EXHIBITION REVIEW
Behind an Ancient Battle
A show examines a decisive conflict in Greece
BY JAMES ROMM
Athens
Over the course of history, only a few single days can be said to have “changed the world,” but the day on which a coalition of Greek city-states was defeated by Philip II of Macedon, at the battle of Chaeronea, may well be among them. In a show that dramatizes that day—Aug. 2, 338 B.C., according to one reckoning—the Museum of Cycladic Art here advances a claim for the battle’s epochal meaning, and briefly raises the question of whether the world was changed for the better.
The issue decided at Chaeronea, some 70 miles northwest of Athens, was whether the Greek city-states could push back the huge, highly trained army led by Philip and his teenage son, Alexander (soon to be known as “the Great”). Philip had slowly encroached on the autonomy of those cities, especially Athens, and threatened to subjugate them entirely.
Athens united with Thebes, the other major power of mainland Greece, and contingents from other states, to take a stand against Philip. Before Aug. 2 was over, however, both leading cities had suffered horrific losses and Philip had made himself master of most of Greece. (The Spartans had stayed out of the fight and remained, at least in theory, independent.)
The Cycladic Museum offers two illustrations of how Aug. 2 played out: a traditional battle map at the show’s entrance, and then, near its conclusion, a whimsical model composed of Playmobil figures, including a blond-haired Alexander leading a cavalry charge. Opposite him stands the tightly grouped Sacred Band of Thebes, a corps made up, according to ancient sources, of paired male lovers fighting side by side. The band had been undefeated in battle for decades before this, but the model shows Alexander cutting them off from their line and preparing to destroy them, as he is known to have done. Unfortunately the toyland smiles on the soldiers’ faces seem out of step with their imminent fate.
The Sacred Band features prominently throughout the exhibition. Its mass grave, uncovered at Chaeronea in 1880, is explored in several displays, including one case containing bones and grave goods as they were found at the site. Remarkably, the band was interred with iron strigils, scrapers for cleansing the skin after exercise, rather than with shields or swords. The significance is unclear, but the curators remark, in an online text linked to the tomb display, that “they died as soldiers but were buried as civilians.” A set of drawings and notes made by the excavator, Panagiotis Stamatakis, evokes the excitement of the discovery of the band’s resting place, beneath the fragments of an enormous marble statue, later reconstructed as the Lion of Chaeronea.
The weaponless grave of the band contrasts with the wide range of arms and armor shown in other parts of the exhibit, connected to peoples involved in the fight at Chaeronea. An intact panoply of infantry gear, found in northern Greece, was buried with a man who lived at the time of the battle. The iron helmet is coated with silver, lending it a metallic sheen that must have terrified foes. Macedonian swords, spearheads and slingshot projectiles give a sense of Philip’s might, as does the metal spike that once tipped the butt end of a wooden sarisa, the fearsome infantry lance that Philip pioneered.
The significance of Aug. 2, as the show demonstrates, extends beyond the battle itself to longer-term or indirect consequences. Philip went on to forge a Panhellenic federation out of the Greek city-states, thereby helping to end the classical age defined by those smaller polities. When Philip was assassinated two years after the battle, Alexander cemented that union of states and then embarked on a grand invasion of Asia, following plans his father had laid down. In a sense then, the Hellenistic world—with its towering kings and vast empires that dwarfed the classical polis—was launched at Chaeronea, where Alexander first took on leadership of the army that went on to conquer what was then a great part of the civilized world.
Before deploying that army in Asia, against the Persian Empire, Alexander first hurled it against the city of Thebes. Unreconciled to the outcome of Chaeronea, Thebes tried to revolt from the Macedonian empire in 335, soon after the death of Philip. A case in the show containing a heap of pottery shards, recovered from the “catastrophe level” at Thebes, attests to what happened next. Alexander allowed his troops to sack and ravage the city, then razed what was left and had the entire populace killed or sold as slaves. A marble inscription seen on a nearby wall contains the names of donors who helped rebuild Thebes, some 20 years later, after Alexander had passed from the scene. At that point, it seems, the great marble lion was also erected atop the Sacred Band’s tomb.
In recent times the battle of Chaeronea, and the lion statue (rebuilt from its fragments in 1902), have taken on new importance, especially in Greece. Some have seen in Philip a national hero and in his victory the violent birth of a unified nation. In a final wall text the Cycladic Museum curators, Panagiotis Iossif and Ioannis Fappas, lean in this direction, claiming that 19thcentury excavations done at the battlefield “were essentially leading to the creation of a new identity for the newly established Greek state.”
That’s a strange transmutation of the view of Demosthenes, who fought in the battle and later delivered the eulogy over Athenian dead. In his view, preserved in that oration, the light of Greek freedom had been blotted out from the sky at Chaeronea. The Cycladic Museum show does not go far in dealing with these complexities, but its amazing array of finds helps put them squarely before us.
Chaeronea, 2 August 338 BC: A Day That Changed the World
Museum of Cycladic Art, through March 31
Mr. Romm is editor of the “Ancient Lives” series published by Yale.
PARIS TAVITIAN/ MUSEUM OF CYCLADIC ART ( 2) Playmobil diorama of the Battle of Chaeronea at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.
Marble head of Alexander (2nd century), son of Philip II of Macedon.
