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Alexander of Macedon,356-323 B.C.:
A Historical Biography
The men of Lower Macedonia worshipped Greek gods; the
royal family claimed descent from Heracles. But the highlanders were much
addicted to Thracian deities, Sabazius, the Clodones and Mimallones, whose wild
orgiastic cult-practices closely resembled those portrayed by Euripides in the
Bacchae.
The sovereigns of Lower Macedonia were equally determined to annex these ‘out-kingdoms’, whether by conquest, political persuasion, or dynastic inter-marriage. Lyncestis was ruled by descendants of the Bacchiad dynasty, who had moved on to Macedonia after their expulsion from Corinth in 657 B.C. Excavations at Trebenishte have revealed a wealth of gold masks and tomb furniture of the period between 650 and 600;these were powerful princes in the true Homeric tradition, like the kings of Cyprus. The Molossian dynasty of Epirus, on the marches of Orestis and Elimiotis, claimed descent from Achilles, through his grandson Pyrrhus – a fact destined to have immeasurable influence on the young Alexander, whose mother Olympias was of Molossian stock.
The Argeads themselves, as we have seen, headed their pedigree with Heracles, and could thus (since Heracles was the son of Zeus) style themselves ‘Zeus-born’ like any Mycenaean dynast: both Zeus and Heracles appear regularly on Philip’s coinage.
Alexander I had, of course, pointed the way, and not
merely in the field of territorial expansion. He worked hard to get Macedonia accepted as a member of the Hellenic family.
For the first time he [Philip] began to understand how
Macedonia’s outdated institutions, so
despised by the rest of Greece , might prove a source of strenght when dealing
with such opponents.
Like that other feudally organized horse-breeding
state, Thessaly, Macedonia possessed a fine heavy cavalry arm.
Lyncestis had more or less seceded from Macedonian
control;
In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from
a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the
Greek world.
Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’.Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexader to be ‘a hegemon[leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.
Besides, he [Alexander] had the whole body of Greek
civilized opinion behind him.Euripides held that it was proper (eikos) for
‘barbarians’; to be subject to Greeks. Plato and Isocrates both thought of all
non-Hellenes as natural enemies who could be enslaved or exterminated at will.
Aristotle himself regarded a war against barbarians as essentially just.
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