For after announcing that he was going to write about a king richly endowed by nature with every quality that makes for virtue, he charges him with everything that is shameful and atrocious.
So that either this author must be a liar and a flatterer in the prefatory remarks at the outset of his history, or he is entirely foolish and childish in his assertions about particulars, imagining that by senseless and far-fetched abuse he will insure his own credit and gain acceptance for his laudatory estimate of Philip.
Again, no one could approve of the general scheme of this writer. Having set himself the task of writing the history of Greece from the point at which Thucydides leaves off, just when he was approaching the battle of Leuctra and the most brilliant period of Greek history, he abandoned Greece and her efforts, and changing his plan decided to write the history of Philip.
Surely it would have been much more dignified and fairer to include Philip's achievements in the history of Greece than to include the history of Greece in that of Philip.
For not even a man preoccupied by his devotion to royalty would, if he had the power and had found a suitable occasion, have hesitated to transfer the leading part and title of his work to Greece; and no one in his sound senses who had begun to write the history of Greece and had made some progress in it would have exchanged this for the more pompous biography of a king.
What can it have been which forced Theopompus to overlook such flagrant inconsistencies, if it were not that in writing the one history his motive was to do good, in writing that of Philip to further his own interests?
Possibly indeed as regards this error in changing the scheme of the work he might have found something to say for himself, if anyone had questioned him,
but as for the foul language he uses about Philip's friends I think he would hardly have been able to defend himself, but would have admitted that he sinned gravely against propriety. . . .
Walbank Commentary