MACEDONIAN HELLENES: FROM DARIUS TO POLIBIUS AND THE GRAECO-INDIAN KINGDOMS

Abstract

The boundaries of ancient Macedonia and the tribes and ethnic groups that were conquered and culturally assimilated by the ancient Macedonians remain a subject of scholarly research and debate. The Macedonians, however, were recorded in ancient sources from the time of Darius in Persia and Aeschylus in Greece - through works of poetry, historiography, theater, geography, politics, and religious studies - as a Greek tribe, speaking a Greek dialect, with Greek traditions and beliefs, and with ways of life that did not differ substantially from those of their compatriots in the rest of the Greek world - whether in the south or the east as far as Ionia and Cappadocia, or in the west as far as Sicily and southern Italy. They had their own regional peculiarities, their own political system, and their own local dialect, but their names and customs were shared, as was the vast reservoir of Greek cultural heritage from which they drew their daily lives. The Persian king Darius the Great referred to the Greeks as Yaunâ, meaning “Ionians,” and to the Macedonians as Yaunâ takabarâ, meaning “Ionians who wear the hats of the sun.” The kingdoms that emerged in 311 B.C. in the depths of the East - the creation of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian rivals - were recognized as “Greco-Indian kingdoms” by the local Indians, Persians, even the Chinese of the Far East, and as such they are attested in world history, because for these ancient peoples, “Macedonian” and “Greek” were synonymous terms, just as “Spartan” and “Athenian” were. The peoples of the East did not distinguish the Macedonians ethnically from the rest of the Greeks. A process of nation-building had to be artificially invented and constructed in the Balkans in order to call into question the identity of Macedonian Hellenism by the Macedonians themselves - an identity that the Medes, Persians, Indians, and Chinese had recognized 2,500 years earlier...