Chapter 16 - Philip II, the Greeks, and the King, 346–336 BC

Summary

The aim of this chapter is to examine a congeries of diplomatic, political, and legal arrangements and obligations that linked the Greeks, Macedonians, and Persians in various complicated ways during Philip's final years. The ties between them all were then often tangled and now imperfectly understood and incompletely documented. These matters evoke such concepts as the King's Peace and the Common Peace (koinē eirēnē) and involve a number of treaties, some bilateral between Philip and individual states, others broader, as with the Peace of Philocrates between himself and his allies and the Athenians and theirs, and finally the nature of Philip's settlement with the Greeks in 338/7. In the background there always stood the King, who never formally renounced the rights that he enjoyed under the King's Peace of 386, even though he could seldom directly enforce them. It is an irony of history that Philip used the concept of a Common Peace in Greece both to exclude the King from Greek affairs and as a tool of war against him. By so doing, Philip rejected the very basis of the King's Peace as it was originally drafted and later implemented. In its place he resurrected the memory of the days when the Greeks had thwarted Xerxes' invasion, and he fanned the desire for retaliation of past wrongs, a theme that Alexander would also later put to good use.