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

4 FATHER, SON, AND COURT
Philip and Pixodarus to establish a political relationship of some
kind. I want to reexamine the Pixodarus affair in terms of this
Philip-Pixodarus relationship, rather than the Philip-Alexander
relationship—though I will deal with that as well.
It is helpful to bring Pixodarus a little more clearly and carefully
into focus. Plutarch’s report of Philip’s characterization of Pixodarus
as a mere Carian and “slave to a barbarian king” has colored modern
characterizations, both in the attitude of dismissive disparagement and
in the particular terms—“petty ruler,” “minor offi cial,” “princeling”—
often chosen to describe Pixodarus. 3 Given our retrospective perspective,
this is not surprising. Unprecedented achievement and glory lay
with Philip and his offspring Alexander. Pixodarus was the dead end
of his dynasty, the Hecatomnids, whose political and military achievements
left no lasting legacy and whose memory was preserved largely
because of the dynastic tomb monument built by Pixodarus’ siblings
Mausolus and Artemisia. 4
But if we want to recapture something of Philip’s likely view of
things, we need to understand his own experience of the Hecatomnids
and Pixodarus in particular. First, the Hecatomnids were, at the time
of Philip’s early monarchy, the grandest of dynastic families in the
Aegean/eastern Mediterranean worlds. As hellenizers, thanks especially
to Mausolus, Pixodarus’ older brother, the Hecatomnids far outstripped
such contemporary philhellenes as the Evagorids of Cypriot
Salamis or Strato of Sidon. But even more, the Hecatomnids outstripped
the others in terms of military strength and political clout.
From Mausolus’ time onward, they maintained a standing mercenary
army in Caria and a ready fl eet, comprising scores of ships, based at
Mausolus’ splendid capital Halicarnassus (Xen. Ages. 2.26; Diod.
16.7.3, 43.7). Numerous Greek cities came within their orbit, including
sites as distant from Halicarnassus as Byzantium. Mausolus, joining
with cities such as Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium during the Social
War, had effectively pushed the Athenian war fl eet out of the Aegean
in the mid-350s (Dem. 15.3; Diod. 16.21.1–4). 5 In the mid-340s Isocrates,
in his letter to Philip, had depicted Idrieus, Mausolus’ successor
and another of Pixodarus’ older brothers, as “the most prosperous of
those in Asia” ( Phil. 5.102), a description that could undoubtedly be
applied as well to Pixodarus (and in fact seems refl ected in the characterization
of the proposed Hecatomnid marriage as “brilliant”).
Philip himself had a history with Pixodarus. Attacking Perinthus
in 340, Philip had been repelled by Persian support for the city. This
was, Diodorus reports, the result of Artaxerxes III’s order that his
“satraps on the coast” use all their resources to aid Perinthus (Diod.
16.74.2–75.2; Paus. 1.29.7; Arr. Anab. 2.14.5). Pixodarus was surely