Modern historians about Macedonia –N. G. L. Hammond

 

 

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 Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century, that the Macedones were a  greek speaking.The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute - paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the ‘yauna takabara’, which meant “Greeks wearing the hat”.

There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of greek. Finally, in the latter part of the  fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiodus genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants  firmly into the Aeolic branch of the greek speaking family.Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be  accepted as conclusive.”

pages 12 -13

 

 

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 As we have mentioned in Chapter I, Perdiccas and his brothers came from Argos and Peloponnese. They were members of the Royal house of Argos, the “Teminidae”, descendants of Temenus, whose ancestor was Heracles, son of Zeus; it was this Temenus who led the Dorian tribes into the Argolid and founded Dorian Argos late in the 12th century. Thus Perdiccas came to Macedonia with the aura of divine favor, and he could claim that the Temenidae and the Argeadae were both descended from Zeus and so were diogeneis. To Greeks of the classical period the Temenid name was well known. 

Thus the oracle which was concerned post eventum with he following of the new capital, Aegeae, by Perdiccas began with the line “The noble Temenidae have royal rule over a wealth producing land. Herodotus made a special point of emphasizing that the royal house of Macedonia was Greek by descent, and Thucydides, who questioned much of what Herodotus said, concurred with him in calling the Macedonian kings “Temenidae from Argos”. Almost a century later Isocrates wrote to Philip II, saying “Argos is your fatherland”, and he asked Philip to emulate his father [Amyntas], the founder of the monarchy [Perdiccas], and the originator of the family (Heracles).

page 18

 

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The matter is of only academic interest to a few scholars today. No one in Antiquity doubted the truth of the clam.

page 19

 

 

 

The Macedonian State:The Origins, Institutions and History,N. G. L. Hammond ,1989