MACEDONIA ERA AND GREEK MERCENARIES
Philip and Alexander both employed mercenary forces. Given the greater wealth that Macedonia could call upon after its gaining control of the gold and silver mines in the area of Mount Pangaeum and the lower Strymon, Philip had the resources to employ them on a much larger scale than other powers. Some of the sources give the impression that Philip used them frequently, but his operations are so ill-documented that it is hard to assess their importance. Apparently he increased their numbers after the mid-340s when he began to have access to Greek sources.
They were used for three types of duty. Firstly, they manned expeditions designed for limited and definite objectives such as the Euboean expedition of 342/341 or in the formation of a bridgehead in northwestern Asia Minor against the Persians in 336;
they usually served in detachments of 2000 to 3000, though on one occasion a force of 10000 is mentioned. Secondly, mercenaries were used as permanent garrisons at important points, as at Thermopylae. Thirdly, they were hired for special skills such as the Cretans who were hired for their expertise in archery. Their role was to be more important under Alexander. In the initial invasion of Persia approximately five thousand mercenary infantry were employed.
Philip II came to the throne of the growing power of Macedon in 359 BC. Philip was the only victor of the Third Sacred War against Phocis, despite the coalition of states, including Thebes, that formed the alliance to defend the shrine of Delphi. Philip’s victory in the Third Sacred War facilitated his entry into the affairs of central Greece. The rise of Macedon provided another region of employment for Greeks abroad. Philip had ample resources to pay soldiers who were Macedonians and to buy the aid of foreigners. Philip’s army was the tool with which his son Alexander conquered Persia. Macedon was not the first among Greek mainland states to have a standing and professional army. Argos maintained a chosen group of soldiers called the logades in the 5th century (Thuc. 5.67.2). The Arcadians had established a core of trained and maintained troops, called the eparitoi, at the inception of the Arcadian confederacy in 369 BC, and Elis had also employed such specialists (Xen. Hell. 7.4.13, 4.34). Thebes had a similar group of men in their 300-strong Sacred Band. Even Athens maintained a picked body of chosen men, the epilektoi (Plut. Phoc. 13.2-3; Aisch. 2.169), and invested its resources in the ephębeia, a group of trained young adult aristocratic but citizen soldiers. All these might loosely be termed professional military organizations in the fourth century BC. However, Philip’s army became both professional and national. It was these professionals who decisively defeated the amateur citizen-hoplites of Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. This victory allowed Philip to dominate the Greek cities of the mainland. The professional soldier had progressively become more common on mainland Greece in the fourth century and, eventually, although citizen militias still appear in Polybius’ histories of the third century BC, he supplanted the amateur farmer-hoplite on the stage of Hellenistic warfare.
Philip’s son and successor Alexander III , conquered the Persian Empire in less than a decade. He used many Greek mercenaries in the process, and his adversary,
the Great King Darius III, employed as many as 50,000 such men to oppose him. Alexander’s army was, essentially, professional. It left the Aegean basin in 334 BC, and ten years later very few of those men returned to their homes. When Alexander died in 323 BC, the Greek world had changed forever, and the Hellenistic period (323-30 BC) had replaced the Classical period just as a Greco-Macedonian empire had replaced the Persian.
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Originally Posted by Petros Houhoulis
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