Battle of Chaeronea
Philip II of Macedon destroyed the armies of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in August 338 BC and ended Greek independence. He had spent twenty years turning a marginal northern kingdom into the strongest military power in the Aegean: a standing professional army, the sarissa phalanx with pikes twice the length of a hoplite spear, siege engineering, and the Companion cavalry as a shock arm. He had absorbed Thessaly, taken the Athenian colonies on the Chalcidice, and become a member of the council that ran the Delphic sanctuary. Demosthenes had spent a decade telling Athens what was happening. The alliance that finally formed was Athens and Thebes with some allies, about 35,000 men against Philip's 32,000, on a plain in Boeotia. The Macedonian right under Philip gave ground deliberately, drawing the Athenian left forward and out of line, and when the gap opened Alexander, then eighteen, led the cavalry into it against the Theban wing. The Sacred Band of Thebes, 300 men in 150 pairs, stood where they were and were killed to the last, and the lion monument raised over the burial has been excavated and the skeletons counted. Philip imposed a league of Greek states under his own presidency with garrisons at the strategic points, and announced a war of revenge against Persia. He was assassinated two years later, and his son took the army east. Philip's own achievement is regularly absorbed into his son's. The army, the money, the siege train and the league that made the Persian expedition possible were all his, and Alexander inherited an instrument that had already conquered Greece.
- Year: 338 BCE
- Category: Military
