by subsequent Roman emperors. But it became conspicuous for the first time in Greece with King Philip. The Emperor Hadrian perhaps heard the story which is reported about an old woman who approached him on his travels: she was petitioning for justice, only to be told by Hadrian ‘don’t bother me’. ‘And don’t you be king, then,’ she retorted, whereupon Hadrian did bother to hear her case.
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What Hadrian would not know was that this story had been told of several previous rulers who were also dispensing personal justice. Aptly, the earliest of whom it was told was Philip, king of Macedon.

The Two Philosophers

Plato used to call Aristotle ‘the foal’. What did he mean by that name? Plainly, it was known that foals kick their mothers when they have had enough milk.

Aelian (
c.
AD
210),
Varia Historia
4.9

Aristotle accuses the old philosophers who thought that philosophy had been perfected by their own efforts and says that they were either very stupid or very vain, but that he himself could see that, as great advances had been made in such a few years, philosophy would be completely finished in a short while.
                         Cicero,
Tusculan Disputations
3.28.69

Philip was to be one of the two great founders in the classical world (the other being Octavian–Augustus), but his career coincided with the two who were certainly its greatest thinkers: Plato and his pupil, Aristotle. Plato ended by teaching at Athens in the surrounds of a hero-shrine, the Academy (the origin of our word, ‘academic’); those who heard him do not seem to have paid or usually to have heard him behind closed doors. Aristotle taught in the surrounds of a shrine once favoured by Socrates, the Lyceum. His followers became known as the Peripatetics (from the Greek word for a colonnaded walk). Both schools persisted for another eight hundred years and their founders’ thought then revived again in Europe. In my Oxford college, Aristotle’s thinking has been taught and studied continuously for more than 625 years.

Both of them associated with the most powerful Greek dynasts of
their age. Plato visited Sicily to lecture and converse with two successive tyrants at Syracuse, both called Dionysius, father and son. A book of his teaching was then published, purportedly by the younger Dionysius, which Plato’s followers promptly disowned. After studying with Plato in Athens, Aristotle lived for a while at the court of a dynast, Hermeias, in north-west Asia Minor, who had created a circle of ‘philosophic’ companions and was eulogized by his visitor in an extravagant hymn. He then travelled to Macedon where his father had been a doctor at court. In 343/2
BC
he had been chosen to teach Philip’s son, Alexander, the world’s most wide-ranging mind teaching the world’s greatest conqueror-to-be. When Alexander became king Aristotle returned to teach in Athens for another thirteen years.

Plato was the older philosopher, born in 427
BC
and living until he was nearly eighty in 348
BC
. He was also the greater writer, in my view the greatest prose-writer in all world literature. He was born into the Athenian upper class and was not too young for those of his same background who hoped, indeed plotted, that democracy would one day go away. He was a star pupil of Socrates, whose questioning about ethical terms, the possibility of knowledge and self-knowledge powerfully influenced the younger Plato’s early dialogues. Socrates’ execution and the experience of majority voting (‘mob-rule’) did not win Plato over to be a democrat. A democracy, he later wrote, is a ‘charming, anarchic and many-sided constitution’ which bestows a ‘sort of equality on the equal and the unequal alike’: Plato detested it.
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It was not only in politics that he went against the current of his fellow citizens. His philosophy was founded on a radical contrast between the worlds of appearance (real to us) and ‘reality’, knowable only to a philosopher who has prepared and trained for more than fifteen years. Plato and his pupils did perhaps engage in classifications of the natural world (the best evidence is only a comedy, sending them up) but they were not really empiricists. What they were most encouraged to admire were the newish sciences of mathematics and astronomy (although Plato himself made no lasting contributions to either of them, as opposed to their appreciation). Plato argued that the soul is separate from the human body, that it enters the body with knowledge from a previous existence which we can then ‘recall’, that there are punishments, and a renewed existence, for souls after bodily
death. Famously, he proposed the existence of ‘Forms’, culminating in an enigmatic ‘Form of the Good’, on which he taught but never published a coherent account. These Forms are thought of as the ideal types which are the essence of the objects (beds, dogs, even horses) and qualities (justice, goodness, wisdom) in the world which we wrongly call ‘real’. Like universals to particulars, they represent the goodness or ‘dog-ness’ which is instantiated in our world.

Plato also returned repeatedly to questions of knowledge, belief and explanation. What is it to ‘know’ something? Does it presuppose knowledge of its definition? What is the difference between knowledge and a belief which is true? What is the moral value of self-knowledge and is it really knowledge if it is not of an object beyond the subject? Is virtue like one of the crafts which expert craftsmen know how to follow? These and other questions, greatly refined, underlie some of the writings which philosophers continue to find the most challenging in all his thought, culminating in his late masterpieces, the
Theaetetus
and the
Sophist
. Even the difficult theory of Forms was to come under Plato’s own criticism, especially in his remarkable
Parmenides
where he criticizes it as leading to an infinite regress and propounds his celebrated ‘third-man’ argument. In the earlier dialogues, especially, Plato hides his own exposition behind his deliberately chosen dialogue form. Keen young opponents are shown arguing with Plato’s version of Socrates who confounds them, sometimes with arguments which strike us as very feeble. On one view, Plato is deliberately exercising his dialogue’s readers by making them engage with arguments whose own validity he is not personally endorsing. This process helps us to tone up our minds, preparing us for future progress. Certainly, Plato does not present his speakers’ views as his own. The use of the dialogue form and the long evolution of his writings across some forty years make it wrong to turn their ideas into one system and call it ‘Platonic’. In antiquity later readers did so, claiming that they were not adding anything new. Their neo-Platonism was radically untrue to much that Plato had discussed.