Philip and the Greeks
After his reorganization of the Macedonian army,
Philip embarked on a whirlwind
of diplomacy, bribery, and military action to make the states of Greece acknowledge
his superiority1. He financed this activity by prodigious spending of
the gold and silver coinage he had minted from the
mines of Macedonia and those
that he captured in Thrace2. A Greek contemporary, the historian
Theopompus3 of Chios, labeled Philip “insatiable and extravagant; he did
everything in a hurry ... he never spared the time to reckon up his income and
expenditure.” By the late 340s B.C. Philip had cajoled or forced most of
northern Greece to follow his lead in foreign policy.
His goal then became to lead
a united Macedonian and Greek army against the Persian Empire4. His announced reason sprung from a central theme in Greek
understanding of the past: the need to avenge the Persian invasion of Macedonia and
Greece of 480 B.C. Philip also feared the potentially destabilizing effect on his
kingdom if his reinvigorated army were left with nothing to do. To launch his grandiose
invasion, however, he needed to strengthen his alliance by adding the forces of southern
Greece to it.
At Athens, Demosthenes used his stirring rhetoric to castigate the Greeks for their
failure to resist Philip: they stood by, he thundered,
“as if Philip
were a hailstorm, praying that he would not come their way, but not trying to do
anything to head him off.”5 Finally, Athens and Thebes headed a coalition of southern Greek states to try to
block Philip's plans. In 338 B.C., Philip and his Greek allies trounced the coalition's
forces at the
battle of Chaeronea6 in Boeotia. The defeated Greek states retained their internal freedom, but they
were compelled to join an
alliance under Philip's undisputed leadership7, called the League of Corinth by modern scholars after the location of its
headquarters.
