Greek myths, Macedonian history

 MACEDONIA UNTIL ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Roberto Paribeni
Professor of archeology and history of Greek and Roman art

 

Excerpt from the book - Chapter 4 - A very ancient history (pp. 23-24-25)

Τhe form of government that prevailed was the monarchy in its special form that is worth knowing. We can with some verifiability reconstruct it for those more ancient times, both by keeping in mind the aspect of the monarchy of Homeric times, and by studying and discerning in the Macedonian monarchical constitution, of fully historical times, those elements that appear to us more archaic.

Originating, as was the case among all Indo-Europeans, from a patriarchal constitution of the family according to which rights and powers are in the hands of the father, the Homeric state consists of a monarchy recognizing the supreme power to the most powerful, to the most rich, the most valiant among the heads of family.

However, they are not strangers to this recognition neither the consent of the gods, nor the approval of other powerful family heads, nor popular acclamation. The transmission of power takes place hereditary in the bosom of the royal family: Telemachus will be the successor of Odysseus and Neoptolemus of Achilles, but it may happen that the sovereign does not retain his power for his entire life. Laertes is alive, but the king of Ithaca is Odysseus. The king has jurisdictional powers of awarding prizes and punishments, supreme command in war. However, he does not exercise these powers absolutely alone, a council of the major heads of family gathers around him and its resolutions are also exposed to the assembly of all free men. While, however, the council of elders in peace or of the heads of individual contingents at war assert their authority and sometimes show themselves riotous and insolent, almost none is the action of the popular assembly. If Thersites dares to speak, he receives some beatings and the whole assembly approves whoever beats him.

The king does not lack even some characters of representative of the people in front of the divinities, he will preside over the sacred ceremonies and festive competitions, but this does not come to the concept of the king-priest and least of all to that of the king-god of the Orientals. No supernatural power is recognized to him, even if he often claims that his family had a god as its progenitor.

Not much differently, the Macedonian king of fully historical age is the military leader of his people, receives and transmits his power within the dynastic framework of his family, has around him the etairoi, often powerful and imperious, must be recognized by the stratos, by the people in arms. And the stratos not only has the right to judge itself the faults of its components and to punish the soldier found guilty mostly by stoning, but is called to judge serious crimes such as high treason, to ratify important acts etc. Every Macedonian in arms has the right to speak in army assemblies (Polyb, 27,6). Now if such temperaments to the royal powers exist in the face of a great king endowed with energetic will and extraordinary prestige such as Philip II, if even in the camp of Alexander the Great, in the most shining glory of his prodigious successes, we can grasp some indications and if we see them persist even under his successors, we will have to keep them in mind for the times in which the Macedonian monarchy not without difficulty began to build itself.

Conversely, there is no news of the existence of an institution that reminds what for the Greeks is the gerousia or the bule or any other college that represents the people, and which is reached by popular election. The consultative functions could be exercised by the etairoi who could also be sovereigns of the different districts into which the nature of the soil divided the country. King, etairoi, stratos constitute that entity called the Makedones, an entity that sometimes appears almost more like a warlike association than a national one and also an association with a utilitarian purpose, something that can make one think of the Genoese Maona company of Chios or the Catalan company in their activities in the Aegean at the end of the Middle Ages.

Who managed to give life and form to these first groupings and who to make them a nation, as never was the Greek, we do not know. We will find it later, firm, compact, aware of its strength and its dignity, ready to respond like a generous horse especially by the work of Philip II. But the work of that great king must not make us forget the difficulties overcome by the predecessors, arduous difficulties, if one thinks of the position and geographical structure of the country, easy to keep the groups of its inhabitants segregated and to leave them exposed to the greed of other peoples: Illyrians, Thracians, Greeks who were easily able to cut their breath from the mountains or the sea. I would not like to repeat the Virgilian tantae molis erat (it was such a great task), but the Macedonian condere la gens (how to build a nation) also had to present its difficulties.

To be continued 

pp 25-26-27-28-29

Traditions collected by Pompeo Trogo and summarized to Justin (VII, 1) speak of very ancient rulers of the region: Ematione from which the name of Ematia would have come, Pelagono, Asteropeo who would have taken part in the defense of Troy against the Greeks. The very formation of the names persuades us of no value to attribute to the particularities of such stories. Naturally, the king or the most powerful of kings tries to assert his sovereignty even better and to transform it into an absolute monarchy. It has recently been thought that in ancient Macedonia only the king makes foreign policy and conducts it as a private affair to round up the royal land. If for this an offensive war is necessary, the soldiers will be salaried as mercenaries of the king, while in the defensive war the army fights for its own interest and will only be able to make up for it with the spoils. The theory is too exclusive, no people, no matter how primitive, can do without regulating their relations with their neighbors, which is the same as doing foreign policy. Secondly, starting with the most ancient treaties, we see that it includes the interests of the whole country and not just those of the monarchy.

Herodotus and Thucydides inform us to a certain extent of the most ancient historical events of the inhabitants of Macedonia. Herodotus, who in the series of his travels also visited Macedonia, narrates things that are not always uniform and certainly reveals that he was informed by what we could call the propaganda ministry of the Macedonian king, towards which he is very benevolent and respectful. He says that three brothers: Gauanas, Aeropos, Perdiccas descendants of Temenos, departed from Argos and went to the Illyrians, and from the Illyrians they then passed into Ανω Μακεδονία (Upper Macedonia) and employed themselves as shepherds for the king of a city that Herodotus calls Λεβαιή (Lebaea). They guarded the eldest horses, the second oxen, the youngest, Perdiccas, sheep. A special divine protection manifested on Perdiccas by prodigies, the king got afraid of it and chased the three brothers, then he sent in their footsteps some knights to kill them. Saved by the prodigious swelling behind their backs of a river, to which their descendants still worship, the three brothers inhabited ες αλλην γην της Μακεδονιας (in another land of Macedonia), near the gardens of Midas the Phrygian, where old Silenus had been captured for him. Mount Vermion looms over these gardens and moving from there, the three brothers also subjected to themselves την αλλην Μακεδονιαν (the other Macedonia).

The good father of history is also in these pages the usual delightful narrator, but while he gets lost in picturesquely useless details such as the praise of the roses of the Midas gardens and the prodigies that accompany the young Perdiccas, he is singularly vague and imprecise in what would interest us most: the way in which this immigrant would have become the master of a part of Macedonia. We don't know more from other sources, either. He then gives the following names as the successors of Perdiccas: Argaios, Philippos, Aeropos, Alketas, Amyntas, Alexandros. There is no reason to reject certainly this series of names which could well have been kept in memory in the circles of the Macedonian court, which Herodotus approached. If we accept the seven names as they are referred to us, since Alexander found himself to be, as we shall see, contemporary with the expedition of Xerxes (480 BC) it would follow that by assigning an average of twenty years of reign to each of the predecessors, the founder of the Perdiccas dynasty should have lived around the seventh century.

Without mentioning the individual names, but in agreement with Herodotus as to the number of kings (eight, up to Alexander son of Amynta) Thucydides also gives the Temenids who came from Argos as rulers of Macedonia, and spreads more about their conquest of Μacedonian lands. He says that the maritime part of Macedonia, which in his time obeyed Perdiccas II son of Alexander, was possessed by the Temenids, after they had driven out the Pierrii and Bottiei, of which the first took refuge at the foot of the Pangeo, beyond the Strymon river, the others kept contiguous to Halkidiki. And continuing their expansion movements, the Timenids would have conquered, along the Axios valley, the Peonia from the mountain regions up to Pella and the sea, and beyond the Axios up to Strymon the Mygdonia, the Eordea and the Almopia, and the Crestonia, Antemunte and the Bisaltia. This group of countries (το δε ξυμπαν) is what is now called (the time when Thucydides writes) Macedonia and is governed by Perdiccas son of Alexander.

Another version that appears in authors all later than Herodotus and Thucydides (the most ancient is Theopompus fragm. 393 Jacoby) places the progenitor of the Karanos dynasty, now called son, now brother of Argive Pheidon, who would be succeeded by his son Koinos, then a Thurimas and finally the Perdiccas mentioned by Herodotus. Also for Karanos the origin is declared from Argos and the descent from Heracles, and for Plutarch Alexander the Great is a Heraclid through Karanos.

Moving from Argos and following according to an oracle a herd of goats, Karanos would have occupied the city of Edessa which from him would have had the name of Αιγαί (Ege) in memory of the prodigy of the goats, and would have then expanded his domain, chasing Midas the Phrygian and other rulers. On the other hand, according to Eusebius who goes back to Diodorus, Karanos left Argos and would have helped the king of the Orestes against the Eordians and would have received half of the kingdom in compensation.

Finally, a third founder of the Macedonian dynasty was given by a tragedy of Euripides. It is reported to us by the summary reports of Hyginos (fab. 219). Archelaus son of Argive Temenos, expelled by his brothers comes to Macedonia, where he is asked for help by a king Cisseo who is at war. Defrauded of the promised reward and threatened in the life of the king, he kills him and founds Ege.

How should we judge these various versions? The one that dates back to Herodotus and Thucydides is certainly inspired by the Macedonian court environments as regards the origin from Argos of the Peloponnese and the descent from Heracles. The concordance between Herodotus and Thucydides in the number of sovereigns that would have succeeded Perdiccas must be taken into account. Since for Herodotus the three immigrant brothers in Macedonia are not the sons of Temenus but his απόγονοι (descendants), the genealogists were left free to insert other names, and here is Karanos, Koinos, Thurimas. The whole tangled history of Karanos appears to be a construction that is not worthy of faith: it is not unlikely, as Momigliano has proposed, that Karanos is simply the common name of chief, of sovereign, which later became a name just as it happened for Pharaoh, Brennus, etc. Karanos would then also have to do with the Greek κάρα (head). A.J. Reinach, on the other hand, prefers to reconnect it to κέρας (horn) so that Karanos would be the one provided with horns, the horned hero, the goat-god with whom the conducting goats of the oracle and the name of Aigai are well associated and, who knows, also to the ram horns around the head of Alexander the Great in his coins. The Archelaus of Euripides, of which a story almost identical to that of Perdiccas I of Herodotus is told, is evidently a variant of that tale invented or collected by the poet to please his royal host Archelaus by giving his name to the progenitor of the royal family.

And as a whole we could hold the following as plausible. Argead tribal chiefs, who move from the mountainous regions close to Illyria, descend towards the alluvial plain along the sea and they become lords of it. The youngest of them, Perdiccas, is the one who comes to see the finished work and is considered the founder of the dynasty. Of the other two, we no longer hear of them and only a memory of them remains in the names of the Macedonian tribes of Elimea and Lincestide. The name Perdicca returns in the series of Macedonian kings in a fully historical period and is largely exemplified in the Macedonian onomastics. He is an Αrgead, so keeping in mind the radical of this denomination and the news that he moves from the region next to Illyria, we could reasonably think that the original seat of the family was the city of Argos Orestikon attested in that mountainous west. Due to political and dynastic opportunism that arose later on, these Argeades want to pass as originating from Argos in Peloponnese and descendants, through the Temenids, from Heracles.

What is said of Αιγαί (Ege) chosen as the center of the nascent state remains acceptable. In fact, not only did the city rise in a place beyond appropriate, where now is Vodena with its beautiful Bistritza waterfalls, in an healthy and fertile place that dominates the plain of the sinus Thermaicus (Thermaicus bay) and the way to the higher regions, but a clear sign of ancient nobility is the fact that the city remained an obligatory burial place for Macedonian kings, even when the capital was taken elsewhere.

A point of convergence in the Herodotus and in the later, of Karanos, legends is found in the mention in both of Midas king of the Phrygians. That the Phrygians reached their headquarters in Asia Minor coming from the north of the Balkan Peninsula and crossing Thrace, is generally admitted and the Βρύγες (Vriges) or Βρύγοι (Vrigi) who are remembered in more parts of Macedonia and Epirus cannot be detached from them.

The name of Midas that may have entered the tradition due to the great notoriety of this king, and the  kipi (gardens) of Midas that Herodotus remembers, may have designated some place in Macedonia more pleasant and fertile than the ordinary and for this reason was reconnected to the very rich Asian monarch. Which, according to another tradition, exactly from Macedonia would have drawn its wealth and precisely from the mines of Mount Vermios.