An impressive book on the differences between the two ancient nations - Macedonians and Greeks. "To understand the history of the ancient Macedonians, their ethnogenesis and their innermost drives as people, we need to analyze and comprehend, first and foremost, their deeply rooted material culture. Only by sifting meticulously through the thick layered strata of their rich culture can we discover and appreciate who this ancient people were. The rare glimpses into their intricate and deeply carved traditions afford us a window of luxury through which the plumage of their race emerges and becomes recognizable. Coupled with numerous anecdotes recorded and preserved through time and epitaphs that are impervious to politics and change, we now have a sizeable body of truth to know and believe that ancient Macedonians were, what they said they were—Macedonians" (from the publisher). "It is an illusion to think that ancient Macedonians were Greeks" (synopsis).

PREFACE

The aim of this paper is to acquaint students with the basic differences between ancient Macedonians and the ancient Greeks. For too many years it was an accepted practice to view the ancient Macedonians as Greeks. Little attention was paid to the fact that, ancient biographers and chroniclers left us with no impression that these two dissimilar people were of the same ethnicity or nationality. On the contrary, their reporting is clear and unambiguously explicit and leaves little room for subsequent second-guessing and interpretation. To them, ancient Macedonians constituted people, and a nation quite separate, and in stark contrast, to the Greeks. They militarily subdued the Greeks and subsequently treated them as conquered people; albeit more favorably then the rest of the people in the empire, but conquered subject they were, nevertheless. Roman and Greek biographers, like Curtius Rufus, Polybius, Plutarch, Arrian, Diodorus, Justin and Herodotus described the ancient Macedonians as being a people quite distinct and separate from the ancient Greeks. Neither from an historical point of view, nor from a philosophical or military one, were these people ever regarded as one and the same with the ancient Greeks. Their neighborly discourse, as destiny will have it, was regularly embroidered with constant hostility and mutual antipathy (Borza 1990). For more Click here!

By J.S. Gandeto

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