Ernst Badian

(from Harvard University's Department of History) and his views on Ancient Macedonians

"What ever the ethnic origins and identity of the Macedonians, they were generally perceived in their own time by Greeks and themselves not to be Greek."

1) "There is no evidence of any Macedonian claim to a Greek connection before the Persian war."

2) On Alexander's I attempt to enter the Olympic games:
"There were outraged protests from the other competitors, who rejected Alexander I as a barbarian -- which proves at the least, that the Teminid descent and the royal genealogy had hitherto been an esoteric knowledge."

The Olympic games were reserved for Greeks only. This is a known fact.

3) "With the exception of the single item, no Macedonian king between Alexander I and Philip II is in anyway connected with the Olympic or any other games.

4) King Archelaus founded Macedonian Olympic games which Badian calls it "COUNTER OLYMPICS".

5) "No Macedonian appears on the list of Olympic victors that have survived ( a fair proportion of the whole) until well into the reign of Alexander the Great."

6) "Nor do we find the Macedonian people ever regarded as a political entity transacting business with the Greek states."

7) "For political purposes no difference was seen between Macedonians and (say) Thracian and Persian, i.e., other nations under monarchical rule. This may have been a contributing factor in unwillingness to recognise Macedonians as Greek."

8) On Alexander the Great: "Characteristically for Alexander despite his thorough Greek education and obviously genuine interest in Greek literature, was nevertheless a Macedonian king."

9) On Philip, "Greeks never commanded his armies".

10) Alexander's integration of troops: "...interesting to notice that he never - either before or at the time - tried to integrate Greeks into the Macedonian units that were his best military assets, either in the tactical or in the emotional sphere, while at the very end, both for tactical and for political reasons integration of Macedonians and Iranians was important, while integration of Greeks with either was not."

11) On Macedonian language:
"The suggestion is surely that Macedonian was the language of the infantry and that the Greek was a difficult indeed a foreign tongue to them".

12) Alexander never tried to impose Greek on his Macedonian infantry, or to integrate it with Greek 'foreign' individuals".

13) On Demosthenes' tirades about Macedonians: "... we are concerned only with sentiment, which is itself historical fact and must be taken seriously as such. In these tirades we find not only the Hellenic descent of Macedonian people (which few seriously accepted) totally denied, but even that of the king."

14) "As regards the Macedonian nation as a whole, (there was as we can see) no division. They were regarded as clearly barbarian, despite the various myths.

15). "Philip had not tried to pass of his Macedonians as Greeks"

16) "He, Philip, never tried to make his Macedonians members of the Hellenic league."

17). "The feeling of being peoples of nonkindred race existed on both side" referring to Isocrates' statement.

18). On Python and the 17 000 Greek soldiers cut down by Macedonian soldiers: "the patent needs of the empire and the oath of their commander were swallowed up in the explosion of what we can only regard as the men's irrational hatred for their Greek enemies."