Phillip II of Macedonia by Ian Worthington
Alexander the Great, it goes without saying, was a man not much given to modesty. In 334 BC, as he was preparing to embark on his invasion of Asia, his mother, the sinister witch-queen Olympias, whispered in his ear ‘the secret of his birth’, revealing that he was in fact the son of a god, of Zeus himself — and Alexander believed her. Three years later, in Egypt, he travelled hundreds of miles out of his way to consult the desert oracle of Siwah and the priest, it is said, ‘left him in no doubt that he was indeed the son of Zeus’. By 324, with a record of victory behind him second to none, he went the whole hog, and openly demanded divine honours, before promptly dying the following year.
The response to this megalomania, among most Greeks, was a mixture of outrage and hilarity. ‘Let him be the son of Zeus,’ sneered the great Athenian orator, Demosthenes, ‘and of Poseidon too, if that is what he wants’. Alexander’s own overwrought pretensions, however, were not the only target of this joke. To hail someone as the son of a god was, of course, to cast his true father as a cuckold — and Demosthenes was hardly the man to miss out on doing that. Philip II, the king of Macedon whose assassination in mysterious circumstances back in 336 had originally brought Alexander to the throne, was a man who had proved himself the most dangerous enemy that Athens had ever faced. Inheriting a kingdom on the verge of implosion, Philip had left it a superpower. The monarchy itself had been centralised, Greece subordinated, and the Macedonian army transformed into a lethal and incomparable killing machine. Here was the inheritance which had enabled Alexander to make his conquest of the world. Demosthenes, who had spent his whole career in a fruitless attempt to oppose Philip’s rise to supremacy, appreciated that better than anyone. It needed no god to explain Alexander. Philip was more than explanation.
Certainly, his reign was quite momentous and remarkable enough to fully merit a study of its own, rather than being treated, as it has always rather tended to be, as merely a prelude to that of his son. As Ian Worthington, in a new biography of Philip, puts it, ‘perhaps he also deserves for history to know him as “the Great”, for he was indeed the king behind Alexander the Great’s achievements’. It is a case which Worthington makes with a painstaking attention to detail: not a source is neglected, not an archaeological discovery overlooked. Every aspect of Philip’s reign, from his fiscal policy to his sex life, is expertly treated. All the twists and turns of his campaigns are here recounted. As a biography, it is certainly exhaustive.
And yet, goodness, it is dull as well. Not that dullness, of course, in a work of scholarship, need necessarily be held a fault — except that it is Worthington’s stated aim ‘to be accessible to a non-specialist readership’. Perhaps he would have been better advised to forgo this ambition altogether: for not only is his prose naturally leaden, but his spasmodic attempts at crowd- pleasing invariably end up off-key. Describing the Philippeion, a distinctively circular building erected by Philip within the very sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, Worthington states, perfectly correctly, that it was designed to inspire in visitors a sense of awe at ‘the power of Macedonia’ — but then ruins his point by making a thoroughly cloth-eared comparison to the British Crown Jewels. Bearing in mind that he must have known that his book would be published in the summer of the Beijing Olympics, surely a more obvious analogy should have sprung to mind?
Philip II, as Worthington’s book more than makes clear, was a man characterised by his daring, orginality and taste for speed. Worthington himself, as a historian, is not. His study of Philip is certainly a valuable work of scholarship, but in terms of literary merit it is both lumbering and resolutely old-fashioned: the equivalent, perhaps, of the hoplite phalanx that met with the Macedonians on the battlefield of Chaeronea, there to be shattered for good by the terrifying impact of Philip’s army, the creation which soon enough would go on to change the world.
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