SECTION 4. MACEDONIA
The storm had been gathering on the Western horizon for some time past. Twenty years earlier there had come to the throne of Macedonia a man of singular constructive ability and most definite ambition. His heritage - or rather his prize, for he was not next of kin to his predecessor - was the central southern part of the Balkan peninsula, a region of broad fat plains fringed and crossed by rough hills. It was inhabited by sturdy gentry and peasantry and by agile highlanders, all composed of the same racial elements as the Greeks, with perhaps a preponderant infusion of northern blood which had come south long ago with emigrants from the Danubian lands. The social development of the Macedonians - to give various peoples one generic name - had, for certain reasons, not been nearly so rapid as that of their southern cousins. They had never come in contact with the higher Aegean civilization, nor had they mixed their blood with that of cultivated predecessors; their land was continental, poor in harbours, remote from the luxurious centres of life, and of comparatively rigorous climate; its configuration had offered them no inducement to form city-states and enter on intense political life. But, in compensation, they entered the fourth century unexhausted, without tribal or political impediments to unity, and with a broad territory of greater natural resources than any southern Greek state. Macedonia could supply itself with the best cereal foods and to spare, and had unexploited veins of gold ore. But the most important thing to remark is this - that, compared with Greece, Macedonia was a region of Central Europe. In the latter's progress to imperial power we shall watch for the first time in recorded history a continental European folk bearing down peninsular populations of the Mediterranean.
Philip of Macedon, who had been trained in the arts of both war and peace in a Greek city, saw the weakness of the divided Hellenes, and the possible strength of his own people, and he set to work from the first with abounding energy, dogged persistence and immense talent for organization to make a single armed nation, which should be more than a match for the many communities of Hellas. How he accomplished his purpose in about twenty years: how he began by opening mines of precious metal on his south-eastern coast, and with the proceeds hired mercenaries: how he had Macedonian peasants drilled to fight in a phalanx formation more mobile than the Theban and with a longer spear, while the gentry were trained as heavy cavalry: how he made experiments with his new soldiers on the inland tribes, and so enlarged his effective dominions that he was able to marshal henceforward far more than his own Emathian clansmen: how for six years he perfected this national army till it was as professional a fighting machine as any condottiere's band of that day, while at the same time larger and of much better temper: how, when it was ready in the spring of the year 353, he began a fifteen years' war of encroachment on the holdings of the Greek states and particularly of Athens, attacking some of her maritime colonies in Macedonia and Thrace: how, after a campaign in inland Thrace and on the Chersonese, he appeared in Greece, where he pushed at last through Thermopylae: how, again, he withdrew for several seasons into the Balkan Peninsula, raided it from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and ended with an attack on the last and greatest of its free Greek coastal cities, Perinthus and Byzantium: how, finally, in 338, coming south in full force, he crushed in the single battle of Chaeronea the two considerable powers of Greece, Athens and Thebes, and secured at last from every Greek state except Sparta (which he could afford to neglect) recognition of his suzerainty - these stages in Philip's making of a European nation and a European empire must not be described more fully here. What concerns us is the end of it all; for the end was the arraying of that new nation and that new empire for a descent on Asia. A year after Chaeronea Philip was named by the Congress of Corinth Captain-General of all Greeks to wreak the secular vengeance of Hellas on Persia.
How long he had consciously destined his fighting machine to an ultimate invasion of Asia we do not know. The Athenians had explicitly stated to the Great King in 341 that such was the Macedonian's ambition, and four years earlier public suggestion of it had been made by the famous orator, Isocrates, in an open letter written to Philip himself. Since the last named was a man of long sight and sustained purpose, it is not impossible that he had conceived such an ambition in youth and had been cherishing it all along. While Philip was in Thebes as a young man, old Agesilaus, who first of Greeks had conceived the idea of invading the inland East, was still seeking a way to realize his oft-frustrated project; and in the end he went off to Egypt to make a last effort after Philip was already on the throne. The idea had certainly been long in the air that any military power which might dominate Hellas would be bound primarily by self-interest and secondarily by racial duty to turn its arms against Asia. The Great King himself knew this as well as any one. After the Athenian warning in 341, his satraps in the north-west of Asia Minor were bidden assist Philip's enemies in every possible way; and it was thanks in no small measure to their help, that the Byzantines repulsed the Macedonians from their walls in 339.
Philip had already made friends of the princely house of Caria, and was now at pains to secure a footing in north-west Asia Minor. He threw, therefore, an advance column across the Dardanelles under his chief lieutenant, Parmenio, and proposed to follow it in the autumn of the year 336 with a Grand Army which he had been recruiting, training and equipping for a twelvemonth. The day of festival which should inaugurate his great venture arrived; but the venture was not to be his. As he issued from his tent to attend the games he fell by the hand of a private enemy; and his young son, Alexander, had at first enough to do to re-establish a throne which proved to have more foes than friends.