THE NORTH-WEST BEND OF THE AEGEAN SEA FORMS A GREAT GULF—the Thermaic Gulf—enclosed by land on three sides. To the west, sweeping northwards from the foothills of majestic Mount Olympus, lie the gently rolling plains of Pieria and Emathia; to the north the rich Amphaxitis plain, on either side of the broad Axius River, extends upward from the coast to the hills of Almopia and Messapion; and to the east the Chalcidice peninsula projects into the Aegean like a squat, three-tined fork (see map 1). In the fourth century BCE these lands were occupied by one of the most remarkable people in western history: the Macedonians.
1. WERE THE MACEDONIANS GREEK?
Who were the Macedonians? The question is simple, but it is anything but simple to answer, since the issue of the ethnic and linguistic identity of the ancient Macedonians has been caught up in the identity politics of the modern peoples and states of the southern Balkan peninsula. As the great Ottoman Empire slowly decayed and crumbled away in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the southern Balkan region four key local peoples sought to establish nation-states encompassing as much territory as possible, and their respective claims collided in Macedonia: the Greeks to the south, the Albanians to the north-west, the Serbs to the north, and the Bulgars to the north-east. In this territorial rivalry, the Greeks used history to bolster their claim to Macedonian lands, making the following argument: the ancient Macedonians were Greek; Macedonia is thus a historically Greek land; Macedonia should therefore, like other historically Greek lands, be part of the modern Greek state. The response to this argument from the Serbs and the Bulgars was, in great part, built around denying the Greekness of the ancient Macedonians, and they found some strong evidence and notable scholars to support that part at least (the non-Greek identity of the ancient Macedonians) of their claims. Thus arose the “Macedonian question” which still arouses partisan passions in the southern Balkan region: were the ancient Macedonians Greek or were they not?
One of the approaches scholars have made to try to answer this question is through archaeological data. If it could be somehow proved archaeologically that the ancient Macedonians belonged to the Greek peoples of archaic and classical times (the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE), or that they did not, the Macedonian question would be answered. As a result, a good deal of time and effort has been spent on studying the Macedonian region and its surroundings, in an attempt to show the origin of the ancient Macedonian people. Much has been learned from this archaeological exploration but, despite some confident claims, nothing has been proved about Macedonian origins. In order to establish such proof, we would need to find some clear markers in the archaeological record that could be tied to Macedonian identity: a distinctive style of pottery, for example, or method of disposing of the dead, or technique of house-building. Any such thing that could be traced in archaeological explorations, shown to be distinctively Macedonian, and then linked to other peoples or regions, would make possible a tracing of Macedonian origins and (perhaps) identity. But no distinctive Macedonian marker of this sort exists.
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Macedonians did, we know, have some very distinctive features. There was a peculiar, beret-like Macedonian hat called the kausia (ill. 1). There was a distinctive Macedonian shield: small and round, and decorated with medallion-like elements around its rim (ill. 2). Unfortunately, though archaeologists have found images of these Macedonian features on gravestones, coins, and the like from the fourth century and later, there is no trace of them before the fifth century. It would be even better if we could find inscriptions mentioning the presence of Macedonians, either in Greek or in a non-Greek language. But again, archaeology has not found such inscriptions earlier than the late fifth century. The results of archaeological exploration, full of interest as they are, do not help settle the Macedonian question. What we see is that the southern Balkan region was, in the first half of the first millennium BCE, home to various groups of people who had similar material culture, no doubt learning from and influencing each other, moving about the Pindus and Rhodopi ranges and their upland plateaus, or down into their neighboring coastal plains. Who these people or peoples were can only be determined, however, when we start to get written records. And those written records were produced by Greeks, beginning about 750 BCE.
1. Coin of Bactrian-Greek ruler Antimachus wearing a Macedonian kausia
(Author’s photo, taken at Metropolitan Museum, NY)
2. Coin of Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas showing Macedonian shield with head of Pan
(Wikimedia Commons from cgb.fr)
The earliest surviving Greek inscriptions, mostly very brief groups of letters, date from the middle and second half of the eighth century; and the earliest surviving works of Greek literature, the Homeric epics, also date from the second half of the eighth century, by most scholars’ reckoning. Nowhere in these early inscriptions do we find mention of Macedonians: as already mentioned, Macedonians are not mentioned in any inscriptions earlier than the fifth century. Nowhere in Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are Macedonians mentioned either. That is especially notable for the Iliad, because in its second book there is to be found a kind of geography of Greece: the so-called Catalogue of Ships. Ostensibly a list of the “heroes” and peoples who fought in the Trojan War, the Catalogue is in fact a kind of survey of Greek communities and peoples, first of central and southern Greece, and then of northern Greece. It probably derives from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, since its pattern shows two itineraries around Greece, both starting from the region of the oracle; and it probably reflects the state of Greece around the end of the eighth century, when the oracle was first becoming important. The survey of northern Greece is basically limited to Thessaly and its immediate surroundings; it does not extend as far north as Macedonia, but then neither does it extend west into Epirus or Acarnania. Similarly, a small appendix, as it were, mentions a few of the Aegean islands, but leaves out most of the Cyclades and all of the Sporades. In other words, the author of the Homeric epics ignores Macedonia, but his geography of Greece is certainly incomplete, however you look at it, so the absence of Macedonia need not imply anything about Macedonian identity.
The first literary reference to Macedonia comes in one of the texts belonging to what is known as the Hesiodic corpus, the so-called Catalogue of Women. Though there is broad consensus among most scholars dating Hesiod around 700, there is considerable uncertainty about the date of this Catalogue, because we cannot be sure whether it was really composed by Hesiod, that is, by the author of the two surviving epic poems that come to us under the name of Hesiod—the Theogony and the Works and Days. The Catalogue of Women survives only in fragments, and while it is attributed to Hesiod in ancient sources, it may in fact have been composed up to 150 years later by an anonymous poet. But whether we call it Hesiod’s work and date it ca. 700, or place it around 550, or somewhere in between, it contains the earliest surviving reference to Macedonia either way.
The first fragments of this Catalogue of Women deal with the origins of the Greek people, specifically with the “eponymous ancestors” of the Greek people. Ancient (and modern) Greeks called themselves “Hellenes” and considered themselves to be descended from a common ancestor named Hellen son of Deucalion (not to be confused with the infamous Helen of Troy, whose name was properly Helene). This kind of genealogical expression of identity is not familiar to us today, except perhaps to readers of the Bible. For there, in the book of Genesis, is to be found a very similar sort of account of the origin of the Israelite people. The patriarch of this people was—we are told—Jacob son of Isaac, who had another name: Israel, after which his descendants were called Israelites. Jacob Israel was the father of twelve sons, the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel: the Levites, named for Jacob’s son Levi; the Judaeans, named for his son Judah, and so on. Just so, Hellen was the ancestor of the Hellenes (Greeks), through his children: his son Aeolus was the ancestor of one great branch of the Greek people, the Aeolians; his son Dorus was the ancestor of the Dorians; and his son Xouthus was the father of Ion, ancestor of the Ionians.
And the war-loving ruler Hellen engendered
Dorus and Xouthus and horse-loving Aeolus.
The sons of Aeolus, law-setting rulers,
Were Cretheus and Athamas and clever Sisyphus,
Unjust Salmoneus and overbold Perieres.
(Catalogue of Women Fragment 4)
Such is the Hesiodic genealogy of the Greek people, or rather a small fragment of it. And it is in this context that we first meet with the name Macedon. Fragments 1 and 3 of the Catalogue of Women offer the following:
Hesiod in the first book of the Catalogue says that Deucalion was the son of Prometheus and Pronoea, and that Hellen was the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
(Scholiast to Apollonius Rhodius 3.1086)
and:
The land of Macedonia was named after Macedon, the son of Zeus and
Thyia, daughter of Deucalion, as Hesiod tells:
She conceived and bore to thunderbolt-loving Zeus
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 collectively 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.
In hard reality, Amyntas III’s rule was precarious at best as he faced challenges from rival claimants to power—a certain Argaeus and another Pausanias are specifically named—and was driven out of all or most of Macedonia on apparently two separate occasions. In order to cling to what power in Macedonia he could, he was forced to make a series of pacts with other strong powers: the dynast Derdas in Elimea, the Illyrians, the powerful city-state of Olynthus in the Chalcidice, the Spartans, and the Athenians. By such pacts, he at times ceded effective control of large parts of his kingdom. Though some thoughtful and excellent attempts have been made to reconstruct the detailed history of Macedonia during these chaotic years—Eugene Borza’s In the Shadow of Olympus is probably the best—the plain truth is that our knowledge of precise reigns, relationships, events, and chronology of Macedonia before the rule of Philip II is as spotty and insecure as Macedonia was unstable. Even after the death of Amyntas III, Macedonia saw three brief and weak rulers during the next decade—Alexander II (ca. 370/69), Ptolemy “of Aloros” (ca. 368–366), and Perdiccas III (366–360)—before Philip II brought stability at last.
3. THE NATURE OF MACEDONIAN SOCIETY
Macedonia, then, was a tribal kingdom or chiefdom—it is unclear whether Macedonian rulers used the title basileus (king) before the time of Alexander the Great, though southern Greek writers certainly gave them that title—ruled by members of a dynastic family called the Argeadae. At one time, there was a widespread belief among ancient historians that Macedonia was a constitutional monarchy: the theory was that the Macedonian people under arms (that is, the adult males of the military class or caste) were the sovereign element in the state, and had the right to freely elect their monarchs, and to try cases of treason. This notion was based on some episodes during the reign of Alexander the Great (336–323) and the time of his Successors. On several occasions when he was proposing to execute important Macedonian leaders, Alexander summoned meetings of his army to inform them of the basis for considering the leaders in question guilty of treason, and to gauge the army’s reaction to these charges. After Alexander’s death, the Macedonian soldiery involved themselves in the disputes among the leading officers as to how the succession should be settled, and the final compromise arrangement that was agreed on was approved by the army by acclamation. These events were worked up by scholars writing in the early twentieth century into a constitutional right for the “Macedonians under arms” to settle the succession and conduct treason trials.
Unfortunately, no example of such a treason trial, or of the Macedonian army choosing a new king, can be pointed to in Macedonian history prior to Alexander the Great. Instead, we hear of plenty of executions and assassinations, and of frequent usurpations of the throne from existing kings by rival claimants of the Argead family, quite often by assassination: rulers who were assassinated included Archelaus, probably Orestes, Amyntas the Little, Pausanias, Alexander II, Ptolemy of Aloros, and perhaps others. The notion of any Macedonian constitution was called into question in a series of important articles in the 1970s and 1980s, and is now no longer much believed in, though it has still a few defenders. What we see instead, in Macedonia, is a region and people loosely held together by allegiance to a ruling family or clan, and a certain sense of common identity. The Argead family was, though, more of a “first among equals” for much of its history. Local regions of Macedonia, especially upper Macedonia, had powerful dynastic families of their own—a family frequently using the name Derdas in Elimea, for example, and a family using the name Arrhabaeus in Lyncus—who were as often rivals and opponents of the ruling Argead family as they were allies or subordinates.
Macedonia was, in effect, a country of large landowners who formed a powerful aristocracy over whom only the strongest rulers could exercise meaningful control. In order to be able to govern, the Argead ruler needed to win the backing of a significant portion of this powerful aristocracy. Those aristocratic landowners who backed the ruler would be designated his hetairoi (companions), and formed an advising council of state (synedrion) helping him to govern. Crucially, they also expressed their backing by riding to the ruler’s support in times of conflict (which was frequent!) with bands of mounted retainers. Before the time of Philip II, Macedonian military power was overwhelmingly based on cavalry, and besides the few hundred cavalrymen a strong ruler could raise himself, he needed the mounted retainers of leading aristocrats in order to field a sizable cavalry army. Equipped with breast-plates and stout lances, Macedonian cavalry were of excellent fighting quality, as Thucydides informs us (2.100). But even strong Macedonian rulers could seldom put more than six or seven hundred cavalry in the field—only with allied forces from neighboring Elimea or the Chalcidice could forces over a thousand strong be mobilized—and the plain truth is that cavalry did not rule the battlefields of ancient Greece: heavily armed infantry did.
Ancient cavalry, before the time of the later Roman Empire, lacked the built-up saddles and stirrups that gave medieval and early modern cavalry a secure seat on their mounts, enabling them to function as shock troops. Ancient cavalrymen, the Macedonians included, rode either bareback, or with at most a blanket between them and their horses. Their seat on their horses therefore depended on their ability to grip with their thighs, and was always rather insecure at best. Any major impact was liable to unseat the rider, so it was not possible for ancient cavalrymen to charge into enemies with “couched lances” in the style of medieval jousters: thrusts at the enemy were made by swinging the arm, and had only the force of the cavalryman’s arm and upper-body strength behind them; and even such thrusts carried the danger of unseating. Furthermore, horses will not charge into a stationary obstacle they can see no way over or around. Disciplined infantry able to present and maintain a solid and unflinching formation in the face of a cavalry charge would thus see the impetus of the charge falter and dissipate as the horses got close enough to see that they could not leap over the mass of men confronting them, nor pass through gaps that did not exist. As their horses pulled up, cavalry were limited to riding along the front of the disciplined infantry formation, hurling insults and, if equipped with them, javelins, but doing little damage. Disciplined phalanxes of southern Greek hoplites (heavily armored infantry: see ill. 3) knew this very well, and were consequently little troubled by cavalry charges.
What this means for Macedonia is that even strong rulers who could reliably mobilize relatively large cavalry forces of six to eight hundred could not compete when confronted by large and well-disciplined infantry forces, especially the hoplite phalanxes of the city-state Greeks. Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans were thus able to intervene effectively in Macedonia almost at will; and when sufficiently unified (as in the Olynthian League of the early fourth century) even the colonial city-states of the Chalcidice could be more than a match for the rulers of Macedonia. Macedonian cavalry were very effective in the open, hit-and-run style of warfare of northern Greece and the southern Balkan region, where the large plains and plateaus gave ample room to maneuver and infantry forces tended to be lightly armed and poorly disciplined. In this style of warfare, the cavalry dominated the field of battle, and the infantry were present largely to provide support to the free-wheeling cavalry. Macedonian rulers could mobilize thousands of light infantry of this sort, but we can see from the descriptions of Macedonian campaigning provided by Thucydides and Xenophon that they were ill disciplined and ineffective when confronted by southern Greek heavy infantry, or even by more numerous and motivated Illyrian or Thracian armies. This explains the basic features of Macedonian history as we know it: strong rulers like Alexander I and Archelaus, who could establish their authority over the Macedonian aristocracy, were able to dominate Macedonia and compete very effectively against neighboring tribes and peoples, but were no match for the Persians or the southern Greek powers; weaker rulers, however, faced chronic instability due to their inability to enforce the submission of local Macedonian dynastic families, and that domestic weakness made them almost helpless in the face of outside interventions, not only by southern Greek hoplite armies, but even by Illyrian and Thracian forces.
3. Greek hoplites on Attic vase in Athens Archaeological Museum
(Wikimedia Commons photo by Grant Mitchell)
With its dominant class of aristocratic families owning most of the land, Macedonia was a highly stratified society, with a rather small elite class of wealthy landowners, a large population of poor people dependent in various ways on the rich, and only a very small “middling” element between the two. Cities had not developed down to 400 BCE, and people lived in a few smallish towns and—for the most part—villages in the countryside. In the late fifth and early fourth centuries at any rate, when we start to have some evidence, we see the wealthy landowning class living in a style that resembles that of the heroes of Homeric epic. That may to some degree have been a matter of imitation: Homer was very popular in Macedonia, as the names drawn from the Homeric epics, referred to above, indicate. Macedonian rulers and other great leaders were surrounded by bands of retainers called hetairoi or companions, just like Homeric heroes. And like Homeric heroes they spent a great part of their time and energy on fighting, hunting, and feasting. Hunting helped to provide the meat for the feasts the Macedonian aristocrats enjoyed: boar, deer, hare, fowl of various sorts, and other game animals were abundant in the marshes, woods, and hills of Macedonia, and a man’s worth in this society was in large part measured by his hunting skills. The few remains of elaborate art surviving from this period of Macedonia often depict the hunt, and there are numerous anecdotes of leading Macedonians hunting. Together with the prevalence of herding in the economy, this meant that meat-eating was much more common in Macedonia than in southern Greece, at least among the wealthy, and the meat-rich diet may help to explain a feature often commented on by southern Greek writers: many of the Macedonian elite were particularly large and beefy men. Philip II’s marshal Parmenio was a big man, as was Alexander the Great’s beloved companion Hephaestion. Among Alexander’s Successors, Lysimachus was strong enough to have once won a “cage fight” against a lion; in later life he liked to show off his scars from the fight. Seleucus, we are told, once stopped a rampaging bull with his bare hands. Demetrius was heroically tall. Biggest of all, Antigonus the One-Eyed was a huge and intimidating figure, bulky and scarred as well as immensely tall.
These men were heavy drinkers at their feasts too. Stories of drunkenness at the feasts abound, and with drunkenness went disorder and not infrequent violence. Philip II’s assassination was, according to the stories we have, in part at least motivated by insults and violence inflicted on one of his guard officers during a drunken feast; at the feast for Philip’s last (seventh) wedding a drunken brawl erupted between the uncle of the bride, Alexander, and Philip himself; and Alexander once killed one of his officers at a feast in a fit of drunken rage. To the Macedonian aristocracy all of this was just manly exuberance: after all, Homer’s heroes had behaved very similarly. To southern Greeks in their city-states, who had long left behind the kind of life depicted in Homer, the manners and lifestyle of the Macedonians seemed primitive and uncivilized. Some of the Macedonian elite recognized this themselves: the Macedonian rulers Archelaus and Philip II strove to introduce Athenian culture and manners at their courts, and Alexander once commented to southern Greek intellectuals at a feast that they must feel as if they were surrounded by beasts in the company of the boisterous Macedonians.
The lifestyle of poor Macedonians was, of course, very different, but it has gone largely unrecorded by our sources, who themselves came exclusively from the elite class. There is one relatively late source that does have a few words to say about it: the historian Arrian in his account of the reign of Alexander the Great.
“When Philip came to power over you, you were indigent wanderers, most of you wearing animal hides and herding a few sheep in the mountains, and fighting in defense of them poorly against neighboring Illyrians and Triballians and Thracians; but he gave you cloaks to wear instead of hides, brought you down from the mountains into the plains, made you a match in battle for the foreigners along your borders … he made you city-dwellers and organized you with proper laws and customs …” (Arrian Anabasis 7.9.2).
These words are said to have been spoken by Alexander in a harangue to his rebellious Macedonian soldiers at Opis in 325/4. Though we can’t be sure that Alexander said just this, the words at the very least represent the view of Macedonian conditions held by Arrian, a well-educated and well-informed Greek historian writing in the second century CE, based on sources (now lost) that were contemporary or near contemporary to Philip and Alexander, such as the fourth-century BCE historians Marsyas of Pella and Theopompus of Chios. The lifestyle of the poor depicted here does make sense: shepherding on a seasonal transhumance basis—that is, moving the flocks between highland pastures in summer and lowland in winter—has been a very common way of life in central and northern Greece all the way into the twentieth century. So the notion that a large part, perhaps even a majority of poor Macedonians made a living by animal husbandry, focused especially on sheep and goats, seems quite plausible. The seasonal movements between different regions made the building of cities unnecessary as well as impossible with the limited resources available. This kind of movement helps to explain the links between the otherwise separate regions of “upper” and “lower” Macedonia. And a population of poor pastoralists, dressed in skins, lacking permanent settlements, and living largely hand to mouth, the prey of stronger and more settled neighboring peoples, accords with what we know of early Macedonian history.
Herein lay the weakness of Macedonia: it was not that resources were lacking, it was that the socio-economic conditions of Macedonia did not permit the diffusion of wealth down the social scale to produce a well-to-do middle class, to enable the development of cities, to allow for a disciplined army of well-equipped infantry to be raised. Macedonia was rich, but most Macedonians were poor. Most Macedonians were dependent serfs, and so Macedonia itself was often at the mercy of stronger neighboring powers. The Macedonian aristocracy was strong, but the Macedonian rulers and people were correspondingly weak, and so Macedonia was weak. But for all that, the resources of Macedonia, human and material, created the potential for strength under the right conditions.
4. THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF MACEDONIA
The inability of Macedonian rulers to mobilize effective infantry armies was not due to any lack of manpower. Macedonia was, by the standards of classical Greece, a large country, with expansive and well-watered agricultural plains and plateaus, capable of sustaining a substantial population. Estimating that population is difficult for any period of Macedonian history, due to the absence of reliable statistics of any sort, but especially so for early Macedonia—before the reign of Philip II, that is—since we don’t even know where exactly the boundaries of Macedonia were at any given time. The territory of the greater Macedonia created by Philip II covered at least over 30,000 km2, which at a standard population density for the ancient world of some 40 persons per km2 would give a population of some 1.2 million. If we reduce that territory by half, and assume a rather low population density of 30 per km2, we arrive at a figure of some 450,000 as a conservative estimate for the population of pre-Philip Macedonia. A ruler strong enough to impose his authority over even this “smaller Macedonia” would thus have had ample manpower resources in principle: by comparison, the population of Athens at the height of her power and success in around 440 BCE has never been suggested to have been greater than 250,000.
With a relatively large territory and population (compared to the city-states of southern Greece), Macedonia had the potential to be a strong power, and it had other important resources besides land and people. As mentioned above, the land of Macedonia was well-watered. Water was a scarce and important commodity in ancient Greece, because Greece is a rather arid country with relatively low annual rainfall, providing barely enough water resources to make agriculture viable in an average rainfall year. The famous older civilizations of the ancient world, in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt, relied on very large and perennially flowing rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt—to provide plentiful water for agriculture via irrigation. In most of Greece, the small rivers and streams dry up completely after the winter/spring rains, leaving the country dry and parched in summer and autumn. Agriculture by irrigation was not possible, therefore, leaving farmers to practice “dry-farming,” in which the crops are dependent on rainfall for watering, and the growing season is during the winter/spring rainy season. But in northern Greece, rainfall was more abundant than in southern Greece, and more importantly winter snows covered the heights of the Pindus and Rhodopi massifs, providing a summer melt run-off that kept northern rivers flowing year round. Macedonia was particularly favored in this regard, with the large rivers Haliacmon, Axius, and Strymon providing year-round water, and several smaller rivers—the Loudias and the Echedorus (modern Gallicus)—supplementing them, as well as numerous streams and springs. So not only did Macedonia have, along with Thessaly, the largest agricultural plains in Greece, but these plains were well watered all year round. Consequently, Macedonia was one of the two regions of ancient Greece (along with Thessaly again) that was not only invariably self-sufficient in its grain supply, but was capable of producing a surplus available for export.
Most of Greece was severely lacking in forestation in antiquity, as Plato for example noted; and yet the cities of Greece required large supplies of timber for their building activities, and especially for their crucial ship-building. Here again Macedonia was particularly favored: the slopes of the Pindus and Rhodopi foothills, and of the Cholomon range in the northern Chalcidice, were heavily forested, particularly in the varieties of evergreens suited to ship-building purposes. Macedonia was, thus, one of the most important suppliers of timber to classical Greece, and the only one in Greece itself. The timber resources of Macedonia were by tradition a monopoly of the ruler, who determined what timber might be extracted and by whom, and who derived a potentially large income from this. Under strong rulers, then, timber was a source of wealth and strength. But timber could also be a curse: it was the timber resources of Macedonia that led the Athenians to intervene constantly in the internal affairs of Macedonia, and to seek to control (often very effectively) the ports along the Macedonian coast. These ports—Pydna and Methone on the western shore of the Thermaic Gulf, and Therme on the eastern side—were in any case not strictly Macedonian cities, but colonies founded from southern Greece, in part no doubt with access to timber in mind. Thus the very timber that was a valuable resource to the Macedonians, was also a contributing cause of the weakness of most Macedonian rulers and their inability to control Macedonia’s coast and ports.
Another important natural resource of Macedonia was metals: iron and copper, silver and gold were all mined in various parts of Macedonia and its immediate environs, offering a significant source of wealth to the ruler strong enough to assert control. The utilitarian metals iron and copper were mined in a number of places throughout Greece. In the Macedonian region, mining in the Cholomon range of the northern Chalcidice was particularly significant for these metals, but not much is known about it, unfortunately. We are better informed about the sources of the precious metals which, in the form of coinage, played a crucial role in the economic life of ancient Greece. Mining silver and gold was, like the extraction of timber, controlled by the ruler of Macedonia, and was a key source of wealth (and thus potentially of power). The suggestively named Echedorus (literally “gift-holder”) River was a significant source of gold, which was panned from its sandy bed. Important silver mines were located in the nearby Dysoron mountain range from which Alexander I drew an income, as Herodotus tells us (5.17), of one silver talent per day. The Cholomon range in the northern Chalcidice was an important source of silver and gold: mining there seems to have been begun by the mid-fourth century, though it is not clear whether it pre-dated the reign of Philip II. Silver was also mined extensively in the region of Mount Pangaeum, between the rivers Strymon and Nestus, where the Thasians had founded a colony named Crenides. Philip II later re-founded this city as Philippi and began extensive and highly remunerative gold-mining operations in the region in addition to the silver. Access to, and ideally control of these mines and the wealth they produced would enable a strong Macedonian ruler to fund a variety of projects, such as building forts and cities, and building up his military forces. It was clearly this wealth which helped Alexander I to extend the boundaries of Macedonia during his reign, and enabled Archelaus to build fortifications and roads, and to better equip his army.
Macedonia, then, had the potential in manpower, in agricultural resources, and in wealth derived from timber and mining, to be a powerful state; and yet it remained until the advent of Philip II a weak and unimportant backwater, peripheral to the history of the Greek and near-eastern great powers. The cause of this weakness was clearly the Macedonian way of life: like their neighbors to the south, the Thessalians, the Macedonians never developed large cities and the city-state way of life that was found elsewhere in Greece. Instead, as we have seen, a traditional landed aristocracy maintained dominance over the region—socially, economically, and politically—with a way of life that centered around horse rearing and riding, hunting, and warfare: hence the popularity noted above of names associated with horses, victory, and war. We are told, for example, that though the Macedonian aristocracy adopted the city-state Greek custom of reclining on couches at dinner, only men who had achieved the feat of killing a wild boar without using a hunting net were permitted to recline. Those who had not achieved this feat had to sit at dinner, as women and children did (Athenaeus 18a). Since we know that the symposium—the upper-class drinking party with groups of men reclining on couches after dinner, drinking wine and entertaining each other with talk, song, and party games—was a key part of Macedonian social life, men whose hunting skills were deficient had this fact rubbed in their faces at every social occasion, with the couches debarred to them. Further, Aristotle informs us (Politics 1324b) that in early Macedonia a man was not permitted to wear a belt until he had killed an enemy in war. In this emphasis on riding, drinking, hunting, and fighting, the Macedonian aristocracy was similar, to be sure, to many other aristocracies known to us: in classical Greece, the Spartiates had the same interests, for example; in more modern times, the English aristocracy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could be pointed to.
Most similar to the Macedonians, though, were clearly their contemporary neighbors, the Thessalians. There too the landowning aristocracy were great riders of horses, great cavalry fighters, keen hunters and symposiasts. There too, cities developed only late (in the fifth and fourth centuries) and never achieved the autonomous status of city-states. And in Thessaly too, warfare centered around the aristocratic cavalry, with the heavy infantry hoplite phalanx failing to develop. Which meant that Thessaly, like Macedonia, was weak compared to the southern Greek city-states, despite its size and wealth. In the city-states of southern Greece and the eastern Aegean, economic and social advances in the sixth and fifth centuries produced a large and well-to-do middle class of independent small farmers, tradesmen, and artisans. These men could afford to equip themselves with the expensive panoply of the hoplite (heavy infantryman), and had free time to devote to military training and warfare on an intermittent basis. For the Greek hoplite was a citizen militiaman who served his community as a warrior at his own expense and only when needed; and this duty of military service was intimately bound up with his rights as a participating citizen in his community. Such an independent and well-to-do middle class was lacking in Thessaly and Macedonia; and it is for this reason that these regions lacked hoplite phalanxes. We know that in Thessaly the majority of the population lived on the landed estates of the aristocracy, farming those lands for their aristocratic lords, and existing in a slave-like status akin to that of the helots of Sparta or the serfs of medieval Europe: these Thessalian serfs were known as penestai. It seems clear that the majority of the Macedonian population, too, lived in a serf-like condition, as dependants on the estates of the aristocracy: it has been estimated that as many as three in five Macedonians were essentially serfs like the Thessalian penestai, and that may even be an underestimate. Even those Macedonians outside the aristocracy who were free and independent were for the most part not well-to-do, if we can believe our sources.
This, then, was the land over which Philip II became ruler in the winter of 360/59, and the task he set himself was to raise Macedonia out of this weakness, and to realize at last the potential strength and power that the size and resources of Macedonia had always promised. He was to succeed in this task more spectacularly than even the wildest hopes of his supporters can have imagined, with incalculable consequences for subsequent Greek and western history, as we shall see.