Philip needed to buy time by means of the first method, appeasement, in order to build the army that would enable him to crush where appeasement failed. (Philip always preferred diplomacy to force, dissimilar in that respect to his son Alexander, whose preferences were the reverse.) Although Philip must have seemed unlucky in coming to the throne at so unpromising a moment in Macedonian history, there were in fact compensations, especially if one looks beyond such real but local enemies as the Illyrians and assumes that from the outset Philip’s vision rested on the far horizon. The greatest hoplite power in Greece, namely Sparta, was preoccupied with regaining Messenia, just as Persia was preoccupied with Egypt. Thebes had lost Epaminondas and was soon to overextend itself badly in the Third Sacred War. Athens still had a naval empire of sorts, but it was already showing signs of breakup; in any case, if Philip was to be stopped, it would not be by sea. He could and arguably did time his operations so as to make it impossible for a fleet to get at him (ships could not sail north when the Etesian winds were blowing). On the positive side, the productivity of the silver and gold mines of the Pangaion region would be a huge asset to Philip, and it was thus encouraging that they were currently controlled by a dwarf among imperial powers, Thasos. Although Thasos seems to have been extending its mainland interests remarkably in the 360s, it was not Athens and could be dealt with.
First Philip needed to reorganize his army, which he accomplished by introducing more rigorous training and employing mercenaries. This enabled him to inflict defeats on the Illyrians and other northern enemies. At the same time he made a string of advantageous “marriages,” some more official than others and scarcely amounting to more than politically slanted concubinage; one of these was to an Illyrian princess, Audata. In 357, however, all of these were effectively displaced by his marriage to the formidable Olympias, who on or about July 20, 356, gave birth to Alexander. In 358 Philip made a preliminary visit to the strategically and politically crucial area of Thessaly. He was now poised for a “blitzkrieg” against Amphipolis, which he besieged and captured in 357. Then he moved on to conquer Pydna and the mining city of Crenides, renamed Philippi (356). In 356 he formed an alliance with the Olynthians, who had good reason to be alarmed at Philip’s dazzlingly rapid progress, which continued with the taking of Potidaea in 356 and the successful siege of Methone (355–354). An inscription shows that the Olynthian alliance was recommended by the Delphic oracle, interesting evidence that the oracle was still politically active. The Olynthian alliance is a reminder that Philip was always happy to operate diplomatically if at all possible; in fact, the Athenians had been kept quiet at the time of Philip’s assault on Amphipolis by promises that he would hand it over to them. He never did. The territory of Amphipolis was distributed to Macedonian feoffees.
After the conquest of Methone came some successes in Thrace, which Athens was unable to prevent despite attempts, a little halfhearted and a little late, to strengthen the independent Thracian princes through alliances with itself. Even the great Athenian orator and statesman Demosthenes (384–322) was slow to realize that Athens’s interest required a united, not a divided, Thrace.
Athens had difficulties of its own at this time. In 357 the Social War, the war against its allies, broke out. Already in the 360s, in the aftermath of the Samian cleruchy, trouble had occurred on Ceos and elsewhere. In addition, Mausolus of Caria, once more loyal to Persia and its new king Artaxerxes III, and surely remembering Epaminondas’s example, incited Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium to revolt against Athens (though, as stated, Byzantium was probably already detached). Dislike of Athens was as much a factor in the outbreak of war as the intriguing of Mausolus, which Demosthenes (naturally) stressed in his search for an outside scapegoat. (Mausolus’s help, however, is a fact and should not be doubted.) To Athens’s costly obsession with Amphipolis and the Chersonese should be added its various breaches of the promises made in 377. (For instance, Athens had, despite the charter, installed garrisons and cleruchies and had even levied tribute under the euphemistic name of “contributions.”) In fact, it did not even respect its most-basic political guarantees: at the end of the 360s, the Athenian commander Chares actually helped an oligarchy to power on Corcyra.
The war went badly for Athens, and it was forced to accept a disadvantageous peace in 355 when the Persian king threatened to intervene on the rebel side. It is disputed how far the inefficiency of the Athenian navy was responsible for the defeat. There are plenty of complaints by contemporary orators to the effect that the trierarchic system was not working properly. Still, there was no absolute shortage of ships, and it has been pointed out that some features denounced by orators, such as the hiring out of trierarchic obligations to third parties, actually tended to promote professionalism, because such hired trierarchs built up expertise. Macedonian supremacy in Greece
In 353 Philip was in undisputed control of a much-enlarged Macedon. He was brought into Greece itself as a result of the Third Sacred War of 355–346. That war originated in a more or less gratuitous Theban attack on Phocis, which in 362 had refused to send a contingent for the Mantinea campaign. The time lag is to be explained in terms of power politics: the Thebans had suffered a reverse on Euboea in 357, when Theban ascendancy was suddenly and humiliatingly replaced by Athenian, and they were looking for a victim. Phocian behaviour offered an excuse. The Thebans, who since 364 had influence over the preponderance of votes in the Delphic Amphictyony, persuaded it to condemn Phocis (autumn 357) to a huge fine for the usual technical offense, “cultivation of sacred land.” The hope was that if, or rather when, Phocis was unable to pay, Thebes would be awarded the conduct of the ensuing Sacred War. It all went wrong. The Phocians seized the temple treasure in 356 and recruited a mercenary force of such size and efficiency that the Thebans could not defeat them. The Phocian leaders were Philomelus, followed by Onomarchus, Phayllus, and finally Phalaecus. The actual declaration of the Sacred War was delayed until 355, partly because it was only in that year that the relative impotence of one of Phocis’s hitherto most-impressive-looking allies, the Athenians, was revealed by the miserable end to the Social War in the Aegean.
After Philomelus’s death, Onomarchus formed alliances with the rulers of the Thessalian city of Pherae. Thessaly as a whole had been willing enough to declare war on Phocis in keeping with an enmity of immemorial antiquity already remarked on as long-standing by Herodotus in the context of the Persian Wars. Nonetheless, Thessalian unity on the one hand and Theban ability to influence events in Thessaly on the other were both less than complete, and Onomarchus evidently succeeded in exploiting this fluid situation. Yet another city, Larissa, responded by issuing an invitation that was ultimately to be disastrous to Greek, as well as merely to Thessalian, freedom. It called in Philip.
The immediate consequence, a victory for Onomarchus’s Phocians over Philip, his only defeat in the field, was totally unexpected. The Phocians seem to have had a “secret weapon,” in the form of nontorsion artillery. In the following year (352) that defeat was, however, completely reversed at the Battle of the Crocus Field. Philip, who had already perhaps been officially recognized as ruler of Thessaly before the Crocus Field, now took over Thessaly in the full sense, acquiring its ports and its revenues. A further asset was the Thessalian cavalry, which was used to augment Macedon’s own “companion cavalry” in the great battles of Alexander’s early years in Asia.