Two sons, Magnes and horse-loving Macedon,
Who established their home around Pieria and Olympus.
Magnes again [was father of] Dictys and god-like Polydectes.
(Constantine Porphyrogenitus De Thematibus 2.48a)
What emerges from this, then, is that according to this author, be it Hesiod or another archaic poet, the ancestor of the Macedonian people was the brother of the ancestor of the Magnesian people, both nephews of Hellen, the ancestor of the Greeks; and he lived in the region of Pieria and Olympos where the historical Macedonians lived. To this early poet, then, the Macedonians were not descendants of Hellen, but closely linked genealogically to them, coming from the same familial background of Deucalion and his children. Did he think of the Macedonians as Greeks? There is, arguably, some ambivalence about this; but it is worth noting that the Magnesians who lived, in the fifth and fourth centuries, among the mountains east of Thessaly, between the Thessalian plain and the sea, were never considered anything other than Greeks, though sharing the same descent as the Macedonians in the Catalogue of Women.
So far the Macedonians are seen, in the only early source that mentions them, as at the very least closely linked to the Greek people by genealogy. The next writers to mention the Macedonians were the two great fifth-century historians, founders of history writing, Herodotus and Thucydides. Basically, such information as we have about the Macedonians before the fourth century comes from these two writers, and it does not add up to a great deal. Neither of them directly addresses the question of Macedonian ethnicity. Herodotus mentions contacts between the Macedonian ruler Amyntas and the deposed Athenian tyrant Hippias about the year 510; tells of the establishment of Persian domination over Macedonia ca. 500; and tells a number of stories about Amyntas’ son and successor as ruler of Macedonia, Alexander I. Several stories have to do with Alexander’s involvement in the great war between the Persians and the Greeks in 480/79, in which Alexander is presented as a Persian vassal, but a friend of the southern Greeks, and especially of the Athenians. Most interesting, though, is a story about the origin of the Macedonian ruling family or clan, called the Argeadae.
As Herodotus tells the story (8.137–38), three brothers from the ruling family of Argos, the Temenids, were sent into exile and, after certain adventures, settled in Macedonia and became rulers of that land. The youngest of the three, Perdiccas, was the ancestor of the Macedonian rulers of the fifth century, Alexander I and his successors. The Temenids, in turn, were supposed to be descended from the greatest of all Greek heroes, Heracles; so according to this story, the Macedonian ruling family came from the southern Greek city most famed in mythic stories and legends, Argos, and were descendants of the most highly regarded hero of Greek myth, Heracles—just as were the two royal families of the Spartans. And Herodotus further alleges that this Argive Temenid descent of the Macedonian ruling family was accepted as true by the judges of the Olympic games, who allowed the young Alexander to compete in the sprint race there based on this account of his Hellenic ancestry (5.22). Left in question in all this is the identity of the other Macedonians. Were they Hellenes? Herodotus doesn’t say, though the apparent need of Alexander to prove himself Greek by alleging Argive descent may seem to imply that Macedonians were not regarded as Greeks. This alleged Argive Temenid descent, by the way, has been accepted as true by some scholars, though it is surely clear that it is merely a self-serving story put about by Alexander—for whom descent from Heracles and Argos would give greatly improved status among the Greeks—based on the similarity between the name of his family (Argeadae) and the name Argos.
Thucydides tells of the expansion of Macedonian power from Pieria northwards and eastwards, through Bottiaea and Almopia to the Amphaxitis and beyond into the northern Chalcidice, and westwards into the upland plateaus of the eastern Pindus (2.99). Interestingly, he accepts the story that the Macedonian rulers were originally Temenids from Argos, and alleges that they and their followers drove out the original inhabitants of the regions they conquered: Pierians were displaced from Pieria, Almopians from Almopia, Bottiaeans from Bottiaea, and so on. That might seem to imply that the Macedonians were mostly Hellenes, who invaded and conquered their later homeland from southern Greece. Later he tells of a joint expedition conducted by the Macedonian ruler Perdiccas II and the Spartan commander Brasidas in 422 (4.124–25). Perdiccas’ forces are said to be composed of “the Macedonians over whom he ruled and hoplites (heavily armed infantry) of the Hellenes who lived there” (4.124); later there is mention of a Macedonian and Chalcidian cavalry force nearly a thousand strong and “a great crowd of barbaroi”; and then, when the arrival of Illyrian warriors to join their opponents frightened Perdiccas’ army into flight (4.125), we hear of “the Macedonians and the mass of barbaroi” fleeing. What is thus left unclear is whether Thucydides counted the Macedonians as barbaroi (foreigners) or not.
Clear statements about the identity of the Macedonians first emerge in fourth-century sources, like the Athenian politician and orator Demosthenes, where the Macedonians were presented as barbaroi. However, such statements occur in the context of enmity between southern Greeks and the Macedonians, in which the Macedonians tend to be likened to the Persians of old, and the war of the southern Greeks against them to the resistance of the southern Greeks, in the days of Miltiades, Leonidas, and Themistocles, to the Persian invasions. Presenting the Macedonians, therefore, as barbaroi just like the Persians, is propaganda and not necessarily to be trusted. There were cultural, social, and political differences between the northern Macedonians, and the southern city-state Greeks, that justified use of the term “barbarian” (in its original meaning, non-Greek-speaking) in the eyes of southern Greek (mostly Athenian) writers. But whether this was an expression of real ethnic/linguistic difference or propagandistic prejudice remains to be decided.
The argument against counting the ancient Macedonians as Greek really hinges on some remarks made in various sources about the language spoken by the Macedonians. In sources dealing with the reign of Alexander the Great, or with the time of his Successors, we hear several times of persons speaking (or not being able to speak) Makedonisti—that is, in the Macedonian manner—or more specifically speaking in the Macedonian phone (language or dialect). Some scholars interpret these passages to mean that there was a Macedonian language, separate and distinct from Greek. Support for this view is offered by a few words quoted in later sources as being “Macedonian”: the first-century BCE geographer Strabo (7 fr. 2) offers the word peligones as Macedonian for “those holding positions of honor”; and the fifth-century CE lexicographer Hesychius tells us that gotan was the Macedonian word for pig (hus in standard Greek). But are these words really the remnants of a distinct Macedonian language? Living on the northern fringe of the Greek world, cheek by jowl with (and often intermingled with) non-Greek Illyrians, Paeonians, Thracians, and others, it would not be surprising for the Macedonians to use “loan-words” derived from those languages; and Strabo in fact goes on to say that Spartans and Massilians (Greek colonists of Marseilles in southern France) also used the word peligones with the meaning gerontes (that is, members of the Council of Elders). And as for a Macedonian phone, this could perfectly well mean a Macedonian dialect of Greek: compare Plato’s reference (in his Cratylus 398d) to “the old Attic phone,” that is, the old dialect spoken by the Athenians.
In order to decide what is really meant by references to a Macedonian phone, or to Macedonians as barbaroi, we need to begin by understanding what standard of “Greekness” is being applied. Because although some very able historians—most famously Ernst Badian—have argued strongly that our ancient sources regarded the Macedonians as non-Greek, what those sources—all written by inhabitants of Greek city-states, and mostly by Athenians—are really saying is that the Macedonians were not city-state Greeks. The standard being applied is that of Greeks who lived in a certain way: in cities that were at the same time autonomous small states, where political decisions were taken colle
ctively in councils and assemblies of citizens, where citizens practiced a culture and way of life revolving around the agora (town square and/or market place), the gymnasion (meeting place to exercise, bathe, and socialize), and the theatron (viewing space to attend dramatic and/or musical performances). Macedonia, in the fifth and fourth centuries, was governed by a tribal monarchy and landowning aristocracy: there were no councils and assemblies; Macedonia had very few cities; those it did have were newly built in the late fifth and fourth centuries and were not autonomous states; and in Macedonia the culture of the agora, the gymnasium, and the theater had not yet taken hold. Macedonians, therefore, from the city-state Greek perspective, looked foreign and lived their lives in a foreign way.
Well, we can stipulate that the Macedonians were not southern Greeks, not city-state Greeks; but does that mean that they were not Greeks? The proper approach to answering this question finally has been shown by scholars working at the Research Center for Greek and Roman Antiquity in Athens, above all Miltiades Hatzopoulos and Argyro Tataki: they have focused attention on the nomenclature of the Macedonians, that is on the names attested to have been used by Macedonians. Names carry meaning, and are clear indicators of the linguistic background and heritage of the people using them; and in pre-modern times people were typically rather conservative in their naming habits. Study of names attested to have been used by fifth- and fourth-century Macedonians is highly revealing: the names are overwhelmingly Greek in their etymology, that is, they are based on Greek words. For example, many Macedonians used names based on the Greek word hippos (horse): Philippos (horse-lover), Hippolochos (horse regiment), Hipponikos (horse victor), Hipparchos (horse ruler), Hippias (horsey), and so on. Names based on the Greek word nike (victory) were in common use: Nikanor (victor), Andronikos and Nikandros (man-victor), Nikomachos (victor in battle), Nikarchos (victorious ruler), Nikippos (horse victor), Nikodemos (victor for the people), and the like. Particularly popular too, were names built from the Greek word for war, polemos: Eupolemos (good at war), Polemaios or Ptolemaios (warlike), Tlepolemos (daring in war), Polemokrates (powerful in war), Polemon (warrior) and so on. Further, the Macedonians are attested as using names drawn from Homer, the archetypal Greek poet: Alexandros, Menelaos, Hektor, Kassandros, Neoptolemos, to name a few. The vast majority of known Macedonian names are in fact Greek names, based on Greek words, and found more or less frequently elsewhere in Greece too. The obvious conclusion would be that the Macedonians were, linguistically speaking, Greeks.
Equally revealing, to my mind, is the history of the Macedonian Empire conquered and established by Alexander the Great and his Successors, especially when compared with the Roman Empire. The Romans had very little high culture of their own when they first began to encounter the Greeks in the third and second centuries BCE; and as is well known, they learned eagerly from the Greeks, adopting their literary forms, their philosophies, their theater and bathing culture, and so on. But in the lands they conquered, the Romans spread a language of their own (Latin); the Romans used names derived from their own Latin language; the Romans produced works of literature and philosophy based on and in some cases copying Greek literature and philosophy, but written in their own Latin language. By contrast, the Macedonians in their empire spread, not a Macedonian language and Macedonian culture, but the Greek language and Greek culture. One will look in vain throughout the revealingly-called Hellenistic (that is, Greek-based) civilization created by the Macedonians through their conquests and empires for any sign of a Macedonian language, or any distinctively Macedonian (and non-Greek) form of culture. As spreaders of the Greek language and Greek culture, therefore, the Macedonians must be counted as Greeks.
The whole “Macedonian question” is thus a modern red herring, based on modern notions of nationality and ethnicity. So far as we can tell, the ancient Macedonians were speakers of a dialect of Greek: their names make this clear. Though other Greeks evidently found the Macedonian dialect hard to understand and harder to speak, and found the Macedonian way of life “foreign” and in some ways uncongenial, that does not make the Macedonians non-Greek: it merely makes them different, peripheral, perhaps from a certain point of view “backward” Greeks. At most, the difference between the Macedonians and their language, and other Greeks and their language, may have been akin to the difference one may see today between Dutch—a language that is Germanic in structure and etymology, deriving from old Germanic roots—and German itself, which comes from the same linguistic roots. More likely, the difference is merely one of dialect, akin to the difference between the kind of English spoken in (for example) such places as Scotland and Louisiana: inhabitants of Glasgow and of the rural parts of Louisiana will almost certainly find it very hard to understand one another, but they both speak the English language.
2. THE EARLY HISTORY OF MACEDONIA
Though Herodotus and Thucydides claimed to know of a whole lineage of kings ruling Macedonia before the fifth century, these rulers are merely names to us, with at best one or two legendary tales attached. The history of Macedonia, in the sense that we have written historical source materials to go on, begins with the reign of Alexander I, ruler of Macedonia during the first decades of the fifth century, down to his death ca. 454. As we have seen, Herodotus had a number of stories to tell about this ruler—specifically about his relations with the Persians, and with the Athenians and other southern Greeks—and he emerges as a key figure in the earliest growth of what came to be, eventually, the Macedonian state. It was apparently during the reign of Alexander that, taking advantage of the weakness and disorder left behind in the wake of the retreat of Persian power from the Balkan region after 479, the Macedonians seized control of neighboring regions to their east and west. In the east, they advanced beyond the Axius River to the Strymon, and along with the broad lands between the rivers also took much of the northern Chalcidice. To the west, Alexander established a form of domination over the peoples and dynasts dwelling in the upland plateaus on the eastern side of the Pindus: Eordaea, Elimea, Orestis, Lyncus, and perhaps also Tymphaea and Pelagonia (see map 1). During this time, if not before, the peoples dwelling in these regions came to be considered, and perhaps to consider themselves, as Macedonians akin to the Macedonians of the coastal plains. In the fourth century, as a result, when Macedonia emerges more fully into history, we hear of a basic division between “lower” Macedonia—the original heartland of Pieria and the coastal plains to the north and north-east of it as far as the Axius valley—and “upper” Macedonia, meaning the upland plateaus of the Pindus, just listed. The unifying factor was the rule of the Argead dynasty, which came from “lower” Macedonia and had its seat in the town of Aegae (modern Vergina) in Pieria.
After the death of the foundational ruler Alexander I about 454, the history of Macedonia became for nearly a hundred years rather unstable and at times chaotic. Alexander had at least five sons—Perdiccas, Philip, Alcetas, Menelaus, and Amyntas—several of whom vied with each other for power during the 440s and 430s, and whose sons and descendants competed for rule of Macedonia thereafter (see genealogical table 1). Since later Macedonian rulers are known to have been polygamous, and such hostility and rivalry between brothers is a common feature in polygamous dynasties, these brothers may well have been Alexander’s sons by different wives.
By the late 430s or early 420s Perdiccas, apparently the oldest of Alexander’s sons, had seemingly established himself as the ruler of Macedonia, at least according to Athenian sources. The Athenians were much interested in Macedonia as a crucial source of timber for building their fleet, and interfered freely in the Macedonian region, dominating the coastal cities and their ports, and making alliances with and/or against Perdiccas, whichever seemed most likely to further Athenian influence in the region. Perdiccas, struggling to cope with the countervailing ambitions of his brothers and nephews, of local dynastic rulers in “upper” Macedonia, of the Athenians, and of powerful neighboring Illyrian and Thracian rulers, is presented
in the Athenian sources as weak, vacillating, and chronically untrustworthy. But the fact that he managed, in the face of all these difficulties, to maintain himself as the ruler of Macedonia and pass on his rule to his son Archelaus, who succeeded on Perdiccas’ death in 413, shows rather that Perdiccas must have been a shrewd man of considerable ability.
Archelaus appears to have been a stronger character than his shrewd father. According to Thucydides, he managed to unify Macedonia effectively, and to strengthen its military preparedness:
but Archelaus the son of Perdiccas … later built the ones (i.e. forts) that are now in the country (Macedonia), and he set out straight roads and for the rest prepared things for war with horses and weapons and other equipment in a better way than all the other eight kings who ruled before him. (Thucydides 2.100).
Archelaus also built a new capital city for Macedonia at Pella, in those days a coastal city at the head of the Thermaic Gulf (it now lies some miles inland as a result of silting); and he strengthened relations between Macedonia and southern Greece by forming a strong alliance with the Athenians, and inviting important cultural leaders like the painter Zeuxis and the tragedian Euripides to spend time at his court, fostering “city-state” culture there. Archelaus was, however, assassinated unexpectedly in 399, ushering in a forty-year period of chronic instability in Macedonia that undid all his good work.
Archelaus was immediately succeeded by his son Orestes, but since Orestes was a child he needed a regent. It was his regent Aeropus—some sort of relative, perhaps his uncle—who actually ruled, until in about 396 Orestes died (or was killed?) and Aeropus assumed power in his own right. His rule only lasted for another three years or so, however, before he died, probably late in 394 and reputedly of disease. Macedonia then descended into a chaotic situation. Aeropus had a son, Pausanias, who claimed the throne, but that claim was disputed by a certain Amyntas “the Little” who may have been another son of Archelaus, or more plausibly of Perdiccas’ brother Menelaus. He seized power and ruled briefly in 393 as Amyntas II, but in that year it seems Aeropus’ son Pausanias was also ruling part of Macedonia: both men issued coins, which have a remarkably similar look. Both rulers were soon killed: Amyntas the Little was assassinated by the Elimiote dynast Derdas; Pausanias was killed by another Amyntas, who became the new ruler of Macedonia. Known to history as Amyntas III, his claim to rule Macedonia came through the fact that his father Arrhidaeus was a grandson of Alexander I via the latter’s fifth son Amyntas. Having killed Pausanias and seized the throne, Amyntas III nominally ruled Macedonia for about twenty-four years, until his death in 370.
Before and After Alexander Page 2