In Antiquity Neither Macedonians and Greeks Considered Macedonians to be Greek!

[Karposh]

A common argument used by Greeks today when defending the indisputable fact that Greeks and Macedonians were often in conflict with each other in ancient times is that it wasn't unusual for Greeks to be in conflict with each other at that time. In fact, it was quite a common thing for one city state to wage war against another or, at times, a coalition of city states to wage war on another coalition of city states. The argument being that, despite their animosity, Greeks and Macedonians were still the same people.

The trouble with that argument is that it assumes that ancient Greeks were as willfully ignorant and clueless as today's Greeks with regard to the ethnicity of the ancient Macedonians. If the ancient Macedonians were indeed, even remotely, related to the Greeks then Demosthenes' legendary rant against Philip (known to history as the 3rd Philippic) would have fallen flat since the ancient Greeks were best placed to know who was a Greek and who wasn't. After all, it should never be overlooked that only true blue Greeks were allowed to compete in the Olympic Games, which were open to all Greeks from across the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts while everyone else was denied this honour. It was only after Alexander the Great's paternal ancestor, Alexander I - The Philhellene (i.e. the "Friend of the Greeks"), faked his Greek credentials that the Olympic judges allowed him to compete, to the utter disgust and protestations of the rest of the Greek competitors. They knew the judges' decision was bullshit and, history tells us, they let them know it. As far as they were concerned, this King of Macedonia was no Greek! So, only a king, it would seem, had the means to bribe the Olympic judges and be allowed to compete. The everyday Macedonian, of course, stood a snow ball's chance in hell.

But, back to Demosthenes' rant. To modern Greeks today, which I have labelled willfully ignorant, and many modern historians, which are also deserving of this title, it's no big deal. Greeks fighting among themselves was a common occurrence. If only it wasn't for one small detail. Here are Demosthenes' thoughts regarding Greeks fighting Greeks in ancient times:

"Ay, and you know this also, that the wrongs which the Greeks suffered from the Lacedaemonians (i.e. the Spartans) or from us (i.e. the Athenians), they suffered at all events at the hands of true-born sons of Greece, and they might have been regarded as the acts of a legitimate son, born to great possessions...(Diod.17.62.1)

So, in other words, even the sufferings inflicted on Greeks by other Greeks carry a different weight and are easier to endure than those inflicted on Greeks by non-Greeks. Thus, the suffering inflicted by Philip, the "wretched Macedonian", is not only not acceptable but degrading and humiliating.

[DaS]

Thank both of you on your reply's.

Soldier of Macedon - No offence could possibly be taken. I thank you on your bluntness and appreciate your candor. It is not that I care what people that have been taught or truly believe propaganda think. I do not care about them at all, to be honest. What I care about is that the world at large is not hearing of our story enough. They only hear their propaganda and they do not know the truth. So they believe them, that will change soon I'm sure, but till then i try to get our voice to as many people as I can. Truly i am not a historian, except as a pastime and a hobby. My interest lie in the fields of Anthropology and Ethnology, but I will try the best I can to further my knowledge on the topic of Macedonian history. So i can better serve my people.

Bill77 - Thank you on your advice. I will put it to good use. And: Добро ве најдов.

[Bill77]

Hello and good day to you all.
I devote as much of my time as I can on arguing with Yunnis, Bulgarians and the like. Or better said I try to counter their propaganda and to make the world see that we Macedonians have something to say. Not just those that deny us.
The problem is that I am not a Historian, and do not have the knowledge some of those that I try to argue with do. And also many of them have no knowledge, they just have easy access to propaganda. What I need is help in countering some of the facts that they bring forth. Is this a good thread for that or is there a better one ?

Use the "Search" feature on top of the page. Type in a particular subject ie: "Delcev" and below that you have 2 options "Show threads" or "show posts" i usually click "Show posts" as it gives you all the specific posts Delcev is mentioned and which thread it was mentioned in. Good luck DaS and welcome.

[Soldier of Macedon]

What I need is help in countering some of the facts that they bring forth. Is this a good thread for that or is there a better one ?

Welcome. A few things. First, I deleted your previous post. We don't need more random anti-Macedonian idiots being cited here, there are plenty of other examples already on this forum and our responses to them. Second, if you're interested in learning about Macedonian history, spend more time going through the history and exposing propaganda sections. This forum has been active for over a decade and there is a plethora of sources and arguments that refute the idiocy of our enemies. Third, if you have a question about a specific topic, do some research on it first then ask for opinions, but be specific, there are plenty of forum members (myself included) that can provide information or point you in the right direction.

Excuse the bluntness and don't take it as an attack against you, but the moronic and opinionated quote you referenced from that idiot isn't worth dignifying with an answer and there is no place for that rubbish here anymore. We passed that stage years ago. Macedonians who are interested in their own history should transcend the mere mention of an opposing argument and at least take some time to develop a counter-argument before haphazardly posting the former here, especially when it lacks any substance or specificity.

[Liberator of Makedonija]

Hello and good day to you all.
I devote as much of my time as I can on arguing with Yunnis, Bulgarians and the like. Or better said I try to counter their propaganda and to make the world see that we Macedonians have something to say. Not just those that deny us.
The problem is that I am not a Historian, and do not have the knowledge some of those that I try to argue with do. And also many of them have no knowledge, they just have easy access to propaganda. What I need is help in countering some of the facts that they bring forth. Is this a good thread for that or is there a better one ?

Really depends on the subject.

[DaS]

Hello and good day to you all.
I devote as much of my time as I can on arguing with Yunnis, Bulgarians and the like. Or better said I try to counter their propaganda and to make the world see that we Macedonians have something to say. Not just those that deny us.
The problem is that I am not a Historian, and do not have the knowledge some of those that I try to argue with do. And also many of them have no knowledge, they just have easy access to propaganda. What I need is help in countering some of the facts that they bring forth. Is this a good thread for that or is there a better one ?

[Carlin]

Unknown artist, Roman

Tablet with Greek transcription of Letter from Emperor Hadrian to Common Assembly of Macedonians, 136 - 137 CE

URL:

https://risdmuseum.org/art-design/collection/tablet-greek-transcription-letter-emperor-hadrian-common-assembly-macedonians

This inscription, a carving of a letter from Hadrian to an assembly of Macedonians, offers a glimpse into the state of Macedonian politics in the 2nd century CE. Remains of pigment indicate that the text was originally painted red to make it more visible; it would have been mounted on a wall in a central location for everyone to read.

In the letter, Hadrian states that in accordance with the request of a delegation from Macedon, all Macedonian politicians must inform their chosen successors thirty days in advance when leaving office. The first six lines of the inscription give the full titles for the emperor, the seventh line addresses the assembly, the next six lines make up the substance of the official decree, and the remaining lines list the five members of the delegation and state the year. The decree itself takes up less than a third of the text.

[Karposh]

You kind of get the feeling that Hammond, a well known philhellene, was quite torn between what he knew to be true with regard to the Ancient Macedonians and what his official position should be at all times. As a consequence, he always maintained that, although neither the Ancient Macedonians nor the Ancient Greeks considered the Macedonians to be Greeks, they were nevertheless akin to the Greeks who spoke a Doric dialect. Eugene Borza, Peter Green and others are less diplomatic. They point out that it is very likely the Macedonians spoke their own language even if there isn't much of a written record for that. Enough material evidence exists in support of its existence that to dismiss it offhand would be foolhardy.

[Carlin]

I attended yesterday a reception at Portcullis House, Westminster, hosted by Her Excellency Marija Efremova, Ambassador of the Republic of Macedonia, and by the Henry Jackson Society, to celebrate Macedonian Independence Day. Following this happy occasion, I should like to take the opportunity to tackle an old canard, which the nationalist regime in Athens uses to justify its policy of trying to force Macedonia to change its name: the myth that the ancient Macedonians, whose ruler Alexander the Great conquered an empire stretching from Macedonia to India, were ‘Greek’; that the modern Greek state therefore has sole legitimate right to use the name ‘Macedonia’; and that the Republic of Macedonia today therefore has no right to call itself ‘Republic of Macedonia’.

This is a case of writing something for the record, rather than because it should actually make any difference to contemporary debates. As every undergraduate studying Modern History knows, modern national identities cannot be projected back onto ancient peoples. Even if the ancient Macedonians had been ‘Greek’ in the ancient Greek sense, this would not mean that they belonged to the same national category as modern Greeks – any more than the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ population of modern-day Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere is of the same national category as the medieval Angles and Saxons. Still, there is always a certain pleasure in pointing out the baselessness of a nationalist claim, even if the claim itself is meaningless.

The late N.G.L. Hammond, Emeritus Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, Honorary Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Officer of the Royal Hellenic Order of the Phoenix, was perhaps the Western world’s leading authority on ancient Macedonia, and author of a three-volume history of ancient Macedonia. From early on, he was quite categorical about the nationality of the ancient Macedonians: ‘The Macedonians in general did not consider themselves Greeks, nor were they considered Greeks by their neighbours.’ This conclusion was based on a study of Herodotus, Thucycidides and other ancient Greek writers (N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 BC, 2nd ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967, p. 535).

This conclusion was reaffirmed in the works on ancient Macedonian history he subsequently published. In his ‘History of Macedonia’, he wrote the following:

The Macedonians had no reason and presumably no wish to align themselves with the Greek states either as promoters of Greek culture or as speakers of a common language. Each people had its own culture, and each people was destined to develop on its own lines in accordance with its own genius and its own situation. Hostility between the two was to be expected. A slender bridge between them was represented by the Greek language, spoken as contemporary Doric by the royal house and in the form of an ancient patois by the Macedones, but a means of communication is very far from assuring peaceful relations between two peoples, as we know from our experience of the modern world. (N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Macedonia, vol. 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 441).

In his ‘The Macedonian State: Origins, Institutions and History’, Hammond wrote the following:

We have already inferred from the incident at the Olympic Games c. 500 that the Macedonians themselves, as opposed to their kings, were considered not to be Greeks. Herodotus said this clearly in four words, introducing Amyntas, who was king c. 500, as ‘a Greek ruling over Macedonians’, and Thucydides described the Macedonians and other northern tribes as ‘barbarians’ in the sense of ‘non-Greeks’, despite the fact that they were Greek-speaking. When it came to political controversy, it was naturally good invective to call the king a barbarian too. Thus a Greek speech-writer called the Thessalians ‘Greeks’ and Archelaus, the contemporary Macedonian king, ‘a barbarian’. Demosthenes spoke of Philip II as ‘the barbarian from Pella’. Writing in 346 and eager to win Philip’s approval, Isocrates paid tribute to Philip as a blue-blooded Greek and made it clear at the same time that the Macedonians were not Greeks. Aristotle, born at Stageira on the Macedonian border and the son of a Greek doctor at the Macedonian court, classed the Macedonians and their institution of monarchy as not Greek, as we shall see shortly. It is thus not surprising that the Macedonians considered themselves to be, and were treated by Alexander the Great as being, separate from the Greeks. They were proud to be so. (N.G.L. Hammond, The Macedonian State: Origins, Institutions and History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 19).

Other classical scholars support Hammond’s thesis on the non-Greek character of the ancient Macedonians. The late Chester G. Starr, Bentley Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan, has this to say:

The Acarnanians, Aetolians, and other Greeks dwelling in the forests and fertile plains of northwest Greece remained backward tribal peoples. To their east lay the large but weak kingdom of Macedonia. This was not counted as Greek, though its stock was closely related. (Chester G. Starr, ‘A History of the Ancient World’, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1991, p. 260).

Macedonia was essentially a tribal kingdom, far larger than any Greek state but so loosely organised and beset by even more barbarian neighbours that it had never been important. Its kings had fostered Greek culture at their courts and been accepted as Greek by the officials of the Olympic games; but the peasantry and nobles, though akin to the Greeks, were considered distinct. (Ibid., p. 367).

As the above quotations indicate, a case could be made that, if not the Macedonian people, then the Macedonian kings could be considered to have been Greek, insofar as they claimed Greek descent and promoted Greek culture at their court. Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge and a biographer of Alexander, mentions that ‘it is noteworthy that only the reigning king of Macedon, and no other Macedonians, was considered sufficiently Greek to be permitted to enter the sacred Olympic Games as a competitor.’ (Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, MacMillan, London, 2004, p. 33).

Yet to describe Alexander the Great and his father Philip II as ‘Greek kings’, as their respective Wikipedia entries, presumably bombarded by edits from Greek nationalists, rather pointedly do, is somewhat akin to calling the British monarchs since the 1710s ‘German kings and queens’. The late Moses I. Finley, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge, wrote that, from the point of view of the Greeks, Philip II was ‘a despot and outsider, at best an “honorary Hellene,” whose own motives and interests, it need scarcely be said, were fundamentally not those of the Greeks he was to lead.’ (M.I. Finlay, The Ancient Greeks, Chatto and Windus, London, 1963, p. 83). As for Philip’s son, Alexander the Great, ‘It seems that he relied almost entirely on his own Macedonian generals and soldiers and had little trust in the Greeks, and that he was prepared to make a place for the Persian nobility.’ (ibid., p. 173).

Cartledge goes into some depth about Alexander’s unwillingness to rely on Greek troops, and on the fact that many more Greeks fought for Persia against him than vice versa:

To sum up: the most plausible explanation of the composition of Alexander’s forces, as it seems to me, is that he mistrusted the Greeks’ loyalty, with good reason after all, and that an awful lot more Greeks disliked or feared Alexander’s Macedonian rule than positively favoured or embraced it. This impression seems confirmed by none other than Arrian, retailer of the pro-Alexander Official version of events for the most part. At the Battle of Issus, he reports, there was among Alexander’s troops ‘even a degree of emulous antagonism between members of the Greek and Macedonian peoples’ – that is, between troops who were supposed to be fighting on the same side in a common cause. This was because for many Greeks, the Macedonians too – not just the Persians – were ‘barbarians’. Furthermore, it was Macedon, not the [Persian] Great King, which they thought was the real, or at any rate the more immediately present, danger and enemy. For many Macedonians, conversely, Greeks were members of a recently defeated and so despised people who did not know how to conduct their political and military life sensibly. (Cartledge, Alexander the Great, pp. 94-95).

There remains the question of why certain classical scholars whose own works have shattered the myth that the ancient Macedonians were Greek should have ended up endorsing the Greek-nationalist cause vis-a-vis the Republic of Macedonia, even at the price of eating their own words. As we noted above, Hammond, in his ‘History of Macedonia’, wrote the following of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians:

‘A slender bridge between them was represented by the Greek language, spoken as contemporary Doric by the royal house and in the form of an ancient patois by the Macedones, but a means of communication is very far from assuring peaceful relations between two peoples, as we know from our experience of the modern world.’

Yet in an interview with the Greek-nationalist publication Macedonian Echo in February 1993, he said the following, in response to the suggestion that Demosthenes of Athens viewed the Macedonians as ‘barbarians’:

‘Personally, I believe that it is the common language, which gives one the opportunity to share a common civilization. Thus the language is the main factor that forms a national identity.’

Cartledge devotes a considerable part of his biography of Alexander to discussing the ambiguous nature of Alexander’s relationship with, and identification with, the Greek world, noting:

‘We have already seen that it was a live issue whether Alexander was truly “Greek”.’ (Cartledge, Alexander the Great, p. 15).

Yet five years later, Cartledge added his name to an open letter to President Obama signed by 200 classical scholars in support of the Greek-nationalist stance on Macedonia, which claimed:

‘Alexander the Great was thoroughly and indisputably Greek.’

I am not going to speculate here as to why such scholars might contradict themselves in this way, though I believe it is not difficult to work out. Suffice it to say that I take more seriously what scholars say in their major works, than what they say when making political statements.

URL:

https://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/the-nationality-of-the-ancient-macedonians/

[Liberator of Makedonija]

Back on topic guys. While some historians do consider at least from Phillip and Alexander a hellenic origin, by way of Hercules, I have never seen one ancient reference that regards the general ancient Macedonian population in the same way.

Even then I feel most historians suggest Philip and Alexander were Hellenophilic or Philhellenes and not actual Hellenes themselves.

[Stevce]

Some interesting reads from the Greek side which I found on google and academia
The Macedonians in Athens
The impact of Ares Macedon on Athenian sculpture.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=1GUsDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=the+impact+of+ares+macedon+on+athenian+sculpture&source=bl&ots=nls-GGzBo9&sig=fLhvEJy2-u3mBBFAvk4U7XU9Kag&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFjobT057dAhVIc3AKHSI0CBsQ6AEwC3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20impact%20of%20ares%20macedon%20on%20athenian%20sculpture&f=false

[Stevce]

Back on topic guys. While some historians do consider at least from Phillip and Alexander a hellenic origin, by way of Hercules, I have never seen one ancient reference that regards the general ancient Macedonian population in the same way.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Farewell JJAskiz. Have fun with your like-minded partners in the racist Greek forums.

[Soldier of Macedon]

JJAskiz, why you'd want to reignite the same discussion after almost 3 years is for you to figure out. I told you back then to stop presenting our people in a negative way on this forum. I also told you I will delete your posts should you decide to persist with such rubbish. And I have. If you want to engage in gutter diatribes then take it to the Greek forums. We don't need or want it here. This is your last chance to return to normality. Read all of my previous posts that have been addressed to you on this thread. If you don't heed my advice this time around it is your account which will be deleted next.

[EgejskaMakedonia]

So it's about accommodating those who are reading it from an English perspective? In that case, 'car core stair en glare zee' lol

Lol, that's even more confusing! Anyways it was just an idea, I'm sure there's a more logical explanation behind it.