Defining borders is a not only a geographical nightmare, but a cultural, religious and political problem.

Aside from the current tensions surrounding the territory of the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and Macedonia (northern Greece) directly underneath it, there is a lot to be said about the changing borders of the region in the ancient world.

Professor John Melville-Jones of the University of Western Australia says the ancient region of Macedonia was harder to defend unlike Australia whose land mass is surrounded by water.

“If you’re on a large island the sea is the best possible border and a wide river, and perhaps a very high mountain too,” Professor Melville-Jones tells Neos Kosmos.

“But if you’ve got undulating country or flat country, well your border is what you can defend. I mean, look at what’s going on in the world now, Ukraine for instance, what’s going to happen with the borders there?”

Professor Melville-Jones is due to present a lecture on ‘The Borders of Ancient Macedonia’ in Brisbane next week, and will cover the history of the region up until the year 1453.
According to the professor, one of the most plausible explanations regarding the origins of the ancient Macedonians was that they came from the Pindus Mountains. However, their whereabouts prior to that remains unknown.

They settled in a small area to the north-east of Mount Olympus sometime after 1000BC.

Despite their neighbours retaining parts of their own identity, the Macedonians proved to be stronger, absorbing a number of other groups and pushing others out of the region.

Although the ancient Macedonians did experience invasions, such as the Illyrians on the west, by the fourth century BC they had become a dominant power and the general trend was expansion under King Phillip II.

Alexander, Phillip II’s son, aided the seizure of the Persian Empire, yet following his death there was nobody left to take his place and further expand.

This led to Macedonia and its acquired territories being ruled by separate dynasties.

Following this, in the second century BC the Romans achieved something that was impossible for so many others.

By conquering the rest of Greece, the Macedonian borders became less fixed, varying as the Byzantine Empire succeeded the Romans.

This effectively turned the Greek-run Macedonia into an enlarged administrative district, fragmenting its ethnic identity.

Prior to the Roman invasion, FYROM’s capital of Skopje was not originally in Macedonia, Professor Melville-Jones explains, and was referred to by the
Romans as ‘Scupi’.

“It [Skopje] later became a part of the territory after the Romans enlarged the new province that they called Macedonia, which stretched all the way over to the Adriatic Sea,” says Professor Melville-Jones.

Due to this instability and change in the region, Professor Melville-Jones doesn’t believe the ancient Macedonians to be the same as today’s FYROM citizens.

“There’s no continuity anywhere in the world. I found out myself for instance, I always thought that I was Welsh because my parents were Welsh,” he tells Neos Kosmos.

“I never thought about it before but then I realised that only one of my grandparents came from a family that was completely Welsh and the other three grandparents all came from people that had moved from England to Wales.”

Rather than placing an emphasis on the continuity of population, he leads us to rather think about the continuity of language and culture, which he says is separate to ethnicity.

According to the professor, until Alexander the Great there wasn’t such a thing as the Greek language; rather, there were various dialects spoken around Greece. However, the Greek of Athens, known as Attic Greek, was the most developed, partly based on the literature of the time.

“So it [Attic Greek] was accepted by the Macedonian court as their high class language. There’s no doubt that Macedonian fits under one of the dialects of the Greek family,” he says.

The lecture to be presented next week will be the same lecture that was given in Melbourne earlier this year, and has Professor Melville-Jones prepared for a backlash.

Giving the lecture to a predominantly Greek-speaking audience, he was not surprised that by question time his lecture was somewhat overlooked and turned to issues of modern times and border security.

“When it came to questions afterwards, of course they were asking me about the modern situation and I felt no hesitation about telling them what I thought,” he says.

“It’s a terrible mess. But what got me involved was this trying to claim Phillip II and Alexander the Great, which is simply untrue. Their territory was never a part of the Kingdom of Alexander. See that’s what makes me go to war.”

The lecture will be supported by a PowerPoint presentation, showing maps and images of the region throughout the period.

Aside from the aforementioned lecture, the professor has been asked to contribute to the journal for the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies. Due to its depth of subject matter, the article will be split into three instalments, with the first part covering the period up to the time just before Phillip II became King of Macedonia.

The lecture ‘The Borders of Ancient Macedonia’ will be given on Thursday 27 November at 7.30 pm at the Respite Centre, behind The Greek Club and the Greek Church of St George in Edmonstone Street, West End.