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Professor Donald Kagan: I have a title for today's talk. I call it, "Philip,
Demosthenes and the Fall of the Polis," and I read that to you
because it's always useful to remember that while we look back
on these events and know their outcome and can assign to them a
special significance, let's never forget they didn't
know that they were on the brink of the end of the independent
polis. In fact, I'm sure if you came along in 362 after that battle it would never
have occurred to you that that whole fundamental arrangement
of the world that had been sort of in place, to some degree,
perhaps as far back as the eighth century was going to
change its character very sharply, and that although there would still be poleis
that would be going on, it might seem in the same
old way, even after the Macedonian conquest, the
fact was that none of them ever again really was autonomous in
the sense of to be fully in control of its own fate both in terms
of the internal constitution and also, more importantly or
at least the one that was most in danger, the capacity
to engage in international relations freely and to be free
to make their own foreign policy. So, as I say,
it's going to be a very major change but it's something that
they don't know they're in the middle of watching. Well, in 359 a man called Philip became King
of Macedon. We know the Macedonians were fundamentally
Greeks. That is to say, they were Greek speakers and
ethnically, if there is such a thing, they were Greek.
But they were so far out of the mainstream of the development of
the Greek poleis that we have been examining this
semester that many, many Greeks, perhaps most of them, didn't think of them
as being Greek. When Greeks thought about what
it was to be a Greek they thought about more than the fact
that they spoke the Greek language, they thought fundamentally--if you get to
Aristotle you see how thoroughly true this is, it had to do with
a culture, a way of life and that way of life was based
upon the independent polis. Well, Macedon did not have
such a structure. The Greeks called the Macedonians an ethnos, a tribal group is what
that sort of means. We use the word "nation"
somehow to translate ethnos and that's okay. The word "nation" itself, you remember,
comes from the Latin word which means to be born;
people who are born of the same stock. But for the Greeks it had a different meaning;
it was people who participated in the culture that they
designated as Hellenic and they thought the Macedonians fell
outside of that. There were no poleis in the Macedonian kingdom. It was something that
we might call feudal. That is to say,
yes there was a monarch, but there were powerful noblemen who were practically independent
and who owed only a limited allegiance to the king and who were
really the dominant figures in the state for most of the history
prior to the appearance of Philip. On the other hand,
the king was an important and powerful character so that you
have--this was true of European feudal states at certain periods
in their development. On the one hand, the fundamental society was based upon great
lords, great noblemen, barons, but there was a king
and he was not inconsequential. That's the situation that
pertained in Macedon. In a certain sense, if a Greek had looked
at Macedonian society prior to Philip,
he might have described it as Homeric, and you'll be familiar
with that. Sure, there were guys called basileus, but they were not really the
rulers over the barons, these great noblemen in their
kingdom. They thought of it as uncivilized in the technical sense.
If you don't live in a polis, a city, as they understood it, then you are
not civilized; you are part of an ethnos and that's the
term they used of the tribal societies all around them,
Illyrians, Scythians, they were all from an ethnos. The Macedonians,
on the other hand, claimed very proudly and powerfully, and insistently that they were
Greeks; they were Hellenes, and they probably invented
a myth of their descent. Indeed, not merely
from Greeks but from the real Greeks, that is to say the
Argives, who were the leading people in the time of
Homer's poetry and they claimed direct descent from Agamemnon
and the other Argive kings. We hear about various
Macedonian monarchs of some importance prior to Philip,
back at the time of the Persian War, Alexander the first played
an interesting and shady role between the Greeks and the
Persians. During the Peloponnesian War we hear of a King Perdiccas, who also played
a role shifting between the Spartans and the Athenians.
This business of shifting between sides is not just
because they're shifty people. It's that their status is such
that they're always vulnerable and not powerful enough to
defend themselves and so they have to make the best deal they
can with whoever has the power at any moment. One other Macedonian king has left a name
that we know something about, Archelaus,
who followed Perdiccas, one of the things about him was
that he kept a kind of a cultural court at his capital,
and for instance Euripides, for reasons that we do not
know, left Athens at some point in the Peloponnesian War and
came to Macedon where he joined a collection of artists and
scholars, and whatever that Archelaus was gathering in his kingdom. Well, Philip becomes
king in 359 and the Macedonian kings were very much
like Homeric kings as we have described them here.
That is, yes you had to have a dynastic claim, you had to be a member of the royal family
to be king, but that wasn't good enough. You had to also
have--remember, to rule as I said about the Homeric kings,
iphi, by force, by power, you had to have the actual capacity to command
and sometimes you had to demonstrate that by fighting
it out among various potential successors with having the
winner coming out as the king. Something like that is what
Philip did. He was not the most direct descendant of the previous king. He was left
as a kind of a regent over the under-aged young king of just
a boy and he was actually Philip's nephew and Philip's ward,
and Philip took care of him in more senses than one,
finally killing him and replacing him on the throne.
That was not a unique event in Macedonian history.
So, Philip is now on the throne and, of course, with this disputed descent, this disputed
right to the throne, you can imagine that he is not
in the most secure position when he takes over this job,
and so I think some part of his actions, certainly at the early
part of his career, and perhaps all the way through, was meant to demonstrate his own
greatness, his own capacity to be king so as to put down
all resistance internally and for that purpose what could
be better than spreading the boundaries, increasing the power,
and in making the greatness of Macedon more than it had been
before and that's what he undertook. It looks as though, I think we have enough
evidence to believe, that he certainly, of course,
meant to rule Macedon and to do whatever was necessary,
however harsh to make that secure. But it is pretty clear that he
had it in mind to conquer Greece, to make himself the
master of Greece. That was certainly one of his
objectives. As a matter of fact, an interesting part of his biography was that
as a young man--probably I should say as a boy,
probably in his teens, he was sent to Thebes as a
hostage as a result of a war between the Thebans and the
Macedonians, but he was treated as a member of the royal family. He was treated very decently
and with respect, and he spent his time in the
house of Epaminondas. Can you imagine a better place
for a young king with his military ambitions to be brought
up than in the house of the man who is surely the foremost
general in the Greece of his time and perhaps of any time,
and I think we should imagine that he must have learned a
great deal about military affairs there. There remains the question, did Philip already
have in his mind the plan of conquering the Persian Empire,
which was, of course, the job that was completed by
his son, because whatever Philip's intentions may have
been he died before he could carry them out. I don't think we can be certain about that,
but it was an idea that he didn't have to do a lot to dream up.
I've mentioned to you how many an orator, Isocrates,
most famously, had been calling on various Greek states and individuals to conquer the
Persian Empire, to solve Greece's problems, and he wrote such
a letter to Philip once Philip became the most powerful
figure in that world. So, he certainly could have had
the idea; I mean, he certainly did have the idea--whether he was planning to do that
or not we don't know. Now, his first--sort of the
instrument that permitted him and Macedon to become as great
as they did was the army that he created. I mean, it is very he who is the revolutionary,
the military genius who creates the weapon which will allow him
to conquer Greece, and it's the same military force that enables Alexander the Great, who
had brought to it brilliant military talents, but he had an
instrument shaped for him that was already far and away the
best army in the Greek world, the best army of the Greek
world had ever seen, perhaps as good an army as
there ever existed in the ancient world. This is the great achievement of Philip,
or at least that was a basis of it. He was not merely a hoplite battle leader
in the old style. One thing about Philip that was very important
was his temperament, his mind, his approach to warfare.
He simply didn't accept the notion of defeat. He didn't accept the notion of making some
kind of a deal except on his terms when he found it necessary
to do so. He's famous for having said after a temporary
setback against one of his opponents, Philip has said,
"I have not fled, but I have retired as rams do
in order that I might make a stronger attack the next time."
He really lived that principle. Nobody ever defeated him
permanently. If he had to accept a temporary setback he immediately went to work to repair
it through a variety of means, military, diplomatic and
whatever else he had available. But as I'm saying at the
moment, he crafted this great grand new army, supplied, led, and organized quite
differently from what I have described to you in the past as
the standard Greek practice, which was essentially the
hoplite phalanx, and as you know, in the course of the Peloponnesian War in
the fourth century new gimmicks were added to that and
different devices were contributed to it but still that was
true. Now, Philip absorbed all the things that had
been going on before his time, but he also made fundamental
changes in the way that things worked. To his phalanx, and I was going to say,
of grim professional soldiers--now, that I think is in itself an enormously important
thing. We have something new on the Greek scene,
an army which is a national army. That is to say,
it is made up of Macedonians serving Macedon, under a Macedonian king, but they are not
the citizen soldiers that we have examined in the case
of the polis and its phalanx. They are hoplites in that
phalanx. They were professional soldiers so that their full time job was being
an army; they did not spend their spare time back on
farms. That means Philip had to pay them a salary
for them to perform. At the same time,
they were not a mercenary army in the traditional sense.
They were not people gathered anywhere who fought for whoever
hired them; they were very much Macedonian soldiers. Something we can understand in
the United States today--an unusual thing in American
history beginning only a couple of decades ago.
We have that sort of an army. We have a professional national
army, and I think this is an objective statement, it has become the best army in the world.
There are many reasons for that, but I would argue one
reason is that if you can have the sociological background to
permit that kind of an army, you are in very good shape
indeed. That's what Philip was able to create. The kind of loyalty,
the kind of commitment, the kind of association with
the cause that only a citizen or a subject of a king can have,
along with the skill, and the practice, and the conditioning that is part of being
a professional soldier. So, he has this phalanx made up
of these professionals that I'm talking about, but he added to that a group of people called
the foot companions, pezetairoi is the Greek word,
who were the biggest and the strongest of all the Macedonians
and to that group he added the companion cavalry, the hetairoi themselves, the companions of
the king, and of course these were the noblemen and
they became personally attached to Philip in a special
way and were the most effective, the most reliable forces that
he had, an elite core, and here again is something different. The cavalry will play a
much more important role in fighting than it ever has in the
Greek fighting of the past. One of the great geniuses of
Philip would be to create a combined force that could use
cavalry and infantry and some other subordinate forces I'll
tell you about in a minute, jointly together, to carry out a rather complex military plan.
These, of course, are these hetairoi, our aristocratic horsemen, heavily armored
on strong horses. That's very important as well,
because if you're going to use them as shock troops,
which he did on many an occasion, all of that has to be
in place. Then there was another contingent of infantry with probably less
body armor than his phalanx had, who were called the shield
bearers, hypaspists, and they occupied the center of
the Macedonian line next to the phalanx. These fellows were usually the first infantry
forces to follow behind a cavalry charge if that's the
way Philip fought the battle, charging a cavalry at the
enemy, and as the enemy provided opportunities, these shield bearers, these lighter armed
infantrymen would find their way and expand the holes,
opening the way for the major blow to be struck by the phalanx.
I'm describing one kind of battle that could be fought.
The thing about having this kind of varied military force is
that you could have different tactics for different battles
and Philip does things differently on different occasions. This group of
hypaspists, lighter infantry, provide a crucial link between the first mounted
attack and the follow up by the phalanx proper. On top of
all of this, you have a professional core; again, they're
all Macedonians remember, made up of really light infantry.
That is to say, slingers, archers, javelin men in the traditional mode that the
old Greek armies had, but didn't make too much use of
typically and so that rounds out the composite army group made up
of these different kinds of forces, and these missile men I guess you could call
them, supplied both preliminary bombardment with
the things they did to help harass the enemy phalanx,
but also they provide a kind of crucial reserve support.
If you need to throw some forces into a suddenly important
piece of the battle these guys were very mobile and you could
order them into that place to support whatever was going on
there. You can see how infinitely more complex this was than the kind of fighting
we've talked about before. Now, these Macedonian
contingents I've been describing do not represent a fragmentation
of forces as might possibly be thought, but rather a diversification and a sophistication
of arms, as one historian puts it, a symphony not a
cacophony of professionally equipped men. Philip's contribution
to the history of western warfare, therefore, is
not so much tactical as it is organizational,
creating this complex organization that could have a
variety of tactical uses. Now at first, the equipment and the tactics of this Macedonian
phalanx for itself did not differ considerably from the
traditional hoplite columns of the Greeks, but he then subsequently made a very important
change. Now, he does keep the spear, the pike that
was the fundamental weapon of the old phalanx.
But it was lengthened from being let's say roughly eight
feet long to fourteen feet or so. Now, you cannot hold a fourteen-foot pike
with one hand. This is a two-handed weapon;
if you're going to control and use it effectively that's what
you have to do. Well, if you're going to have two hands on this thing you can't have that
hoplite shield that was the characteristic of the old hoplite
phalanx. So, the shield shrank and became unimportant.
You realize that once you do this to your hoplite phalanx,
it can only function successfully as an aggressive force, if you see what I mean. You can't just
take blows; you have to be delivering blows all the time.
The greaves and the breastplates, and the heavy head gear were replaced either
with leather which was lighter, or various composite materials,
or else abandoned altogether. So, you can see these hoplites
don't look anything like the hoplites we're accustomed to.
The central idea, however, of a fighting mass of
infantrymen remained predominant. In fact, integrated with and protected by
such diverse forces, Philip's phalanx of true pikemen,
their lances now allowed the first five, not merely the first
three ranks to strike at the enemy, was both more lethal and more versatile than
the traditional hoplite columns. The historian Polybius,
who wrote in the second century B.C., but you have to realize he
was a contemporary of Macedonian soldiers, who were still fighting fundamentally in the
same way that Philip had created, so he knew what he
was saying. He, for instance, he describes the great battles
between the Romans and the Macedonians that occurred late
in the third and into the second century. So, he even saw or certainly knew about the
new phalanx, the Macedonian phalanx, tackling the Roman
Legion and fighting it practically to a standstill.
Polybius says that infantry, who faced such a storm of
spears, as he puts it, might have as many as ten iron
points concentrated on each man. Nothing Polybius concluded can
stand up to the phalanx. The Roman, by himself with his
sword, can neither slash down nor break through the ten spears
that all at once press against him. Well, he has to face the fact that the Roman
Legion did defeat one of these phalanxes in the course of the
third century, but I think if you look at the details you
realize that there was nothing inevitable about that defeat.
Circumstances in battle allowed the Romans to win,
because it put a premium on the great advantage that the legion
had over the phalanx; namely, that it was divided up
into smaller fighting units that could adjust and move about the
field much more freely than the fighters in the phalanx of the
Macedonians. That was certainly an edge that the legion had, but there never was a time
when a legion fighting a good Macedonian phalanx
could predict that it would win, much less that it would
be any kind of a walk over. Of course, against the
kind of forces that Philip faced, it was all the more
likely to produce a Macedonian victory, because those
were not Roman legions that they had to face. Now, if you're
going to have a national mercenary army, a national
army made up of professionals, that means it costs money in
a way that the old phalanx system did not require
the expenditure of funds very much. So, Philip, early in his
career, had to gain control of sources of money and he did so.
Early as king he immediately had to put down his opponents
from within Macedonia, but he also did what I suppose
Macedonian kings always had to do on their accession,
they were surrounded by what the Greeks called barbarian
peoples and these barbarian peoples were always fighting
against the Macedonians and trying to push back their
frontiers and so on. So Philip turned against these,
the Illyrians and various other peoples, and did an excellent
job of defeating them, driving them back, establishing the boundaries where he wanted
them. In the process, accomplishing two very
important things. One was to establish his credentials as a great general and leader
for internal purposes and for military purposes is in a sense of
winning the confidence of his soldiers, but also it meant
that his own stature in general and the reputation that
he gained both among enemies and friends grew, and finally
the last point, this kind of fighting allowed him to train
his army and to create this army, and to make it as excellent
as it became before he had to face more formidable
forces than these. So, now he has won the loyalty
of his nobility to a degree that no predecessor ever had.
He now has these barons who are so independent, happily, gladly serving him and being rather
in awe of him, and the army in general was devoted to him
in a way that was unprecedented for the Macedonians.
Now, with this weapon largely forged he was able to
begin serious expansion in the Greek world. A critical step rather early in his monarchy
was his attack on Amphipolis, and you will remember Amphipolis
was this Athenian colony that was such a big deal for
the Athenians that they were prepared to do almost anything to
get it back, but they never had thoroughly been able to
get it back until recently. So, now he took
Amphipolis--what was more important than anything for him
was that who held Amphipolis was likely to hold Mt.
Pangaean which is right near Amphipolis, which contained gold
and silver mines that were producing wealth as they had
been for centuries now, and now that wealth was going
into Philip's pocket and he used it for the purpose that was most
important, chiefly for paying for that army that I have been talking about.
We are told that this produced about 1,000 talents a
year for Philip's use, and that's about the same
amount that the Athenians got out of their empire.
So, you are talking about lots and lots of money and this
explains the economic capacity that gave Philip the chance to
use the kind of army he had. But he was extraordinarily skillful at the game of diplomacy.
I say game, because he treated it in that way.
Diplomacy, I think, for him was an extension of
military forces by peaceful means. It's kind of a standing Clausewitz's definition
of war on its head. Who was it?
Sir John Fortescue, I think, it was in the fifteenth century defined a diplomat as a
man sent to lie abroad for his country. I think the spirit
behind that pun was certainly right for Philip, that for
him diplomacy was a way for advancing his country's interests
by whatever means that he possibly could; he was very
good. One of his very great skills was precisely
to lie in a very convincing manner and, of course, it's
much easier to get people to believe what you say if you
have got the strongest army anywhere in sight in case you
should be so impolite as to say "you're a liar."
I think that must have assisted him. But what I mean is Philip would come into
conflict with some polis or some poleis over some
territory that was in dispute or whatever, and they would say Philip what are you trying
to do, you seem to be trying to conquer this territory.
Oh no, no Philip said, I have absolutely no interest
in this territory, I've got other things to do
that are much more important. Those Paeonians in my
background require my attention and when the other guys would
calm down he would calmly take the place that he had left
alone. I'm reminded, and I guess after the Second World War, in
fact even before, there were some scholars who made the analogy
between Hitler and Philip, and Demosthenes and Churchill,
it's not the worst one. It's very imperfect, but it's not the worst analogy possible, but
I remember Hitler kept saying before his strength was great
enough simply to launch a major war he would say, if you give
me this that's all I'm interested in, that is absolutely my last
territorial demand in Europe, and then in a few months he
would then seize Austria or something like that.
So, Philip reminds me of that, because he did such things from
time to time. It's just too much to tell in terms of the
detail of his career, but let me just hit a few highlights
and give you the direction in which it was going. The first
business that he had to do after he gained Amphipolis and the
wealth of the mines was to gain control of the shoreline
of the northern Aegean Sea, and that meant of course his
own Macedonia, which he had, but also eastward into the region of Thrace.
He began precisely to gain control of those places.
It was in 357 that he took Amphipolis and that meant that
he had to clash with Athens, because as I say,
Athens had never given up its claim to Amphipolis and kept
trying to get it back, because of its value to the
Athenians. What we will see is war between Philip and Athens on and off until the final
victory of Macedonia. It's a period of quite a
stretch of time in here in which that's going on.
On the other hand, it's never a full scale war
with Philip trying to conquer Athens. How could he? He's still outside from a
territorial point of view, outside the entire old Greek
world. But he can cause all the havoc he wants to in the northern Aegean and the
Athenians will be unhappy about it; they will send forces up
into that part of the world to contest Philip's
expansion and that's where the fighting goes on.
But the Athenians are not ready to take him on and really try to
stop him from going where he seems to be going. What they do is they respond when he does
something that annoys them or that they're worried about.
Sometimes they go out and fight him, but usually they don't,
or sometimes they do and they do so too little and too late.
That's the story of the relationship between these two
powers throughout this whole stretch of time. With the expansion of Philip in a variety
of directions, he increases his revenues wherever
he conquers. He gets down into Thessaly, now we're talking
about territory that the Greeks consider to be Greece
and Philip is now gaining more and more control of that
area. The revenues grow and he even builds a navy
and begins to challenge Athens and others at sea.
He attacks Athenian commerce when he is quarreling with the
Athenians. The Athenian position in general is badly weakened in the years between
357 and 355 in what the traditional historians call the Social
War. That doesn't mean that they fought over teacups
or anything like that, "social" derives from the Latin
word socii, which means allies. It was a rebellion against
the allies of Athens in the Athenian Confederation, which really frightened the Athenians, and
kept them busy putting it down for a couple of years.
There is some debate among scholars today as to how
oppressive or not was the Athenian rule of its empire.
The more recent scholarship has suggested that the Athenians
were not really very oppressive, which leaves for,
I think, for them an uncomfortable question, if that's true why was there this rebellion
in the years 357 to 355? We just don't know enough to
talk details about this, but I think there can be no
mistake; the Athenians abused their position of power and leadership in the empire.
They didn't do so as thoroughly and completely as they did in
the great Athenian Empire of the fifth century but that was
largely because they couldn't. They never had the power,
they never had the financial strength to be able to impose
their will as the earlier empire had, but they did what they could and they did
enough to annoy their allies into such a rebellion.
Athens recovers, they win, they put down the allied rebellion, but they are weakened in
the process. In 356, there breaks out on the
mainland of Greece, what they would call the Sacred
War. It's the old business of who controls the Delphic Oracle. The neighbors,
Phocis, Locris, frequently take advantage of
opportunities to gain control of the oracle and to deprive the
priests of their control of the region. The priests then call on other Greeks traditionally
led by Sparta but not always to beat up the people
who have taken over the oracle's place and drive them out and
restore it to the priest. Well, this is another in that
theory, in that series of events. Thebes and Phocis are involved in a war over
Delphi. The Phocian general is the only time he crops
us in this story, Onomarchus apparently was an outstanding military
leader and defeated the Thebans and even pushed into
Thessaly, and that brings Philip into the picture, because
Philip has been expanding Macedonian power into Thessaly from
the north coming south. So, Philip takes his forces
and he pushes the Phocians back, defeats Onomarchus, sends them off. Now, here's the question.
Is this good or bad for the Greeks? On the one hand the one thought would be well,
sure he's just put down this fellow who has arrogantly seized
the Delphic Oracle, but now who is there, who is sitting in Thessaly, this great big
new army. Is he going to be a menace to the Greeks in
general? Well, we who have had a chance to know how
it came out and know that it did. But at the time people were
divided, some say oh my heavens this is a thoroughly aggressive
man at the head of an army that looks incredibly strong and he
has terrific ambitions, what are we going to do,
against those who said, no it's okay, he's okay now, he's happy, he doesn't want
to do anymore than that. Let's take a look at
Athens, which will necessarily be the leading figure in the
opposition to Philip such as it is. Thebes, last time we looked at Thebes, Thebes
had reached a position of power perhaps greater than that
of Athens, but you remember the deaths of Pelopidas and
Epaminondas simply did not allow Thebes to continue to have that
vitality and power that it had before. It's still a very strong
state. Its hoplite phalanx is still formidable;
they still have great ambitions and so on, but it turns out they
don't really have the capacity to take the lead in such a
business. The Athenians do and they are very much concerned about what's happening.
But it's not the same Athens that we saw in the height of its
power in the fifth century. Relatively speaking, it is a very poor place indeed. It is, however,
still the number one naval power in the Greek world and
therefore very important. Let's take a look at the
internal life of Athens a little bit and notice some changes they
will have some significance in terms of what decisions the
Athenians make. There is something that was introduced -- we don't know just when -- it
might have been late in the Peloponnesian War it, might have been
afterwards. It is called the theoric fund, and it gets
its name apparently because there was a payment to
the Athenian citizens of the price necessary to pay for the ticket
to see the great theatrical festivals that went on twice a
year in Athens, which had apparently degenerated pretty much
into a dole, into a kind of a welfare fund for the
very poor. It did not amount to a stunning amount of
money, but given the poverty of Athens in general,
any fund of money could be very significant at critical moments,
especially on issues of national defense. But there was a lot of argument, a sort of
a democratic party, the party of the underprivileged or
whatever, always insistent that everybody's supposed
to keep hands off the theoric fund which should only
be used for its welfare state--I'm embarrassed to
use such a term because of course there was nothing like that
in the ancient world. Just for that portion of the
national income that was used to alleviate the worst poverty they
wanted that untouched, but when the state was under
siege, it was under threat, it was--had to go to war,
so it seemed to some politicians, they needed money
to do it and say let's take the theoric fund for now
while we have this necessity and there would be a fight about
that. You remember the Athenian Empire in the fifth
century? Never had a money--not never, but could generally
handle its money problem because it had this great income
from the empire, say roughly 1,000 talents a
year coming in. That was not true. So, that if Athens wanted to send an expedition
anywhere, they had to levy a direct war tax;
it was called the eisphora. They had done so two or three times during
the Peloponnesian War. As far as we know they had
never done it before that time. We have stressed how unnatural
direct taxation was in the Greek world, but here that's what they
really had. They had to pay this eisphora, if they were going to conduct a
military and naval campaigns that they felt were necessary.
In fact, it used to be true that individual Greeks back in
the fifth century could pay their share, what was assigned to them for the eisphora,
individually, but now they were so few people who could do that they organized groups of
taxpayers whom they called symmories who would share the burden.
It makes me think that it probably sank further down
the--sort of the wealth class of Athens. More people I guess were now paying taxes
than before. In the fifth century the only people who paid
taxes were the very wealthy and now that I think was
attenuated as people who were not so wealthy had to pay something
as well. Another thing is that we find the Athenians
using, as a regular thing in these campaigns that
they will have to fight, mercenary soldiers. I don't mean mercenaries
of the Macedonian kind, the kind that Philip was
using. I mean hiring a band of mercenaries who might
come from anyplace in Greece. That was because the Athenians
were reluctant themselves to go out on expeditions. Nothing could be more different I think from
the way the Athenians behaved in the fifth century when
they were all over the joint, as you remember,
in 457 that inscription that talked about those died from one
tribe all over the battle. They were proud of it and they
never ran short of soldiers willing to do this kind of
thing. The assembly voted it and the people win. Not now.
The Athenians are reluctant to engage in these activities.
Our main source for complaint about this is Demosthenes,
who much of the time is pleading with the Athenians to
recognize the danger presented by Philip and for them to take
the necessary steps to check Philip before it was too late.
What he asked them to do repeatedly was to first of all
vote the money that was necessary to support the
expedition and then not to hire mercenaries but to serve
themselves in the fighting, and he did not win those
arguments very often. There were in Athens throughout
this period people that we would call in our own jargon hawks and
doves; people who were ready to fight for these purposes and people who were very
reluctant to do so. The people who seemed to be the
most reluctant to do this were the upper classes, of course, because war meant taxation and
they were going to do the bulk of the paying of the taxes.
It may well be--I don't want to make too much of this,
Philip, wherever he could would install oligarchic governments
in places that he ruled. He was not interested in
democracy; he was not a friend of democracy. There were some Athenians who
had never given up their hope that an oligarchy could be
placed into Athens, instead of a democracy. They would have been doves and more.
I mean, there is a pretty clear indication that Philip did in
Athens what he did in other states as well. He bribed important Athenians to be champions
of his cause and the people it's easiest to get this to work
with are people who agree with your approach, who on your side
of the argument. So, there was some of that.
I mean, there was a real difference of opinion as there
always is. We should be very aware of it and in recent years this is the kind of
thing you see. Some people in society seeing a great danger
out there that must be prepared for and confronted, others thinking
that that is overblown, that that is too pessimistic, that
there is no such great danger or that it can best be dealt
with by negotiation and conversation, and anything
but fighting, and that was the situation in Athens.
If you were hostile, if you were a member of the
hawk faction, you would say your opponents were deluding themselves about the degree
of the danger and that Philip was a very special kind of a menace.
If you were a dove you would accuse your opponents of being
alarmists, excessively afraid and worse. Of course, both sides accused each other of
much worse things having to do with their characters and so
on, as people always do. The first statement we
have of Demosthenes, who will emerge as the dominant
hawk for most of the time that he is doing business in Athens
is in 351, when he delivers the speech that we call the First Philippic.
He delivered a series of speeches attacking Philip and
warning the Athenians of the danger presented by Philip.
To this day, philippic is a word in English which means a strong attacking piece of rhetoric
against some individual or some nation. He charged the
Athenians with having created the great danger that they
faced by making Philip into a great man through neglect by their
refusal to stop him when it was relatively easy to do so.
They should send, he thought, a fleet, a good-sized fleet to serve in the northern
Aegean Sea and to stop Philip's expansion and to stop Philip
period. He urged them, and he will do this over and
over again. Don't hire mercenaries, enlist for service yourself, vote for war
tax, and those of you who should pay it should
do so. He lost the argument. The Athenians did not
take that action that he recommended. Philip, pretty
soon after that, attacked the Olynthians; you remember Olynthus
is an important state on the Chalcidic Peninsula;
it has been a very significant state back in this century you
remember when the Spartans went up there to defeat the
Olynthians who had constructed a league of their.
Well, they weren't out of business yet. So, Philip went after them and, again, Demosthenes
urges the Athenians to get involved and to prevent Philip
from taking Olynthus an the Chalcidic states and gaining
control of the northern Aegean Sea and all the danger that
that presented to Athenian interests. Again, he loses the argument.
He delivers three Olynthiac speeches which have the same
character as the one I've described, but the Athenians do
not do it. In the year 348 Olynthus falls. That city and the other cities
of the region were destroyed. You remember this is not a
typical way in which the Greeks dealt with defeated states,
although heaven knows the Peloponnesian War had seen
examples of it, but it was a very, very harsh kind of warfare that Philip carried
forward. He destroyed the cities physically, he enslaved
what was left of the population and so this was a message.
I think it wasn't just that he had a cruel temperament,
though I suppose he must have had that too, but it was meant to be exemplary.
It was meant to say when Philip says do this, do it, because if you don't, he will crush
you and this is what will happen to your city and to you.
That's an old technique. We know that the Assyrians used
to do that way back in biblical times in which they would
deliberately be as brutal and cruel as they could be,
and having done so would broadcast how brutal and cruel
they had been, in order to encourage other states to behave appropriately in the future.
Hitler had used those same tactics early in the Second
World War when he destroyed the city of Rotterdam from the air,
completely not military whatsoever. It was obviously intended to terrify everybody
who might want to resist him. So, that's what Philip did
up there. Finally after further fighting
of one kind or another, the Athenians and a number of
other Greeks make a treaty with Philip. It is called the Peace of Philocrates;
he was one of the negotiators on the Athenian team.
There really didn't seem to be much disagreement among the
Athenians as to the desirability of this peace, even Demosthenes who is normally opposed to
anything like it, felt that it probably had to be done,
and I think that just reflected the realities of the
distribution of power and also of the willingness of the
Athenians to do anything more than that, and so there is this period of the Peace of
Philocrates in which the Athenians make a defensive alliance
with Philip. There things sit when another development
raises the panic button, I think, for Demosthenes and
some others. The Sacred War, there's another Sacred War going on.
This time the people who want to restore power to the priests
invite Philip to lead the Greek forces in the Sacred War.
That is a very big deal. First of all, it recognizes the Macedonians as Greeks in
the truest sense of the word. It should have been,
probably was, a major source of satisfaction for Philip and extraordinary glory in the
eyes of his fellow Macedonians that the Greeks should have done
this. Not only accepted them as Hellenes, but asked
them to save the Oracle of Apollo, the center of Greek
worship there. So, he takes his army,
he runs into the Phocians, blasts the Phocian army and
does what he was asked to do. In the process, when it's all over, he decides that from now
on Macedon and King Philip will take not just
one vote on the council that governs the Delphic Oracle.
I may have mentioned it to you earlier in the semester,
the Amphictyonic Council, the council of those who dwell
around Delphi. He took two votes on that council, and he made himself president of
the Pythian Games-- you remember these panhellenic festivals.
There were four great panhellenic festivals, Olympia, Nemea, the isthmus of Corinth,
and the one at Delphi which was called the Pythian Games and
here is this barbarian from Macedonia not only sitting on
the council but being the chairman, holding the position of honor as all the Greeks
gather for the Pythian Games. Well, this must have had an
enormously intimidating effect on many in the Greek world,
and it becomes more and more Athens that has to take the
lead, if anybody is going to resist. The Athenians were concerned; at least those
who were not determined to accept the course of events.
Phillip was very careful with Athens, for this there was a
very good reason. They had a special strategic set of advantages that nobody else in the
Greek world had, and that Philip didn't have an easy answer
for. Athens was a walled city which had proven
itself capable of defending those walls. You should realize
that up to this point in Greek history, nobody has demonstrated
any kind of ability of taking a walled city by
force, the only way you can take a walled city is
by surrounding it and starving it out, but you remember now
that the Athenians have a navy and walls, they can't
be starved out in the same way. So, taking on Athens,
if you really want to take the city, is a job that's very
difficult indeed. Of course, the Athenians have
their navy which makes that true, but also allows the
Athenians to do you harm in a way that other states cannot do.
So, all of that means that Philip is not about to make a
headlong assault on Athens, but to try to have his way by
going around Athens somehow. He tried to win Athenian
support through his usual technique of soft words,
explaining how he had no aggressive intentions in areas
that the Athenians were interested in, even though he had already demonstrated that
that wasn't right. Also by working Athenian
politics, by bribing Athenian politicians to be on his side
and using every device he could to make it harder for the
hawkish people to have their way. Demosthenes from here on in is determined,
and determinedly against Philip, spending all his energy and
time trying to get up Athenian support and then,
indeed, to put together a coalition of states besides
Athens to resist and fight and defeat Philip. Indeed, he is more successful than he was
before, because the danger from Philip is obviously
greater, so that more Athenians can see it that way.
The league he puts together includes Euboea, Megara, Achaea, Acarnania, Lucas,
Phocis, and finally Thebes. Now, that's a pretty good
trick. Phocis and Thebes are traditional opponents, but they're both in
the league and what that tells you is that those states,
and especially those states which are in central Greece,
closest to where Philip is located with his forces into
Thessaly and so they now see that there is a great danger
from him and they join in an anti-Philip coalition. He doesn't go at them immediately directly;
he goes to war but he does so up in the north on the shores of
the Aegean Sea. He moves eastward--this is an
enormously clever thing to do, towards what the Greeks call
the Chersonese, the peninsula which we call the
Gallipoli Peninsula, the Hellespont. Philip wants to gain control of that, because
if he can control the Hellespont, it's the old story,
he can cut off trade, he can starve Athens out and it
would hurt others too but Athens would be the main attack.
So, he moves forces to the Thracian coast, taking various cities there, and gaining more
and more territory towards that end, and then he goes
all the way across to the Bosporus to Byzantium, modern
Istanbul, and he takes that city as well, and, of course,
you can cut off trade, if you can control the
Bosporus. So this is very, very serious for Athens and it's on this occasion
that Demosthenes delivers his third Philippic making
the same case as he has been making all along, and only
doing so but I think with even greater intensity and this time
with more persuasiveness, because more and more Athenians
understand how serious this menace has become. Small point but not so trivial that the Athenians
were able even to enlist the support in language
at least by Persia. If the Greeks are going to fight this guy,
it would be awfully handy if you could get the Persian
support. As it turns out, the Persians don't do anything of importance
in resisting Philip, but it shows you how
Demosthenes and those Greeks who agreed with him were attempting
to put together as strong a coalition as they could to try
to stop him. Forgive me. Don't pay too much attention to what I'm saying
but I'm constantly being reminded of the behavior
of the European states just prior to the Second World War,
and in place of Persia I think we would have to put the United
States of America, which was out of the game and
sort of constantly trying to stay out of the game,
powerful isolation of sentiment in this country, and people in Europe, some people urging that
everything be done to get the United States into the game and
others reluctant to do that. It wouldn't have made any
difference, nothing would have gotten the Americans to take an
active part against Hitler at that time, and I suspect there was no chance that anybody
could have convinced the Persians to do anything at this
point either. But the Athenians do send a force and it's
a good size force and it does a very good job, and they drive
Philip back out of some of the places that he has conquered,
which I think is interesting to think about. It's not obvious that if the Athenians had
gotten their collation together earlier, and if they had
done the best they could, it's not obvious that they couldn't
have defeated Philip. There's this terrible danger
that we will all become victims of a fait accompli,
what happened obviously had to happen, it couldn't happen any
other way. No, I don't think that's right. We certainly don't live our lives as though
that's true, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to imagine
it's true in retrospect. The fact that the Athenians
could have such success against Philip as they did at this
moment is evidence that that was by no means a hopeless cause.
Once again, a Sacred War breaks out over Delphi. Again, the Amphictyonic League, this time
of course having as its president Philip invite Philip to lead
the forces of the Sacred War. The Sacred War has been
declared against the town near Delphi called Amphisa and that's
the force that he's going to use against it. Philip moves down from Thessaly, arrives at
a place not very far from Delphi called Elatea on one
side, and the other side at Thermopylae.
These are the roots to get down into central Greece.
Once you go through those places you are right next to
Boeotia, you are a couple of days from Athens, you're right in the middle of a position where
you could do terrific harm. When the Athenians received
the news, there really is panic. Demosthenes tells the story.
Now, Demosthenes is a witness who is excellent because he's a
participant, contemporary, that's great, but you've got to look at him with a certain
amount of skepticism because he's a participant.
He's a guy who held a certain point of view, he was very active in politics, he has strong
views on everything, his reputation depends upon how
you look upon what he did. So, you must understand that
when he tells us these things he's telling it form his
perspective. It's very much like Winston Churchill's histories of the two world wars
in which he played a very large part, even in the first but certainly
in the second, and it's not that he lies, it's not that he deceives, but when you read
those stories you read them as Winston Churchill sees them
and you have to be alert to them. There's a wonderful--about
Churchill is a wonderful story, apparently true,
that when Churchill's book on the First World War came out--I
forget the title; let's say it was called "The
Great War," which it wasn't. The former prime minister,
Arthur Balfour, who didn't like Churchill at
all is supposed to have said, "I see that Winston has
published another book about himself and called it The Great
War." The enemies of Demosthenes might say the same things about what he says
in some of his speeches. But later on in his career when
there was a big battle between him and his chief opponent,
Demosthenes' friends were asking the assembly to vote him
a crown. It meant a crown of leaves, not of gold, but the honor for things he had
done for Athens and his opponents thought that what
should be done for Demosthenes for what he had done to Athens
is to throw him off the Acropolis. So, there's a great debate that we have both
halves of. It's in that debate that he recounts the things
he has done for Athens, why they should be grateful to
him, and this moment is one he points to.
He tells about the news came to Athens that Philip was in
Elatea, and he says, we all gathered there first
thing in the morning and the place was full. If you remember that passage I read to you
from Aristophanes about how things usually were
in the Athenian assembly, where everybody came ambling in
late, no problem, nobody was in a hurry, no he says, everybody was there.
When the prytany for the day, the president of the
meeting said, who wishes to speak, no one, no one raised their hand.
Then I got up and gave you guys the good advice that followed
and all that stuff. But I think we can't doubt the
essential truth of the situation, that there was just a
terrible fear and no idea how to cope. Demosthenes then suggested what steps should
be taken to resist. One of them, and he was able to do it now,
was to use the theoric fund to supply the forces that
were necessary. Secondly, to do something that
was quite an achievement from a diplomatic point of view,
to make an alliance with Thebes. Ever since the late 370s Athens had not been
allied to Thebes, it had become alarmed that Theban
power had joined even with Sparta against the Thebans,
but here as we're into the very late 340s, early 330s,
he makes an alliance with Thebes so that what is surely
the strongest ground force on the side of the Greeks against
Philip will be there, namely the Thebans, and the Boeotians in general. Finally, in
338 the Battle of Chaeronea takes place in western Boeotia and
the result is a victory for Philip.
The battle itself was by no means a walkover; it was very close. Our accounts of it make
it clear that there was every possibility, even
then, even though the Spartans weren't there,
even though Philip's forces were at their peak.
The Greeks might have won that battle, that's a very important
thing to remember, but they didn't. Philip won and that was the end of Greek freedom.
Thereafter, the states all had to bow down to Philip in terms
of foreign policy. In many cases, he actually interfered in their internal autonomy.
He established garrisons at key places in the Greek world,
including Chalcis and Euboea, Corinth and Mount Ambracia in
the west and they were called the fetters of Greece.
It was like he put a great chain across Greece to show and
demonstrate, and make real his control. Athens was forced to abandon the confederacy,
its own confederacy; they were forced to make an
alliance with Philip. He constituted in 336 the
League of Corinth with himself as president. It was an offensive and defensive alliance.
Philip was commander in chief and he could tell everybody what
to do, and they would have to do it. This truly was the end of Greek freedom.
As it turned out, Philip was assassinated in the
same year so that he never was able to demonstrate how he would
carry on once he had that power. The business of the
conquest of Persia, if that was in the mind of
Philip, had to be left to his very young son Alexander,
who I think was eighteen at this point. So, that gets us to the interesting question
of history's judgment on these events,
and especially I think the interesting person is
Demosthenes, and as you read in your problems collection,
the nineteenth-century German historian Droysen and the German
historians of that time in general had no doubt about the
judgment. It was very negative about Demosthenes. After all, what was Athens
anyway? According to Droysen it was ein advokaten republic, it's the lowest blow
anybody could deliver, a republic of lawyers.
What Demosthenes was trying to preserve was kliene
Städte, the world of small independent states, a contemptible term in the eyes
of Droysen and his fellow nationalists. German, you remember had just--I forget the
date of his writing, either it had already been unified
by Bismarck or nationalists were demanding that these little
states all be brought together into a great German empire
and that's where Droysen was. The future,
Droysen said, was with Philip. Demosthenes was a reactionary trying to retain
things that were--whose time had come and gone.
What was needed was the unification of the ancient
Mediterranean and this was a step in that direction.
Why was it necessary to have a unification of the ancient
Mediterranean? As would finally be accomplished, not by Philip and Macedon,
but by the Romans, because it was all part of the
great plan without which there could not have been
Christianity. Christianity could come to the world and dominate Europe, because it had
been made into a single word by virtue of the Macedonian and
Roman conquest, and Demosthenes in his small minded petty
way was standing in the way of that. Yes, there were admirable
things about Demosthenes, but his behavior and his policy
was quixotic, because it was hopeless. I think this is my reading of what Droysen
really is saying; he lost so he must have been wrong.
Winners are always right or else they wouldn't win.
Now, I think we can evaluate that in a different way.
If we think about a different situation, I've been thinking
about it all along and telling you about it, which is let's take a look at Winston Churchill
who had been called by historians the Demosthenes of that
time. The man who had been calling attention to
the danger from Hitler and trying to rally support and really
treated like an idiot until finally the knife,
the dagger was at the throat of the British and only then,
and with great reluctance did the British put him in control.
Now, if we look at his experience and what he did I
think it's illuminating. The difference between heroic
victory and disaster can be terribly thin. Taking office at a low point in the fortunes
of his country and its allies, Churchill made a famous speech,
which just breathed defiance when there was no physical
justification for such a position. He said this, "I have myself full confidence
that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made as they
are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to
defend our island home. To ride out the storm of war
and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years,
if necessary alone, we shall go onto the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on
the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing
confidence and growing strength in the air, and we shall defend
our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight
on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields,
and in the streets, and we shall fight in the
hills, we shall never surrender." Yet England came within a hair's breath of
losing that war and suffering the horrors of invasion and
occupation by Nazi Germany. In fact, had Hitler and Guering
continued bombing the RAF's landing fields and ground
facilities as they began to do with the Battle of Britain,
instead of turning away from that and using their planes to
bomb cities and scaring civilians, it's very clear to me that Germany would have
won the Battle of Britain and control of the air,
which would have made their success inevitable. Now imagine that it had gone that way;
in that case, Churchill's bulldog determination, his refusal to accept what
was a relatively generous peace offer after the
fall of France, would seem in retrospect the wrong-headed
defiance of a man, who brought his people low by his own intransigence.
He would have been treated, I think by history, as some kind of a gallant fool, some kind
of a brave imbecile. But men like Churchill and Demosthenes know
that those who love liberty must fight for it, even against
odds, even when there is little support, even when
victory seems impossible. In spite of the outcome,
it seems to me that the stand of Athens and its Greek allies
at Chaeronea may have been in words that Churchill used in
another context, "their finest hour." Thank you very much.