In the early 330s b. c., Greece began to experience rumblings from the north from a people beyond its borders who considered themselves heirs to the Grecian heritage, even if the Greeks themselves did not consider them entirely Greek. They seemed to have come out of another time, a world quite
Removed from the refinements of Athens—a world more like the Greece of myth, when heroes such as Achilles walked the earth.
They were the Macedonians, a hard, warlike nation who, along with the much softer Lydians, considered themselves the descendants of Heracles. They absorbed the culture of Greece. Unlike the Spartans, they recognized that their focus on warfare and survival brought with it certain limitations. They were more like the Persians in their respect and admiration for the cultures of gentler lands they conquered.
The Macedonians had their origins in the distant past, so far back that myth explained them as descending from a son of Zeus called Macedon. (Similarly, the Bible describes the African Kushites as having come from a grandson of Noah named Cush.) They were goatherders, a tribal people whose animals grazed on the slopes of Mount Olympus. In time they became so cut off from the rest of Greece that their dialect could hardly be understood.
The Macedonians' true history began with Perdiccas (puhr-DIK-uhs), a Greek who came north and took the throne in about 650 b. c., establishing a dynasty that would rule Mace-don for more than three centuries. In 510 b. c., his descendant Amyntas I (uh-MIN-tuhs) expanded the kingdom greatly by making an alliance with the Persians. The Persians were on the move in the area, of course, building their empire and soon coming to blows with the Greeks.
Alexander I (r. c. 495-452 b. c.) used Persian help to further strengthen his nation's power; but unbeknownst to the Persian emperor Xerxes, he was supporting the Greeks fighting the Persian Wars. After the defeat of the Persians in 479 b. c., he helped himself to lands between Macedon and Thrace, but his dream of a Macedonian empire seemed to die with him. Not only were the Greeks of the Golden Age too strong an opponent, but the various tribes of Macedon did not always follow their rulers, and the kings after Alexander were weak. Then in 359 B. C., a king powerful enough to fulfill Alexander's dream took the throne.
World History
