Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

80 PHILIP AND ALEXANDER AT WAR
fl ag of vengeance and of the fi ght for Greek freedom, while the expedition
of the Persian king is described as intended to reduce the
Greeks to slavery. This was an ideological view which was not new
and that had been proposed, in the recent past, by Athenian intellectuals.
Following their examples, Callisthenes, who was a Peripatetic,
nurtured by Athenian culture and already involved in the
propaganda in favor of Philip, picked up again, as he had in the past, 80
Herodotus’ tradition on the Persian Wars and adapted the ideological
theme of vengeance to Alexander and his undertakings.
Conclusions
The theme of vengeance was, therefore, created with regard to the war
against the Phocians, and successfully employed during the Third
and Fourth Sacred War, but was also used for the Persian expedition,
with similar ideological devices. We can quickly see the trajectory of
this theme in the following table 7.1:
Using this theme, Isocrates, Ephorus, Theopompus, Speusippus,
and Callisthenes were able to justify fi rst the Sacred War and then the
expedition to Asia. The two confl icts concealed specifi c interests—
control of the Amphictiony for Philip and the conquest of the Persian
Empire for Alexander—which had to be covered up by great ideals
and presented in a light that would attract consensus among the
Greeks. The vengeance theme linked to the mythical and historical
past of the Greeks, moved the focus from the conquest strategies of
the Macedonian kings to the world of the Hellenic towns, called upon
the Greeks to join forces with the two kings, and to give full support
to their initiatives. 81