CJ Forum Online 2009.07.02 (forthcoming CJ 105.1)
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WHOSE IS MACEDONIA, WHOSE IS ALEXANDER?
On 18 May 2009, 200 Classical scholars from around the world sent an open
letter to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. This
unusual action, and the contents of the letter, raise issues which may not
have been considered by all those who have endorsed it, but which deserve
consideration. In order to put the discussion that follows into context, it
may be useful first to quote the body of the letter itself. [[1]]
***
Dear President Obama,
We, the undersigned scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, respectfully
request that you intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left
in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration.
On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W.
Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the “Republic of
Macedonia.” This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact,
but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism,
of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government
in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.
We believe that this silliness has gone too far, and that the U.S.A. has no
business in supporting the subversion of history. Let us review facts. (The
documentation for these facts can be found attached and at:
http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html)
The land in question, with its modern capital at Skopje, was called Paionia
in antiquity. Mts. Barnous and Orbelos (which form today the northern
limits of Greece) provide a natural barrier that separated, and separates,
Macedonia from its northern neighbor. The only real connection is along the
Axios/Vardar River and even this valley “does not form a line of
communication because it is divided by gorges.”
While it is true that the Paionians were subdued by Philip II, father of
Alexander, in 358 B.C. they were not Macedonians and did not live in
Macedonia. Likewise, for example, the Egyptians, who were subdued by
Alexander, may have been ruled by Macedonians, including the famous
Cleopatra, but they were never Macedonians themselves, and Egypt was never
called Macedonia.
Rather, Macedonia and Macedonian Greeks have been located for at least
2,500 years just where the modern Greek province of Macedonia is. Exactly
this same relationship is true for Attica and Athenian Greeks, Argos and
Argive Greeks, Corinth and Corinthian Greeks, etc.
We do not understand how the modern inhabitants of ancient Paionia, who
speak Slavic—a language introduced into the Balkans about a millennium
after the death of Alexander—can claim him as their national hero.
Alexander the Great was thoroughly and indisputably Greek. His
great-great-great grandfather, Alexander I, competed in the Olympic Games
where participation was limited to Greeks.
Even before Alexander I, the Macedonians traced their ancestry to Argos,
and many of their kings used the head of Herakles—the quintessential
Greek hero—on their coins.
Euripides—who died and was buried in Macedonia—wrote his play Archelaos
in honor of the great-uncle of Alexander, and in Greek. While in Macedonia,
Euripides also wrote the Bacchai, again in Greek. Presumably the Macedonian
audience could understand what he wrote and what they heard.
Alexander’s father, Philip, won several equestrian victories at Olympia
and Delphi, the two most Hellenic of all the sanctuaries in ancient Greece
where non-Greeks were not allowed to compete. Even more significantly,
Philip was appointed to conduct the Pythian Games at Delphi in 346 B.C. In
other words, Alexander the Great’s father and his ancestors were
thoroughly Greek. Greek was the language used by Demosthenes and his
delegation from Athens when they paid visits to Philip, also in 346 B.C.
Another northern Greek, Aristotle, went off to study for nearly 20 years in
the Academy of Plato. Aristotle subsequently returned to Macedonia and
became the tutor of Alexander III. They used Greek in their classroom which
can still be seen near Naoussa in Macedonia.
Alexander carried with him throughout his conquests Aristotle’s edition
of Homer’s Iliad. Alexander also spread Greek language and culture
throughout his empire, founding cities and establishing centers of
learning. Hence inscriptions concerning such typical Greek institutions as
the gymnasium are found as far away as Afghanistan. They are all written in
Greek.
The questions follow: Why was Greek the lingua franca all over
Alexander’s empire if he was a “Macedonian”? Why was the New
Testament, for example, written in Greek?
The answers are clear: Alexander the Great was Greek, not Slavic, and Slavs
and their language were nowhere near Alexander or his homeland until 1000
years later. This brings us back to the geographic area known in antiquity
as Paionia. Why would the people who live there now call themselves
Macedonians and their land Macedonia? Why would they abduct a completely
Greek figure and make him their national hero?
The ancient Paionians may or may not have been Greek, but they certainly
became Greekish, and they were never Slavs. They were also not Macedonians.
Ancient Paionia was a part of the Macedonian Empire. So were Ionia and
Syria and Palestine and Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Bactria and
many more. They may thus have become “Macedonian” temporarily, but none
was ever “Macedonia.” The theft of Philip and Alexander by a land that
was never Macedonia cannot be justified.
The traditions of ancient Paionia could be adopted by the current residents
of that geographical area with considerable justification. But the
extension of the geographic term “Macedonia” to cover southern
Yugoslavia cannot. Even in the late 19th century, this misuse implied
unhealthy territorial aspirations.
The same motivation is to be seen in school maps that show the
pseudo-greater Macedonia, stretching from Skopje to Mt. Olympus and labeled
in Slavic. The same map and its claims are in calendars, bumper stickers,
bank notes, etc., that have been circulating in the new state ever since it
declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Why would a poor
land-locked new state attempt such historical nonsense? Why would it
brazenly mock and provoke its neighbor?
However one might like to characterize such behavior, it is clearly not a
force for historical accuracy, nor for stability in the Balkans. It is sad
that the United States of America has abetted and encouraged such behavior.
We call upon you, Mr. President, to help—in whatever ways you deem
appropriate—the government in Skopje to understand that it cannot build a
national identity at the expense of historic truth. Our common
international society cannot survive when history is ignored, much less
when history is fabricated.
***
Some readers may be amused, as I was myself, when they first read what
looks like a—somewhat naïve—undergraduate essay. But the amusement
disappears when one realizes that the letter has been signed by countless
leading scholars, many of whom teach Classics or Ancient History at
renowned institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Cambridge or
Oxford, to name but a few. The political impact will no doubt be limited
despite this fact. But since the opinion of people of this caliber has
considerable authority within the academic community, and since their sheer
number may make it look to the outside world as if they represent our
disciplines in their entirety, a reply is in order; for what is presented
as a summary of “historic truth”—a notoriously slippery term—is in
reality a crude statement that betrays some fundamental principles of
historical scholarship. What follows is thus not to be understood as an
endorsement of any real or imaginary expansionist ambitions of the modern
Republic of Macedonia, but as a call for greater methodological and factual
levelheadedness and caution when attempts are made to instrumentalize the
classical world in modern-day politics.
It is true that most of the factual observations in the letter are correct.
But it is equally true that (a) the text is one-sided and (b) its
argumentative logic is often weak. As for (a), it would have been only fair
to state more clearly how much of our knowledge about the ancient
Macedonian kings’ “Greekness” we owe to the fact that, at least for
propagandistic reasons, it could be subject to doubts in a way that would
have been unthinkable in the case of, say, a Spartan king. The internet
documentation which is referred to in the letter may be right when it sees
nothing but “a personal grudge” behind Demosthenes’ calling Philip II
a “barbarian,” but to cite Herodotus 5.22 as conclusive evidence that
Alexander the Great was “thoroughly and indisputably Greek” is
seriously misleading, since Herodotus’ statement “I happen to know that
[the forefathers of Alexander] are Greek” is triggered precisely by the
existence of a dispute over the matter, long before the age of Demosthenes.
As for (b), the question “Why was Greek the lingua franca all over
Alexander’s empire if he was a ‘Macedonian’?” cannot be adequately
answered with the words “[Because] Alexander the Great was Greek,”
given that we have numerous examples of ancient empires in which the lingua
franca was not the language of the ruler. Nor can the presence of
Heracles’ head on Macedonian coins or Euripides’ stay at the Macedonian
court prove anything more than that the Macedonian kings were ready to
embrace Greek traditions and Greek culture.
But all of this is not the real issue at stake. What is at the core of the
letter is a mistaken and unhealthy notion of historical identity. “While
it is true that the Paionians were subdued by Philip II, father of
Alexander, in 358 B.C. they were not Macedonians and did not live in
Macedonia”—but is that really so? How many Paionians did we ask about
it, and at what point in history? The comparison with Egypt is awkward, for
at least after the incorporation of “Paionia” under Antigonos Gonatas
(249 BCE) a territorially continuous political unity had come into being
which survived as such in the Roman provincial administration. That the
case of Egypt is rather different in this respect need hardly be stressed.
And even if it could be ascertained that a distinct Paionian identity
continued to exist, that alone could never prove that there was not also an
overarching Macedonian one; after all, it is perfectly possible to have a
Californian and an American identity at the same time. Moreover, to use an
ancient but immediately relevant analogy, are we really to think that
Thucydides got it all wrong when he wrote that, decades before the conquest
of Paionia, the term “Macedonia” also applied to lands not inhabited by
“ethnic” Macedonians (Thuc. 2.99)?
Identities are thus shifting, not static, and they can be multiplied if
need be. Few signatories of the letter would probably deny this fact when
dealing with other areas of the ancient world. But to call Cleopatra a
“Macedonian” gives away what constitutes true identity in the eyes of
the letter’s authors: to them, identity seems defined by ancestry and
blood-lines, by the past more than the present. Are we then to conclude
that, for example, John F. Kennedy—or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, for
that matter—were never real Americans? And if John F. Kennedy’s
ancestors spoke Irish at one point, is it preposterous for all
English-speaking Americans to use him today in their construction of a
national identity because of that?
One might object that this is different. By coming to America John F.
Kennedy’s ancestors chose to become Americans (with Irish roots); but why
could the Slavs coming to Macedonia then not become Macedonians (with
Slavic roots)? Yet different it remains, for no political body ever
encompassed both the entire territory of the modern United States and
Ireland at the same time. Hence, a different analogy must be sought. The
internet documentation offers one suggestion:
***
An apt analogy is at hand if we imagine a certain large island off the
southeast coast of the United States re-naming itself Florida, emblazoning
its currency with images of Disney World and distributing maps showing the
“Greater Florida.”
***
But this will not do, and here we begin to perceive a categorial error even
if we do not wish to subscribe to the “postmodern” possibility of
choosing one’s identity freely. By focusing almost exclusively on
Alexander the Great, the letter conveniently forgets everything that
happened later in the area. Let us leave it open how the Paionians or their
descendants thought of themselves by the time Macedonia lost its
independence, and whether or not they would have objected to seeing their
own region referred to as part of “Macedonia” at that stage. One point
is crystal-clear: the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia does
have a shared past with the modern Greek province of Macedonia—and a
past, at that, during which the entire area was unquestionably thought of
as “Macedonia” by many, if not most, of its inhabitants. [[2]] For
“Macedonia” was not only the name of the relevant Roman
province—later divided into Macedonia Prima and Macedonia Salutaris (not:
*Paionia), both of which became part of the Byzantine Empire—as well as
the heartland of Tsar Samuil’s so-called “Bulgarian” Empire in the
10th and 11th centuries CE. It was also, more importantly for the recent
history and nomenclature in the Balkans, a distinctly perceived territorial
unit within the Ottoman Empire. Essentially this is the “pseudo-greater
Macedonia” depicted in the modern Macedonian maps which the letter
decries, rightly or wrongly, as politically inflammatory. When this land
was divided in 1912/13, ten years after the unsuccessful Ilinden Uprising
of 1903, between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia as a consequence of the Balkan
Wars, a “Macedonian” identity of sorts had been in the making for
centuries and was now forcefully broken up. To be sure, this early modern
“Macedonia” was never politically independent or ethnically homogeneous
in any sense, and certainly not exclusively Slavic. But neither must we
erroneously believe that those parts of it which form the modern Greek
province of Macedonia were ethnically as distinctly Greek as they have
become, for better or worse, in recent times. So the “apt analogy” of a
“Greater Florida” is in reality a politically biased image that
misconstructs the “historic truth” it claims to promote. No matter what
its ethnic mix was—and what serious scholar would nowadays want to argue
that the only “good” states are ethnically “pure” states, in which
everyone must speak the same language?—the tendentiously-labeled
“pseudo-greater Macedo¬nia,” far from being a recent invention, did
exist as a real identitarian concept well before the 20th century. And in a
sense its roots can be traced back to the conquests of Philip II, Alexander
the Great and their successors in “Paionia”; for if those conquests had
never taken place, the history of the region would have looked different
and the territory of “Paionia” might not have shared the fate and
fortune of “Aegean” Macedonia for long stretches of its history. Thus,
unless one subscribes to a dangerous “blood-and-soil ideology,” there
is no reason why the modern Slavic Macedonians should not be allowed to
continue to call their country “Macedonia” and to pride themselves in
Alexander the Great just as much as the modern Hellenic Greeks do. What
does it matter if Alexander “was Greek, not Slavic,” as long as no one
claims the opposite?
One final analogy may help us look at the entire issue more soberly. The
West Germanic Franks originally lived near the Lower Rhine, in the
territory of modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. During the Migration
Period they began to move southwards and eventually established hegemony
over most of Roman Gaul. That did not mean that the Romans living in Gaul
at the time immediately had to think of themselves as Franks or start to
speak the Germanic language of their kings, including Charlemagne.
Nevertheless the name of the Franks ultimately imposed itself on the entire
territory they ruled, and it survives to this day in the modern name of
France. Clearly this does not imply that France “brazenly mocks and
provokes its neighbor[s]” Belgium and the Netherlands—where the “real
France” must be located according to the ancient sources—by
appropriating the name of a people that did not speak the ancestor language
of modern French, or by calling schools or streets after Charlemagne. Nor
would anyone think of writing a letter to President Obama to protest
against this state of affairs. But why should such a letter then be written
in the case of modern Macedonia? If one of our foremost academic duties as
Classicists and Ancient Historians is to think about the ancient world sine
ira et studio, we must do the same when invited to express our views on a
contemporary political issue, however much those who invite us try to make
it look as if they shared our love for historical understanding. By putting
our academic authority behind tendentious political statements like the
letter quoted above, we risk not only bringing into disrepute our
disciplines and the institutions at which we are allowed to work and teach,
but betraying the past whose guardians we ought to be.
ANDREAS WILLI
University of Oxford
WORK CITED
Rossos, Andrew. 2008. Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History. Stanford.
[[1]] The letter (accessed 10 July 2009), together with some additional
documentation and a full list of signatories (which at the time this
article was accepted for publication included well over 300 names) is
freely accessible at http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html.
[[2]] For a balanced and accessible survey of Macedonian history and the
“Macedonian question” (written by a Greek Macedonian) see now Rossos
(2008).
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