No Greek statesman for a hundred and fifty years, say roughly from 500 B.C. to 350 B.C., the most brilliant period of Greek history, regarded the kingdom of Macedon as anything but a negligible quantity. Macedon itself was a land that lay on the boundaries of the Hellenic world. Its people were held to be half Hellenic and half barbarian. Even to-day scholars are not at one on the question whether the Macedonian dialect can be reckoned as properly belonging to Greek speech. But it was this alien power that ended in bringing Greece to a kind of unity, a unity based on the force of arms. The most remarkable feature of this achievement lies in the fact that it was accomplished by one man, Philip of Macedon, who began his victorious career in 359 B.C. by repressing internal disturbances at home and by dealing effectively with his warlike neighbors, the Illyrians and the Thracians. The divisions in Greece gave him the opportunity of intervention there. He posed as the friend of the oligarchic party in various Greek communities, and made it his aim to oppose by diplomacy and by war the most important center of Greek democracy, Athens. The final struggle between the free states and the Macedonian monarchy took place at the battle of Chæronea, August, 338 B.C. Philip won a decisive victory, because he had spent years in training a professional army that proved irresistible when it faced the best citizen soldiers of Athens, Thebes, and other smaller towns which, persuaded by the eloquence of Demosthenes, stood side by side in the defense of liberty. Philip survived his victory only a short time, dying in 336 B.C. as the master of Greece and leaving to his son Alexander the heritage of his unique achievements. II THE CONQUEST OF GREECE Alexander’s succession to the throne of Macedon seemed secured by his father Philip’s sincere personal affection for him. His confidence in Alexander’s ability, even in his son’s early youth, was manifested in the assignment to him of the most responsible positions under his father’s directions. Philip saw to it that his son should be carefully educated by placing him under the charge of Aristotle. Good reports must have come of his precocity, because Philip, while he was occupied in the siege of Byzantium, handed over to Alexander, then only sixteen years old, the administration of Macedon. Two years later, at the battle of Chæronea, already mentioned as marking the downfall of Greek freedom, the youth was placed at the head of the division of the army which took the offensive at a critical part of the engagement, and it was through this important command that the questionable honor of striking the decisive blow in the defeat of the allied forces of free Greece was ungrudgingly conceded to him.