14. New conquests of Philip in Illyria and Thrace. The Adriatic sea and the Danube appear to have been the boundaries of his empire on this side. But the views of the Macedonian king were directed less against the Thracians, than against the Grecian settlements on the Hellespont; and the attack of the Athenian Diopithes furnished him a pretext for making war against them. The siege, however, of Perinthus and Byzantium, was frustrated by Phocion, to the great vexation of Philip; an event which aroused the Athenians, and even the Persians, from their lethargy. 15. Policy of Philip after this check.--At the very time that, engaged in a war against the barbarians on the Danube, he appears to have wholly lost sight of the affairs of Greece, his agents redouble their activity. Aeschines, richly paid for his services, proposes in the Amphictyonic council, that, to punish the sacrilegious insults of the Locrians to the Delphian oracle, he should be elected leader of the Greeks in this new sacred war. Following his usual maxim, Philip suffers himself to be entreated. 16. Second expedition of Philip into Greece. His appropriation of the important frontier town of Elatea soon showed that, for this time at least, he was not contending merely for the honour of Apollo.--Alliance between Athens and Thebes brought about by Demosthenes.--But the defeat of Chaeronea in the same year decided the dependence of Greece. Philip now found it easy to play the magnanimous character towards Athens. 17. Preparations for the execution of his plan against Persia, not as his own undertaking, but as a national war of the Hellenes against the barbarians. Thus, while Philip, by obtaining from the Amphictyons the appointment of generalissimo of Greece against the Persians, secured in an _honourable_ manner the dependence of the country, the splendour of the expedition flattered the nation at whose expense it was to be conducted. It is a question, indeed, whether Philip's own private views extended much further! 18. The internal government of Macedonia, under so skilful and successful a conqueror, must necessarily have been absolute. No pretender would dare to rise up against such a ruler, and the body guard ([Greek: doryphoroi]) established by him at the beginning of his reign, and taken from the Macedonian nobility, contributed much to keep up a proper understanding between the prince and the nobles. The court became a military staff, while the people, from a nation of herdsmen, was converted into a nation of warriors.--Philip was unfortunate only in his own family; but the blame is not to be attributed to him if he could not agree with Olympias. 19. Philip murdered by Pausanias at Aegae, probably at the instigation of the Persians, while celebrating the marriage of his daughter.