At last, when Philip had taken Elatea on the borders of Boeotia, the Athenians, on the advice of Demosthenes, determined to make war and to send envoys to Thebes.  Demosthenes was at the head of the embassy; he met at Thebes an envoy come from Philip; the Thebans hesitated.  Demosthenes besought them to bury the old enmities and to think only of the safety of Greece, to defend its honor and its history.  He persuaded them to an alliance with Athens and to undertake the war.  A battle was fought at Chaeronea in Boeotia, Demosthenes, then at the age of forty-eight, serving as a private hostile.  But the army of the Athenians and Thebans, levied in haste, was not equal to the veterans of Philip and was thrown into rout.

=The Macedonian Supremacy.=—­Philip, victorious at Chaeronea, placed a garrison in Thebes and offered peace to Athens.  He then entered the Peloponnesus and was received as a liberator among the peoples whom Sparta had oppressed.  From this time he met with no resistance.  He came to Corinth and assembled delegates from all the Greek states (337)[96] except Sparta.

Here Philip published his project of leading a Greek army to the invasion of Persia.  The delegates approved the proposition and made a general confederation of all the Greek states.  Each city was to govern itself and to live at peace with its neighbors.  A general council was initiated to prevent wars, civil dissensions, proscriptions, and confiscations.

This confederacy made an alliance with the king of Macedon and conferred on him the command of all the Greek troops and navies.  Every Greek was prohibited making war on Philip on pain of banishment.

=Alexander.=—­Philip of Macedon was assassinated in 336.  His son Alexander was then twenty years old.  Like all the Greeks of good family he was accustomed to athletic exercises, a vigorous fighter, an excellent horseman (he alone had been able to master Bucephalus, his war-horse).  But at the same time he was informed in politics, in eloquence, and in natural history, having had as teacher from his thirteenth to his seventeenth year Aristotle, the greatest scholar of Greece.  He read the Iliad with avidity, called this the guide to the military art, and desired to imitate its heroes.  He was truly born to conquer, for he loved to fight and was ambitious to distinguish himself.  His father said to him, “Macedon is too small to contain you.”

=The Phalanx.=—­Philip left a powerful instrument of conquest, the Macedonian army, the best that Greece had seen.  It comprised the phalanx of infantry and a corps of cavalry.

The phalanx of Macedonians was formed of 16,000 men ranged with 1,000 in front and 16 men deep.  Each had a sarissa, a spear about twenty feet in length.  On the field of battle the Macedonians, instead of marching on the enemy facing all in the same direction, held themselves in position and presented their pikes to the enemy on all sides, those in the rear couching their spears above the heads of the men of the forward ranks.  The phalanx resembled “a monstrous beast bristling with iron,” against which the enemy was to throw itself.  While the phalanx guarded the field of battle, Alexander charged the enemy at the head of his cavalry.  This Macedonian cavalry was a distinguished body formed of young nobles.