...for the first time he [Philip] began to understand how Macedonia's outdated institutions of feudalism and aristocratic monarchy, so despised by th… - Peter Green

Macedonia as a whole tended to remain in isolation from the rest of Greece...

In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the Greek world.

Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.