Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
1
Perception of the self and the other: The case of Macedon*
By Pr. Miltiades Hatzopoulos, VII International Symposion on Ancient Macedonia, 2002.
Source: http://macedonia‐evidence.org/identity.html
In my communication to the last Ancient Macedonia symposium on the character of the
ancestral tongue of the Macedonians I cautioned that I did not pretend to solve the
controverted question of the “nationality” of the ancient Macedonians, not only because
language is, at best, only one of the several elements which contribute to the formation of
group identity, but also –and mainly– because such a debate presupposed a previous
response to the question of the nature of “nationality” in ancient Greece, provided of course
that this question is well formulated and admits an effective answer.[1]In the ensuing years
“ethnic” studies, as they are now called,[2] have enjoyed, especially on the other side of the
Atlantic, a wild success comparable only to that of that other New World invention, “gender”
studies.[3] Among recent publications on this subject the collective volume Ancient Perceptions
of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass. and London 2001) edited by Irad Malkin stands out for
its scholarly quality. Several of the included contributions and especially the “Introduction”
and “Greek Ambiguities: Between ‘Ancient Hellas’ and ‘Barbarian Epirus’” by Irad Malkin
himself and “Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of
Greek Ethnicity” by Jonathan Hall, go a long way towards satisfying the condition I had laid
down, to wit that the nature of Greek “nationality” be previously explored. Although a
certain conformism of most contributors in their unreserved adoption of the “politically
correct” antiessentialist view, which reduces group identities to mere inventions constructed
on pure discourse, needs to be watered down,[4] the result is impressive, and Jonathan Hall’s
paper in particular sets the parameters within which the question of the ancient Macedonian
identity, which interests us here, can be approached.
Hall challenges the view that Macedonia was marginal or peripheral in respect to a Greek
centre or core, for the simple reason that such a Greek hard core never existed, since
“‘Greekness’ is constituted by the totality of multifocal, situationally bound, and self‐
conscious negotiations of identity not only between poleis and ethne but also within them”,
and because a view such as this “assumes a transhistorically static definition of
Greekness”.[5] As he argues at greater length in his monograph,[6] in the fifth century,
mainly as a consequence of the Persian Wars, the definition of Greek identity evolved from an
“aggregative” noninclusive conception based on fictitious descent from the eponymous
Hellen and expressed in forged genealogies (which may leave outside not only Macedonians
and Magnetes, but also other goups such as Arcadians or Aitolians) into an “oppositional”
one, turned against out‐groups, relegating thus (fictitious) community of blood to the same
level –if not to an inferior one (vide infra)– as linguistic, religious and cultural criteria. (In this
perspective there is not much sense in opposing a putative compact, homogeneous and
immutable “Greekness” to the contested identities of groups such as the Aitolians, Locrians,
Acarnanians, Thesprotians, Molossians, Chaones, Atintanes, Parauaioi, Orestai,
Macedonians).[7]
Hall proceeds to a penetrating analysis of the shifting definitions of Greekness in Herodotus,
Thucydides and Isocrates, our main sources for the evolution of the concept in the Classical
period. Of Thucydides in particular he writes that, contrary to Herodotus, he did not view
Greeks and barbarians “as mutually exclusive categories” but as “opposite poles of a single,
linear continuum.” Thus, the inhabitants of north‐western Greece “are ‘barbarian’ not in the
sense that their cultures, customs, or behavior are in direct, diametrical opposition to Greek
norms but rather in the sense that their seemingly more primitive way of life makes them
Hellènes manqués.”[8]
Finally, not only he but also I. Malkin in his introduction and Rosalind Thomas in her
contribution “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus”, which contains a section
on the Macedonians, stress the importance of religion, or rather of cults[9] (“common shrines
of the gods and sacrifices”).[10]
J. Hall in his conclusions confirms my doubts about the possibility of answering the question
concerning the “nationality” of the ancient Macedonians. “To ask whether the Macedonians
‘really were’ Greek or not in antiquity“, he writes, “is ultimately a redundant question given
the shifting semantics of Greekness between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C. What cannot
be denied, however, is that the cultural commodification of Hellenic identity that emerged in
the fourth century might have remained a provincial artifact, confined to the Balkan
peninsula, had it not been for the Macedonians”.[11]
This finely balanced verdict is all the more praiseworthy in that it does not hesitate
explicitly[12] or implicitly to contradict[13] authoritative views current in the American
academic establishment,[14] or even to modify opinions previously expressed by the author
himself.[15] Moreover, it was partly attained through sheer reasoning and intuition, as crucial
evidence was not accessible to him.
Epigraphic data of capital linguistic interest which have become available only after the
Center of Hellenic Studies Colloquium of 1997[16] and important recent monographs and
articles which seem not to have been accessible in the United States,[17] if known, would
have provided additional arguments and prevented some minor inaccuracies.[18] It is worth
noting, however, that although Hall[19] fully shares Malkin’s view on the overriding
importance of religion and in particular of common shrines and sacrifices,[20] he does not
exploit the unique evidence of the theorodokoi catalogues,[21] which precisely list the Greek
states visited by the theoroi, the sacred envoys, of the panhellenic sanctuaries and invited to
participate through official delegations in sacrifices and contests celebrated in those
sanctuaries.[22]
It has long been established that the theoroi of the Panhellenic sanctuaries, did not visit mere
urban centres, whatever their importance, but only states, be they of the polis or of the ethnos
variety, for their mission consisted in announcing (ἐπαγγελία) the sacred truce and the
oncoming contests to the state authorities.[23]
Since only Hellenes participated in the Panhellenic sacrifices and contests,[24] it is obvious
that the theoroi visited only communities which considered themselves and were considered
by the others as Greek. Starting with one of the oldest catalogues, that of Epidauros, dating
from 360, and continuing with those of Nemea, Argos, and Delphi, the Macedonian kingdom
is never absent from their surviving North Aegean sections. At such an early date in the
fourth century as that of the first one it cannot be claimed that the Macedonian presence was
the result of the kingdom’s political and military might. Nor can it be said that the invitation
concerned only the “Greek” royal family, for, as we have already stressed, it was addressed
not to individuals but to states.[25]
One might object the “post‐Philippian“ date of the Nemea, Argos and Delphi lists. It is true
that none of the three is earlier than the last quarter of the fourth century, but even the most
recent one, the late third century great list of the theorodokoi of Delphi, following a long
established tradition, includes, with very few and obvious exceptions, only the coastal,
ἀρχαιόθεν ἑλληνίδες cities of Asia.[26] Still for the sake of argument, we can start by
considering only the list of Epidauros, which dates back to around 360, years before it could
be argued that Macedonia by its meteoric rise had imposed itself on the terrorised personnel
of the panhellenic sanctuaries.[27]
The Epidaurian list, in its surviving sections, on a first stele, starting from Megara moves
through Attica and Boeotia to Thessaly, Macedonia, Chalkidike and Thrace. On a second stele
are listed the theorodokoi of Corinth, Delphi, Ozolian Lokris, Aitolia, Akarnania, Sicily and
southern Italy. Of particular interest are the Macedonian (including Chalkidike) and Epirotic
sections. In the first, after Thessalian Homolion, one reads the names of the theorodokoi of
Pydna, Methone, Macedonia, Aineia, Dikaia, Poteidaia, Kalindoia, Olynthos, Apollonia,
Arethousa, Arkilos, Amphipolis, Berga, Tragila, Stagira, Akanthos, Stolos, Aphytis, Skiona
and Menda.
Fortunately we possess a contemporary document describing the same region, the work of
Pseudo‐Skylax.[28] He describes the Macedonians as an ethnos after the Peneios, mentions the
Thermaic Gulf, and lists Herakleion as the first city of Macedonia, then Dion, Pydna a Greek
city, Methone a Greek city, the river Haliakmon, Aloros a city, the river Lydias, Pella a city
and a palace in it and a waterway up the Lydias to it, the river Axios, the river Echedoros,
Therme a city, Aineia a Greek city, Cape Pallene, and after an enumeration of the cities of
Chalkidike, Arethousa a Greek city, Lake Bolbe, Apollonia a Greek city, and “many other
cities of Macedonia in the interior”.
As U. Kahrstedt was the first to understand, the distinction between “Greek cities” and
“Macedonian cities” or simple “cities” is not ethnological but political. Independent cities are
qualified as Greek, while the cities remaining within the Macedonian kingdom have to
content themselves with the simple qualification of “cities”.[29]
The list of the theorodokoi of Epidauros confirms the nature of this distinction, for in the
section west of the head of the Thermaic Gulf it enumerates only three states: Pydna,
Methone and Macedonia. Thus the first, although a city originally Macedonian,[30] is called a
“Greek city”, just like the originally Eretrian colony of Methone, because at the time they
were both independent from the kingdom and members of the Second Athenian League,
while the equally Macedonian Herakleion, Dion, Aloros and Pella were simply styled as
“cities”. The Epidaurian theorodokoi visited only “Macedonia”, that is to say the capital of the
state, presumably Pella or Aigeai, not because this was the only Greek city of the kingdom
and even less because they intended to invite the king only –the invitation, as we have seen,
was extended to communities not to persons–, but because there was the seat of the
authorities to whom the epangelia had to be made, as at that time, before the reforms of Philip
II, the several Macedonian cities did not possess sufficient political latitude to qualify as
autonomous cities and to be eligible to participate as such in panhellenic festivals.[31]
Similarly the section Epirus lists the states of Pandosia, Kassopa, Thesprotoi, Poionos,
Korkyra, Chaonia, Artichia, Molossoi, Ambrakia, Argos (of Amphilochia). Of these the Elean
colony of Pandosia and the Corinthian colonies of Korkyra and Ambrakia represent the
southern Greek element, while Kassopa, the Thesprotoi, the Molossoi, Chaonia and Argos the
“native” Epirote one. (Nothing is known of Poionos and Artichia). The important point is that
colonial cities, Epirote cities and Epirote ethne, republican and monarchical alike, are
considered equally Greek and invited to the great panhellenic sacrifices at Epidauros.
The same picture emerges from the slightly later lists of Argos[32] and Nemea[33] and from
the late third century list of Delphi, the main difference being that after Philip II’s reforms the
several Macedonian cities take the place of the central Macedonian authorities,[34] while
Epirus wavers between a single centralised and several civic representations.
A piece of evidence which until very recently had gone unnoticed is the actual presence of
Macedonians and Epirotes in the panhellenic sanctuaries, which is first attested in the Archaic
period, but increases dramatically in the second half of the fourth century. Alexander I was
neither the first nor the only Macedonian active at a panhellenic sanctuary in the fifth
century. He had been preceded at Delphi by Macedonians from Pieria, and both his fifth
century successors Perdikkas II and Archelaos participated in panhellenic festivals at
Olympia, Delphi or Argos.[35]
It is in this context that we can properly understand some other facts that have puzzled
modern historians, such as the participation of Macedonian envoys in the panhellenic
conference held at Sparta in 371[36] or the inclusion of the Macedonian ethnos –and not just
king Philip– in the Delphic Amphictiony.[37] Under these conditions Demosthenes’ outrage
at the presence of Philip II and his Macedonians at Delphi loses much of its candour and
credibility.[38] As J. Hall rightly observes, the rhetorical contrast between Greeks and
Macedonians in the age of Alexander, by which some American scholars set much store, “has
military‐political rather than ethnic connotations”.[39] A case in point is the list of Alexander
the Great’s trierarchs in Arrian’s Indica, which E. N. Borza, labouring to demonstrate the un‐
Hellenic character of the ancient Macedonians, adduced inter alia in an article in honour of E.
Badian.[40]
“The men appointed by Alexander to command the Hydaspes River”, he writes, “are named
according to their ethnicity: ‘these were the Macedonians altogether: as for the Greeks ....’
(houtoi men hoi sympantes Makedones, Hellenon de...). Arrian concludes by mentioning the
appointment of a single Persian, thus preserving the distinction among Macedonians, Greeks,
and others, as mentioned elsewhere (2.17.4 and 7.30.2‐3). I regard the men...de usage as
significant”.[41]
The list of the trierarchs is admittedly an interesting document and the μὲν.....δὲ... usage is
indeed significant, provided they are accurately reported and correctly analysed. In reality, to
the μὲν of the Macedonians are opposed not one but two δὲ (Οὗτοι μὲν οἱ ξύμπαντες
Μακεδόνες. Ἑλλήνων δὲ.....Κυπρίων δὲ....), followed by the single Persian (ἦν δὲ δὴ καὶ
Πέρσης...). Thus Arrian, or rather his source, distinguishes (if we leave aside the odd
Persian), between three groups: the Macedonians, the Greeks and the Cypriots. The next
point which arises concerns the exact nature of this distinction. Borza has no doubt that it
relates to the “ethnicity” of these men. He explains that he uses this term “to describe a
cultural identity that is near the meaning of nationality, but without the necessity of
membership in a political organism...” and proposes to use as criteria “language,
contemporary perceptions, historical perceptions, and cultural institutions”.[42]
As I recently wrote in a different context,[43] the case of the Macedonians is bound to remain
paradoxical as long as it is viewed by itself. I then had in mind the parallel case of Epirus,
which was geographically excluded from Greece and whose inhabitants from the time of
Thucydides to that of Strabo were qualified as barbarians, even from the linguistic point of
view, although they undoubtedly spoke a Greek dialect that we have no difficulty in
understanding, enjoyed Greek institutions and shared, as we have seen, the same shrines and
sacrifices and participated in the same panhellenic events as the other Greeks.[44] In their
case, the reason for the occasional and paradoxical denial of their Hellenism is probably to be
sought in the absence before the Hellenistic period of urban centres deserving the name and
status of poleis.[45]The Cypriot case, however, is equally instructive.
An overview of the evidence concerning Cyprus, which I reserve for fuller treatment
elsewhere,[46] would lead us to the conclusion that, whatever the physical appearence of
ancient Cypriots,[47] it did not cast any doubts on the Hellenic origin of the kingdoms of the
island, on the Greek character of the local dialect or on the Hellenic nature of the gods
venerated there with the only –and obvious– exceptions of the Phoenician city of Kition and
of the “autochthonous” one of Amathous.
The Cypriot syllabic script was indeed an obstacle to written communication, but from the
middle of the fourth century the use of the Greek alphabet spreads across the island.[48] For
oral communication the Cypriot dialect probably sounded exotic –then as now– to some –but
not all–[49] Greek speakers from the Aegean area. But then many Greeks were aware of the
existence of other Greeks with uncouth tongues. Did Thucydides not write that the
Eurytanians “speak a most incomprehensible tongue”[50] and has it not been said of the
Eleans that they are “speakers of a barbarous tongue”[51]? Nonetheless, at least as far as
practical policies are concerned, the Greekness of neither of them was ever contested. Sacred
prostitution assuredly shocked more than one Greek. But it was in no way a Cypriot
monopoly. The Epizephyrian Locrians, for instance, reputedly followed the same practice.[52]
The Cypriot kingships, whatever their exact origin and nature, were for most city‐state
Greeks an anomaly. But monarchies had survived in Cyrenaica and the northern fringes of
the Greek world or had reappeared in Sicily. Thus, no single criterion can satisfactorily
explain the exclusion of the Cypriots from the Greek community in the list of Alexander the
Great’s trierarchs, but not from participation in panhellenic sacrifices and contests, as the
theorodokoi lists attest. For, whatever the conditions in earlier periods, it seems that by the last
quarter of the fourth century most Greeks and apparently all foreigners recognised the
Cypriots as Greeks.[53]
The unsatisfactory results of our inquiry oblige us to question the validity of the premisses on
which it was based, to wit that Alexander’s trierarchs “are named according to their
ethnicity”, as Borza thought. An obvious anomaly should have made us suspicious. The list
of the Macedonian trierarchs comprises at least two persons whose impeccable Greek
“ethnicity”[54] the American historian would readily recognise: Nearchos son of Androtimos
and Laomedon son of Larichos hailing respectively from the Cretan city of Lato and the
Lesbian city of Mytilene. Borza makes no mention of this difficulty in his comment on the list,
but attempts to deal with the first case in a note referring to a different context, hesitating
between casting doubts on the reliability of the list[55]and on that of Nearchos’ origin.[56] In
fact, just as the presence of the “forgotten” category of the Cypriots contradicts the alleged
binary opposition between Greeks on the one hand and Macedonians on the other,
discrepancies such as the above belie the supposed “ethnic” character of the list and cannot
be explained, unless the latter reflects “nationality”, “Staatsangehörigkeit”, rather than
“ethnicity”. Borza, who sets great store by the case of Eumenes’ handicap as an “ethnic”
Greek, despite his long years in Macedonian service, could not convincingly argue that
Nearchos and Laomedon and thousands of other Greeks from beyond Olympus ceased to be
“ethnic” Greeks ‐‐ whatever that may mean ‐‐ when they settled in Macedonia.[57]
The explanation of the presence of Nearchos and Laomedon in the Macedonian list is
obvious: contrary to Eumenes, when they moved to Macedonia, they did not simply settle in
the country, but became citizens of Amphipolis and ipso facto also of the Macedonian
Commonwealth.
It is thus more than clear that the trierarchs are not “named according to ethnicity”. The
classification is determined by political criteria. All citizens of Macedonian civic units are
classified as Macedonians, whatever their origin. Who then are the Greeks? Medios son of
Oxythemis from Larissa, Eumenes son of Hieronymos from Kardia, Kritoboulos son of Platon
from Kos, Thoas son of Menodoros and Maiandros son Mandrogenes from Magnesia,
Andron son of Kabeles from Teos. Now, the home cities of these trierarchs share a common
feature: they were all members of the Hellenic League (of which Macedon itself was no part),
Larissa and Kardia from the time of Philip II,[58] Kos and Magnesia and Teos since 332.[59]
On the other hand the kingdoms of Cyprus, which joined Alexander at the siege of Tyre,
never adhered to the League officially styled as “the Hellenes”.
A closer look at other passages collected and adduced by Borza as supposedly revelatory of
the –“ethnic” that is to say, according to him (vide supra), of the cultural– distinction between
Greeks and Macedonians betrays similar difficulties and discrepancies. As M. B. Sakellariou
has aptly stressed, the contrast and occasionally the antagonism between Greeks and
Macedonians in the age of Philip and Alexander, of which the American historian makes so
much, was political and had to a certain extent social causes.[60] In fact the Macedonians
satisfied the criteria of Greekness put forward by the Athenians in their celebrated answer to
the Spartan envoys, as it is reported by Herodotus.[61] Nevertheless, it is equally true that
their Hellenic quality was recurrently disputed, especially when political animosities created
a suitable political environment. For the opposition was political and doubly so, between
polis‐states and an ethnos‐state, as well as between regimes which ideally were democratic and
a reputedly tyrannic monarchy. Thus, even for pro‐Macedonians wanting to dispel legitimate
fears that the Macedonian kings might extend their monarchical regime to the Greek cities, it
was important to dissociate as much as possible the Temenid kingdom from the world of the
polis‐states. This was the reason why Isokrates, eager to reassure his readers that a
Macedonian hegemony was not dangerous for their liberties, insisted that, just as Philip’s
ancestors, knowing that the Greeks could not suffer monarchical regimes, rather than enslave
their fellow citizens, preferred to leave Greece altogether and rule over a different (οὐχ
ὁμοφύλου γένους) people,[62] so Philip himself would not dream of imposing his rule on the
Greeks, but would content himself with reigning over the Macedonians.[63] In this often‐
cited passage the Athenian orator masterfully exploits the implicit correspondence between
the geographical term ἑλληνικὸς τόπος and the ethnic Ἕλλην, from which it derives, in
order to enforce in the mind of his readers the un‐Hellenic character of οἱ ἄλλοι, the subjects
of the Macedonian kings, since for most writers of the Classical and Hellenistic periods[64]
Hellas did not extend geographically beyond the Ambracian Gulf and the river Peneios.[65] It
is not excluded that the Macedonian king himself shared the Athenian orator’s concern, and
that, heeding his advice, he preferred to keep his kingdom completely apart from the Hellenic
League.[66] It should then not come as a surprise that the modern scholars who have best
understood the Macedonian paradox are the nineteenth and early twentieth century
Germans, who were aware of the particular position of Prussia vis‐à‐vis the rest of Germany,
initially outside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and, even after
the abolition of the latter, an entity whose citizens were to be reckoned separately from the
other Germans.[67] Did not Jakob Salomon Bartholdy write in such terms to his brother‐in‐
law Abraham Mendelssohn on 6 February 1817: “Als ich hier (in Neapel) kam, fand ich viele
deutsche und preussische Künstler von entschiedenen Anlagen und Talenten”, and can one
not still in 1990 publish a book under the title Preussen und Deutschland gegenüber dem
Novemberaufstand 1830‐1831? Does not the reluctance of the South German states to submit to
Prussia, and at the same time the Prussian king’s desire to maintain direct and exclusive hold
on his own kingdom, for which reason William I styled himself “Deutscher Kaiser, König von
Preussen” rather than “Kaiser der Deutschen“ in 1871, ring Isocratic echoes?
Abbreviations
Badian, “Greeks” = E. Badian, “Greeks and Macedonians” in Beryl Bar‐Sharrar – E. N. Borza
(ed.), Macedonia and Greece in Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Times (Washington D.C. 1982)
33‐51.
Borza, “Archelaos” = E. N. Borza, “The Philhellenism of Archelaos”, Ancient Macedonia V
(Thessalonike 1993) 237‐44 (= Makedonika 124‐33).
Borza, “Greeks” = E. N. Borza, “Greeks and Macedonians in the Age of Alexander: The
Source Traditions”, in R. W. Wallace – E. M. Harris (eds.), Transitions to Empire. Essays in
Greco‐Roman History, 360‐146 B.C. in Honor of E. Badian (Norman, Okla.‐London 1996) 122‐39.
Daskalakis, Hellenism = Ap. Daskalakis, The Hellenism of the Ancient Macedonians (Thessalonike
1965).
Hall, “Ethnicities” = J. Hall, “Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within
Evolving Greek Identity”, in I. Malkin, (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge,
Mass.‐London 2001) 159‐86.
Hall, “Language”, = J. Hall, “The Role of Language in Greek Ethnicities”, ProcCamPhilSoc 41
(1995) 83‐100.
Hatzopoulos, “Epigraphie” = M. B. Hatzopoulos, “Epigraphie et philologie: récentes
découvertes épigraphiques et gloses macédoniennes dʹHesychius”, CRAI 1998, 1189‐1218.
Hatzopoulos, “Herodotos” = M. B. Hatzopoulos, “Herodotos (VIII 137‐138), the
Manumissions from Leukopetra, and the Topography of the Middle Haliakmon Valley”, The
World of Herodotus (forthcoming).
Hatzopoulos, “Macédonien” = M. B. Hatzopoulos, “Le macédonien: nouvelles données et
théories nouvelles”, Ancient Macedonia VI (Thessalonike 1999) 225‐39.
Hatzopoulos, Institutions = M. B. Hatzopoulos, Macedonian Institutions under the Kings: A
Historical and Epigraphic Study (= «ΜΕΛΕΤΗΜΑΤΑ» 22; Athens 1996).
Malkin, “Ambiguities” = I. Malkin, “Greek Ambiguities: Between ʹAncient Hellasʹ and
ʹBarbarian Epirusʹ”, in I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass.‐
London 2001) 187‐212.
Malkin, “Introduction” = I. Malkin, “Introduction”, in I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of
Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass.‐London 2001) 1‐28.
Mari, Olimpo = Manuela Mari, Al di là dellʹOlimpo: Macedoni e grandi santuari della Grecia dellʹetà
arcaica al primo ellenismo («ΜΕΛΕΤΗΜΑΤΑ» 34; Athens 2002).
Perlman, City = Paula Perlman, City and Sanctuary in Ancient Greece: The Theorodokia in the
Peloponnese (Göttingen 2000).
Thomas, “Ethnicity” = Rosalind Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in
Herodotus”, in I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass.‐
London 2001) 213‐33.
* Abbreviations are listed at the end of this paper. Christine Sourvinou‐Inwood’s important
paper “Greek Perceptions of Ethnicity and the Ethnicity of the Macedonians”, Identità e prassi
nel Mediterraneo greco (Milano 2002), which the author had the kindness to send me, came to
my knowledge too late for inclusion in the present discussion.
[1].Hatzopoulos, “ Macédonien ” 225: « La présente communication ne prétend nullement
résoudre la question tant controversée de la “nationalité “ des anciens Macédoniens. Un tel
débat présuppose une réponse à la question préalable de la nature de la “ nationalité “ dans le
monde grec, à supposer qu’une telle question soit bien posée et qu’elle comporte
effectivement une réponse. Quoi qu’il en soit, il est hors de doute que la langue n’est au
mieux qu’un des éléments qui concourent au sentiment d’appartenance d’ un groupe... ».
[2]. Cf. F.W. Walbank, “Hellenes and Achaeans: ‘Greek Nationality’ Revisited”, Further
Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis (Historia Einzelschriften 138; Stuttgart 2000) 18. F. W. Walbank,
in 1951, still named his relevant article, without any inverted commas, “The Problem of Greek
Nationality”, Phoenix 5 (1951) 41‐60 (= Selected Papers [Cambridge 1985] 1‐19). Is it merely
coincidental that the word “ethnicity” is untranslatable –except as a calque– in languages
such as French or Greek?
[3]. Cf. the rich bibliography in J. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, Cambridge 1997; in I.
Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley, Cal. 1998; and at the end
of each contribution in the collective volume I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek
Ethnicity, Cambridge Mass.‐London 2001. Among the numerous recent works, besides those
already cited, I would also mention the following: Cinzia Bearzot, “La Grecia di Pausania.
Geografia e cultura nella definizione del concetto di Ἑλλάς”, in Marta Sordi (ed.), Geografia e
storiografia nel mondo classico, Milan 1988, 90‐112; Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self‐
Definition through Tragedy, Oxford 1989; Catherine Morgan, “Ethnicity and Early Greek States:
Historical and Material Perspectives”, PCPhS 37 (1991)131‐63; E. N. Borza, “Ethnicity and
Cultural Policy at Alexander’s Court”, AncW 22 (1991) 21‐25 (= Makedonika, Claremont Cal.
1995, 149‐58); Marta Sordi (ed.), Autocoscienza e rappresentazione dei popoli nell’antichità, Milan
1992; P. Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, Oxford‐New York 1993; Catherine
Morgan, “The Origins of Panhellenism”, in Nanno Marinatos – R. Hägg (eds.), Greek
Sanctuaries, London‐New York 1993, 18‐44; A. Giovannini, “Greek Cities and Greek
Commonwealth”, in A. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A. A. Long, A. Stuart (eds.), Images and Ideology:
Self‐Definition in the Hellenistic World, Berkeley‐Los Angeles‐London 1993, 265‐86; J. Hall, “The
Role of Language in Greek Ethnicities”, PCPhS 41 (1995) 83‐100; F. Cassola, “Chi erano i
Greci?”, in S. Settis (ed.), I Greci: Storia, cultura, arte, società, 2.1, Turin 1996, 5‐23; D. Asheri,
“Identità greche, identità greca“, in the same work 2.2, Turin 1997, 5‐26.
[4]. And attracts the ironic scepticism of the editor (p. 1): ʺThe tone of the current writings
about ethnicity, any ethnicity, reflects a ubiquitous antiessentialism. Things have no essence,
no ʺcoreʺ. Ethnicity? There is no such thing, as such, and the key words for discussing it are
now ʺinventionʺ and ʺconstructionʺʺ. (He might have added ʺdiscourseʺ).
[5]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 166.
[6]. Hall, Identity 40‐51; cf. id., “Language” 91‐96.
[7]. As, for instance, E. N. Borza systematically does for the Macedonians. Cf. In the Shadow of
Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon, Princeton, N.J. 19922, 94‐97; 258; 268‐72; 275‐82; id., Before
Alexander: Constructing Early Macedonia. Publications of the Associations of Ancient Historians 6,
Claremont Cal. 1999, 32‐34.
[8]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 169‐72.
[9]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 179, n. 92; Malkin, “Introduction” 6; Thomas, “Ethnicity” 215 and 219.
[10]. Cf. Herod. 8.144.2: αὖτις δὲ τὸ ἑλληνικόν, ἐὸν ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον, καὶ θεῶν
ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα...
[11]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 172.
[12]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 173, n. 8.
[13]. Cf. Hall, “Ethnicities” 171.
[14]. Cf. E. Badian, “Greeks and Macedonians”, in Beryl Bar‐Sharrar – E. N. Borza (eds.),
Macedonia and Greece in Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Times, Washington D.C. 1982, 33‐51;
id., “Herodotus on Alexander I of Macedon: A Study in some Subtle Silences”, in S.
Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography, Oxford 1994, 35‐51; E. N. Borza, In the Shadow of
Olympus. The Emergence of Macedon, Princeton, N.J. 19901; 19922; id., “Ethnicity and Cultural
Policy at Alexander’s Court”, AncW 22 (1991) 21‐25 (= Makedonika 149‐58); id., “The
Philhellenism of Archelaos”, Ancient Macedonia V, Thessalonike 1993, 237‐44 (= Makedonika
124‐33); id., “Greeks and Macedonians in the Age of Alexander: The Source Traditions”, in R.
W. Wallace – E. M. Harris (eds.), Transitions to Empire. Essays in Greco‐Roman History, 360‐146
B.C., in Honor of E. Badian, Norman, Okla.‐London 1996, 122‐39; id., “La Macedonia di Filippo
e i coflitti con le ‘poleis’”, in S. Setis (ed.), I Greci. Storia, Cultura, Arte, Società 2.3, Turin 1998,
21‐46; id., “Macedonia Redux”, in Frances B. Titchener – R. F. Moorton Jr. (eds.), The Eye
Expanded: Life and the Arts in Greco‐Roman Antiquity, Berkeley‐Los Angeles‐London 1999, 249‐
66, and particularly 263, n. 17; P. Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the
Hellenistic Age, Berkeley‐Los Angeles 1990, 3‐5; Sarah B. Pomeroy, S. M. Burstein et al., Ancient
Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History, New York‐Oxford 1999, 373‐75, etc.
[15]. Cf. Hall, Identity 63‐65.
[16]. See C. Brixhe, “ Un ‘nouveau’ champ de la dialectologie grecque : le macédonien ”,
ΚΑΤΑ ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΟΝ. Atti del III Colloquio Internazionale di Dialettologia Greca, A.I.O.N. 19 (1997)
41‐71; Sophia Moschonisioti, A. Ph. Christides, Theodora Glaraki, «Κατάδεσμος ἀπὸ τὴν
Ἀρέθουσα», in A. Ph. Christides – D. Jordan (eds.), Γλῶσσα καὶ μαγεία. Κείμενα ἀπὸ τὴν
ἀρχαιότητα, Athens 1997, 193‐98; E. Voutiras, ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΦΩΝΤΟΣ ΓΑΜΟΙ: Marital Life and
Magic in Fourth Century Pella, Amsterdam 1998; M. B. Hatzopoulos, “ Epigraphie et
philologie : récentes découvertes épigraphiques et gloses macédoniennes d’Hésychius ”;
CRAI 1998, 1189‐1218; id., “ Le Macédonien : nouvelles donnnées et théories nouvelles ”,
Ancient Macedonia V, Thessalonike 1999, 225‐39 ; id., “ ‘L’histoire par les noms’ in
Macedonia ”, in Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence, ProcBritAcad 104 (2ooo) 99‐117;
id., “ La position dialectal du macédonien à la lumière des découvertes épigraphiques
récentes ”, Die alte griechischen Dialekte, ihr Wesen und Werden (forthcoming); id., “ Herodotos
(VIII. 137‐138), the Manumissions from Leukopetra, and the Topography of the Middle
Haliakmom Valley ”,The Word of Herodotus (forthcoming).
[17]. This is the case of much of the fundamental archaeological and epigraphic scholarly
production published in Greece, such as the fourteen volumes of Tὸ ἀρχαιολογικὸ ἔργο στὴ
Μακεδονία καὶ Θράκη, 1‐14 (1987‐2000) series, the volumes of the Ἐπιγραφὲς
Μακεδονίαςseries and the seventeen volumes of the ΜΕΛΕΤΗΜΑΤΑ series devoted to
Macedonia, some of which have a direct bearing on the present subject.
[18]. For instance, the epigraphic discoveries mentioned in the previous notes have greatly
reduced the importance of glosses and have rendered redundant much of the relevant
discussion. In particular, dreptos (p. 162) is a ghost (see Anna Panayotou, «Γλωσσικὲς
παρατηρήσεις σὲ μακεδονικὲς ἐπιγραφές», Ancient Macedonia IV, Thessalonike 1986, 417).
Strabo 7.7.8 (p. 163) does not say that Macedonians, Epirotes and Illyrians shared some
dialectal commonalities. In fact he says two different things: 1) that some extend the term
Macedonia to the whole country (west of Upper Macedonia) as far as Corcyra, because the
inhabitants of this area (to wit the Epirotes opposite Corcyra and not the Illyrians, who lived
farther north, beyond the Ceraunian mountains), use similar hairstyles, dress and dialect (cf.
R. Baladié, Strabon, Géographie. Livre VII, Paris 1989, 228, n. 4 ad locum; 2) some of the Epirotes
inhabiting this area are bilingual (presumably they spoke Greek as well as Illyrian).
Epigraphic evidence accumulating over the years has rendered Tarn’s list of divinities and its
discussion (p. 164) irrelevant. Thaulos, Gyga, Zeirene, Xandos, Bedu, Arantides, Sauadai,
Sabazius never occur in epigraphic documents; Totoës, attested once in Roman times, is an
imported Egyptian deity (cf. H. Seyrig, “ Tithoës, Totoës et le Sphinx panthée ”, Annales du
Service des Antiquités dʹEgypte 35 (1935) 197‐202; Ch. Picard, “ La sphinge tricéphale, dite
ʹpanthéeʹ, dʹAmphipolis et la démonologie égypto‐alexandrine ”, CRAI 1957, 35‐46; id., “ La
sphinge tricéphale dite ʹpanthéʹ, dʹAmphipolis et la démonologie égypto‐alexandrine ”,
Mon.Piot 50 (1958) 49‐84; Gazoria is a local epithet from the name of the eastern Macedonian
city of Gazoros (cf. M.B. Hatzopoulos, “ Artémis Agrotéra, Gazoreitis et Bloureitis: une déesse
thrace en Macédoine ”, Festschrift Ivan Marazov [forthcoming]). Judging from dedicatory
inscriptions, the most popular gods of the Macedonians were Zeus, Herakles, Asklepios,
Dionysos and a feminine deity variously appearing as Demeter, the Mother of the Gods,
Artemis, Pasikrata, Ennodia etc. Catherine Trümpy’s excellent monograph, Untersuchungen zu
den altgriechischen Monatsnamen und Monatsfolgen (Heidelberg 1997) 262‐65, has made obsolete
previous discussions of the Macedonian calendar. For the months Peritios, Dystros and
Hyperberetaios in particular, cf. Hatzopoulos, “ Macédonien “ 237‐39 ; id., “ Epigraphie ”
1202‐1204. Klodones and Mimallones (p. 176, n. 54) have nothing to do with Thrace; see M. B.
Hatzopoulos, Cultes et rites de passage en Macédoine («ΜΕΛΕΤΗΜΑΤΑ» 19; Athens 1994) 73‐85.
On the political system of the Molossi (p. 166), cf. the divergent view of J. K. Davies, “A
Wholly Non‐Aristotelian Universe: The Molossians as Ethnos, State, and Monarchy”, in R.
Brock‐St. Hodkinson (eds), Alternatives to Athens: Varieties of Political Organization and
Community in Ancient Greece, Oxford 2000, 258: «...so far from being un‐Greek, as supercilious
southerners thought, their world shows clear signs of similarity to that of the communities of
southern Aegean and proto‐urban Greece in the archaic period». Concerning the Aiolian
ancestry of the Macedonians in Hellanicus’ version, as opposed to the Dorian one of the royal
dynasty (p. 169), it is not impossible that this Lesbian historian’s invention may have
stemmed from the contrast between the Upper Macedonian origin of the Argeads and the
north‐Thessalian one of the Lower Macedonian commoners; cf. Hatzopoulos, “Herodotos”.
[19]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 72, n. 92.
[20]. Malkin, “Introduction” 5‐6.
[21]. See now Paula Perlman, City and Sanctuary in Ancient Greece. The Theodorokia in the
Peloponnese, Göttingen 2000. For the Delphic catalogues, awaiting for the new edition by J.
Ouhlen, Les Théarodoques de Delphes (doctoral dissertation, Université de Paris X, 1992), see A.
Plassart, “ Inscriptions de Delphes. La liste des théarodoques ”, BCH 45 (1921) 1‐85. Its date in
the late third century, first proposed by G. Daux, “ Liste delphique de théarodoques ”; REG
62 (1949) 12‐27, has been confirmed by a series of new discoveries; cf. Ph. Gauthier, Nouvelles
inscriptions de Sardes II, Geneva 1989, 149‐50 ; M. B. Hatzopoulos, “ Un prêtre d’Amphipolis
dans la grande liste des théarodoques de Delphes ”, BCH 115 (1991) 345‐47 ; D. Knoepfler,
“ Le temple de Métrôon de Sardes et ses inscriptions ”; Museum Helveticum 50 (1993) 26‐43.
[22]. Cf. Hatzopoulos, Institutions 472‐76. This has been admirably done now by Manuela
Mari in her monograph Al di là dell’Olimpo: Macedoni e grandi santuari della Grecia dallʹetà
arcaica al primo ellenismo («ΜΕΛΕΤΗΜΑΤΑ» 34; Athens 2002).
[23]. See in particular L. Robert, “ Villes de Carie et d’Ionie dans la liste des théarodoques de
Delphes ”, BCH 70 (1946) 510 (= OMS I 331); id., Documents dʹAsie Mineure, Paris 1987, 292‐95;
cf. BullEpigr 1980, 297; cf. Perlman, City 32‐33; ead., «Θεωροδοκοῦντες ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν.
Panhellenic Epangelia and Political Status», in M.H. Hansen, Sources for the Ancient Greek City‐
State, Copenhagen 1995, 113‐47).
[24]. This widely attested fact (cf. Herod. 5.22.1‐2) has recently been commented upon by R.
Parker, Cleomenes on the Acropolis, Oxford 1998, 10‐11.
[25]. See now also Christiane Sourvinou‐Inwood, “Greek Perceptions of Ethnicity and the
Ethnicity of the Macedonians”, Identintità e prassi storica nel Mediterraneo greco, Milano 2002,
190‐92.
[26]. L. Robert, “ Villes de Carie et d’Ionie dans la liste des théarodoques de Delphes ”, BCH
70 (1946) 515‐16 (= OMS 336‐37).
[27]. IG V 1, 94‐95; cf. Perlman, City 177‐79; Ep. Cat. E. 1.
[28]. Pseudo‐Skylax 66.
[29]. U. Kahrstedt, “Städte in Makedonien”, Hermes 81 (1953) 91‐111.
[30]. The relevant information in the literary sources (Thuc. 1.137.1 and Diod. 11.12.3) has
been confirmed by recent epigraphic and other archaeological discoveries. Cf. M. Bessios,
«Ἀνασκαφὴ στὸ βόρειο νεκροταφεῖο τῆς Πύδνας», Τὸ ἀρχαιολογκὸ ἔργο στὴ Μακεδονία
καὶ Θράκη. 3, 1989, Thessalonike 1992, 155‐63; J. B. Cuberna – D. Jordan, “Curse Tablets from
Pydna”, (forthcoming).
[31]. Cf. Hatzopoulos, Institutions I 473.
[32]. From Argos we have a fragmentary list (P. Charneux, “ Liste argienne de
Théarodoques ”, BCH 90 [1966] 156‐88; Perlman, City 100‐104, Ep. Cat. A. 1) dating from c.
334‐325/4 and preserving the names of the theorodokoi from north‐western Greece, the
Peloponnese, and western Asia Minor and the Aegean islands, and a fragmentary list
preserving the amounts of contributions from Thessaly and Macedonia, probably related to
the expenses of the sacred envoys, and dating from the end of the fourth century (IG IV 617;
cf. Perlman, City 127‐29).
[33]. S. G. Miller, “The Theorodokoi of the Nemean Games”, Hesperia 57 (1988) 147‐63;
Perlman, City 236‐39, Ep. Cat. N. 1. The fragmentary catalogue probably dates from c. 321‐317
(Hatzopoulos, Institutions 474, n. 7) and preserves the names of the theorodokoi of Cyprus,
Akarnania, the Ionian Islands, Macedonia, the Hellespont, Kyme, Eretria and Chios.
[34]. Cf. Hatzopoulos, Institutions I 472‐86.
[35]. See the new monograph by Manuela Mari, (Olimpo 29‐66). Imaginative scenarios about
Archelaos’ and the other Macedonian kings’ exclusion from the panhellenic shrines and the
creation of counter‐Olympics at Dion (cf. Badian “Greeks” 35; Borza, “Archelaos” 129) not
only are explicitly contradicted by the unique available literary source (Solinus 9.16), but are
also implicitly refuted by epigraphic evidence such as the Epidauros list and the inscribed
tripod from the great tomb of Vergina (M. Andronikos, Vergina: The Royal Tombs, Athens 1984,
165‐66; see now Mari, Olimpo 35‐36). From Epirus too, in the first half of the sixth century, the
Molossian Alkon had been present at the Olympic Games along with other young Greek
nobles (Herod. 6.127.4; cf. Cabanes, Les Illyriens 24; Malkin, “Ambiguities” 201.
[36]. Aesch. 2.32; cf. Badian, “Greeks” 37 with n. 28; N. G. L. Hammond, “Literary Evidence
for Macedonian Speech”, Historia 43 (1994) 134‐35 (= Collected Studies IV 80‐81).
[37]. P. Marchetti, “ A propos des comptes de Delphes sous les archontats de Théon (324/3) et
de Laphis (327/6) ”, BCH 101 (1977) 14, n. 37; N. G. L. Hammond, “Some Passages in Arrian
Concerning Alexander”, CQ 30 (1980) 462‐63; id., “Were Makedones Enrolled in the
Amphictyonic Council in 346?”, Electronic Antiquity I/3 (1993). See now F. Lefèvre,
L’Amphictionie pyléodelphique: histoire et institutions, Paris 1998, 94‐101; Mari, Olimpo 71, n. 4.
[38]. Dem., 19. 327.
[39]. Hall, “Ethnicities” 173, n. 8.
[40]. Cf. though Badian, “Greeks” 39‐40 and 49, n. 50, who is much more cautious in his
discussion of that particular passage.
[41]. Borza, “Greeks” 125.
[42]. Borza, “Greeks” 136, n. 2.
[43]. M. B. Hatzopoulos, “Prefazione” in Mari, Olimpo 9‐10.
[44]. M. B. Hatzopoulos, “The Boundaries of Hellenism in Epirus during Antiquity”, in M. B.
Sakellariou (ed.), Epirus, Athens 1997, 140‐42.
[45]. Hatzopoulos, Institutions I 473, n. 4.
[46]. M. B. Hatzopoulos, Epirus, Macedonia, Cyprus and Other Controverted Cases of Greek
Identity («ΜΕΛΕΤΗΜΑΤΑ»; forthcoming); cf. P. J. Stylianou, The Age of the Kingdoms. A
Political History of Cyprus in the Archaic and Classical Periods («Μελέται καὶ Ὑπομνήματα» ΙΙ;
Nicosia 1989) 492 [117]‐510 [136].
[47]. Cf. G. Hill, History of Cyprus, vol. I, Cambridge 1949, 93‐94.
[48]. Cf. O. Masson, Les inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques, Paris 19832, 46‐47.
[49]. For instance, not to the Arcadians.
[50]. Thuc. 3.94.5.
[51]. Hesych. s.v. βαρβαρόφωνοι.
[52]. Ath., Deipn. 12.516a.
[53]. Cf. Perlman, City 115‐16.
[54]. The word “ethnicity”, as already mentioned, is practically untranslatable in languages
such as Greek, German or French, except as a calque from Engish. Its success in the latter
language, and in particular in American English, is probably due to the shift in meaning of
the term “nation” in a country without a long national tradition, which, instead of the people,
came to be used for the “state”, causing the need for the creation of a new term. For a Greek
the existence of an ἔθνος or for a German the existence of a “nation” is clearly independant
from that of a state apparatus.
[55]. “Nearchos is mentioned among the notables, but Arrian (rather than Nearchos himself,
Ind.18.4) classifies him among the Macedonians” (Borza, “Greeks” 137‐38, n. 14).
[56]. “While probably of Cretan origin...” (Borza, “Greeks” 138, n. 14, my italics). It is not a
question of probability but of certainty based on both literary and epigraphical evidence (cf.
H.Berve, Das Alexanderreich auf prosopographischer Grundlage I‐II, Munich 1926, 269, no 544).
[57]. Cf. Badian, “Greeks” 39‐40 and 49, n. 48‐50.
[58]. N. G. L. Hammond – G. T. Griffith, A History of Macedonia, vol. II, Oxford 1979, 381.
[59]. E. Badian, “Alexander and the Greeks of Asia”, Ancient Societies and Institutions. Studies
Presented to Victor Ehrenberg, Oxford 1966, 37‐96.
[60] M. B. Sakellariou, “The Inhabitants”, in M. B. Sakellariou (ed.), Macedonia, Athens 1983,
52; cf. Hall, “Ethnicities” 173, n. 8.
[61]. Herod. 144.2.
[62]. Given the obvious opportunism of the passage, it is vain to delve into the exact meaning
of the term, which in Greek has meanings as varied as the word φῦλον, from which it is
composed. In any case, it is noteworthy that it can be used to denote not necessarily another
“race” or “nation”, but just another Greek population (cf. Thuc. 1.141, aptly adduced by
Daskalakis, Hellenism 274, n. 56.).
[63]. Isocr., Phil 107‐108: ὁ δὲ τὸν μὲν τόπον τὸν ἑλληνικὸν ὅλως εἴασε, τὴν δʹ ἐν
Μακεδονίᾳ βασιλείαν κατασχεῖν ἐπεθύμησεν˙ ἠπίστατο γὰρ τοὺς μὲν Ἕλληνας οὐκ
εἰθισμένους ὑπομένειν τὰς μοναρχίας˙ τοὺς δʹἄλλους οὐ δυναμένους, ἄνευ τῆς τοιαύτης
δυναστείας διοικεῖν τὸν βίον τὸν σφέτερον αὐτῶν ... μόνος γὰρ τῶν Ἑλλήνων, οὐχ
ὁμοφύλου γένους ἀξιώσας ἄρχειν, μόνος καὶ διαφυγεῖν τοὺς κινδύνους τοὺς περὶ τὰς
μοναρχίας γιγνομένους.
Cf. Daskalakis, Hellenism 249‐56.
[64]. Cf. Ephor. FGrHist 70 frg 143; Pseudo‐Skylax 33; 65; 66; Dion. Calliph. 24 and 31‐36.
[65]. Nearly a century and a half later a Macedonian King, in a sarcastic repartee (Pol. 18.5. 7‐
9: ʺποίας δὲ κελεύετέ μεʺ φησὶν ʺἐκχωρεῖν Ἑλλάδος καὶ πῶς ἀφορίζετε ταύτην; αὐτῶν
γὰρ Αἰτωλῶν οὺκ εἰσὶν Ἕλληνες οἱ πλείους˙ τὸ γὰρ τῶν Ἀγραῶν ἔθνος καὶ τὸ τῶν
Ἀποδωτῶν, ἔτι δὲ τῶν Ἀμφιλόχων, οὺκ ἔστιν Ἑλλάς ἢ τούτων μὲν παραχωρεῖτέ μοι;ʺ)
exploited the same ambiguity in order to stress the absurdity of the proposed exclusion of
Macedonia from Greece. Cf. le commentaire de P. Cabanes, “ Cité et ethnos dans la Grèce
ancienne ”, Mélanges P. Lévêque II, Paris 1989,75: « Suivre cette voie qui conduit à lʹexclusion
de la Grèce dʹune très grande région de la Grèce septentrionale, cʹest aussi écarter de
lʹhellénisme aussi bien lʹOlympe cher aux dieux du panthéon des Hellènes que le sanctuaire
de Dodone, déjà visité au temps de lʹIliade, et le pays des morts arrosé par lʹArchéron et le
Cocyte réunis à proximité du Nekromanteion dʹEphyre de Thesprotie, où Ulysse vient à la
rencontre du devin Tiresias, selon le récit de lʹOdyssée ».
[66]. Which proved to be a mistake, for it enabled anti‐Macedonian politicians to construe a
Hellenic identity from which Macedonia was excluded.
[67]. See in particular, F. Geyer, Makedonien bis zur Thronbesteigung Philipps II, Munich and
Berlin 1930, 32: „Nicht anders steht es mit dem Hinweis darauf, dass die Makedonen sich
namentlich in der Zeit Alexanders des Grossen und der Diadochen als ein Volk für sich
gefühlt hätten: Dieses Gefühl war lediglich ein Ausfluss nationalen Stolzes auf die unerhörten
Leistungen, die ihnen die östliche Welt zu Füssen gelegt hatte, eine Wirkung des stolzen
Bewussteins, auch den Griechen militärisch und politisch unendlich überlegen zu sein. Ganz
ähnlich haben sich die Preussen zur Zeit Friedrichs des Grossen allen anderen Deutschen
gegenüber als ein besonderes Volk gefühlt, haben sich mit Stolz als Preussen und nicht als
Deutschen bekannt.”
Source: http://macedonia‐evidence.org/identity.html
2
THE NATIONALITY OF THE MACEDONIANS
by Michalis Sakellarioy, Macedonia: 4000 Years of Greek History and Civilization, pages 44‐63,
1983, Ekdotike Athinon
There has been much discussion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the nationality
of the Macedonians. The views expressed are basically three: the first recognizes the
Macedonians as Greeks; the second denies that they were Greeks; and the third adopts an
intermediate position. The same views have been propounded with reference to a more
specific subject: the Macedonian tongue. This depends upon the more general question,
however. The first view has met with the support or the acceptance of the majority of
historians and philologists.44 Those who differ from them and are opposed to the idea that the
Macedonians and their tongue were Greek in origin are not agreed as to who the
Macedonians were or what language they spoke. Some are of the opinion that the
Macedonians were Illyrians and Macedonian an Illyrian dialect;45 others regard them as
Thracians;46 others see them as a distinct people, with a separate language,47 and lastly others
have declined to express any definite opinion.48 The third view also has its variations. Some,
for example, have asserted that the Macedonians separated from the Greeks at a very early
point in time,49 while others suggest that the Macedonians were a product of intercourse
between Greeks and non‐Greeks.50 Reference should also be made at this point to those who
feel that the available evidence does not permit the drawing of conclusions as to the
nationality of the Macedonians or the nature of their speech.51
These differences of opinion are due (1) to some extent to the nature of the evidence and (2) to
non‐academic reasons. The truth is:
1) The information handed down from antiquity concerning the nationality of the
Macedonians is contradictory, and very few examples of their language remain; 2) the
conclusions reached have frequently been influenced by the views of various modern powers
(and not only Balkan states) on Macedonia.
The arguments used by all sides have remained within the pages of monographs or articles in
academic journals. Outside this context, the various views have been presented only in a very
brief and dogmatic fashion (frequently in a single phrase). In the belief that the readers to
whom this volume is addressed will wish to acquire a rounded, comprehensive picture of the
issues involved in the question of the nationality of the Macedonians, I shall attempt to set the
evidence before them as briefly as is consistent with completeness, to enable them to check
the conclusions I draw from it.
1. ANCIENT TRADITIONS, TESTIMONIA AND OPINIONS
Many passages in ancient authors record echoes of the traditions, testimonia and opinions
regarding the nationality of the Macedonians, or, more narrowly, of the Macedonian royal
family. We shall first examine what these passages have to say. After completing this review,
we shall proceed to an assessment of their content and arrive at definitive conclusions
derived from this kind of evidence.
a) Concerning the Macedonian people
It is convenient to refer separately to the passages (1) that support the idea that the
Macedonians were Greeks; (2) that are opposed to this idea; and (3) that can be used to argue
either case, or that are inconclusive. We shall also (4) deal with the hypotheses put forward
by modern historians on the view held by Philip and Alexander as to the nationality of their
subjects.
1) Reference has been made above (see page 46) to an ancient tradition, according to which
the Dorians were descended from a section of the Makednoi or Makedones. This tradition
came down to Herodotos either through information he himself gathered in some Doric city,52
or through a very ancient epic poem, the Aigimios.53 The surviving fragments of this poem,
together with other sources, reveal more precisely that the Dorians were formed by the union
of some Macedonians with other tribes. The Dorians were pure Greeks. Various attempts to
derive one section of them from Illyrian origins have been unsuccessful. In any case, these
attempts were concerned with the Doric tribe the Hylleis, which was certainly not identical
with the Makednoi.54 The fact that the Dorians were Greek naturally presupposes that the
tribes of which they were composed were also Greek, and these include the Makednoi or
Makedones, at a date earlier than the fourteenth century (see page 46).
A Persian inscription dating from 513 B.C. records the European peoples who were at that
date subject to the Great King. One of these is described as Yauna Takabara ‐ ʹIonians whose
head‐dress is like a shieldʹ. The Persians, like the other eastern peoples of antiquity, are
known to have applied the term ʹIoniansʹ to all the Greeks; on the other hand the head‐dress
resembling a shield has been rightly recognized as that depicted on Macedonian coins. The
people called by the Persians ʹGreeks whose headdress is like a shieldʹ are therefore identified
with the Macedonians. The identification is supported by the fact that, in another Persian
inscription, of 479 or 478, also listing the peoples of Europe subject to the Great King, this
name is missing; at this date, it is known that the Macedonians were fighting the Persians.
This Persian name for the Macedonians is the earliest piece of direct evidence available so far
for the nationality of the Macedonians. 55
In a fragment of Hellanikos (fifth century B.C.), Makedon, the mythical founder of the
Macedonians, appears as the son of Aiolos.56 This genealogical relationship reflects the idea
that the Macedonians were a section of the Aiolians, a sub‐division of the Greek race.
After the battle of Issos, Alexander the Great sent a letter to Darius that began as follows:
ʹYour ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us much harm though we
had done them no prior injury; I have been appointed commander‐in‐chief of the Greeks and
invaded Asia in the desire to take vengeance on Persia for your aggressions.ʹ57 From this
extract it emerges clearly that Alexander regarded Macedonia as a Greek country, identified
the sufferings of Macedonia at the hands of the Persians with the destruction they had
wrought in southern Greece, and represented himself as the avenger of all these wrongs.
The formulation ʹMacedonia and the rest of Greeceʹ also occurs in the treaty of alliance
between Philip V of Macedonia and Hannibal.58 In the same text the phrase ʹthe Macedonians
and the rest of the Greeksʹ occurs twice. The ambassador of this same king, in his address to
the Aitolians in 200 B.C., ranged the Macedonians with the Greeks and not with the
ʹforeignersʹ (αλλοεθνείς) and ʹbarbariansʹ (βάρβαροι).59
Other passages demonstrate that non‐Macedonian Greeks also thought of the Macedonians as
their kindred, and of Macedonia as a Greek country. In 217 B.C. Agelaos of Naupaktos,
speaking to a gathering at which Philip V and representatives of his allies were present,
prayed that internecine wars between the Greeks would cease.60 In 211 B.C., Lykiskos,
representative of the Akar‐nanians, described the Macedonians as kinsfolk of the Achaeans.61
Macedonia is accounted part of Greece by various authors.62 As late as the second century
A.D., the Ephesians referred in a decree to ʹthe Macedonians and the other Greek peoplesʹ.63
2) The general sense of a passage in Thucydides gives the impression that the historian
considered the Macedonians barbarians.64 The Macedonians are also distinguished from the
Greeks and classified with the barbarians in the Peri Politeias, an anonymous work written
about the end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century B.C.65 Various ancient
geographers and historians of the classical and post‐classical periods, such as Ephoros,
Pseudo‐Skylax, Dionysios son of Kalliphon and Dionysios Periegetes, put the northern
borders of Greece at the line from the Ambrakian Gulf to the Peneios.66 Isokrates places
Macedonia outside the boundaries of Greece and describes the Macedonians as ούχ
όμόφυλον γένος (ʹan unrelated raceʹ).67 Medeios of Larisa, who accompanied Alexander on
his campaign in Asia, calls the Thessalians ʹthe most northerly of the Greeksʹ.68
3) In contrast with the genealogy of the mythical founder of the Macedonians to be found in
Hellanikos (see above), there are three other genealogies of Makedon in which he is not
included in the stemma of Hellen. About 700 B.C., Hesiod refers to Makedon as the son of
Zeus and Thyia.69 Pseudo‐Skymnos calls him γηγενής, that is, born from the earth.70 Pseudo‐
Apollodoros and Aelian reflect a tradition according to which Makedon was the son of
Lykaon.71 However, the lack of any genealogical connection between Makedon and Hellen
does not imply that the Macedonians were not Greeks. These three genealogies were not
concerned with the question of the nationality of the Macedonians, as was that preserved by
Hellanikos, but had different sources and different concerns. This also happens with many
other genealogies of the mythical founders of Greek tribes. I shall refer here to only two
examples: in the same fragment of Hesiod, Zeus and Thyia are said to be the parents not only
of Makedon, but also of Magnes, the eponymous hero of the Greek tribe the Magnetes. Arkas,
founder of another Greek tribe, is usually said to be the offspring of Zeus and the nymph
Kallisto. Although the three genealogies of Makedon referred to above do not indicate that
the Macedonians were distinct from the Greeks, we cannot deduce from this negative
conclusion its opposite — that they support the view that the Macedonians were Greeks. The
fragment of Hesiod, on the other hand, does reflect a knowledge of Magnetes, who were
Greeks. It also portrays the mother of Makedon as the sister of Hellen.
When Alexander I, king of the Macedonians, wanted to compete at Olympia (possibly in 496
B.C.),71 his prospective opponents attempted to exclude him by arguing that only Greeks, and
not barbarians, could take part in the Olympic games. Alexander proved that he was a Greek
and was therefore allowed to compete.72 We may safely conclude from this episode that the
Greeks who attended the Olympic games had no reason, at the beginning of the fifth century
B.C., to know the nationality of the Macedonians. It is also certain that when Alexander I
submitted to the Hellanodikai proofs of his own, but not of his subjectsʹ Greek descent, he left
the question open. But this was not the question that had been posed. Thus it cannot be
argued that Alexander I considered the Macedonians to be Greeks; but neither can the
reverse. These same considerations hold good in a number of other cases: when, for example,
Alexander I, speaking only of himself, says ʹfor I am a Greek by raceʹ73 or when other kings, or
the Macedonian royal family in general, are described as Greek.74 One further point should be
added: the application of the term ʹphilhelleneʹ to Alexander I does not imply that the king
was not a Greek. Jason of Pherai was also so called,75 and a number of other passages
demonstrate that this epithet was also applied to Greeks in antiquity, in which cases it was
equivalent to ʹpatrioticʹ.76
The distinction is made in a passage of Isokrates between Greeks, Macedonians and
barbarians.77 Those who believe that the Macedonians were not Greeks concentrate on the
distinction between Greeks and Macedonians rather than that between Macedonians and
barbarians. From the context, it emerges clearly that the basis used by the author to
distinguish between the Greeks and the Macedonians was the difference in their political
relationship to Philip.
4) Those who believe that the Macedonians were not Greek have used the argument that the
term Makedones is never employed in negotiations, treaties and other political actions in
which the Macedonian state was involved, as was the Greek custom (cf. the use of Athenaioi,
Lakedaimonioi, Korinthioi)™ but that it was always represented by its king. Even Philip did not
admit his subjects to the Delphic Amphiktyony in 346 B.C. nor to the confederation Of the
Greeksʹ in 338/337 B.C. This argument, however, does not take account of the fact that those
ancient Greek states that were ruled by monarchs entered into agreements and negotiated
alliances through the agency and in the name of their rulers. It was thus perfectly normal
practice for Philip, but not the Macedonians, to become a member of the Delphic
Amphiktyony. As for the confederation ʹof the Greeksʹ, even Philip himself did not become a
member, but rather assumed the titles and responsibilities of its ʹleaderʹ and of commander‐
in‐chief of its military forces.
The same scholars argue that Alexander the Great did not believe that the Macedonians were
Greeks, supporting their case by reference to the fact that when he sent spoils to Athens, he
accompanied them with the inscription ʹAlexander and the Greeks with the exception of the
Lacedaemonians....ʹ and that in many passages of Arrian he addresses his soldiers as
ʹMacedonians and Greeksʹ. In both cases, however, the term ʹGreeksʹ is used to indicate the
soldiers of the confederation of the ʹGreeksʹ of 338/337, which was renewed after the death of
Philip and which bestowed upon Alexander the same powers and offices it had given to his
father. Thus, in the inscription, Alexander uses his own name to include his subjects and the
term ʹGreeksʹ to cover the soldiers of the allied cities. In his speeches, ʹMacedonians and
Greeksʹ is addressed to the two component parts of his army with each of which he had a
different relationship: to the Macedonians he was king, to the ʹGreeksʹ commander‐in‐chief.
In any event, Alexanderʹs letter to Darius, referred to above (see page 49) leaves no doubt that
Alexander considered his Macedonians to be Greeks.
5) Lastly, on the following grounds, it has been maintained that Macedonians no more felt
like Greeks than Greeks recognized them as compatriots: a) many thou sands of Greek
mercenaries served the Persians during Alexanderʹs campaigns; b) others who eventually
enlisted in Alexanderʹs army revolted after his death, and seventeen thousand were
butchered by Macedonians; c) as soon as the news of Alexanderʹs death reached Greece, the
main cities tried to throw off the Macedonian yoke.
These arguments are unconvincing. Let us consider how many Greek states should be
discounted as Greek because they encountered Greek mercenaries on the field of battle; or
because they revolted against Greek domination; or because they shed the blood of those who
had revolted. In the particular connection of the Greeks of the city‐states and Alexander, and
indeed with Philip, it should not be ignored that these were determined, to a large extent, by
fear of the popular classes, that the domination of the Macedonians would reinforce the
oligarchic parties and limit the autonomy of the city states. Because the mercenaries came
from the poorer classes they probably harboured deeper resentment of the Macedonians.
Finally, it should be noted that the revolt of the Greek mercenaries in 323 B.C. was motivated
by a desire to return home after long years of absence, first in the service of the Great King
and then of Alexander.
b) Concerning the royal family
1) From the time that Alexander I asserted at Olympia that he was Greek, and the tradition
that the Macedonian dynasty was descended from the Temenids of Argos became generally
known, it was commonly accepted by the Greeks that the Macedonian royal family was part
of the Greek race (see above).
2) There were exceptions, however: in a fragment of the speech ʹfor the people of Larisaʹ by
the orator Thrasymachus of Chalkedon (second half of the fifth century), Archelaos, king of
the Macedonians, is described as a barbarian, 79 and similar descriptions of Philip were for‐
mulated by Demosthenes80 and even by Aischines at the beginning of his political career.81
Evaluation of the categorical evidence
Thus far we have set out the evidence to be derived from ancient traditions, testimonia and
opinions concerning the nationality of the Macedonians or, more specifically, of the
Macedonian royal family, distinguishing between that which expresses a definite view,
whether for or against the idea that they were Greeks, and that which is inconclusive or
inconsistent (see page 49). We shall now attempt to evaluate the former, with a view to seeing
which of it is credible and which is not.
1) Traditions. Amongst the categorical evidence, we have met one ancient tradition that
connects the Macedonians with the Dorians and another which traces the royal family to
Argos in the Peloponnese. The former contains a kernel of truth that is a synopsis of events
earlier than the middle of the thirteenth century. From this it can be deduced indirectly, but
with certainty, that the Macedonians, like the Dorians, were Greeks (see page 49). The
opinions of historians are divided on the second tradition: some accept that it reflects a
historical memory, while others believe that it arose from the circumstance that the Temenids
who ruled in Macedonia had the same name as the royal house of the Argives, and explain
this fact in terms of the presence of a Macedonian element amongst the Dorians. The first
view founders on the phenomenon to be observed in early societies whereby the royal family
emerged from within the ranks of the tribe. The second view, on the contrary, is consistent
with the thesis that the Dorians were in part descended from Macedonians. The Temenids of
Macedonia will have been part of that branch of the original tribe that did not move
southwards, while the Temenids of Argos will have been descended from a branch that
migrated from the Pindos to central Greece where, with other groups, it helped to form the
Dorian people.
2) The official Macedonian view. In official documents of Alexander the Great and Philip V,
Macedonia is described as a Greek country; in the first of them, moreover, Alexander
represents himself as the avenger of the evils wrought by the Persians both in Macedonia and
in the rest of Greece; and an ambassador of Philip V classifies the Macedonians with the
Greeks in contradistinction with ʹforeignersʹ (αλλοεθνείς) and ʹbarbariansʹ (βάρβαροι) (see
page 49). The Macedonian kings, therefore, although they believed that they had a different
ancestry from their subjects, did not consider themselves to be ruling outside Greece, or over
a people foreign to the Greeks.
3) External Testimonia. The rest of the evidence cited above consists of testimonia about the
Macedonians deriving from external observers. By their very nature, these are less valuable as
evidence than a genuine tradition recalling that a branch of the Macedonians had made its
contribution to the formation of the Greek tribe of the Dorians, or the official Macedonian
view. Let us examine them in their own right, however, as though we did not have more
reliable evidence at our disposal.
The external testimonia fall into two conflicting groups. A Persian inscription of 513 B.C., the
representation of Makedon as son of Aiolos in a fragment of Hellanikos, the speeches of
Agelaos and Lykiskos, and a number of passages in other authors and a decree of the
Ephesians afford evidence in support of the thesis that the Macedonians were Greeks (see
page 49). In contrast, Thucydides, the unknown author of the Peri Politeias, Isokrates,
Medeios, Ephoros, Pseudo‐Skylax, Dionysios son of Kalliphon and Dionysios Periegetes, all
depict the Macedonians as non‐Greeks, or Macedonia as a non‐Greek country (see page 49).
The passages in the orators that portray Archelaos and Philip II as barbarians point in the
same direction (see page 52). In which of the two groups should we place our trust? The
Persian inscription is an early and direct piece of evidence. The earliest of the authors of the
first group is the sole writer who knew the Macedonians at first hand: he resided at the court
of Amyntas I, some time before the middle of the fifth century B.C. 82 He himself, as a native of
Mytilene, spoke Aiolic, and recognized in the Macedonian language a dialect resembling his
own: it was for this reason that he made Makedon son of Aiolos. On the other hand, it is
interesting that one of the authors in the second group, Ephoros, refers to the Pamphylians as
barbarians83 though they were in fact Greeks. This demonstrates that some Greeks came close
to being thought barbarians by their fellow Greeks. The backward institutions and coarseness
of the Macedonians will have been among the reasons why they seemed to other Greeks to be
barbarians. The rhetorical apostrophes of Thrasymachos and Demosthenes should, a fortiori,
be considered unreliable: the former was attempting to arouse the people of Larisa, the latter
the Athenians, to resist the Macedonian kings, and they described them as barbarians in spite
of the fact that they had officially and widely been recognized as Greeks.84 The rhetorical
accusations that they were ʹbarbariansʹ made not against the Macedonians but against their
kings, refer in any case to court scandals, or to the incontinence and violence of the rulers (cf.
Plato on Archelaos and Theopompos85 and other authors on Philip.).
4) Conclusion. The hypothesis that the Macedonians were Greeks is supported by all the
reliable evidence: the ancient tradition that the Dorians were descended from a section of the
Macedonians; the view the Macedonian kings held about themselves; and the testimony of
Hellanikos, who lived at the Macedonian court. All the testimonia that contradict this view
are external and derive either from observers who might have been mistaken, or from
enemies of the Macedonians.
2. THE MACEDONIAN TONGUE
The earliest Macedonian written documents contain only names. When more extensive
Macedonian texts begin to appear, they are expressed in the Attic dialect. This fact furnishes
one of the arguments used by those who deny that the Macedonians were Greeks and claim
that the Macedonians were a people who spoke a different tongue and who became
Hellenized. Those who support the view that the Macedonians were Greeks counter that their
kings introduced the Attic dialect into the court and the administration because the local
dialect was undeveloped; Attic thus became widespread amongst the Macedonians as a
means of expressing themselves in writing. Both these explanations are hypotheses that
require proof. And the proof of either depends on other factors that will be examined below.
Despite the lack of Macedonian texts written in the local language, the nature of Macedonian
may be discerned from certain testimonia; from about one hundred surviving Macedonian
words; and from several hundred Macedonian names.
1) Testimonia. There are three ancient pieces of indirect evidence of a conclusive nature: a) In
a scene from the Attic comedy Macedonians, by the fifth‐century writer Strattis, an Athenian
asks ή σφύραινα δʹ εστι τίς; (ʹsled‐fish, what do you mean?), and a Macedonian replies
κέστραν μεν ΰμμες ώττικοΐ κικλήσκετε (ʹwha ye Attics caʹ a hammer‐fush, ma freenʹ).86 In
order to appreciate the value of the Macedonianʹs reply for the problem under discussion, we
must not forget that, as is clear from many passages in Aristophanes, the Attic comedians
made their non‐Greeks speak broken Greek with an admixture of barbarian words (some of
them imaginary), while Lacedaemonians, Megarians, Boiotians and other Greeks spoke in
their own dialects (albeit with a number of inaccuracies). The Macedonianʹs reply is in good
Greek with dialect (ΰμμες, σφύραινα) and archaizing (κικλήσκετε) elements, b) Alexander
the Great, having selected thirty thousand Persian youths, gave an order that they were ʹto
learn Greek letters and be trained in the use of Macedonian weaponsʹ.87 From this it may be
deduced that the Macedonian soldiers spoke Greek: it would be pointless to teach the young
Per sians who were to fight alongside the Macedonians a language that the Macedonians did
not understand, c) An ambassador from Macedonia, speaking to the Aitolians in 200 B.C. says
of the Macedonians, the Aitolians, and the Akarnanians that they spoke the same language.88
2) Words. Today, over a hundred Macedonian words and a few hundred Macedonian names
are known from a variety of sources. Although the names presuppose words, they will be
examined separately for a number of methodological reasons.
A total of one hundred and twelve words, with ninety‐nine different stems, are attested
directly. Of these, sixty‐five words, or sixty‐three stems, have been preserved in lex‐ica, while
forty‐seven words, with thirty‐six stems, survive in various ancient texts, none of which is
Macedonian.97 All the words in the second group are Greek. The opponents of the view that
the Macedonians were Greeks refuse to take them into consideration, arguing that they were
all words borrowed by the Macedonians from Greek at the time they began to use the Attic
dialect as the official language — which they ascribe to the reign of Philip II. However: a) the
word σφύραινα and the form ΰμμες are not Attic in origin, and are attributed to the
Macedonians half a century before the accession of Philip (see above); b) the majority of these
words are military and, as has already been observed, it would be illogical to suppose that
Philip would impose a foreign military terminology on the Macedonians; moreover, twelve of
these same words are not attested as common to all dialects and fourteen more, while being
common words, have a different meaning in Macedonian.98 In dealing with the Macedonian
material in the lexica, the opponents of the view that the Macedonians were Greeks have
made use to varying extents of the following method: they select from amongst these words
the ones that cannot be shown to have a Greek derivation; they do not always inquire
whether the form of some of these has changed as a result of copying errors; they suggest
derivations for these words from Indo‐European roots without always demonstrating
adequately that their derivations are well‐grounded; using this kind of etymology as their
point of departure they draw up rules for the conversion of Indo‐European vowels or
consonants to ʹMacedonianʹ; finally, since the same rules can be detected in words that are not
attested as Macedonian in the sources, they declare that these words, notwithstanding,
should be considered Macedonian.ʺ
The latest, and most complete, monograph on the nationality of the Macedonians, devotes
hundreds of pages to the study of Macedonian words, and contains some perceptive critical
observations and original views. It concludes that fifty‐two of the sixty‐five words in the
lexica are Greek, while the remaining thirteen include not only genuinely non‐Greek words
but also ambiguous forms, copyistsʹ errors and words used by children.100
Let us assume, however, that all the Macedonian words handed down by the lexica are
demonstrably non‐Greek (which is not claimed even by the most extreme opponents of the
theory that the Macedonians were Greeks). Even in this eventuality, it would not necessarily
follow that the Macedonians did not speak Greek. The reason is that these words are not a
representative sample of the Macedonian tongue. This would require that they had been
preserved at random and from a variety of sources. Quite the reverse is true: they have all
been catalogued in lexica whose purpose is the interpretation of rare words only. It follows
that the Alexandrian scholars who were the first to compose lexica of this sort (the
forerunners of the surviving lexica in which the words in question are preserved) found only
a few dozen Macedonian words that required interpretation. However, there is no language
or dialect that does not have a number of words of foreign origin.
3) Names. In addition to the Macedonian ethnic name, we today know the ethnic names of
some of the Macedonian tribes, scores of place names in Macedonia and dozens of names of
gods and heroes, the names of six festivals and twelve months, and hundreds of personal
names, covering thousands of men and women.
The ethnic names of the Elimiotai, Lynkestai and Orestai derive from place names. The first has
an undoubtedly Greek termination. Some scholars believe that the στ of the second and third
are an affix that is found in Illyrian names. In the name of the Orestai at least, the σ belongs to
the root (Ορεσ‐) and the τ to the termination (‐ται), which is Greek. Furthermore, both the
Orestai and the Lynkestai were undoubtedly Greeks (see page 59).
Alexander I, other Macedonian kings, Philip II, Alexander the Great and his successors all
gave Greek names to the cities they founded; Alexander the Great and some of his officers
went further and translated some of the local names into Greek. Those opposed to the view
that the Macedonians were Greeks are not prepared to take this evidence into consideration,
justifying their stance with the argument that it all post‐dates the introduction of Attic into
the court and the state administration. There is no proof of this argument, however, other
than the claim that the Macedonians did not speak Greek, and it is this claim that the
argument is designed to support. The introduction of this argument into the chain of
reasoning designed to demonstrate the above view thus leads to a vicious circle. In order to
avoid the accusation that we are using these same toponyms as proof that the Macedonians
were Greek, while the evidence for and against this view is still being discussed, we shall
restrict ourselves to toponyms in areas where the expansion of the Macedonians ante‐dates
Philip, and to those names attested before his reign. Some of these names were Greek and
some non‐Greek. The latter do not prove that the Macedonians were not Greeks, for the areas
in question were inhabited for many millennia (from the beginning of human habitation until
c. 2300/2200, and from 1900 until the eighth, seventh, sixth and even the fifth centuries B.C.)
by non‐Greek peoples. We also know that place‐names survive even after the disappearance
of the ethnic groups from which they derive. Further, if the non‐Greek toponyms of western
and central Macedonia are attributed to the Macedonians, this has two consequences. Firstly,
we have to concede that the Pelasgians, the Paiones, the Bottiaioi, the Eordoi, the Almopes,
the Phrygians, the Thracians and other races left no mark on the toponyms of Macedonia,
which is improbable. Secondly, the following problem arises: if we exclude the possibility
that the Macedonians were responsible for the Greek toponyms in western and central
Macedonia before Philip, to which Greeks are they to be attributed? It is possible that only the
names Haliakmon and Pieria are earlier than the Macedonian expansion. There are many more
toponyms that are connected by our sources with the Macedonian expansion, or that cannot
be dated to the period when the Proto‐Greeks occupied Macedonia, for in this case they
would exhibit a more archaic form which would have been fossilized or corrupted through
the intervention of a non‐Greek language.
Of seventy‐two names and epithets of gods and heroes, fifty‐six are panhellenic or Greek
from a linguistic point of view, at least one is Greek with non‐Greek phonetics, eleven are
foreign (nine of these came from areas where non‐Macedonian populations survived), and
two derive from foreign toponyms, with a Greek termination; the rest are doubtful (see page
60). The proportion of non‐Greek names of gods is very small, especially in view of the fact
that they are attested at very late periods, when the entire Greek world was feeling the
influence of foreign religions.
All the names of festivals are Greek (see page 60). All the names of the months have Greek
terminations, and only two of them have roots that are possibly non‐Greek (see page 60).
No comprehensive collection of the personal names has yet been made. The few collections
that have been made for prosopographical purposes have not inspired any exhaustive
linguistic studies or statistical evaluations. A review of the names borne by members of the
royal family of the Temenids, of the dynasties of upper Macedonia, and other Macedonians, 101
before the rule of Philip, reveals only very small percentages for each of the three groups. The
recent discovery of large numbers of grave stelai at Vergina has increased our knowledge of
Macedonian personal names by adding dozens of examples. With one or two exceptions,
these are Greek, and a number of them date from before the accession of Philip. They are all
names of members of the middle classes.
Those who deny that the Macedonians were Greeks assert that they took the Greek names for
gods, heroes, festivals, months and people from the Greeks. In the first place, however, there
is no other example of a people neighbouring on the Greeks whose names were 95% Greek
before the middle of the fourth century; many centuries later than this, a large percentage of
Paionians, Thracians, Mysians, Lydians, Karians and Lycians had local names, even though
they had begun to feel Greek cultural influences much earlier. Furthermore, a number of the
Greek‐sounding names given by the Macedonians to gods, heroes, festivals, months and
persons do not occur outside Macedonia or areas in which Macedonians had settled.
The majority of Macedonian names in all categories are either nouns as such, or adjectives, or
their derivatives, or a variety of compounds; they also include a number of verb‐stems,
prepositions and affixes. As a result, the names help us to form a picture of the vocabulary,
phonetics and rules of derivation and synthesis of the Macedonian tongue which is
quantitatively richer and qualitatively superior to that derived from the hundred or so roots
of words that have been handed down directly. Consequently, in attempting to trace the
features of Macedonian, it is necessary to go beyond the words and make use of all the data
to be gleaned from the Macedonian names.
Synthesis
a)The nature of the Macedonian tongue
From the above evidence — testimonia, words and names — it is clear that Macedonian was
not a separate language but a Greek dialect.
b)The relationship of Macedonian to other Greek dialects
The fact that there are no texts written in Macedonian prevents us from forming as good an
idea of this dialect and its relationship to other Greek dialects as we can for those in which
even a few written documents survive. Nonetheless, the material at our disposal enables us to
make a number of observations that demonstrate a relationship between Macedonian and the
West Greek dialect (to which Doric and north‐west Greek belong), and the Aiolic and
Thessalian dialects.102
1) Macedonian and West Greek: a) ‐δδ‐ in place of ‐ζζ‐ b) nominative singular of certain
compounds in ‐ας instead of ‐ος c) a number of words (to those already recorded103 should be
added the word καλόν, the existence of which in Macedonian was recently demonstrated by
the name Δρύκαλος, read on one of the stelai from Vergina (fig.31); this name will have
meant ʹHe who is of the wood of the oakʹ — cf. the Macedonian name Πευκέστας: ʹHe who is
of the wood of the pineʹ).
2)Macedonian and Aeolic: 104 a) ‐vv‐ from ‐σν‐ (consequently, also ‐λλ‐ from ‐σλ‐ etc); this
phonetic rule is attested in Macedonian by the toponym Κράννα (Doric: Κράνα; Ionic‐Attic:
Κρήνη); b) nominative plural of the second person of the personal pronoun ΰμμες (Ionic‐
Attic: ύμεΐς; Doric: ύμές); for the Macedonian example, see page 55.
3) Macedonian and Thessalian: ω instead of ου attested in both Macedonian and Thessalian.
4) Macedonian and Arcadian: conversion of εν to iv
5) Macedonian, Thessalian and A rcadian: conversion of α into ε under certain conditions;
Macedonian σε‐ (in Σέλευκος) from διέ‐ which is attested in Thessalian (δια‐ in the other
Greek dialects)‐ Macedonian ζέρεθρον=ΑΓΰ3‐dian ζέρεθρον, Thessalian βέρεθρον, for
βάραθρον.
c) Non‐Greek features of Macedonian
A number of features may be observed in the surviving Macedonian linguistic material that
are not Greek. All those who have asserted that Macedonian was a distinct language and not
a dialect of Greek have represented these features as having universal application. In fact,
they have relied on selected evidence, which they have put forward as being the only genuine
examples of Macedonian. This evidence consists of: a) those of the Macedonian words in the
ancient lexica (see page 56) which cannot be assigned a Greek derivation; b) the very few
Macedonian names for gods, heroes, festivals, months, places and people, that are not Greek,
at least phonetically; c) words known from ancient lexica or other sources which are not
stated to be Macedonian but which have features either identical with or similar to those of
the first two groups. The evidence is selected on the bases of the following arguments: all the
examples that are stated to be Macedonian but have Greek characteristics are not genuinely
Macedonian, but will have passed into the Macedonian language as loan‐words; all the
examples that are not stated to be Macedonian but display the same characteristics as
Macedonian are concealed examples of the Macedonian language. These arguments,
however, fall into the logical trap of taking as assumed that which has to be proven, namely,
that Macedonian was a separate language which was gradually influenced to a considerable
degree by Greek; and that the examples in the third group are Macedonian.
The following characteristics have been suggested as features distinguishing Macedonian
from Greek, though most of them in fact suggest an affinity with Thracian and Illyrian: 1) the
retention of the Indo‐European s before an initial vowel (in Greek, the s became h, the
daseia); 2) the conversion of the Indo‐European voiced aspirates bh, dh, gh into voiced stops,
b (β), d (δ), g (γ) (in Greek these became (φ, θ, χ), the dissimilation of the first aspirate in
cases where two of these sounds occur in successive syllables; 4) the conversion of b (β), g (γ),
d (δ) into ρ (π), k (κ), t (τ); 5) the conversion of the vowel group αι into a; 6) the conversion of
the vowel group au (αυ) into a; 7) the dropping of final r (p); 8) the formation of feminines in ‐
ισσα; 9) the formation of ethnic names by the affix ‐στ . Let us examine matters more closely.
1) Only three Macedonian words have σ‐ before a vowel in their first syllable: σάρισσα,
Σαυαδαι/Σαΰδοι and σιγύνη/σιβύνη. However: a) none of these has been convincingly
derived from an Indo‐European root; b) the third is also attested in the Greek dialect of
Cyprus from as early as the third century, and the second corresponds to the godʹs name
Σαβάζιος, which spread through southern Greece at an early date; c) Greek has many
examples of the retention of Indo‐European ‐s‐ before a vowel in the first syllable, occurring
in words borrowed by Greek from the languages spoken by populations subjected to Greek
tribes. Thus: either the Macedonian examples do not prove the existence of the phenomenon
in question or, if they prove it, they do not constitute criteria for distinguishing the
Macedonian tongue from Greek; in the latter eventuality, they will have derived from
Pelasgians or Thracians who were subjugated by the Macedonians. The fact that Macedonian
has examples in which initial s‐ is converted into an aspiration cannot be ignored, however.
This phenomenon cannot be interpreted in terms of Greek influence, for it occurs in the
names Ύπερβερέτας and Ύπερβερεταΐος amongst others; these are not only unknown
outside Macedonia, but exhibit β in the place of φ. It is illogical to cite these names amongst
the examples in which β appears in place of the Greek φ and simultaneously to ignore the
fact that they represent examples of the change of the initial s into h‐ in accordance with a
Greek phonetic law.
2) The second phenomenon is attested in Plutarch, 105 Eustathios of Thessalonike,106 and a
number of lemmata in Byzantine lexica. One of the passages in Plutarch gives the impression
that the phenomenon was widespread in Macedonia. Examples are the names Βίλιππος,
Βερενίκη, Βάλακρος, Βέροια, Κεβαλΐνος, Βρύγες (for: Φίλιππος, Φερενίκη, Φαλακρός,
Φέροια, Κεφαλΐνος, Φρύγες), Ύπερβερεταΐος (=‐φερ.), *Ξάνδος (=Ξανθος), Μάγας
(=Μάχας), and words such as άβροϋτες (=όφρϋς), άδραία (αιθρία), δάνος (=θάνατος),
δανών (=θαν‐). On the other hand, it is to be noted that the name Φίλιππος, and Macedonian
names in general in which the first component is φιλ, are written more frequently with φ
from the beginning of the written tradition; also, that φ and not β occurs in: άμφοτερός,
άρφύς, Βουκεφάλας, φάλαγξ, Φόβος, Φυλακαί and φύλαξ; χ and not γ in: άγχαρμος,
διμάχαι, λόχος,‐οχος, Πολυπέρχων, Χαρικλής and Χάρων; θ and not δ in ζέρεθρον,
Θαΰλος Θούριδες and Πείθων. Those who oppose the view that elements of Macedonian
were Greek argue, of course, that the versions with φ, θ, χ, represent Macedonian names
transmitted in Greek texts, and also names and words borrowed by the Macedonians from
the Greeks. If the evidence of the Greek texts is excluded, on the grounds that it is
untrustworthy, then exception cannot be made for those passages which attest to β, δ, γ in
place of φ, θ, χ. If these latter are not excluded, and it is thus conceded that the Greek authors
rendered the Macedonian pronunciation correctly by writing Βίλιππος etc., then it is
illegitimate to assert that the versions with φ, θ, χ are errors. Furthermore, the spelling
Φίλιππος is not attested solely in non‐Macedonian texts; it also occurs on coins of Philip II,
and on Macedonian arrows, and tiles of the same period. It would be curious if the coins
issued by the Macedonian state did not accurately reflect the national pronunciation. Let us
concede, however, that Philip insisted that his name be written with Φ, since he had
established the Attic dialect as the official language of the state: this explanation might
account for the phonetic form of the royal name on the coinage, but not also on arrows and
tiles. The hypothesis that Macedonian names and words having φ, θ, χ in place of β, δ, γ are
borrowed from Greek has properly been countered with the hypothesis that this is
unacceptable in the case of words like άρφύς, which is otherwise unknown; άγχαρμον,
which had fallen into disuse in the rest of Greece; ζέρεθρον, which was used in the isolated
region of Arcadia; χάρων, which in Macedonia was not used to mean ʹCharonʹ but ʹlionʹ. Two
conclusions emerge: 1) the pronunciation of the ancient bh, gh, dh as β, γ, δ, was not
universal throughout Macedonia, but occurred alongside the pronunciation φ, χ, θ; 2) the
pronunciation φ, χ, θ appears in some words which could not have been borrowed by the
Macedonians from a Greek people. In the light of these conclusions, we must look for some
other explanation of the appearance of β, γ, δ in Macedonia. This demand can be satisfied by
the following observations: 1) the same phenomenon also occurs sporadically in words and
names transmitted in indisputably Greek sources; 2) these words and names are thought to
be loan‐words borrowed by the Greeks from other Indo‐European peoples that they first
conquered and then absorbed; 3) the Macedonians too conquered the Pelasgians (see page 47)
and after them the Thracians (see page 47) and Illyrians who, like the Pelasgians, had con‐
verted Indo‐European bh, gh, dh into β, γ, δ. Since, on the one hand, the appearance in
Macedonian of φ, χ, θ deriving from Indo‐European bh, gh, dh cannot be attributed to ex‐
ternal influences and since, on the other, the conversion of the same sounds to β, γ, δ,
occurred in Macedonian under conditions similar to those that account for it in an in‐
disputably Greek linguistic area, we are obliged to give the same interpretation to the
Macedonian data.
3 and 4) These two phenomena also occur in words and names found in the Greek world in
general, where they are regarded as vestiges of Pelasgian, or of pre‐Greek languages
generally, that have been preserved in Greek. Their occurrence in Macedonian can therefore
also be attributed to pre‐Macedonian substrata (both Pelasgian and Thracian).
5) That the group au was converted to a is a conjecture based on a very small number of
names and words. Since there are also reliable indications that the group was also preserved,
we may reasonably assume that this is another case in which we have to deal with two
different kinds of development; 107 that one of these (the preservation of the group) does not
distinguish Macedonian from Greek; and that the other (the conversion of the group to a),
since it was sporadic, is not an ancient hallmark of Macedonian but is due to the influence of
populations conquered by the Macedonians.108
6) The hypothesis that the group au became a in Macedonian is based entirely on a dubious
derivation. By contrast, the preservation of the group au in this tongue is well attested.109
7) The dropping of final r is similarly supported by unlikely etymologies.110
8) The formation of feminines in ‐ισσα is attested in Macedonian by: βασίλισσα,
Μακεδόνισσα and σάρισσα. The view that the ‐ισσα in these examples corresponds to ‐izza
in Illyrian remains undecided. On the other hand, the Greek Κίλισσα and Φοίνισσα cannot
be ignored. Admittedly, the ‐ισσα of the Macedonian examples cannot be in terpreted
phonetically in the same way as the ‐ισσα in the two Greek words (from Κίλικ‐j‐a and
Φοίνικ‐j‐a); but it is not impossible that Μακεδόνισσα, βασίλισσα and σάρισσα were formed
by analogy with Κίλισσα and Φοίνισσα, in accordance with a phenomenon familiar in
linguistics.111 Furthermore, the most likely derivation of σάρισσα relates it to a common noun
indicating a type of oak‐tree, which is attested in Greek.112
9) The names of the nations of upper Macedonia, Όρέσται and Λυγκησταί, the ethnics found
in various parts of Macedonia derived from the names of cities, such as *Άργεσταΐοι (from
ʺΑργός), Διέσται/Διάσται (from Δίον), Έορδισταί (from Εορδαία), Εύϊέσται (from Εύίά),
Κραννέσται (from *Κράννα), Κυρρέσται/Κυρρησταί (from Κύρρος), and personal names
like Πευκέστας have been thought to be Illyrian, since an affix does in fact appear in ethnic
names in Illyria and in regions inhabited by Illyrian tribes. However: a) the names
*Άργεσταΐοι, Όρέσται, Πευκέστας have stems in ‐εσ‐ (Άργεσ‐ Όρεσ‐, Πευκεσ‐) and a
termination ‐τας (‐της), like the familiar Greek words and names Θυέστης, Ορέστης,
Όρέστης, όρχηστής, τελεστάς ‐ής, etc. They do not, therefore, belong to the category of
names that have an affix ‐στ‐.113 Moreover, the Λυγκησταί and the Όρέσται were Greek
tribes, and Argos, whose inhabitants were called *Άργεσταΐοι, was a city of the second of
these two tribes. The Έορδισταί derived their name from the verb έορδίζω. b) The toponyms
Δίον and Κράννα were Greek. In these, and all the others that were also Greek, the ‐στ‐ may
best be attributed to the influence of the Greek Όρέσται. For the others, we have to assume a
double influence both from the Greek and from the Illyrian names.
3. RELIGIOUS AND ETHNOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
From the point of view of the question of the nationality of the Macedonians, the surviving
religious and ethnological evidence may be divided into Greek, non‐Greek, doubtful and
irrelevant; the Greek evidence may in turn be subdivided into (a) that found throughout
Greece, (b) that which is attested in various parts of Greece, and (c) local Macedonian. This
subdivision is rendered necessary by the fact that opinion is divided as to the value as
evidence of the first group, and also of some of the items in the second. Some scholars agree
that this evidence demonstrates that the Macedonians were Greeks, while others claim that it
does not prove this, since the relevant information dates mainly from the period of Alexander
and his successors and only rarely from the time of Philip and earlier. If this argument holds
good, however, then a fortiori, we must reject as irrelevant all the non‐Greek evidence, since
the passages concerning them are of much later date.
A. Greek elements
a) Panhellenic elements
From the data at our disposal at present, we know that the Macedonians worshipped the
twelve Olympian gods (fig. 32), both collectively and individually, and also Pluto,
Persephone, Dionysos, Pan, Hestia, Herakles (fig. 29), Asklepios, Okeanos, Amphitrite, the
Nereids, Tethys, Orpheus, the Dioskouroi, Amphilochos, the Nymphs, the Graces, the Fates,
Hygieia, Lethe, Nemesis and Eros. They also gave them the familiar Greek epithets, such as
Agoraios, Basileus, Olympios, Hypsistos of Zeus, Basileia of Hera, Soter of Apollo,
Hagemona (Attic‐Ionic Hegemone) and Soteira of Artemis, Boulaia of Hestia, etc. Some of the
evidence for the worship of Ge, Helios, Dionysos, Pan, Asklepios and Herakles is earlier than
the period of Philip, while the earliest evidence for the twelve gods comes from this period.114
The large number of these godsʹ names and the early date of the evidence militates against
the familiar false argument advanced by those opposed to the idea that the Macedonians
were Greeks — namely, that the Greek cultural features that appear in Macedonia were
imposed by kings who admired things Greek, especially Philip. Moreover, Philip or one of his
immediate predecessors introduced the Attic dialect as the official language of the state, and
if the Greek names of gods used by the Macedonians were imported, they ought to be Attic in
form. The name Άγεμόνα115 however, has retained the original long a in both the first syllable
of the stem and the termination. If this word did not have its roots in Macedonia but had been
imported as a result of royal initiative, we would know it in the form Ήγεμόνη.
b) Elements limited to particular areas
In Macedonia, the name Θαΰλ(λ)ος was used of a god who was identified with Ares. The
hypothesis that this god was Thraco‐Phrygian is groundless. On the contrary, he has been
convincingly related to Zeus Thaulios of Thessaly, the clan of the Thaulonidai of Attica, and
the Doric festival, the Thaulia.116 The god Thaulos was probably originally a separate god
who had qualities which later led to his identification with Ares in some regions and with
Zeus in others.
Pasikrata is attested as a goddess in Macedonia and at Demetrias in Thessaly; we also find an
Artemis Pasikrata in Ambrakia and a Pasikrateia (Persephone?) at Selinous.117
Phobos was worshipped by the Macedonians and the Dorians.118
It has been conjectured that the Macedonians had a festival called the Apellaia, both from the
name of the month Apellaios and from an independent reference to a special bread called
δράμις; this was similar in both form and etymology to the δαράτα, an offering made by the
inhabitants of Delphi during the Apellaia. This same festival was widespread amongst the
Dorians. The bread δράμις or δράμιξ or δαράτα or δάρατος is also attested amongst the
Thessalians and the Athamanes.119 The Hetaireidia were celebrated by the Macedonians and
the Magnesians.120
Xandikos (name of a month ),130 Peritia (name of a festival) and Peritios (name of a month),131
telesias (name of a dance),132 Hyperairetas, Hyperberetas, Hyperpheretes (epithets of Zeus);
Hyperberetaios (name of a month),133 Pseudanor (epithet of Dionysos).134 The names Xandikos
and Hyperberetaios (Hyperberetas) have δ and β in place of the Greek θ and φ, but are Greek
in all other respects.
B. Thracian elements
The names of the gods Asdoules, Bendis, Daimones An‐tanoi, Dyalos, Eteudoniskos or
Oteudanos or Oteudonikos, Pyrmerylas and the epithet Derronaios (of Herakles) are
indigenous to Pelagonia, Derriopos and Paionia135 — all areas in which the pre‐Macedonian
populations survived. Moreover, they are attested at late dates, chiefly from the Christian
centuries when Thracian and other foreign religions were to be found throughout the Greek
world. The names Zeirene (a goddess identified with Aphrodite) and Sauadai (the name of
demons identified with the Satyrs) are each attested once. The reference to each, in an article
in the lexicon of Hesychios, contains the statement that they were local to Macedonia. Bearing
in mind that the godsʹ names mentioned above occurred in very restricted areas, it seems at
least possible that these latter names too were restricted to regions in which the pre‐
Macedonian populations survived, and were disseminated throughout Macedonia in the
Hellenistic period.
C. Doubtful elements
The names of two Macedonian months, Gorpiaios136 and Dystros131 have given rise to
inadequately supported etymologies.
D. Evidence without value
The passage stating that the Macedonians worshipped the air under the name Bedu has been
disputed, with very convincing arguments.138 It has also been shown that Totoes, the god of
sleep, who was thought to be Thracian or ʹMacedonianʹ, was imported from Egypt.139
Some of the other names of deities and nymphs are of no value, since they are derived from
place‐names: cf. Bloureitis and Gazoreitis (epithets of Artemis), Echedorides (epithet of the
nymphs of the river Echedoros), Pierides and Pimpleiai (epithet of the Muses who were
worshipped in Pieria and were connected with the spring Pimpleia).140 The suggestion that
these names indicate distinct deities is erroneous, as is the attribution of the first two to
Thracian deities identified with Artemis.
E. Conclusions from a comparison of the Greek and non‐Greek religious and ethnological
elements
Elements that are unquestionably Greek are much more numerous than those Which are not
Greek. The great majority of the Greek elements is earlier in date than the non‐Greek and the
doubtful elements.
Some fifteen Greek elements had a limited dissemination which did not coincide with a
particular geographical area; some of them were local to areas a considerable distance from
Macedonia. Furthermore, none of them had any particular influence. A further fifteen Greek
elements do not occur outside Macedonia.
Nine of the eleven items of non‐Greek evidence were local to areas that had pre‐Macedonian
populations.
When taken as a whole, these observations show that the Macedonians were not Thracians, or
Illyrians, or any other race that became hellenized, but Greeks whose culture was slightly
influenced by non‐Greek features.
4. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MACEDONIANS AND OTHER GREEK TRIBES
We have already met various indications of the relations between the Macedonians and some
of the Greek tribes. These relations demonstrate that the Macedonians were a Greek tribe
from as early as the Bronze Age.
The Macedonians were bound to the Dorians and the Magnesians by very close ties of
kinship. Their ties with the former are attested by a tradition preserved in Herodotos,
corrected by other evidence (see page 46). They are also implicit in a number of dialect
features common to both Doric and Macedonian (see page 57); the fact that the kings of
Sparta and of the Macedonians offered sacrifices to the Dioskouroi; the cult of Pasikrata in
Macedonia and in the Doric world (at Selinous, a colony of the Dorian Megarians); and the
division of the Temenids into two branches, one of which stayed in Macedonia, while the
other appears at Dorian Argos (see page 52).
The relationship between the Macedonians and the Magnesians was familiar to the ancients,
for Hesiod portrays Makedon and Magnes as brothers (see page 49). It is confirmed by the
fact that the name of both peoples is derived from the root mak —ʹhigh, tallʹ— and by the cir‐
cumstance that the Macedonians and the Magnesians celebrated a festival called the
Hetaireidia, unknown elsewhere (see page 60).
A number of cultural features common to the Macedonians and the Dorians are also shared
by other Greek tribes that were formerly neighbours of the Macedonians. The festival of the
Apellaia and the names of three months, Apellaios, Artemisios and Panamos or Panemos
occur in the calendars of the Macedonians, various Doric cities (see page 60), the Lokrians, the
Phokians and the Aiolians (see p. 60). The names of three more months, Dios, Daisies or
Theodaisios and Loos or Homoloos link the Macedonians, the Dorians and the Aiolians. The
Macedonians and the Dorians worshipped the god Phobos (see page 60). The Macedonians
sacrificed to this god on the eve of battle, and legend has it that Theseus did the same before
he fought with the Amazons. Theseus himself did not originally belong to the Ionians of
Attica, but to sections of other Greek tribes (the Lapithae and Molossoi) that neighboured on
the Macedonians.
The Thaulia of the Dorians implies the existence amongst them of the Macedonian god
Thaul(i)os, with whom the Thessalian Zeus Thaulios and the Athenian clan of the
Thaulonidai are connected.
The dance karpaia is one of the cultural features uniting the Macedonians and the
Magnesians; the same dance was performed by the Aenianai, who were once neighbours of
both tribes.
When the Macedonians lived at Lakmos and in the surrounding area, the Athamanians were
bounded by the Athamanian mountains to the south of Lakmos. This explains the connection
between the name of the mountain Laphystion, the epithet Laphystios used of Zeus, and
Laphystiai, one of the names given to the Bacchae by the Macedonians (see page 46). The
same explanation accounts for the use of the word dramis by the Macedonians and the word
dramix by the Athamanians to mean a kind of bread (see page 60).
The fact that the Macedonians were once neighbours of the Aiolians also accounts for the
features common to these two dialects.
CROSS‐CHECK OF CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM THE DIFFERENT CATEGORIES
OF EVIDENCE
We have examined in turn (1) the surviving traditions and testimonia concerning the
Macedonians; (2) the available evidence for the Macedonian tongue; (3) what is known today
of their religion and ethnology; (4) the relations between the Macedonians and various Greek
tribes. The valid data under all these headings leads naturally and definitively to the same
conclusion: the Macedonians were a Greek tribe. Some of the evidence, indeed, points to a
more specific conclusion: that the Macedonians constituted a distinct tribe from as early as
the Bronze Age.
NOTES
They located in the book.
3
GREEK PERCEPTIONS OF ETHNICITY
AND THE ETHNICITY OF THE MACEDONIANS *
Christiane Sourvinou‐Inwood, in Identità e Prassi Storica nel Mediterraneo Greco
(Milan 2002) 173‐203
Source: http://macedonia‐evidence.org/ethnicity.html
The realization that Macedonian is a Greek dialect 1 has created serious problems for
those scholars who are convinced that the Macedonians were not, and were not perceived to
be, Greeks. Their conviction, I will argue, is based on conclusions concerning Greek
perceptions of Macedonian ethnicity which resulted from the implicit and explicit
deployment of flawed presuppositions about Greek perceptions of ethnicity in general. 2
Ethnic identity is not a timeless essence, but a fluid construction, involving sets of culturally
determined perceptions, so the meaningful question about the ethnicity of the Macedonians
is; ‘How was this ethnicity perceived by the Macedonians themselves and by the non
Macedonian Greeks?’ It may be thought that many past enquiries investigated precisely this
question, and concluded that the Macedonians wanted to be thought of as Greek, but the
other Greeks believed that they were barbarians. However, I will try to show, such
investigations often implicitly relied on modern ‘logic’ (which, for example, overprivileged
notions such as ‘political manipulations and propaganda’) and on modern presuppositions
about ethnic identity, and also about the meanings of myths pertaining to ancestry and about
religion, and they also deployed by default modern assumptions in the reading of ancient
statements. For unless the assumptions that had shaped the ancient formulations (and their
readings by their contemporaries) are reconstructed, these formulations are inevitably made
sense of through ‘commonsense’ and thus, inevitably, culturally determined, presuppositions
– which leads to culturally determined conclusions. The danger of culturally determined
distortions lurks even at the most basic level of reading. Since the word barbaros did not only
mean ‘non Greek’, but also ‘rude, uncivilized, brutal’ 3 , in Greek eyes the word’s meanings
were different depending on whether they perceived the person or people so characterized to
be Greek or not; if not, the word certainly denoted their non Greekness (with or without the
connotations of cultural inferiority, depending on the context); if those so characterized were
perceived to be Greek, then the word characterized them as culturally inferior, like
barbarians, it was, in other words, a cultural insult – which may or may not have had the
potentiality of being understood as casting aspersions on the Greekness of the people thus
* I am very grateful to Professor Robert Parker for discussing some of these problems with
me. Professor Ernst Badian will probably disagree with my conclusions, so I hope that he
will not mind if I mention that what led me to pursue some of these issues further was a most
inspiring and stimulating discussion with him at Harvard.
1 See O. Masson, s.v. Macedonian language , in OCD3 (1996), 905‐906; C. Brixhe, Un “nouveau”
champs de la dialectologie greque: le Macédonien, in A.C. Cassio (a cura di), Kata Dialekton. Atti del
III Colloguio Internazionale de Dialettologia greca (Napoli‐Fiaiano d’Ischia 1996), Napoli 1999, 41‐
71; see also M.B. Hatzopoulos, Cultes et rites de passage in Macédoine, Athènes‐Paris 1994, 121.
2 Sometimes with the help of extraneous preconceptions pertaining to the modern world –
preconceptions of which oneself is, of course, free, but ‘the other’ (especially the modern
Greek ‘other’) is guilty (see some striking examples of this attitude in E. N. Borza, In the
shadow of Olympus: the emergence of Macedon, Princeton‐Oxford, 1990, 90‐91; E. N. Borza,
Before Alexander: constructing early Macedonia, Claremont, Calif. 1999, 34‐37, 39.
3 ARISTOPH. Nub. 492; DEM 21.150; 26.17.
insulted. There is, then, a danger of circularity in ‘commonsense’ readings of Greek
statements pertaining to ethnicity, the danger of reading into the evidence expectations
derived from modern assumptions – or of simply adopting the lectio facilior. In order to avoid
these dangers it is necessary to begin with the most crucial assumptions that shaped the
relevant Greek filters, Greek perceptions of Greek ethnic identity, and then reconstruct the
ways in which these perceptions related to perceived Macedonian realities. I have discussed
elsewhere 4 archaic and classical Greek perceptions of Greek ethnic identity, and argued that
it is an extremely complex and fluid construction, and that the people who shared in the
Greek ethnic identity were the people who perceived themselves to be Greeks, and whose
self‐perception was validated by those who had the dominant role in ‘controlling’ the
boundaries of Greekness, such as, in the fifth century, the Hellanodikai who controlled
participation in the Olympic Games. That is, Greeks were those who perceived themselves,
and were perceived, to be members of a group which defined itself as Greek through a cluster
of cultural traits which pertained, above all, to perceived ancestry, language and religious
practices. Material culture is not a strongly defining trait; it was also adopted by non Greeks
in various circumstances, and there were strong regional diversities in the material cultures of
the Greek world, which involved – among other things – varying degrees of input from
different non Greek cultures, and included colonial hybridities in cities that were
unequivocally perceived to be Greek. 5 Nevertheless, material culture does have a place –
albeit a peripheral one – in the cluster of traits defining Greekness, above all in so far as it
reflected, and was perceived to be reflecting, a ‘common way of life’, which contributed to the
construction of Greek identity. 6
Ancestry was the most effective argument for convincing those who had the dominant role in
controlling the boundaries of Greekness, but implicit in such arguments concerning ancestry
was the fact that the ‘petitioners’ shared in the language, religion and other cultural traits that
were considered Greek. For the role of ancestry, and the discourse of Greek ethnicity in
general, was, I have argued elsewhere, much more complex, and less monolithic, than is often
4 Hylas, the Nymphs, Dionysos and others. Myth, ritual, ethnicity (forthcoming), chapter I.2 (in
which I also set out a critique of J.M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, Cambridge 1997);
see also my forthcoming paper entitled Herodotus (and others) on Pelasgians: some perceptions of
ethnicity, to be published in a volume edited by Prof. R. Parker and Dr. P. Derow and
dedicated to the memory of W.G. Forrest.
5 In colonial situations the dominant culture of the colonists and the native cultures of the
people of the area being colonized mix in complex ways resulting in new cultural artifacts, ‐
not simple combinations of two cultures, but complex interactions generating complex
phenomena that may be subsumed in the post colonial concept of hydridity. (On hybridity
see H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London 1994, 102‐122, cf. esp. 111‐116; 127; cf. also
85‐92; P. Van Dommelen, Colonial constructs: Colonialism and archaeology in the Mediterranean,
in C. Gosden (ed.), Culture Contact and Colonialism, in “World Archaeology”, 28, 1997, 305‐323,
esp. 309‐310, 314‐320.
Borza’s flawed perceptions of the relationship between material culture and Greek ethnicity
(for example, the simple fact that there is no essence ‘Greek material culture’ to which we can
compare ‘Macedonian material culture’) can be illustrated by the fact that he appears to
believe that the notion that Macedonian craftsmen developed a “regional style, heavily
indebted to Greece, but with abundant Balkan and Asian influences in shape and decoration”
is an argument against the Greekness of the Macedonians (Borza Before Alexander, cit., 33).
6 See the notion of ήθεα ομότροπα in Hdt. 8,144,23. This similar way of life was reflected, in
complex ways, in the material culture.
assumed. 7 Though the Greeks appeared to privilege ancestry, this was perceived by them as
one element in a complex system of interacting traits that made up perceived Greekness, in
which one or another element could be privileged or underprivileged, depending on the
circumstances. For example, despite the importance of ancestry, people could have barbarian
ancestors and still perceived to be Greek, as is illustrated by myths about barbarian kings
such as Pelops, and barbarian peoples who had lived in Greece, such as the Pelasgians and
the Leleges, who became absorbed in the Greek mainstream. 8 Because blood ancestry was
not the only criterion for Greek ethnicity, barbarians could become Greeks.
What, then, of the Macedonians? With regard to the first crucial criterion of Greek ethnic
identity, language, it is now unambiguously clear that Macedonian is a Greek dialect related
to Northwest Greek. 9 As for the second criterion, religion, space prevents me from
discussing Macedonian religion in other than the most superficial terms. The minimum that
can be asserted with certainty is that as soon as the religion of the Macedonians becomes
visible to us, it is part of Greek religion, involving Greek cults, deities and rites. 10 Like the
religious systems of all Greek poleis and ethne, it is a local religious system, the system of a
particular ethnos, with its own characteristics and emphases – for Greek religion consists of
interacting local systems, each with their particular characteristics, and also of a Panhellenic
dimension which interacted significantly with the local religious systems. 11
Methodologically, it is not more rigorous to think that Macedonian religion had been a non
Greek religion before it becomes visible to us than it is to think that it had been Greek in the
early archaic period. On the contrary, since there is no evidence whatsoever to support the
notion that Macedonian religion had ever been non Greek, it is far less rigorous to believe
that it was. The only reason why such a position may misleadingly appear to be rigorous is
because ‘we cannot be sure that Macedonian religion was a Greek religion from the
beginning’ takes the superficial form of skepticism, which appears rigorous because ‘we
cannot be sure that’ sounds like scholarly caution; but in reality it relies on an implicit fallacy,
since the fact that we cannot assume that A is right does not entail that it is more rigorous to
presume that, unless the opposite can be demonstrated conclusively (in an area where very
little can) A is wrong, though all the evidence indicates that it is right. All the evidence does
indicate that Macedonian religion was a Greek religious system, and there is no evidence that
it had been non Greek at any time. In fact, the more information becomes available, the
further back Macedonian religion can be shown to have been part of Greek religion. At Dion,
for example, recent excavations have shown that the sanctuary of Demeter was in use at least
7 See supra n. 4.
8 I have discussed the complex issue of the ethnicity of the Pelasgians elsewhere (Sourvinou‐
Inwood, Herodotos, cit.). On the Leleges see infra.
9 See supra n. 1.
10 That Macedonian religion was Greek is also stated by M. Oppermann, s.v. Macedonia, cults,
in OCD3 (1996), 905: “they also shared in the common religious and cultural features of the
Greek world.” but “regional characteristics have to be noted.”
11 I have discussed these issues in” Persephone and Aphrodite at Locri: a model for personality
definitions in Greek religion, in “JHS), 98, 1978, 101‐121 (=C. Sourvinou‐Inwood, ‘Reading’ Greek
culture: texts and images, rituals and myths, Oxford 1991, 147‐188): see also C. Sourvinou‐
Inwood, What is polis religion?, in O. Murray‐S. Price (eds.), The Greek City from Homer to
Alexander, Oxford 1990, 295‐322 [also published in: R. Buxton (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek
Religion, Oxford 2000, 13‐37].
as early as the late sixth / early fifth century. 12 Moreover, the cultic institutions that are the
rights of transition to adulthood which are associated with divine cults have been shown to
be closely comparable to those in the rest of Greece, with similarities to, and differences from,
those of other Greek religious systems, comparable to the similarities and differences that
govern the relationships between such rites in the different Greek religious systems. 13 All
this indicates that there is no reason to think that the Macedonians had ever had any religious
system that had not been Greek, and that, on the contrary, all the available evidence suggests
that Macedonian religion had been a Greek local religious system.
Material culture, we saw, has a place – albeit a peripheral one – in the cluster of traits that
defines Greekness, especially in so far as it reflects a ‘common way of life.’ However,
defining what constitutes Greek material culture in the archaic and classical period (let alone
which aspects of it reflect a common way of life) is an extremely complex issue, involving the
consideration of regional diversities, and above all of colonial hybridities in cities
unequivocally perceived to be Greek. 14 It should also involve defining more specifically the
material cultures of the elites, the Panhellenic aristocracy, the most ‘international’ segment of
all archaic Greek societies, and also of the non elite cultures in each society, and determining
the extent to which the latter as well as the former were similar to, and different from, each
other in the different Greek cities, ethne and regions, and how that situation related to the
situation in Macedonia. Thus, an investigation of Macedonian material culture in the archaic
and classical period, 15 and the ways in which, if any, it may have reflected (and to what
extent) a ‘common way of life’ with the other Greeks, for example in burial customs, would
require at the very least one whole book. All I can do here is set out my own view on this
extremely complex issue simply as a personal assessment, for I would need a great amount of
space to present even a rudimentary form of an argument. I believe that it is becoming
increasingly clear that the Macedonians, to a certain extent at least, shared the material
culture of the other Greeks (at least the Macedonian elite of the other Greek elites) in the
archaic period; the objects imported by the Macedonians from southern Greece do not
12 LS. Pingiatoglou, To hiero tis Dimitras sto Dion. Anaskaphi 1990, in “Archaeologiko Ergo ste
Macedonia kai Thrake,” 4, 1990 [1993[, 205‐215; “AR”, 1997‐1998, 82; M. B. Hatzopoulos,
Macedonian institutions under the kings, Athens‐Paris, 1996, 129‐130.
13 Hatzopoulos, Cutles, cit. passim, see esp. 122.
14 See supra n. 5.
15 The investigation of Macedonian material culture before the fifth century needs to be
directed to the area west of the Axios, and focused on Vergina, the Haliakmon and its
surrounding area and down to Olympos. (Restrictions of space prevent me from attempting
to discuss Macedonian geography and the history and expansion of the kingdom of
Macedon, so I will simply say that the area suggested above is not coterminous with the
kingdom of Macedon from an early period, but it involves the areas known to have been
inhabited by people perceived to be Macedonians from an early period; the perception that
shaped Catalogue of Women fr. 7 M‐W. suggests that they included (in one way or another, and
whoever the Pieres may have been – if they had any historical existence and were not a later
construct) Pieria]. The Greek colonies in the Chalcidice and the lands of the non Macedonian
tribes in part of the central and in the eastern part of present day Macedonia are not directly
relevant – though a systematic study should use them as a set of comparanda, since they can
provide sets of similarities with, and differences from, the land of the Macedonians, in the
different periods, which would help place more precisely the Macedonian forms of use of
Greek material culture by determining the extent to which on the one hand Greek colonies
interacted with local non Greek material culture and created certain hybridities, and on the
other non Greeks took over Greek material culture.
appear to have been deployed as exotic or in other ways in which alien elites deploy material
objects appropriated from other cultures; on the contrary, I suggest, they are deployed, for
example as grave offerings, in ways comparable to those in which they had been used in their
original Greek contexts of production, with the imports slotting into preexisting functions,
being luxury replacements of local products – which, in my view, would suggest a common
way of life between Macedonians and other Greeks.
I will now consider the ancestry of the Macedonians, the discussion of which will also involve
an attempt to reconstruct the assumptions that will allow us to read the various discourses of
Macedonian ancestry as much as possible through Greek eyes; this discussion will eventually
become intertwined with the consideration of Greek statements about the ethnicity of the
Macedonians. The earliest formulation pertaining to the Macedonian’s ancestry comes from a
fragment of the Catalogue of Women or Ehoiai, 16 which is probably of early sixth century date 17
and had circulated orally in the seventh century. 18 According to this poem, Thyia, the
daughter of Deukalions and sister of Hellen, had two sons from Zeus, Magnes and Makedon,
who lived around Pieria and Olympos. 19 Another sister of Hellen and Thyia, Pandora, was
the mother of Graikos, also from Zeus. 20
In order to attempt to reconstruct the perceptions concerning the Macedonians’ ethnic
identity that had shaped this genealogy, and the ways in which the archaic and classical
Greeks had made sense of it, we need to reconstruct the assumptions that had shaped their
filters. Starting with the set of assumptions that is most concretely available to us, the
Magnetes, whose eponymous hero was Magnes, were perceived to be Greek. Most
specifically, they were perceived to be Greek in the particular geographical and cultic milieu
in which the Catalogue of Women had been constructed and circulated, since they had two
votes in the council of the Delphic Amphictyony. 21 Since in this genealogy Magnes, the
eponymous hero of the Magnetes, was the brother of Makedon, the eponymous hero of the
Macedonians, it is unambiguously clear that in the assumptions concerning ethnic identity
that had shaped the genealogy, and in the eyes of the Greeks making sense of this
representation, the Macedonians were perceived to have had the same ethnic identity as the
Magnetes, and therefore to be Greek. This genealogy, then presents the Macedonians as
Greek, and would have been understood to be doing so by the archaic and classical Greeks.
This conclusion is supported by other arguments. Before I consider them, I should say
something about the modern belief that only the people who are descended from Hellen were
perceived to be Greek in the assumptions articulating this poem, and that therefore this poem
presents the Macedonians as non Greek. 22 That this belief is mistaken 23 is illustrated, for
16 On the Catalogue of Women see now R.L. Fowler, Genealogical thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue, and
the creation of the Hellenes, in “PCPhS” 44, 1998, 1‐19 with bibliography.
17 It is certainly not later than the last quarter of the sixth century at the very latest (see
Fowler, art.cit., 1 n. 4).
18 See Fowler, art.cit., 1.
19 Catalogue of Women fr. 7 M‐W.
20 Fr. 5 M‐W.
21 On the connection between the Catalogue of Women and the Delphic Amphictyony see
Fowler, art.cit., 11‐15
22 See, for example, most recently, Fowler’s opinion (Fowler, art.cit. 14‐15): “unhellenic, like
the Macedonians and the Graikoi, who descended not from Hellen, but from daughters of
Deukalion, sisters of Hellen. Their descent directly from Deukalion acknowledges their
affinity to the Hellenes . . . . It would be unthinkable for Makedon or Graikos to be brothers
example, by the fact that the Arcadians, who were unequivocally perceived to be Greek, were
not descended from Hellen; Arkas was, on his mother’s side, in one way or another, of
autochthonous descent 24 and this is correlative with the myths that make the Arcadians
autochthonous. 25 Since this was more significant than descent from Hellen, he was not made
to be descended from Hellen, precisely because in Greek eyes descent from Hellen was not a
necessary part of Greek ethnic identity. The expectation that because Hellen became the
eponymous hero of the Greeks, and the Catalogue presents so many eponyms and royal
houses as his descendants, all those perceived to be Greeks would have been made into his
descendants is a reflection of modern preconceptions concerning Greek ideas of blood
ancestry. But ancient perceptions were not so tidy, and this particular expectation about
descent from Hellen is invalidated by the poem. Besides the Arcadians, the Locrians also
ought to have been perceived to be non Greeks if descent from Hellen was a necessary
precondition of Greekness. For in the Catalogue 26 Lokros was the leader of the Leleges, who
had been created from the stones thrown by Deukalion and Pyrrha. The poem, then, presents
the Locrians as being descended from a barbarian people created from stones. Thus, if those
not descended from Hellen had been perceived to be barbarians, the Locrians would have
been perceived the most barbarian barbarians, since they were descended from barbarians
who were descended from stones; they certainly would have been much more barbarian
than the allegedly barbarian Macedonians, ant the same would be true for the Arcadians,
since, unlike the Arcadians and the Locrians, the Macedonians were descended from Hellen’s
sister. In reality, of course, the Locrians were perceived to be Greeks, indeed were members
of the Delphic Amphictyony; their allegedly barbarian ancestry does not make them any less
Greek, nor does the fact that they may have been perceived to be, or accused of being,
culturally backward. 27 Such commonsense readings, then, can be seen to be mistaken when
they can be tested; the Greeks started with certain presuppositions when constructing, and
also when making sense of, these genealogies, and we should try to reconstruct at least some
of these to read the poem in ways as near as possible to those of the Greeks.
It could be argued that if the Macedonians were indeed perceived to be Greeks, we would
expect that at some point a genealogy would have been constructed that made them
descendants of Hellen. Such a genealogy had indeed been constructed. Hellanikos 28 is
quoted as saying that Makedon, the eponym of the Macedonias, was the son of Aiolos – who
was the son of Hellen in the Catalogue of Women. 29 The particular quotation referred to comes
from the first book of The Priestesses of Hera at Argos, but since Hellanikos had written a
Deukalioneia it is likely that he had created (or adopted) this genealogy in the context of that
work.
of Hellen.” This formulation leaves out Magnetes, for he would have invalidated the
argument, since the Magnetes are Greek; its latter part shows that it is based on, or at least
facilitated by, the assumption that the Macedonians cannot be Greeks.
23 I have set out a longer argument against the view that only the people who are descended
from Hellen were perceived to be Greek elsewhere (Sourvinou‐Inwood, Hylas, cit., chapter
I.2).
24 Cf. e.g. Hesiod, frs. 160‐161 M‐W; See Jacoby, Komm ad FGrHist 3F156, 1a, 427.
25 Cf. e.g. Hdt. 8.73; Hell. FGrHist 4F161.
26 Fr. 234 M‐W.
27 See Thuc. 1.5 on the Ozolian Locrians; S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides. Volume
I: Books 1‐III, Oxford 1991, 24 ad loc.
28 Hell. FGrHist 4F74
29 Fr. 9 M‐W.
Another argument that shows that the Catalogue presents the Macedonians as Greek, and
would have been understood to be doing so by the archaic and classical Greeks, concerns the
mother of Magnes and Makedon. The poem articulates three elements of her persona. First,
her name, which in Greek eyes evoked connotations that we need to reconstruct if we are to
try to make sense of Makedon’s genealogy as much as possible through Greek eyes. Second,
her familial associations: she is the daughter of Deukalion and sister of Hellen. Finally, her
story is structured through the schema ‘woman has sex with a god, a hero is born,’ in a
variant which involves two heroes, and in which the god is Zeus – not only the most
powerful Greek god, and the father of many heroes, but also a god especially connected with
Olympos and the Pieria region, and therefore an especially appropriate father for Magnes and
Makedon. What of Thyia? The name Thyia is closely connected with Dionysos. Thyiai or
Thyiades is a term for women associated with the worship of Dionysos. 30 Thyia is the name
of an Elean festival of Dionysos. 31 Thyia is also a name associated with Delphi. 32 In one
version of his myth, Delphos, the city’s eponym, was the son of Apollo and Thyia, the
daughter of the autochthon Kastalios. 33 Thyia was the first priestess of Dionysos, and the
first to celebrate orgia for the god; and people call the women who μαίνονται for the god
Thyiades, after her. There is a very close connection, etymological and ritual, between
Thyiades and μανία: the Thyidades are the women who μαίνονται. 34 The mythological
female companions of Dionysos were also called Thyiades at Delphi, and in some other
contexts, and they were associated with μανία. 35 The other main association of the name
Thyia is with central Greece; besides the connection with Delphi, Thyios is the name of a
month in Thessaly, Boeotia and Naupaktos, presumably name after a festival of Dionysos. 36
I submit that the fact that the mother of Magnes and Makedon has a name that is intimately
connected with Greek religion, specifically the cult of Dionysos, 37 and also with central
Greece, adds support to the reading that in the perceptions shaping the selections that led to
30 On the Thyiades see e.g. Paus. 10.4.3; 10.32.7; Plut. Aetia Graeca 293F; M.‐Ch. Villanueva
Puig, A propos des thyiades de Delphes, in L’association dionysiaque dans les sociétés anciennes. Actes
de la table rond organisée par l’École française de Rome (Rome 1984), Paris‐Rome 1986, 31‐51. A.
Henrichs, Der rasende Gott: Zur Psychologie des Dionysos und des Dionysischen in Mythos und
Literatur, in “A&A,” 40, 1994, 31‐58. Cf. also H.s. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman
religion 1. Ter Unus. Isis, Dionysos, Hermes. Three studies in Henotheism, Leiden 1990, 137‐138.
31 See Paus. 6.26.1‐2; Plut. Aetia gr. 299A; Theop. FGrHist 115F277. See also M.P. Nilsson,
Griechische Feste von religiöser Bedeutung mis MAusschluss der attischen, Leipzig 1906, 291‐293;
V. Mitsopoulos‐Leon, Zur Verehtrung des Dionysos in Elis. Nochmals: AXIE Taure und de
sechzehn heiligen Frauen, in “MDAI(A)” 99, 1984, 275‐290; Versnel, op.cit. 138‐139 and bibl. in
n. 168.
32 Cf. Hdt. 7.178.2 (a place called Thyia in which there is a temenos to Thyia the daughter of
Kephisos).
33 Paus. 10.6.4
34 Henrichs, art.cit. 53‐54.
35 See Henrichs, loc.cit. On the West pediment of the temple of Apollo Delphi see Paus.
10.19.4; Villanueva Puig, art.cit., 38‐39; cf. bibl.: Henrichs, art.cit. 56 n. 97. See also Soph, Ant.
1149‐1152, where the Thyiades μαινόμεναι πάννυχοι χορεύουσι.
36 See e.g. C. Trümpy, s.v. Monatsnamen. Griechenland, in NP, VIII (2000), 357.
37 There are also connections between other Thy‐ names and Dionysos: Thyone was another
name for Semele (see e.g. Apollod. 3.5.3); or Thyone was a nurse of Dionysos (Panyassis fg. 5
Davies); or Thyene was the name of one of the Dodonidai Nymphs who was a nurse of
Dionysos (Pherrec. fr. 90 d; see the text in R.L. Fowler, Early Greek Mythography I, Oxford
2000, 323).
the construction of this genealogy the Macedonians were perceived to be Greeks, and would
have been so understood by the archaic and classical Greek ‘readers’ 38 of this genealogy.
The central Greek associations of the name Thyia strengthens the notion that the genealogy of
Makedon in the Catalogue was a central Greek construct. It is possible to go further, and
suggest that the basic genealogical schema that had structured the early versions of the
Catalogue was tripartite, and had involved descendants of Deukalion who were eponyms of
places in central Greece: 39 first, the group whose eponym is Deukalion’s son Hellen, the
Hellenes inhabiting Hellas, to be understood as Thessaly, 40 and then the other groups, whose
eponyms are the sons of Deukalion’s daughters from Zeus, through the deployment of the
schema ‘woman has sex with a god, a hero is born.; This is as we would expect, since the
Catalogue stands at the end of a process that took place in the seventh century, and of which
the first stage ‘involved north‐central Greece”; 41 it was focused on that region and articulated
relationship between its different peoples: Hellen is the eponymous hero of the region
Hellas, and his sister’s sons are the eponymous heroes of other peoples in the regions, of
whom Makedon and Magnes are associated with Pieria and Olympos, 42 who were perceived
to be related to the people of Hellas – not to the Hellenes = Greeks, but to the Hellenes = the
inhabitants of Hellas. Once Hellen came to be seen as the eponymous hero of the Greeks,
genealogies were constructed (through the deployment and reshaping of other genealogical
constructs) to show that specific heroes were descended from Hellen. In the tripartite schema
involved the offspring of Deukalion the groups whose eponyms are Deukalion’s daughters’
sons are in one way less privileged, because they are descended from daughters, but in
another way more privileged, because their eponyms have a divine father. When the figure
of Hellen came to be privileged because he became the eponym of the Greeks (thought not
the ancestor of all of them) he was given divine paternity, the schema ‘woman has sex with a
god, a hero is born’ came to structure his myth, so that in one version he was only said to be
the son of Deukalion, while in reality he was the son of Zeus. 43
A discourse about barbarians in Greece ascribed to Hekataios by Strabo 44 includes a
statement pertaining to the ethnicity of the Macedonians. “Hekataios of Miletos says of the
Peloponnese that before the Greeks it was inhabited by barbarians. Nearly the whole of
Greece was the abode of barbarians in the past, if one draws inferences from the traditions
themselves.” Then Strabo, probably reporting Hekataios, mentions Pelops bringing over
peoples from Phrygia and Danaos from Egypt, and ht also mentions the Dryopes, Kaukones,
Pelasgians and Leleges, before going on to claim that Attica was once held by Eumolpos’
Thracians, Daulis in Phokis by (the clear implication is the Thracian) Tereus, and Thebes by
the Phoenicians who came with Kadmos; then he states that (among others) Kodros and
Kekrops are shown to have been barbarians by their names, and goes on to say that “even
now” the Thracians, Illyrians, and Epirotes live on the flanks of the Greeks, and that
“barbarians hold many parts of the land which is at the present time indisputably Greece,
Macedonia is held by the Thracians, as are parts of Thessaly, and the parts above Akarnania
38 I use this term conventionally, to include the notion ‘audiences.’
39 The Catalogue (fr. 6 M‐W) says that those descended from Deukalion reigned in Thessaly, as
does Hekataios (FGrHist 1 F 14). Hellanikos (FGrHist 4 F 6; cf. F 117) says that Deukalion
reigned in Thessaly.
40 Cf. also Fowler, art.cit. 11 for the association between Hellen and Thessaly.
41 See Fowler, art.cit., 15.
42 On Graikos and Graikoi see F. Gschnitzer, s.v. Grai, Graikoi, in DNP, IV (1998), 1195.
43 See Acou. fr. 34 Fowler.
44 Hecat. FGrHist 1 F 119 (= Strabo 7.7.1, C 321).
and Aitolia are held by Thesprotians, the Kassopaeans, the Amphilochians, the Molossians,
and the Athamanes who are Epirot ethne.” It is not certain that this last segment reflects
Hekataios. If it does not, then it is not relevant to my investigation. But in order to conduct
this investigation as rigorously as possible I will examine the position that is most inimical to
the conclusions that I have reached so far; that is, I will assume as a working hypothesis that
the last segment is based on a formulation by Hekataios.
If it is assumed that this segment is based on a formulation by Hekataios, the first problem
that arises is, in whose present were these lands ‘indisputably Greece’? If it was in Hekataios’
present, if, that is, the formulation was part of Hekataios’ text, what would have made
Hekataios think of Macedonia as ‘indisputably Greek’, if he believed that it had been
inhabited by Thracians? There are two possibilities. First, the formulation has been
Hekataios’, in which case it would follow that Macedonia had been considered indisputably
Greek in the Greek collective representations of his time – which would entail that the Greeks
as a whole had not believed that its inhabitants were Thracians; or, second, and most likely,
this segment was shaped by Strabo, through Strabo’s filters, which were different from
Hekataios’. I do not think that we can know Hekataios’ perception of Macedonia, 45 but he
clearly considered the country east of the Axios river to be Thrace, 46 while for Strabo
Macedonia extended from the Adriatic on the West to the river Hebros in the East. 47 There
certainly were Thracians in territories that were conquered and absorbed by the Macedonians
in the wake of the Persian Wars, such as Mygdonia and Bisaltia – and also other non Greeks,
such as the Paiones. 48 Thus, if the segment of the text under consideration had been shaped
through Strabo’s filters, it is impossible to reconstruct even the general lines of what
Hekataios had said; he may have said that Macedonia was held by Thracians, or he may
simply have named specific areas, for example Mygdonia and Bisaltia, as being Thracian, and
perhaps also others as being non Greek, and Strabo gave it that particular spin, summarized
it as Thracians holding the ‘now indisputably Greek’ land of Macedonia.
In these circumstances, it is unsafe to conclude that Hekataios had said that Macedonia, in the
sense of the land west of the Axios, and especially the kingdom of Macedon, was held by
Thracians. But even if Hekataios had made such a statement, would it have been taken by
fifth century Greeks to mean that the Macedonians had been Thracians? Though we cannot
reconstruct what Hekataios had said, let alone the nuances of his text, it is possible to set in
place some of the parameters that would have shaped ‘the main lines of the ways in which
fifth century Greeks would have made sense of the main lines of the discourse in Strabo that
may be reflecting Hekataios, and so to chart a rough sketch of how it would have been
perceived to have related to common Greek perceptions.
45 Hatzopoulos, Institutions, cit. 465 agrees with the view that Strabo 7 fr. 11 reflects Hekataios.
I am far from convinced.
46 Cf. N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Macedonia I, Oxford 1972, 146‐147. An illustration of the
difference between Hekataios’ and Strabo’s conception of Macedonia can be seen, for
example, in FGrHist 1 F 146, a quotation from Stephanos Byzantios, who says that according
to Hekataios Chalastra was a Thracian town, while according to Strabo it was a town of
Macedonia. Chalastra was a town in Mygdonia conquered by the Macedonians in the wake
of the Persian Wars. On Chalastra see Hatzopoulos, Institutions, cit., 107‐108.
47 Strab. 7 fr.10. On Strabo on Macedonia see also Borza, Shadow, cit., 292‐293.
48 On the history of the Macedonian kingdom and its expansion see e.g. Thuc. 2.99;
Hatzopoulos, Institutions, cit., 105‐123,; 167‐179; 463‐486 with bibl. On the process of
Macedonization see e.g. on Lete in Mygdonia: Hatzopoulos, Cultes, cit. 42‐53 passim.
First, this discourse privileges a strong version of the notion of barbarians as ancestors of the
Greeks – and so implies a strong version of the Greek perception that barbarians can become
Greek; it is based on the manipulation of complex myths, through rationalization and a
radical expansion of the barbarian element, not least through the claim that Pelops, Danaos
and Kadmos brought with them peoples from Prygia, Egypt and Phoenicia respectively, so
that what were myths about the arrival of heroes became stories about population
movements. Second, some of these statements would have run counter to the common Greek
representations and would have been considered invalid by the specific Greeks involved. For
example, the statement that the names of Kodros and Kekrops show that the people who bore
them were barbarians would have been considered wrong by the Athenians. The same
would probably have been true of the claim that a barbarian Thracian Tereus held Phokis (on
which is clearly based Thucydides’ statement that Daulis in Phokis was inhabited by
Thracians when the story of Prokne and Tereus had taken place), 49 which can be seen to be
based on a rationalizing interpretation, through the filter of strongly privileging the notion of
‘barbarians in Greece in the heroic age,’ of the fact that there were two versions of the myth of
Tereus, in one of which he was from Daulis in Phokis, while in the other that he was a
Thracian. In reality, each of these versions is mythologically significant, constructs different
meanings pertaining to Tereus’ role as husband and father, perpetrator and victim, which is
beyond my scope to discuss here. Finally, the claim that Thracians held parts of Thessaly in
the present (if it had been made by Hekataios) does not, to my knowledge, correspond to a
Greek perception that at c. 500 parts of Thessaly were inhabited by people whom the Greeks
perceived to be non Greek. Thus, there is a disjunction between common Greek perceptions
of the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of Thessaly and the statement attributed to Hekataios.
Consequently, fifth century Greeks would almost certainly not have believed all these
statements to be correct (even if they had been made by Hekataios), and so would probably
not have believed that the Macedonians were Thracians. If (which, we saw, is far from
certain) Hekataios had written that the kingdom of Macedon was held by Thracians, which
would imply that the Macedonians were Thracians, fifth century Greeks would have
perceived this as an exaggeration to fit the ideological bias of his discourse, thus leaving open
the ethnicity of the Macedonians, since even readers who knew nothing about that ethnicity
would have registered Hekataios’ discourse concerning what they did know about as
distortions, and would have adjusted their filters accordingly. 50
To sum up. So far we have seen that Macedonians are presented as Greek in the earliest
extant text relevant to the issue, the Catalogue of Women; this is especially interesting, since
the first stage of development of this poem involved north‐central Greece, 51 and so was
shaped in an area, and by people, who had knowledge of the Macedonians, and would thus
have been aware of the fact that they shared in the system of interacting cultural traits that
defined Greekness, above all language and religion. Strabo’s version of Hekataios’ discourse
cannot be used to support the belief that in the Greek perceptions the Macedonians were
considered to be non Greeks – though if the relevant segment is indeed reflecting Hekataios,
and reflecting him correctly, it may indicate their vulnerability to being subsumed together
with the barbarian neighbours when looked at from a distance, if the text’s ideological thrust
makes this desirable. If Hekataios had said that Macedonia was held by barbarians, which is
far from certain, he would have blurred distinctions to class all the inhabitants of the wider
49 Thuc. 2.29.3; see Hornblower, op.cit., 287‐288 ad loc.
50 Very much later Greek readers is another matter, which does not concern me here.
51 See Fowler, art.cit., 15.
geographical region together, in a context in which he stressed the presence of barbarians in
Greece and lessened the distance between Greeks and barbarians.
Herodotos, the next earliest source on the ethnicity of the Macedonians, presented the
Macedonians as Greeks. He articulated two sets of relevant perceptions, one pertaining to the
Macedonian ethnos as a whole, the second pertaining to king Alexander and the Macedonian
royal family. 52
Herodotos connects the Macedonians with the Dorians twice. First, in the highly problematic
passage 1.56, 53 the Dorian γένος, which was an Hellenikon ethnos, had been driven from
Histaiotis and gone to live in the Pindos area, where it was called Makednon – from there it
migrated to Dryopia, and eventually to the Peloponnese, where it came to be called Dorian.
Herodotos, then, identifies the early Dorians with the Macedonians – though, obviously, the
Macedonian Dorians who, in his articulation, went to the Peloponnese would not have been
perceived to have been the same as the Macedonians who now live in Macedonia, but those
who are now Dorians are those who left Macedonia. But there can be no doubt that the fact
that Herodotos presents the Dorians as Macedonians entails that he perceived the Dorians to
be closely connected with the Macedonians of Macedonia; and that therefore he perceived
the Macedonians to have been among those who were already Greek when the early Ionians
were Pelasgian, and who had spoken Greek from the beginning. This, of course, also entails
that in Herodotos’ assumptions the fifth century Macedonians were speaking Greek – which
is historically correct. A comparable assumption is articulated in book 8, where he calls
various Peloponnesians (the Lacedaemonians and others) “a Dorian and Macedonian
(Μακεδνόν) ethnos.” 54
Alexander, Herodotos reports, referred to his father Amyntas as a Greek man in a message he
sent to the Persian king (ανήρ Έλλην Μακεδόνων ύπαρχος). 55 A bit later on Herodotos
asserts the Greek ethnicity of the Macedonian kings in his own voice: 56 “That these
descendants of Perdikkas are Greeks, as they themselves say, I myself happen to know and
will prove it in the later part of my writing.” Then he says that the Hellenodikai at Olympia
established that the Macedonian kings are indeed Greeks, for when Alexander went to
compete at the Olympic Games, some of those who were to compete against him tried to stop
him by saying that the competition is for Greeks only and not for barbarians, but Alexander
proved himself to be an Argive, and was judged to be a Greek. Herodotos eventually 57 fulfills
his promise to prove the Greek ethnic identity of the Macedonian kings by telling the story of
there Herakleid ancestry. According to this myth the Macedonian royal house was
descended from Herakles via Perdikkas, a descendant of Temenos (who was a descendant of
Heracles), who had fled Argos with his two brothers and become king of Macedonia.
Euripides’ Archelaos tells a different variant of the myth: the Macedonian royal house was
52 On Alexander I in Herodotos see also E. Badian Herodotus on Alexander I of Macedon: A
Study in Some Subtle Silences, in S. Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography, Oxford 1994, 107‐
130.
53 I discuss this passage elsewhere, together with some aspects of Herodotos’ perceptions of
ethnicity and the problems concerning the Greekness of the Ionians and the Pelasgians
(Sourvinou‐Inwood, Herodotos, cit.).
54 Hdt. 8.43: “These, except the Hermioneans, are Dorians and Macedonians who had last
come from Erineos and Pindos and Dryopia.”
55 Hdt. 5.20. This is discussed in Badian, Herodotus on Alexander, cit., 114‐115.
56 Hdt. 5.22. See also R. Thomas, Herodotus in Context. Ethnography, Science and the Art of
Persuasion, Cambridge 2000, 223.
57 Hdt. 8.137‐139.
descended from a different exiled Temenid Argive, a son of Temenos called Archelaos.
Finally, according to Herodotos, 58 ‘Alexander, speaking in secret to the Athenian generals
before the battle of Plataea, says that he cares for συναπάσης της Ελλάδος; the selections that
shaped this formulation may suggest that Herodotos is presenting Alexander as thinking of
his own country, Macedonia, as part of Greece, since they may suggest an underlying
meaning ‘I care for the whole of Greece, not just my own country.” Then he explains that he
himself is Greek by ancient descent, at this rhetorically appropriate point, when the Athenian
generals were still ignorant of this identity, which he reveals at the very end, “I am
Αλέξανδρος ο Μακεδών.”
The story that some of those who were to compete against Alexander at the Olympic Games
had tried to stop him by claiming that he was a barbarian may be a narrative dramatization,
an articulation through an agonistic schema, of the notion ‘Alexander had to prove that he
was Greek,’ or it may be reflecting a real event, perhaps an attempt to eliminate a strong
competitor (which we know Alexander was, since αγωνιζόμενος στάδιον συνέξεπιπτε τω
πρώτω), or it may be a narrative marking of Alexander’s Greekness. In the story Alexander
by‐passes the question of whether the Macedonians were Greeks, by demonstrating that he
himself is an Argive. 59
The implications of this story in the eyes of fifth century Greeks have not, in my view, been
fully realized, and this, together with certain fourth century statements I will be discussing
below, has helped to generate the modern view according to which the Macedonian royal
family was considered to be Greek, but the other Macedonians were considered barbarians.
This, of course, was the irreducible minimum Greekness that modern discourses based on the
ancient statements about the Macedonians’ ethnicity have to accept, that from the early fifth
century the Macedonian royal family was perceived by the other Greeks to be Greek. But this
interpretation, (besides being in conflict with statements which will be discussed below,
which should alert us to the fact that the situation is more complex than may appear) 60 would
also, I will now argue, not have been consistent with the implications of Herodotos’ story in
Greek eyes, or indeed with Herodotos’ own presentation of the Dorians.
Herodotos, we saw, presents the Macedonians as Dorian, and their kings as Achaeans,
descendants of Herakles. This is also how represents the Spartans, Dorians whose kings were
Herakleids, descended from Eurysthenes and Procles, the twin sons of Aristodemos son of
Aristomachos, son of Kleodaios, son of Hyllos, 61 and so of Achaean origin. Herodotos, then,
has constructed identifications and isomorphisms between on the one hand the Macedonians,
58 Hdt. 9.45; see also Badian, Herodotus on Alexander, cit., 118‐119.
59 E. Badian, Greeks and Macedonians, in B. Barr‐Sharrar – E.N. Borza (eds.), Macedonia and
Greece in late classical and early Hellenistic times, Washington 1982, 35 noted that Alexander I
was described as Philhellene in the lexicographers who go back to fourth century sources,
and suggested that such an adjective would not have been used for a Greek. The last point is
indeed valid, but, in my view the fact that the attestation is late, and is more likely than not to
have been a construct by later readers, who were steeped in and conditioned by, fourth
century cultural insults suggests that it is not a valid argument against the view that
Alexander was perceived to be Greek in the fifth (and indeed fourth) century.
Editor’s note: both Badian and the author are mistaken. See FAQ #1.
60 See esp. Dem. 3.24; 9.31; cf. also 30.32
61 Hdt. 6.52; cf. Ephor. FGrHist 70 F 117. See C. Calame, Spartan Genealogies: The Mythological
Representation of a Spatian Organization, in J. Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology,
London 1987, 175‐177.
and on the other the Dorians of the Peloponnese in general, but most specifically and closely,
the Spartans. All four elements of this construct, the Spartan Dorians and their Achaean
kings, the Macedonians (whom he identified with Dorians) and their Achaean kings, are
Greek; but in both cases the peoples are more purely Greek than their kings; first, because
Herodotos claims that the Dorians are the most purely Greek among Greeks, 62
and second, because he says of the Spartan Herakleid kings – and this in his eyes would have
been also valid of the Macedonian Herakleid kings – that though their ancestors were
reckoned to be Greeks by Perseus’ times, if one goes further back than that, then the leaders
of the Dorians had Egyptian ancestors. 63 Once again, we see the Greek perception that people
can become Greek, here coupled with the paradox that the leaders of the Dorians who were
the most purely Greek are descended from Egyptians. This paradox would have been
activated at 8.137‐9, where Alexander’s Argive descent, which he demonstrated when
challenged to prove his Greekness at 5.22, proves to be a Herakleid descent (as had not been
stated at 5.220, which gives him a glorious ancestry, by which also in Herodotos’ schema,
makes him somewhat less purely Greek than his subjects, the Macedonian people. 64
The stated Greekness of Herodotos’ Macedonians and their place in the construct involving
he Spartans is one of the arguments that invalidate the notion that the story of Alexander at
the Olympic Games shows that the Macedonian royal family was considered to be Greek, but
the other Macedonians were perceived to be barbarians. Herodotos’ readers had been told
that the Macedonians are Greeks, and later on they will be directed to seeing them through
the filters of the Spartans with their Herakleid kings. So they would be assuming that the
Hellanodikai acknowledged the Greekness of a Macedonian king of Argive descent who
ruled over Macedonians who were Dorian Greeks, especially since – and this is a second,
related, but also independent and most important argument in my case – in Greek
perceptions of ethnicity ancestry alone, we saw, was not enough to define someone as Greek;
it was the most effective argument, but implicit in discourses that deployed it was the fact
that those claiming to be Greek shared in the language, religion and other cultural traits that
62 Hdt. 1.56, 58.
63 Hdt, 6.53
64 The myths of the Herakleid ancestry, and indeed of the Macedonian/Dorian movements in
central and northern Greece, should be considered only as myths; what is pertinent is these
myths’ meanings and functions in Herodotos’ text and in the Greek collective representations
in general, and what perceptions they articulated (for ex. that Herodotos perceived them, or
at the very least chose to present them, as correlative with the Spartans). Attempts to
reconstruct history on the basis of myths (as in Borza, Shadow,cit., 78‐79, 81‐84) are doomed to
create culturally determined constructs, reflecting the operator’s own presuppositions, and
flawed with circularity. This is illustrated for ex., in Borza, Shadow,cit., 78: “this account of
early Macedonian history is based on the most skeptical analysis of literary traditions.” ‐ a
statement that reveals an absence of awareness of the dangers of cultural determination and
circularity and of the complex modalities of mythopoea. This simplistic perception of
mythopoea also underlies Borza’s (Shadow, cit., 84) confident assertion: ‘The fact that their
fifth‐century B.C. kings found it desirable to impose a southern Greek overlay through the
adoption of Argive lineage in no way alters the picture, beyond suggesting that fifth‐century
Macedonians were less certain about their Hellenic origins than are some modern writers.”
The only rigorous way of correlating myth with history is to study each (on the one hand the
historical data, including archaeological evidence, and on the other the myths and their sets
of complex meanings) totally separately, on the basis of their own appropriate
methodologies, and then compare the two – bearing in mind that historical material I
radically changed as it is deployed to serve mythological purposes.
were perceived to be defining Greekness. Consequently, it would have been a necessary
presupposition for Alexander’s argument about his ancestry to have been accepted by the
Hellanodikai that should have lived in a place in which Greek was spoken and Greek religion
was practiced – and which, at least to some extent, shared in the main lines of what could be
called the Greek way of life. Herodotos’ readers certainly would have brought to bear the
knowledge derived from Herodotos’ text that the Macedonians were Dorian Greeks. It is
now clear that the decision of the Hellanodikai was right; the Macedonians did indeed speak
Greek and practise Greek religion. The sanctuary of Demeter at Dion is one Macedonian
sanctuary, a Greek sanctuary to a Greek deity, that predated the Persian Wars. 65
The notion that in terms of these other cultural traits – as opposed to ancestry – Alexander
could have been judged separately from the rest of the Macedonians, and the related notion
that Alexander’s admission to the Olympic Games had only involved the acknowledgment of
Greekness for himself and the royal family, and not for the Macedonians as a whole, also
conflicts, I will not argue, with the religious mentality articulated the Panhellenic Games. In
Greece membership of a group was expressed and reinforced through cult. The Greeks saw
themselves as a religious group; their common sanctuaries and sacrifices was one of the
things that made them all Greek, and this identity was expressed in , and reinforced through,
ritual activities in which the worshipping group was “all the Greeks,” all those who were
members of a Greek polis or ethnos, the most important of which was the Olympic Games.
Participation in the Olympic Games defined Greeks as a worshipping group, helped define
Greekness, because the Panhellenic Games were the ritual shared by all Greeks. 66 At the
same time, and correlatively with this, an individual’s participation in Panhellenic religion
was mediated by the polis or ethnos; one participated in Panhellenic religion in virtue of
being a member of a polis or ethnos. 67 To think that it would have been different for
Alexander because he was the king is to impose logical schemata on a conceptual framework
governed by a different mentality; for in terms of Greek mythological (and so also ethnicity
shaping) mentality, kings define kingdoms – to a greater of lesser extent, in different contexts:
at one end of the spectrum, Erichthonios’ autochthony and descent from Hephaistos, for
example, gave all Athenians a share in autochthony and a claim to being the sons of
Hephaistos; 68 at the other end, we saw, the Dorian Spartans had Herakleid Achaean kings, as
did the Macedonians; but even here (in the case of the Spartan kings for which we have the
evidence), the disjunction is within circumscribed parameters: kings and Dorian Spartans
shared a common history since the conquest of the Peloponnese, and they certainly shared a
language, religion and way of life. Since Herodotos invites us to see the Macedonian kings
and the Macedonian people through the filter of the Spartan kings and the Spartan people,
there can be no doubt that he perceived and presented the two relationships as isomorphic,
and so that his presentation of the story about the Olympic Games did not involved
assumptions in which the kings were to be perceived as radically different from the
Macedonian people.
The acknowledgement of the Greekness of the Macedonians by the Hellanodikai was of
fundamental importance, precisely because participation in the Olympic Games defined
65 See supra n. 12.
66 Conceptually; only a small proportion were actually there, but all, or almost all, were
present symbolically, since individual cities sent official embassies to the Panhellenic Games.
67 Sourvinou‐Inwood, Polis, cit., 297‐298
68 Cf. Aesch. Eum. 13.
Greekness. 69 This acceptance, then, would have sealed the Greek ethnicity of the
Macedonians in Greek perceptions, so that even those Greeks who were not familiar with
them would have perceived them to be Greek. But if this is right, how can we make sense of
Greek statements that appear to contradict this? Before I attempt to answer this question I
will sum up the discussion on ancestry, since from now on the focus will be on statements
pertaining to ethnicity.
Editor’s note: the author might have noted, in this context, the fragment of an ode by Pindar in honor
of Alexander I (fr 120‐121). Although usually considered an enkomion rather than a victory ode, it
certainly places Alexander in the mainstream of contemporary literary efforts, and just might have
referred to his Olympic victory.
The earliest myth about the Macedonians’ ancestry, which was generated and circulated from
at least as early as the early sixth century, probably since the seventh century, in north‐central
Greece, the area with which the Macedonians interacted most closely, presents them (when
read through archaic Greek assumptions) as Greeks, descended from an eponym who was
the son of Zeus and Hellen’s sister Thyia. Herodotos, the only other extant early source on
the ancestry of the Macedonians, presents the Macedonian people as Dorians and the
Macedonian kings as Achaean Herakleids, in an isomorphic relationship with the Spartan
kings and the Spartan people; both the Macedonian and the Spartan kings were less purely
Greek than their subjects. This representation of the Macedonians as Greek that has been
reconstructed here is, I submit, consistent with the conceptual geography that shaped the
representations articulated in, and articulating, Greek tragedies, in which Thrace represents
the marginal other – especially the version in the in the fourth stasimon of Sophocles’
Antigone, in which there are degrees in the otherness and marginality of Thrace, with the land
of the Edonoi and Lykourgos, around Strymon and Mount Pangaion, being less remote and
less marginal, and Salmysessos at the other end the most other and most savage. 70
Like Herodotos, Thucydides also stated that the Macedonian royal family were descended
from a Herakleid: in his discussion of the history and expansion of the Macedonian
kingdom 71 he says that the Macedonian kings were descended from the Argive Temenos. 72 I
69 Badian, who expressed no opinion as to whether the Macedonians were Greek (see Badian,
Herodotus on Alexander, cit., 119n.13) had pointed out (Badian, Greeks, cit., 36) that
Macedonians do not appear in the surviving Olympic victor lists before the reign of
Alexander the Great, and that Archelaos instituted ‘’counter‐Olympics’ at Dion. He connects
this (see Badian, Herodotus on Alexander, cit. 119n.13) with the Macedonian kings’ desire to
avoid having Macedonian noblemen compete in the Olympic Games because it would not
have suited them to have their subjects recognized as equals in Hellenic descent, which
would have opened up the possibility of such noblemen winning an Olympic victory. I am
arguing that it had not been possible for the Macedonian royal family to have been admitted
to the Olympic Games without such participation becoming open to all Macedonians. But I
am sure that Badian is right that the Macedonian kings would not have been keen on, and
would have discouraged, participation by their people, because of the prestige involved in an
Olympic victory, as well as the networking with aristocrats from other cities and ethne.
Editor’s note: Both Badian and the author ignore the participation, and victories, in the
Olympics by Philip, and perhaps even by Archelaos, before the reign of Alexander the Great. See
Moretti, Olympionikai, nos. 434, 439 and 445 for Philip and no. 349 for Archelaos.
70 See C. Sourvinou‐Inwood, The fourth stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone, in “BICS,” 36, 1989, 154,
162.
71 Thuc. 2.99‐100.2; see Hornblower, op.cit., 374‐376 ad loc.
will not consider Thucydides’ statements pertaining to the ethnicity of the Macedonians, and
try to reconstruct the perceptions articulated in them. A cluster of references to the
Macedonians in book 4, at 124‐126, contains formulations that have given rise to the belief
that Thucydides had not, or may have not, considered the Macedonians to be Greeks. There
are two such formulations at 4.124.1. First, Thucydides says that Perdikkas led the
Macedonian forces, ων εκράτει των Μακεδόνων την δύναμιν and a hoplite force of Greeks
who lived in the country, των ενοικούντων Ελλήνων οπλίτας. It has generally been thought
that Thucydides sets out an opposition here between Macedonians and Greeks, with the
implication that in his view the Macedonians were not Greeks. 73 But I submit that the
contrast at 2.124.1 is not between Macedonians and Greeks, but between Macedonians on the
one hand, ων εκράττει Perdikkas, and on the other non Macedonian Greeks living in
Macedonia.
In the second formulation at 4.124.1 Thucydides first refers to the entire hoplite forces of the
Greeks, who came to about three thousand, ξύμπαν δε το οπλιτικόν των Ελλήνων τρισχίλιοι
μάλιστα, then to “the Macedonian cavalry with the Chalkidians, nearly one thousand
strong,” ιππείς δ’οι πάντες ηκολούθων Μακεδόνων ξυν Χαλκιδεύσιν ολίγου ες χιλίους,
“and also a great crowd of barbarians” και άλλος όμιλος των βαρβάρων πολύς. It has been
suggested that while just before Thucydides had made a binary distinction between
Macedonians and Greeks, here it looks as though he is sorting into three categories, Greek,
Macedonians and barbarians, with the Macedonians intermediate between Greeks and
barbarians. 74 However, I would suggest that the tripartite division here is not structured by
perceptions pertaining to three different types of ethnicity, but by three categories of combat
forces, a categorization which partly also involved ethnicity: first, the hoplites who were
Greeks from different places, who came to about three thousand; second the cavalry, which
consisted of Macedonians and Chalkidians (from the Chalkidian League), who came to nearly
a thousand; and finally a great crowd of barbarians, presumably lightly armed, and with or
without the connotation of absence of proper military discipline, certainly to be distinguished
from both hoplites and cavalry.
In the third passage, at 4.125.1, Thucydides speaks of οι μεν Μακεδόνες και το πλήθος των
βαρβάρων. Here there is an opposition between Macedonians on the one hand and
barbarians on the other, which fits perfectly the readings proposed for the two passages at
4.124.1. 75
The final passage is not in Thucydides’ own voice. At 4.126.5 he sets out a speech by Brasidas
to his troops, in which Brasidas refers to the Macedonians as barbarians: he speaks of the
72 Thuc. 2.99.3.
73 See the nuanced discussion in S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides. Volume II: Books
IV‐V.24, Oxford 1996, 390‐392 ad loc., which summarized that position; Hornblower’s own
much more sophisticated opinion concerning all these passages in 4.124‐126, is that
Thucydides’ view was not rigid or consistent; that if he had to choose between saying
whether the Macedonians were Greeks or barbarians he would say barbarians, hence 124.1,
and also 126.3; but he thought there were degrees of barbarian‐ness, and in the second
passage from 124.1, he meant to suggest that the Macedonians were intermediate between
Greeks and utter barbarians. I will be offering a different view.
74 Hornblower, Thucydides II, cit., 391‐392 ad loc.
75 Hornblower, Thucydides II, cit., 394 ad 4.125.1 rightly rejects a suggested emendation for this
passage, which had aimed at making Thucydides’ Macedonians fit into the category
‘barbarians.’
“barbarians, whom you now fear because you have no experience of them,” and then says
“from the contests you have had before with the Macedonians among them, τοις Μακεδόσιν
αυτών.” As Hornblower noted, in such a speech by a Spartan general “a slighting reference
to a recently defeated sub‐group of Macedonians, . . the Lynkestians, as barbarians is
rhetorically appropriate and says nothing about Th.’s own categorization.” 76 It is not the
main, Perdikkas’, Macedonians to whom Brasidas refers as barbarians, but the Lynkestian
Macedonians. 77 Indirectly, the insult may or may not have been perceived as affecting
Perdikkas’ Macedonians; if it did, it would be hardly surprising that this would not have
worried Brasidas or his audience, since the reason they were in a difficult position just then is
because the Macedonians had ran away, together with the barbarians.
Let us consider more closely the rhetorical manipulation involved in this passage.
Thucydides’ Brasidas begins his speech by addressing the army as ‘Peloponnesians,’ while
most were not Peloponnesians; he is rhetorically treating the army as a cohesive unit. 78 So
the rhetorical manipulation of ethnicity begins at the very beginning in an overt way, and this
sets the filters for the rest of the speech; what Brasidas is presented as doing with the
Lynkestian Macedonians is the mirror image of the address: he refers to the opposing
enemies as also one unit, barbarians, through a pars pro toto trope that allows him implicitly to
construct the claim that the Illyrians, the barbarians whom, we are told at 125.1, everyone
feared, were no different from the Lynkestian Macedonians, whom his forces had defeated
before. In these circumstances, the filters through which Thucydides’ readers would have
made sense of his slighting reference to the Lynkestian Macedonians would have left open
the question of their actual ethnicity. Given the readers’ assumptions, the formulation (τοις
Μακεδόσιν αυτών) may well not have been anchored to the meaning ‘from among the
barbarians’ for Thucydides’ readers, though that meaning would have registered as a
rhetorical construct; the reading may have implicitly slid to ‘among the enemy.’ Be that as it
may, it is, in any case, clear that this passage tells us nothing about Thucydides’ – or indeed
Brasidas’ ‐ perceptions of the ethnicity of the Macedonians.
To sum up. On my reading, there is nothing in these passages to suggest that Thucydides
thought that the Macedonians were not Greek. On the contrary, I suggest, the problem of
apparent inconsistencies between the different passages disappears in the readings that
construct meanings articulated by the perception that the Macedonians were Greeks.
However, we have also seen an instance of the use of the term ‘barbarian’ being allowed to be
constructed as a cultural insult against the Macedonians. After the Macedonians conquered
the territories of neighboring Thracian tribes, they had absorbed many of those non Greeks,
and they Hellenized people and places. 79 So the notion ‘Macedonians’ would have come to
include a spectrum of people, from the Greek Macedonians of the kingdom which had its
capital at Aigai to the not yet Hellenized Thracians of the latest conquest. However, given
Greek perceptions of ethnicity, according to which people can become Greek, and did, hence
the Greek identity of Greek colonies with mixed populations, 80 this did not mean that the
Greek ethnic identity of the Macedonians became unstable. But this state of affairs my well
have facilitated the deployment of the term ‘barbarian’ as a cultural insult against the
76 Hornblower, Thucydides II, cit., 392 ad 126.3.
77 On the Lynkestians see Hammond, op.cit., 102‐105; map: 58 map 8.
Editor’s note: It might have been appropriate for the author to have cited Thucydides’ (2.99.2)
identification of the Lyknestians as one of the Macedonian tribes of the upper country.
78 See Hornblower, Thucydides II,cit., 397 ad 4.126.1.
79 On the history of the Macedonian kingdom and its expansion see supra n. 48.
80 I discuss some of these questions in Sourvinou‐Inwood, Hylas, cit. chapter I.2.
Macedonians in certain polemical contexts – with the ‘cultural inferiority’ meaning of
‘barbarian’ both facilitating this and also entailing that the accusation was never clearly
unambiguously about ethnicity. However, the notion that the Macedonian royal family was
considered to be Greek, but the other Macedonians were barbarians (which, I argued, is a
modern construct), appears at first glance to be supported by a statement of Isocrates. In
Philippus (5) 106‐108 Isocrates tells Philip that the Argive founder of the Macedonian
kingdom 81 had wanted a king’s power, but did not pursue it in the same way as other Greeks
did, by fomenting στάσεις and bringing about bloodshed in their own cities; he left the
Hellenic territory and became king in Macedonia because he knew that Greeks were not
accustomed to submit to monarchy, while the others cannot order their lives without some
such control. And so (108) “because he along among the Greeks did not feel worthy of ruling
over a people of kindred race, he alone managed to escape the dangers involved in
monarchies.” Thus, while those Greeks who had acquired one‐man power over Greeks were
destroyed, as was their γένος, he lived happily and bequeathed the kingdom to his
descendants.
I will now set in place some of the parameters for the reconstruction of the main lines of the
ways in which Isocrates’ contemporaries would have made sense of this discourse. To begin
with, Isocrates’ statement is not only in conflict with Herodotos’ presentation of the
Macedonians, and my readings of the Catalogue and of Thucydides, and of the religious
significance of Alexander’s participation in the Olympic Games, it is also in conflict with
some statements of Demosthenes, which are of interest because they articulate a rejection of
the Greekness of the Macedonian royal family, which even on modern culturally determined
readings is guaranteed by Alexander’s participation in the Olympic Games. In one of his
speeches against Philip 82 Demosthenes claims that Philip is not only not Greek, nor related to
the Greeks, he is not even a barbarian from a place that can be named with honour, but a
pestilent (όλεθρος) Macedonian, from a place from which one couldn’t even buy a good
slave. This characterization, it should be noted, was presented at a time when Macedonian
culture was Greek to an extent that even skeptical commentators cannot deny. Demosthenes’
claim is in conflict with reality, that is, with Greek perceptions of the Macedonian royal
family – even on the modern minimalist reading of Alexander’s participation in the Olympic
Games. Obviously, this distortion is correlative with the orator’s hostility towards, and his
forensic construction of contempt for, Philip. Demosthenes’ remarks on Philip’s ethnicity are
a cultural insult, which radically distorts the generally perceived reality – partly through a
reliance on an implicit blurring of the notion ‘barbarian as a non Greek’ and ‘barbarian in the
sense of uncivilized.’ At 3.24 Demosthenes’ rhetorical manipulation of the Macedonian
kings’ ethnicity is explicitly correlative with his rhetorical manipulation, and distortion, of
past history. 83 For he claims that Perdikkas II had been a subject of the Athenians, as it was
appropriate, ώσπερ εστί προσήκον for a barbarian to be the subject of Greeks. In fact,
Perdikkas II had not been the subject of the Athenians, or anything like it.
Demosthenes’ claim that Philip and the Macedonians were barbarians is correlative with his
ideological desire to eliminate from the Athenians’ conceptual university any possibility that
a positive paradigm of Panhellenic unity under Philip’s leadership may challenge
81 See also 5.76 (Philip a Herakleid).
82 The third Philippic (Dem. 9.31; cf. also 30, 32). See also 4.10.
83 On how far orators could go in manipulating history see C. Pelling, Literary Texts and the
Greek Historians, London 2000, 61‐67.
Demosthenes’ presentation of reality. 84 Denying that they were Greeks was a radical strategy
for achieving such elimination. Demosthenes’ statements illustrate the fact that descriptions
of the Macedonians as non Greeks in rhetorically charged contexts can radically distort what
we would consider to be historical reality; therefore they must not be assumed to be
necessarily reflecting historical Greek perceptions in every case in which they cannot be
shown to be wrong – as they can in the case of Demosthenes’ statements. 85
Like Demosthenes, Thrasymachos also appears to have characterized a Macedonian king as a
barbarian. He is said to have deployed a modified form of a formulation from Euripides’
Telephos in his υπέρ Λαρισαίων “Will we, who are Greek, be slaves to the barbarian
Archelaos?” 86 Since we do not know the context of the Euripidean formulation, or the context
of the deployment of the modified Euripidean expression by Thrasymachos, we cannot
reconstruct the ways in which the readers would have made sense of this expression. But
since we know that we lack some of the assumptions they had deployed in making sense of it,
we are not entitled simply (and implicitly) to assume that the meaning was straightforward,
that the formulation referred to a generally accepted barbarian ethnicity for Archelaos, let
alone for the Macedonian royal family as a whole, especially since such a notion is in conflict
with the acknowledgment of the Greekness of (at the very least) the Macedonian royal family
by the Hellenodikai. Archelaos was hardly a colourless ‘Macedonian king’ figure. He was an
ally of the Athenians, who bestowed public approval on him, but he also aroused strong
feelings of hostility in Platonic circles and Plato traduced him in Gorgias as a paradigm of an
evil man. 87 His mother is said to have been a slave, though he was certainly legitimized. 88
Thrasymachos’ expression, then, would have activated knowledge of Archelaos’ mother’s
(probably) barbarian origin; the raising of the issue of ethnicity (if it is right that the Greek
ethnic identity of the Argeads had been firmly established) would have made his mother’s
ethnicity an issue and evoked her (at least alleged) slave statue. This is an insult, constructed
through rhetorical manipulation of perceived reality in a hostile context, which activated the
issue of one individual’s idiosyncratic parentage; it should therefore not form the basis of
modern assessments of Greek perceptions of the ethnicity of the Macedonians.
I now return to Isocrates. In order to set the parameters for reconstructing the filters that will
allow us to make sense of the passage in Philippus 106‐108 as much as possible in ways similar
to those of Isocrates’ contemporary Greeks we should first look at another passage from the
same oration, Philippus 117, which involved matter for which we have better access to
evidence that will allow us to chart the relationship between Isocrates’ rhetoric and the
generally perceived reality. In this passage Isocrates is making a distinction between on the
one hand benevolent gods who bring blessings, and who, he says, are called Olympian, and
on the other those who bring punishments and disasters, who, he says, have less pleasant
84 I am not interested in Demosthenes’ motivation, or ‘real’ beliefs, only in his rhetorical
constructs, agenda and consequent ideological desiderata. On Demosthenes as a politician
and orator see now I. Worthington (ed.), Demosthenes: Statesmen and Orator, London 2000.
85 In reality, the reading of the evidence through filters implicitly constructed through the
deployment of such statements have shaped modern perceptions of Macedonian ethnicity, in
the same was as, as Hatzopoulos (Institutions, cit., 49) pointed out, the rhetorically charged
passage in Arr., Anab. 7.9.2, from a speech ascribed to Alexander, has shaped modern views
of Macedonian civic institutions more than archaeological discoveries.
86 Thrasym. D‐K 85 fr. 2.
87 Gorgias 470c9‐471d2. See E. R. Dodds (ed.), Plato, Gorgias, Oxford 1959, 241‐243 ad 470c9‐
471d2.
88 On Archelaos see E.N. Badian, s.v. Archelaos, in DNP, I (1996), 984‐985.
names; he claims that to the first group are offered temples and altars, while the second is not
honoured in prayers and sacrifices but only apotropaic rites are performed, rites intending to
push them away. The descriptions, especially of the second group, are somewhat vague and
ambiguous. This is not an accident; it is the result of the fact that, we shall see, this statement
presents a version of Greek religious realities that is polarized to the point of distortion. The
vagueness of the description prevents complete identification with the relevant cultic
categories, and this partly protects Isocrates’ statement from total invalidation. For it was not
only chthonic gods who received chthonic cult; celestial gods also received chthonic cults
and chthonic deities had non chthonic cults. The real situation in Greece, that deities in each
category, Olympian or chthonic, had sides and cults belonging to the other, does not
correspond to Isocrates’ claim. Another dissonance is that Isocrates has grouped under the
second category al those deities who bring disasters and punishments, whom he contrasts to,
and differentiates from, the Olympians. But in fact the gods who bring calamities and
punishments are a much broader category than simply the Chthonian gods, and include at
least some of the Olympians. Even the most Olympian, full of light, gods could have a dark
side; Apollo, for example, was also a death bringer. We can make sense of this disparity
between Isocrates’ statement and Greek religious beliefs and practices when we consider the
context of this statement: Isocrates is urging Philip to be benevolent towards the Greeks,
arguing that benevolence makes people more well disposed toward the superior who is
benevolent, while harshness is bad for those who exercise it as well as for those who suffer it.
Clearly, in this context it suited his purposes to manipulate reality to make things appear
much more polarized than they in fact were, to stress the binary opposition in a form
exaggerated to the point of distortion of the actual beliefs and practices. This is deliberate
rhetorical manipulation, a restructuring of reality that allows Isocrates to articulate implicitly
the compliment that the best way of thinking of the relationship between Philip and the
Greeks was on the model of that between the gods and humanity. Isocrates is doing
something comparable in 106‐108, where his rhetorical manipulation of reality allows him to
distance the Macedonian royal family from the bad connotations of kingship and tyranny
(which he subsumes under ‘monarchy’) in the Athenian collective representations, indeed to
contrast the two to the benefit of the Macedonian monarchy. In order to construct this
contrast he has deployed the scheme ‘Macedonians as barbarians,’ a cultural insult reversing
an anti‐Macedonian schema into a pro‐Macedonian royal family one. But even in this
exaggerated rhetoric, he does not use the word ‘barbarian’ to refer to the Macedonians –
though he does contrast them to the Greeks: at 107 τους μεν Έλληνας……τους δω includes
the Macedonians, and also Macedonia is contrasted to ο τόπος ο Ελληνικός, and at 108 the
Macedonian king rules over an ουχ ομόφυλον γένος. At 5.154, Isocrates says that Philip
should ευεργετείν the Greeks, βασιλεύειν over the Macedonians and άρχειν over as many
barbarians as possible. The assumptions underlying the distinction between Greeks and
Macedonians is obvious here: Philip is king of the Macedonians, Isocrates obviously does not
want him to be king of all the other Greeks.
In these circumstances, I conclude that in the archaic and classical period the Macedonians
perceived themselves to be Greeks and were also perceived to be Greeks by the other Greeks.
When they first became involved in affairs that concerned the Southern Greeks, and then
major players in Southern Greek politics, their ethnicity became open to rhetorical
manipulation, or rather, they became vulnerable to the cultural insult ‘barbarian,’ with the
help of the deployment of the ‘cultural inferiority’ meaning of ‘barbarian’, so that the
accusation was not unambiguously about ethnicity. It is not that perceptions of the
Greekness of the Macedonians became unstable; it was the acknowledgement of their
Greekness that became unstable at the level of rhetoric, it was manipulated as a weapon. But
in Greek eyes the Greek identity of the Macedonians was indelibly sealed through their
admittance as participants in the Panhellenic Games, which in the Greek collective
representations defined Greekness, and defined not simply the individual, but also, I hope to
have made clear, his polis or ethnos, as Greek.
Appendix: Deconstructing a construct
Borza pays lip service to the dangers of attempting to define ethnicity on the basis of
archaeological evidence, 89 but he uses archaeological evidence to support his thesis that the
Macedonians were not Greek in his argument concerning the Late Bronze Age. 90 For he
claims that there are no “genuine Mycenaean settlements” in Macedonia, just imports and
local imitations of Mycenaean pottery, and that this places “an additional burden” on those
who think that the Macedonians were Greek later; for “If the roots of the Greek world lie in
the Mycenaean period, but Macedonia is not part of the Mycenaean world, where are the
Greek roots of Macedonia? That is, if Macedonia was not ‘Greek’ in the Late Bronze Age,
when and under what circumstances did it become Greek?” This argument, and his
underlying assumption, that unless we identify through the material culture whether the
Macedonians were, or ‘became’ Greek, in the Late Bronze, or the Early Iron, Age it is difficult
to believe that they were Greek in the historical period, are, I will now try to show, deeply
flawed.
First, B. Speaks of Macedonia ‘being’ Greek rather than the Macedonians perceiving
themselves and/or being perceived by other Greeks as Greek – or not Greek, as the case may
be – which we saw, is the only meaningful issue. Then, through the deployment of the hazy
notion “the roots of the Greek world lie in the Mycenaean period” B. implicitly, through
suggestion, makes the presence of Mycenaean material culture into a diagnostic index of
Greek ethnicity in the historical period. But a series of arguments invalidate this construct.
To begin with, the ways in which “the roots of the Greek world” can be said to “lie in the
Mycenaean period” are extremely complex, and pertain above all to Greek perceptions of the
heroic age; what matters is not the historical realities concerning the ethnicity of a particular
region in the Mycenaean period, but the perceptions (in that region, and among the other
Greeks) in the historical period pertaining to that ethnicity. Of course historical realities
contributed to the creation of such perceptions, but the relationships between the two are
complex and shifting, and they most certainly do not involve a simple equation.
Furthermore, a consideration of, first, the distribution of known Mycenaean settlements, and
second, of the complex upheavals in the transition between the Bronze Age and the Early Iron
Age and in the Early Iron Age, 91 both suggest that the notion that the presence of Mycenaean
settlements in the Late Bronze Age is a diagnostic index of Greek ethnicity in the historical
period is very unlikely to be correct.
B.’s belief that he can determine whether or not Macedonia ‘was’ Greek in the Mycenaean
period on the basis of whether or not there had been Mycenaean settlements might have had
89 Borza, Before Alexander, cit., 38.
90 Borza, Before Alexander, cit., 30‐31.
91 These, in my opinion, had included various small population movements from the
periphery of the Mycenaean world into southern Greece, which eventually became
mythologized into the construct ‘unified Dorian invasion’ in the construction of a discourse of
Dorian ethnicity (see briefly on this, and on the construction of Dorian ethnicity in Herodotos
(which, we saw, involved also the Macedonians) Sourvinou‐Inwood, Herodotos, cit. and n.
109).
some validity if Mycenaean material culture had been brought from outside by a newly
arrived group of incomers that could be identified as ‘the Greeks,’ since in that case its
absence would have shown that those incomers had not settled in a particular region.
However, Mycenaean material culture developed out of Middle Helladic culture with the
help of Minoan influences, with localized features eventually becoming combined to create a
kind of koine. This complex culture, I need hardly mention, was only one possible
development out of Middle Helladic culture. The handmade matt‐painted pottery that
characterizes the area that concerns us, Macedonia west of the Axios river, had also
developed out of the Middle Helladic tradition. 92 I must stress that the area that concerns us
is Macedonia west of the Axios, for B/’s contention about Mycenaean culture and later
ethnicity in Macedonia should implicate only the area inhabited by the Macedonians in the
early period; 93 It is this area that, given his argument, he needs to show was non‐Greek in the
Late Bronze Age. It is not without interest that the Axios is the cultural boundary 94 for the
distribution of the matt‐painted handmade pottery that developed out of Middle Helladic
pottery, a development alternative to that which (under Minoan influence) had created
Mycenaean pottery – which was then both imported and imitated in Macedonia.
The central problem implicated in B.’s argument, is one which he has not even considered:
‘what does it mean to be Greek in the Mycenaean period’? We do not know that there was a
Mycenaean notion of Greekness at all; but if there was, judging both from historical Greek
perceptions of ethnicity and from cross‐cultural parallels, Greekness would not have been
equated with sharing an identical material culture – which is a marginal defining trait that
pertained above all to its reflection of a common way of life, which is difficult enough to
determine even in the historical period. Macedonian language in the Mycenaean period is
inaccessible to us, and religion virtually so – though further finds, and a systematic study of
all the relevant material may give some answers. Limitations of space prevent me from
setting out what I think may be deduced on the basis of the present, extremely limited,
evidence with regard to religion and way of life in Late Bronze Age Macedonia west of the
Axios – or indeed of attempting to define the modalities of penetration and deployment of
Mycenaean material culture in the different parts of Late Bronze Age Macedonia. 95 But if the
inhabitants of the area that concerns us had spoken Greek and had a Greek religious system –
with local variations, like the other religious systems of Mycenaean Greece – they would have
perceived themselves, and the other Greeks would have perceived them, to be Greek.
In these circumstance, it is clear that the available evidence cannot tell us anything about the
ethnicity of the inhabitants of Macedonia west of the Axios in the Late Bronze Age, and it
most certainly does not allow the conclusion that the Macedonians were not Greek in the
Mycenaean period – let alone offer any support for the notion that they were not Greek in the
historical period.
92 L. Stefani – N. Meroussis, Incised and Matt‐painted Pottery from Late Bronze Age Settlements in
Western Macedonia: Technique, Shapes and Decoration, in R. Laffineur – P. P Betancourt (eds.),
TEXNH: Craftsmen, Craftswomen and Craftsmanship in the Aegean Bronze Age, Liège 1997, 357.
93 See supra n. 15.
94 Stefani – Meroussis, art.cit., 357.
95 Though I should perhaps mention that Mycenaean pottery is more widely distributed than
would have been the case with prestige goods for the elites [cf. E. Kiriatzi – S. Andreou – S.
Dimitriadis – K. Kotsakis, Co‐existing Traditions: Handmade and Wheelmade Pottery in Late
Bronze Age Central Macedonia, in Laffineur – Betancourt (eds.), op.cit. 366, for Central
Macedonia].
Editor’s note: The author might have pointed out that Borza’s unhappy theory— that the
absence of Mycenaean settlements in the prehistoric period in Macedonia indicates the absence of
Greeks in the historic period— if applied elsewhere would mean that there were never Greeks in Magna
Graecia, very few in Ionia, etc.
4
The speech of the ancient Macedonians,
in the light of recent epigraphic discoveries
By Miltiades Hatzopoulos, VI International Symposion on Ancient Macedonia, 1999.
Source: http://macedonia‐evidence.org/macedonian‐tongue.html
Modern discussion of the speech of the ancient Macedonians began in 1808, when F. G. Sturz
published a small book entitled De dialecto macedonica liber (Leipzig 1808), intended to be a
scientific enquiry into the position of Macedonian within Greek. However, after the
publication of O. Müller’s work Über die Wohnsitz, die Abstammung und die ältere Geschichte des
makedonischen Volks (Berlin 1825), the discussion evolved into an acrimonious controversy ‐‐
initially scientific but soon political ‐‐ about the Greek or non‐Greek nature of this tongue.
Diverse theories were put forward:
I) Macedonian is a mixed language either of partly Illyrian origin ‐‐ such was the position of
Müller himself, G. Kazaroff, M. Rostovtzeff, M. Budimir, H. Baric; or of partly Thracian
origin, as it was maintained by D. Tzanoff.
II) Macedonian is a separate Indo‐European language. This was the opinion of V. Pisani, I.
Russu, G. Mihailov, P. Chantraine, I. Pudic, C. D. Buck, E. Schwyzer, V. Georgiev, W. W. Tarn
and of O. Masson in his youth.
III) But according to most scholars Macedonian was a Greek dialect. This view has been
expanded by F. G. Sturz, A. Fick, G. Hatzidakis, O. Hoffmann, F. Solmsen, V. Lesny,
Andriotis, F. Geyer, N. G. L. Hammond, N. Kalleris, A. Toynbee, Ch. Edson and O. Masson in
his mature years.
IV) Finally, a small number of scholars thought that the evidence available was not sufficient
to form an opinion. Such was the view of A. Meillet and A. Momigliano.
Whatever the scientific merits of the above scholars, it was the nature of the evidence itself
and, above all, its scarcity, which allowed the propounding of opinions so diverse and
incompatible between themselves.
In fact, not one phrase of Macedonian, not one complete syntagm had come down to us in the
literary tradition;
• because Macedonian, like many other Greek dialects, was never promoted to the
dignity of a literary vehicle;
• because the Temenid kings, when they endowed their administration with a chancery
worthy of the name, adopted the Attic koine, which in the middle of the fourth
century was prevailing as the common administrative idiom around the shores of the
Aegean basin.
Thus, the only available source for knowledge of Macedonian speech were the glosses, that is
to say isolated words collected by lexicographers mainly from literary works because of their
rarity or strangeness, and also personal names which, as we know, are formed from
appellatives (Νικηφόρος< νίκη + φέρω).
The glosses, rare and strange words by definition, had the major defect of being liable to
corruption, to alterations, in the course of transmission through the ages by copyists who
could not recognise them.
As far as personal names are concerned, for want of scientific epigraphic corpora of the
Macedonian regions, until very recently it was impossible to compile trustworthy lists.
On top of that, these two sources of information, far from leading to convergent conclusions,
suggested conflicting orientations.
While the glosses included, besides words with a more or less clear Greek etymology
(καρπαία∙ ὄρχησις μακεδονική [cf. καρπός]∙ κύνουπες∙ ἄρκτοι∙ Μακεδόνες [cf. κύνωψ]˙
ῥάματα∙ βοτρύδια, σταφυλίς∙ Μακεδόνες [cf. ῥάξ, gen. ῥαγός]), a significant number of
terms hard to interpret as Greek ( γόδα˙ ἔντερα˙. Μακεδόνες; γοτάν˙ ὗν˙ Μακεδόνες;
σκοῖδος˙ ἀρχή τις παρὰ Μακεδόσι [Hesychius]), the vast majority of personal names, not
only were perfectly Greek (Φίλιππος, Ἀλέξανδρος, Παρμενίων, Ἀντίπατρος, Ἀντίοχος,
Ἀρσινόη, Εὐρυδίκη) but also presented original traits excluding the possibility of their being
borrowed from the Attic dialect, which was the official idiom of the kingdom (Ἀμύντας,
Μαχάτας, Ἀλκέτας, Λάαγος), indeed from any other Greek dialect (Πτολεμαῖος, Κρατεύας,
Βούπλαγος).
Until very recently it was hard to tell which set of evidence was more trustworthy.
During the last thirty years the situation has radically changed thanks to the publication of
the epigraphic corpora of Thessalonike (1972) and Northern Macedonia (1999) by the Berlin
Academy and of Upper Macedonia (1985) and Beroia (1998) by the Research Centre for Greek
and Roman Antiquity (KERA). Meanwhile the latter centre has also published three
important onomastic collections: of Beroia, of Edessa and of Macedonians attested outside
their homeland.
This intense epigraphic activity fed by continuous archaeological discoveries has brought to
light an abundance of documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian. This
new body of evidence renders to a large extent irrelevant the old controversies and requires
an ab initio re‐opening of the discussion on a different basis.
Old theories however, die hard and relics of obsolete erudition still encumber handbooks and
scientific journals. I particularly have in mind R. A. Crossland’s chapter in the second edition
of volume III 1 of the Cambridge Ancient History and E. N. Borza’s latest booklet Before
Alexander. Constructions of Early Macedonia published respectively in 1982 and 1999.
One reason – perhaps the main one – for such resistance to the assimilation of new evidence
and persistence of obsolete theories until these very last years is the way in which since the
nineteenth century the scholarly discussion about Macedonian speech and its Greek or non‐
Greek character has focused on the sporadic presence in Macedonian glosses and proper
names ‐‐ which otherwise looked perfectly Greek ‐‐ of the sign of the voiced stop (β, δ, γ)
instead of the corresponding unvoiced, originally “aspirated” stop expected in Greek, as for
instance in Βάλακρος and Βερενίκα instead of Φάλακρος and Φερενίκα.
Here I must open a parenthesis. The traditional English pronunciation of classical Greek
presents an obstacle to the understanding of the problem. To make things simple, one may
say that classical Greek originally possessed several series of occlusive consonants or stops,
that is to say consonants obtained by the momentary occlusion of the respiratory ducts.
These, according to the articulatory region, can be distinguished into labials, dentals and
velars (the occlusion is respectively performed by the lips, the teeth or the velum of the
palate) and, according to the articulatory mode, into unvoiced (/p/, /t/, /k/), voiced (/b/, /d/, /g/)
and unvoiced “aspirates” – in fact “expirates”, that is to say, accompanied by a breathing –
(/ph/, /th/, /kh/). These “aspirates”, in some dialects from the archaic period and in most by the
Hellenistic age, had become spirants, that is to say they were no longer obtained by the
complete occlusion of the respiratory ducts, but by their simple contraction and were
accordingly pronounced as /f/, /θ/, /χ/. At the same time the voiced stops also might,
according to the phonetic context, lose their occlusion and become spirants pronounced /v/,
/δ/, /γ/. In fact, the chronology of the passage from the “classical” to the “Hellenistic”
pronunciation varied according to dialect and to region.
The occlusive consonants of Greek are the heirs of an Indo‐European system which differed
from the Greek one in that it possessed an additional series of occlusive consonants
pronounced with both the lips and the velum. This series survived until the Mycenaean
period, but was subsequently eliminated from all Greek dialects in various ways. Moreover,
in the Indo‐European system of consonants the place of the Greek series of unvoiced
“aspirate” stops was occupied by a series of voiced “aspirate” stops, that is to say voiced
stops accompanied by a breathing. These last ones (/bh/, /dh/, /gh/, gwh/) survived to a large
extent only in Sanskrit and in modern Indian dialects. Elsewhere, they either lost their
breathing (such is the case of the Slavonic, Germanic, and Celtic languages), or their sonority
(such is the case of the Greek and Italic languages, in which they evolved into (/ph/, /th/, /kh/,
/khw/). Thus the root bher‐ is represented by the verb bharami in Sanskrit, bero in Old Slavonic,
baira in Gothic, berim in ancient Irish, φέρω in Greek and fero in Latin.
The supporters of the non‐Greek nature of Macedonian reasoned as follows: if, instead of the
well known Greek personal names Φάλακρος (“the bald one”) or Φερενίκη (“she who brings
victory”) with a phi, we read the names Βάλακρος or Βερενίκα with a beta on the inscriptions
of Macedonia, this is because the Macedonian tongue has not participated in the same
consonant mutations as prehistoric Greek ‐‐ already before the first Mycenaean documents in
Linear B ‐‐ which had transformed the “aspirate” voiced stops of Indo‐European (/bh/, /dh/,
/gh/) into “aspirate” unvoiced stops (/ph/, /th/, /kh/). That is to say that, instead of the loss of
sonority of Greek, in Macedonian we are dealing with the loss of “aspiration” in Macedonian,
which classifies the latter along with the Slavonic, the Germanic and the Celtic languages.
But, if Macedonian was separated from Greek before the second millennium B.C., it cannot be
considered a Greek dialect, even an aberrant one.
What the partisans of such theories have not always explicitly stated is that they all rely on
the postulate that the sounds rendered by the signs β, δ, γ in Macedonian glosses and proper
names are the direct heirs of the series of voiced “aspirate” stops of Indo‐European and do
not result from a secondary sonorisation, within Greek, of the series represented by the signs
φ, θ, χ. However, one must be wary of short‐cuts and simplifications in linguistics. For
instance, the sound /t/ in the German word “Mutter” is not the direct heir of the same sound
in the Indo‐European word *mater, but has evolved from the common Germanic form *moδer,
which was the reflex of Indo‐European *mater.
The example of Latin demonstrates that the evolution /bh/>/ph/>/f/>/v/>/b/, envisaged above, is
perfectly possible. Thus, the form albus (“white”) in Latin does not come directly from Indo‐
European *albhos. In fact the stem albh‐ became first alph‐ and then alf‐ in Italic, and it was only
secondarily that the resulting spirant sonorised into alv‐ which evolved into alb‐ in Latin (cf.
alfu=albos in Umbrian and ἀλφούς˙ λευκούς in Greek).
G. Hatzidakis (see especially Zur Abstammung der alten Makedonier [Athens 1897] 35‐37) was
the first – and for many years the only one – to stress the importance ‐‐ and at the same time
the weakness ‐‐ of the implicit postulate of the partisans of the non‐Greek character of
Macedonian, to wit the alleged direct descent of the series represented by the signs of the
voiced stops in the Macedonian glosses and personal names from the Indo‐European series of
“aspirate” voiced stops.
Since the middle of the eighties of the last century the acceleration of archaeological research
in Macedonia and also the activities of the Macedonian Programme of the Research Centre for
Greek and Roman Antiquity (KERA) mentioned above have occasioned numerous scholarly
works exploiting the new evidence has been collected and allows us to go beyond the
Gordian knot which since the nineteenth century had kept captive all discussion about the
tongue of the ancient Macedonians (Cl. Brixhe, Anna Panayotou, O. Masson, L. Dubois, M. B.
Hatzopoulos). It would not be an exaggeration to say that henceforward the obstacle
hindering the identification of the language spoken by Philip and Alexander has been
removed: ancient Macedonian, as we shall see, was really and truly a Greek dialect. On this
point all linguists or philologists actively dealing with the problem are of the same opinion. It
is equally true that they do not agree on everything. Two questions still raise serious
contention:
a) How should be explained this sporadic presence in Macedonian glosses and proper names
of the signs of voiced stops (β, δ, γ) instead of the corresponding originally “aspirate”
unvoiced ones (φ, θ, χ) of the other Greek dialects?
b) What is the dialectal position of Macedonian within Greek?
The first question has been tackled several times in recent years, but with divergent
conclusions by Cl. Brixhe and Anna Panayotou on the one hand and O. Masson, L. Dubois
and the present speaker on the other.
On the question of the dialectal affinities of Macedonian within Greek, besides the above
mentioned scholars, N. G. L. Hammond and E. Voutiras have also made significant
contributions. As far as I am concerned I have been gradually convinced that the two
questions are intimately linked, or rather, that the search for the affinities of the Macedonian
dialect can provide a satisfactory explanation of this controversial particularity of its
consonantal system.
A problematic mutation
Down to very recent years discussion on the topic on the Macedonian consonantal system
was almost exclusively dependent on literary evidence.
The systematic collection of inscriptions from Macedonia in the Epigraphic Archive of KERA
occasioned the publication of three articles exploiting this epigraphic material, the first two in
1987 and the third in 1988.
The first one, written by the present speaker had its starting point in a series of manumissions
by consecration to Artemis from the territory of Aigeai (modern Vergina), who was qualified
as Διγαία and Βλαγαν(ε)ῖτις, the latter derived from the place name at which she was
venerated (ἐν Βλαγάνοις).
It was obvious to me that the first epiclesis was nothing else than the local form of the
adjective δίκαιος, δικαία, δίκαιον (“the just one”).
As for the explanation of the less obvious epiclesis Blaganitis and of the place name Blaganoi,
the clue was provided by Hesychius’ gloss βλαχάν˙ ὁ βάτραχος, which I connected with one
of the manumission texts qualifying Artemis as the godess [τῶν β]ατράχων.
The two epicleseis of Artemis demonstrated that Macedonian might occasionally present
voiced consonants – in the case in hand represented by the letter gamma — not only instead of
unvoiced “aspirates” (in this case represented by the letter chi of βλαχάν) but also instead of
simple unvoiced stops (in this case represented by the letter kappa of Δικαία).
This discovery had important implications, because it showed that the phenomenon under
examination, of which I collected numerous examples, had nothing to do with a consonant
mutation going back to Indo‐European, which could concern only the voiced “aspirates” and
would make a separate language of Macedonian, different from the other Greek dialects. In
fact, it ought to be interpreted as a secondary and relatively recent change within Greek,
which had only partially run its course, as becomes apparent from the coexistence of forms
with voiced as well as unvoiced consonants also in the case of the simple unvoiced stop (cf.
Κλεοπάτρα‐Γλευπάτρα, Βάλακρος‐Βάλαγρος, Κερτίμμας‐Κερδίμμας, Κυδίας‐Γυδίας,
Κραστωνία‐Γραστωνία, Γορτυνία‐Γορδυνία), but also from the presence of “hypercorrect”
forms (cf. ὑπρισθῆναι=ὑβρισθῆναι, κλυκυτάτῃ=γλυκυτάτῃ, τάκρυν=δάκρυν).
This tendency to voice the unvoiced consonants was undoubtedly impeded after the
introduction of Attic koine as the administrative language of the Macedonian state and only
accidentally and sporadically left traces in the written records, especially in the case of local
terms and proper names which had no correspondents and, consequently, no model in the
official idiom.
In the second article published the same year I collected examples of forms with voiced and
unvoiced sounds inherited from Indo‐European voiced “aspirates” and was able to identify
the complete series of feminine proper names with a voiced labial formed on the stem of
φίλος: Βίλα, Βιλίστα, Βιλιστίχη parallel to Φίλα, Φιλίστα, Φιλιστίχη.
These names presenting a voiced consonant, rendered by a beta, formed according to the rules
of Greek, and the Greek etymology of which was beyond doubt, convinced me that the
explanation of the phenomenon should be sought within that language.
The third article, written jointly by Cl. Brixhe and Anna Panayotou, who was then preparing
a thesis on the Greek language of the inscriptions found in Macedonia on the basis of the
epigraphic documentation collected at KERA, followed another orientation.
– Whereas new evidence did not leave them in any doubt that the Macedonian of historical
times spoken by Philip II and Alexander the Great was a Greek dialect, they contended that,
besides this Macedonian, there had formerly existed another language in which the Indo‐
European “aspirates” had become voiced stops and that this language had provided the
proper names and the appellatives presenting voiced stops instead of the unvoiced stops of
Greek, for instance Βερενίκα and Βάλακρος instead of Φερενίκα and Φάλακρος.
These ideas were later developed and completed in a chapter devoted to Macedonian and
published in a collective volume. In this paper Cl. Brixhe and Anna Panayotou identified this
other language that according to them had disappeared before the end of the fifth century
B.C., not before playing “a not insignificant part in the genesis of the Macedonian entity”,
with the language of the Brygians or Phrygians of Europe.
Such was the beginning of a long controversy in the form of articles, communications to
congresses and also private correspondence, which, as far as I am concerned, was particularly
enriching, because it gave me the opportunity to refine my arguments.
Their objection, at first sight reasonable, to wit that a form such as Βερενίκα cannot be the
product of the voicing of the first phoneme of Φερενίκα, for the “aspirate’ stop /ph/ has no
voiced correspondent in Greek, obliged me to examine their postulate on the conservative
character of the pronunciation of the consonants and, in a more general way, of the Attic koine
spoken in Macedonia.
With the help of documents such as the deeds of sale from Amphipolis and the Chalkidike
and of the boundary ordinance from Mygdonia, I was able to show that by the middle of the
fourth century in Northern Greece
– the ancient “aspirate” stops written with the help of the signs φ,θ,χ had already lost their
occlusion and had become spirants, that is to say they were formed by the simple contraction
instead of the complete occlusion of the respiratory ducts;
– the ancient voiced stops written with the help of the signs β, δ, γ were pronounced, without
any phonological significance, as spirants as well as stops, according to the phonetic context,
just like in modern Castillian (ἄνδρες‐πόδες; cf. andar‐querido).
This contention is proved by “errors” such as βεφαίως in a mid‐fourth century B.C. deed of
sale from Amphipolis, which cannot be explained unless phi, pronounced like an f, indicated
the unvoiced correspondent of the phoneme pronounced like a v and written with the help of
the letter beta.
On the other hand, I drew attention to a series of allegedly “Brygian” terms – since they are
found in Macedonian proper names presenting voiced consonants as reflexes of Indo‐
European voiced “aspirates” – which, however, showed a suspicious likeness with Greek
words not only in their stems, but also in their derivation and composition. Thus, if we accept
the Brygian theory, the name of the fifth Macedonian month Ξανδικός presupposes the
existence of a Brygian adjectif xandos parallel to Greek ξανθός; likewise the Macedonian
personal name Γαιτέας a Brygian substantive gaita (mane) parallel to Greek χαίτα (χαίτη);
the Macedonian personal name Βουλομάγα a Brygian substantive maga parallel to Greek
μάχα (μάχη); the Macedonian personal name Σταδμέας a Brygian substantive stadmos
parallel to Greek σταθμός; the Macedonian personal names Βίλος, Βίλα, Βίλιστος, Βιλίστα a
Brygian stem bil‐ parallel to Greek phil‐ and also Brygian rules of derivation identical to the
Greek ones responsible for the formation of the superlative φίλιστος, φιλίστα (φιλίστη) and
of the corresponding personal names Φίλιστος, Φιλίστα (Φιλίστη); the compound
Macedonian personal names Βερενίκα and Βουλομάγα not only the Brygian substantives
nika, bulon, maga and the verb bero parallel to Greek νίκα, φῦλον, μάχα, φέρω, but on top of
that rules of composition identical to the Greek ones responsible for the formation of the
corresponding Greek personal names Φερενίκα and Φυλομάχη.
However, the Brygian language reconstituted in this manner is not credible, for it looks
suspiciously like Greek in disguise.
Finally, a series of observations 1) on the names of the Macedonian months, 2) on the use of
the patronymic adjective, and 3) on a neglected piece of evidence for the Macedonian speech,
induced me to reconsider the connexion between Macedonian and the Thessalian dialects.
1) The Macedonian calendar plays a significant role in the Brygian theory, because according
to the latter’s supporters it testified the “undeniable cultural influence” of the Phrygian
people in the formation of the Macedonian ethnos. They particularly refer to the months
Audnaios, Xandikos, Gorpiaios and Hyperberetaios, which according to them can find no
explanation in Greek.
– In fact, the different variants of the first month (Αὐδωναῖος, Αὐδυναῖος, Αὐδναῖος,
Ἀϊδωναῖος) leave no doubt that the original form is ἈFιδωναῖος, which derives from the
name of Hades, “the invisible” (a‐wid‐) and followed two different evolutions: on the one
hand ἈFιδωναῖος>Αὐδωναῖος>Αὐδυναῖος>Αὐδναῖος, with the disappearence of the closed
vowel /i/ and the vocalisation of the semi‐vowel /w/ and, later, with the closing of the long
vowel /o:/ into /u/ (written –υ‐) and finally with the disappearence of this closed vowel, and,
on the other hand ἈFιδωναῖος> Ἀϊδωναῖος, with the simple loss of intervocalic /w/.
– The case of Xandikos is even clearer. It was felt as a simple dialectal variant within the
Greek language, as is apparent from the form Ξανθικός attested both in literary texts and in
inscriptions.
– Concerning Γορπιαῖος, Hofmann had already realised that it should be connected with
καρπός, the word for fruit in Greek, which makes good sense for a month corresponding
roughly to August (cf. the revolutionary month Fructidor). This intuition is confirmed today,
on the one hand by the cult of Dionysos Κάρπιος attested in neighbouring Thessaly and, on
the other hand, by the variant Γαρπιαῖος showing that we are dealing with a sonorisation of
the unvoiced initial consonant, a banal phenomenon in Macedonia, and a double treatment of
the semi‐vowel /r/, of which there are other examples from both Macedonia and Thessaly.
– The name of the twelfth month Ὑπερβερεταῖος, the Greek etymology of which was put in
doubt, orientates us too in the direction of Thessaly. In fact it is inseparable from the cult of
Zeus Περφερέτας also attested in nearby Thessaly.
2) At the exhibition organised at Thessalonike in 1997 and entitled Ἐπιγραφὲς τῆς
Μακεδονίας was presented an elegant funerary monument from the territory of Thessalonike
of the first half of the third century B.C. bearing the inscription Πισταρέτα Θρασίππεια
κόρα.
– Κόρα as a dialectal form of Attic κόρη is also known from other inscriptions found in
Macedonia. As for the use of the patronymic adjective instead of the genitive as a mark of
filiation (Ἀλέξανδρος Φιλίππειος instead of Ἀλέξανδρος Φιλίππου), which is characteristic
of Thessalian and more generally of the ʺAeolicʺ dialects, it had been postulated by O.
Hoffmann on the basis of names of cities founded by the Macedonians, such as Ἀλεξάνδρεια,
Ἀντιγόνεια, Ἀντιόχεια, Σελεύκεια. Now it was for the first time directly attested in a text
which could be qualified as dialectal.
– The confirmation that the patronymic adjective constitutes a local Macedonian characteristic
and that the monument of Pistareta could not be dismissed as set up by some immigrant
Thessalians was provided by a third century B.C. manumission from Beroia, which, although
written in Attic koine,refers to the daughter of a certain Agelaos as τὴν θυγατέρα τὴν
Ἀγελαείαν.
3) Finally, although it had been known for centuries, recent studies have ignored the sole
direct attestation of Macedonian speech preserved in an ancient author. It is a verse in a non‐
Attic dialect that the fourth century Athenian poet Strattis in his comedy The Macedonians
(Athen. VII, 323b) puts in the mouth of a character, presumably Macedonian, as an answer to
the question of an Athenian ἡ σφύραινα δ’ἐστὶ τίς; (“The sphyraena, what’s that?”): κέστραν
μὲν ὔμμες, ὡτικκοί, κικλήσκετε (“It’s what ye in Attica dub cestra”).
Thus research on the Macedonian consonantal system has led to the question of the dialectal
affinities of this speech, to which it is closely connected.
It was natural that the major controversy about the Greek or non‐Greek character of
Macedonian had relegated to a secondary position the question of its position within the
Greek dialects. Nevertheless it had not suppressed it completely.
Already F. G. Sturz, following Herodotos, considered Macedonian a Doric dialect, whereas O.
Abel was even more precise and placed it among the northern Doric dialects. He thought that
Strabo and Plutarch provided the necessary arguments for maintaining that Macedonian did
not differ from Epirote.
It was the fundamental work of O. Hoffmann that forcibly introduced the Aeolic thesis into
the discussion, which is largely accepted in our days (Daskalakis, Toynbee, Goukowsky).
The Doric‐north‐western thesis made a strong come‐back thanks to the authority of J. N.
Kalleris followed by G. Babiniotis, O. Masson and other scholars with more delicately shaded
opinions (A. Tsopanakis, A. I. Thavoris, M. B. Sakellariou and Brixhe).
Finally, N. G. L. Hammond held a more original position, arguing for the parallel existence of
two Macedonian dialects: one in Upper Macedonia close to the north‐western dialects and
another in Lower Macedonia close to Thessalian.
But a new piece of evidence, the publication of a lengthy dialectal text from Macedonia,
created a new situation. It is a curse tablet from Pella dating from the first half of the fourth
century B.C. which was discovered in a grave at Pella.
[Θετί]μας καὶ Διονυσοφῶντος τὸ τέλος καὶ τὸν γάμον καταγράφω καὶ τᾶν ἀλλᾶν πασᾶν
γυ‐
[ναικ]ῶν καὶ χηρᾶν καὶ παρθένων, μάλιστα δὲ Θετίμας, καὶ παρκαττίθεμαι Μάκρωνι καὶ
[τοῖς] δαίμοσι∙ καὶ ὁπόκα ἐγὼ ταῦτα διελέξαιμι καὶ ἀναγνοίην πάλειν ἀνορόξασα,
[τόκα] γᾶμαι Διονυσοφῶντα, πρότερον δὲ μή∙ μὴ γὰρ λάβοι ἄλλαν γυναῖκα ἀλλ’ ἢ ἐμέ,
[ἐμὲ δ]ὲ συνκαταγηρᾶσαι Διονυσοφῶντι καὶ μηδεμίαν ἄλλαν. Ἱκέτις ὑμῶ(ν) γίνο‐
[μαι∙ Φίλ?]αν οἰκτίρετε, δαίμονες φίλ[ο]ι, δαπινὰ γάρ
ἰμε φίλων πάντων καὶ ἐρήμα∙ ἀλλὰ
[ταῦτ]α φυλάσσετε ἐμὶν ὅπως μὴ γίνηται τα[ῦ]τα καὶ
κακὰ κακῶς Θετίμα ἀπόληται.
[‐‐‐‐]ΑΛ[‐‐‐‐]ΥΝΜ..ΕΣΠΛΗΝ ἐμός, ἐμὲ δὲ [ε]ὐ[δ]αίμονα καὶ μακαρίαν γενέσται
[‐‐‐‐‐] ΤΟ[.].[‐‐‐‐].[..]..Ε.Ε.ΕΩ[ ]Α.[.]Ε..ΜΕΓΕ[‐‐‐]
“Of Thetima and Dinysophon the ritual wedding and the marriage I bind by a written spell,
as well as (the marriage) of all other women (to him), both widows and maidens, but above
all of Thetima; and I entrust (this spell) to Macron and the daimones. And were I ever to
unfold and read these words again after digging (the tablet) up, only then should
Dionysophon marry, not before; may he indeed not take another woman than myself, but let
me alone grow old by the side of Dionysophon and no one else. I implore you: have pity for
[Phila?], dear daimones, for I am indeed downcast and bereft of friends. But please keep this
(piece of writing) for my sake so that these events do not happen and wretched Thetima
perishes miserably. [‐‐‐] but let me become happy and blessed. [‐‐‐]” (translation by E.
Voutiras, modified).
E. Voutiras, the editor of the tablet from Pella, was well aware of the linguistic traits that his
text shared with the north‐western Greek dialects: in particular the conservation of the long
/a/ (or of its reflex: ἄλλαν), the contraction of /a/ and /o/ (short or long) into a long /a/ (or its
reflex: ἀλλᾶν), the dative of the first person singular of the personal pronoun ἐμίν, the
presence of temporal adverbs ending in –κα (ὁπόκα), the apocope of verbal prefixes
(παρκαττίθεμαι), the dissimilation of consecutive spirants which betrays the use of the signs
‐στ‐ instead of ‐σθ‐; but, on the other hand, he ignored, as if they were simple errors, the
dialectal traits which did not conform to the purely north‐western idea that he had of the
dialect. These, as L. Dubois and I have pointed out, are in particular the forms διελέξαιμι,
ἰμέ, ἀνορόξασα, δαπινά instead of διελίξαιμι, εἰμί, ἀνορύξασα, ταπεινά, which bear
witness to phonetic phenomena having, in the first three cases, their correspondents both in
dialectal Thessalian texts and in koine texts from Macedonia, whereas the fourth case presents
the voicing of the unvoiced typical of the Macedonian dialect.
Cl. Brixhe returned to this text with a thorough analysis which confirmed and refined those of
his predecessors. He pointed out the treatment of the group –sm‐, with the elimination of the
sibilant and the compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel, which is proper to north‐
western dialects but not Thessalian, the presence of the particle –κα, expected in the north‐
western dialects as opposed to Thessalian –κε, and the athematic form of the dative plural
δαίμοσι, attested in the north‐western dialects but not in Thessalian, where one would expect
δαιμόνεσσι; he interpreted the graphic hesitation Ε/Ι, Ο/Υ (pronounced /u/) as resulting
“from a tendency, in the Macedonian dialect and, later, in the koine of the region towards a
closing of the vocales mediae e and o, respectively becoming i and u”, which indicated an
affinity of Macedonian not with the north‐western dialects but with Attic and even more with
Boeotian and Thessalian and with the northern dialects of modern Greek; he adopted L.
Dubois’ interpretation of δαπινά and admitted that the spirantisation of the “aspirates” and
the voiced stops in Macedonian had already taken place in the classical period, but persisted
in considering “more efficient” his interpretation of forms such as Βερενίκα as “Brygian”
rather than Greek.
In my opinion the presence of forms such as διελέξαιμι, ἰμέ, ἀνορόξασα, δαπινά, expected
in Macedonia but alien to the north‐western dialects, is a decisive confirmation of the local
origin of the author of the text and allows the elimination of the unlikely hypothesis that it
might have been the work of an Epirote resident alien living in Pella. But this is not all. The
fact that the closing of the vocales mediae, of which the first three examples bear witness, is a
phenomenon well attested in Thessalian confirms the coexistence of north‐western and of
Thessalian characteristics in Macedonian; it indicates the intermediate position of the latter
dialect, and legitimises the attempt to verify whether the tendency to voice the unvoiced
consonants was not shared with at least some Thessalian dialects.
Kalleris had already pointed out that the place names Βοίβη and Βοιβηίς and the personal
names Δρεβέλαος and Βερέκκας, which were attested in Thessaly but were unknown in
Macedonia, respectively corresponded to Φοίβη, Φοιβηίς, Τρεφέλεως and to a composite
name, the first element of which was Φερε‐. Nevertheless he did not draw the conclusion that
the sonorisation phenomenon, far from being limited to Macedonia, was common to that area
and to Thessaly, because he refused to admit its localisation in Macedonia and in nearby
areas, as P. Kretschmer had suggested.
In previous papers I had added to these place names a third one, Ὀττώλοβος (Ὀκτώλοφος),
and a series of personal names either unknown (then) in Macedonia: Βουλονόα (Φυλονόα) or
attested in a different form: Σταδμείας (Σταθμείας), Παντορδάνας (Παντορθάνας). The
publication of fascicule III.B of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, which contains the
onomastic material from Thessaly makes it now possible to add additional examples:
Ἀμβίλογος, Βύλιππος, Βῦλος corresponding to Ἀμφίλοχος, Φύλιππος, Φῦλος, in the same
manner that Βουλομάγα and Βουλονόα correspond to Φυλομάχη and Φυλονόη. Moreover,
the frequent attestation of Κέββας in Thessaly does not allow us to consider it as an
onomastic loan from Macedonia, where this personal name is attested only once.
Is it now possible to separate this hypocoristic from the family of personal names well
represented in Thessaly and derived from the Greek appellative κεφαλή, one of which,
namely Κεφαλῖνος, appears in Macedonia as Κεβαλῖνος? And if the purely Thessalian
Ἀμβίλογος, Βύλιππος, Βῦλος, Βερέκκας or the both Thessalian and Macedonian
Βουλομάγα, Βουλονόα, Κέββας find a perfect explication in Greek, what need is there to
solicit the Phrygian language in order to explain the Macedonian form Βερενίκα, which is
attested in Thessaly as Φερενίκα, since its case is strictly analogous to that of
Κεβαλῖνος/Κεφαλῖνος?
If we now consider the geographic distribution of the forms with voiced consonants in
Thessaly, we observe that they are concentrated in the northern part of the country,
essentially in Pelasgiotis and Perrhaibia, with the greater concentration in the latter region.
But in Macedonia also these forms are unequally distributed. They are to be found in
significant numbers and variety – bearing witness to the authentic vitality of the phenomenon
– in three cities or regions: Aigeai, Beroia and Pieria. Now all these three are situated in the
extreme south‐east of the country, in direct contact with Perrhaibia. I think that this
geographical distribution provides the solution to the problem. We are dealing with a
phonetic particularity of the Greek dialect spoken on either side of Mount Olympus,
undoubtedly due to a substratum or an adstratum, possibly but not necessarily, Phrygian. If
there remained any doubts regarding the Greek origin of the phenomenon, two personal
names: Κεβαλῖνος and Βέτταλος should dispel it. It is well known that the first comes from
the Indo‐European stem *ghebh(e)l‐. If, according to the “Brygian” hypothesis, the loss of
sonority of the “aspirates” had not taken place before the dissimilation of the breathings, the
form that the Greek dialect of Macedonia would have inherited would have been Γεβαλῖνος
and not Κεβαλῖνος, which is the result first of the loss of sonority of the “aspirates’ and then
of their dissimilation. Cl. Brixhe and Anna Panayotou, fully aware of the problem, elude it by
supposing a “faux dialectisme”. Βέτταλος, on the other hand, is obviously a Macedonian
form of the ethnic Θετταλός used as a personal name with a probable transfer of the accent.
We also know that the opposition between Attic Θετταλός and Boeotian Φετταλός requires
an initial *gwhe‐. Given, on the one hand, that in Phrygian, contrary to Greek, the Indo‐
European labiovelars lost their velar appendix without conserving any trace thereof, the form
that the Greek dialect of Macedonia should have inherited according to the “Brygian”
hypothesis would have an initial *Γε‐, which manifestly is not the case. On the other hand,
the form Βέτταλος, which the Macedonians pronounced with a voiced initial consonant, is to
be explained by a form of the continental Aeolic dialects, in which, as we know, the
“aspirate” labio‐velars followed by an /i/or an /e/ became simple voiced labials. The Aeolic
form Φετταλός, lying behind Βετταλός, provides us with a terminus post quem for the voicing
phenomenon. For, if we take into consideration the spelling of the Mycenaean tablets, which
still preserve a distinct series of signs for the labiovelars, it is necessary to date this
phenomenon at a post‐Mycenaean period, well after the elimination of the labio‐velars, that is
to say at the end of the second millennium B.C. at the earliest, and obviously within the Greek
world. It is manifest that in the case of Βέτταλος an ad hoc hypothesis of a “faux dialectisme”
is inadmissible, for at the late date at which a hypothetical Macedonian patriot might have
been tempted to resort to such a form the Thessalian ethnic had long since been replaced by
the Attic koine form Θετταλός. Its remodelling into a more “Macedonian‐sounding”
Βετταλός would have demanded a level of linguistic scholarship attained only in the
nineteenth century A.D.
Historical Interpretation
According to Macedonian tradition the original nucleus of the Temenid kingdom was the
principality of Lebaia, whence, after crossing Illyria and Upper Macedonia, issued the three
Argive brothers , Gauanes, Aeropos and Perdikkas, as they moved to conquer first the region
of Beroia, then Aigeai and finally the rest of Macedonia.
It is highly probable that the royal Argive ancestry was a legend invented in order to create a
distance and a hierarchy between common Macedonians and a foreign dynasty allegedly of
divine descent. Might this legend nevetheless not retain, some authentic historical
reminiscence?
In a previous paper, first read at Oxford some years ago, I attempted to show that Lebaia was
a real place in the middle Haliakmon valley near the modern town of Velvendos, a region the
economy of which was until very recently based on transhumant pastoralism. It is a likely
hypothesis that during the Geometric and the Archaic period too the inhabitants of this
region made their living tending their flocks between the mountain masses of Olympus and
the Pierians and the plains of Thessaly, Pieria and Emathia, until under a new dynasty they
took the decisive step of permanently settling on the fringe of the great Macedonian plain, at
Aigeai.
What were the ethnic affinities of these transhumant shepherds? A fragment of the Hesiodic
catalogue preserves a tradition according to which Makedon and Magnes were the sons of
Zeus and of Thyia, Deukalion’s daughter, and lived around Pieria and Mount Olympus. The
Magnetes, of whom Magnes was the eponymous hero, were one of the two major perioikic
ethne of northern Thessaly, who originally spoke an Aeolic dialect.
The other one was the Perrhaibians. Although they were not mentioned in the Hesiodic
fragment, we know by Strabo that even at a much later period they continued to practice
transhumant pastoralism. Their close affinity with the Macedonians is evident not only from
onomastic data, but also from their calendar. Half of the Perrhaibian months the names of
which we know figure also in the Macedonian calendar. Thus, it is no coincidence that
Hellenikos presents Makedon as the son of Aiolos.
The above data outline a vast area between the middle Peneios and the middle Haliakmon
valleys, which in prehistoric times was haunted by groups of transhumant pastoralists who
spoke closely related Greek dialects. Is it unreasonable to think that, just as in modern times
the Vlachs of Vlacholivado, who frequented precisely the same regions, spoke, under the
influence of the Greek adstratum, a peculiar neo‐Latin dialect, their prehistoric predecessors
had done the same (undoubtedly under the influence of another adstratum which remains to
be defined) and that the tendency to voice the unvoiced consonants was one of these
peculiarities?
As to the three Temenid brothers, according to Herodotos mythical founders of the
Macedonian kingdom, already in antiquity there was a suspicion that they had not come
from Peloponnesian Argos but from Argos Orestikon in Upper Macedonia, hence the name
Argeadai given not only to the reigning dynasty but to the whole clan which had followed
the three brothers in the adventure of the conquest of Lower Macedonia. Knowing that the
Orestai belonged to the Molossian group, it is readily understandable how the prestigious
elite of the new kingdom imposed its speech, and relegated to the status of a substratum
patois the old Aeolic dialect, some traits of which, such as the tendency of closing the vocales
mediae and the voicing of unvoiced consonants survived only in the form of traces, generally
repressed, with the exception of certain place names, personal names and month names
consecrated by tradition.
Select Bibliography
G. Babiniotis, “ Ancient Macedonia : the Place of Macedonian among the Greek Dialects “,
Glossologia 7‐8 (1988‐1989) 53‐69.
‐ “ The Question of Mediae in Ancient Macedonian Greek Reconsidered “, Historical Philology
: Greek, Latin and Romance (“ Current Issues in Linguistic Theory ” 87; Amsterdam‐
Philadelphia 1992) 30‐33.
Cl. Brixhe, “ Un nouveau champ de la dialectologie grecque : le macédonien “, KATA
DIALEKTON, Atti del III Colloquio Internqzionale di Dialettologia Greca. A.I.O.N. 19 (1997) 41‐71.
Cl. Brixhe ‐ Anna Panayotou, “ L’atticisation de la Macédoine : l’une des sources de la koinè
“, Verbum 11 (1988) 256.
‐ “ Le macédonien “, Langues indo‐européennes (Paris 1994) 206‐220.
R. A. Crossland, ʺThe Language of the Macedoniansʺ, Cambridge Ancient History III, 1 (1982)
843‐47.
L. Dubois, “ Une tablette de malédiction de Pella : s’agit‐il du premier texte macédonien ? “,
REG 108 (1995) 190‐97.
M. B. Hatzopoulos, “ Artémis, Digaia Blaganitis en Macédoine “, BCH 111 (1987) 398‐412.
‐ “ Le macédonien : nouvelles données et théories nouvelles “, Ἀρχαία Μακεδονία VI
(Thessalonique 1999) 225‐39.
‐ “ L’histoire par les noms in Macedonia “, Greek Personal Names. Proceedings of the British
Academy 104 (2000) 115‐17.
‐ “La position dialectale du macédonien à la lumière des découvertes épigraphiques
récentes“, (J. Hagnal ed.) Die altgriechischen Dialekte. Wesen und Werden (Innsbruck 2007) 157‐
76.
O. Hoffmann, Die Makedonen. Ihre Sprache und ihr Volkstum (Göttingen 1906).
J. N. Kalléris, Les anciens Macédoniens, v. I‐II (Athens 1954‐1976).
O. Masson, “ Macedonian Language “, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford‐New York
1996) 905‐906.
‐ “ Noms macédoniens “, ZPE 123 (1998) 117‐20.
Em. Voutiras, Διονυσοφῶντοςγάμοι (Amsterdam 1998) 20‐34.
5
Pr. Ulrich Wilcken regarding
the ancient Macedonian background
Source: Ulrich Wilcken, Alexander The Great, pages 22‐23
6
Pr Joseph M. Bryant regarding
the ancient Macedonian background
Source:ʺMoral Codes and Social Structure in Ancient Greece: A Sociology of Greek Ethics
from Homer to the Epicureans and Stoicsʺ, pages 306‐307
7
Pr. Ian Worthington regarding
the ancient Macedonian background
Source: ʺPhilip II of Macedoniaʺ, page 219