Macedon

Macedon was a kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world from about 700 BC, regarded by the southern city-states as barely Greek - its people spoke a dialect Athenians found unintelligible, its kings ruled a landed aristocracy rather than a citizen assembly, and it was for centuries a buffer raided by Thracians and Illyrians and manipulated by Persia. Philip II changed that in twenty years after 359 BC. He reformed the army around the sarissa, a pike twice the length of a hoplite spear, combined the phalanx with heavy cavalry as the striking arm, took the gold mines of Pangaeum to pay for it, and used bribery and marriage as freely as force. Chaeronea in 338 BC ended the independence of the Greek city-states. His son Alexander inherited the army and the plan and destroyed the Persian Empire with it in eleven years, reaching the Punjab before his troops refused to go further; he died at Babylon in 323 BC at thirty-two, leaving an heir not yet born. The empire was divided among his generals within a generation, and Macedon itself became one kingdom among several, ruled by the Antigonids. Rome then arrived. Three Macedonian Wars ended at Pydna in 168 BC, where the legion beat the phalanx decisively; the kingdom was partitioned into four republics and, after a revolt, annexed outright as a Roman province in 146 BC. The royal tombs at Vergina, opened in 1977, are almost certainly those of Philip II and his family. Macedonian identity - whether the kingdom was Greek - was contested in antiquity and is contested politically today. The province Rome created became the base for its conquest of the rest of the Balkans.

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