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

74 PHILIP AND ALEXANDER AT WAR
This celebration of Philip and of his achievements refl ected not
only the image that the king planned to convey but also the aspiration
of Isocrates and his school to strengthen their bond with the Macedonian
sovereign. This is made clear by the similar attempts of the Platonic
school that, in the years following the end of the war, also tried
to celebrate and fl atter the victorious king. In his letter to Philip, in 343
B.C., the philosopher Speusippus, head of the Academy after Plato’s
death, showed how the vengeance theme was one of the main ideological
issues used to build consensus in favor of the king. Speusippus
wanted to facilitate the access of his disciple Antipater of Magnesia to
the Macedonian court. In order to achieve this, he tried to shed a bad
light on Isocrates, who had written a speech addressed to Philip in 346
B.C., 43 but also on Theopompus who didn’t deserve, in his opinion, to
be at the Macedonian court. 44 The philosopher, drawing on Antipater’s
work, coupled the vengeance motif in the Third Sacred War to Athens’
mythical past and to the First Sacred War when, according to him,
Apollo, Heracles, and the other Amphictyons had defeated the
Phlegyans, Driopians, and Crisaeans and had determined their
exclusion from the Amphictiony. 45 He stressed Apollo’s action and
those of his allies, but omitted the theft of Apollo’s tripod by Heracles,
the forefather of the Argead dynasty. That was the only way to glorify
Philip’s punishment of the Phocians as being like that of Heracles and
also to promote Antipater’s position in the Macedonian court. It was,
however, a distortion of the facts, a device he used in other passages of
his writing. Like Demosthenes, Speusippus mentioned Alexander I of
Macedonia but, against the orator’s version and the Herodotean tradition,
he portrayed Alexander I as a defender of the Greeks during the
Persian Wars. 46 Speusippus ascribed to Heracles, forefather of the
Argead dynasty, possession of the towns of Amphipolis and Olynthus,
thereby implying that Philip had legitimately regained possession of
these towns. 47 He also made Heracles a citizen of Athens because of
his adoption by Pilius, using an obscure and scarcely verifi able tradition
to establish a connection between the king and the Athenians. 48
The propaganda about the Third Sacred War wasn’t only orchestrated
by the intellectuals. Philip himself initially made his contribution
and supported it with some of his actions. In 352 B.C., he ordered
his soldiers to crown their brows with laurel and on two other occasions
he defended his image as advocate of divine justice. In 352 B.C.,
as Justin notes, after punishing the Greek towns of Thessaly, who had
supported the Phocians, he tried to cancel out the bad reputation ( ad
abolendam invidiae famam) that his actions had produced. Consequently,
he sent messengers to announce his intention ( qui opinionem
sererent) to rebuild the walls and the temples of these towns. But