Before Alexander there was Philip, the one-eyed king who remade Macedon
Alexander the Great inherited his world-conquering army rather than building it. His father Philip II took a backwater kingdom beset by invaders and, in under 25 years, made it master of Greece, with a new kind of phalanx, gold from captured mines and a talent for broken promises. He was murdered on the eve of invading Persia.
Born around 382 BC, Philip was the youngest son of King Amyntas III. As a youth he was sent away as a hostage, first to Illyria and then to Thebes, then the leading Greek city, where around 368–365 BC he absorbed military and diplomatic lessons from the general Epaminondas. When his brother Perdiccas III was killed fighting the Illyrians in 359 BC, Philip was named regent for an infant nephew and simply took the throne for himself.
The kingdom he inherited was being raided by Paeonians and Thracians while Athens backed a rival claimant on the coast. Philip bought off some enemies, beat 3,000 Athenian hoplites and then rebuilt the army. Cavalry grew from 600 to 4,000, soldiers could earn promotion and bonuses, and infantry carried the sarissa, a very long pike, in the tight formation that became the Macedonian phalanx. Siege engines and marriage alliances did the rest; he took seven wives, among them Olympias of Epirus, mother of Alexander, born in 356 BC.
His word was flexible. He promised Athens the gold-mining town of Amphipolis in exchange for Pydna, then kept both. He renamed Crenides Philippi and used its mines to fund later wars. An arrow at the siege of Methone cost him his right eye, and he flattened Olynthus in 348 BC after posing as its friend. When he warned Sparta that if he invaded Laconia he would drive them out, the Spartans answered with a single word: if. He invaded anyway.
Setbacks at Perinthus and Byzantium were erased in 338 BC, when he defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea. The Greek states then chose him to lead a league for war on Persia, and in 336 BC an advance force of 10,000 crossed into Asia Minor. That October his own bodyguard Pausanias of Orestis killed him, and the invasion passed to Alexander.
Source: Philip II of Macedon
