"The Bulgarian will assert that in point of fact the Macedonians are Slavs. The Greek takes higher ground. His mind moves among abstractions. He talks not of Greeks, but of Hellenism, not of fact, but of right. That Hellenism has a right to Macedonia is his thesis, and he is never at a loss for an argument. He begins of course with Alexander. It does not trouble him that in classical times the Greeks possessed only a few isolated colonies on the Macedonian coast. He waves aside the objection that for the ancients, Alexander and his Macedonians were no better than barbarians... Aristotle won Macedonia for Hellenism when he gave lessons to Philip's son, and all Macedonia is in consequence a sort of legacy bequeathed by the Stoa to the King George. Object that even the Macedonians vanished, the Greek changes his ground. Hellenism, which had meant Athenian culture, now stands for the Byzantine Empire. But in the interval between Aristotle and Constantine Macedonia was more or less Romanised. In the dark ages it was ruled by Serbian kings, by Bulgarian czars, and even by Frankish kings, but still its legitimate overlord was Byzantium, and Byzantium had become Greek. One may answer that the Byzantine Empire has after all gone under, and that it had lost Macedonia to the Slavs long before it was driven from Constantinople. But once again the old elastic abstraction re-appears. "Hellenism" claims these peoples because they were civilized by the "Greek" Orthodox Church. That is a conception which the Western mind grasps with difficulty... It is much as though the "Roman" Catholic Church should claim the greater part of Europe as the inheritance of Italy..."13

Until recently there was a widely held belief in Western historiography in the premise that at the core of Western civilization lies the civilization of the "Ancient Greeks", and today's Greeks (modern Greeks) are generally considered to be the successors of the "Ancient Greeks". Martin Barnal has demonstrated the groundlessness of this premise in the first volume of his breakthrough four volume work "The Black Athena, Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece".

However, according to some Greek historians, who coin a distorted Aristotelian logic, "The Modern Greeks are the successors of the Ancient Greeks. The Ancient Macedonians were Greek. Therefore no one can use the name of Macedonia except we the Greeks."

Let aside the logical error in this reasoning, it flatly contradicts the historical facts, which we will enumerate below.

The Macedonians of history were from the Macedonian Kingdom founded by Philip of Macedon. According to Hammond, "The Macedonians in general did not consider themselves Greeks, nor were they considered Greeks by their neighbours. The Macedonians themselves had little love for the Greeks who had settled in city-states on the coast and in Chalcidice, nor for the imperialistic powers, Sparta, Thebes and Athens, which treated Macedonia as a pawn in the game of power politics."14 Hammond gives references from the works of Heredotus, Thucydides, Isocrates and Plutarch, showing that the Macedonians were alien to the Ancient Greeks as expounded in the works of these ancient Greek philosophers.

The Ancient Greek city-states had not penetrated into Macedonia beyond the coastal cities: "The Greek colonies were never much more than the trading centers along the coast... There is no evidence that the interior was settled by a rural Greek population..."15

Macedonia previously occupied a trivial place in the relations of the Ancient Greek city-states. JB Bury and Russell Meiggs tell how the Macedons were regarded as alien by the Ancient Greeks: "For Macedon was regarded in Hellas as an outsider. If Thessaly was hardly inside the inner circle of Hellenic politics, Macedonia was distinctly outside it. To Athens and Sparta, to Corinth and Argos, and Thebes, the old powers, who, as we might say, had known each other all their lives as foes or friends, and had a common international history, the supremacy of Macedonia seemed the intrusion of an upstart".16

The state founded by Philip of Macedon (359-336 BC) extended from northern Greece into Thessaly. Confused politics and divisions among the ancient Greek city-states provided ample opportunity for interference. At the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) Philip defeated an army of Athenians, Thebans and others, induced to join forces by the new threat of this northern power. According to AR Burn, the "decisive battle of Chaeronea was the end of Greek independence. Isocrates, Milton's old man eloquent, who had hoped to see Philip the leader of a willing Greece, is said to have died of shock after hearing the news".17

It was hatred of Philip that inspired the famous "Philippics" of Demosthenes. But in the following year all the Greek city-states, accepting the supremacy of Philip, with the exception of Sparta, had to answer an invitation to send representatives to a Pan-Hellenic Congress under Philip's presidency at Corinth.

After the assassination of Philip, his son Alexander expanded the Macedonian Kingdom as far as India. Meanwhile, the Ancient Greek city-states were trying to form a united front against the Macedonians. They did not help the Macedonians in the face of the Persian aggression.
The death of Alexander the Great, considered by Hellenes a king alien to them, was cheered in Ancient Greek city-states. According to AR Burn, "Alexander's death gave the signal for driving Macedonian garrisons from Greece and the recovery of full freedom. Most of Greece united in a new, anti-Hellenic League".18 Later during the Macedonian Wars, Flaminius, the Roman Consul defeating Philip, declared himself the protector of Greek freedom. The third Macedonian War ended in the defeat of Philip's son and successor, Perseus, at the battle of Pydna in 168 BC, and the dissolution of the Macedonian Empire.

According to Heredotus in the same historical period, Macedonians were related to the Pelasgians, a non-Greek nation. For Straboni, in 50 BC, the people of Macedonia spoke a different language from the Greeks. For Demosthenes, too, the Macedonians were neither of Greek origin nor had anything related to the Greeks. At that time the Macedonians were called "barbarians", meaning "aliens".

JB Bury, on Demosthenes' hatred of Macedonians, writes that, "The most prominent among these opponents was Demosthenes, who had recently made a reputation as a speaker in the Assembly. The harangue, which is known as the First Philippic, calls upon the Athenians to vigorously oppose Philip, "our enemy".19 H Lloyd Jones cites passages from the Philippics: "This man Philip is not only not a Greek, or a man who has anything to do with us Greeks, but not even a barbarian from a country with an honourable name; no, a pestilent Macedonian fellow from a country where one could never buy a decent slave before".20

According to SR Hamilton, Philip was a barbarian in the eyes of Demosthenes: "Demosthenes, the implacable enemy of Macedon, was fond of describing Philip as a barbarian and once at least refers to his marshals as slaves. (Philippics, 3. 32)... Vulgar abuse, of course, was the stock in trade of the Athenian politician; yet such abuse would have been pointless had there been no difference between Greeks and Macedonians, and important cultural and political differences did in fact divide them."21

The Macedonians, like the Illyrians, were barbarians, ie alien to the Greeks.22 The name "barbarian" later acquired the meaning of "uncivilized". According to Arnold Toynbee, the word "barbarian" seems to have had a purely linguistic meaning originally. It was an expressive word, coined to describe someone whose language sounded like gibberish to the ear of the Greek speaker, who employed the term "barbarous". In the course of time, however, the word "barbarous" acquired a cultural connotation in addition to, or even instead of and in contrast to, its original linguistic connotation. This development was a result of the word having come to be thought of as being the correlative and antithesis of the word "Hellene".23

The Corinthians, the last Ancient Greek city-state, had been wiped out in 146 by the Romans. No Greek state emerged from this date until 1830.

The western side of the Bulgarian Kingdom, which was divided into two in the 10th century, emerged as the first Macedonian state between 997-1014 under the reign of Samuel, Ohrid being its centre. Under the rule of Samuel, the eastern provinces were lost, but the empire remained firmly seated in the west. It was then definitely a Macedonian state. After the death of Samuel, the Macedonian state weakened, and its lands soon came again under Byzantine sovereignty.

Consequently, the name "Macedonia" was already known at the dawn of history, as was the name of the Kingdom of the Thracians, who were established as a separate people in the valley of the river Bistritsa (Haliakmon), but the etymology of the name has no generally accepted explanation. King Philip II (359-336 BC) had spread Macedonian authority over the southern part of the Balkan peninsula, and his son, Alexander, had turned his kingdom into a short-lived world empire.

After it penetrated the Balkans, Rome subjugated Macedonia in 148 BC and made it a Roman province. During the 4th century AD, "Macedonia" became the name of a new administrative unit - a diocese - including Greece itself and Crete. After all these changes, "Macedonia" was no longer an ethnic and political term connected directly with the identity of the ancient Macedonians. It also became a regional geographic notion.
Thus Macedonia and Greece were presented as part of the Hellenic world.

Greece has concentrated much of its recent propaganda on its claim that ancient Macedonia was Greek. The result has been that groups of archaeologists, philologists and classical scholars have been pressed and mobilized into service by Athens to support its argument. However, modern political geography is not and cannot be mortgaged to ancient history. One might as well complain that the borders of modern Germany do not correspond to what Tacitus meant by "Germania".

The root cause of the problem is the neurotic nature of Greek nationalism, in its wilful confusion of modern politics and ancient history. It is claimed that their "unbroken descent" from Plato, Aristotle and Demosthenes sets them apart. Theirs is a higher civilization, a higher destiny. But over the thousands of years, there was no such thing as a national Greek state.24

Macedonia in the following centuries came under the rule of the Roman, the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires. The Greek historians argue that since during this long period of history there had been no Macedonian state, as there had been no Greek state since the Corinthian city-state was destroyed by the Romans in the Second Century, and because of the influx of Slav migration to the Balkans in the 6th and 8th centuries, a Macedonian nation could not be talked about.

However, not only Macedonia but also Greece and Bulgaria had been subject to the same immigration waves. Even the Greek historian Paparigopoulos tells how the "Ancient Greek" nation disappeared and the "modern Greekness" was born:

"The pure Greeks had disappeared from the scene of history after the occupation of Corinth by the Romans in 146. In the 6th and 8th centuries the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs immigrated as far south as the Peloponnesian peninsula and even some Aegean islands and settled there. Slavs settled in Epiros, Thessaly, Roumeli and Peloponnesian peninsula, Albanians in Athens, Corinth, Mani, Thessaly and Aegean Islands, Vlachs in Thessaly, Roumeli, Seven Islands [the Ionian Islands] and Aegean Islands."

The historical arguments put forward to justify the Greek position are not only historically ungrounded, but they, being applied selectively and incoherently to different historical periods, and in a deliberately distorted manner for the Balkan nations other than the Greeks, are completely ill-founded.

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