Oxford scholar Nicholas G.L. Hammond has written (uniquely) a three-volume account of ancient Macedonia (1972-88) and his memoir Venture into Greece (1983) is a vivid account of his wartime exploits in that area just when it was being ‘reorganized’ by Messrs Tito and Dimitrov into the nuisance which it has come, notoriously, to be. He has written monographs and lectured on the subject and is a staunch philhellene. Now he has been persuaded to abbreviate his special knowledge (being both personal and scholarly), within a compass of a couple of hundred pages for a popular series devoted to Great Civilizations.
At the First International Conference on Ancient Macedonia organized by the Institute of Balkan Studies in 1968 in Thessaloniki, Professor Hammond advanced the then startling belief that Vergina was the ancient Macedonian capital of Aegeae which he claimed one day would yield up the bones of its kings. Among those who seriously questioned this curious belief was archaeologist Manolis Andronikos. But further exploration led him to agree with Hammond, and he began excavations six years later leading him to the discovery of Philip IPs tomb in 1977.
It is not surprising, then, given Professor Hammond’s long and intimate affair with the Macedonian heartland, that he should put more emphasis on the birthplace of the first-known Western-based empire rather than on its mammoth expansion and the international consequences of it. As a result he gives greater weight to Philip’s organizational skills and his forceful character than to the personality and achievements of his son which have been written about so often elsewhere, and have so sunk into popular imagination that it is just about impossible today to reclaim the Divine Youth to such mundane things as history and humanity.
Philip is a more manageable matter: tough, crafty, hard-drinking, stubborn – generous and goodhearted when approached in the right way, vengeful and ruthless when not – recognizably Balkan today in proximity to his semi-barbaric, transhumant goat-raising, and sheep-stealing forebears. He didn’t know it, but he took these unpromising materials around him and wove the fabric for a cradle of empire without parallel, since half of it remained a dream (which is still dreamt) and the other half materialized in a way that it had an intimate effect on every supranational state of affairs in the West since, from the Roman Empire to the UN.
Like all favored of the gods, Philip found opportunity in early adversity. Due to his incompetent father’s exile or defeats, he served time as a hostage first at Thebes where he studied the tactics of Epaminondas’ brilliant Sacred Band and developed the pike-man phalanx which was to destroy Persia. Later, with the Illyrian army, then the greatest military power in the Balkans, he learned how to forge from small tribal elements a mini-empire of his own, for, as we know all too well today, a multi-national, multi-religious state can be made – or unmade – out of quite modest dimensions in the Balkans. What is extraordinary is that Philip, and the genius of his son, was able to expand and transform this narrow-valleyed Balkan experience to encompass an area that stretched from the Adriatic to Bactria and India.
The Macedonia which Philip inherited from his clumsy predecessors was not unlike the melange some claim it to be today. Since the regions took their names from the tribes which inhabited them, and the tribes themselves were transhumant pastoralists, the regions ‘moved’ around with them giving the fourth century BC Balkan peninsula that blurred, instable look it still has – a geographical hotchpotch of mountains and valleys which, by nature, produced quarrelsome men with narrow minds and confused hearts. A major part of the problem of Macedonia is that it has changed shape in history with the persistence and ingenuity of Proteus.
The remarkable ease with which ancient Macedonians adapted to, yet at the same time transformed, Asian despotism may have been prepared for by the Persian Empire’s occupation early in the fifth century, a not unfriendly association strengthened by a hatred held in common of Athens and its democratic institutions.
Macedonia was above all monarchist; this was the key to its genius. For generations before Philip, its kings were elected and deposed by an Assembly (hence ‘constitutional’). His administration, however, was made up of ‘Companions’ of his own choosing. As the sole owner of ‘spear-won’ land, however, he had a private wealth immensely greater than any Greek city-state capitalist.
Philip’s martial and bureaucratic abilities (which his son so fortuitously inherited) forged a despotism combined with an oligarchy whose strength was enhanced by the absence of a middle class or slavery. Hammond stresses that Macedonian society was powerful and closely knit because of the absence of slaves. Since, however, Macedonians were mostly transhumants and moving around was their business, Philip was able to massively relocate his people to suit his purposes. Hammond argues persuasively that the sudden emergence of Greek-dominated cities in so much of the Middle East in the third century, becoming the foundations of the Hellenistic kingdoms, had traceable origins in Balkan wanderlust. The ‘miracle’ in the title of the book under review may be mostly the inspiration of the euphony-loving editor of this series (The Glory That Was Greece, etc) but the achievement of Macedonia was accomplished with extraordinarily speed – as miracles usually are. Professor Hammond is a devout Philipophile, and even a democrat would be churchish to begrudge his greatness. For Athenocentric scholars of the past, history ended at Chaeronea; in fact, that’s when most of it began – for good or ill. Philip, of course, was lucky. A Greek himself (thank you, Professor Hammond!) Philip oversaw the Hellenization of Macedonia as whole, and the concurrent spread of standard spoken Greek (koine) allowed in the next generations for the Hellenization of the ecumene.
The miracle, at least in Macedonia itself, fizzled out as soon as Alexander crossed into Asia, and even our patriotic historian cannot make the intrigues, murders and incests of the latter Macedonian royal house into anything but a confused chronicle of wretchedness. Macedonian painting probably did point towards the glories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but polygamy, another, less wholesome Macedonian tradition, invited princesses to join and intensify court intrigues, inspire the later antics of Messalina and the Agrippinas. The Macedonian legacy was a mixed bag, but its achievements were inspiring.
Professor Hammond’s latest book is more a reduction of his earlier studies than a simplified reassessment of them. Consequently the text, if shortened, is as dense as a phalanx. The photographs seem haphazard in choice, often ill-produced, and the maps are difficult to read.
Yet the author is a true Macedonian. Even as eminent a scholar as his predecessor W.W. Tarn seemed to whistle Macedonia arbitrarily from the side-benches into the playing field of history for no better reason than the spectators had tired of those Greek city-state players and their overly complex, repetitious strategies.
In Professor Hammond’s narrative, Philip and Alexander, like the children of Cadmus, spring naturally out from the Macedonian earth, not uprooted and sterilized for safekeeping in the Hall of Heroes.
Macedonia was Greek, the author insists (whew!), and without the Greeks, the future empire was inconceivable. But, Professor Hammond also argues, in its institutions and much of its art and its psychology, Macedonia had more in common with its neighbors just west and east, Illyria and Thrace, than the city-states to the south. It was the blend, planted by Alexander into his vast lands, that made the transition from Oriental despotism to Hellenistic hegemony possible.
The ultimate truth, as usual, is inexplicable. At the Feast at Opis-on-Tigris, Alexander prayed for the brotherhood of man, the community of culture, the fusion of races: a gradually unfolding vision of the ecumene: one inhabited world, single and unified. One wonders where he got all that from?
“Horizons in the Middle East,” writes that clairvoyant traveller, Freya Stark, “often seem mere passages for the eye to things unseen.” One thing is certain: There was no ‘Macedoine’ on the Opis Feast menu.
