Classical World

The near-simultaneous appearance of two large Companion volumes dealing with ancient Macedon, only eight years after a similar volume from Brill centered on Alexander the Great, seems to attest to growing scholarly interest in Macedonian studies. Unfortunately in this case there is another factor at work: political tensions over what modern nation, if any, controls the Macedonian [End Page 539] legacy. The Blackwell's Companion volume, as I have learned from one of its contributors, was slated to include a large cohort of Greek contributors; but when these scholars learned that the volume would also contain an essay by Loring Danforth, exploring the modern conflict over cultural identity between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), they withdrew their articles. Most of these Greek scholars subsequently published their work in Brill's Companion. The two volumes therefore are not contemporaneous by chance, and readers who consult them should be aware of their different origins and different points of view.

It is a sad statement about the politicization of Macedonia-centered scholarship that Danforth's essay caused such a schism. It is in fact an admirably balanced and professional discussion of what has been termed "the Macedonian question." The careful language and measured tone of his essay characterizes the Blackwell volume generally, in contrast to the often polemical approach of the contributors to Brill's Companion. Readers should approach the latter volume with caution, and put their trust more solidly in the former.

The two volumes announce their tonal differences in their opening essays. A "Preamble" to the Blackwell volume by Edward M. Anson, with the appealing title "Why Study Ancient Macedonia and What this Companion is About," gives an overview of the whole field, including a sensitive discussion of the ethnicity controversies that have roiled it. (Anson, who has investigated this topic extensively through his work on Eumenes of Cardia, concludes that the ancient Macedonians spoke a form of Greek, though Johannes Engels, writing on "Macedonians and Greeks" in the same volume, is more circumspect.) Brill's Companion opens with a strident screed by its editor, Robin Lane Fox, on the identity of the occupants of Tomb II at Vergina (ancient Aegae). Lane Fox reviews the entire body of evidence, by this time quite vast, that has been used to argue for either Philip II (Alexander's father) or Philip III (Alexander's half-brother), finding for Philip II in every case. Why such a tendentious piece forms the introduction to the volume, or why a historian (esteemed though he is) chose to write it rather than one of the many archaeologists on the volume's masthead, are unclear. The Blackwell volume, by contrast, chose not to address the Tomb II controversy at all, even though one of its editors, Ian Worthington, has recently proclaimed—in a more judicious discussion than Lane Fox's—his support for the Philip II attribution (Appendix 6 to his 2008 biography, Philip II of Macedonia).

Lane Fox has contributed five other pieces to the Brill Companion, which, though spread throughout, form a kind of running history of Macedon in the fourth and third centuries B.C. There are also four pieces by Miltiades Hatzopoulos giving overviews of the land, people, and institutions of ancient Macedonia. Apart from these two and Oxford tutor John Ma, every other contributor in the volume belongs to a Greek institution. Given the high investment of the Greek people in claiming the Macedonians as part of their heritage, this...