Alexander I (498-454)

The first two centuries of the Macedonian monarchy, covered by the reigns of six kings, were a period shrouded in obscurity, during which the rising kingdom had enlarged itself at the expense of its neighbors, and crossing the Axios had even reached the Strymon. This career of conquest had been scarcely arrested by the Persian invasions of Europe. Indeed Alexander I, son of Amyntas, was cunning enough to bow to the storm, and while cautiously doing his utmost to befriend the Greeks, affected to fall in with Persian ideas as to Macedon being the centre of a great vassal state, and thankfully accepted any extension of territory which the Great King might be pleased to give him. By these means he gained a footing among the Thracian tribes as far as Mount Haemus, while he attained an object by which he set even greater store as a true-blooded Hellene; for his claims to that title were publicly acknowledged at Olympia, and his victories in the Stadium celebrated by the Hellenic Pindar. Yet the difficulties of Alexander did not cease, but rather increased when danger no longer threatened Greece from the side of Persia. He had removed his capital from Aigai to Pydna, a step nearer to the Hellenes whom he admired so much. But close to Pydna lay Methone, an independent Greek city; while to the eastward in Chalcidice, and as far as the Strymon, were numerous Hellenic colonies whose sympathies drew them naturally to the south rather than the west—to Hellas, not to Macedon—and which, after the Persian wars, recognized in the maritime Athens their natural leader and protectress.

It was a difficult position; and for a century it tried to the utmost the skill of the Macedonian kings. On the one hand the expansion of the kingdom had outrun its internal consolidation, and there were latent elements of discontent which more than once brought it to the verge of ruin. On the other hand, if the Macedonian monarchs were to be anything more than petty lords of half-barbarous tribes, they could hardly put up with the permanent dependence of what was practically their own seacoast on a far distant and hostile power, any more than with its permanent independence. The kings of Macedon were forced by their position to choose between two alternatives, to make good their claim to Methone and Potidaea, Chalcidice and Amphipolis, and to win their way to the coast, or else to submit to a humiliating exclusion from the political affairs of Hellas. In such a case no able man hesitates in the choice of his alternative; and we thus strike the key-note of the discords and jealousies, which for so many years troubled Northern Greece. Even before the Peloponnesian war, in the time of Perdiccas II (454-413), Athens and Macedon were face to face, conscious of divergent interests.

Perdiccas II (454-413)

The colonization of Amphipolis had been the crowning stroke of the policy by which Pericles sought to keep a firm hold of Chalcidice and the Thracian coast, and so of the Aegean. Perdiccas on the other hand, threatened at once by discontented neighbors’ in the west, by the formidable empire of the Thracian Sitalkes in the east, and by Athenian jealousy in Chalcidice, was forced to pursue a tortuous policy. Adroitly observant of the current of affairs, and quite devoid of scruples, he made treaties and broke them, he waged war or bowed to the storm, with equal facility. In the field of diplomacy he must have been an exceptionally able man; for every neighbor in turn was utilized to serve his purpose, and was neglected or attacked when the object of the moment was attained. Brasidas the Spartan he made use of against his private enemies the Illyrians. He skillfully fomented the revolt of the Chalcidic towns against Athens in 432; while in the next year we find him allied with his old enemies the Athenians, and showing his gratitude by attacking his old friends the Chalcidians. Two years later—once more allied with Chalcidians and at war with Athens—he was attacked by Sitalkes, and was within a little of being ruined. Yet from these and similar perils he escaped with unimpaired strength, or rather the stronger, in that the brilliant campaigns of Brasidas had undermined the power of Athens in the north. Nor was Athens ever again as formidable to Macedon as she had been; for the disastrous issue of the Sicilian expedition (413) paralyzed her influence everywhere, and probably Macedon reaped more advantage from the victory of Syracuse than Syracuse did herself.

Archelaos (413-399)

The policy of Perdiccas was continued with success by his illegitimate son Archelaos. He climbed to power by a series of violent deeds, with which most barbarous societies are only too familiar: for he assassinated his brother, as well as his uncle and his uncle’s son. Such were his crimes. His merits were not less marked as the great civilizer of Macedon. Thucydides goes out of his way to insist that Archelaos benefited his country more than all his eight predecessors put together, not only in his military improvements, but in building roads and founding cities. He transferred the capital from Pydna to Pella, while he pacified Pieria by the foundation of a new city, Dion, dedicated to Zeus and the Muses, and reserved for festival celebrations. He gathered round him some of the most brilliant Greeks of the day—not sorry perhaps to exchange the insecurity of their native cities for the lettered ease and secure patronage of a court. But these efforts, though praiseworthy, were not altogether successful. His clients seem to have been corrupted by the atmosphere around them; and the premature attempt at artistic development was cut short by the forty years of disorder which followed his murder. It is an illustration of the assertion that the history of Macedonia is the history of its kings, that this effort should have been thus fruitless, and that to the last the people should apparently have retained so many characteristics of barbarism. Hard fighters and hard drinkers, they were fine soldiers but indifferent citizens, and seem to have received only faint impressions from the civilization for which they prepared the way in Asia.

Amyntas II (393-369)

The murder of Archelaos was the signal for six years of bloodshed and disorder, until Amyntas, the father of the great Philip, murdered his predecessor and seized the throne. Amyntas was nominal king for twenty-four years, but it was a reign full of romantic reverses of fortune. Ten years of anarchy had given to the native nobility a long-coveted opportunity of revolt, against a culture and ordered peace which in their hearts they disliked, as well as against the tightening reins of despotism. It is a phenomenon often seen in political history, that the substitution of one strong will for a hundred conflicting wills is a slow process, subject to ebb and flow, and often desperately opposed by those who have a personal interest in a time of license. What Normandy suffered in the ninth and tenth centuries AD, and England in the twelfth, and France in the fifteenth, that Macedonia suffered in the fourth century BC, until Philip gained the throne. The nobility were insubordinate. Authority was set at nought. Each man fought for his own hand. Murder was rife; and the anarchy was only temporarily allayed by a politic marriage. The union of Amyntas with Eurydice, a daughter of a leading family among the Lynkestai, was intended, like the marriage of Henry the Fifth of England with Katharine of France, to put an end to a series of exhausting struggles.

But the marriage failed in its object and only secured him a temporary respite from trouble. The Lynkestai were not mollified by the union of a daughter of their house with the royal family; and the neighbors of Amyntas were eager to benefit by his difficulties. Illyrians, Thracians, Thessalians, in turn or in concert, poured into Macedon. He was even obliged to surrender the coast of the Thermaic gulf to the Chalcidians of Olynthos. We might almost say that he was elbowed out of his own country by encroaching friends and powerful enemies, and for nearly two years was a king without a kingdom.

But he was a dexterous diplomatist, who in the school of adversity seems to have learnt the art of playing off one foe against another, and of exciting them to mutual jealousy. If the Olynthians gained from him more than they gave, it would seem that they checked the further advance of the Illyrians. Against Olynthos itself, which was too near and powerful not to be disliked, a happy combination of circumstances gave him an irresistible ally in Sparta. For Olynthos also had enemies, whose enmity had arisen in the following way. Favored by accident, Olynthos had become head of a considerable league of cities in and near Chalcidice. Indeed, the terms of confederation (as described by Xenophon, an unwilling witness) were so fair and generous, that it is hardly strange that the smaller and more exposed Hel­lenic cities in those parts gladly exchanged precarious independence for safety even if combined with partial dependence; or that Macedonian cities, although as important as Pella, preferred comparative security within the hardly felt restraints of a fairly constituted con­federacy to being subjects of a despot who could not protect them from even the attacks of Illyrians. In the year 383 envoys appeared before the Spartan assembly from King Amyntas and the city of...