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

154 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
Argead kingship was simply the product of any one moment, although
its exercise certainly seems to have been.
Since the extermination of the Argead house created a constitutional
crisis among Macedonians everywhere, forcing the redefi nition
of political legitimacies and making Hellenistic examples irrelevant
to any interpretation of the Argead state, the sources which might
render some service in understanding what the nature of that earlier
state was, are few. I will omit here reconsiderations of the literary
exempla (e.g., the accessions of Philip II, Alexander III, and the confusion
reigning after the death of the latter) so often covered by the
scholars interested in this issue, because they have been so well
exploited by especially Lock, Errington, and Anson to demolish the
basic constitutionalist premises. As for the epigraphic record, its
almost complete absence is itself testimony against the constitutionalist
position, since where a political culture with the appropriate
checks and balances of its existence does not exist, it tends not to
leave behind testimony of its nonexistence. Where a few stones do
leave some testimony as to the nature of the Argead state, that testimony
exclusively mentions royal prerogatives, without qualifi cation.
19 So also does the numismatic evidence. 20 In short, my position
is that the few stones we have from Macedonia proper during the
Argead era do not reveal a constitutionalist mentality, because such a
mentality did not exist: the Argead king was the law until the Argeads
were no more and other legitimacies had to evolve. Of course, practical
considerations tempered too authoritarian a rule, because no
matter how relatively small or weak a kingdom might be, or how popular
a ruler might be, no kingdom can (or could) be absolutely dominated
by its monarch without the collusion of signifi cant others: woe
quickly befell Argead kings like Archelaus and Alexander II who
moved too quickly for the good of powerful vested interests. 21
But, let us return to Aristotle and Macedonian kingship (references
hereafter to the Politics). The great polymath of the fourth century,
from personal experience intimately acquainted with the status of
Macedon in his time, has been cited peripherally by scholars in connection
with Argead kingship, especially by Lock and Hammond. 22 It
has frequently been stated that he has little to say about the nature
of the Macedonian monarchy, although the Politics cites many
Macedonian particulars in passing and addresses kingship (e.g., 3.7 ff.;
3.9.1–11.13; 5.8.2–13). Although we will never be certain as to why
there is no overt analysis of royal Macedonian institutions in the extant
Politics, it is not enough to argue that the philosopher simply did not
understand the full implications of Macedon’s rise and its potential
impact on the world of the polis.