Ιστορία της Μακεδονίας - Νίκολας Χάμοντ

 

Οι αντιπρόσωποι των κρατών –μελών της κοινής ειρήνης,που είχαν δράσει εναντίον του Φιλίππου,είχαν συγκεντρωθεί στην Κόρινθο.Απαντώντας στην ευγλωτία και στην πειθώ ενός εικοσάχρονου νέου αλλά και πιεχόμενοι από τον Μακεδονικό στρατό και τις δυνάμεις των βορείων Ελλήνων, οι εκπρόσωποι ψήφισαν ομόφωνα να ανακηρυχτεί ηγεμόνας ο Αλέξανδρος και να προωθήσουν την εκστρατεία όλων εναντίον της Περσίας (Δ.Σ. 17.4.9 και Πολύβιος 9.33.7).

Οι ως τότε διαφωνούντες στην Πελοπόννησο δικαιολογήθηκαν.Μόνο η Σπάρτη έμεινε,όπως και πριν έξω από την συμμαχία των Ελλήνων και διακήρυξε με περηφάνια ότι δεν ήταν φτιαγμένη για να ηγεμονεύεται,αλλά για να ηγεμονεύει.

 

Καθώς κανείς δεν έδειξε διάθεση να ηγεμονευθεί από τη Σπάρτη,ο Αλέξανδρος,σοφά ποιών,την άφησε στην ησυχία της.

Η ηγεμονία που είχε εκείνη κάποτε ασκούνταν τώρα από την Μακεδονία.

Νίκολας Χάμοντ,Ιστορία της Μακεδονίας,γ' τόμος:Περίοδος από το 336 έως το 167 π.Χ,σελ.24

Modern historians about Macedonia – N.G.L Hammond & F.W.Walbank

The members of the Council of the Greek League whoo had acted in Philip’s time were assembled at Corinth; in response to an eloquent and peruasive speech by Alexander a young man of twenty,but backed by the Macedonian army and force of northern Greeks, the Councillors all voted to appoint him hegemon and proceed with the joint campaign against Persia( D.S. 17.4.9 and Plb 9.33.7).

Dissidedents in the Peloponnese apologized.Only Sparta stayed,as before out of the Greek League.She declared proudly that it was her way not to be led,but lead.As no one showed any desire to be led by Sparta,Alexander wisely let her be.

The hegemony she had once had was exercised now by Macedonia.

N.G.L.Hammond & F.W.Walbank,A History of Macedonia:Volume III: 336-167 B.C.,page 16  

Ancient writers about Macedonia – Strabo

 

Strabo – “Geography”

“There remain of Europe,first,Macedonia and the parts of Thrace that are contiguous to it and extend as far as Byzantium; secondly, Greece; and thirdly, the islands that are close by. 

Macedonia, of course, is a part of Greece, yet now, since I am following the nature and shape of the places geographically, I have decided to classify it apart from the rest of Greece and to join it with that part of Thrace which borders on it and extends as far as the mouth of the Euxine and the Propontis. Then, a little further on, Strabo mentions Cypsela and the Hebrus River, and also describes a sort of parallelogram in which the whole of Macedonia lies.”

Strabo,Geography,book 7,Fragment 9

“And even to the present day the Thracians, Illyrians, and Epeirotes live on the flanks of the Greeks (though this was still more the case formerly than now); indeed most of the country that at the present time is indisputably Greece is held by the barbarians — Macedonia and certain parts of Thessaly by the Thracians, and the parts above Acarnania and Aetolia by the Thesproti, the Cassopaei, the Amphilochi, the Molossi, and the Athamanes — Epeirotic tribes.”

Strabo, Geography,book 7,VII,1

“What is now called Macedonia was in earlier times called Emathia. And it took its present name from Macedon, one of its early chieftains. And there was also a city emathia close to the sea. Now a part of this country was taken and held by certain of the Epeirotes and the Illyrians, but most oii by the Bottiaei and the Thracians. The Bottiaei came from Crete originally, so it is said, along with Botton as chieftain. As for the Thracians, the Pieres inhabited Pieria and the region about Olympus; the Paeones, the region on both sides of the Axius River, which on that account is called Amphaxitis; the Edoni and Bisaltae, the rest of the country as far as the Strymon. Of these two peoples the latter are called Bisaltae alone, whereas a part of the Edoni are called Mygdones, a part Edones, and a part Sithones. But of all these tribes the Argeadae, as they are called, established themselves as masters, and also the Chalcidians of Euboea; for the Chalcidians of Euboea also came over to the country of the Sithones and jointly peopled about thirty cities in it, although later on the majority of them were ejected and came together into one city, Olynthus;and they were named the Thracian Chalcidians.”

Strabo, Geography, book 7, Fragment  11

Modern historians about Macedonia –John Bagnell Bury

 

“In their fortress of Aegae the macedonian kings had ruled for ages with absolute sway over the lands on the northern and north-western coasts of the Thermaic - Gulf,which formed Macedonia in the strictest sense.

The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify.”

John Bagnell Bury,A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1900),page 683

A History of Greece To the Death of Alexander the Great

Cambridge Library Collection Classics

 

This book, originally published in 1900, was the major work of the classical historian J. B. Bury. It became a standard textbook on the topic of ancient Greek history to the death of Alexander the Great for almost a century, and in its updated form is still studied today.

 Bury had studied philosophy as well as classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and had travelled widely in Greece, but until the publication of this work was better known for his two-volume History of the Later Roman Empire (also reissued in this series), and many of his other works also deal with the Byzantine period. He describes in the preface his decision to limit the extent of his history: 'compression into a single volume often produces a more useful book'. This magisterial and very readable synthesis of political and military history encompasses nearly three millennia and the whole of the Mediterranean and Near East.

 

Modern historians about Macedonia – Eugene Borza

 

Only recently have we begun to clarify these muddy waters by revealing the Demosthenic corpus for what it is: oratory designed to sway public opinion and thereby to formulate public policy. That elusive creature, Truth, is everywhere subordinate to Rhetoric; Demosthenes’ pronouncements are no more the true history of the period than are the public statements of politicians in any age. 

In the Shadow of Olympus:The Emergence of Macedon, Eugene N. Borza, Princeton University Press,1990,pages 5- 6

This larger Macedon included lands from the crest of the Pindus range to the plain of Philippi and the Nestos River. Its northern border lay along a line formed by Pelagonia, the middle Axios valley and the western Rhodopi massif. Its southern border was the Haliacmon basin, the Olympus range and the Aegean, with the Chalcidic peninsula as peripheral.

 

We thus have a conception of Macedonia both more and less extensive than Hammonds’s - less in that it reduces Emphasis on the north western lands that lie today within the Yugoslav state, but more in that it takes into greater account the territory east of the Axios. It is a definition based on the political development of the Macedonian State over a long period of time,incorporating the territory drained by 3 rivers,adding the Strymon to the Haliacmon and Axios.

In the Shadow of Olympus:The Emergence of Macedon, Eugene N. Borza, Princeton University Press,1990,pages 29 - 31 

“Borza has taken the trouble to know Macedonia: the land, its prehistory, its position in the Balkans, and its turbulent modern history. All contribute…to our understanding of the emergence of Macedon…. Borza has employed two of the historian’s most valuable tools, autopsy and common sense, to produce a well-balanced introduction to the state that altered the course of Greek and Near Eastern history.”

—Waldemar Heckel, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Modern historians about Macedonia – John Maxwell O’Brien

 

To underline his role as avenger and hegemon of the Corinthian League, and perhaps in the hope that the Athenians would come to share in the fantasy of this as a war of revenge, Alexander selected 300 full sets of armor from dead Persians and ordered them to be sent back to Athens and dedicated to Athena on the Acropolis. The attached inscription read:

“Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians,106 set up these spoils from the barbarians dwelling in Asia” (A.1.16.7).

Alexander the Great:The Invisible Enemy by John Maxwell O’Brien, page 62

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

 

 

Quote:

 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

 

 

Quote:

 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

 

Quote:

 

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

Μ. Χάιντεγκερ,ο μεταφυσικός του μηδενισμού και οι αντιπλατωνιστές επίγονοί του

 

                                    Νύχτα και Ομίχλη

 

Περιγραφή

Η μελέτη αυτή –εκκρεμότητα τριών δεκαετιών– επιχειρεί να διαλύσει την σύγχυση που διαχύθηκε στο μυαλό μας, όταν την κριτική και νοηματοδοτική δύναμη του νου υποκατέστησε η γλωσσική εκφορά της απουσίας νοήματος. Γίναμε, έτσι, υποχείρια φλύαρου αναμασήματος μηδαμινοτήτων, μέσω επικοινωνιακών δικτύων, σ’ ένα κόσμο που έχασε την ισορροπία του και την θέλησή του να δρομολογήσει μια νέα.

 Kατάθεση μιας εμπειρίας ζωής με την φιλοσοφία, η μελέτη αυτή, εξιχνιάζει και διασαφηνίζει τον τρόπο με τον οποίο η σκέψη του καιρού μας παροπλίσθηκε, αφήνοντας αναξιοποίητα όσα γόνιμα στοιχεία της ελληνο-δυτικής φιλοσοφίας θα συνέβαλλαν στην επανεκκίνηση θεσμίσεων δικαιότερης πολιτικο-κοινωνικής οργάνωσης και αναδόμησης του σύγχρονου κόσμου. Για την σάρωσή τους από την φαουστική παράδοση της γενικευμένης κυριαρχίας, χρειάστηκε να μεσολαβήσει η αποδόμηση των σύγχρονων μεταστοιχειώσεων του Αριστοτελικού Πλατωνισμού από τον Μ.Heidegger και τους επιγόνους του, με τη μορφή «φονικής» ερμηνείας της κοσμικής και ανθρώπινης θετικότητας.

Η εξιχνίασή της στην ανά χείρας μελέτη μπορεί να τελεσφορήσει ως αντίσταση ή εναντίωση στον αντιδραστικό μηδενισμό, με τη συνεργασία πολλών θετικών δυνάμεων, στον ακαδημαϊκό και στον έξω-ακαδημαϊκό χώρο.

         Λίγα λόγια για την συγγραφέα

 

Η Αλεξάνδρα Δεληγιώργη γεννήθηκε στην Θεσσαλονίκη και ζει στην Αθήνα.Σπούδασε φιλοσοφία στο Α.Π.Θ και κοινωνιολογία/εθνολογία στην Σορβόννη. Είναι Ομ. Καθηγήτρια φιλοσοφίας (Α.Π.Θ).Συνεργάστηκε με φιλοσοφικά και λογοτεχνικά περιοδικά και εφημερίδες. Έχει εκδώσει δοκίμια, φιλοσοφικές μελέτες, μυθιστορήματα και διηγήματα. Το δοκίμιό της Ά-νοστον ήμαρ (εκδ. Άγρα 1997) τιμήθηκε με το Κρατικό Βραβείο Δοκιμίου του 1998 και το μυθιστόρημά της Τρυφερός Σύντροφος (εκδ. Άγρα 2011) τιμήθηκε με το Βραβείο «Νίκος Θέμελης» 2012.

 

 Εκδόσεις Αρμός

Modern Linguists about Macedonia – Sylvain Auroux

 

 

    “Before the times of the national unity installed by the Macedonians around the middle of the 4th century BC, Greece was composed of many regions or city states[…]

 

That they [Dorians] were related to the North-West Dialects (of Phocis, Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania and Epirus) was not perceived clearly by the ancients. “

page 439

 

History of the Language Sciences / Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften / Histoire des sciences du langage

An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present / Ein internationales Handbuch zur Entwicklung der Sprachforschung von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart

Edited by: Sylvain Auroux,E.F.K.Koerner,Hans-Josef Niederehe and Kees Versteegh

Walter de Gruyter GmBH

Modern historians about Macedonia – William John Woodhouse

 

This was Macedonia in the strict sense, the land where settled immigrants of Greek stock later to be called Macedonians.

William John Woodhouse,The tutorial history of Greece,from the earliest times to the death of Demosthenes,page 402

 

Modern historians about Macedonia – Fergus Millar

 

The importance attached to Hadrian’s institution is best illustrated by an early third-century inscription from  Thessalonica honouring a local magnate, T.Aelius Geminius Macedo [i.e., the Macedonian], who had not only held magistracies and provided timber for a basilica in his own city, and been Imperial  curator of Apollonia,

 

but had been archon of the Panhellenic congress in Athens, priest of the deified Hadrian and president of the eighteenth Panhellenic Games (199/200); the inscription mentions proudly that he was the first archon of the Panhellenic Congress from the city of  Thessalonica.

 

Fergus Millar,The Roman Empire and Its Neighbours (1967), pages 205 - 206

Modern Historians about Macedonia – James S. Romm

 

Eventually the Greek way of war would prove so superior to that of the barbarian world as to enable a largely Hellenic army,led by Alexander the Great,to conquer not only Egypt but most of Asia as well. 

On the War for Greek Freedom:Selections from the ‘Histories’,edited by James S. Romm,translated by Samuel Shirley,page xiii

In the large scheme of things,Xerxes’ analysis was correct, as would be demonstrated by Alexander the Great and his Greco-Macedonian invasion of Asia,150 years down the road. 

On the War for Greek Freedom:Selections from the ‘Histories’,edited by James S. Romm,translated by Samuel Shirley,page 125

Modern Historians about Macedonia – Robin Osborne

 

After that victory Philip imposed his own conditions on the whole Greek mainland, making a treaty with all significant cities except Sparta, the so-called ‘League of Corinth’. This treaty obliged the Greek cities to provide soldiers for Philip’s campaigns, but it did not, contrary to what had been feared at Athens, interfere with the constitutions of the individual cities.

Greek History Classical Foundations Series,Robin Osborne,Routledge,2004,page 127

 

Although Macedonians were accepted as Greek, after some discussion, for the purposes of competing at the Olympic games, and although the language of the Macedonians appears most probably to have been a dialect of Greek related to the dialects of north-west Greek, some Macedonian customs were distinct.

Greek History Classical Foundations Series,Robin Osborne,Routledge,2004,page 127

Modern Historians about Macedonia – Rosalie and Anthony E. David

 

The history of ancient Egyptian civilisation covers a period from c.3100 BC to the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Before the Dynastic Period (beginning c.3100 BC), the communities laid the foundations for the later great advances in technological, political, religious and artistic developments; this is generally referred to as the Predynastic Period (c.5000-3100 BC). 

After *Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, the country was ruled by a line of Macedonian Greeks who descended from *Alexander’s general, Ptolemy (who became *Ptolemy I) .The last of this dynasty, *Cleopatra VII, failed to prevent the absorption of Egypt into the Roman Empire in 30 BC, and subsequently Egypt was ruled by Rome as a province.

Rosalie and Anthony E. David, ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt’,Routledge,1991

 

Modern Historians about Macedonia – Francis Sydney Marvin

 

With the conquests of Alexander the Great more than the dream of Isocrates became actual fact. A Hellene was now lord over a vast tract of Asia. What attitude would the Hellene in these new circumstances take up to the barbarian?

It is interesting that Aristotle had advised Alexander to adopt a markedly different attitude towards Greeks and towards Asiatics. To the Greeks he was to show himself a leader (ἡγεμών), but to the Asiatics a despotic master (δεσπότης).

 Francis Sydney Marvin,‘’Western Races and the World’’,page 57