Kindle Notes & Highlights
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November 3 - November 23, 2019
“When Philip took you over you were nomadic and poor, the majority of you clad in skins and grazing sparse herds on the mountains, and putting up a poor fight for them against Illyrians, Triballians, and the neighboring Thracians. He gave you cloaks to wear instead of skins.
Support that Alexander relied on the success of Philip II in his own achievements.
When new peoples were absorbed into the realm, the full rights of all Macedones were extended to them.
Conquered peoples were permitted to practice their own religions, laws, and customs; to speak their own languages; and to raise their own taxes.
As Alexander reminded his troops, “He [Philip] brought you down from the mountains to the plains, making you a match in battle for the neighboring barbarians, trusting for your salvation no longer in the natural strength of places so much as in your courage. He made you dwellers in cities and graced your lives with good laws and customs.”
Major roads ran from Macedonia’s ports to the capital, while others connected the mines and forests to important urban centers as well as the ports. Some of these roads were ten meters wide.
Philip’s model of governance was somewhat similar to that later employed by Rome, but it was Philip who first attempted it in the West.
Deciding whether to fight, when and where to fight, and in what political context and for what national goals to fight is the concern of the strategist and ought not be confused with those of the tactician.
Even to a Homeric and Greek warrior such as Philip, the search for individual glory and heroism had no place in his strategic thinking. This position is in contrast to that of his son Alexander, who “seems to have been possessed of some sort of restless, almost irrational desire for glory unchecked by a larger political sense,” that is, by strategic calculation or vision.55
Philip revolutionized Greek warfare by transforming cavalry from an adjunct force on the battlefield into the combat arm of decision.
Without Alexander inheriting the ability to subdue cities quickly from Philip’s engineers, his Persian campaign would not have been possible.
The battle at Livahdi ridge was the first in a twenty-three-year-long series of combat engagements in which the Macedonian phalanx was victorious in all but one.
His defeat of the Illyrians on the Lyncus plain was one of the most decisive battles in military history because it achieved the unification of Macedonia and expanded the manpower and resource base available to Philip to realize his strategic vision of Macedonian hegemony over the Greek states.
an event that was completely without precedent in Greece, a foreign king was chosen by free election and without compulsion or intimidation to be archon or “ruler of a league of Greek cities.”68 What made Philip’s election even more astonishing is that the office was conferred for life.69 Not only was it Philip’s greatest diplomatic victory, it also changed the history of Greece.
Philip set the Macedonian navy to work protecting the Thessalian coast and raiding Athenian shipping. He watched from afar as the Greek states wore themselves out dealing with their own problems.
Example of Philip's strategic acumen. Long game in defeating the Greeks.
Philip’s use of specialty military units drawn from the various tribes and peoples of the empire created the multiethnic army that established Macedonian supremacy in eastern Europe and that Alexander later took with him into Asia.78
Unlike other Greek armies, Philip’s army was capable of fighting a battle of annihilation.
Philip was the first Greek general to command his forces from outside the battle space, where he could orchestrate the timing and direction of his forces.
It is the degree to which a battle allows the political objectives of the victor to be achieved, more than the successful exercise of military technique, that permits history to define a battle as great.
Justin says Philip “managed his conquest that none might think of him as a conqueror.”18
Alexander took this culture of Hellenism with him to Asia, but it was Philip, as leader of the Greeks, who created it and in doing so made the Hellenistic Age possible.
In fact, Philip’s legacy was so significant that without it, there would have been no Alexander the Great.
Alexander, by contrast, was the prototypical Homeric warrior fighting for personal glory and reputation, a military adventurer almost entirely lacking in strategic vision.
