The Classical World (29 page)

Even in fourth-century Athens, we have no first-hand surviving evidence of conversations between husband and wife. Like children, wives were certainly loved by Athenian husbands, and the more scandalous
demi-monde
which is evoked against Neaera must not be taken as the norm. Other sources tell us how it was bad form to frequent ‘courtesans’ when married, let alone to keep one in the matrimonial home. What we do not know is the tone of male–female relations in Athenian households: were upper-class wives really so submissive as idealizing male texts imply?

There is also the problem of how typical these women were of other Greek city-states, except for the contrarian Spartans. At Locris, in south Italy, women were said to have held real power and to have passed inheritances down the female line (in my view, this ancient ‘mirage’ is most unlikely). In the mid-third century
BC
a traveller in Greece describes how women at Thebes were veiled, so much so that only their eyes were visible: we even have examples of this attire, in a few of the terracotta figurines of women, known as ‘Tanagras’, some of which were found at Thebes.
⁵
Had a similar style been imposed on women by the male ‘Boeotian pigs’ (the Athenians’ name for them) already in the fourth century
BC
? The Athenians’ strict insistence on a citizen’s birth from two citizen-born parents was very important for their sense of cohesion and civic identity, but it, too, was not the norm in most other Greek city-states. Up in the north of Greece, there are mothers who look even less ‘Athenian’. In the Molossian kingdom in Epirus, two fourth-century decrees actually bestow citizenship on a woman: perhaps as a monarchy, the state had different criteria.
⁶
In its neighbour, the Macedonian kingdom, the relations of wives, husbands and children had a much more dramatic character.

The Macedonian kings were polygamous and, as we shall see, their history would be coloured for centuries by the consequences. In the 390s the ruling king, Amyntas III, took a second wife, Eurydice. She was alleged, at least, to have attempted to kill her husband and to have cohabited with her own daughter’s husband. She was also credited with killing two of her three sons.
⁷
These extreme stories do at least point to the potential tensions in a polygamous royal family, whether all, part or none of them is justified. But her third son, certainly, lived in the world in which they circulated. He was Philip, the future king of Macedon and father of Alexander. Family tensions were as much a part of his formation as of his son’s, and they were carried to most un-Athenian lengths, matched only on the Athenians’ tragic stage.

Philip of Macedon

Philip despised those who were of an orderly character and took care of their own property, but he praised and honoured those who were extravagant and spent their lives in playing dice and drinking… Were not some of them shaven and smooth-skinned even when they were adult men, while others dared to mount one another and have sex even though they had beards? They used to take around two or three male prostitutes each, and themselves give the same services to others. Justly, then, would someone suppose them to be ‘courtesans’ not ‘court-Companions’
…

Theopompus F225 B (Jacoby), after his time at Philip’s Pella

Down to the 350s there were many changes in inter-state relations in Greece, but no great surprise emerged from an unforeseen corner. Within twenty years, however, the freedom of the Greeks would have a new master, a king of Macedon, who ruled beyond Mount Olympus in the north of Greece. The unexpected dominance of Macedon would far exceed that of Periclean Athens and would persist for more than a hundred and seventy years.

Its beginnings were most inauspicious. Its founder, Philip, entered the stage aged twenty or so as the regent for an even younger prince. His elder brother had been killed in battle (not, as rumour said, by his mother) and his kingdom was being overrun by barbarians from the north-west. Greek city-states to the south had seen it all before: murders in the Macedonian royal family, a disputed succession to the throne, oaths sworn and broken by harassed kings. There had been
brief flashes of power, but during more than two centuries not a single king of Macedon had died peacefully in old age. Nonetheless, after more than twenty years in power, the new Macedonian leader, King Philip, could now marshal a highly trained army, including many Thessalians and other Greeks, and win a decisive victory over the major Greek city-states, including Athens. By 338
BC
his power extended from the river Danube to southern Greece. He then imposed a highly restrictive peace on his Greek ‘allies’. He even began an invasion of the Persian Empire. His making of a new Macedon was antiquity’s most rapid and remarkable feat of power-building.

In the fourth century
BC
Macedon centred on a lowland palace and capital, Pella, but it was a patchwork of little kingdoms whose own ruling houses had at times followed their own line. Hostile Greeks to the south had sometimes called its kings ‘barbarian’ and the ‘Macedonian speech’ of its ordinary people was very difficult for many southern Greeks to understand. The ‘Macedonians’ did sometimes distinguish themselves, even in official lists, from ‘Hellenes’.
¹
However, the royal house claimed descent from Argos and traced back their arrival to
c.
650
BC
, as if they had fled north from the coming age of tyrants and hoplite warfare in Greece. That claim is rather dubious, but in
c.
500
BC
their king Alexander I had been allowed, after careful screening, to compete in the Olympic Games, which were confined to Greeks only. What, then, was the truth? Were Macedonians Greeks?

In the past thirty years, ever more evidence has been found of Macedonians’ patronage of fine Greek arts and crafts. Texts had already told us how their fifth-century kings had settled Greek exiles in their kingdom. They also patronized great Greek poets like Pindar and Euripides and hired the great painters of the day: we can now add the master-sculptor, Callimachus, to the list after recent archaeological finds. Certainly, the Macedonian kings and courtiers wished to be seen as Greeks. Patronage does not make a patron into a Greek, but there has also been renewed study of Macedonian personal names, the month-names in the Macedonian calendar, and some of the odd words preserved from ‘Macedonian dialect’. A growing number of personal inscriptions have been found in fourth-century contexts; they begin to allow us to connect the ‘Macedonian dialect’ to the Greek
which was current in north-western Greece. One of the earliest Greek inscriptions in Macedon, recently found, is a curse written for or by a woman at Pella who invokes the gods against that perpetual human phenomenon, a man who had proved to be a love-rat.
²

The ‘perceived common ancestor’ of the kingdom was the legendary Makedon whom Greek genealogy accepted as a son of the Greek god Zeus. At their original capital and dynastic centre, Aigai (modern Vergina), the kings even held local Olympics, a festival in honour of Zeus. Near their kingdom’s southern border at Dion they held a musical and cultural festival for the Muses.
³
Within the kingdoms, even the kings had sometimes intermarried with non-Greek ‘barbarians’: Philip’s own mother is said, perhaps rightly, to have been one. But the dominant culture and language of the kings and their nobles was certainly Greek.

Philip’s own upbringing had a double element. As a young man he was sent as a hostage to Thebes, the dominant military power in Greek affairs. A leading Theban general is said to have been his male lover. Yet Philip also spent time as a hostage in barbarian Illyria. He himself favoured Greek artists, actors and orators, although his mother is said to have learned to read and write only in middle age; we have recently found Greek inscriptions, beautifully carved in her name, at the Macedonians’ dynastic centre, Aigai. But Philip also kept company with barbarian kings and allies, people who responded to extravagant shows of prowess and generosity. In this company, it was customary to reward a barbarian ally who cut off an enemy’s head in battle with the gift of a gold cup: ‘heads for cups’ had never been the classical Greek way.
⁴
Some of Macedon’s own traditions were also decidedly primitive. In the past, a man could not wear a belt unless he had killed an enemy in battle. In Philip’s day, he could not recline at dinner until he had killed a wild boar while out hunting. Like previous kings, but unlike contemporary Greeks, Philip was polygamous. Within three years, he had four ‘wives’ in his palace and ended up with seven, three of whom were non-Greek barbarians. One of them, Cynnane, was famous as a warrior on the battlefield and taught martial arts to her courageous daughter. Philip played one wife off against another, much as, publicly, he played off the major Greek powers. His final infatuation, the young Macedonian Cleopatra (also
called Eurydice), split the royal family and arguably cost Philip his life. The sensational finds of painted tombs in the royal burial ground at Aigai include a double royal tomb, almost certainly Philip’s, in which, if so, the cremated remains of Philip and Cleopatra were laid to rest. Greek outsiders, including the historian Theopompus, a contemporary visitor, told lurid stories of revenge about this burial ground: in the recently found tombs, we now have the basis of fact from which these unchecked rumours developed.

The self-image of the kings and their subjects was Greek, and as Philip’s power grew, ambassadors from all over Greece were to be found at his court, Pella. The Athenian delegates to him are the best witnesses to his style. By 346
BC
Philip had already lost an eye during a siege, one of the many wounds, including broken collarbones, which his strong physique survived in twenty years. Yet his Athenian visitors remarked on his handsome looks, his excellent memory, his hospitality and his talent at his drinking-sessions. Philip had an educated charm, combined with great bravery in battle and an impulsive generosity. They were apt gifts for a court-life which retained its wilder side. It was probably in Macedon that the poet Euripides had written his dramatic masterpiece, the
Bacchae
, on the god Dionysus. At court, the staging of this tragedy must have had a raw resonance, not least because Philip’s main wife, Olympias, was said to handle live snakes (we now have evidence of local women worshipping Dionysus, attested by a strip of gold, inscribed with Greek and newly found in Macedonia).
⁵
At dinner, Philip was also said to toast his guests with wine in great drinking-horns, which were probably modelled on the horns of oxen from the European steppes. There were also tales of women dancing on the table, whips and unsavoury Greek exiles urging on the evening’s revelry.

Publicly, Philip was favoured by the difficulties of his elderly neigh-bours. The ageing barbarian kings around him opted for peace with him and then bequeathed divided kingdoms to their weakened heirs: Philip could conquer these heirs one by one. First in Thessaly, then in central Greece, Philip was also invited south to take sides in the political divisions of Greek communities. In his first three years he followed the traditional ambitions of previous Macedonian kings, as befitted a young prince who was ruling as a regent among hardened
older nobles. Then, in one magnificent year (356
BC
), he became father to a son (Alexander), routed a coalition of barbarian enemies and captured a nearby Greek city-state (Potidaea). He also won a prestigious victory with his racehorse at the Olympic Games, and signalled his own status by striking silver coins showing himself with a hand upraised, on horseback. He even founded a new town, named after himself, the famous Philippi beside the river Nestus to which he had advanced Macedon’s eastern frontier.

Further conflicts in Greece then brought him into central Greece and to the symbolic ‘rescue’ of the threatened Delphic oracle. Here, Philip profited by invitations from Greeks with wars of their own. After a rebuff in nearby Euboea in 357
BC
the Thebans had started a gratuitous war against the local Phocians who were long-standing friends of Athens. When the Phocians resisted and borrowed treasure from Delphi, the Thebans labelled them ‘temple-robbers’ and gained Thessaly, an old enemy of Phocis, as an ally in a war on ‘sacrilege’. Having started the war the Thebans could not finish it. They ended by inviting their former hostage, King Philip, to come south and help them out. The request was to prove disastrous for Greek freedom. In spring 352
BC
Philip’s victories in central Greece won him immense support from Thessaly’s traditionalists who even appointed him ‘ruler’ of their League: Thessaly’s revenues were at his disposal, and the greatest gain was her cavalry, which numbered thousands. Fighting in their diamond-shaped formations, Thessalian cavalrymen would loyally follow Philip and his son Alexander, until Alexander dismissed them in 329
BC
at the faraway river Oxus in central Asia.

Backed by Thessaly, Philip won a ‘Sacred War’ against Phocis’ ‘sacrilege’, as if he was fighting on behalf of Apollo: Phocis’ captive mercenaries were drowned in the sea, to mark them out as polluting enemies. In 346 Philip then swore a peace and alliance with the Athenians, while promising them vague ‘benefits’: realists in the city were not deceived. This peace should not be understood as Philip’s intended base for a permanent settlement with the Greek city-states. Rather, it would contain affairs in Greece for him while he engaged on massive campaigns into barbarian Illyria (perhaps as far as modern Dubrovnik) and then into Thrace (modern Bulgaria), right up to the river Danube. Meanwhile, before the Greek city-states, his envoys
continued to profess his willingness to heed their grievances; professions of ‘friendship’ and ‘benefits’ were classic weapons in Philip’s diplomatic armoury. At the same time, from summer 343 to 341 approaches from discontented factions in Greek cities were rewarded with money, arms and even mercenaries. All the while Philip encouraged the notion that in southern Greece, he would curb the feared and hated Spartans. Sparta’s neighbours, therefore, hesitated to join any opposition to him, because they feared a Spartan revival even more than this untried Macedonian ‘ally’.