August 2, 338 b.c.
The dream of the Athenian leader Demosthenes of a pan-Hellenic rebuff to
Philip II of Macedon was nearly realized when thirty thousand Greeks in the plain of Chaeronea blocked the southward march of the
Macedonians. The victorious Athenians on the left wing at first ran wildly after Philip and his retreating hypaspists, the royal guard of mobile infantry. But the king was most likely feinting, not retreating, and all the Athenians accomplished was to split open their own allied line. On cue, the eighteen-year-old
Alexander rushed into the resulting gap, his Macedonian cavalry encircling the Thebans on the right wing, causing a general collapse throughout the army. The startled Greeks fled south into the mountains before Philip's renewed onslaught.
Chaeronea was not proof of the superiority of the Macedonian phalanx with its lighter body armor and lengthier spears. Rather, it was a more fundamental reassessment of the entire nature of Greek warfare, a preview of a new military to come, wherein light infantry, cavalry, and the phalanx worked in concert, incorporating feints, reserves, encirclements, and oblique advances to confuse and tear apart less imaginative and slower-moving infantry.
In the Greek mind, Chaeronea marked the end of the entire idea of an autonomous and free city-state and the invincibility of its amateur militia. Philip himself must have recognized the significance of his victory: he allowed a magnificent stone lion to rest over the bodies of the Theban Sacred Band, the elite corps of three hundred lovers, annihilated, to the man, by the cavalry charge of his son.
Victor Davis Hanson
