Philip of Macedon, who had been trained in the arts of both war and
peace in a Greek city, saw the weakness of the divided Hellenes, and the
possible strength of his own people, and he set to work from the first
with abounding energy, dogged persistence and immense talent for
organization to make a single armed nation, which should be more than a
match for the many communities of Hellas. How he accomplished his
purpose in about twenty years: how he began by opening mines of precious
metal on his south-eastern coast, and with the proceeds hired
mercenaries: how he had Macedonian peasants drilled to fight in a
phalanx formation more mobile than the Theban and with a longer spear,
while the gentry were trained as heavy cavalry: how he made experiments
with his new soldiers on the inland tribes, and so enlarged his
effective dominions that he was able to marshal henceforward far more
than his own Emathian clansmen: how for six years he perfected this
national army till it was as professional a fighting machine as any
condottiere's band of that day, while at the same time larger and of
much better temper: how, when it was ready in the spring of the year
353, he began a fifteen years' war of encroachment on the holdings of
the Greek states and particularly of Athens, attacking some of her
maritime colonies in Macedonia and Thrace: how, after a campaign in
inland Thrace and on the Chersonese, he appeared in Greece, where he
pushed at last through Thermopylae: how, again, he withdrew for several
seasons into the Balkan Peninsula, raided it from the Adriatic to the
Black Sea, and ended with an attack on the last and greatest of its free
Greek coastal cities, Perinthus and Byzantium: how, finally, in 338,
coming south in full force, he crushed in the single battle of Chaeronea
the two considerable powers of Greece, Athens and Thebes, and secured at
last from every Greek state except Sparta (which he could afford to
neglect) recognition of his suzerainty--these stages in Philip's making