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Description
Before the Mongols, before the Romans, the most revered, feared, and expansive army in history were the Macedonians. It wasn't always this way, though. Indeed, Macedonia has always been a bit of an outlier when compared to their neighbors to the south. Today of course, the conflict arises from Hellenic culture's clash against Macedon's Slavic majority, but that's a story for another day. In the ancient world, the Greeks didn't count Macedonians among their ranks either, though they were much more culturally similar back then. Homer doesn't even list the Macedonians among the troops of the Trojan War. While people from abroad, such as the Iranian kings, couldn't tell a Macedonian apart from a Greek, the Greeks would insist that the Macedonians were a people only slightly less barbaric than the Thracians, eking out a drunken pastoral society in the highlands and speaking a yokel tongue. Macedonians meanwhile were determined to identify themselves as culturally Greek despite their stuck up neighbors, sharing a related language and identical religious rites. The way I prefer to put it is that Macedonia was to Greece as Scotland is to Britain. Not a perfect comparison, but it gets the point across.

The Macedonians themselves claimed descent from a Doric chieftain from Argos named Tyrimmas. Around the 7th century BCE, Perdiccas, one of three brothers of Tyrimmas's line, was exiled to Macedon and found work as shepherd for a local chieftain. Worried Perdiccas was destined for greatness after witnessing supposed divine miracles, the chieftain had the brothers exiled. As always happens in these stories though, Perdiccas rallied support from his base in the hills and launched a conquest which would see him crowned king of a united Macedonia. His dynasty, the Argeads, would rule uninterrupted until the collapse of their great empire in the 4th century BCE. Ironically in hindsight, the Macedonians initially became voluntary vassals of the Achaemenid Empire through the late 6th and late 5th centuries BCE. The Persian kings Darius and Xerxes both marched their armies through Macedonian territory unabated during their respective campaigns. Greek as they proclaimed to be, Macedonians were under no illusion that it wasn't every city-state for themselves. Indeed, the Greeks came to frustratingly understand how damn Swiss the Macedonians were when it came to their neutrality. Whether it was the Persian Wars or the Peloponnesian Wars, all sides of the conflicts knew that Macedon swore loyalty to no one, and would supply resources and support to every side of the conflicts. As a Swiss myself, I have mad respect for that.

Of course, we don't remember Macedon for its era of neutrality. By the 4th century BCE, Macedon… and really the entire Greek world, was on the brink of self destruction. Wrought with internal politics and external raids on all sides, it would take one hell of a force of nature to bring it all under control. In 359 BCE, that force of nature would ascend to the throne of Macedon as Philip II. The details of the conquests and politics of Philip's reign are beyond the scope of this blurb, but it resulted in the creation of the pan-Hellenic (except for Sparta, who decided to be whiny bitches about it) League of Corinth in 338 BCE. The League of Corinth basically turned all of Greece into one big puppet state for Macedon, and Philip planned to milk this resource to "liberate" the Ionian cities under Achaemenid rule. However, he was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in 336 BCE, which brings us at last to the start of the reign of his twenty year old son who would go on not just to conquer Ionia, not just Persia, but most of the known world at the time. This boy king was Alexander the Great, and his legacy is one that needs no introduction. He brought down the Achaemenid Empire, was deemed the son of Zeus by the Egyptians, and took his army all the way to the Indus Valley, only stopping when his army started complaining that their feet hurt. Alexander's life is a whole affair in itself, but when it came to an end in 323 BCE, so too did the greatness of Macedon. His generals squabbled over the remains of his empire, and what was left of Macedon proper was conquered by the Romans in the 2nd century BCE. Still, the legacy of Alexander and Macedon cannot be understated, and certainly deserves more exploration than I can provide in my little art blog blurbs.

Design notes, this one was relatively straight forward. I'm wouldn't go so far as to say ancient Macedon was "standardized", but most reference images I came across seemed to be pretty consistent with their appearance. Philip's reforms tended to favor lighter armor than the army of his predecessors, which they could afford to rely on because the Macedonians had a ridiculously overpowered weapon for the time: the sarissa. I modeled the spear of the regular off of the sarissa, but I couldn't really get across its magnitude in this format on a sheet of printer paper. A real Macedonian sarissa was a 4 to 6 meter long monster of a pike with one end fitted with a special cap designed to be anchored into the ground. All you had to do was point these sticks in front of you, and the enemy just kind of impaled themselves before they even had the chance to get within striking range. A whole phalanx of these things was incredibly effective on the battlefield, and I could only really do it justice if I portrayed them in a proper landscape scene. Aside from that, I'm quite happy with this. Could use some tweaking, but I think Alexander would find these lads to be in satisfactory shape.

Description
Before the Mongols, before the Romans, the most revered, feared, and expansive army in history were the Macedonians. It wasn't always this way, though. Indeed, Macedonia has always been a bit of an outlier when compared to their neighbors to the south. Today of course, the conflict arises from Hellenic culture's clash against Macedon's Slavic majority, but that's a story for another day. In the ancient world, the Greeks didn't count Macedonians among their ranks either, though they were much more culturally similar back then. Homer doesn't even list the Macedonians among the troops of the Trojan War. While people from abroad, such as the Iranian kings, couldn't tell a Macedonian apart from a Greek, the Greeks would insist that the Macedonians were a people only slightly less barbaric than the Thracians, eking out a drunken pastoral society in the highlands and speaking a yokel tongue. Macedonians meanwhile were determined to identify themselves as culturally Greek despite their stuck up neighbors, sharing a related language and identical religious rites. The way I prefer to put it is that Macedonia was to Greece as Scotland is to Britain. Not a perfect comparison, but it gets the point across.

The Macedonians themselves claimed descent from a Doric chieftain from Argos named Tyrimmas. Around the 7th century BCE, Perdiccas, one of three brothers of Tyrimmas's line, was exiled to Macedon and found work as shepherd for a local chieftain. Worried Perdiccas was destined for greatness after witnessing supposed divine miracles, the chieftain had the brothers exiled. As always happens in these stories though, Perdiccas rallied support from his base in the hills and launched a conquest which would see him crowned king of a united Macedonia. His dynasty, the Argeads, would rule uninterrupted until the collapse of their great empire in the 4th century BCE. Ironically in hindsight, the Macedonians initially became voluntary vassals of the Achaemenid Empire through the late 6th and late 5th centuries BCE. The Persian kings Darius and Xerxes both marched their armies through Macedonian territory unabated during their respective campaigns. Greek as they proclaimed to be, Macedonians were under no illusion that it wasn't every city-state for themselves. Indeed, the Greeks came to frustratingly understand how damn Swiss the Macedonians were when it came to their neutrality. Whether it was the Persian Wars or the Peloponnesian Wars, all sides of the conflicts knew that Macedon swore loyalty to no one, and would supply resources and support to every side of the conflicts. As a Swiss myself, I have mad respect for that.

Of course, we don't remember Macedon for its era of neutrality. By the 4th century BCE, Macedon… and really the entire Greek world, was on the brink of self destruction. Wrought with internal politics and external raids on all sides, it would take one hell of a force of nature to bring it all under control. In 359 BCE, that force of nature would ascend to the throne of Macedon as Philip II. The details of the conquests and politics of Philip's reign are beyond the scope of this blurb, but it resulted in the creation of the pan-Hellenic (except for Sparta, who decided to be whiny bitches about it) League of Corinth in 338 BCE. The League of Corinth basically turned all of Greece into one big puppet state for Macedon, and Philip planned to milk this resource to "liberate" the Ionian cities under Achaemenid rule. However, he was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in 336 BCE, which brings us at last to the start of the reign of his twenty year old son who would go on not just to conquer Ionia, not just Persia, but most of the known world at the time. This boy king was Alexander the Great, and his legacy is one that needs no introduction. He brought down the Achaemenid Empire, was deemed the son of Zeus by the Egyptians, and took his army all the way to the Indus Valley, only stopping when his army started complaining that their feet hurt. Alexander's life is a whole affair in itself, but when it came to an end in 323 BCE, so too did the greatness of Macedon. His generals squabbled over the remains of his empire, and what was left of Macedon proper was conquered by the Romans in the 2nd century BCE. Still, the legacy of Alexander and Macedon cannot be understated, and certainly deserves more exploration than I can provide in my little art blog blurbs.

Design notes, this one was relatively straight forward. I'm wouldn't go so far as to say ancient Macedon was "standardized", but most reference images I came across seemed to be pretty consistent with their appearance. Philip's reforms tended to favor lighter armor than the army of his predecessors, which they could afford to rely on because the Macedonians had a ridiculously overpowered weapon for the time: the sarissa. I modeled the spear of the regular off of the sarissa, but I couldn't really get across its magnitude in this format on a sheet of printer paper. A real Macedonian sarissa was a 4 to 6 meter long monster of a pike with one end fitted with a special cap designed to be anchored into the ground. All you had to do was point these sticks in front of you, and the enemy just kind of impaled themselves before they even had the chance to get within striking range. A whole phalanx of these things was incredibly effective on the battlefield, and I could only really do it justice if I portrayed them in a proper landscape scene. Aside from that, I'm quite happy with this. Could use some tweaking, but I think Alexander would find these lads to be in satisfactory shape.