ANCIENT MACEDONIA AND GREECE
In the course of the second pre-Christian millennium, the ancient Greeks descended in several migratory waves from the interior of the Balkans to Greece. Some passed across the plain of Thessaly on their way south, while others went south through Epirus. More recent scholars point to Asia Minor as the original Greek homeland.
There is no evidence that the ancient Greeks ever settled prehistoric Macedonia. Archeological evidence shows that ancient Macedonia lay beyond the cultural and ethnic borders of the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek Civilization, which ends at the border of northern Thessaly (1400 - 1100 BC). The prehistoric Macedonians show a remarkable continuation of existing material culture.
Ancient Macedonia was home to many tribes. The ancient Macedonian tribes emerged from the Brygians or Phrygians. Some of the Brygians left Macedonia and migrated to Asia Minor where they changed their name to Phrygians and established a powerful Phrygian kingdom (Herodotus). When the Macedonian army under Alexander the Great will enter Phrygia centuries later, Philotas spoke of the connections between the Phrygians and the Macedonians, by calling the Macedonians "Phrygians" (Curtius).
Greek migrants settled few coastal areas of Macedonia, Thrace, and Illyria after they exhausted the possibilities of settlement in Asia Minor, Italy, France, Spain and Scythia (Ukraine and Russia). However, they did not consider Macedonia especially attractive for permanent settlement. Neither did the Macedonians welcome them as open-heartedly as did the Italians and Scythians. By the middle of the fourth century BC, the Greek settlers were expelled from Macedonia and their cities, including Aristotle's native Stragira, razed to the ground by the Macedonian king Philip II (360-336). Aristotle died in exile in Greece.
The ancient Macedonians regarded the Greeks as potentially dangerous neighbors, never as kinsmen. The Greeks stereotyped the Macedonians as "barbarians" and treated them in the same bigoted manner in which they treated all non-Greeks. Herodotus, the Father of History, relates how the Macedonian king Alexander I(498-454 BC), a Philhellene (that is "a friend of the Greeks" and logically a non-Greek), wanted to take a part in the Olympic games. The Greek athletes protested, saying they would not run with a barbarian. Historian Thucydidis also calls the Macedonians barbarians, and so did Thracymachus who called Archelaus a barbarian who enslaved Greeks. Demosthenes, the great Athenian statesman and orator, spoke of Philip II as:
"... not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honors, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave." [Third Philippic, 31]
The Macedonian "barbarian" defeated Greece at the battle of Chaeronea in August 338 BC and appointed himself "Commander of the Greeks". This battle had established Macedonian hegemony over Greece and this date is commonly taken as the end of Greek history and the beginning of the Macedonian era. Greece did not regain its independence until 1827 AD.
In 335 BC, Philip's son Alexander campaigned toward the Danube, to secure Macedonia's northern frontier. On rumors of his death, a revolt broke out in Greece with the support of leading Athenians. Alexander marched south covering 240 miles in two weeks. When the revolt continued he sacked Thebes, killing 6,000 people and enslaving the survivors. Only the temples and the house of the poet Pindar were spared.
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