In 359 B.C., Philip became King of Macedonia. He had spent three years in Thebes, where he had seen the transformation that the military genius of Epaminondas had effected in the Theban army, and now at the age of twenty-four, he found himself ruler of Macedonia. But his inheritance was one that might have daunted the stoutest heart. He had no allies and no money; enemies surrounded him on all sides, and there was no unity in his kingdom. But he had youth, a few faithful friends, unbounded ambition, and a body fit to endure any hardships. Philip never asked anything of his soldiers that he was not ready to do himself, yet he was not a man whom they loved, and he inspired fear rather than affection. Philip had three definite aims in his policy: to create a standing army, one that would be ready to march and fight at all times, in winter as well as summer; to unite all Macedonia into a real kingdom, and then to unite all Greece under his rule. Having done that, he intended to march into Asia against the Persian King. Philip created his army, he subdued and united Macedonia, and then he was ready to turn to Greece. Athens, Sparta and Thebes were now all weak. The power of the city-state was passing away and was {331} to yield in time to the new idea of national unity, but it was not to yield without a conflict. The struggle between Philip and the Greek states was more than a struggle between a strong state and several weak ones; it was a conflict of ideas. On the one side was Athens and the states who sided with her, the last representatives of the independent city-state who still jealously guarded their political freedom; on the other side was Philip, who represented this new idea of national unity. He determined to subdue most of Greece by force, but he would have liked Athens to yield to him of her own free will. The power of her fleet and her armies had been broken, but her thought, her art and her culture remained. Could Philip have been received by Athens with good-will, and been recognized by her as the leader of all Greece; he would have held it of greater importance than any military victory. He wrote letters to her statesmen, sent special envoys to Athens to plead his cause, he tried to prove to her that her fears of him were groundless, and he treated the very soil of Attica as if it were sacred. It is a striking picture: Philip, the warrior, at the head of a powerful army, lowering his sword before the politically weak little state, because of the might of her spirit. And that spirit was not dead. One more flash of the old Athenian independence flamed out in the defiance she hurled at Philip.