As usual, though, it was ordinary people who suffered the ravages of war. Demosthenes recalled traveling through a devastated landscape:
When we recently made our way to Delphi, we could not help but see everything—houses razed, fortifications demolished, countryside empty of adult men, a handful of women and children, miserable old people. No one could find words to describe the trouble [the Phocians] now have.
The winner of these proceedings was, without a doubt, Philip. He was now a member of an ancient and respected Panhellenic institution and had a foothold in the polity of mainland Greece. Of great practical value, his army’s boots were firmly on the ground. Nobody could say any longer that he was not a Greek, as he had always claimed he was.
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The people of Athens were a grave disappointment to Demosthenes. In the first of a series of great speeches he delivered against the threat that Philip posed to the Hellenic world, he compared their lack of spirit to a boxer who covers where he has been hit rather than aggressively counterattacks.
You wage war on Philip in exactly the way a barbarian boxes. When struck, he always grabs that spot; hit him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary. So if you hear of Philip in the Chersonese you send a relief force there; if at Thermopylae, you vote one there. If he is somewhere else, you still run around to keep up with him.
If the Athenians were less than eager to take the war to Philip, he was not looking for a fight with them. He greatly respected the city, which was the cultural and intellectual center of the Greek world. While he knew how to drink deep with his Companions, he liked to associate on equal terms with Athenian philosophers and writers. In 343 he chose Aristotle, Plato’s onetime student, to be tutor to his teenaged son Alexander, whom he wanted to grow up into a fully fledged Hellene. The boy studied literature and philosophy, just as if he were a young Athenian.
Many Greeks approved of King Philip. A reader of the speeches of Demosthenes might gain the impression that all Hellas hated and feared him. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was not only intellectuals like Isocrates who, in the grand manner, saw in Philip a long overdue pacifier of Greece’s poisonous poleis. Small states in the Peloponnese felt threatened by an angry Sparta desperate to restore her power over the peninsula. The weakness of Thebes and its inability to protect them as it had in the days of Epaminondas meant that Philip’s arrival was a godsend. In many quarters the Macedonian king was genuinely welcome.
This was a curious phenomenon—a popular enemy whom most people did not wish to fight, an aggressor who admired the civilization he wished to vanquish. And yet the logic of events brought about a renewal of hostilities.
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Demosthenes organized a deep Athenian sulk. At his prompting, the city made an implied protest against Macedonia’s membership of the Amphictyonic League by deciding not to attend the Pythian Games, but backed down after Philip sent a polite but firm ultimatum. Having marched the demos up the hill, the orator was forced embarrassingly to march it down again by conceding that it would be folly “to go to war for the shadow at Delphi.”
As time passed, though, anti-Macedonian propaganda had its effect. The public mood swung decisively against the peace. Its leading Athenian negotiator was charged with treason and fled the city. He was condemned to death in absentia for contempt of court. In 343 Demosthenes then impeached Aeschines, his great oratorical rival and supporter of the treaty with Philip. The defendant needed all his skills as a public speaker to obtain an acquittal.
The king lost patience with a state that was ostensibly his friend and ally, and seems to have financed a failed attempt to fire the dockyards of Piraeus. He probably wanted to neutralize the still powerful Athenian fleet before proceeding with his next great enterprise—the permanent and final conquest of Thrace. After a ten months’ campaign in 342 and 341 he was victorious. He doubled the size of his kingdom and extended the Macedonian frontier to the edge of the Chersonese.
Athens rightly regarded this as a threat to the uninterrupted passage of the grain imports on which its population depended. It deployed to the region a few ships and some mercenaries, who unwisely broke the terms of the peace by raiding a recognized ally of Philip. This prompted an angry note from the king.
The Athenians were obviously in the wrong, but Demosthenes was having none of it. He delivered a speech in which he claimed that it was the Macedonian king who had broken the peace.
Now there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that Philip was looking for any opportunity to increase the power of Macedon. His presence at the Chersonese was indeed dangerous and he was being provocative when he encouraged poleis on the island of Euboea to set up oligarchies with Macedonian support.
However, although the Athenian fleet ruled the Aegean waves, Philip’s military superiority by land was there for all to see. Macedonia was wealthy and populous. In the long run, relatively impoverished and un-military as it had become, Athens could not hope to compete with the new great power. Its interest lay in the friendly and active alliance that Philip sought. Indeed he proposed that the treaty between Macedon and Athens should be enlarged to become a common peace for all who wished to join in it.
Demosthenes believed, though, that the king’s chief aim was not to enter into a partnership with Athens, but to bring about its ruin. Hatred outweighed reason in the orator’s mind. There was no doubting his sincerity. He resisted bribery from Macedon, although, writes Plutarch, he was “overwhelmed by Persian gold, which poured from Susa and Ecbatana in a torrent.” Demosthenes gave the demos sincere but very bad advice.
Athenian efforts to mount a common Hellenic front against the king were beginning to show signs of success. At home the ecclesia levied taxes, and monies from the Festivals Fund were diverted to preparations for war. The Great King, fearful of Philip’s invasion plans, agreed to offer his support. In 340 two allies of Macedon in the northeast, Perinthus and the well-fortified polis of Byzantium, changed sides. Philip laid both of them under siege, but even his new torsion catapult failed to dent their defenses.
In compensation, Philip scored a victory at sea. His small fleet attacked and captured an Athenian grain convoy of 230 vessels near the mouth of the Propontis, the contents of which were sold for the enormous sum of 700 talents. All those belonging to Athenians, some 180 ships, were destroyed.
The king marched home through Thrace where he conducted a brief campaign and picked up a serious thigh wound. He limped for the rest of his life, but he had secured Thrace and could safely (and with a certain regret) turn his attention to dealing with Greece.
Philip’s aggressions in the Chersonese were a serious threat to Athens. The loss of the convoy was the last straw. The ecclesia declared war on Macedon and the marble column on which the terms of the peace were inscribed was formally shattered. The policy of Demosthenes had triumphed and he was voted a gold crown in gratitude for his services to the state.
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Once again a dispute in the Amphictyony gave Philip the opportunity he needed.
After the battle of Plataea in the previous century, the Athenians dedicated at Delphi a set of gold shields with an inscription reading “From the spoils of Persians and Thebans who fought together against the Greeks.” Recently they refurbished and re-presented the trophy. The Thebans had always found this reference to their long-ago alliance with Xerxes to be offensive and this new display opened an old wound.