PHILIP AND ALEXANDER OF MACEDON

David G. Hogarth

My intention is the same as before: to debunk the revisionist propaganda of modern Greece and show the reader that ancient chroniclers knew that ancient Macedonians were a separate and distinct people from the ancient Greeks

(1) Hogarth on Philip "Reading the lesson of his times, and making the proved inferiority of citizen militia to standing forces, and of the capricious rule of the many to an imperial system under a single head, he evolved the first European Power in the modern sense of the word-- an armed nation with a common national ideal. This, his own conception, he understood clearly and pursued consistently through twenty-three years. Surely such a man may be called great for what he was." (P.3)

(2) "The clearest distinction is always drawn between "Macedonians" and all other components of the national phalanx in the Asiatic army of Alexander." (P.7)

(3) "So far as we can tell, the belief that the "Macedonians" of the coast-planes and the men of the hills were distinct people with distinct traditions and claims was held not only in Greece but in Macedonia as well." (P.7)

(4) "His clansmen spirits rose, and their faith centred in him. Here was the nucleus of the army, but as yet too small and too little professional. Philip must train and arm this Clan like Greeks, and swell their number by the only method open to him as yet -- the hiring of mercenaries." (P.45)

(5) "Philip taught his Macedonians the Greek drill and tactics, constantly exercised them under arms, and made them cover as much as five and thirty miles a day in heavy marching order, each man with flour for a month and full baggage." (45)

(6) "Philip demanded that the Lyncestian towns be surrendered at discretion and the Illyrian allies be sent away. The armies met, and Philip experimented for the first time in the new tactics, which were to crush Greece and conquer Asia." (p.47) (7) "Twelve years later again his son, rising to a conception of world-wide empire on the stepping-stone of his father's panhellenic kingdom, dreamed of effacing the distinction of Macedonian, Hellene, and Asiatic, by making all march shoulder to shoulder to the conquest of Africa and Europe." ["A national standing army was a new thing in those days"] (P.50)

(7) "A professional army with a national spirit--that was the new idea; and Philip, equally great in practice and theory, intended to add later a new organization, a new weapon, and new tactics." (P.51)

(8) "Neither an army nor a nation is made in a day. The six years which succeeded the capture of Amphipolis and preceded the first serious attempt on Greece, probably saw in Macedonia the birth of both one and the other; but Philip was engaged all his life in completing his work." (P.52)

(9) Philip began enrolling his subjects according to their local and tribal divisions and assigned them to standing territorial regiments. These standing regiments were known each by its colonel's name and quoted thus by Arrian. "All were called 'Macedonians'; the only general distinction, made thereafter, is between Macedonians and Greeks, Thracians and Illyrians." (p.54) (10) "Philip promoted whom he pleased to this service, Macedonian or Greek, and thus in time swelled the six hundred who accompanied him on his first campaign, to the two thousand who followed his son to Asia." (P.55)

(11) "As Philip had extended the honourable title of 'King's Followers' to all his native cavalry, so he took the corresponding term 'pezshatairoi', and applied it to all the Macedonian infantry, whether of his clan or no: thus distinguishing the new nation from the Greeks, as the clan had once distinguished itself from the feudatories." (P.56)

(12) "Though in conception this phalanx was not different from the existing Greek fighting array, Philip so far developed and systematized it that he came to be regarded as its inventor." (P.60)

(13) "Let a foot or two more be allowed to the phalangite of Philip and Alexander, and we save the indubitable fact that a longer weapon than the Greek was introduced, and do not render the attack at Issus a practicable impossibility. This phalanx, however, be it observed, did not prove instantly superior to the Greek infantry formations that it encountered; and it is a frequent error, derived from the Romans, to attach to it a supreme importance in the Macedonian fighting line." (P.63)

(14) "During the winter he pressed the Thessalians to supply better support, and when he came south again in the spring of 352 he was able to take the field with more than twenty thousand foot and three thousand horse. A host of knights and mercenaries, superior to his own, was awaiting him, and in the plain of Volo Philip fought his first great battle on Greek soil." (P.70)

(15) "Flushed with success, Philip conceived the idea of pushing his pious championship of Apollo even to Delphi. Perhaps already he craved for Hellenic recognition;" (p.70)

(16) Philip in front of Olynthus. "He razed the city to the ground, sold its citizens for slaves, after the brutal Macedonian manner, which even his hellenized son used, executed his two half brothers, and went off to Dium to give thanks at the great festival of Macedonian Zeus for the crowning mercy of a united Macedonia. (P.78)

(17) "Never did Philip hold better cards than at Pella in May, 346, and never better did he play his game. Encamped about him in the plain of the Vardar was such an army as united Greece could not excel;" (p.92)

(18) "His whole soul was set on one great end---unconditional supremacy over the Hellenes---and he had the most definite plan of action." (P.92)

(19) "For the six years or more that follow, Philip's life, alas is withdrawn, except at rare intervals, from our knowledge. Alas, indeed! For these are the years in which his men at arms marched, the first foreigners since history has begun, into the Peloponnese, and he himself besieged and took cities on the Adriatic, and led his spearmen up to, or even beyond, the Danube; years, too, in which his final ambition took shape, 'for it was coming to be his desire to be designated Captain- General of Hellas, and to wage the War against the Persians'." (P.97)

(20) While Philip was conquering (342) the western shores of the Black Sea, and the northern coast of the sea of Marmora, and all inland up to the Danube, the Greek states conspire against him forming a kind of anti-Macedonian League. "They sent envoys up to the Great King in Susa, to warn him of Philip's panhellenic project, and induce him to assist Philip's enemies." (P.108)

Referring to Athens, Hogarth writes: "Her adhesion to his panhellenic League against Persia was only compelled, as not he, but his son lived to know." (P.132)

(21) "Not only were the Thracian lands compelled henceforward to pay him tithe, but he founded military colonies here and there in all the region, continuing a policy inaugurated by himself at Philippi, and destined to be developed signally by his son and his successors in Asia, Egypt, and Greece." (P.110)

(22)...

(23) At Chaeronea "On the one side stood the miscellaneous array, half mercenary, half civic, of the last imperial Greek city-states; on the other was ranged the first great army of a national power." (P.127)

(24) "To Philip it mattered little if the panhellenic movement was factitious now; a successful campaign in Asia would go far to give it reality, and common danger and common triumph would unite his Macedonians and their Greek allies." (P.136)

(25) "Alexander, however, began his venture two years later with no more than forty thousand men; and at no higher figure is it probable that Philip's national Macedonian force should be estimated. But there remains to be added the auxiliary host of Greeks, who would have been used rather to garrison towns and keep open communications than to accompany the seasoned troops into the heart of the Persian Empire." (P.137)

(26) "For all that, it may be said of Philip that perhaps he died none too soon. The great work of his life was accomplished. Macedonia was already a nation, and as Phocion warned the exulting Athenians, by the death of its creator, the army of Chaeronea lost no more than one man." (P.143)

(27) "Europe had borne no such man, take him for all in all, as the son of Amyntas" (Theopompus) (p.145)

(28) "The interest of the modern world in Philip, and his place in universal history, depend after all most on his relation to Greek civilization. Therefore, we must examine, in conclusion, the indictment so often repeated, that the Macedonian destroyed Hellenic liberty, and the measure of the wrong he did to civilization, if that indictment be true." (P.145)

(29) "Who so disposed of the forces of Macedon could dispose also of the earth" (p.164)

(30) "Alexander came, then, in this April of 334, to the shore of Dardanelles, with an ambition to possess all Persia as already he possessed all Greece." (P.177)

(31) In a few passages here, Hogarth writes that both Philip and Alexander were Hellene by birth and training, and both believed that the second element -- to conquer and hold a vast empire-- must be incorporated with the Macedonian-- can be understood more fully with the following passage: "But to say that he had learned from his father's and his own experience that a base on which Hellene and Macedonian would fuse firmly together must be outside the traditional home of the either; that the Hellene would prove of even greater service in the holding of Empire than in the conquering thereof;..." (p.177)

(32) "It is a small matter, but a straw on the stream of events. What had happened since the 'Cavalry Battle', to ease the conscience of the Captain--General? In effect enough to make Miletus a point clearly marked in the passing of the enthusiastic boy into the calculating man of affairs. For those two months had proved to demonstration nothing less than that the maritime states of Hellas, those that alone greatly mattered, were in their hearts not for Alexander, but for his enemies. The larger islands, Rhodes, Chios, and Lesbos, and nearly all the lesser, kept open ports to the Persian admirals, and the city of Athens had been at no pains to disguise her sympathies. Her continental position and twenty of her ships, held as hostages by the Macedonian, made her warn Pharnabazus off the Piraeus; but openly she sat within her walls watching for the first Macedonian reverse, and indeed had sent already, or was about to send soon, an envoy direct to Darius." (P.179)

(33) "Therefore, at Miletus, the first sanguine hour of Alexander's life has closed, and on the wreck of his exuberant illusions begins his rise a sterner purpose. Greece must be coerced if she will not be courted. Her command of the seas shall be broken by the capture of the coasts of the Levant, and her people be bent willy nilly to the panhellenic work." (P.180)

(34) "In the face of present hostility, however, it was no longer worth while to maintain an offensive fleet; and, accordingly, he issued now his much canvassed decision to 'burn his boats' and leave himself stranded in Asia." (180)

(35) "The sea was the element of the Greek. No fleet that, as yet, Alexander could requisition would make head for a moment against the squadrons of Persia and the Hellenic powers, should these combine." (P.180)

(36) "This early disillusionment, though it cooled the boy's spirit all too soon, and when pressed home by much future trouble with Greeks, embittered him not a little, and forced him in the end to adapt a policy alien to modern sympathy, was in certain ways salutary." (P.180-1)

(37) "Certain consequence of Issus, however, are of more importance to Alexander's individual history than the battle itself; for through it, in two ways, illumination come to him, and a distinct change in his personal attitude ensues. In the first place, not only had he been placed by the capture of Darius' baggage in possession of much correspondence between the Great King and Hellenic states, but also, for the first time, he had seized in flagrant fault the persons of Hellenic envoys sent up to the Persians." (P.185)

[Note: These are the reasons that I had no trouble posting passages where Hogarth speaks of Alexander as being Hellene (#31). His referral to Alexander as such is in accordance with, and as a result off, the assumed generalship of the crusade by the League of Corinth, and the self-proclaimed Homeric spirit of the Macedonian. The reader is left with unobstructed view of Alexander's most inner feelings ("exuberant illusions" and "early disillusionment"), and his subsequent hatred for the Hellenes;

(38) "These springs of irritation fell to be added to all that had been happening for a year past in Greece, to the crusade preached by Agis of Sparta, to the militant speeches of the anti-Macedonian orators at Athens, and to the unequal struggle of his friends in the islands with the ubiquitous Persian admirals." (p.185)

(39) "If the Greeks and the Macedonians were to coalesce into a Hellenic nation, there was no land on the eastern Mediterranean left so open to mixed colonization as the Egyptian." (p.189)

(40) "Arrian is probably right in saying that the Macedonian system, with its lack of an all-powerful supreme official, its three nationalities set one against the other, and its counteracting civil and military powers, anticipated in some ways the Romans." (p.192-3)

(41) "The king, say they, about to proceed to the East, and already desirous of exaltation above his Macedonians and Greeks, deliberately assumed divine character as son of Amen." (p.196)

(42) "He was officially both King of Macedon, and Federal Captain-General of the Hellenes; but neither the habitual attitude of his Macedonians towards his Greeks, nor of his Greeks towards his Macedonians, was consistent with the relation in which each stood to the general." (p.207)

(43) "The attitude of the Hellenes in Greece had raised, as we have seen, a first difficulty; the attitude of the older Macedonians was now raising a second. The party which Parmenio led had no panhellenic ideals. They would have had Alexander even as Philip and his forefathers had been--feudal king of the Macedonians, conqueror of the Greeks if he would, and of the Persians if he could." (p.207)

(44) "The Macedonians would be retained, for to follow the king was their simple feudal duty. The professional part of the Philipian army, even if not Macedonian by birth, could be relied on to stay by the standards, for it knew no other trade half so lucrative. But to all the allied political contingents, especially the Greeks, which had been sent by their cities to assist a crusade for which neither they themselves nor their Captain-General felt unmixed enthusiasm, there must now be offered a choice between retiring from further service or re-enlisting simply as soldiers of fortune." (p.212)

(45) "How far and fast had the world moved since Marathon! Greeks were fraternizing now with Persians, both at their ease; only the Macedonians sat glowering and constrained, masterful, stiff-necked Northerners that they were. They might well feel uneasy! Their native speech had become so rare at the court of their King that a word of command, shouted in it, rang on unwonted ears like a tocsin." (p.234)

There is, as it has been from the onset, only one conclusion and Hogarth, even though at times strongly influenced by the romantic trappings of J.G.Droysen, brings forth the inescapable finale -- the ancient Macedonians were not the same as the ancient Greeks.