Ten years before Philip's reign, it had been boasted that Asia was easier to conquer than Greece, that depended on where Asia was thought to end, but the subjection of Greece was indeed the first and most awkward essential for any invader who crossed the Aegean. As heir to his father's Greek council, Alexander was dictator to Greece in all but name. There are three recognized aids to a dictatorship: police, a myth and an army, and on leaving for Asia, he arranged Greek politics with the help of all three.

His mother Olympias was to act as Macedonia's queen, her daughter Cleopatra as queen of Epirus; Antipater was appointed general over Greece and Europe with 12,000 Macedonian infantry and 1800 cavalry and the power to recruit more in times of crisis both from Macedonia and from her Greek allies. Personally, Antipater and Olympias would never settle down, but in Greece there were Philip's methods of policing to simplify their task; at least three strategic cities were being garrisoned, and elsewhere there were the favourable governments which had been frozen into power by Philip's treaties. A common peace' had been agreed among the Greek cities, whose presiding council forbade domestic revolution and the return of exiled undesirables in any member state. 'Supervisors of the common stability' had been set up to see that none of the three traditional means of social upheaval, redistribution of land, freeing of slaves and abolition of debt, took place inside an allied city's constitution. Externally, the political balance was suitably feeble; Thebes was now broken, Sparta was detested by neighbours who feared her for her past history, and only Athens remained of the major Greek powers. Alexander's brush with her had been indecisive, but as long as he held the Dardanelles and their cities, 'the corn-table of the Piraeus', he controlled the grain route from the Black Sea on which she depended for food and so was her ultimate master. It was an uneasy relationship. Although the allied Greek council had guaranteed stability for Greek cities, the Athenians were so afraid that Philip and Alexander might interfere with their city's laws that they had already approved a commission to recommend protections for their democracy. But Philip and Alexander still saw this strongly walled city as central to their plans, and their moves on her behalf were very revealing, for it was with Athens in mind that they had turned to the use of myth.

Already, on his gold coinage, Alexander was displaying on one side the goddess Athena, on the other the figure of Victory holding a naval symbol and shown in the style of the statue of Victory on the Acropolis in Athens. Very possibly, in the first autumn of his reign, he had helped to restore two such bronze statues on the Acropolis, and this conscious publicity fitted with his theme of Victory and Invincibility and with his hopes for Athens in the Asian invasion. Victory, his coins implied, would be forthcoming, won by a fleet with Athenian connections; Macedonia owned the finest ship-timber in the Balkans, but only through her Greek harbour towns did she have any ships of her own, whereas Athens's dockyards housed more than 350 warships, too expensive for the city to man in force but still more powerful than any fleet docked in the Aegean and a dreadful danger if they fell into Persia's rich hands. The myth of naval victory was meant to woo them, and although events refuted it, the Athenian fleet did at least remain neutral to overtures from Spartan kings and Persian admirals during the next four years. 'Athens, would you ever believe what dangers I endure to win your commendation?' so Alexander's vice-admiral recorded him as saying, and the myth of Victory was part of this calculated policy. It was supported, moreover, by the slogan of the whole invasion.

War, Philip had announced, 'was being declared against the Persians on behalf of the Greeks, to punish the barbarians for their lawless treatment of the old Greek temples': he was fighting as the Greeks' crusader, and had chosen his slogan for its many subtle overtones. Historically, it referred back to the dark days of 480, when the Persian King Xerxes had invaded Greece and left a trail of sacrilege which only ended with his sensational defeats at Salamis and Plataea: it was not, however, an idle echo of the past, for a Greek crusade brilliantly disguised a Macedonian 92 venture led by Macedonians, and it flattered, above all, the interests of Athens. In 480, it was the temples on the Athenian Acropolis which Xerxes had burnt, and for more than thirty years they had been left unrestored as a war reminder to her allies; these allies she had led in a protective league which had fast degenerated into her empire, but its slogan, too, had been a crusade of revenge against Persian sacrilege, By reviving this old political theme, Philip appealed directly to Athens's lively memories of her imperial past, and the tone of contemporary speeches and decrees confirms that her past glory and her 'Dunkirk spirit' in 480 were still worth invoking; since her defeat by Philip, Athens's horizons had been narrowing in space and turning back in time, and her political mood combined sentiment with bitter bursts of incrimination. A Greek crusade against Persia's 'barbarians' implied justice and religion and promised plenty of the plunder on which Greek warfare depended; it coloured the way in which Greek allies saw their Macedonians' task, and this colouring worked into the bones of the expedition. The small Greek town of Thespiae had delightedly helped in the ruin of her dominant neighbour, Thebes, and so she sent a squadron of cavalry to join Alexander's army; when those cavalrymen returned rich and victorious from Hamadan, they made a dedication from their spoils, not as Greeks who had served Alexander's Macedonian interests, but as avengers of their ancestors' virtue against the insults of Asian barbarians. The Greek crusade was a myth, for the Macedonians fought it with the barbarian help of Thracians and Illyrians and the Greeks featured mostly as Alexander's hostages and Persia's allies; only seven hundred Athenians accompanied the land army, a mere seventh of which was drawn from Greeks. But the myth was not outdated or without a real effect.

To its Macedonian leaders it had other attractions than glamour. Thorough crusades should begin their revenge at home, so the slogan licensed the use of Greek allies against troublesome pockets of Greek resistance, whether 'treacherous' Greeks in Persian service or rebellious Thebans whose help to Xerxes's Persians in 480 had not been forgotten; it went unsaid, of course, that the Macedonians and their Thessalian allies had also aided Persia when it mattered most. The myth was more than a flexible call to arms; it created a mood which its leaders could share, and one of the reasons why Philip had chosen Corinth as the centre for his Greek council was surely that Corinth had been the only Greek city to have recently repulsed barbarians from the Greek world. In Sicily, as Philip's friends had told him, Corinth had supported her own Timoleon in a triumphant liberation of the Greek cities from the threat of Carthage, a mirror in the west of Philip's declared aims in the east. So too, with Alexander's attitude; the interests of the Greek allies of course remained secondary to his own, but a mood of Greek revenge and religious retribution did influence his actions, and it was not inconsistent with Greek ideas of such an expedition that he soon took Persian nobles into his court in return for surrender and that he appointed 'barbarians' to commands where they knew the countryside and language. It was still possible to punish the Persians by ruling through them, and revenge for Greece's past did not exclude an ambition to be Asia's king of the future. Part of Alexander's fascination is to watch how this second aim would grow to be dominant, but it is wrong to dismiss the theme of the crusade as mere publicity, cynically adopted and always disbelieved. The stress on the role of Greek allies was a polite formality, but the call to revenge of past sacrilege was only upheld because it was taken seriously.