The Battle of Chaeronea was fought in 338 BC, near the city of Chaeronea in Boeotia, between Macedonia under Philip II and an alliance of city-states led by Athens and Thebes. The battle was the culmination of Philip's final campaigns in 339–338 BC and resulted in a decisive victory for the Macedonians and their allies.
Philip had brought peace to a war-torn Greece in 346 BC by ending the Third Sacred War and separately concluding his ten-year conflict with Athens for supremacy in the north Aegean with the Peace of Philocrates. Philip's much-expanded kingdom, powerful army and plentiful resources then made him the de facto leader of Greece. To many of the fiercely independent city-states, Philip's power after 346 BC was perceived as a threat, especially in Athens, where the politician Demosthenes led efforts to break away from Philip's influence. In 340 BC Demosthenes convinced the Athenian assembly to sanction action against Philip's territories and to ally with the Achaemenids in Byzantium, which Philip was besieging. These actions were against the terms of their treaty oaths and amounted to a declaration of war. In summer 339 BC, Philip therefore led his army towards South Greece, prompting the formation of an alliance of a few southern Greek states opposed to him, led by Athens and Thebes.
After several months of stalemate, Philip finally advanced into Boeotia in an attempt to march on Thebes and Athens. Opposing him, and blocking the road near Chaeronea, was the allied army, similar in size and occupying a strong position. Details of the ensuing battle are scarce, but after a long fight the Macedonians crushed both flanks of the allied line, which then dissolved into a rout.
The battle has been described as one of the most decisive of the ancient world. The forces of Athens and Thebes were destroyed, and continued resistance was impossible; the war therefore came to an abrupt end. Philip was able to impose a settlement upon southern Greece, which all states accepted, with the exception of Sparta. The League of Corinth, formed as a result, made all participants allies of Macedon and each other, with Philip as the guarantor of the peace. In turn, Philip was voted as strategos (general) for a pan-Hellenic war against the Achaemenid Empire, which he had long planned. However, before he was able to take charge of the campaign, Philip was assassinated, and the Kingdom of Macedon and responsibility for the war with Persia passed instead to his son Alexander.
Background
thumb|left|upright|A bust of [[Philip II of Macedon]]
In the decade following his accession in 359 BC, the Macedonian king, Philip II, had rapidly strengthened and expanded his kingdom into Thrace and Chalkidiki on the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. He was aided in this process by the distraction of Athens and Thebes, the two most powerful city-states in Greece at that point, by events elsewhere. In particular, these events included the Social War between Athens and her erstwhile allies (357–355 BC), and the Third Sacred War which erupted in central Greece in 356 BC between the Phocians and the other members of the Delphic Amphictyonic League. Much of Philip's expansion during this period was at the nominal expense of the Athenians, who considered the north Aegean coast as their sphere of influence, and Philip was at war with Athens from 356–346 BC. Seeing an opportunity to expand his influence, Philip obliged, and in 353 or 352 BC won a decisive victory over the Phocians at the Battle of Crocus Field in Thessaly. In the aftermath, Philip was made archon of Thessaly, which gave him control of the levies and revenues of the Thessalian Confederation, thereby greatly increasing his power. However, Philip did not intervene further in the Sacred War until 346 BC. Philip's power was by now so great that ultimately the Phocians did not even attempt to resist, and instead surrendered to him. Philip was thus able to end a particularly bloody war without any further fighting. Philip allowed the Amphictyonic council the formal responsibility of punishing the Phocians, but ensured that the terms were not overly harsh; nevertheless, the Phocians were expelled from the Amphictyonic League, all their cities were destroyed, and they were resettled in villages of no more than fifty houses.
thumb|right|upright|A bust of the Athenian politician [[Demosthenes.]]
By 346 BC, the Athenians were war-weary, unable to match Philip's strength, and had begun to contemplate the necessity of making peace. Nevertheless, when it became apparent that Philip would march south that year, the Athenians originally planned to help the Phocians (whom they were allied to) keep Philip out of central Greece by occupying the pass of Thermopylae, where Philip's superior numbers would be of little benefit. The Athenians had successfully used this tactic to prevent Philip from attacking Phocis itself after his victory at Crocus Field.
The occupation of Thermopylae was not only for the benefit of Phocis; excluding Philip from central Greece also prevented him from marching on Athens itself. Suddenly unable to guarantee their own security, the Athenians were forced instead to make peace with Philip. Their peace treaty, known as the Peace of Philocrates, made Athens a reluctant ally of Macedon.
For the Athenians, the treaty had been expedient, but it was never popular. Philip's actions in 346 BC had expanded his influence over all Greece, and although he had brought peace, he had come to be seen as the enemy of the traditional liberty of the city-states. The orator and politician Demosthenes had been a principal architect of the Peace of Philocrates, but almost as soon as it was agreed, he wished to be rid of it. Over the next few years, Demosthenes became leader of the "war-party" in Athens, and at every opportunity he sought to undermine the peace. From 343 BC onwards, in order to try to disrupt the peace, Demosthenes and his followers used every expedition and action of Philip to argue that he was breaking the peace.
Conversely, there was at first a substantial body of feeling in Athens, led by Aeschines, that the peace, unpopular though it was, should be maintained and developed. Towards the end of the decade, however, the "war party" gained the ascendancy and began to openly goad Philip; in 341 BC for instance, the Athenian general Diopeithes ravaged the territory of Philip's ally Cardia, even though Philip demanded that they desist. Philip's patience finally ran out when the Athenians formed an alliance with Byzantium, which Philip was at that time besieging, and he wrote to the Athenians declaring war. Shortly afterward Philip broke off the siege of Byzantium; George Cawkwell suggests that Philip had decided to deal with Athens once and for all. Philip went on campaign against the Scythians, and then began to prepare for war in southern Greece.
Prelude
200px|thumb|A map showing Philip's movements during 339–338 BC.
Philip's forthcoming campaign in southern Greece became linked with a new, Fourth Sacred War. The citizens of Amphissa in Ozolian Locris had begun cultivating land sacred to Apollo on the Crisaean Plain south of Delphi; after some internal bickering the Amphictyonic council decided to declare a sacred war against Amphissa. A Thessalian delegate proposed that Philip should be made leader of the Amphictyonic effort, which therefore gave Philip a pretext to campaign in southern Greece; it is, however, probable that Philip would have gone ahead with his campaign anyway.
Philip's relatively lenient treatment of the Phocians at the end of the Third Sacred War in 346 BC now bore fruit. Reaching Elatea, he ordered the city to be re-populated, and during the next few months the whole Phocian Confederation was restored to its former state. He probably also engaged in diplomatic attempts to avoid further conflict in Greece, although if so, he was unsuccessful. In what Cawkwell describes as his proudest moment, Demosthenes alone counselled against despair, and proposed that the Athenians should seek an alliance with the Thebans; his decree was passed, and he was sent as ambassador. Philip was presumably prevented from entering Boeotia by way of Mount Helicon, as the Spartans had done in the run-up to the Battle of Leuctra, or by any of the other mountain passes that led into Boeotia from Phocis. Philip took command of the right wing of the Macedonian army and placed his 18-year-old son Alexander (the future conqueror of the Persian Empire) in command of the left wing, accompanied by a group of Philip's experienced generals. The modern view is that the numbers of the city-states that fought were approximately equal to those of the Macedonians. Athenian aristocrat Philippides of Paiania campaigned for Philip's cause with his associates during the battle in Thebes, Eleuthera and Tanagra. Philippides was later prosecuted by Hypereides for his pro-Macedonian actions after the defeat.
Strategic and tactical considerations
The allied army of Athens and Thebes had taken up a position near Chaeronea, astride the main road. He then recounts that the young Alexander, "his heart set on showing his father his prowess" succeeded in rupturing the allied line aided by his companions, and eventually put the right wing to flight; meanwhile, Philip advanced in person against the left wing and also put it to flight.
In another 'stratagem', Polyaenus suggests that Philip deliberately prolonged the battle, to take advantage of the rawness of the Athenian troops (his own veterans being more used to fatigue) and delayed his main attack until the Athenians were exhausted. This latter anecdote also appears in the earlier Stratagems of Frontinus.
Polyaenus's accounts have led some modern historians to tentatively propose the following synthesis of the battle. After the general engagement had been in progress for some time, Philip had his army perform a wheeling manoeuver, with the right wing withdrawing, and the whole line pivoting around its centre. At the same time, wheeling forward, the Macedonian left wing attacked the Thebans on their right and punched a hole in the allied line. This, together with the improbability that a head-on cavalry charge against the spear-armed Thebans could have succeeded, has led Gaebel and others to suggest that Alexander must have been commanding a portion of the Macedonian phalanx at Chaeronea.
Diodorus says that more than 1,000 Athenians died in the battle, with another 2,000 taken prisoner, and that the Thebans fared similarly. In the Roman period, the 'Lion of Chaeronea', an enigmatic monument on the site of the battle, was believed to mark the resting place of the Sacred Band. Modern excavations found the remains of 254 soldiers underneath the monument; it is therefore generally accepted that this was indeed the grave of the Sacred Band, since it is unlikely that every member was killed. However, Philip had no intention of besieging any city, nor indeed of conquering it. He wanted the southern Greeks as his allies for his planned campaign against the Persians, and he wanted to leave a stable Greece in his rear when he went on campaign; further fighting was therefore contrary to his aims. He also ordered that the Boeotian cities of Plataea and Thespiae, which Thebes had destroyed in previous conflicts, be re-founded. Generally, Philip treated the Thebans severely, making them pay for the return of their prisoners, and even to bury their dead; he did not, however, dissolve the Boeotian Confederacy. Philip's motives are not entirely clear, but one likely explanation is that he hoped to use the Athenian navy in his campaign against Persia, since Macedon did not possess a substantial fleet; he therefore needed to remain on good terms with the Athenians. He then turned to deal with Sparta, which had not taken part in the conflict, but was likely to take advantage of the weakened state of the other Greek cities to try to attack its neighbours in the Peloponnese.
Philip seems to have moved around in the months after the battle, making peace with the states that opposed him, dealing with the Spartans, and installing garrisons. His movements also probably served as a demonstration of force to the other cities, that they should not try to oppose him.
The principal terms of the concord were that all members became allied to each other, and to Macedon, and that all members were guaranteed freedom from attack, freedom of navigation, and freedom from interference in internal affairs. Philip, and the Macedonian garrisons installed, would act as the 'keepers of the peace'. Alexander therefore became King of Macedon, and in a series of campaigns lasting from 334 to 323 BC, he conquered the whole Persian Empire.