Who is King Philip II of Macedonia?

Answer 1

King Philip was father of Alexander the great. He built a strong army and won the support of some city-states that opposed Athens. A great Athenian statesman and public speaker, Demosthenes, warned of this new threat, but the quarrelsome city-states could not unite soon enough to stop Philip. In 338 B.C., at Chaeronea Philip's united Greek forces crushed the Athenian Greek alliance. The Athenians lost what they loved most, hegemony over the Greek states.

As the eminent historian J. B. Bury wrote:

As the hegemony or first place among Greek states had passed successively from Athens to Sparta, and to Thebes, so now it passed to Macedon. The statement that Greek liberty perished on the plain of Chaeronea is as true or as false as that it perished on the field of Leuctra or the strand of the Goat's River.Whenever a Greek state became supreme, that supremacy entailed the depression of some states and the dependency or subjection of others. Athens was reduced to a secondary place by Macedon, and Thebes fared still worse; but we must not forget what Sparta, in the day of her triumph, did to Athens, or the more evil things which Thebes proposed.