Philip and Alexander

1

IN THE BEGINNING

Long before Philip or Alexander there was Macedonia, a kingdom in northern Greece ruled by the Argead dynasty. The nature of the family is important, for their sole right to become king was never challenged by the aristocracy. One justification for this was that the Argeads claimed to be distinct, originally outsiders to the region, descendants of a nobleman exiled from the city of Argos in the southern Greek Peloponnese, who in the seventh century BC took his family and household north and conquered a new kingdom. As aristocrats of Argos, they claimed Hercules, the demigod and son of Zeus, as the founder of their line, often worshipping him as Herakles Patruoüs (the “ancestor” or “father”). Such stories were common in the ancient world; the Romans famously boasted that their city was founded by Romulus—son of Mars and descendant of Aeneas, himself son of Venus, who had led away a party of Trojans after the sack of their city and eventually settled in Italy. By the first century BC, the Aedui, a large tribe living in Gaul, claimed to be the offspring of other refugees from Troy, making them “brothers” of the Romans, and smoothing the alliance between the tribe and Rome’s Republic.¹

Ancient communities were fond of such stories, happily inventing them when convenient, making it hard to know whether any of these tales contained the slightest shred of truth. Perhaps the Argeads were originally from elsewhere—a chief and his band of warriors forced to leave their homeland or migrants seeking new opportunities—but it is impossible to know. For whatever reason, only an Argead could be king of Macedon, a rule that was never broken until the final extinction of the line with the murder of Alexander IV, son of Alexander the Great, in 310 BC. Something in the Argead bloodline was seen as special and sacred, for the king had an important role as somehow more closely connected to the gods. Tradition claimed that one of Philip’s ancestors, newly become king on the death of his father, was carried as a babe in arms to join the Macedonian army as it faced the Illyrians, turning defeat into victory. More routinely, an adult king led the army on any important occasion and presided over major festivals, while each royal day began with the king personally cutting the throat of the sacrificial animal.²

The Argeads were special, alone possessing the right to rule, but this had failed to grant Macedonia any great stability, since any male Argead could be king if enough people supported him, or at least were willing to accept him. As far as we can tell there was no fixed rule as to who should succeed when the king died. If his oldest son was an adult, then there would probably need to be a good reason not to choose him, but this was certainly possible. Brothers might be preferred, or members of another line of the wider clan. Although a gathering of adult males representing the people in arms, or at least the most significant among them, acclaimed a new king by clashing weapons against shields, there is no sense of an election where royal candidates were chosen. Instead a man claimed to be king and then saw whether he was supported and able to survive. There were sometimes plenty of other options available, for the Argeads bred prolifically, helped by a tradition of polygamy. They also tended to be long-lived, at least if they did not come to a violent end.³

In the earliest days the names of kings are known, including the first Philip, but little else is certain, and the dynasty begins to emerge into recorded history in the second half of the sixth century BC, under the rule of Amyntas I, who was succeeded c. 498 BC by his son, Alexander I, and then in 454 BC by his grandson Perdiccas II. After these three long reigns, the kingdom became less stable, with many of the next monarchs assassinated by those around them. In 399 BC Archelaus I was murdered during a hunt, the conspirators not quite managing to make it look like an accident. The philosopher Aristotle judged that the king was killed because of his own vices, dying at the hands of a disappointed young lover, although he explains that politics as well as personal grudges played a role. Archelaus had ruled fairly successfully for fourteen years, strengthening his kingdom, but he had risen to power in the first place through assassinations and executions. He was the son of King Perdiccas II, but the philosopher Plato alleges that his mother was no more than a slave owned by his uncle. This may simply be a slur, a misunderstanding of royal polygamy, or could even true, confirming that the child of a concubine might be recognized as legitimate. Archelaus killed his uncle, the uncle’s son, and also a half brother as he made himself king.⁴

Amyntas III became king in 393 BC, the fifth king in the six years since the murder of Archelaus. One of his four predecessors may have died of disease, but the rest were murdered, and the precise details and lengths of their reigns are hard to decipher. Amyntas most likely assassinated his immediate predecessor. The new king was a great-grandson of Alexander I. The first Alexander had lived a long life and fathered at least six children, including Amyntas’s grandfather, but neither this man nor Amyntas’s father had been king. For whatever reasons the line had so far been overlooked, for Amyntas was already a mature man and yet had clearly not been seen as an obvious candidate for the throne up to this point. Yet in spite of the heavy Argead death toll during the last few years, rivals survived and would soon resurface. Apart from the threat posed by Amyntas’s own relatives, his kingdom was surrounded by foreign enemies.⁵

The first to act were the Illyrians, old adversaries of the Macedonians, who lived to the northwest. They were a numerous and warlike people divided into many different tribes and following different kings and chieftains. Illyrians was the name given by the Greeks to the “barbarians” living in this area, much as they dubbed other groups Celts, Thracians, or Scythians because they felt them to be similar and it was easier to use such blanket terms than to understand the complicated reality of tribes and clans. There is little reason to believe that the Illyrians felt much sense of corporate identity, and they certainly had no idea of nationhood. However, by the start of the fourth century BC a leader named Bardylis, most likely a king of a tribe called the Dardanians, had united not simply his own people, but also many of their neighbors under his rule. He may have been behind the major invasion that struck the heartland of Macedonia just a few months after Amyntas III became king. Whichever group of Illyrians was responsible, the new king was forced to flee, probably taking refuge in Thessaly, Macedon’s southern neighbor.⁶

Eventually Amyntas III returned, aided by Thessalian allies; usually the Illyrians were interested more in plunder and extortion than permanent occupation, so Amyntas did not have to drive them out. A man named Argaeus may have exploited the king’s flight to seize the throne for himself, for according to Diodorus some of his sources claimed that the man ruled for two years, but the whole episode is obscure and hard to interpret. A decade later there was another major Illyrian attack, and this was soon followed by hostility from some of the Greek communities in the Chalcidice, the triple-pronged peninsula to the east. These latter were led by Olynthus, a city-state that Amyntas had tried to appease in the past. Once again, the king was forced to flee, and this time it took aid from Sparta to restore him in 382 BC.⁷