Parmenion

(Παρμενίων). (1) The son of Philotas, a distinguished Macedonian general in the service of Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great. Philip held him in high esteem, and used to say of him that he had never been able to find more than one general, and that was Parmenion. In Alexander's invasion of Asia, Parmenion was regarded as second in command. At the three great battles of the Granicus, Issus, and Arbela, while the king commanded the right wing of the army, Parmenion was placed at the head of the left, and contributed essentially to the victory on all those memorable occasions. The confidence reposed in him by Alexander appears to have been unbounded, and he is continually spoken of as the most attached of the king's friends, and as holding, beyond all question, the second place in the State. But when Philotas, the only surviving son of Parmenion, was accused in Drangiana (B.C. 330) of being privy to the plot against the king's life, he not only confessed his own guilt, when put to the torture, but involved his father also in the plot. Whether the king really believed in the guilt of Parmenion, or deemed his life a necessary sacrifice to policy after the execution of his son, he caused his aged friend to be assassinated in Media before the latter could receive the tidings of his son's death. The death of Parmenion, at the age of seventy years, will ever remain one of the darkest stains upon the character of Alexander. It is questionable whether even Philotas was really concerned in the conspiracy, and we may safely pronounce that Parmenion had no connection with it.

(2) Of Macedonia, an epigrammatic poet, whose verses were included in the collection of Philip of Thessalonica; whence it is probable that he flourished in, or shortly before, the time of Augustus.