This was the heartland of the kingdom and was ringed with hills. Beyond them lay the plateaus of Upper Macedonia to the west, which are themselves ringed by mountains. Feudal barons dominated these remote fastnesses. Unlike the lowlanders, they preferred Thracian deities to the Olympian gods and indulged in orgiastic cult practices, not at all dissimilar to those in Euripides’ late masterpiece, The Bacchae, written in Macedon and premiered in Athens in 405.
To the west and north lived the tribes of Epirus, Illyria, and Paeonia and, farther along on the eastern shore, the coastline of Thrace. These unmanageable peoples were constantly on the attack and placed Macedon under severe pressure. From about 700 the Argead dynasty had provided rulers for the region, but they exercised only a loose control outside the lowlands.
Greeks from their city-states regarded themselves as civilized and looked down on the Macedonians as barbarous and uncouth. They spoke a dialect of what they claimed to be Greek, but nobody else understood it. In fact, although they had no indigenous literature, they enjoyed a sophisticated visual culture. Their craftsmen created very fine gold, silver, and bronze artworks. They also painted murals in their tombs and commissioned superb mosaics depicting stories from Greek mythology or everyday scenes, such as deer hunting. Their feudal warriors had something of Homer about them; they thirsted to excel and placed a high value on military glory for its own sake. They lived the life of an Achilles or a Hector.
The Macedonians insisted that they were members of the Hellenic community, competed in the various international games, and did their best to adopt the best of Greek culture. Both Agathon and the octogenarian Euripides emigrated from Athens to the court of King Archelaus. The king had the reputation of a dissipated homosexual, but he was a busy administrator and a committed Hellenizer; he founded the Olympian Festival, which was dedicated to the Nine Muses and included athletic and musical contests. He invited Socrates to Macedon, but the philosopher was too much attached to his home city and politely declined the offer. He would rather not accept favors, he explained, that he could never repay.
Archelaus did his best to unify Upper and Lower Macedonia. He undertook major military reforms, improving the supply of weapons, horses, and other military resources and building a network of roads. He relocated the capital to the strategic port of Pella.
If other things had been equal, Macedon should have been a great power. But its monarchs were always having to resist the enemies that crowded around the country’s borders, and when they were not doing so they faced treacherous pretenders at home. It is something of a mystery that anyone should compete for such a contested and blood-drenched throne. So far as the Hellenic powers were concerned Macedon was a fringe player in the great game of international politics.
After the assassination of Archelaus in 399 a period of anarchy ensued. Five monarchs followed one another on the throne in the space of six years. All the good work of Archelaus had seemingly gone for nothing. Calm was restored under Philip’s father, Amyntas III, but upheavals and lawlessness resumed on his death in 369. The kingdom entered another period of dynastic chaos.
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For ten years after Leuctra, Thebes was the leading power in Greece, but its predominance was only temporary.
Soon after the battle, Pelopidas was invited to arbitrate between two contenders for the Macedonian throne. The one he chose was swiftly murdered by his rival, who decided that a treaty with Thebes would be advisable.
To demonstrate his sincerity, the usurper sent some distinguished hostages to Thebes. These included Philip, then only fifteen years old and a younger son of the dead monarch. He was a bright and attractive teenager, who appears to have caught the roving eye of Pelopidas. He learned from him the art of polite behavior. His Theban hosts were also intellectuals and it was probably from them that, a little surprisingly in the light of his later violent career, he also developed an interest in the philosophy of the mathematician and mystic Pythagoras.
To more practical effect, Philip watched Epaminondas at work on army affairs and listened carefully to his conversation. He received military advice from another general, Pammenes, in whose house he lodged and with whom he was also rumored to have shared his charms. He was a popular boy. Pammenes admired the Sacred Band, whose self-discipline he compared favorably with the unruly peoples and tribes in Homer. Philip stored in his mind everything he heard at Thebes before returning home in 364.
During the ten years after Leuctra, we have seen that Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnese a number of times. He was determined to prevent a Spartan resurgence. Thebes also turned its attention to central and northern Greece. It built a fleet to rival that of the Athenians and fostered discontent among their allies, Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium. Pelopidas intervened in Thessaly, where Jason of Pherae’s son and successor was behaving aggressively towards his neighbors, but, although the campaign was ultimately successful, the Theban commander lost his life.
People began to tire of Thebes—so much so that there was talk in the Peloponnese of that most implausible event, an anti-Theban alliance between Lacedaemon and its long-standing enemy, the Arcadians. In 362, fearful of losing influence, Epaminondas found himself having to launch his fourth expedition to southern Greece. Once again he threatened Sparta itself. Xenophon compared the city to helpless chicks in a nest without their parents, but luckily Agesilaus was warned in time and came to the rescue.
At Mantinea, Epaminondas faced the army of a grand alliance, led by Athens and Sparta. In terms of numbers, this was to be the largest battle yet fought between Hellenes: the Thebans and their allies came with thirty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry and ranged against them were twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. It was a long day, but the Theban cavalry and then the deep phalanx eventually put the Spartans to flight.
The enemy targeted Epaminondas, who was pushing a little ahead of his line and a Spartan wounded him with a spear. He was taken to his tent. Victory in the battle was his, but he knew that he had been fatally hurt. He asked for one of his best generals to assume command, and was told he had been killed; then for another, but he too was dead. “In that case,” said Epaminondas before expiring, “make peace.”
The loss of Epaminondas and Pelopidas was a heavy blow to Thebes. Its influence ebbed. In the long run, though, this had less to do with victories or defeats in the field than with the fact that it had never managed to unite Boeotia fully into an integrated and loyal whole. One medium-sized polis on its own did not have the resources to play a leading role on the international stage for any length of time.
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The waning of Thebes left Athens as the strongest Hellenic power. But the old energy was missing. Somehow lifeblood was seeping from the polis, the city-state that, in the fifth century, had claimed to be an education to Greece and had not only demanded but received its citizens’ active loyalty on the battlefield. The orator Aeschines made a telling point when he said
the people, discouraged by their experiences, as though they were suffering from dementia or been declared of unsound mind, lay claim only to the name of democracy, and have given away the substance of it to others. And so you go home from the meetings of your
ecclesia,
not from a serious debate, but after dividing the profits like shareholders.
The city was becoming an open-air museum. Visitors came to tour the monuments of the Periclean age. Apart from restoring their fortifications, the Athenians only started major new building works and refurbishments again in the third quarter of the century; these included ship sheds, the arsenal, the great stone theater of Dionysus, and a Panathenaic stadium in a valley southeast of the city—important projects, but not quite on the old grand scale. Wonderful sculpture continued to be carved or cast, but with a difference. Where Pheidias conveyed the majesty of anthropomorphic gods, Praxiteles, the leading Athenian sculptor of his age, portrayed in marble beings that were nominally supernatural but in fact looked like individual men and women, if very beautiful ones. His celebrated Aphrodite at Cnidus was sexy and erotic: so much so that it is said that a young admirer had himself locked up overnight in the temple where she stood and left semen stains on the marble.