Philip and Alexander of Macedon; Two Essays in Biography (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ARMY MAKING 49 than a thousand talents yearly, a much larger revenue than was accruing at this time from external sources to any state except Persia, ? and he began to strike that extensive coinagel of staters which penetrated to Britain, and originated the types of certain of our early coins.2 In the winter of 358 Philip could begin in earnest the great work which he had conceived at Thebes ? the creation of a national standing army. He cannot have been unconscious that his work would prove in the event not merely military. If his national army was to be more than an organization of his own clansmen, he must incorporate the feudatories; and whenever the army should become an accomplished fact, there would be in Macedonia no longer a disunion of tribes, but the unity of a nation It is not to be supposed that his main object was the promotion of a political union, nor indeed that in 358 he had that end more consciously in view, than had the organizers of the Prussian military system in 1864; but neither he was not more ignorant than they of the unifying influence of common service in a great war. Salamis had consolidated the Athenian Demos, and Leuctra made Boeotia almost one in sentiment with Thebes. Community of hope passes in very short time into community of tradition. 1 Diod. xvi. 8. 2 The remarkable series, illustrating the degeneration of the type, is well known. Philip's original staters have been found in greater numbers than almost any other gold coins of antiquity. As the Germans in 1870, so the Macedonians in 352 marched out an Alliance to return a Union. Philip's claim to rank among great creative statesmen is not that he foreknew all the ultimate results of his action, but that he seized in their inception and directed successive developments. Both h...