Apparently, the king was an effeminate homosexual and ran a relaxed and open court. The aged Euripides, the most popular and radical of the great Athenian tragedians, came to stay; he was accompanied by a younger playwright, Agathon, then about forty, who played a starring role in the philosopher Plato’s Symposium, a semi-fictional account of a dinner party in Athens. They were rumored to be lovers—rather daring if true, for many Greeks disliked permanent adult same-sex relationships. (They did value liaisons between teenaged boys and young adult males; these were partly educational and partly erotic in character, but were temporary and usually gave way after a few years to close friendships and heterosexual marriage—see this page for more details). The king challenged Euripides for kissing the middle-aged Agathon at a public banquet, but the old man replied, perhaps with a wintry smile: “Springtime isn’t the only beautiful season; so is autumn.”
Archelaus tempted the fashionable painter Zeuxis to decorate his house in the new Greek-style capital, Pella, to which he had moved his administration. However, he had no luck with Socrates. The philosopher turned down the king’s invitation to visit, saying that he never accepted favors he could not repay.
The king instituted and oversaw a nine-day festival beneath Mount Olympus, home of the gods. It featured athletic and dramatic competitions in honor of Zeus and the Muses. He may well have hoped, unrealistically, that his festival would outshine the Olympic Games, also dedicated to the king of the gods. Like his predecessor Alexander, he competed at Olympia, in his case winning the chariot race (he did the same during the Pythian Games at Delphi).
The tone of the court became increasingly Hellenic, and little ruffians from the Macedonian aristocracy were polished with a Greek education. How far did the king’s efforts succeed? The results were mixed. Royals and aristocrats were won over by the propaganda, but international snobbery was harder to overcome.
Thrasymachus was a noted philosopher and an educational and political consultant (what the Greeks called a sophist) who appears as a character in Plato’s masterpiece, The Republic. He asked: “Shall we, who are Greeks, be slaves to Archelaus, a barbarian?”
He was not alone in being immune to blandishment. Archelaus’s successors maintained the uphill struggle for acceptance, and Philip was no exception. When Plato died in 347, he went out of his way to “honor” the great philosopher’s passing. But a cultured Athenian like Demosthenes regarded Philip not only as a political opponent but also as a boor. The king, he said dismissively, was “not only not Greek and unrelated to Greeks…but a wretched Macedonian, from a land where once you couldn’t even buy a decent slave.”
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IF ARCHELAUS ENCOURAGED THE appurtenances of civilization, there were barbarian aspects of his public personality and of court culture at large that proved too ingrained to erase. The palace was a viper’s nest of ambition, and members of the royal family were often at risk of extermination, especially at moments of transition between one reign and the next.
The king was no slouch in this regard. According to Plato, he was Perdiccas’s illegitimate son by a slave and “had no claim to the throne he now occupies.” However, he clambered up to it through a bloodbath. He invited a leading contender, his uncle (in whose household he seems to have lived), and the uncle’s son to dinner. He got them drunk, packed them into a carriage, and drove them away by night; out of sight out of mind, they were then put to death.
The seven-year-old son of the late king, although far too young to rule, had a just title to the throne. He was thrown down a well and drowned. His surely incredulous mother was told that he had fallen in while chasing a goose.
Archelaus was a clever and farsighted ruler, but he should have known that those who live by the sword have a way of dying by it too. In 399, he was assassinated. The sources are confused and differ. According to one account, a boyfriend called Craterus killed him and seized power. Within four days he himself was murdered, the biter bit. Aristotle noted dryly: “At the bottom of the coolness between them was Craterus’s disgust with granting sexual favors.”
The king’s son, Orestes, succeeded his father, but, fatally for him, was another small boy. His guardian promptly put him to death and took his place. He lasted only a few years himself. Three more short-lived kings came and went, and finally in 393 a great-grandson of Alexander, lover of Greeks, took charge. This was Amyntas III—it is something of a surprise that any members of the dynasty were left standing after all the bloodletting—who stayed in place (barring a brief deposition) for two decades. He maintained the traditional Macedonian policy of routinely switching alliances, although he seems always to have had a soft spot for Athens.
On the domestic front, life was busy. Amyntas appears to have been a bigamist (not unusual among Macedonian royalty) and fathered at least seven children. One of his wives, Eurydice, has been presented as almost completely out of control. If we can believe the sources, she plotted the assassination of her husband, intending marriage to her son-in-law, Ptolemy. Her daughter, justifiably outraged, informed Amyntas of her intentions. He courageously forgave his wife and, against the odds, died in his bed in 370 at an advanced age.
Once again the royal family imploded, with Eurydice (it appears) at the sanguinary heart of events. Alexander II, a young man, ascended the throne, but was assassinated a couple of years later at the instigation of Ptolemy. The dowager queen’s lover then set himself up as regent for her second son, Perdiccas III, who was still in his teens. The young king was energetic and daring; in 365 he had Ptolemy put to death and seized the reins of power.
History does not record Eurydice’s fate, although she sought to retrieve her maternal reputation by encouraging her own education and that of her sons (not without some success, for Perdiccas developed a serious interest in philosophy). She dedicated an inscription to the Muses, in which she claimed that “by her diligence she succeeded in becoming literate.”
Perdiccas fell afoul not of palace conspiracies, but of a military disaster. In 359, he attempted to wrest northern Macedonia from the permanently pugnacious Illyrians, but was struck down in a great battle. All the gains of the previous century or so were lost and the kingdom’s neighbors gathered gleefully round to tear meat from the carcass.
The lost leader was survived by his son, Amyntas IV, yet another child heir who was obviously of no use in this emergency. Luckily, there was one final adult brother left alive. Old enough to show promise if too young to guarantee achievement, he was called Philip.
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PHILIP WAS LUCKY TO have avoided the machinations of his mother. This was because he had spent the last few years as a hostage among the Illyrians and then in Thebes, the capital of Boeotia and, for the time being, the leading state in Greece. Absence from Pella had kept him in good health and he learned a great deal from his hosts.
He was a young and attractive teenager and his Theban host, a distinguished but amorous commander called Pammenes, is reported to have seduced him. This was a routine adolescent experience at the Macedonian court and there is no evidence that the prince demurred. The episode is better understood as a rite of passage than as sexual abuse.
More importantly, Philip was introduced to a military genius, Epaminondas, whose mastery of tactics, discipline, and training had enabled Thebes to destroy forever the power of Sparta, the dominant military state of the age. He also encountered the three-hundred-strong Sacred Band, a crack regiment of male lovers. Its members were devoted couples, recruited on the principle that neither would want to disgrace himself in the presence of the other. This elite corps probably had its origin in the heroic age of solo champions and their chariot drivers.