To truly understand how any great Empire came to power, we must explore its oldest roots.
This is especially true when it comes to Macedonia, the birthplace of the legendary King Philip
II, and his son, Alexander the Great - a man who needs no introduction. Long before there
was an Empire that spanned across three continents, there was a tiny Kingdom on the very edge
of the Greek world, whose humble beginnings made possible the great conquests we all know
today. Welcome to our video on the history of Ancient Macedonia!
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According to the historian Nicholas Hammond, the earliest ancestors of the Macedonians
emerged as semi-nomadic shepherds in the Orestian Highlands during the late Bronze age. These
seasonal pastoralists were not part of the Greek world, which at the time was dominated
by the Mycenean palace culture of the southern Peleponnese. This is evidenced by their absence
in the works of Homer, whose epics were a fantastical retelling of this ancient era.
In book two of the Iliad, the iconic poet compiles an extensive list of the contingent
of allied Greeks sailing to Troy, a list that stops just south of the traditional territory
of Macedon. The Macedonians only emerged in Greek records
well after the Bronze age collapse, after the warlike Dorian subgroup of the Greeks
invaded the peninsula, significantly changing the ethnic makeup of the land. It is possible
that the Macedonians were a Dorian tribe, which would explain their appearance in the
historical records during these tumultuous migrations.
It was Herodotus, the ancient father of history, who transcribed the story of how the Kingdom
of Macedonia was founded. According to him, the tale begins in the city-state of Argos,
where there lived three brothers: Gauanes, Aeropas, and Perdiccas. The brothers were
descendents of Temerus, a legendary Dorian Greek warrior, who himself was a descendant
of the great Heracles. Sometime in the early 6th century BC, the
brothers were exiled from their home in Argos, and made their way north, to the Orestian
Highlands, where the barbaric Macedonians dwelled, divided into primitive pastoralist
tribes. The siblings found work as shepherds for a local petty Chieftain, but this did
not last for long. The Chieftain noticed that the bread his wife was making for Perdiccas,
the eldest of the siblings, always swelled to twice the size of everyone elses' bread
during their communal meals. Interpreting this as a sign that Perdiccas was destined
for greatness, and therefore was a threat to his reign, the Chieftain ordered all three
brothers to leave his lands. Perdiccas remarked that he should at least be paid for the shepherding
work he had done. But the King refused, instead snidely offering him a patch of sunlight shining
through their stable’s smoke-hole. Rather than showing outrage, Perdiccas calmly
accepted the payment offered, using his knife to draw a circle around the sun patch, claiming
it for his own before leaving. The King was bewildered, until one of his priests informed
him that this was an ill-Omen from the Gods. Enraged, the petty despot sent horsemen out
to kill the brothers, but Perdiccas and his siblings managed to evade death by jumping
into the Haliacmon river and letting the currents carry them away.
They soon came upon the Gardens of Midas, a vibrant rose field at the base of Mount
Bermion. From there, the three brothers made a new home, and eventually, garnered enough
support to unite or conquer all the disparate Macedonian tribes. Perdiccas ascended as the
first King of a united Macedonian people, while the sunlight he had claimed from the
petty King became the emblem of his royal house: The Vergina Sun.
Perdiccas and his followers then migrated eastwards out of the Orestian Highlands and
into the Emathian plain. There, they set up a center of power in a settlement called Aigai.
By the 6th century BC, the Macedonians had established control over a strip of land from
Bottiaea to the Aegean coast, driving out the Thracian tribes who had lived there previously.
It was here they settled and made their Kingdom. Whether or not this story has any truth to
it is unknown, but Herodotus claims that it is the tale that the Macedonians of his time-
some two hundred years after the legend - claimed was the genesis of their Kingdom. Perdiccas’
dynasty would become known as the Argeads, named after their ancestral homeland of Argos.
It would be their bloodline that would rule Macedonia in an uninterrupted succession,
right up until Alexander the Great and his son.
It is here that we should take a brief tangent to explore the culture of the Macedonians
under the Argead Dynasty, particularly in the context of how it was perceived by the
Greek cities to their south. Kings of Macedon certainly had a place in
the Greek world. In the late 5th century BC, one member of the Argaed royal family named
Alexander- no, not that one - sought to participate in the Olympic games, an event open only to
Greeks. Many protested that Alexander was not a Greek, and therefore could not enter
the sacred competition, but the Hellenodikai, the Olympic Judges, ruled that by virtue of
Alexander’s ancestral ties to Argos, that the Macedonian had the right to compete. According
to Herodotus, Alexander entered the foot race, and won “equal first”.
And yet, despite their ruling family’s undeniable link to the Hellenic world, the common people
of Macedonia were still inherently alien to the traditionally xenophobic Greeks. Herodotus
himself refers to Macedonia not as a Greek Kingdom, but as a Kingdom of Macedonians,
ruled over by Greeks. The historian Thucydides, who chronicled the Peleponnesian war, recalls
three main groups fighting in that denominative conflict: The Greeks- who constituted the
main belligerents of Athens and Sparta - the Illyrian Barbarians, and the Macedonians,
who he considered to be neither fully Greek nor fully Barbarian.
The state of semi-Hellenic limbo the Macedonians lived in was a product of their way of life,
which to the Greeks seemed both recognizable, and horridly strange at the same time. The
Macedonians were a predominantly rural, village dwelling people, as opposed to the Greeks,
who considered their urban polis-based way of life the hallmark of civilization. Hunting
was a huge aspect of highland living, and the Macedonians delighted in chasing dangerous
game like boars, and even lions. Successful hunts were celebrated with banquets, where
the Macedonians revelled heartily and drank undiluted wine. This horrified their southern
guests, who saw such a practice as an utter lack of self control and good taste.
Furthermore, the Macedonians lived under the rule of a King. This was unfathomable to the
Greeks, particularly the Athenians, who prided themselves on their public assemblies, councils,
and elected magistrates. In their eyes, no Greek could ever live under a monarchy, so
the Macedonians could not be Greeks. With that said, the religious rites practiced
in the north would have been comfortably familiar to an Athenian. The Macedonians worshipped
more or less the same Gods in the same ways as their southern neighbours. They were particularly
reverent of Zeus, and his son Herakles, who they believed was the ancient ancestor of
their royal Argaed line. The Macedonian language remains an enigma
to us. The Argead Kings performed their courtly functions in Attic, a prestigious Athenian
dialect of Greek. As a result, the native Macedonian tongue spoken by the common people
is scarcely attested to. Through footnotes in literary sources, ancient coins and a handful
of inscriptions, we have a scant 200 or so words of the Macedonian language. Most of
these words have Greek roots, but some are of Illyrian and Thracian origin. Ultimately,
Ancient Macedonian was probably a highly divergent dialect of Ancient Greek, a tongue that would
have sounded vaguely familiar, yet distorted and strange to the average Athenian or Spartan.
With all that said, the peoples outside of the Greek world rarely made any distinction
between Macedonians and Greeks, who they generally saw as two branches of the same people. The
Persians, in particular, referred to the Greeks as “Yaunas”, meaning Ionians, and to the
Macedonians as “Yauna Sakabara”, meaning Ionians with hats that look like Shields.
It would in fact be the Persians who would indirectly launch the Argead Monarchs into
political relevancy, a convenient segway we will use to jump back into the history of
the Macedonian Kingdom. In 510 BC, the great King of Kings himself, Darius I, led a campaign
to subdue the Scythian tribes in the central Balkans. This failed, and Darius returned
home, leaving his top general Megazabus in charge of subjugating the Paeonians, and other
tribes along the Strymon river. From here, the ancient sources tend to contradict
one another, but the most reliable tale relates that Amyntas I, the reigning King of Macedonia,
sought to spare his realm from the ravages of war that the Persians brought to his doorstep.
To do so, he presented Earth and Water to the Persian authority, submitting his realm
as a vassal of the Achaemenid Empire. Three decades later, a new King of Kings had
risen to the throne in Babylon. Xerxes was determined to resume his father’s European
campaigns, and so prepared a force to invade the Greek mainland. At this time, the reigning
Argead King was Alexander I, the same man who had competed in the Olympics some years
earlier. Alexander was a shrewd and unscrupulous ruler, determined to come out on top, whatever
the outcome of the war. Nevertheless, he was formally an obedient vassal to the Persian
King, so he mustered a force of cavalrymen and joined Xerxes’ army as it marched southwards.
Meanwhile, the allied Greek army had decided to meet their foe at the Peneus river. When
informed of this, Alexander sent secret messengers ahead to the Greek encampment, presenting
himself as a spy within the Persian army. He advised the Greeks against making their
stand there, for Xerxes was taking the long way around west of Olympus, and planned on
flanking them from behind, where they would surely be destroyed. Reluctantly, the Greeks
heeded the Macedonians’ warnings and withdrew. Alexander probably did prevent the Greeks
from being slaughtered, while the retreat allowed the Persians to conquer Thessaly without
any real resistance. Through diplomatic cunning, the shrewd Macedonian had pleased both sides.
The following year of the campaign saw Alexander stand with a Persian army commanded by General
Mardonius as they faced down a Spartan-led coalition of Greeks at a plain near Plataea.
For decades, Historians have hotly debated what role the Macedonian King played in the
famous battle that followed, but Herodotus tells the following tale: Before the armies
clashed, Augurs on both sides had performed divinations, and both the Persians and Greeks
were told the Gods did not favour an attack. However, with his supplies dwindling, and
Greek reinforcements trickling in day by day, Mardonius decided that despite the Gods warnings,
he would attack at dawn. When learning of this, Alexander rode under
cover of darkness into the Greek camp, informing their commander, Pausaunias of Sparta, of
the Persian generals’ intentions. The Greeks were thus able to prevent themselves from
being ambushed or outflanked, and thanks to Alexander’s warnings, emerged victorious
at the battle of Plataea. Following this last great defeat, the Persian army fled eastwards,
abandoning Europe entirely. Through this, Macedon was once more an independent Kingdom.
Historians both ancient and modern alike have long argued over Alexander’s motives during
the Persian wars. However, it seems most likely that he was neither a Panhellenist nor a Persian
sympathizer. As a vassal to the Achaemenids, he had gladly played the role of the collaborator,
helping the massive Empire subjugate the war-like tribes on his borders. When the Persians had
fulfilled their purpose to him, he helped the Greeks take them down from the inside.
The Achaemenid retreat left a power vacuum in the lands surrounding Macedonia, which
Alexander used to expand the borders of his Kingdom threefold. He had played both sides,
and come out on top. The next King to ascend after Alexander was
Perdiccas II, and it would be under his reign that Macedonia would play a key role in the
second of ancient Greece’s two most famous conflicts: The Peloponnesian War. In the years
leading up to the conflict, Macedonia had been gradually inserting itself into the geopolitical
sphere of the Greek world. They had become a friend and ally of Athens, and according
to some sources, the legendarily powerful Athenian navy was built using Macedonian timber.
This was not to last, as Athens was nothing if not aggressively expansionist. In 437,
seeking to seize dominance over the trade coming out of the northern Aegean, the Athenians
established the colony of Amphipolis right upon the doorstep of Macedonia. This put the
southerners a little too close for comfort for Perdiccas, so when the Spartans, equally
incensed by Athenian expansionism, declared war, the Macedonian King brought his realm
into the conflict on the side of Sparta. Early on, the Argead Monarch foiled an Athenian
attempt to convince a Thracian King, Sitacles, to invade his realm, forging a marriage alliance
with the latter. This victory was short lived, as Arrhabaeus, a local ruler in Upper Macedonia,
launched himself into open rebellion against his king. Perdiccas marched upon the rebels
with the support of his ally, the Spartan general Brasidas. But then, spooked by Arrhabaeus’s
vast host of fearsome Illyrian allies, he fled with his troops in the night without
even bothering to tell the Spartans, abandoning Brasidas to his fate.
Thankfully for the Spartans, Brasidas was able to orchestrate an ingenious retreat,
and in revenge began to pillage the Macedonian countryside. Having now made an enemy of the
Spartans, Perdiccas flipped sides and joined the Athenians. It is here the capricious Macedonian
King disappears from the historical record, last seen in 414BC on an expedition with the
Athenians to retake Amphipolis, which was then in Spartan hands.
Perdiccas was succeeded by his son Archelaus I, who managed to phase Macedon out of the
war. The Athenians had just lost a huge fleet during a disastrous campaign in Syracuse,
and were in desperate need of good timber. Archelaus used the leverage he now possessed
as a supplier of timber to reassert hegemony over his northern Aegean economic interests,
ending the reason Macedon entered into war in the first place. He was also probably the
one who finally ended Arrhabaeus’ rebellion. Taking advantage of the hard won stability
in his realm, Archelaeus set to overhauling the infrastructure of his lands, building
roads and fortresses, while modernizing his army to be able to go toe to toe with the
best phalanxes the Greek world had to offer. Thucydides, the famous historian of the Peleponnesian
war, praised the reign of his Macedonian contemporary, claiming Archelaeus surpassed the achievements
of all eight Kings who came before him. It was under Archelaus that the so-called
“Greekification” of Macedon really got under way, a slow Hellenization that saw the
highland Kingdom morph into something resembling its southern neighbours, slowly transforming
into a more urbanized society. Archelaus most likely orchestrated the construction of Pella.
The city quickly grew to become a hub of international trade, boasting a massive agora that featured
exotic products flowing in from both east and west.
Archelaus’ royal palace was designed with a distinctly Greek style. One source claims
that he invited Zeuxis, the greatest painter in the Hellenic world, to decorate his royal
courtroom with a mural of Pan, the God of the Wild. Other artists were also brought
in to enrich the Macedonian cultural fabric, the most famous example being Euripides, one
of Athens’ most famous playwrights. The poet spent his last years in Macedon, writing
plays about the King and his ancient ancestors that were performed in the lavish Athenian-style
theatres of Pella. In 399 BC, Archelaus died while on a hunt,
possibly because of a jealous conspiracy born of a homosexual love affair he had had with
a page in his court. His death resulted in a six-year interregnum as his Kingdom was
torn apart by different claimants to the throne. This hiccup was tenuously ended by the ascension
of Amyntas III, whose reign was still plagued by constant war, first with the Dardani Illyrians,
who took advantage of the instability of Macedon to launch a massive invasion, and later with
the Chalcidian League to the south. Nevertheless, Macedon managed to come out
on top of both of these conflicts, and the now reigning King, Alexander II- no, still
not that one - pressed his Kingdom’s advantage by launching an invasion into Thessaly. This
was foiled by Theban intervention, and Alexander was forced to send his younger brother, Philip,
as a hostage to Thebes. Yes. That Philip. The young Philip would learn well during his
time in Thebes, but when he returned to Macedon to claim the throne in 364 BC, no one could
have predicted that it would be he who would expand the borders of his highland Kingdom
beyond anything anyone ever managed. Nor could they have foreseen that it would be his son,
Alexander III, yes, that Alexander, who would forever cement Macedonia as one of the most
famous Kingdoms in world history. The Ancient Greeks, proud in their democratic
traditions, could never have foreseen that one day, they would all owe their allegiance
not only to a King, but to a Macedonian King. However, to those of us paying attention,
the conquests of Philip and Alexander are anything but surprising, for their ancestors
had long before them forged a land of shrewd monarchs and hardy people, whose ability to
assert themselves politically, economically and militarily against the powerhouses of
the Ancient World was second to none. We will talk about the Greek world more in
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