Southern Thessaly was the gateway to Greece proper, as Thermopylae had illustrated in 480 and the Spartans had recognized by their foundation of Heraclea in Trachis. A probe by Philip on Thermopylae itself was, however, firmly repelled by Athens. Philip could afford to wait and perhaps was obliged to do so by Thracian trouble closer to home (end of 352). When he laid siege to a place called Heraeum Teichos, Athens sent a small contingent in September 351. At some date not long before this, perhaps June 351, Demosthenes delivered his “First Philippic,” a denouncement of Philip and Macedonian imperialism. He decried the Athenian moves to counter Philip as always being too little and coming too late. He also urged the creation of a task force and larger emergency force. It is not clear how influential Demosthenes’ advice was—or how influential, at this stage, it deserved to be: at about the same time, and, perhaps actually after the “First Philippic,” Demosthenes was found advocating, in the “Speech on the Freedom of the Rhodians,” a foolish diversion of resources to the southeastern Aegean against the encroachments of Mausolus’s family. The situation there was, in fact, beyond repair.
In summer 349, with Etesian winds about to blow, Philip, despite the alliance of 356, attacked Olynthus, the centre of the Chalcidic Confederation. Olynthus turned to the only and obvious place for help, Athens. This was the occasion of the three “Olynthiac Orations” of Demosthenes. One of Demosthenes’ pleas was to make the reserves of the so-called Festival, or Theoric, Fund immediately available for military purposes—in fact, to finance an Olynthian expedition. There is no agreement that his stirring patriotism was correct from the point of view of policy; perhaps the decision to build up Athens’s financial resources slowly in preparation for the time when Philip had to be confronted nearer home was right. This unglamorous, though not actually dishonourable, policy is associated with the name of Eubulus, the Athenian leader of the pacifist party, whose caution helped to make possible the prosperous Athens of the time of the statesman and orator Lycurgus.
Olynthus fell in 348, despite the Athenian help that was eventually sent. Many of the inhabitants of the city were sold into slavery. Although Greek warfare always permitted this theoretically, the treatment of Olynthus was, nevertheless, shocking to Greek sentiment. In addition, there was no comfort for Athens from the events on its doorstep; Euboea, which Eubulus and his supporters agreed should always be defended, successfully revolted in 348.
At Athens, it must have seemed that there was no immediate further point in fighting, with Amphipolis and Olynthus gone; Philip, moreover, had been putting out peace feelers for some time. The Sacred War, however, brought Philip back into Greece, when desultory warfare in 347 caused the Boeotians to call him in; in alarm Phocis appealed to Athens and Sparta. The Phocian commander Phalaecus, however, unexpectedly declined to allow the Athenians and Spartans to occupy Thermopylae, and Athens was forced to make peace. This was the notorious Peace of Philocrates—notorious because of the attempts by various leading Athenian orator-politicians to saddle each other with responsibility for what was in fact an inevitability.
The Phocians surrendered to Philip, who received their Amphictyonic votes. Many individual Phocian troops, branded as temple robbers, had already fled; some of them eventually joined Timoleon in Sicily. The cities of Phocis were physically destroyed and the remaining inhabitants distributed among villages. It is doubtful whether Philip ever seriously intended any other solution to the war in its Phocian dimension. Demosthenes was later to allege that Philip at one point had a different plan—namely, to crush Thebes and save the temple robbers in Phocis. This, however, would have been an implausible renunciation of a valuable weapon, the leadership of a Sacred War. Any such threats or promises can have been no more than feints.
Philip was for the moment supreme not merely in Phocis but in Greece. Athens, as its chief concession, had to abandon claims to Amphipolis formally. It also had to enter into an alliance, as well as make peace, with Philip. This raises the interesting question of whether Philip was already thinking of a grand crusade against Persia as early as 346; some of the sources make such a claim, but they may be contaminated by hindsight. He probably was considering such a move. For one thing, the idea of punishing the Persians for their sack of Athens in 480 was not prominent before 346 but was much heard of thereafter. Moreover, Philip had triumphantly ended one religious war and demonstrated his Hellenism and suitability for the leadership of the Greeks. Nothing would be more natural than that he or his propagandists should have hit on the idea of exploiting the still greater moral appeal to the Greeks of an all-out war of revenge for Persian impiety.
In fact, the idea of a Macedonian spillage into Anatolia was a very old one indeed, and a natural one. About half a millennium earlier, the Phrygian kingdom of Midas, the predecessor of the Lydian dynasty of Croesus, had emerged as a result of a mass movement of peoples from Macedon. An Asiatic expedition is an idea that Philip could surely have thought of for himself: he did not need Isocrates to urge him, as he did in his pamphlet called the Philippus of 346, to settle the Persian empire with wandering Greeks (or resettle them: some of these wanderers must have been mercenaries rendered unemployed by Artaxerxes’ demobilization edict of about 359). Information supplied by Artabazus, a satrap who had fled to the Macedonian court at some time in the late 350s, may have been helpful to Philip. Artabazus could have told Philip—and the very young Alexander perhaps—about the complex Persian system of supplies and travel vouchers for high-ranking officials, a system revealed to historians only in 1969, with the publication of the Persepolis Fortification Tablets. In addition, Philip seems to have had contacts elsewhere in western Anatolia, for instance with Hermias of Atarneus, a fascinating minor ruler at whose court Aristotle stayed. Whatever Philip’s plans may have been, the Persian empire was not yet as debilitated or ripe for takeover as it was to be in the 330s; on the contrary, Persia suppressed revolts in Cyprus and Phoenicia in the mid-340s, and, the greatest success of all, in Egypt in 343.
In Athens after 346 there was a group who seemed to want war against Persia, and this entailed good relations with Philip. However, Demosthenes, who constantly worked against that policy, argued that Philip was untrustworthy; he pointed out that in the second half of the 340s Philip was a persistent peacebreaker, as, for instance, in the Peloponnese and on Euboea. In 344 Demosthenes even persuaded the Athenians to reject a proposed renegotiation of the peace terms offered by Philip in the person of an orator from Byzantium called Python.
Philip had preoccupations closer to Macedon in this period, which themselves make it unlikely that he wanted to upset the arrangements of 346—at least not yet. In 345 he had to deal with the Illyrians again, which he did at the expense of a bad leg wound. The strains of his intense military life had by now left their effects on his appearance. He must have looked older than his age, scarcely more than the mid-30s, because he had already lost an eye at Methone. (It is possible that a skull found in Macedonian Verghina bearing traces of a missile wound over the eye may in fact be the actual skull of Philip II of Macedon. That possibility encouraged the forensic reconstruction in 1983 of the entire head, by techniques used for rebuilding the features of unknown crash victims with a view to identification.) Philip’s leg wound of 345 did not incapacitate him completely; in 344 he had the energy to reorganize Thessaly into its four old divisions, or “tetrachies.” It helps to explain, however, why he was relatively inactive in Macedon until 342, when he made another and final move against Thrace, removing the first local recalcitrant, a ruler named Cersebleptes. From the economic as well as the political point of view, subduing the Thracian rulers was well worth the effort: the gorgeous Thracian Treasure from Rogozen in Bulgaria, discovered in 1986, consists of 165 high-grade silver and gilded vessels; one of them is inscribed “Property of Cersebleptes.”