The outsized glamour of the life and conquests of Alexander the Great have obscured for us the achievements of his father, Philip II. Yet in many ways Philip’s deeds are as historically significant as those of his son. Indeed, Alexander’s success would not have been possible if not for his remarkable father, who, in the words of the historian Diodorus Siculus, “established his kingdom as the greatest of the powers of Europe.” Now, thanks to Ian Worthington’s lively new biography, readers can more fully understand the circumstances and origins of the world-changing transformation of the ancient Mediterranean initiated by Philip, who as Worthington writes, “deserves to live beyond the shadow of his more famous son.”

Worthington is a professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of several first-rate studies of the fourth century and Alexander. This familiarity with the sources and scholarship of that complex century is indispensable for making sense of a seemingly endless parade of inter-city feuds, full-scale wars, and intra-city political wrangling, all spread over the equally complex geography, states, and peoples of northern and central Greece. Moreover, our surviving ancient sources for this period, as Worthington explains in one of his many invaluable appendices, either are fragmentary or were written centuries after the fact; they invariably describe events from a Greek and Athenian rather than a Macedonian perspective. We do not possess a Herodotus, a Thucydides, or a Xenophon, who all lived during or close to the events they