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Ancient MacedoniaMacedonia: ancient landscape and state, situated in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and northern Greece, best known because its king Alexander the Great (336-323) conquered the Persian Empire and inaugurated a new period in Greek history.
The study of ancient Macedonia is bedeviled by the Macedonian question. Scholars from modern Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia have made bold statements on the nature of ancient Macedonia, which in their more extreme variants can be summarized as "the ancient Macedonians spoke a Slavic language" and "Macedonia has been Greek for at least 3,000 years". Unfortunately, politicians in both nations argue (with a textbook example of a non sequitur) that the borders of the past should also be those of the present.
Of course, modern politics can not be based on ancient history. Scholars who allow themselves to be used for political purposes, overestimate the importance of their field of study. They also force others to digress longer and more often than they like on the relation between ancient Macedonia, the Slavs, and Greece, which must therefore be the leitmotiv of this article too. Those interested in the origin of the debate, can read the appendix.
Although the two landscapes are different, they share a continental climate with cold winters. This climate makes the Macedonian vegetation different from the rest of the Aegean region.Pella, published in 1994, is written in Northwest Greek, and later inscriptions are in Attic Greek. Many personal names (like Philippos and Alexandros, Zeus and Herakles) are Greek as well. That the Macedonians spoke Greek, looks like an inevitable conclusion.
However, there is some room for doubt. To start with, there are also Macedonian names that have no Greek parallel (Arridaeus or Sabattaras). In the second place, in many semi-literate societies, there is a difference between the spoken and the written language. It would not be without parallel if a Macedonian, when he wanted to make an official statement, preferred decent Greek instead of his native tongue. (Cf. the altars of the goddess Nehalennia, which were all written in Latin, a language that was almost certainly not spoken by the people who erected them.)
Thirdly, many historical sources are written in Greek, and it was a common practice among Greek historians to hellenize foreign names. For example, the name of the powerful first king of the Persian empire, Kuruš, ought to be transcribed as Kourous or Kouroux in Greek, but became Kyros, because this looks like a Greek word ("Mr. Almighty"). The name that is rendered as Alexandros, which has a perfect Greek etymology, may in fact represent something like Alaxandus, which is not Greek. A related argument that forces us to hesitate is that the Greeks nearly always converted the names of foreign deities. Supreme gods like Jupiter and Marduk are called "Zeus". So, the fact that Greek authors use Greek names for Macedonian people and deities does not prove very much about the Macedonian language.
None of this forces us to say that the Macedonians did not speak Greek, but it leaves the possibility that things were not what they seem. There is room for skepticism.
This is why linguists take several remarks by the authors of ancient dictionaries, which otherwise might have been interpreted as indications for a mere difference in dialect, very seriously. For example, there is evidence that Greeks were unable to understand people who were makedonizein, "speaking Macedonian". The Macedonian king Alexander the Great was not understood by the Greeks when he shouted an order in his native tongue and the Greek commander Eumenes needed a translator to address the soldiers of the Macedonian phalanx. The Greek orators Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and Demosthenes of Athens called Macedonian kings like Archelaus and Philip II barbarians, which prima facie means that they did not speak Greek. Now this happens in polemical contexts and is certainly exaggerated, but the statements need to refer to some kind of linguistic reality.
We know frustratingly little about the Macedonian language/dialect. For instance, we don't know anything about its grammar or syntaxis. We do not even know whether the Macedonians spoke one language at all; many societies, now and then, have more than one language. All we have is a set of about 150 words that were recognized as Macedonian in Antiquity, many of which are derived from a Macedonian-to-Greek dictionary by a man named Amerias. These 150 words can be divided into two groups:
Finally, it must be stressed that, despite what modern politicians and some modern scholars argue, language says not much about ethnicity. (People can speak Frisian and have a Dutch passport, whereas people speaking Dutch can live in Belgium and Surinam and feel offended when they are called Dutch.) The identification of "one language, one nation, one state", is nineteenth-century and says nothing about Antiquity. Still, language is one of the factors that is used to classify people, just like religion and a shared past, so it is not altogether irrelevant either.
The Roman Age
Jona Lendering © 2005
Revised: 17 July 2006