The King's Path

Introduction

The book, "The King's Path: The Rise of Prince Philip, Father of Alexander the Great" is extremely captivating because it sets the stage for the amazing and near total domination of the Macedonian kingdom and Alexander over their known world. Philip inherited the Macedonian kingdom from his father, King Amyntas who had taken the kingdom from an unrespectable city-state to an up and coming kingdom during the period of 393 BC to 370 BC. Amyntas instilled it with purpose, created a coherent society, secured revenue streams for it's natural resources and created a very successful army.

Philip, in turn was able to take what his father left him and tremendously improve the Macedonian kingdom. When he died at the age of 50 years old Philip left Alexander a kingdom that was built for rapid expansion. He left him a very powerful and tactically superior army, a base of political allies, natural and monetary resources and wonderful public support. Like his father, Amyntas Philip also trained Alexander to be the perfect empire builder. They were both crafty politicians and successful military leaders. Philip even went as far as securing the great philosopher, Aristotle as Alexander's personal teacher for most of his childhood. These pillars allowed Alexander to have unparalleled success in taking over most of Greece including Athens, the vast Egyptian and Persian empires, vast sections of the Middle East and at its zenith parts of Northern India. Very likely, Alexander controlled the largest amount of wealth that any single person ever has after his conquests. These incredible conquests very importantly anchored the Greek ideas of democracy, philosophy, law and the arts into western and world society. In particular, the conquests of the great empires of Egypt and Persia were amazing accomplishments especially at that time and had far reaching eYects on world history reaching into today. Alexander was able to achieve these victories with much less manpower than his enemies and would not have been able to do so without the great support that his father left him.

This book covers the early adulthood of Philip. He had the very unique opportunity to not only learn from his own father and kingdom but also learn from the neighboring kingdom of Thebes and their very successful general and leader, Epaminondas. Philip was a political captive of Thebes for nearly four years and surprisingly had the very good fortune of being treated extremely well by his captors. Most importantly Philip had a chance to learn the most advanced military technology of this time period from the Thebans.

This book also provides an insight into the lives of the fighting men of the Macedonian army and fighting men throughout time. This insight is shown through the life of Gallus of Macedon. Gallus came from humble beginnings, his parents were simple and uneducated people. However, they were honest and very hard-working. Gallus and his family were the kind of people that great nations are built from and they and others like them made Macedonia and Greece what it was.