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

INTRODUCTION xxi
was once one of the fi ve that stood in the Philippeum, as the mother
of Philip II, and argues instead that it was that of Philip’s last wife,
commonly called Cleopatra but also referred to as Eurydice. This, she
concludes, means that the Philippeum was both a monument to polygamy
(since both Olympias and Cleopatra were depicted) and to a
compromise Philip was attempting to maintain between the forces of
Olympias and Alexander on one hand and those of Cleopatra and her
guardian Attalus on the other. Elizabeth Carney, in “Putting Women
in Their Place: Women in Public under Philip II, Alexander III and
the Last Argeads,” attempts to determine to what degree royal women,
as well as their avatars (like their images in the Philippeum), were
part of the staging of monarchy for both father and son and actually
interacted with the rest of the court. The last chapter in this section is
Frances Pownall’s “The Symposia of Philip II and Alexander III: The
View from Greece.” It examines the ways in which Greeks made rhetorical
use of Macedonian court symposia to demonstrate Greek virtue
and Macedonian vice.
The next section, “Philip and Alexander at War,” covers the most
traditional area of scholarship but includes papers that do not necessarily
take a traditional approach. The section begins with a piece on
the war rhetoric of Philip and Alexander, Giuseppe Squillace’s “Consensus
Strategies under Philip and Alexander: The Revenge Theme.”
He points out the ways in which both kings used myth and mythic
revenge to unite Greek and Macedonian forces in combined operations.
Edward M. Anson, in “The Astheteroi: Macedonia’s Hoplites,”
focuses on the origin of this term and the nature of the troops who
bore this title, but also uses this particular problem to consider the
overall makeup and armament of the army and how it changed over
time. The theme of change is central to A. B. Bosworth’s, “The Argeads
and the Phalanx.” He traces the evolving nature of the phalanx in
terms of its relationship to the kings but suggests that the critical moment,
both militarily and politically, was the role of the phalanx in
the victory of 358 against the Illyrians under Bardylis, a force that had
threatened the continued existence of the Macedonian kingdom.
Waldemar Heckel, Carolyn Willekes, and Graham Wrightson take a
specifi c issue, “Scythed Chariots at Gaugamela: A Case Study,” as an
exemplum of their new approach to the study of infantry warfare, one
which employs experimentation to understand the practicalities of
maneuvers by infantry units.
The third part of the book, “After Philip and Alexander: Legacy
and Legitimation,” looks at the immediate fate of the kings’ legacies
in the hands of the Successors, and the Successors’ attempts to derive
their own legitimacy from the pair. In “Cassander and the Legacy of