Were Ancient Macedonians Greek?

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I'm unconvinced; Roman religion predates the philhellenism of the Classical era, their language remained Latin and their attitude to Greek culture was fundamentally conquering rather than assimilating. I've argued this at length elsewhere, but what the Romans were doing when they carved statues, wrote poems and thought about philosophy wasn't trying to become Greek, it was trying making 'Greek culture' Roman. Without this, Greeks could have found pride in their culture: it could be the hallmark of a defeated yet culturally superior people. When their foreign rulers made it part of their own culture, though, it lost its 'national' character. So a Greek practising his native culture was inevitably, implicitly buying in to the Roman status quo. Listening to Homer could never be an act of defiance in Greece as long as the emperor in Rome was doing it too.
 
That just is counter to all classical sources of the extended roman era, but ok, if you want to go with that. Then why are you so hostile to the more or less equally serious fyroslavic macedonian cult of philippovic? :jesus:
 
Are you talking about Horace? What the Romans thought was going on wasn't necessarily what was going on. Roman moralists might have pleaded that the Republic was growing degenerate - but they pleaded that in every age - and the artists actually on the sharp end (Horace, to name one) may well have felt a sense of inferiority, but what I'm talking about is the (perhaps unconscious) process by which the ruling class improved its own position. After all, ruling classes don't change unless that change is in their own interests.

Two points to note, though. Firstly, there's practically no Roman source which admits to thinking itself inferior to the current state of the Greeks: where they did profess inferiority, it was in the fact of names such as Homer, Alexander and Demosthenes. Pliny the Younger - a philhellene if ever there was one - wrote to Maximus, sent to govern Achaea, urging him 'remember it is to Athens that you go, that you rule over Sparta ... think of what each city used to be, but don’t despise it because it is less than that now.'

Secondly, I think you can definitely see a conscious bid to claim superiority in the opening of the Aeneid. Looking at their titles shows you that the Iliad is the story of a war, and the Odyssey that of a man, and both within the first line ask a goddess to relate the story through the poet. Virgil's Aeneid begins 'Of arms and a man I sing'. He claims the territory of both Homeric poems for his single poem, and has no qualms about calling it his own effort. He doesn't actually invoke the Muse, a defining epic trope, for several more lines.
 
Do you know of any Roman theatrical play?
And how about literature on the whole, apart from Virgil? Most people would have heard of maybe one other latin poet, and for reasons quite Aristophanic at that.
Some philosophers are known, but even they are part of schools named after at the latest the 5th century BC Greece (eg neo-platonic).
Astronomers abound, but they tend to be in the Greek dominated areas, eg Ptolemy or Strabo.
Although i am not well-read at all in Latin, i do know that all the 19th-early 20th century western/northern european writers i read (and i did read most of the main names) always claim that the Greek works of the same era are far superior to the Latin ones of the classical/roman era. Furthermore the basis is always (ultimately) the Greek mythology, philosophy, and art.

This has to do with refined culture, which itself is tied to some of the individuals in that culture, but also (more generally, of course) to the living environment where the culture is sustained, eg the Polis or other states of that time. Maybe some concurrent Celt might have been equally intelligent as Archimedes, but what use would that be if he never learned geometry or any other means of extrapolating logic in a science setting?
 
Do you know of any Roman theatrical play?
And how about literature on the whole, apart from Virgil? Most people would have heard of maybe one other latin poet, and for reasons quite Aristophanic at that.
Some philosophers are known, but even they are part of schools named after at the latest the 5th century BC Greece (eg neo-platonic).
Astronomers abound, but they tend to be in the Greek dominated areas, eg Ptolemy or Strabo.
Although i am not well-read at all in Latin, i do know that all the 19th-early 20th century western/northern european writers i read (and i did read most of the main names) always claim that the Greek works of the same era are far superior to the Latin ones of the classical/roman era. Furthermore the basis is always (ultimately) the Greek mythology, philosophy, and art.

This has to do with refined culture, which itself is tied to some of the individuals in that culture, but also (more generally, of course) to the living environment where the culture is sustained, eg the Polis or other states of that time. Maybe some concurrent Celt might have been equally intelligent as Archimedes, but what use would that be if he never learned geometry or any other means of extrapolating logic in a science setting?

You're telling me that Greek art is better than Roman art, which isn't really the point - also, to be honest, I think you've got far too little information about Roman literature to make a qualified argument on it. For one thing, Roman drama was extremely fruitful, and the model of a story with a sympathetic character and a villain taking place over five implicit acts - which fits nearly all modern films and TV shows - is a Roman creation.

I'm talking strictly in terms of class control and how by apparently 'Hellenising' the Roman aristocracy gained leverage over the Greeks rather than striving to become Greeks themselves. Hence I reject the use of the Romans as a case study for 'Greeks in all but ancestry', which I think would be required to cement the idea that ancestry was of ultimate importance. I think there were enough competing claims about ancestry that they could be chosen, advanced and accepted depending on the present political climate, and I don't think historical reality would have stood in the way of an otherwise appropriate and well-liked community being declared Greek enough for (say) Olympia.
 
And if there is any 'cardinal mistake' in the thread, then surely that is even bringing fyroslavs into the question of ancient Macedonia at all? ;)

I agree that's ridiculous and I've never claimed otherwise. I've talked about two separate issues and have always carefully kept them separate. One issue is whether Ancient Macedonians were Greek (the original topic of the thread), the other was whether modern Macedonian should be penalized in some form for using the name Macedonia.
 
Macedonians are Bulgarian and Alexander the Great was Macedonian, thus Bulgarian. Tolni descends from Alexander the Great. He will conquer Greece, Anatolia, Thrace, Persia, the Middle East and India as his ancestor did! Long live Bulgarian Macedonia! HELLO!
 
Do you know of any Roman theatrical play?
And how about literature on the whole, apart from Virgil?

You're not seriously claiming that the civilisation of Cicero, Horace, Catullus, Apuleius, and Augustine was lacking in decent literature. Are you?
 
Actually I think the reverse is true, and that a lot of the reverence that Greek literature and art are given stems from them being the first ones there. The Romans themselves idolised the past, and professed almost as a platitude that their forerunners were better than them. It's accepted quite uncritically that Homer wrote the best epic poems in history, but I've never really seen anyone defend that view. Certainly, Greek literature is usually different from what came afterwards, by necessity of working in a relative vacuum. There's a case to be made that that means it's undeveloped rather than pure and perfect. I'd certainly take Latin historians, novelists or lyric poets over Greek, and there's certainly a higher ratio of good epics to bad epics in Latin.
 
^"βῆ δ' ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης", murmured the Angel, and can you destroy that too? :p

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/fotd/fotd17.htm
 
I always thought that the reverence for a 'good line' was an understandable but unfortunate consequence of the Classical obsession with difficult metres and intellectually sophisticated poetry. I like that story, though.
 
@Flying Pig, Kyriakos, Louis XXIV


I thing you're trying to compare different things, the most significant difference of whom is the time period which they prospered.

Also Rome is like lemon, acidic and sour.
Then again a good pâtissier using... lemon along with the proper ingredients (...greek mostly), can make propably the best sweet pie on Planet Earth.
Not all romans were making good "lemon pies".


...And of course the ingredients needed to make a lemon pie -besides lemon- are more or less the same (the basis) for all pies, and in the absence of which no pie as we know it can ever be made.


Just two more things...

I'll say one name only, regarding engineering in ancient Rome (which was undeniably advanced); Archimedes.
For your free time (for those who haven't seen it - the latest (2012) discoveries): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM


The Vitruvian Man.
Did you know that there's an exact same image of a man of the 5th BC, with the exact same porportions sculptured on marble, which was used in the construction of the Parthenon (nowadays in the island of Aegina) as a metric converter?
The workers and sculptors who worked there, came from different places and were using different metric systems...
 
There's a kouros statue in the museum at Delphi which was allegedly constructed in two halves by two brothers in two different cities, and when the two halves were put together the join was invisible, because the brothers had followed the canon of proportion so accurately. Greek art in the 5th century had an obsession with making things perfect, in particular with depicting the perfect male nude in sculpture. The Romans never created anything to match the Doryphoros, but I'm not sure that they had the same goals in mind. Greek sculptures are notably devoid of character, while Roman portraits scorn aesthetic perfection and try to convey a sense of the person's character - usually severe, weather-worn and practical, in other words a total rejection of the 'vanity' with which the Greeks depicted themselves.
 
There's a kouros statue in the museum at Delphi which was allegedly constructed in two halves by two brothers in two different cities, and when the two halves were put together the join was invisible, because the brothers had followed the canon of proportion so accurately. Greek art in the 5th century had an obsession with making things perfect, in particular with depicting the perfect male nude in sculpture. The Romans never created anything to match the Doryphoros, but I'm not sure that they had the same goals in mind. Greek sculptures are notably devoid of character, while Roman portraits scorn aesthetic perfection and try to convey a sense of the person's character - usually severe, weather-worn and practical, in other words a total rejection of the 'vanity' with which the Greeks depicted themselves.

You're saying the Romans were more pragmatists, more realistic in art than the Greeks.
Indeed. They studied the Greek philosophers...
Then again the Greeks were more realistic in many aspects (in more aspects) of life. Wouldn't you agree?
Take for example governing. Though Republic is more advanced for an empire, is not that advanced for life in Poleis. Not to mention that Republic as founded and as being implemented these days, is nothing but a deception regarding that people has the power.
This was never the case in a Republic.
 
Then again the Greeks were more realistic in many aspects (in more aspects) of life. Wouldn't you agree?
Aristotle thought female emotions were dictated by the uterus moving around her body, so no.
 
You're saying the Romans were more pragmatists, more realistic in art than the Greeks.
Indeed. They studied the Greek philosophers...
Then again the Greeks were more realistic in many aspects (in more aspects) of life. Wouldn't you agree?
Take for example governing. Though Republic is more advanced for an empire, is not that advanced for life in Poleis. Not to mention that Republic as founded and as being implemented these days, is nothing but a deception regarding that people has the power.
This was never the case in a Republic.

I don't know what that bolded part means, I'm afraid. I also wouldn't say that the Greek philosophers were as a rule 'realistic' - have you come across Aristophanes' Clouds? Some Greek philosophy was grounded in reality - for example, Aristotle's sadly lost biology, Thucydides' and Polybius' (if the latter counts) observations of the workings of international relations - but Greece also produced Plato's theory of forms, Socrates' idea that all people were born with all knowledge, and any number of philosophers competing as to whether the world was made of fire, earth, air or water. Neither Greece nor Rome ever produced what we would call a 'scientist'; the concept didn't really exist.
 
I don't know what that bolded part means, I'm afraid. I also wouldn't say that the Greek philosophers were as a rule 'realistic' - have you come across Aristophanes' Clouds?

It's my english...
It's much easier to run an Empire using Republic as the Romans implamented it, than with Democracy (there's only one Democracy, the ancient Athenian Democracy - not the nowadays so-called Democracy).
In fact it's impossible to run an empire using Democracy.

Yet Democracy is more advanced and more realistic for the citizen.

Republic is not a Democracy. The people in a Republic never historically had the power in their hands.


Edited
Also I'll get back for the last part of you comment, to which I disagree !!
 
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