A Companion to Ancient Macedonia

Joseph Roisman, Ian Worthington, Joseph Roisman, Ian Worthington

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444351637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

The most comprehensive and up-to-date work available on ancient Macedonian history and material culture, A Companion to Ancient Macedonia is an invaluable reference for students and scholars alike.

• Features new, specially commissioned essays by leading and up-and-coming scholars in the field
• Examines the political, military, social, economic, and cultural history of ancient Macedonia from the Archaic period to the end of Roman period and beyond
• Discusses the importance of art, archaeology and architecture
• All ancient sources are translated in English
• Each chapter includes bibliographical essays for further reading

PART I

Preamble

1

Why Study Ancient Macedonia and What this Companion is About

Edward M. Anson

This Companion to Ancient Macedonia reflects a dramatic change in the focus of ancient Greek history over the last half century. The ancient kingdom of Macedonia was typically regarded until the latter part of the twentieth century as the land which produced Alexander the Great, who brought Hellenic civilization to the Near East, and in the view of G. Droysen paved the way for the success of Christianity, but noted for little else.¹ Alexander the Great not only grew beyond his homeland but also transformed the entire Greek world. Indeed, Alexander’s creation of the Hellenistic world for most nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historians was sufficient to forgive his participation in the eclipse of the Greek Classical Age and its concomitant reign of the city-states. Alexander’s father Philip II then shouldered most of the blame for this end to ‘Greek freedom’. For most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars Alexander was Greek. It was only by the accident of birth that he came from Macedonia, the primitive and backward march of the Greek world. Of course, this view has a basis in antiquity. Alexander’s dynasty, the Argead or Temenid, was generally acknowledged by contemporaries and vigorously endorsed by the members of the royal family themselves, to have arisen in the Peloponnesian city-state (polis) of Argos.²

A more critical view of the great conqueror has emerged in more recent times and is widely seen in this book. The conquests of Alexander and the inauguration of the new Hellenistic Age left his homeland behind in many ways. While Alexander had apparently brought Macedonia to a world stage with his conquest of the Persian Empire, the greatest empire that the West had yet seen, Macedonia benefitted little. On the face of it, Macedonia in a century and a half had achieved a remarkable change of fortune. Beginning in the late sixth century and lasting until 479, Macedonia had been an appendage of this same Persian Empire and Macedonian troops had even fought alongside those of Persia during the Great Persian War of 480–479 (for this history and Alexander’s subsequent conquest of the Persian Empire, see M.J. Olbrycht, ‘Macedonia and Persia’, chapter 17). While Alexander and the Macedonians had conquered Persia, Olbrycht demonstrates that Alexander, beginning in 330, began to ‘Persianize’ his court, his dress, and his army. Alexander had left his homeland behind more than just in miles; he was becoming the living god-ruler of a vast empire of which Macedonia was to be but a part. Moreover, D.L. Gilley and Ian Worthington, in chapter 10, ‘Alexander the Great, Macedonia and Asia’, while relating and discussing the life of this individual who so altered the course of history, emphasize that his effect on Macedonia was not all that positive. Alexander was only present in Macedonia during the first two years of his reign and this long absence, in addition to his tardiness in producing an heir, born after his father’s death, who shared the rule with the conqueror’s ill-suited half-brother, contributed substantially to the demise of his dynasty as rulers of his native land. P. Millett in ‘The Political Economy of Macedonia’ (chapter 23) also notes that Alexander’s conquests were not made part of a Macedonian empire but rather these lands became independent, competitive, states. Very little of the tens of thousands of pounds of gold and silver liberated from the various Persian treasuries ever made its way to Macedonia. Much of this wealth was expended in the wars that broke out soon after Alexander’s death among his successors. W.L. Adams in ‘Alexander’s Successors to 221 BC’ (chapter 11) chronicles these battles and the resulting breakup of Alexander’s great empire and the emergence of a new Macedonia, ruled by a new dynasty.

Alexander’s failures even had an impact on the end of Macedonian independence before the onslaught of Rome two centuries later. While there were other contributing factors, including the power of the Romans, the expenditure of Macedonian manpower in the initial conquest of and subsequent migration to the greener pastures of Asia and Egypt, the resulting ongoing conflicts among Alexander’s successor kingdoms, which sapped the strength of the Greek world, were all part of Alexander’s legacy to his homeland. A.M. Eckstein in ‘Macedonia and Rome, 221–146 BC’ (chapter 12) chronicles the series of wars that led to the Roman conquest, emphasizing the political anarchy especially in the eastern Mediterranean world, which encouraged warfare as the way to settle international disputes. Rome and Macedonia were two aggressive states whose conflicts were not likely ‘to result in mutual coexistence or cooperation’. In four wars, fought from the late third century to the middle of the second, Rome acquired control and then full possession of Alexander the Great’s homeland. Macedonia would continue as a Roman province whose borders would expand or contract according to the organizational plans of their Roman overlords for the next thousand years. The first five centuries of this history, down to the reorganization of Roman provinces in the late third century AD, is covered in J. Vanderspoel’s ‘Provincia Macedonia’ (chapter 13); the account is then continued into the sixth century by C.S. Snively, in ‘Macedonia in Late Antiquity’ (chapter 26). The province to the late third century included the lands of the previous independent Macedonia kingdom and also those of neighboring peoples. During the reign of Emperor Diocletian the Roman province of Macedonia was divided into several smaller components and even the core of Macedonia was partially dismembered.

While the obsession with Alexander by so many earlier historians previously obscured Macedonia, what more recent historians have proclaimed is that Alexander did not appear out of a vacuum and that the culture and institutions of the Hellenistic Age did not begin with his death, nor were they mere continuations, albeit muted, of the previous Classical Age and its city-state culture. Increasingly the focus on Macedonia has shown that both Alexander and the Hellenistic era owed much to his homeland. C.G. Thomas in ‘The Physical Kingdom’ (chapter 4) reviews the land that was ancient Macedonia. Its often rugged terrain, continental climate, and its location, ‘the node of connections between both north/south and east/west’, made Macedonia a land that produced a ‘tough people’. Macedonia itself was seen in antiquity as divided between the coastal plain, commonly referred to as Lower Macedonia, and the western and northern highlands, referred to as Upper (or Inner) Macedonia.

P. Millett, ‘The Political Economy of Macedonia’ (chapter 23), emphasizes that Macedonia was a land of many natural resources, including rich farmland, abundant pastoral wealth, large deposits of base and precious metals, and especially abundant supplies of timber and its by-products which were in short supply in southern Greece. From Macedonia’s earliest history these resources made the land a target for its neighbors. Macedonia was surrounded by numbers of often hostile populations, whose frequent incursions were certainly part of the chemistry that made the Macedonians a ‘tough people’. To the northwest were the Illyrians and to the west the Epirotes. W.S. Greenwalt in ‘Macedonia, Illyria, and Epirus’ (chapter 14) records the long history of interaction and conflict between the Macedonians and the Illyrians and the more peaceful relationship between the former and the Epirote tribes. The frequent hostility between the collective group of tribesmen, called Illyrians by the Greeks, and the Macedonians was not the result of any long-standing enmity but rather the consequence of proximity, Macedonian weakness, and the importance of raiding and pillaging to the Illyrian economy. By the mid-fourth century with the growth in power of Macedonia, the Illyrians turned their efforts to easier targets. Little is known of Macedonia’s relations with its western neighbors, the Epirote tribes, until the fourth century when it became the policy of the Macedonian kings to ally with these western neighbors in part to forge a common resistance to Illyrian raids. To the east of Macedonia were the Thracians whose resources and lifestyle paralleled those of the Macedonians in many ways (see Z. Archibald, ‘Macedonia and Thrace’, chapter 16), and to the south were the Thessalians, whose history and long-term contacts with their northern neighbors are chronicled by D. Graninger in ‘Macedonia and Thessaly’ (chapter 15). Thessalian elite society maintained close connections both to the Macedonian kings and to individual Macedonian aristocrats. Of all the areas of the southern Greek world Thessaly shared not only a common border with its northern neighbor but also much else. This was especially true with respect to religion. With regard to the northern neighbors Macedonia had long served as a little-appreciated bulwark for the Greeks to the south, a buffer that repulsed or absorbed attacks from these northern peoples, a condition that remained also through the early years of her existence as a Roman province. It was only with the extension of the Roman frontier to the Danube, and even beyond that great river, that Macedonia relinquished this role to others.

The new scholarly emphasis on Macedonia has developed in part out of the many archaeological finds being revealed almost on a daily basis. Much of our new appreciation of Macedonian culture and society comes from the numerous surviving and excavated tombs of prominent Macedonians dating from the period of the Argead and the following Antigonid dynasties, the latter who ruled until supplanted by Roman suzerainty (see A.M. Eckstein, ‘Macedonia and Rome, 221–146 BC’, chapter 12). These tombs from the monarchical period contain frescoes and other magnificent objects of artistic manufacture which demonstrate that amongst the upper classes Macedonian society existed at a very high level of sophistication. These remains then give insights into the lifestyle of the upper class, as set forth by N. Sawada in ‘Social Customs and Institutions: Aspects of Macedonian Elite Society’ (chapter 19). Much of this lifestyle revolved around lavish entertainments and hunting, and such scenes predominate on the walls of the noble tombs.

Macedonia still awaits the intensive field surveys, those meticulous examinations of land surfaces, which should provide more information regarding the ancient Macedonian countryside.³ Such studies as those conducted in the Argolid,⁴ Boeotia,⁵ and Messenia,⁶ would give historians a better understanding of the life of the Macedonian rural population, the majority of the ancient Macedonian people. Apart from these archaeological discoveries of predominantly upper-class material culture, however, there is little other evidence available for the study of Macedonia. Much of the evidence for the history of Macedonia is reviewed by P.J. Rhodes in ‘The Literary and Epigraphic Evidence to the Roman Conquest’ (chapter 2).⁷ Most of our literary information comes from late sources and is especially concentrated on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Rhodes points out that of the lost Greek historians listed by F. Jacoby in Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, only 13 possible writers of histories of Macedonia are listed, and of these perhaps five date from the time of the Roman Empire. For Macedonian history prior to the reign of Philip II, the creator of the united ancient state of Macedonia and Alexander the Great’s father and predecessor as king, modern-day historians have to rely on the occasional inscription or other material remains, fragments from these now lost historians, the occasional references to Macedonia and Macedonian affairs in the fifth-century historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and ‘universal histories’, dating from the Roman era. S.R. Asirvatham, in ‘Perspectives on the Macedonians from Greece, Rome, and Beyond’ (chapter 6), points out that despite the oft-quoted aphorism that the victors write the history, in the case of Macedonia that is certainly not the situation. Macedonia’s entire history is provided to us almost exclusively by non-Macedonian sources. Even with regard to Philip, while there is considerable contemporary evidence, it is largely Athenian and most often hostile. With respect to the great fifthcentury historians Herodotus and Thucydides, not to mention many of the inscriptions, the content typically concerns the relations of various Greek city-states with Macedonia, with the focus most often clearly centered on these other entities rather than on Macedonia and her interests. As Rhodes notes, ‘there are very few inscriptions, of any kind, from Macedonia or cities and other units within it, of the Classical period; some are of the Hellenistic period but most are later than AD 100’. P. Millett in ‘The Political Economy of Macedonia’ (chapter 23) comments, ‘there is also absent from earlier Macedonia the “epigraphic habit” that was a feature of mainstream poleis’. These few inscriptions, however, many of which for the Classical and Hellenistic periods can now be conveniently found in the second volume of M.B. Hatzopoulos’s Macedonian Institutions under the Kings, provide, among other insights, some understanding of the functioning at the municipal level of the Macedonian kingdom.⁸ Part of the explanation for the reluctance of earlier scholars to pursue Macedonian history was the lack of any contemporary, relatively detailed, narrative histories until that of Polybius in the second century, and even here much of the focus is otherwise directed and large portions of the original are lost.

Other forms of evidence are examined by K. Dahmen in ‘The Numismatic Evidence’ (chapter 3), C.I. Hardiman in ‘Classical Art to 221 BC’ (chapter 24), and R. Kousser in ‘Hellenistic and Roman Art, 221 BC–AD 337’ (chapter 25). According to Dahmen, coinage began in Macedonia in the sixth century showing wide-ranging influences, including Greek, Persian, and Thracian, and representing different tribes and cities. Beginning with Alexander I (498–454), Macedonian coinage came to be the province of the monarch. Hardiman and Kousser examine the artistic and material culture of Macedonia from earliest times well into its history as part of the Roman Empire. While Hardiman emphasizes that Macedonia’s art in the ‘Classical’ period was derived from strong Hellenic influence, Kousser stresses that subsequently its art maintained a distinctive quality, and in the later Roman and Byzantine Empires Macedonia became a Christian religious and artistic center with Thessaloniki, the modern port and capital of the Greek Periphery (region) of Central Macedonia, becoming a second city to Constantinople in the east (much of this long history is reviewed in C.S. Snively’s ‘Macedonia in Late Antiquity’, chapter 26).

Historians seeking to reconstruct Macedonian history and institutions for the period before and after the reign of Alexander III (‘the Great’), down to the regency and monarchy of Antigonus Doson (229–221) and the history of Polybius, must rely primarily on two problematic historians of the Roman era: Diodorus of Sicily, writing a ‘universal history’ in the last half century of the Roman Republic, and Justin’s Epitome of the now lost Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, another world history but with its primary focus on the rise of Macedonia and the following Hellenistic Age. Trogus’ original was written during the reign of Augustus; the Epitome dates probably from the third or fourth century of the Roman imperial period.⁹

Despite the difficulty of the task of reconstructing Macedonia’s past prior to the reigns of her two greatest monarchs, Philip II and his son Alexander III, what can be k...