Archelaus I of Macedon
Archelaus I was the king who turned Macedon from a loose upland kingdom into a state that could be governed, in fourteen years from 413 to 399 BC, by building straight roads and forts, moving the capital from Aegae to Pella on the coastal plain, reorganising the army with cavalry, hoplites and a supply of arms the kingdom had never had, and making his court the refuge of Greek artists, so that Euripides wrote the Bacchae there and died there, Zeuxis painted the palace, and Agathon and Timotheus were his guests. Thucydides, who was alive to see it, said he had done more for Macedon than all eight kings before him together. He was the son of Perdiccas II by a slave woman, the Athenians said, and took the throne by murdering his uncle, his cousin and his seven-year-old half-brother, whom he drowned in a well after a drinking party. Plato, who disliked him, made him the type of the unjust man who is happy. He supplied Athens with the timber for the fleet rebuilt after Sicily, was made an Athenian proxenos and benefactor for it. He kept out of the last years of the Peloponnesian War. He took Pydna on the coast when it revolted and moved it inland, put his own men in the cities of the Thessalian border and Larissa, and held the upland princes of Lyncestis and Elimeia as vassals by marriage and by force. The Olympic games he founded at Dion in honour of Zeus and the Muses were the state's festival, as the Pella court was its theatre. He was killed in 399 while hunting, by a young courtier called Craterus who had been his lover and had been promised a daughter, according to Aristotle, who lists it among the murders of kings done for insult. The kingdom fell back into forty years of pretenders, and it was Amyntas III and then Philip II who recovered what Archelaus had made; the roads and the capital they inherited from him.
- Nationality: Macedonian
- Roles: king, monarch
