The World

This was the sort of brutishness that civilized Greeks expected of the wild Macedonians. Their dialect was almost incomprehensible. They worked their own fields instead of using slaves like most Greeks; the polygamy of their kings was uncouth and often led to queens and princes killing each other for the crown; their drinking unmixed wine led to oafish royal drunkenness and brawls. Macedonia was usually divided between settled towns in the south, ungovernable northern tribes and predatory outsiders from Persia to Athens whose patronage had allowed Archelaos to transform the kingdom, moving the capital from Agae, which remained the location for royal weddings and burials, to a colonnaded new capital at Pella, where the uncouth goat-chaser played the Greek king.

Archelaos proudly invited a literary celebrity, Euripides, to stay and was infuriated when one of his lovers mocked the poet’s halitosis. Archelaos had him thrashed. The boy plotted against the king along with two other embittered lovers. The literary halitosis plot led to Archelaos’ assassination. In 393 his nephew Amyntas III restored order. Amyntas had three sons: all three would be kings. The youngest would be the greatest Greek of his time.

ONE-EYED PHILIP AND QUEEN OLYMPIAS

Like all Greeks, the three princes were raised on Homer, but in Macedonia they also fought, hunted and spent days recovering from hard-drinking symposia. Most unusually for a Macedonian king, Amyntas died old and in his bed, leaving the throne to the eldest boy, Alexander II, who was defeated by the city of Thebes, then the leading Greek power, which forced him to surrender fifty hostages.

The king sent his youngest brother, the thirteen-year-old Philip. Spending three years in Thebes, Philip was taught a lifestyle of vegetarianism, celibacy and pacifism (all of which he later ignored), but he stayed in the house of the Theban general who was his mentor, probably also his lover, and studied the tactics of the Sacred Band, the elite corps of 300 (supposedly 150 male couples) whose victories had won Thebes its supremacy.

At home, both his elder brothers died violently, leaving a baby as King Amyntas IV. But in 359 BC the Macedonians, facing an invasion from their aggressive neighbours, the Illyrians, acclaimed Philip II, who immediately killed as many of his surviving brothers as he could get his hands on, then divided and played his enemies – by bribery, trickery and marriage (his own, to an Illyrian princess). Influenced by Persian guests, he imitated the Great Kings by creating an inner court of Royal Companions. Then he relentlessly drilled a new army, coordinating cavalry led by his Companions with a remodelled infantry, armed with xiphos stabbing swords and fourteen-foot sarissa pikes that allowed them to form wedges invulnerable to cavalry.

In 358, Philip first defeated the Illyrians and northern Macedonians, doubling the size of his kingdom and recruiting his best general Parmenion, then making marriage alliances with Thessaly and Epiros, marrying first Princess Philinna who soon gave birth to a son Arrhidaios, then his fourth wife, Princess Polyxena, a daughter of the king of Molassia, part of Epiros. In 356, Polyxena gave birth to a boy named Alexander and later to a daughter, Cleopatra. When Philip learned his team had won the Olympics, Polyxena changed her name to Olympias to celebrate. But they were never close, and soon Olympias found she positively disliked him. Vigilant and feral in her political instincts, Olympias, an adept of Dionysian mystery cults, nurtured a menagerie of sacred snakes that slept in her bed with her and frightened her menfolk – and that surely included Philip, who was afraid of virtually nothing else. Besides, he was very rarely at home.

In twenty years of harsh campaigning and silken diplomacy, Philip defeated all his threatening neighbours, then intervened in Greece proper to defend the neutrality of sacred Delphi and crush the resurgent democracy, Athens, where the orator Demosthenes rallied the resistance to the Macedonian ‘despot’, mocking Macedonia as ‘a place not even able to provide a slave worth buying’. Philip led from the front, and that was a dangerous game. An arrow hit him in the right eye, a wound he survived thanks to his doctor; on another occasion, he was stabbed in the leg. Philip’s skull and body have been found in his tomb at Agae and reconstructed, giving us a sense of this fearsomely compact and pugilistic warlord, scarred, limping, one-eyed – yet ever vigilant.

His firstborn, Arrhidaios, epileptic or autistic, was incapable of ruling. The younger one, Alexander, aged thirteen in 343 BC, was avidly reading Homer and Euripedes, and training for war – but he was also learning about Persia. Philip gave asylum to a Persian rebel satrap, Artabazus, who brought his daughter Barsine: she befriended Alexander, who regularly cross-examined Persian visitors. The two would meet again.