The Macedonians
spoke the Greek language, using a peculiar dialect, but that dialect disappears
with their other provincialisms when they suddenly become dominant. We find no
trace in Asia of any specially Macedonian deities;
it is the
gods of Hellas that the army of Alexander bears into the East. Even in manners
and customs there seems to have been small difference between Greek and
Macedonian; in our own day many primitive Greek customs, which have died out
elsewhere, survive in remote districts of Macedonia.
No doubt
there was a great deal of Thracian blood among the hardy shepherds who followed
the standards of Philip and Alexander; but if not only the nobility but even
the common people had no language, religion, or customs different from those of
the Greeks, how was it possible to prevent the races from becoming mingled?
The more
wealthy and educated classes in Macedonia were mostly Greek by blood, and
entirely Greek in everything else except the practice of self-government.
Wherever
Alexander went, Homer and Aristotle went too. In the wake of his army came the
Greek philosopher and man of science, the Greek architect and artist, the Greek
merchant and artisan. And Alexander must have known this. When he tried to fuse
Greeks, Macedonians, and Persians, into one race, he must have known that whose
blood soever ruled the mixture, Greek letters, science, and law must needs gain
the upper hand.
He must have known that the Greek schoolmasters
would make Homer and Hesiod familiar to the children; that the strolling
companies of Dionysiac artists would repeat in every city the masterpieces of
the Greek drama; and that the Odes of Simonides and Pindar would be sung
wherever there was a Greek lyre.
“New Chapters
in Greek History:Historical Results of Recent Excavations in Greece and Asia Minor” by
Percy Gardner,1892,page 415
The truth is,
that the history of Greece consists of two parts, in every respect contrasted
one with the other.
The first
recounts the stories of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, and ends with the
destruction of Thebes and the subjugation of Athens and Sparta.
The Hellas of which it speaks is a cluster of
autonomous cities in the Peloponnesus, the Islands, and Northern Greece,
together with their colonies scattered over the coasts of Italy, Sicily,
Thrace, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and Africa. These cities care only to be
independent, or at most to lord it over one another. Their political
institutions, their religious ceremonies, their customs, are civic and local.
Language, commerce, a common Pantheon, and a common art and poetry are the ties
that bind them together.
In its second
phase, Greek history begins with the expedition of Alexander.
It reveals to us the Greek as everywhere lord
of the barbarian, as founding kingdoms and federal systems, as the instructor
of all mankind in art and science, and the spreader of civil and civilized life
over the known world.
In the first
period of her history Greece is forming herself, in her second she is educating
the world. We will venture to borrow from the Germans a convenient expression,
and call the history of independent Greece the history of Hellas, that of
imperial Greece the history of Hellenism.
“New Chapters
in Greek History:Historical Results of Recent Excavations in Greece and Asia Minor ” by
Percy Gardner ,1892,pages 416-417
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