According to Vaultedwatches, the fate of the Panhellenic league fell at Chaeronea, where the Macedonians won a decisive victory (338) due to the excellence of their infantry and the Thessalian cavalry they had at their disposal, to the perfected armament of their phalanx equipped with long spears (sarisse), devised based on the experiences made by the Athenian Iphrates with his peltasts, and finally on the skilful use of the tactical innovations of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, and in particular on the combined weapons tactics they introduced, but now used for the first time on a large scale . Thebes had to accept the harsh conditions imposed by the winner, to dissolve the Boeotic league and receive a garrison in the Cadmea. Athens, thanks to its maritime superiority, secure in the area of ​​fortifications, could have resisted, but preferred to yield, preparing the resumption of the war at a more opportune time. He surrendered by renouncing his cleruchies of Chersonese, dissolving what remained of his ancient maritime league, but keeping his autonomy full, his army intact, save for the colonies he still possessed in the Aegean. However, he had to enter the new Hellenic league constituted by Philip, centered in Corinth, which also embraced all of northern and central Greece, including Aetolia and all the Peloponnesian cities except Sparta, from which Philip contented himself with demonstrating his superiority by snatching them away. to the benefit of the neighbors a good part of the territory and invading Laconia, as Epaminondas had already done. But he did not destroy it or subdue it; in fact, that was the way to always keep the cities bordering Sparta tied to him, enriched by him with Spartan remains: Argos, Megalopoli and Messene.
The battle of Chaeronea gathered Greece into unity and allowed Hellenic expansion into the East. Therefore, the romantic-liberal conception according to which Greek history ended with the battle of Chaeronea must be rejected. But equally erroneous is the modern conception that considers the battle of Chaeronea as the almost culmination of Greek history, as the moment in which a national unity was created in Greece for the first time that is more or less explicitly compared to unity. of modern nations. Indeed, it would be anti-historical to compare even remotely in its effects the battle of Chaeronea to the battle of Solferino. Not that the forbidden prejudice according to which the Macedonians were barbarians can be renewed, so that the submission of the Greeks to the Macedonians would have been their first submission to the foreigner, prelude to their definitive submission to Rome. The Macedonians appeared to be barbarians to the Greeks and they were said to be such as backward in civilization, not participating in that ideal movement for which Greece had created its admirable patrimony of art and thought, because they did not know that political freedom which it seemed to the Greeks inseparable from their civilization. But there is no evidence that they were regarded as peoples of different races; and besides being themselves probably Hellenes by lineage and language, they had in any case entered resolutely into the Hellenic nation, by assuming the Attic as their cult language, by becoming scholars in the science and art of the lineages more advanced Greeks, by modeling their military institutions on the Greek example, by opening up, in short, consciously, since the time of Alessandro Filelleno, to the civil influences of Greece and to those only. But they felt the profound difference between the political-social institutions of the Greeks and their own and the impossibility of assimilating the one and the other, corroborated by the difference in level of culture and by the disparity of economic conditions, and therefore, by establishing their supremacy on Greece, they did not even remotely think of assimilation or fusion. The Greeks, always autonomous by name, could only be the subjects of the northern monarchy; subjects however not equated in rights and duties to the other subjects, but perennially separated from them, so as to constitute a simple appendix of Macedonia, in which, under the appearance of spontaneous deliberation of the federal council established in Corinth, only the will of the rulers was realized. The Sanhedrin was a simple lustra, necessarily destined to disappear as soon as it was no longer needed. By then Philip had to give the lordship he had founded with arms a content that made it in some way acceptable. And he arrived there in two ways: one was the guarantee, provided by the federal constitution, of the regulations in force in the individual cities, which under the guise of a concession was a very serious attack on citizen freedom because it prevented its spontaneous development, but to every way aimed at binding the wealthier class to Philip’s interests; the other was the program of the Panhellenic struggle against the Persian. This program Philip did not take from the Macedonian homeland traditions. Among the Greeks, since Aristagoras had risen against Persian domination and since Sparta and Athens had won their famous victories over the barbarian, the war against the barbarian was felt as a national war, the liberation of the brothers enslaved to him was felt as a duty, expansion in a territory that the barbarians, due to their civil inferiority, were unable to defend as a right. All these traditions, all these aspirations were foreign to the Macedonians. They had not participated in the national war, or rather had participated in it on the side of the barbarians. They had no hatred against the Persian and had no reason to make just that feeling of superiority and contempt which liberty and civil progress had generated for the barbarians in the Greeks. History, as it had happened up to then, it seemed to direct the Macedonians in other ways and to mark their other needs. Continuously endangered by the assaults of the nearby Thracian and Illyrian tribes, the Macedonians had only recently made those tribes feel the effects of their civil and military superiority. To free themselves from such dangers, to consolidate their dominance, to open the whole northern part of the Balkan peninsula to civilization, this seemed to be the task assigned by history to the Macedonians. And the urgency of it had to appear all the more clear now that a new people, the Celts, settling in the northwestern part of the peninsula, were already endangering the neighboring Thracian and Illyrian tribes. The neglect of this task, which fully corresponded to the forces the Macedonians had at the time, later proved fatal to Macedonia. L’ having turned the Macedonians to another task, that is, to that submission of the East to which history directed the Greeks of the peninsula, was Philip’s most important and lasting work. In this way he certainly prepared that marvelous expansion of Greek civilization which is given the name of Hellenism; and here it would be vain and anti-historical to seek whether this expansion the Greeks could even now have achieved it by other means without the help of the Macedonians and their dominance. But he thus perennially detached from the Macedonian people those living forces which later constituted the fulcrum of the great Hellenistic states. And the Panhellenic enterprise thus conducted by the Macedonians, in addition to being in a certain sense anti-Macedonia, was also and more, as oxymoron has pointedly said, anti-Greek.
