Great Battles
Macedon, led by King Philip II, had come to dominate most of Greece and only an unlikely alliance of Athens and Thebes stood in his way
The Battle of Chaeronea was one of the most decisive in the ancient world. It decided the fate of Greece – would it come under Macedonian domination or remain free? The future of Greece rested on two of its hitherto greatest military powers: Athens and Thebes. The other great hoplite power, Sparta, had been humbled by Thebes 25 years earlier. The result of Chaeronea was, however, to be a crushing victory for Macedonia which kept all of Greece compliant to Macedonian will for the next 15 years – this in turn allowed Alexander to embark on his unprecedented conquest of the Persian Empire in 334 BCE. The history of the ancient world (and subsequent centuries) would have been very different had the result of the Battle of Chaeronea been an Athenian and Theban victory.
The details of the battle (as much as we can recover them) deserve to be far better known. For such an important engagement we, frustratingly, do not have much surviving source material on it; our best sources for the period are lost and we are left with only summaries and anecdotes. What is more, the historians of Alexander, of which there are many, tend to rush over Chaeronea because of the greatness Alexander achieved after it – the biographer Plutarch, for instance, has only a single sentence on Alexander’s role at Chaeronea. But all that was to come for Alexander began at Chaeronea – he learned all he needed to know of warfare at this battle.
Even though he was only 18, he commanded the cavalry; he had, however, fought in his first military campaign at 16.
Philip probably never expected to become the king of Macedonia because he had two older brothers – Alexander II and Perdiccas III – who were both kings before him. What is more, Philip seems to have been traded as a hostage to guarantee peace, first to the Illyrians and then to the Thebans. There he would observe and learn all about the greatest military threats to Macedon. At the court of Bardylis, the Illyrian king, Philip probably witnessed the cavalry and combined arms tactics of the Illyrians (the use of cavalry and light-armed troops). In the Thebes of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, whose revolutionary reforms of warfare came to dominate hoplite warfare, he probably observed the deepening of the hoplite line and the lengthening of the spear. These would all be changes Philip embraced and brought into effect as soon as he unexpectedly ascended the throne – with an eye to defeating both styles of warfare. When Perdiccas III was killed in battle wit
