Is Zeus the King of the Greek pantheon?

The story is based on the Greek mythological tale of Europa and the bull, where the white bull is the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, in disguise. Zeus, the sky and thunder god of the Olympic pantheon, often wore a disguise when romantically pursuing mortal women, so as to avoid the eye of his wife and sister, Hera.

The White Bull

The White Bull (original title in French: "Le Taureau Blanc") is a fable and a work of ""contes philosophiques"", a philosophical novel, written by the Age of Enlightenment-era philosopher Voltaire. The story is based on the Greek tale of Europa and the bull, where the white bull is in fact the Greek god Zeus.

The date the story was written is unknown but it was published between the years 1773 and 1774. Voltaire's work seems to be prophetic in nature because the story was published only fifteen years before the French Revolution, when beheadings became common.

"How the Princess Amasidia met a bull"
The story takes place in Ancient Egypt where Princess Amasidia, daughter to King Amasis, is walking along the Pelusium Way in the company of Old Mambres, who the king appointed to be in charge of her household. She is deeply saddened as her love has been missing for 7 years and the King has forbidden him. No one in the kingdom is to even speak his name. While walking along the Pelusium Way she encounters many majestic creatures one which is the most beautiful White Bull she has ever seen. As soon as the Bull sees the princess he tries to run towards her as a peculiar old lady tries to restrain the bull. As soon as the Bull reaches princess Amasidia, he throws himself to the ground weeping and kissing her feet. As soon as the princess sees this she offers to purchase the Bull and the bull seems to want to be with the princess, yet the bull cannot speak. Seeing that Amasidia wants the bull, Mambres goes to the old women to try to persuade her to sell the bull.

"How wise Mambres, former sorcerer to the Pharaohs, recognized an old woman, and how she recognized him"
As Mambres tries to persuade the old lady to sell the bull, she states that the bull is not hers to sell, like the rest of the animals they see there. Then they speak of how they met 700 years ago when Mambres was traveling from Syria to Egypt. The old lady was the noble Pythoness of Endor. The old woman states that even though they are old friends, she cannot satisfy their curiosity about the bull. Amasidia then goes to talk to the woman about buying the bull, yet the old lady still refuses. The lady says you are welcome to see the bull and feed him to your likings but he is never to leave the watch of the other animals and the old lady. They argue and Amasidia asks if he were to escape she would not be able to restrain him, but the old lady says that if he were to do that, the magical serpent might give the bull a venomous bite. As the day turns to night Amasidia knows that she has to return home and leave the bull.

"How the fair Amasidia held secret converse with a handsome serpent"
The next day Amasidia and Mambres are talking and decide the bull truly is a majestic creature and they start devising a plan to speak with the serpent. Mambres sets up a meeting between the princess and the serpent, and informs her that to get a secret from the serpent she must flatter him. They speak of his past presence as a god, and the serpent informs the princess that she has a certain power over him, the same power which he is to have over others. The serpent then agrees to tell Amasidia the tale of the white bull. The bull used to be a king who fell in love with his dreams as he slept. Wanting to remember them he hired Magi to retell him his dreams and interpret them for him. The Magi failed and the king had them hanged. Then about seven years ago a Jew interpreted his dream, and then suddenly the king turned into the ox he is now. Upon hearing that the ox is her lost love she faints, and Mambres rushes over, thinking she is dead.

"How they wanted to sacrifice the ox and exorcize the Princess"
The bull saw the princess's ladies rushing to her and did the same dragging the old lady. No one could wake the princess till the bull arrived. Then the princess abruptly awoke. She then showered the bull with kisses and all of the princess's ladies were bewildered. The ladies rushed back to their homes and told different stories to all who would hear. With all the talk of this gossip the king took wind of the story. Upon hearing the story he was filled with anger and sentenced his daughter to be locked in her chamber. Mambres knowing that the bull was the princess's love had to keep it a secret because that man was Nabuchad the one who had dethroned Amasis 7 years prior. The king had hired the Jew to perform the metamorphoses. Mambres then informs the princess that the only metamorphoses that can be changed back is one of an ox.

"How wise Mambres acted wisely"
Mambres then tries to trick the old lady into giving the ox to him so that he may hide him in one of his country's stables. Mambres then devised a plan to appoint the white bull as the new bull god Apis, and sent four magical animals, a raven, she-ass, dog, and dove to deliver a letter to the High Priest of Memphis, so that the priests could come and worship the new bull. He used tests to see of the animals were trustworthy, and all passed but the raven, who left displeased. Mambres then sent three servants to follow the animals.

"How Mambres met three prophets and gave them a good dinner"
Upon talking to his servants, they revealed themselves as the three prophets, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. He then invited them along with the old lady and bull to a great dinner. The white bull was unable to take part in the feast as he was an animal and his identity was unknown to them. He sat angered as the prophet that had imprisoned him, Daniel, and the old lady got to enjoy a feast while he lay in the grass hungry. The dinner continued and the prophets, Mambres, and old lady feasted and drank wine, telling stories. Then the prophets and Mambres walked along the Nile talking into the night. The white bull seeing and opportunity to strike his enemies took it and as he was charging towards the prophets the master of things transformed them into magpies so they were not harmed.

"The King of Tanis arrives. His daughter and the bull are to be sacrificed."
As the King arrived he yelled out saying that the bull needed to be tied up and thrown out to the Nile where the whale of Jonas was to eat him, for having placed a spell on his daughter. Mambres knowing that the raven had told the king everything, had the serpent go to Amasidia and reassure her that everything would be okay. Mambres then told the king that the bull needed to stay alive until another suitor had been found for the bull god Apis. The king agreed and gave Mambres one week to find a replacement. The old lady had departed spirits try and scare the king into not sacrificing the bull, but just like Nabuchad he did not remember in the morning.

"How the serpent told stories to the Princess, to comfort her"
The serpent told stories to Amasidia to calm her, telling her times when he cured serpent bites by just displaying himself on the end of a stick. He told her other inspirational stories and in order that her night might not be filled with grief.

"How the serpent brought her no comfort"
The princess remarked to the serpent stories by saying they did nothing but bore her. She needed stories that did not resemble dreams. He continued to tell her plausible stories, but she was not entertained. After one tale of love she could not refrain and yelled the name of her lover, Nebuchadnezzar!. Her ladies also yelled the name, and the raven went to inform the king, as it was still an offense to even utter his name. Amasis was enraged again and sent 12 of his evilest men to gather his daughter.

"How they wanted to cut off the Princess's head, and how they did not cut it off"
As they brought the Princess to Amasis, he re-informed her how by uttering his name you are condemned to death. She told her father to carry out the penalty, but to first allow her to bewail her virginity. He granted her wish and said tomorrow both you and the bull will be killed. Priests arriving due to the letter, and crowds joined from all reaches of the kingdom, all chanting "Our ox is dead and done, we'll find ourselves a better one."

"How the princess married her ox"
The king was surprised by this spectacle, and did not carry out the killing of the bull. The priests had arrived just in time to worship Nebuchad as the new Apis. Mambres then told the king that he should be the first to untie the ox and worship him, and the king obliged. Then Amasis went to kill his daughter as if he didn't he would be sentenced to hell. While preparing for the killing, Amasidia shouted her love for Nebuchad. Upon becoming the new bull god Nebuchad gained the ability to speak and shouted back to Amasidia that he will love her till his death. After this the bull regained his human form in front of the large crowd. Then Nebuchad said, "I would rather be Amasidia's lover than a god. I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Kings." Nebuchad then married Amasidia on the spot and showed mercy to his new father-in-law and let him keep his kingdom of Tanis. He also bestowed foundations to the dove, she-ass, dog, whale, three magpies, and even the raven., showing the whole world that he could pardon as well as conquer. The old lady even received a fat pension. This created a custom that was passed on to all kings, that all can be pardoned after recognizing the error of their ways.

The stories of the Greek Olympic pantheon would have been well known by the educated people of Voltaire's time.
In 1951 an illustrated version was published by the French erotic painter Paul-Émile Bécat.

Zeus played a dominant role, presiding over the Greek Olympian pantheon. He fathered many of the heroes and was featured in many of their local cults. Though the Homeric "cloud collector" was the god of the sky and thunder like his Near-Eastern counterparts, he was also the supreme cultural artifact; in some senses, he was the embodiment of Greek religious beliefs and the archetypal Greek deity.

Zeus

Zeus (;, "Zeús" ) is the sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion, who rules as king of the gods of Mount Olympus. His name is cognate with the first element of his Roman equivalent Jupiter. His mythologies and powers are similar, though not identical, to those of Indo-European deities such as Indra, Jupiter, Perkūnas, Perun, and Thor.

Zeus is the child of Cronus and Rhea, the youngest of his siblings to be born, though sometimes reckoned the eldest as the others required disgorging from Cronus's stomach. In most traditions, he is married to Hera, by whom he is usually said to have fathered Ares, Hebe, and Hephaestus. At the oracle of Dodona, his consort was said to be Dione, by whom the "Iliad" states that he fathered Aphrodite. Zeus was also infamous for his erotic escapades. These resulted in many godly and heroic offspring, including Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Persephone, Dionysus, Perseus, Heracles, Helen of Troy, Minos, and the Muses.

He was respected as an allfather who was chief of the gods and assigned the others to their roles: "Even the gods who are not his natural children address him as Father, and all the gods rise in his presence." He was equated with many foreign weather gods, permitting Pausanias to observe "That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men". Zeus' symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak. In addition to his Indo-European inheritance, the classical "cloud-gatherer" (Greek:, "Nephelēgereta") also derives certain iconographic traits from the cultures of the ancient Near East, such as the scepter. Zeus is frequently depicted by Greek artists in one of two poses: standing, striding forward with a thunderbolt leveled in his raised right hand, or seated in majesty.

The god's name in the nominative is ("Zeús"). It is inflected as follows: vocative: (""); accusative: (); genitive: (); dative: (). Diogenes Laërtius quotes Pherecydes of Syros as spelling the name,.

"Zeus" is the Greek continuation of *"," the name of the Proto-Indo-European god of the daytime sky, also called *' ("Sky Father"). The god is known under this name in the Rigveda (Vedic Sanskrit "Dyaus/Dyaus Pita"), Latin (compare "Jupiter", from "Iuppiter", deriving from the Proto-Indo-European vocative *'), deriving from the root *"dyeu"- ("to shine", and in its many derivatives, "sky, heaven, god").
Zeus is the only deity in the Olympic pantheon whose name has such a transparent Indo-European etymology.

The earliest attested forms of the name are the Mycenaean Greek, "di-we" and, "di-wo", written in the Linear B syllabic script.

Plato, in his "Cratylus", gives a folk etymology of Zeus meaning "cause of life always to all things," because of puns between alternate titles of Zeus ("Zen" and "Dia") with the Greek words for life and "because of." This etymology, along with Plato's entire method of deriving etymologies, is not supported by modern scholarship.

Cronus sired several children by Rhea: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon, but swallowed them all as soon as they were born, since he had learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overthrown by his son as he had previously overthrown Uranus, his own father, an oracle that Rhea heard and wished to avert.

When Zeus was about to be born, Rhea sought Gaia to devise a plan to save him, so that Cronus would get his retribution for his acts against Uranus and his own children. Rhea gave birth to Zeus in Crete, handing Cronus a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he promptly swallowed.

Varying versions of the story exist:After reaching manhood, Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge first the stone (which was set down at Pytho under the glens of Parnassus to be a sign to mortal men, the Omphalos) then his siblings in reverse order of swallowing. In some versions, Metis gave Cronus an emetic to force him to disgorge the babies, or Zeus cut Cronus's stomach open. Then Zeus released the brothers of Cronus, the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes, from their dungeon in Tartarus, killing their guard, Campe.

As a token of their appreciation, the Cyclopes gave him thunder and the thunderbolt, or lightning, which had previously been hidden by Gaia. Together, Zeus, his brothers and sisters, Hecatonchires and Cyclopes overthrew Cronus and the other Titans, in the combat called the Titanomachy. The defeated Titans were then cast into a shadowy underworld region known as Tartarus. Atlas, one of the titans who fought against Zeus, was punished by having to hold up the sky.

After the battle with the Titans, Zeus shared the world with his elder brothers, Poseidon and Hades, by drawing lots: Zeus got the sky and air, Poseidon the waters, and Hades the world of the dead (the underworld). The ancient Earth, Gaia, could not be claimed; she was left to all three, each according to their capabilities, which explains why Poseidon was the "earth-shaker" (the god of earthquakes) and Hades claimed the humans who died (see also Penthus).

Gaia resented the way Zeus had treated the Titans, because they were her children. Soon after taking the throne as king of the gods, Zeus had to fight some of Gaia's other children, the monsters Typhon and Echidna. He vanquished Typhon and trapped him under Mount Etna, but left Echidna and her children alive.

The most notable conflict in Zeus's history was his struggle for power. Zeus's parents Cronus and Rhea ruled the Ancient World after taking control from Uranus, Cronus's father. When Cronus realized that he wanted power for the rest of time he started to eat his children, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. When Rhea realized what was going on, she quickly saved their youngest child, Zeus. Having escaped, Zeus was spared because of the swiftness of Rhea tricking Cronus into thinking she consumed Zeus. She wrapped a stone in a blanket, and Cronus swallowed it thinking he was swallowing his last child. As a result of this, Zeus was shipped off to live on the island of Crete.

When Zeus was atop Mount Olympus he grew upset with mankind and the sacrifices they were performing on one another. Furiously, he decided it would be smart to wipe out mankind with a gigantic flood using the help of his brother Poseidon, King of the Seas. Killing every human except Deucalion and Pyrrha, Zeus flooded the entire planet but then realized he then had to restore society with new people. After clearing all the water, he had Deucalion and Pyrrah create humans to repopulate the earth using stones that became humans. These stones represented the "hardness" of mankind and the man life. This story has been told different ways and in different time periods between Ancient Greek Mythology and The Bible, although the base of the story remains true.

Throughout history Zeus has used violence to get his way, or even terrorize humans. As god of the sky he has the power to hurl lightning bolts as his weapon of choice. Since lightning is quite powerful and sometimes deadly, it is a bold sign when lightning strikes because it is known that Zeus most likely threw the bolt.

The "Iliad" is a poem by Homer about the Trojan war and the battle over the City of Troy. As God of the sky, lightning, thunder, law, order, justice, Zeus controlled ancient Greece and all of the mortals and immortals living there. The Iliad covers the Trojan War, in which Zeus plays a major part.

Notable Scenes that include Zeus
Zeus was brother and consort of Hera. By Hera, Zeus sired Ares, Hebe and Hephaestus, though some accounts say that Hera produced these offspring alone. Some also include Eileithyia, Eris, Enyo and Angelos as their daughters. In the section of the Iliad known to scholars as the Deception of Zeus, the two of them are described as having begun their sexual relationship without their parents knowing about it. The conquests of Zeus among nymphs and the mythic mortal progenitors of Hellenic dynasties are famous. Olympian mythography even credits him with unions with Leto, Demeter, Metis, Themis, Eurynome and Mnemosyne. Other relationships with immortals included Dione and Maia. Among mortals were Semele, Io, Europa and Leda (for more details, see below) and with the young Ganymede (although he was mortal Zeus granted him eternal youth and immortality).

Many myths render Hera as jealous of his amorous conquests and a consistent enemy of Zeus's mistresses and their children by him. For a time, a nymph named Echo had the job of distracting Hera from his affairs by talking incessantly, and when Hera discovered the deception, she cursed Echo to repeat the words of others.

The Greeks variously claimed that the Moires/Fates were the daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Themis or of primordial beings like Chaos, Nyx, or Ananke.

The Charites/Graces were usually considered the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome but they were also said to be daughters of Dionysus and Aphrodite or of Helios and the naiad Aegle.

Some accounts say that Ares, Hebe, and Hephaestus were born parthenogenetically.

According to one version, Athena is said to be born parthenogenetically.

Helen was either the daughter of Leda or Nemesis.

Tyche is usually considered a daughter of Aphrodite and Hermes.

Zeus played a dominant role, presiding over the Greek Olympian pantheon. He fathered many of the heroes and was featured in many of their local cults. Though the Homeric "cloud collector" was the god of the sky and thunder like his Near-Eastern counterparts, he was also the supreme cultural artifact; in some senses, he was the embodiment of Greek religious beliefs and the archetypal Greek deity.

Aside from local epithets that simply designated the deity as doing something random at some particular place, the epithets or titles applied to Zeus emphasized different aspects of his wide-ranging authority:Additional names and epithets for Zeus are also:The major center where all Greeks converged to pay honor to their chief god was Olympia. Their quadrennial festival featured the famous Games. There was also an altar to Zeus made not of stone, but of ash, from the accumulated remains of many centuries' worth of animals sacrificed there.

Outside of the major inter-polis sanctuaries, there were no modes of worshipping Zeus precisely shared across the Greek world. Most of the titles listed below, for instance, could be found at any number of Greek temples from Asia Minor to Sicily. Certain modes of ritual were held in common as well: sacrificing a white animal over a raised altar, for instance.

With one exception, Greeks were unanimous in recognizing the birthplace of Zeus as Crete. Minoan culture contributed many essentials of ancient Greek religion: "by a hundred channels the old civilization emptied itself into the new", Will Durant observed, and Cretan Zeus retained his youthful Minoan features. The local child of the Great Mother, "a small and inferior deity who took the roles of son and consort", whose Minoan name the Greeks Hellenized as Velchanos, was in time assumed as an epithet by Zeus, as transpired at many other sites, and he came to be venerated in Crete as Zeus Velchanos ("boy-Zeus"), often simply the "Kouros".

In Crete, Zeus was worshipped at a number of caves at Knossos, Ida and Palaikastro. In the Hellenistic period a small sanctuary dedicated to Zeus Velchanos was founded at the Hagia Triada site of a long-ruined Minoan palace. Broadly contemporary coins from Phaistos show the form under which he was worshiped: a youth sits among the branches of a tree, with a cockerel on his knees. On other Cretan coins Velchanos is represented as an eagle and in association with a goddess celebrating a mystic marriage. Inscriptions at Gortyn and Lyttos record a "Velchania" festival, showing that Velchanios was still widely venerated in Hellenistic Crete.

The stories of Minos and Epimenides suggest that these caves were once used for incubatory divination by kings and priests. The dramatic setting of Plato's "Laws" is along the pilgrimage-route to one such site, emphasizing archaic Cretan knowledge. On Crete, Zeus was represented in art as a long-haired youth rather than a mature adult and hymned as "ho megas kouros", "the great youth". Ivory statuettes of the "Divine Boy" were unearthed near the Labyrinth at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans. With the Kouretes, a band of ecstatic armed dancers, he presided over the rigorous military-athletic training and secret rites of the Cretan "paideia".

The myth of the death of Cretan Zeus, localised in numerous mountain sites though only mentioned in a comparatively late source, Callimachus, together with the assertion of Antoninus Liberalis that a fire shone forth annually from the birth-cave the infant shared with a mythic swarm of bees, suggests that Velchanos had been an annual vegetative spirit.
The Hellenistic writer Euhemerus apparently proposed a theory that Zeus had actually been a great king of Crete and that posthumously, his glory had slowly turned him into a deity. The works of Euhemerus himself have not survived, but Christian patristic writers took up the suggestion.

The epithet Zeus Lykaios ("wolf-Zeus") is assumed by Zeus only in connection with the archaic festival of the Lykaia on the slopes of Mount Lykaion ("Wolf Mountain"), the tallest peak in rustic Arcadia; Zeus had only a formal connection with the rituals and myths of this primitive rite of passage with an ancient threat of cannibalism and the possibility of a werewolf transformation for the ephebes who were the participants. Near the ancient ash-heap where the sacrifices took place was a forbidden precinct in which, allegedly, no shadows were ever cast.

According to Plato, a particular clan would gather on the mountain to make a sacrifice every nine years to Zeus Lykaios, and a single morsel of human entrails would be intermingled with the animal's. Whoever ate the human flesh was said to turn into a wolf, and could only regain human form if he did not eat again of human flesh until the next nine-year cycle had ended. There were games associated with the Lykaia, removed in the fourth century to the first urbanization of Arcadia, Megalopolis; there the major temple was dedicated to Zeus Lykaios.

There is, however, the crucial detail that "Lykaios" or "Lykeios" (epithets of Zeus and Apollo) may derive from Proto-Greek *, "light", a noun still attested in compounds such as, "twilight",, "year" (lit. "light's course") etc. This, Cook argues, brings indeed much new 'light' to the matter as Achaeus, the contemporary tragedian of Sophocles, spoke of Zeus Lykaios as "starry-eyed", and this Zeus Lykaios may just be the Arcadian Zeus, son of Aether, described by Cicero. Again under this new signification may be seen Pausanias' descriptions of Lykosoura being 'the first city that ever the sun beheld', and of the altar of Zeus, at the summit of Mount Lykaion, before which stood two columns bearing gilded eagles and 'facing the sun-rise'. Further Cook sees only the tale of Zeus' sacred precinct at Mount Lykaion allowing no shadows referring to Zeus as 'god of light' (Lykaios).

Although etymology indicates that Zeus was originally a sky god, many Greek cities honored a local Zeus who lived underground. Athenians and Sicilians honored Zeus Meilichios ("kindly" or "honeyed") while other cities had Zeus Chthonios ("earthy"), Zeus Katachthonios ("under-the-earth") and Zeus Plousios ("wealth-bringing"). These deities might be represented as snakes or in human form in visual art, or, for emphasis as both together in one image. They also received offerings of black animal victims sacrificed into sunken pits, as did chthonic deities like Persephone and Demeter, and also the heroes at their tombs. Olympian gods, by contrast, usually received white victims sacrificed upon raised altars.

In some cases, cities were not entirely sure whether the "daimon" to whom they sacrificed was a hero or an underground Zeus. Thus the shrine at Lebadaea in Boeotia might belong to the hero Trophonius or to Zeus Trephonius ("the nurturing"), depending on whether you believe Pausanias, or Strabo. The hero Amphiaraus was honored as Zeus Amphiaraus at Oropus outside of Thebes, and the Spartans even had a shrine to Zeus Agamemnon. Ancient Molossian kings sacrificed to Zeus Areius. Strabo mention that at Tralles there was the Zeus Larisaeus.

In addition to the Panhellenic titles and conceptions listed above, local cults maintained their own idiosyncratic ideas about the king of gods and men. With the epithet Zeus Aetnaeus he was worshiped on Mount Aetna, where there was a statue of him, and a local festival called the Aetnaea in his honor. Other examples are listed below. As Zeus Aeneius or Zeus Aenesius, he was worshiped in the island of Cephalonia, where he had a temple on Mount Aenos.

Although most oracle sites were usually dedicated to Apollo, the heroes, or various goddesses like Themis, a few oracular sites were dedicated to Zeus. In addition, some foreign oracles, such as Baʿal's at Heliopolis, were associated with Zeus in Greek or Jupiter in Latin.

The cult of Zeus at Dodona in Epirus, where there is evidence of religious activity from the second millennium BC onward, centered on a sacred oak. When the "Odyssey" was composed (circa 750 BC), divination was done there by barefoot priests called "Selloi", who lay on the ground and observed the rustling of the leaves and branches. By the time Herodotus wrote about Dodona, female priestesses called peleiades ("doves") had replaced the male priests.

Zeus's consort at Dodona was not Hera, but the goddess Dione — whose name is a feminine form of "Zeus". Her status as a titaness suggests to some that she may have been a more powerful pre-Hellenic deity, and perhaps the original occupant of the oracle.

The oracle of Ammon at the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt did not lie within the bounds of the Greek world before Alexander's day, but it already loomed large in the Greek mind during the archaic era: Herodotus mentions consultations with Zeus Ammon in his account of the Persian War. Zeus Ammon was especially favored at Sparta, where a temple to him existed by the time of the Peloponnesian War.

After Alexander made a trek into the desert to consult the oracle at Siwa, the figure arose in the Hellenistic imagination of a Libyan Sibyl.

Zeus was identified with the Roman god Jupiter and associated in the syncretic classical imagination (see "interpretatio graeca") with various other deities, such as the Egyptian Ammon and the Etruscan Tinia. He, along with Dionysus, absorbed the role of the chief Phrygian god Sabazios in the syncretic deity known in Rome as Sabazius. The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes erected a statue of Zeus Olympios in the Judean Temple in Jerusalem. Hellenizing Jews referred to this statue as Baal Shamen (in English, Lord of Heaven).

Zeus is occasionally conflated with the Hellenic sun god, Helios, who is sometimes either directly referred to as Zeus' eye, or clearly implied as such. Hesiod, for instance, describes Zeus's eye as effectively the sun. This perception is possibly derived from earlier Proto-Indo-European religion, in which the sun is occasionally envisioned as the eye of *"Dyḗus Pḥtḗr" (see Hvare-khshaeta).

The Cretan Zeus Tallaios had solar elements to his cult. "Talos" was the local equivalent of Helios.

In Neoplatonism, Zeus's relation to the gods familiar from mythology is taught as the Demiurge or Divine Mind. Specifically within Plotinus's work the "Enneads" and the "Platonic Theology" of Proclus.

Zeus is mentioned in the New Testament twice, first in Acts 14:8–13: When the people living in Lystra saw the Apostle Paul heal a lame man, they considered Paul and his partner Barnabas to be gods, identifying Paul with Hermes and Barnabas with Zeus, even trying to offer them sacrifices with the crowd. Two ancient inscriptions discovered in 1909 near Lystra testify to the worship of these two gods in that city. One of the inscriptions refers to the "priests of Zeus", and the other mentions "Hermes Most Great"" and "Zeus the sun-god".

The second occurrence is in Acts 28:11: the name of the ship in which the prisoner Paul set sail from the island of Malta bore the figurehead "Sons of Zeus" aka Castor and Pollux.

The deuterocanonical book of 2 Maccabees 6:1, 2 talks of King Antiochus IV (Epiphanes), who in his attempt to stamp out the Jewish religion, directed that the temple at Jerusalem be profaned and rededicated to Zeus (Jupiter Olympius).

Depictions of Zeus as a bull, the form he took when abducting Europa, are found on the Greek 2-euro coin and on the United Kingdom identity card for visa holders. Mary Beard, professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has criticised this for its apparent celebration of rape.

Zeus has been portrayed by Axel Ringvall in "Jupiter på jorden", the first known film adaption to feature Zeus; Niall MacGinnis in "Jason and the Argonauts" and Angus MacFadyen in the 2000 remake; Laurence Olivier in the original "Clash of the Titans", and Liam Neeson in the 2010 remake, along with the 2012 sequel Wrath of the Titans; Anthony Quinn in the 1990s TV series ""; Rip Torn in the Disney animated feature "Hercules"; Corey Burton in "Hercules", "God of War II", "God of War III", "", "PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale", and "Kingdom Hearts 3"; and Sean Bean in "" (2010).

The Classical Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides reported the legend that the Macedonian kings of the Argead dynasty were descendants of Temenus, king of Argos, and could therefore claim the mythical Heracles as one of their ancestors as well as a direct lineage from Zeus, chief god of the Greek pantheon. Contradictory legends state that either Perdiccas I of Macedon or Caranus of Macedon were the founders of the Argead dynasty, with either five or eight kings before AmyntasI. The assertion that the Argeads descended from Temenus was accepted by the "Hellanodikai" authorities of the Ancient Olympic Games, permitting Alexander I of Macedon () to enter the competitions owing to his perceived Greek heritage. Little is known about the kingdom before the reign of AlexanderI's father Amyntas I of Macedon () during the Archaic period.

Macedonia (ancient kingdom)

Macedonia () or Macedon (;, ""), was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece, and later the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. The kingdom was founded and initially ruled by the royal Argead dynasty, which was followed by the Antipatrid and Antigonid dynasties. Home to the ancient Macedonians, the earliest kingdom was centered on the northeastern part of the Greek peninsula, and bordered by Epirus to the west, Paeonia to the north, Thrace to the east and Thessaly to the south.

Before the 4th century BC, Macedonia was a small kingdom outside of the area dominated by the great city-states of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, and briefly subordinate to Achaemenid Persia. During the reign of the Argead king PhilipII (359–336 BC), Macedonia subdued mainland Greece and Thrace through conquest and diplomacy. With a reformed army containing phalanxes wielding the "sarissa" pike, PhilipII defeated the old powers of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338BC. PhilipII's son Alexander the Great, leading a federation of Greek states, accomplished his father's objective of commanding the whole of Greece when he destroyed Thebes after the city revolted. Pro-Macedonian Athenian oligarch, Philippides of Paiania was instrumental in the defeat of Chaeronea by assisting in king Philip's cause. He was prosecuted as a traitor known in the speech Hypereides against Philippides, known from Athenaeus. During Alexander's subsequent campaign of conquest, he overthrew the Achaemenid Empire and conquered territory that stretched as far as the Indus River. For a brief period, his empire was the most powerful in the worldthe definitive Hellenistic state, inaugurating the transition to a new period of Ancient Greek civilization. Greek arts and literature flourished in the new conquered lands and advances in philosophy, engineering, and science spread throughout much of the ancient world. Of particular importance were the contributions of Aristotle, tutor to Alexander, whose writings became a keystone of Western philosophy.

After Alexander's death in 323BC, the ensuing wars of the Diadochi, and the partitioning of Alexander's short-lived empire, Macedonia remained a Greek cultural and political center in the Mediterranean region along with Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid Empire, and the Kingdom of Pergamon. Important cities such as Pella, Pydna, and Amphipolis were involved in power struggles for control of the territory. New cities were founded, such as Thessalonica by the usurper Cassander (named after his wife Thessalonike of Macedon). Macedonia's decline began with the Macedonian Wars and the rise of Rome as the leading Mediterranean power. At the end of the Third Macedonian War in 168BC, the Macedonian monarchy was abolished and replaced by Roman client states. A short-lived revival of the monarchy during the Fourth Macedonian War in 150–148BC ended with the establishment of the Roman province of Macedonia.

The Macedonian kings, who wielded absolute power and commanded state resources such as gold and silver, facilitated mining operations to mint currency, finance their armies and, by the reign of PhilipII, a Macedonian navy. Unlike the other "diadochi" successor states, the imperial cult fostered by Alexander was never adopted in Macedonia, yet Macedonian rulers nevertheless assumed roles as high priests of the kingdom and leading patrons of domestic and international cults of the Hellenistic religion. The authority of Macedonian kings was theoretically limited by the institution of the army, while a few municipalities within the Macedonian commonwealth enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and even had democratic governments with popular assemblies.

The name Macedonia (, "") comes from the ethnonym Μακεδόνες ("Makedónes"), which itself is derived from the ancient Greek adjective μακεδνός ("makednós"), meaning "tall", possibly descriptive of the people. It has the same root as the adjective μακρός ("makros"), meaning "long" or "tall" in Ancient Greek. The name is originally believed to have meant either "highlanders", "the tall ones", or "high grown men". Linguist Robert S. P. Beekes claims that both terms are of Pre-Greek substrate origin and cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European morphology.

The kingdom of Macedonia was situated along the Haliacmon and Axius rivers in Lower Macedonia, north of Mount Olympus. Historian Robert Malcolm Errington suggests that one of the earliest Argead kings established Aigai (modern Vergina) as their capital in the mid-7th centuryBC. Before the 4th centuryBC, the kingdom covered a region corresponding roughly to the western and central parts of the region of Macedonia in modern Greece. It gradually expanded into the region of Upper Macedonia, inhabited by the Greek Lyncestae and Elimiotae tribes, and into regions of Emathia, Eordaia, Bottiaea, Mygdonia, Crestonia, and Almopia, which were inhabited by various peoples such as Thracians and Phrygians. Macedonia's non-Greek neighbors included Thracians, inhabiting territories to the northeast, Illyrians to the northwest, and Paeonians to the north, while the lands of Thessaly to the south and Epirus to the west were inhabited by Greeks with similar cultures to that of the Macedonians.

A year after Darius I of Persia () launched an invasion into Europe against the Scythians, Paeonians, Thracians, and several Greek city-states of the Balkans, the Persian general Megabazus used diplomacy to convince AmyntasI to submit as a vassal of the Achaemenid Empire, ushering in the period of Achaemenid Macedonia. Achaemenid Persian hegemony over Macedonia was briefly interrupted by the Ionian Revolt (499–493BC), yet the Persian general Mardonius brought it back under Achaemenid suzerainty.

Although Macedonia enjoyed a large degree of autonomy and was never made a satrapy (i.e. province) of the Achaemenid Empire, it was expected to provide troops for the Achaemenid army. AlexanderI provided Macedonian military support to Xerxes I () during the Second Persian invasion of Greece in 480–479 BC, and Macedonian soldiers fought on the side of the Persians at the 479BC Battle of Platea. Following the Greek victory at Salamis in 480BC, AlexanderI was employed as an Achaemenid diplomat to propose a peace treaty and alliance with Athens, an offer that was rejected. Soon afterwards, the Achaemenid forces were forced to withdraw from mainland Europe, marking the end of Persian control over Macedonia.

Although initially a Persian vassal, AlexanderI of Macedon fostered friendly diplomatic relations with his former Greek enemies, the Athenian and Spartan-led coalition of Greek city-states. His successor PerdiccasII () led the Macedonians to war in four separate conflicts against Athens, leader of the Delian League, while incursions by the Thracian ruler Sitalces of the Odrysian kingdom threatened Macedonia's territorial integrity in the northeast. The Athenian statesman Pericles promoted colonization of the Strymon River near the Kingdom of Macedonia, where the colonial city of Amphipolis was founded in 437/436BC so that it could provide Athens with a steady supply of silver and gold as well as timber and pitch to support the Athenian navy. Initially Perdiccas II did not take any action and might have even welcomed the Athenians, as the Thracians were foes to both of them. This changed due to an Athenian alliance with a brother and cousin of PerdiccasII who had rebelled against him. Thus, two separate wars were fought against Athens between 433 and 431BC. The Macedonian king retaliated by promoting the rebellion of Athens' allies in Chalcidice and subsequently won over the strategic city of Potidaea. After capturing the Macedonian cities Therma and Beroea, Athens besieged Potidaea but failed to overcome it; Therma was returned to Macedonia and much of Chalcidice to Athens in a peace treaty brokered by Sitalces, who provided Athens with military aid in exchange for acquiring new Thracian allies.

PerdiccasII sided with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta, and in 429 BC Athens retaliated by persuading Sitalces to invade Macedonia, but he was forced to retreat owing to a shortage of provisions in winter. In 424 BC, Arrhabaeus, a local ruler of Lynkestis in Upper Macedonia, rebelled against his overlord Perdiccas, and the Spartans agreed to help in putting down the revolt. At the Battle of Lyncestis the Macedonians panicked and fled before the fighting began, enraging the Spartan general Brasidas, whose soldiers looted the unattended Macedonian baggage train. Perdiccas then changed sides and supported Athens, and he was able to put down Arrhabaeus's revolt.
Brasidas died in 422 BC, the year Athens and Sparta struck an accord, the Peace of Nicias, that freed Macedonia from its obligations as an Athenian ally. Following the 418BC Battle of Mantinea, the victorious Spartans formed an alliance with Argos, a military pact PerdiccasII was keen to join given the threat of Spartan allies remaining in Chalcidice. When Argos suddenly switched sides as a pro-Athenian democracy, the Athenian navy was able to form a blockade against Macedonian seaports and invade Chalcidice in 417BC. PerdiccasII sued for peace in 414BC, forming an alliance with Athens that was continued by his son and successor ArchelausI (). Athens then provided naval support to ArchelausI in the 410BC Macedonian siege of Pydna, in exchange for timber and naval equipment.

Although Archelaus I was faced with some internal revolts and had to fend off an invasion of Illyrians led by Sirras of Lynkestis, he was able to project Macedonian power into Thessaly where he sent military aid to his allies. Although he retained Aigai as a ceremonial and religious center, ArchelausI moved the capital of the kingdom north to Pella, which was then positioned by a lake with a river connecting it to the Aegean Sea. He improved Macedonia's currency by minting coins with a higher silver content as well as issuing separate copper coinage. His royal court attracted the presence of well-known intellectuals such as the Athenian playwright Euripides. When ArchelausI was assassinated (perhaps following a homosexual love affair with royal pages at his court), the kingdom was plunged into chaos, in an era lasting from 399 to 393BC that included the reign of four different monarchs: Orestes, son of ArchelausI; AeropusII, uncle, regent, and murderer of Orestes; Pausanias, son of AeropusII; and AmyntasII, who was married to the youngest daughter of ArchelausI. Very little is known about this turbulent period; it came to an end when AmyntasIII (), son of Arrhidaeus and grandson of AmyntasI, killed Pausanias and claimed the Macedonian throne.
Amyntas III was forced to flee his kingdom in either 393 or 383BC (based on conflicting accounts), owing to a massive invasion by the Illyrian Dardani led by Bardylis. The pretender to the throne Argaeus ruled in his absence, yet AmyntasIII eventually returned to his kingdom with the aid of Thessalian allies. AmyntasIII was also nearly overthrown by the forces of the Chalcidian city of Olynthos, but with the aid of Teleutias, brother of the Spartan king Agesilaus II, the Macedonians forced Olynthos to surrender and dissolve their Chalcidian League in 379BC.

Alexander II (), son of EurydiceI and AmyntasIII, succeeded his father and immediately invaded Thessaly to wage war against the "tagus" (supreme Thessalian military leader) Alexander of Pherae, capturing the city of Larissa. The Thessalians, desiring to remove both AlexanderII and Alexander of Pherae as their overlords, appealed to Pelopidas of Thebes for aid; he succeeded in recapturing Larissa and, in the peace agreement arranged with Macedonia, received aristocratic hostages including AlexanderII's brother and future king PhilipII (). When Alexander was assassinated by his brother-in-law Ptolemy of Aloros, the latter acted as an overbearing regent for PerdiccasIII (), younger brother of AlexanderII, who eventually had Ptolemy executed when reaching the age of majority in 365BC. The remainder of Perdiccas III's reign was marked by political stability and financial recovery. However, an Athenian invasion led by Timotheus, son of Conon, managed to capture Methone and Pydna, and an Illyrian invasion led by Bardylis succeeded in killing PerdiccasIII and 4,000 Macedonian troops in battle.

Philip II was twenty-four years old when he acceded to the throne in 359BC. Through the use of deft diplomacy, he was able to convince the Thracians under Berisades to cease their support of Pausanias, a pretender to the throne, and the Athenians to halt their support of another pretender. He achieved these by bribing the Thracians and their Paeonian allies and establishing a treaty with Athens that relinquished his claims to Amphipolis. He was also able to make peace with the Illyrians who had threatened his borders.

Philip II spent his initial years radically transforming the Macedonian army. A reform of its organization, equipment, and training, including the introduction of the Macedonian phalanx armed with long pikes (i.e. the "sarissa"), proved immediately successful when tested against his Illyrian and Paeonian enemies. Confusing accounts in ancient sources have led modern scholars to debate how much PhilipII's royal predecessors may have contributed to these reforms and the extent to which his ideas were influenced by his adolescent years of captivity in Thebes as a political hostage during the Theban hegemony, especially after meeting with the general Epaminondas.

The Macedonians, like the other Greeks, traditionally practiced monogamy, but PhilipII practiced polygamy and married seven wives with perhaps only one that did not involve the loyalty of his aristocratic subjects or new allies. His first marriages were to Phila of Elimeia of the Upper Macedonian aristocracy as well as the Illyrian princess Audata to ensure a marriage alliance. To establish an alliance with Larissa in Thessaly, he married the Thessalian noblewoman Philinna in 358BC, who bore him a son who would later rule as Philip III Arrhidaeus (). In 357BC, he married Olympias to secure an alliance with Arybbas, the King of Epirus and the Molossians. This marriage would bear a son who would later rule as AlexanderIII (better known as Alexander the Great) and claim descent from the legendary Achilles by way of his dynastic heritage from Epirus. It is unclear whether or not the Achaemenid Persian kings influenced PhilipII's practice of polygamy, although his predecessor AmyntasIII had three sons with a possible second wife Gygaea: Archelaus, Arrhidaeus, and Menelaus. PhilipII had Archelaus put to death in 359BC, while PhilipII's other two half brothers fled to Olynthos, serving as a "casus belli" for the Olynthian War (349–348BC) against the Chalcidian League.

While Athens was preoccupied with the Social War (357–355 BC), PhilipII retook Amphipolis from them in 357BC and the following year recaptured Pydna and Potidaea, the latter of which he handed over to the Chalcidian League as promised in a treaty. In 356BC, he took Crenides, refounding it as Philippi, while his general Parmenion defeated the Illyrian king Grabos of the Grabaei. During the 355–354BC siege of Methone, PhilipII lost his right eye to an arrow wound, but managed to capture the city and treated the inhabitants cordially, unlike the Potidaeans, who had been enslaved.

Philip II then involved Macedonia in the Third Sacred War (356–346BC). It began when Phocis captured and plundered the temple of Apollo at Delphi instead of submitting unpaid fines, causing the Amphictyonic League to declare war on Phocis and a civil war among the members of the Thessalian League aligned with either Phocis or Thebes. PhilipII's initial campaign against Pherae in Thessaly in 353BC at the behest of Larissa ended in two disastrous defeats by the Phocian general Onomarchus. PhilipII in turn defeated Onomarchus in 352BC at the Battle of Crocus Field, which led to PhilipII's election as leader ("archon") of the Thessalian League, provided him a seat on the Amphictyonic Council, and allowed for a marriage alliance with Pherae by wedding Nicesipolis, niece of the tyrant Jason of Pherae.

After campaigning against the Thracian ruler Cersobleptes, in 349BC, PhilipII began his war against the Chalcidian League, which had been reestablished in 375BC following a temporary disbandment. Despite an Athenian intervention by Charidemus, Olynthos was captured by PhilipII in 348BC, and its inhabitants were sold into slavery, including some Athenian citizens. The Athenians, especially in a series of speeches by Demosthenes known as the "Olynthiacs", were unsuccessful in persuading their allies to counterattack and in 346BC concluded a treaty with Macedonia known as the Peace of Philocrates. The treaty stipulated that Athens would relinquish claims to Macedonian coastal territories, the Chalcidice, and Amphipolis in return for the release of the enslaved Athenians as well as guarantees that PhilipII would not attack Athenian settlements in the Thracian Chersonese. Meanwhile, Phocis and Thermopylae were captured by Macedonian forces, the Delphic temple robbers were executed, and PhilipII was awarded the two Phocian seats on the Amphictyonic Council and the position of master of ceremonies over the Pythian Games. Athens initially opposed his membership on the council and refused to attend the games in protest, but they eventually accepted these conditions, perhaps after some persuasion by Demosthenes in his oration "On the Peace".
Over the next few years, Philip II reformed local governments in Thessaly, campaigned against the Illyrian ruler Pleuratus I, deposed Arybbas in Epirus in favor of his brother-in-law AlexanderI (through PhilipII's marriage to Olympias), and defeated Cersebleptes in Thrace. This allowed him to extend Macedonian control over the Hellespont in anticipation of an invasion into Achaemenid Anatolia. In 342BC, PhilipII conquered a Thracian city in what is now Bulgaria and renamed it Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv). War broke out with Athens in 340BC while PhilipII was engaged in two ultimately unsuccessful sieges of Perinthus and Byzantion, followed by a successful campaign against the Scythians along the Danube and Macedonia's involvement in the Fourth Sacred War against Amphissa in 339BC. Thebes ejected a Macedonian garrison from Nicaea (near Thermopylae), leading Thebes to join Athens, Megara, Corinth, Achaea, and Euboea in a final confrontation against Macedonia at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338BC. After the Macedonian victory there, PhilipII installed an oligarchy in Thebes, yet was lenient toward Athens, wishing to utilize their navy in a planned invasion of the Achaemenid Empire. He was then chiefly responsible for the formation of the League of Corinth that included the major Greek city-states except Sparta. Despite the Kingdom of Macedonia's official exclusion from the league, in 337BC, PhilipII was elected as the leader ("hegemon") of its council ("synedrion") and the commander-in-chief ("strategos autokrator") of a forthcoming campaign to invade the Achaemenid Empire. Philip's plan to punish the Persians for the suffering of the Greeks and to liberate the Greek cities of Asia Minor as well as perhaps the panhellenic fear of another Persian invasion of Greece, contributed to his decision to invade the Achaemenid Empire. The Persians offered aid to Perinthus and Byzantion in 341–340BC, highlighting Macedonia's strategic need to secure Thrace and the Aegean Sea against increasing Achaemenid encroachment, as the Persian king Artaxerxes III further consolidated his control over satrapies in western Anatolia. The latter region, yielding far more wealth and valuable resources than the Balkans, was also coveted by the Macedonian king for its sheer economic potential.

When Philip II married Cleopatra Eurydice, niece of general Attalus, talk of providing new potential heirs at the wedding feast infuriated PhilipII's son Alexander, a veteran of the Battle of Chaeronea, and his mother Olympias. They fled together to Epirus before Alexander was recalled to Pella by PhilipII. When PhilipII arranged a marriage between his son Arrhidaeus and Ada of Caria, daughter of Pixodarus, the Persian satrap of Caria, Alexander intervened and proposed to marry Ada instead. PhilipII then cancelled the wedding altogether and exiled Alexander's advisors Ptolemy, Nearchus, and Harpalus. To reconcile with Olympias, PhilipII had their daughter Cleopatra marry Olympias' brother (and Cleopatra's uncle) AlexanderI of Epirus, but PhilipII was assassinated by his bodyguard, Pausanias of Orestis, during their wedding feast and succeeded by Alexander in 336BC.

Modern scholars have argued over the possible role of AlexanderIII "the Great" and his mother Olympias in the assassination of PhilipII, noting the latter's choice to exclude Alexander from his planned invasion of Asia, choosing instead for him to act as regent of Greece and deputy "hegemon" of the League of Corinth, and the potential bearing of another male heir between PhilipII and his new wife, Cleopatra Eurydice. AlexanderIII () was immediately proclaimed king by an assembly of the army and leading aristocrats, chief among them being Antipater and Parmenion. By the end of his reign and military career in 323BC, Alexander would rule over an empire consisting of mainland Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and much of Central and South Asia (i.e. modern Pakistan). Among his first acts was the burial of his father at Aigai. The members of the League of Corinth revolted at the news of PhilipII's death, but were soon quelled by military force alongside persuasive diplomacy, electing Alexander as "hegemon" of the league to carry out the planned invasion of Achaemenid Persia.

In 335 BC, Alexander fought against the Thracian tribe of the Triballi at Haemus Mons and along the Danube, forcing their surrender on Peuce Island. Shortly thereafter, the Illyrian king Cleitus of the Dardani threatened to attack Macedonia, but Alexander took the initiative and besieged the Dardani at Pelion (in modern Albania). When Thebes had once again revolted from the League of Corinth and was besieging the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmea, Alexander left the Illyrian front and marched to Thebes, which he placed under siege. After breaching the walls, Alexander's forces killed 6,000 Thebans, took 30,000 inhabitants as prisoners of war, and burned the city to the ground as a warning that convinced all other Greek states except Sparta not to challenge Alexander again.

Throughout his military career, Alexander won every battle that he personally commanded. His first victory against the Persians in Asia Minor at the Battle of the Granicus in 334BC used a small cavalry contingent as a distraction to allow his infantry to cross the river followed by a cavalry charge from his companion cavalry. Alexander led the cavalry charge at the Battle of Issus in 333BC, forcing the Persian king Darius III and his army to flee. DariusIII, despite having superior numbers, was again forced to flee the Battle of Gaugamela in 331BC. The Persian king was later captured and executed by his own satrap of Bactria and kinsman, Bessus, in 330BC. The Macedonian king subsequently hunted down and executed Bessus in what is now Afghanistan, securing the region of Sogdia in the process. At the 326BC Battle of the Hydaspes (modern-day Punjab), when the war elephants of King Porus of the Pauravas threatened Alexander's troops, he had them form open ranks to surround the elephants and dislodge their handlers by using their "sarissa" pikes. When his Macedonian troops threatened mutiny in 324BC at Opis, Babylonia (near modern Baghdad, Iraq), Alexander offered Macedonian military titles and greater responsibilities to Persian officers and units instead, forcing his troops to seek forgiveness at a staged banquet of reconciliation between Persians and Macedonians.
Alexander perhaps undercut his own rule by demonstrating signs of megalomania. While utilizing effective propaganda such as the cutting of the Gordian Knot, he also attempted to portray himself as a living god and son of Zeus following his visit to the oracle at Siwah in the Libyan Desert (in modern-day Egypt) in 331BC. His attempt in 327BC to have his men prostrate before him in Bactra in an act of "proskynesis" borrowed from the Persian kings was rejected as religious blasphemy by his Macedonian and Greek subjects after his court historian Callisthenes refused to perform this ritual. When Alexander had Parmenion murdered at Ecbatana (near modern Hamadan, Iran) in 330BC, this was "symptomatic of the growing gulf between the king's interests and those of his country and people", according to Errington. His murder of Cleitus the Black in 328BC is described as "vengeful and reckless" by Dawn L. Gilley and Ian Worthington. Continuing the polygamous habits of his father, Alexander encouraged his men to marry native women in Asia, leading by example when he wed Roxana, a Sogdian princess of Bactria. He then married Stateira II, eldest daughter of DariusIII, and Parysatis II, youngest daughter of Artaxerxes III, at the Susa weddings in 324BC.

Meanwhile, in Greece, the Spartan king Agis III attempted to lead a rebellion of the Greeks against Macedonia. He was defeated in 331BC at the Battle of Megalopolis by Antipater, who was serving as regent of Macedonia and deputy "hegemon" of the League of Corinth in Alexander's stead. Before Antipater embarked on his campaign in the Peloponnese, Memnon, the governor of Thrace, was dissuaded from rebellion by use of diplomacy. Antipater deferred the punishment of Sparta to the League of Corinth headed by Alexander, who ultimately pardoned the Spartans on the condition that they submit fifty nobles as hostages. Antipater's hegemony was somewhat unpopular in Greece due to his practice (perhaps by order of Alexander) of exiling malcontents and garrisoning cities with Macedonian troops, yet in 330BC, Alexander declared that the tyrannies installed in Greece were to be abolished and Greek freedom was to be restored.

When Alexander the Great died at Babylon in 323BC, his mother Olympias immediately accused Antipater and his faction of poisoning him, although there is no evidence to confirm this. With no official heir apparent, the Macedonian military command became split, with one side proclaiming Alexander's half-brother PhilipIII Arrhidaeus () as king and another siding with Alexander's infant son with Roxana, AlexanderIV (). Except for the Euboeans and Boeotians, the Greeks also immediately rose up in a rebellion against Antipater known as the Lamian War (323–322BC). When Antipater was defeated at the 323BC Battle of Thermopylae, he fled to Lamia where he was besieged by the Athenian commander Leosthenes. A Macedonian army led by Leonnatus rescued Antipater by lifting the siege. Antipater defeated the rebellion, yet his death in 319BC left a power vacuum wherein the two proclaimed kings of Macedonia became pawns in a power struggle between the "diadochi", the former generals of Alexander's army.

A council of the army convened in Babylon immediately after Alexander's death, naming PhilipIII as king and the chiliarch Perdiccas as his regent. Antipater, Antigonus Monophthalmus, Craterus, and Ptolemy formed a coalition against Perdiccas in a civil war initiated by Ptolemy's seizure of the hearse of Alexander the Great. Perdiccas was assassinated in 321BC by his own officers during a failed campaign in Egypt against Ptolemy, where his march along the Nile River resulted in the drowning of 2,000 of his men. Although Eumenes of Cardia managed to kill Craterus in battle, this had little to no effect on the outcome of the 321BC Partition of Triparadisus in Syria where the victorious coalition settled the issue of a new regency and territorial rights. Antipater was appointed as regent over the two kings. Before Antipater died in 319BC, he named the staunch Argead loyalist Polyperchon as his successor, passing over his own son Cassander and ignoring the right of the king to choose a new regent (since PhilipIII was considered mentally unstable), in effect bypassing the council of the army as well.

Forming an alliance with Ptolemy, Antigonus, and Lysimachus, Cassander had his officer Nicanor capture the Munichia fortress of Athens' port town Piraeus in defiance of Polyperchon's decree that Greek cities should be free of Macedonian garrisons, sparking the Second War of the Diadochi (319–315BC). Given a string of military failures by Polyperchon, in 317BC, PhilipIII, by way of his politically engaged wife Eurydice II of Macedon, officially replaced him as regent with Cassander. Afterwards, Polyperchon desperately sought the aid of Olympias in Epirus. A joint force of Epirotes, Aetolians, and Polyperchon's troops invaded Macedonia and forced the surrender of PhilipIII and Eurydice's army, allowing Olympias to execute the king and force his queen to commit suicide. Olympias then had Nicanor and dozens of other Macedonian nobles killed, but by the spring of 316BC, Cassander had defeated her forces, captured her, and placed her on trial for murder before sentencing her to death.

Cassander married Philip II's daughter Thessalonike and briefly extended Macedonian control into Illyria as far as Epidamnos. By 313BC, it was retaken by the Illyrian king Glaucias of Taulantii. By 316BC, Antigonus had taken the territory of Eumenes and managed to eject Seleucus Nicator from his Babylonian satrapy, leading Cassander, Ptolemy, and Lysimachus to issue a joint ultimatum to Antigonus in 315BC for him to surrender various territories in Asia. Antigonus promptly allied with Polyperchon, now based in Corinth, and issued an ultimatum of his own to Cassander, charging him with murder for executing Olympias and demanding that he hand over the royal family, King AlexanderIV and the queen mother Roxana. The conflict that followed lasted until the winter of 312/311BC, when a new peace settlement recognized Cassander as general of Europe, Antigonus as "first in Asia", Ptolemy as general of Egypt, and Lysimachus as general of Thrace. Cassander had AlexanderIV and Roxana put to death in the winter of 311/310BC, and by 306–305BC, the "diadochi" were declared kings of their respective territories.

The beginning of Hellenistic Greece was defined by the struggle between the Antipatrid dynasty, led first by Cassander (), son of Antipater, and the Antigonid dynasty, led by the Macedonian general Antigonus I Monophthalmus () and his son, the future king DemetriusI (). Cassander besieged Athens in 303BC, but was forced to retreat to Macedonia when Demetrius invaded Boeotia to his rear, attempting to sever his path of retreat. While Antigonus and Demetrius attempted to recreate PhilipII's Hellenic league with themselves as dual hegemons, a revived coalition of Cassander, Ptolemy I Soter () of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty, Seleucus I Nicator () of the Seleucid Empire, and Lysimachus (), King of Thrace, defeated the Antigonids at the Battle of Ipsus in 301BC, killing Antigonus and forcing Demetrius into flight.

Cassander died in 297 BC, and his sickly son PhilipIV died the same year, succeeded by Cassander's other sons Alexander V of Macedon () and Antipater II of Macedon (), with their mother Thessalonike of Macedon acting as regent. While Demetrius fought against the Antipatrid forces in Greece, AntipaterII killed his own mother to obtain power. His desperate brother AlexanderV then requested aid from Pyrrhus of Epirus (), who had fought alongside Demetrius at the Battle of Ipsus, but was sent to Egypt as a hostage as part of an agreement between Demetrius and PtolemyI. In exchange for defeating the forces of AntipaterII and forcing him to flee to the court of Lysimachus in Thrace, Pyrrhus was awarded the westernmost portions of the Macedonian kingdom. Demetrius had his nephew AlexanderV assassinated and was then proclaimed king of Macedonia, but his subjects protested against his aloof, Eastern-style autocracy.

War broke out between Pyrrhus and Demetrius in 290BC when Lanassa, wife of Pyrrhus, daughter of Agathocles of Syracuse, left him for Demetrius and offered him her dowry of Corcyra. The war dragged on until 288BC, when Demetrius lost the support of the Macedonians and fled the country. Macedonia was then divided between Pyrrhus and Lysimachus, the former taking western Macedonia and the latter eastern Macedonia. By 286BC, Lysimachus had expelled Pyrrhus and his forces from Macedonia. In 282BC, a new war erupted between SeleucusI and Lysimachus; the latter was killed in the Battle of Corupedion, allowing SeleucusI to take control of Thrace and Macedonia. In two dramatic reversals of fortune, SeleucusI was assassinated in 281BC by his officer Ptolemy Keraunos, son of PtolemyI and grandson of Antipater, who was then proclaimed king of Macedonia before being killed in battle in 279BC by Celtic invaders in the Gallic invasion of Greece. The Macedonian army proclaimed the general Sosthenes of Macedon as king, although he apparently refused the title. After defeating the Gallic ruler Bolgios and driving out the raiding party of Brennus, Sosthenes died and left a chaotic situation in Macedonia. The Gallic invaders ravaged Macedonia until Antigonus Gonatas, son of Demetrius, defeated them in Thrace at the 277BC Battle of Lysimachia and was then proclaimed king Antigonus II of Macedon ().

In 280 BC, Pyrrhus embarked on a campaign in Magna Graecia (i.e. southern Italy) against the Roman Republic known as the Pyrrhic War, followed by his invasion of Sicily. Ptolemy Keraunos secured his position on the Macedonian throne by giving Pyrrhus five thousand soldiers and twenty war elephants for this endeavor. Pyrrhus returned to Epirus in 275BC after the ultimate failure of both campaigns, which contributed to the rise of Rome because Greek cities in southern Italy such as Tarentum now became Roman allies. Pyrrhus invaded Macedonia in 274BC, defeating the largely mercenary army of AntigonusII at the 274BC Battle of Aous and driving him out of Macedonia, forcing him to seek refuge with his naval fleet in the Aegean.
Pyrrhus lost much of his support among the Macedonians in 273BC when his unruly Gallic mercenaries plundered the royal cemetery of Aigai. Pyrrhus pursued AntigonusII in the Peloponnese, yet AntigonusII was ultimately able to recapture Macedonia. Pyrrhus was killed while besieging Argos in 272BC, allowing AntigonusII to reclaim the rest of Greece. He then restored the Argead dynastic graves at Aigai and annexed the Kingdom of Paeonia.

The Aetolian League hampered AntigonusII's control over central Greece, and the formation of the Achaean League in 251BC pushed Macedonian forces out of much of the Peloponnese and at times incorporated Athens and Sparta. While the Seleucid Empire aligned with Antigonid Macedonia against Ptolemaic Egypt during the Syrian Wars, the Ptolemaic navy heavily disrupted AntigonusII's efforts to control mainland Greece. With the aid of the Ptolemaic navy, the Athenian statesman Chremonides led a revolt against Macedonian authority known as the Chremonidean War (267–261BC). By 265BC, Athens was surrounded and besieged by AntigonusII's forces, and a Ptolemaic fleet was defeated in the Battle of Cos. Athens finally surrendered in 261BC. After Macedonia formed an alliance with the Seleucid ruler Antiochus II, a peace settlement between AntigonusII and Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt was finally struck in 255BC.
In 251 BC, Aratus of Sicyon led a rebellion against AntigonusII, and in 250BC, PtolemyII declared his support for the self-proclaimed King Alexander of Corinth. Although Alexander died in 246BC and Antigonus was able to score a naval victory against the Ptolemies at Andros, the Macedonians lost the Acrocorinth to the forces of Aratus in 243BC, followed by the induction of Corinth into the Achaean League. AntigonusII made peace with the Achaean League in 240BC, ceding the territories that he had lost in Greece. AntigonusII died in 239BC and was succeeded by his son Demetrius II of Macedon (). Seeking an alliance with Macedonia to defend against the Aetolians, the queen mother and regent of Epirus, Olympias II, offered her daughter Phthia of Macedon to DemetriusII in marriage. Demetrius II accepted her proposal, but he damaged relations with the Seleucids by divorcing Stratonice of Macedon. Although the Aetolians formed an alliance with the Achaean League as a result, DemetriusII was able to invade Boeotia and capture it from the Aetolians by 236BC.

The Achaean League managed to capture Megalopolis in 235BC, and by the end of DemetriusII's reign most of the Peloponnese except Argos was taken from the Macedonians. DemetriusII also lost an ally in Epirus when the monarchy was toppled in a republican revolution. DemetriusII enlisted the aid of the Illyrian king Agron to defend Acarnania against Aetolia, and in 229BC, they managed to defeat the combined navies of the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues at the Battle of Paxos. Another Illyrian ruler, Longarus of the Dardanian Kingdom, invaded Macedonia and defeated an army of DemetriusII shortly before his death in 229BC. Although his young son Philip immediately inherited the throne, his regent Antigonus III Doson (), nephew of AntigonusII, was proclaimed king by the army, with Philip as his heir, following a string of military victories against the Illyrians in the north and the Aetolians in Thessaly.
Aratus sent an embassy to Antigonus III in 226BC seeking an unexpected alliance now that the reformist king Cleomenes III of Sparta was threatening the rest of Greece in the Cleomenean War (229–222BC). In exchange for military aid, AntigonusIII demanded the return of Corinth to Macedonian control, which Aratus finally agreed to in 225BC. In 224BC, AntigonusIII's forces took Arcadia from Sparta. After forming a Hellenic league in the same vein as PhilipII's League of Corinth, he managed to defeat Sparta at the Battle of Sellasia in 222BC. Sparta was occupied by a foreign power for the first time in its history, restoring Macedonia's position as the leading power in Greece. Antigonus died a year later, perhaps from tuberculosis, leaving behind a strong Hellenistic kingdom for his successor PhilipV.

Philip V of Macedon () faced immediate challenges to his authority by the Illyrian Dardani and Aetolian League. PhilipV and his allies were successful against the Aetolians and their allies in the Social War (220–217 BC), yet he made peace with the Aetolians once he heard of incursions by the Dardani in the north and the Carthaginian victory over the Romans at the Battle of Lake Trasimene in 217BC. Demetrius of Pharos is alleged to have convinced PhilipV to first secure Illyria in advance of an invasion of the Italian peninsula. In 216BC, PhilipV sent a hundred light warships into the Adriatic Sea to attack Illyria, a move that prompted Scerdilaidas of the Ardiaean Kingdom to appeal to the Romans for aid. Rome responded by sending ten heavy quinqueremes from Roman Sicily to patrol the Illyrian coasts, causing PhilipV to reverse course and order his fleet to retreat, averting open conflict for the time being.

In 215 BC, at the height of the Second Punic War with the Carthaginian Empire, Roman authorities intercepted a ship off the Calabrian coast holding a Macedonian envoy and a Carthaginian ambassador in possession of a treaty composed by Hannibal Barca declaring an alliance with PhilipV. The treaty stipulated that Carthage had the sole right to negotiate the terms of Rome's hypothetical surrender and promised mutual aid in the event that a resurgent Rome should seek revenge against either Macedonia or Carthage. Although the Macedonians were perhaps only interested in safeguarding their newly conquered territories in Illyria, the Romans were nevertheless able to thwart whatever grand ambitions PhilipV had for the Adriatic region during the First Macedonian War (214–205BC). In 214BC, Rome positioned a naval fleet at Oricus, which was assaulted along with Apollonia by Macedonian forces. When the Macedonians captured Lissus in 212BC, the Roman Senate responded by inciting the Aetolian League, Sparta, Elis, Messenia, and Attalus I () of Pergamon to wage war against PhilipV, keeping him occupied and away from Italy.

The Aetolian League concluded a peace agreement with PhilipV in 206BC, and the Roman Republic negotiated the Treaty of Phoenice in 205BC, ending the war and allowing the Macedonians to retain some captured settlements in Illyria. Although the Romans rejected an Aetolian request in 202BC for Rome to declare war on Macedonia once again, the Roman Senate gave serious consideration to the similar offer made by Pergamon and its ally Rhodes in 201BC. These states were concerned about PhilipV's alliance with Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid Empire, which invaded the war-weary and financially exhausted Ptolemaic Empire in the Fifth Syrian War (202–195BC) as PhilipV captured Ptolemaic settlements in the Aegean Sea. Although Rome's envoys played a critical role in convincing Athens to join the anti-Macedonian alliance with Pergamon and Rhodes in 200BC, the "comitia centuriata" (people's assembly) rejected the Roman Senate's proposal for a declaration of war on Macedonia. Meanwhile, PhilipV conquered territories in the Hellespont and Bosporus as well as Ptolemaic Samos, which led Rhodes to form an alliance with Pergamon, Byzantium, Cyzicus, and Chios against Macedonia. Despite PhilipV's nominal alliance with the Seleucid king, he lost the naval Battle of Chios in 201BC and was blockaded at Bargylia by the Rhodian and Pergamene navies.
While Philip V was busy fighting Rome's Greek allies, Rome viewed this as an opportunity to punish this former ally of Hannibal with a war that they hoped would supply a victory and require few resources. The Roman Senate demanded that PhilipV cease hostilities against neighboring Greek powers and defer to an international arbitration committee for settling grievances. When the "comitia centuriata" finally voted in approval of the Roman Senate's declaration of war in 200BC and handed their ultimatum to PhilipV, demanding that a tribunal assess the damages owed to Rhodes and Pergamon, the Macedonian king rejected it. This marked the beginning of the Second Macedonian War (200–197BC), with Publius Sulpicius Galba Maximus spearheading military operations in Apollonia.
The Macedonians successfully defended their territory for roughly two years, but the Roman consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus managed to expel PhilipV from Macedonia in 198BC, forcing his men to take refuge in Thessaly. When the Achaean League switched their loyalties from Macedonia to Rome, the Macedonian king sued for peace, but the terms offered were considered too stringent, and so the war continued. In June 197BC, the Macedonians were defeated at the Battle of Cynoscephalae. Rome then ratified a treaty that forced Macedonia to relinquish control of much of its Greek possessions outside of Macedonia proper, if only to act as a buffer against Illyrian and Thracian incursions into Greece. Although some Greeks suspected Roman intentions of supplanting Macedonia as the new hegemonic power in Greece, Flaminius announced at the Isthmian Games of 196BC that Rome intended to preserve Greek liberty by leaving behind no garrisons and by not exacting tribute of any kind. His promise was delayed by negotiations with the Spartan king Nabis, who had meanwhile captured Argos, yet Roman forces evacuated Greece in 194BC.

Encouraged by the Aetolian League and their calls to liberate Greece from the Romans, the Seleucid king AntiochusIII landed with his army at Demetrias, Thessaly, in 192BC, and was elected "strategos" by the Aetolians. Macedonia, the Achaean League, and other Greek city-states maintained their alliance with Rome. The Romans defeated the Seleucids in the 191BC Battle of Thermopylae as well as the Battle of Magnesia in 190BC, forcing the Seleucids to pay a war indemnity, dismantle most of its navy, and abandon its claims to any territories north or west of the Taurus Mountains in the 188BC Treaty of Apamea. With Rome's acceptance, PhilipV was able to capture some cities in central Greece in 191–189BC that had been allied to AntiochusIII, while Rhodes and Eumenes II () of Pergamon gained territories in Asia Minor.

Failing to please all sides in various territorial disputes, the Roman Senate decided in 184/183BC to force PhilipV to abandon Aenus and Maronea, since these had been declared free cities in the Treaty of Apamea. This assuaged the fear of EumenesII that Macedonia could pose a threat to his lands in the Hellespont. Perseus of Macedon () succeeded PhilipV and executed his brother Demetrius, who had been favored by the Romans but was charged by Perseus with high treason. Perseus then attempted to form marriage alliances with Prusias II of Bithynia and Seleucus IV Philopator of the Seleucid Empire, along with renewed relations with Rhodes that greatly unsettled EumenesII. Although EumenesII attempted to undermine these diplomatic relationships, Perseus fostered an alliance with the Boeotian League, extended his authority into Illyria and Thrace, and in 174BC, won the role of managing the Temple of Apollo at Delphi as a member of the Amphictyonic Council.
Eumenes II came to Rome in 172 BC and delivered a speech to the Senate denouncing the alleged crimes and transgressions of Perseus. This convinced the Roman Senate to declare the Third Macedonian War (171–168BC). Although Perseus's forces were victorious against the Romans at the Battle of Callinicus in 171BC, the Macedonian army was defeated at the Battle of Pydna in June 168BC. Perseus fled to Samothrace but surrendered shortly afterwards, was brought to Rome for the triumph of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus, and was placed under house arrest at Alba Fucens, where he died in 166BC. The Romans abolished the Macedonian monarchy by installing four separate allied republics in its stead, their capitals located at Amphipolis, Thessalonica, Pella, and Pelagonia. The Romans imposed severe laws inhibiting many social and economic interactions between the inhabitants of these republics, including the banning of marriages between them and the (temporary) prohibition on gold and silver mining. A certain Andriscus, claiming Antigonid descent, rebelled against the Romans and was pronounced king of Macedonia, defeating the army of the Roman praetor Publius Iuventius Thalna during the Fourth Macedonian War (150–148BC). Despite this, Andriscus was defeated in 148BC at the second Battle of Pydna by Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, whose forces occupied the kingdom. This was followed in 146BC by the Roman destruction of Carthage and victory over the Achaean League at the Battle of Corinth, ushering in the era of Roman Greece and the gradual establishment of the Roman province of Macedonia.

At the head of Macedonia's government was the king ("basileus"). From at least the reign of PhilipII, the king was assisted by the royal pages ("basilikoi paides"), bodyguards ("somatophylakes"), companions ("hetairoi"), friends ("philoi"), an assembly that included members of the military, and (during the Hellenistic period) magistrates. Evidence is lacking regarding the extent to which each of these groups shared authority with the king or if their existence had a basis in a formal constitutional framework. Before the reign of PhilipII, the only institution supported by textual evidence is the monarchy.

The earliest known government of ancient Macedonia was that of its monarchy, lasting until 167BC when it was abolished by the Romans. The Macedonian hereditary monarchy existed since at least the time of Archaic Greece, with Homeric aristocratic roots in Mycenaean Greece. Thucydides wrote that in previous ages, Macedonia was divided into small tribal regions, each having its own petty king, the tribes of Lower Macedonia eventually coalescing under one great king who exercised power as an overlord over the lesser kings of Upper Macedonia. The direct line of father-to-son succession was broken after the assassination of Orestes of Macedon in 396BC (allegedly by his regent and successor Aeropus II of Macedon), clouding the issue of whether primogeniture was the established custom or if there was a constitutional right for an assembly of the army or of the people to choose another king. It is unclear if the male offspring of Macedonian queens or consorts were always preferred over others given the accession of Archelaus I of Macedon, son of Perdiccas II of Macedon and a slave woman, although Archelaus succeeded the throne after murdering his father's designated heir apparent.
It is known that Macedonian kings before PhilipII upheld the privileges and carried out the responsibilities of hosting foreign diplomats, determining the kingdom's foreign policies, and negotiating alliances with foreign powers. After the Greek victory at Salamis in 480BC, the Persian commander Mardonius had Alexander I of Macedon sent to Athens as a chief envoy to orchestrate an alliance between the Achaemenid Empire and Athens. The decision to send Alexander was based on his marriage alliance with a noble Persian house and his previous formal relationship with the city-state of Athens. With their ownership of natural resources including gold, silver, timber, and royal land, the early Macedonian kings were also capable of bribing foreign and domestic parties with impressive gifts.

Little is known about the judicial system of ancient Macedonia except that the king acted as the chief judge of the kingdom. The Macedonian kings were also supreme commanders of the military. PhilipII was also highly regarded for his acts of piety in serving as the high priest of the nation. He performed daily ritual sacrifices and led religious festivals. Alexander imitated various aspects of his father's reign, such as granting land and gifts to loyal aristocratic followers, but lost some core support among them for adopting some of the trappings of an Eastern, Persian monarch, a "lord and master" as Carol J. King suggests, instead of a "comrade-in-arms" as was the traditional relationship of Macedonian kings with their companions. Alexander's father, PhilipII, was perhaps influenced by Persian traditions when he adopted institutions similar to those found in the Achaemenid realm, such as having a royal secretary, royal archive, royal pages, and a seated throne.

The royal pages were adolescent boys and young men conscripted from aristocratic households and serving the kings of Macedonia perhaps from the reign of PhilipII onward, although more solid evidence dates to the reign of Alexander the Great. Royal pages played no direct role in high politics and were conscripted as a means to introduce them to political life. After a period of training and service, pages were expected to become members of the king's companions and personal retinue. During their training, pages were expected to guard the king as he slept, supply him with horses, aid him in mounting his horse, accompany him on royal hunts, and serve him during "symposia" (i.e. formal drinking parties). Although there is little evidence for royal pages in the Antigonid period, it is known that some of them fled with Perseus of Macedon to Samothrace following his defeat by the Romans in 168BC.

Royal bodyguards served as the closest members to the king at court and on the battlefield. They were split into two categories: the "agema" of the "hypaspistai", a type of ancient special forces usually numbering in the hundreds, and a smaller group of men handpicked by the king either for their individual merits or to honor the noble families to which they belonged. Therefore, the bodyguards, limited in number and forming the king's inner circle, were not always responsible for protecting the king's life on and off the battlefield; their title and office was more a mark of distinction, perhaps used to quell rivalries between aristocratic houses.

The companions, including the elite companion cavalry and "pezhetairoi" infantry, represented a substantially larger group than the king's bodyguards. The most trusted or highest ranking companions formed a council that served as an advisory body to the king. A small amount of evidence suggests the existence of an assembly of the army during times of war and a people's assembly during times of peace.

Members of the council had the right to speak freely, and although there is no direct evidence that they voted on affairs of state, it is clear that the king was at least occasionally pressured to agree to their demands. The assembly was apparently given the right to judge cases of high treason and assign punishments for them, such as when Alexander the Great acted as prosecutor in the trial and conviction of three alleged conspirators in his father's assassination plot (while many others were acquitted). However, there is perhaps insufficient evidence to allow a conclusion that councils and assemblies were regularly upheld or constitutionally grounded, or that their decisions were always heeded by the king. At the death of Alexander the Great, the companions immediately formed a council to assume control of his empire, but it was soon destabilized by open rivalry and conflict between its members. The army also used mutiny as a tool to achieve political ends.

Antigonid Macedonian kings relied on various regional officials to conduct affairs of state. This included high-ranking municipal officials, such as the military "strategos" and the politarch, i.e. the elected governor ("archon") of a large city ("polis"), as well as the politico-religious office of the "epistates". No evidence exists about the personal backgrounds of these officials, although they may have been chosen among the same group of aristocratic "philoi" and "hetairoi" who filled vacancies for army officers.
In ancient Athens, the Athenian democracy was restored on three separate occasions following the initial conquest of the city by Antipater in 322BC. When it fell repeatedly under Macedonian rule it was governed by a Macedonian-imposed oligarchy composed of the wealthiest members of the city-state. Other city-states were handled quite differently and were allowed a greater degree of autonomy. After PhilipII conquered Amphipolis in 357BC, the city was allowed to retain its democracy, including its constitution, popular assembly, city council ("boule"), and yearly elections for new officials, but a Macedonian garrison was housed within the city walls along with a Macedonian royal commissioner ("epistates") to monitor the city's political affairs. Philippi, the city founded by PhilipII, was the only other city in the Macedonian commonwealth that had a democratic government with popular assemblies, since the assembly ("ecclesia") of Thessaloniki seems to have had only a passive function in practice. Some cities also maintained their own municipal revenues. The Macedonian king and central government administered the revenues generated by temples and priesthoods.

Within the Macedonian commonwealth, some evidence from the 3rd centuryBC indicates that foreign relations were handled by the central government. Although individual Macedonian cities nominally participated in Panhellenic events as independent entities, in reality, the granting of "asylia" (inviolability, diplomatic immunity, and the right of asylum at sanctuaries) to certain cities was handled directly by the king. Likewise, the city-states within contemporary Greek "koina" (i.e., federations of city-states, the "sympoliteia") obeyed the federal decrees voted on collectively by the members of their league. In city-states belonging to a league or commonwealth, the granting of "proxenia" (i.e. the hosting of foreign ambassadors) was usually a right shared by local and central authorities. Abundant evidence exists for the granting of "proxenia" as being the sole prerogative of central authorities in the neighboring Epirote League, and some evidence suggests the same arrangement in the Macedonian commonwealth. City-states that were allied with Macedonia issued their own decrees regarding "proxenia". Foreign leagues also formed alliances with the Macedonian kings, such as when the Cretan League signed treaties with Demetrius II Aetolicus and Antigonus III Doson ensuring enlistment of Cretan mercenaries into the Macedonian army, and elected Philip V of Macedon as honorary protector ("prostates") of the league.

The basic structure of the Ancient Macedonian army was the division between the companion cavalry ("hetairoi") and the foot companions ("pezhetairoi"), augmented by various allied troops, foreign levied soldiers, and mercenaries. The foot companions existed perhaps since the reign of Alexander I of Macedon. Macedonian cavalry, wearing muscled cuirasses, became renowned in Greece during and after their involvement in the Peloponnesian War, at times siding with either Athens or Sparta. Macedonian infantry in this period consisted of poorly trained shepherds and farmers, while the cavalry was composed of noblemen. As evidenced by early 4th century BC artwork, there was a pronounced Spartan influence on the Macedonian army before PhilipII. Nicholas Viktor Sekunda states that at the beginning of PhilipII's reign in 359BC, the Macedonian army consisted of 10,000 infantry and 600 cavalry, yet Malcolm Errington cautions that these figures cited by ancient authors should be treated with some skepticism.

After spending years as a political hostage in Thebes, PhilipII sought to imitate the Greek example of martial exercises and the issuing of standard equipment for citizen soldiery, and succeeded in transforming the Macedonian army from a levied force of unprofessional farmers into a well-trained, professional army. PhilipII adopted some of the military tactics of his enemies, such as the "embolon" (flying wedge) cavalry formation of the Scythians. His infantry wielded "peltai" shields that replaced the earlier "hoplon"-style shield, were equipped with protective helmets, greaves, and either cuirass breastplates or "kotthybos" stomach bands, and armed with "sarissa" pikes and a dagger as a secondary weapon. The elite "hypaspistai" infantry, composed of handpicked men from the ranks of the "pezhetairoi", were formed during the reign of PhilipII and saw continued use during the reign of Alexander the Great. PhilipII was also responsible for the establishment of the royal bodyguards ("somatophylakes").
For his lighter missile troops, Philip II employed mercenary Cretan archers as well as Thracian, Paeonian, and Illyrian javelin throwers, slingers, and archers. He hired engineers such as Polyidus of Thessaly and Diades of Pella, who were capable of building state of the art siege engines and artillery that fired large bolts. Following the acquisition of the lucrative mines at Krinides (renamed Philippi), the royal treasury could afford to field a permanent, professional standing army. The increase in state revenues under PhilipII allowed the Macedonians to build a small navy for the first time, which included triremes.

The only Macedonian cavalry units attested under Alexander were the companion cavalry, yet he formed a "hipparchia" (i.e. unit of a few hundred horsemen) of companion cavalry composed entirely of ethnic Persians while campaigning in Asia. When marching his forces into Asia, Alexander brought 1,800 cavalrymen from Macedonia, 1,800 cavalrymen from Thessaly, 600 cavalrymen from the rest of Greece, and 900 "prodromoi" cavalry from Thrace. Antipater was able to quickly raise a force of 600 native Macedonian cavalry to fight in the Lamian War when it began in 323BC. The most elite members of Alexander's "hypaspistai" were designated as the "agema", and a new term for "hypaspistai" emerged after the Battle of Gaugamela in 331BC: the "argyraspides" (silver shields). The latter continued to serve after the reign of Alexander the Great and may have been of Asian origin. Overall, his pike-wielding phalanx infantry numbered some 12,000 men, 3,000 of which were elite "hypaspistai" and 9,000 of which were "pezhetairoi". Alexander continued the use of Cretan archers and introduced native Macedonian archers into the army. After the Battle of Gaugamela, archers of West Asian backgrounds became commonplace.

The Macedonian army continued to evolve under the Antigonid dynasty. It is uncertain how many men were appointed as "somatophylakes", which numbered eight men at the end of Alexander the Great's reign, while the "hypaspistai" seem to have morphed into assistants of the "somatophylakes". At the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197BC, the Macedonians commanded some 16,000 phalanx pikemen. Alexander the Great's royal squadron of companion cavalry contained 800 men, the same number of cavalrymen in the sacred squadron (Latin: "sacra ala"; Greek: "hiera ile") commanded by Philip V of Macedon during the Social War of 219BC. The regular Macedonian cavalry numbered 3,000 at Callinicus, which was separate from the sacred squadron and royal cavalry. While Macedonian cavalry of the 4th century BC had fought without shields, the use of shields by cavalry was adopted from the Celtic invaders of the 270s BC who settled in Galatia, central Anatolia.

Thanks to contemporary inscriptions from Amphipolis and Greia dated 218 and 181BC, respectively, historians have been able to partially piece together the organization of the Antigonid army under PhilipV. From at least the time of Antigonus III Doson, the most elite Antigonid-period infantry were the peltasts, lighter and more maneuverable soldiers wielding "peltai" javelins, swords, and a smaller bronze shield than Macedonian phalanx pikemen, although they sometimes served in that capacity. Among the peltasts, roughly 2,000 men were selected to serve in the elite "agema" vanguard, with other peltasts numbering roughly 3,000. The number of peltasts varied over time, perhaps never more than 5,000 men. They fought alongside the phalanx pikemen, divided now into "chalkaspides" (bronze shield) and "leukaspides" (white shield) regiments.

The Antigonid Macedonian kings continued to expand and equip the navy. Cassander maintained a small fleet at Pydna, Demetrius I of Macedon had one at Pella, and Antigonus II Gonatas, while serving as a general for Demetrius in Greece, used the navy to secure the Macedonian holdings in Demetrias, Chalkis, Piraeus, and Corinth. The navy was considerably expanded during the Chremonidean War (267–261BC), allowing the Macedonian navy to defeat the Ptolemaic Egyptian navy at the 255BC Battle of Cos and 245BC Battle of Andros, and enabling Macedonian influence to spread over the Cyclades. AntigonusIII Doson used the Macedonian navy to invade Caria, while PhilipV sent 200 ships to fight in the Battle of Chios in 201BC. The Macedonian navy was reduced to a mere six vessels as agreed in the 197BC peace treaty that concluded the Second Macedonian War with the Roman Republic, although Perseus of Macedon quickly assembled some "lemboi" at the outbreak of the Third Macedonian War in 171BC.

Following its adoption as the court language of Philip II of Macedon's regime, authors of ancient Macedonia wrote their works in Koine Greek, the "lingua franca" of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Rare textual evidence indicates that the native Macedonian language was either a dialect of Greek similar to Thessalian Greek and Northwestern Greek, or a language closely related to Greek. The vast majority of surviving inscriptions from ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek and its successor Koine. Attic (and later Koine) Greek was the preferred language of the Ancient Macedonian army, although it is known that Alexander the Great once shouted an emergency order in Macedonian to his royal guards during the drinking party where he killed Cleitus the Black. Macedonian became extinct in either the Hellenistic or the Roman period, and entirely replaced by Koine Greek.

By the 5th century BC, the Macedonians and the southern Greeks worshiped more or less the same deities of the Greek pantheon. In Macedonia, political and religious offices were often intertwined. For instance, the head of state for the city of Amphipolis also served as the priest of Asklepios, Greek god of medicine; a similar arrangement existed at Cassandreia, where a cult priest honoring the city's founder Cassander was the nominal head of the city. The main sanctuary of Zeus was maintained at Dion, while another at Veria was dedicated to Herakles and was patronized by Demetrius II Aetolicus (). Meanwhile, foreign cults from Egypt were fostered by the royal court, such as the temple of Sarapis at Thessaloniki. The Macedonians also had relations with "international" cults; for example, Macedonian kings Philip III of Macedon and Alexander IV of Macedon made votive offerings to the internationally esteemed Samothrace temple complex of the Cabeiri mystery cult.

In the three royal tombs at Vergina, professional painters decorated the walls with a mythological scene of Hades abducting Persephone and royal hunting scenes, while lavish grave goods including weapons, armor, drinking vessels, and personal items were housed with the dead, whose bones were burned before burial in golden coffins. Some grave goods and decorations were common in other Macedonian tombs, yet some items found at Vergina were distinctly tied to royalty, including a diadem, luxurious goods, and arms and armor. Scholars have debated about the identity of the tomb occupants since the discovery of their remains in 1977–1978, and recent research and forensic examination have concluded that at least one of the persons buried was PhilipII. Located near Tomb1 are the above-ground ruins of a "heroon", a shrine for cult worship of the dead. In 2014, the ancient Macedonian Kasta Tomb was discovered outside of Amphipolis and is the largest ancient tomb found in Greece (as of 2017).

Young Macedonian men were typically expected to engage in hunting and martial combat as a by-product of their transhumance lifestyle of herding livestock such as goats and sheep, while horse breeding and raising cattle were other common pursuits. Some Macedonians engaged in farming, often with irrigation, land reclamation, and horticulture activities supported by the Macedonian state. The Macedonian economy and state finances were mainly supported by logging and by mining valuable minerals such as copper, iron, gold, and silver. The conversion of these raw materials into finished products and the sale of those products encouraged the growth of urban centers and a gradual shift away from the traditional rustic Macedonian lifestyle during the course of the 5thcenturyBC.

The Macedonian king was an autocratic figure at the head of both government and society, with arguably unlimited authority to handle affairs of state and public policy, but he was also the leader of a very personal regime with close relationships or connections to his "hetairoi", the core of the Macedonian aristocracy. These aristocrats were second only to the king in terms of power and privilege, filling the ranks of his administration and serving as commanding officers in the military. It was in the more bureaucratic regimes of the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Alexander the Great's empire where greater social mobility for members of society seeking to join the aristocracy could be found, especially in Ptolemaic Egypt. Although governed by a king and martial aristocracy, Macedonia seems to have lacked the widespread use of slaves seen in contemporaneous Greek states.

By the reign of ArchelausI in the 5th century BC, the ancient Macedonian elite was importing customs and artistic traditions from other regions of Greece while retaining more archaic, perhaps Homeric, funerary rites connected with the symposium that were typified by items such as the decorative metal kraters that held the ashes of deceased Macedonian nobility in their tombs. Among these is the large bronze Derveni Krater from a 4th-centuryBC tomb of Thessaloniki, decorated with scenes of the Greek god Dionysus and his entourage and belonging to an aristocrat who had had a military career. Macedonian metalwork usually followed Athenian styles of vase shapes from the 6thcenturyBC onward, with drinking vessels, jewellery, containers, crowns, diadems, and coins among the many metal objects found in Macedonian tombs.
Surviving Macedonian painted artwork includes frescoes and murals, but also decoration on sculpted artwork such as statues and reliefs. For instance, trace colors still exist on the bas-reliefs of the late 4th-century BC Alexander Sarcophagus. Macedonian paintings have allowed historians to investigate the clothing fashions as well as military gear worn by the ancient Macedonians. Aside from metalwork and painting, mosaics are another significant form of surviving Macedonian artwork. The Stag Hunt Mosaic of Pella, with its three-dimensional qualities and illusionist style, show clear influence from painted artwork and wider Hellenistic art trends, although the rustic theme of hunting was tailored to Macedonian tastes. The similar Lion Hunt Mosaic of Pella illustrates either a scene of Alexander the Great with his companion Craterus, or simply a conventional illustration of the royal diversion of hunting. Mosaics with mythological themes include scenes of Dionysus riding a panther and Helen of Troy being abducted by Theseus, the latter of which employs illusionist qualities and realistic shading similar to Macedonian paintings. Common themes of Macedonian paintings and mosaics include warfare, hunting, and aggressive masculine sexuality (i.e. abduction of women for rape or marriage); these subjects are at times combined within a single work and perhaps indicate a metaphorical connection.

Philip II was assassinated in 336 BC at the theatre of Aigai, Macedonia, amid games and spectacles celebrating the marriage of his daughter Cleopatra of Macedon. Alexander the Great was allegedly a great admirer of both theatre and music. He was especially fond of the plays by Classical Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works formed part of a proper Greek education for his new eastern subjects alongside studies in the Greek language, including the epics of Homer. While he and his army were stationed at Tyre (in modern-day Lebanon), Alexander had his generals act as judges not only for athletic contests but also for stage performances of Greek tragedies. The contemporaneous famous actors Thessalus and Athenodorus performed at the event.

Music was also appreciated in Macedonia. In addition to the agora, the gymnasium, the theatre, and religious sanctuaries and temples dedicated to Greek gods and goddesses, one of the main markers of a true Greek city in the empire of Alexander the Great was the presence of an odeon for musical performances. This was the case not only for Alexandria in Egypt, but also cities as distant as Ai-Khanoum in what is now modern-day Afghanistan.

Perdiccas II of Macedon was able to host well-known Classical Greek intellectual visitors at his royal court, such as the lyric poet Melanippides and the renowned medical doctor Hippocrates, and Pindar's "enkomion" written for Alexander I of Macedon may have been composed at his court. ArchelausI received many more Greek scholars, artists, and celebrities at his court than his predecessors. His honored guests included the painter Zeuxis, the architect Callimachus, the poets Choerilus of Samos, Timotheus of Miletus, and Agathon, as well as the famous Athenian playwright Euripides. The philosopher Aristotle, who studied at the Platonic Academy of Athens and established the Aristotelian school of thought, moved to Macedonia, and is said to have tutored the young Alexander the Great, as well as serving as an esteemed diplomat for PhilipII. Among Alexander's retinue of artists, writers, and philosophers was Pyrrho of Elis, founder of Pyrrhonism, the school of philosophical skepticism. During the Antigonid period, Antigonos Gonatas fostered cordial relationships with Menedemos of Eretria, founder of the Eretrian school of philosophy, and Zenon, the founder of Stoicism.

In terms of early Greek historiography and later Roman historiography, Felix Jacoby identified thirteen possible ancient historians who wrote about Macedonia in his "Fragmente der griechischen Historiker". Aside from accounts in Herodotus and Thucydides, the works compiled by Jacoby are only fragmentary, whereas other works are completely lost, such as the history of an Illyrian war fought by Perdiccas III written by Antipater. The Macedonian historians Marsyas of Pella and Marsyas of Philippi wrote histories of Macedonia, the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy I Soter authored a history about Alexander, and Hieronymus of Cardia wrote a history about Alexander's royal successors. Following the Indian campaign of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian military officer Nearchus wrote a work of his voyage from the mouth of the Indus river to the Persian Gulf. The Macedonian historian Craterus published a compilation of decrees made by the popular assembly of the Athenian democracy, ostensibly while attending the school of Aristotle. Philip V of Macedon had manuscripts of the history of PhilipII written by Theopompus gathered by his court scholars and disseminated with further copies.

When Alexander I of Macedon petitioned to compete in the foot race of the ancient Olympic Games, the event organizers at first denied his request, explaining that only Greeks were allowed to compete. However, AlexanderI produced proof of an Argead royal genealogy showing ancient Argive Temenid lineage, a move that ultimately convinced the Olympic "Hellanodikai" authorities of his Greek descent and ability to compete. By the end of the 5thcenturyBC, the Macedonian king ArchelausI was crowned with the olive wreath at both Olympia and Delphi (in the Pythian Games) for winning chariot racing contests. PhilipII allegedly heard of the Olympic victory of his horse (in either an individual horse race or chariot race) on the same day his son Alexander the Great was born, on either 19 or 20July 356BC. Non-royal Macedonians also competed in and won various Olympic contests by the 4th century BC. In addition to literary contests, Alexander the Great staged competitions for music and athletics across his empire.

Ancient Macedonia produced only a few fine foods or beverages that were highly appreciated elsewhere in the Greek world, including eels from the Strymonian Gulf and special wine produced in Chalcidice. The earliest known use of flat bread as a plate for meat was made in Macedonia during the 3rdcenturyBC, which perhaps influenced the later trencher bread of medieval Europe. Cattle and goats were consumed, although there was no notice of Macedonian mountain cheeses in literature until the Middle Ages. The comedic playwright Menander wrote that Macedonian dining habits penetrated Athenian high society; for instance, the introduction of meats into the dessert course of a meal. The Macedonians also most likely introduced "mattye" to Athenian cuisine, a dish usually made of chicken or other spiced, salted, and sauced meats served during the wine course. This particular dish was derided and connected with licentiousness and drunkenness in a play by the Athenian comic poet Alexis about the declining morals of Athenians in the age of Demetrius I of Macedon.

The "symposium" in the Macedonian and wider Greek realm was a banquet for the nobility and privileged class, an occasion for feasting, drinking, entertainment, and sometimes philosophical discussion. The "hetairoi", leading members of the Macedonian aristocracy, were expected to attend such feasts with their king. They were also expected to accompany him on royal hunts for the acquisition of game meat as well as for sport.

There is some disagreement among both ancient authors and modern scholars about the ethnic identity of the ancient Macedonians. Ernst Badian notes that nearly all surviving references to antagonisms and differences between Greeks and Macedonians exist in the written speeches of Arrian, who lived at the time of the Roman Empire, when any notion of an ethnic disparity between Macedonians and other Greeks was incomprehensible. Hatzopoulos argues that there was no real ethnic difference between Macedonians and Greeks, only a political distinction contrived after the creation of the League of Corinth in 337BC (which was led by Macedonia through the league's elected "hegemon" PhilipII, when he was not a member of the league itself), N. G. L. Hammond asserts that ancient views differentiating Macedonia's ethnic identity from the rest of the Greek-speaking world should be seen as an expression of conflict between two different political systems: the democratic system of the city-states (e.g. Athens) versus the monarchy (Macedonia). Other academics who concur that the difference between the Macedonians and Greeks was a political rather than a true ethnic discrepancy include Michael B. Sakellariou, Malcolm Errington, and Craige B. Champion.

Anson argues that some Hellenic authors expressed complex or even ever-changing and ambiguous ideas about the exact ethnic identity of the Macedonians, who were considered by some such as Aristotle in his "Politics" as barbarians and others as semi-Greek or fully Greek. Roger D. Woodard asserts that in addition to persisting uncertainty in modern times about the proper classification of the Macedonian language and its relation to Greek, ancient authors also presented conflicting ideas about the Macedonians. Simon Hornblower argues on the Greek identity of the Macedonians, taking into consideration their origin, language, cults and customs. Any preconceived ethnic differences between Greeks and Macedonians faded by 148BC soon after the Roman conquest of Macedonia and then the rest of Greece with the defeat of the Achaean League by the Roman Republic at the Battle of Corinth (146 BC).

Macedonian architecture, although utilizing a mixture of different forms and styles from the rest of Greece, did not represent a unique or diverging style from other ancient Greek architecture. Among the classical orders, Macedonian architects favored the Ionic order, especially in the peristyle courtyards of private homes. There are several surviving examples, albeit in ruins, of Macedonian palatial architecture, including a palace at the site of the capital Pella, the summer residence of Vergina near the old capital Aigai, and the royal residence at Demetrias near modern Volos. At Vergina, the ruins of three large banquet halls with marble-tiled floors (covered in the debris of roof tiles) with floor plan dimensions measuring roughly 16.7 x 17.6 m (54.8 x 57.7 ft) demonstrate perhaps the earliest examples of monumental triangular roof trusses, if dated before the reign of Antigonus II Gonatas or even the onset of the Hellenistic period. Later Macedonian architecture also featured arches and vaults. The palaces of both Vergina and Demetrias had walls made of sundried bricks, while the latter palace had four corner towers around a central courtyard in the manner of a fortified residence fit for a king or at least a military governor.

Macedonian rulers also sponsored works of architecture outside of Macedonia proper. For instance, following his victory at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), PhilipII raised a round memorial building at Olympia known as the Philippeion, decorated inside with statues depicting him, his parents Amyntas III of Macedon and Eurydice I of Macedon, his wife Olympias, and his son Alexander the Great.
The ruins of roughly twenty Greek theatres survive in the present-day regions of Macedonia and Thrace in Greece: sixteen open-air theatres, three odea, and a possible theatre in Veria undergoing excavation.

By the Hellenistic period, it became common for Greek states to finance the development and proliferation of ever more powerful torsion siege engines, naval ships, and standardized designs for arms and armor. Under PhilipII and Alexander the Great, improvements were made to siege artillery such as bolt-shooting ballistae and siege engines such as huge rolling siege towers. E.W.Marsden and M.Y.Treister contend that the Macedonian rulers Antigonus I Monophthalmus and his successor Demetrius I of Macedon had the most powerful siege artillery of the Hellenistic world at the end of the 4thcenturyBC. The siege of Salamis, Cyprus, in 306BC necessitated the building of large siege engines and drafting of craftsmen from parts of West Asia. The siege tower commissioned by DemetriusI for the Macedonian Siege of Rhodes (305–304 BC) and manned by over three thousand soldiers was built at a height of nine stories. It had a base of, eight wheels that were steered in either direction by pivots, three sides covered in iron plates to protect them from fire, and mechanically opened windows (shielded with wool-stuffed leather curtains to soften the blow of ballistae rounds) of different sizes to accommodate the firing of missiles ranging from arrows to larger bolts.

During the siege of Echinus by Philip V of Macedon in 211BC, the besiegers built underground tunnels to protect the soldiers and sappers as they went back and forth from the camp to the siege works. These included two siege towers connected by a makeshift wickerwork curtain wall mounted with stone-shooting ballistae, and sheds to protect the approach of the battering ram. Despite the early reputation of Macedon as a leader in siege technology, Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt became the center for technological improvements to the catapult by the 3rdcenturyBC, as evidenced by the writings of Philo of Alexandria.

Although perhaps not as prolific as other areas of Greece in regards to technological innovations, there are some inventions that may have originated in Macedonia aside from siege engines and artillery. The rotary-operated olive press for producing olive oil may have been invented in ancient Macedonia or another part of Greece, or even as far east as the Levant or Anatolia. Mold-pressed glass first appeared in Macedonia in the 4thcenturyBC (although it could have simultaneously existed in the Achaemenid Empire); the first known clear, translucent glass pieces of the Greek world have been discovered in Macedonia and Rhodes and date to the second half of the 4thcenturyBC. Greek technical and scientific literature began with Classical Athens in the 5thcenturyBC, while the major production centers for technical innovation and texts during the Hellenistic period were Alexandria, Rhodes, and Pergamon.

The minting of silver coinage began during the reign of AlexanderI as a means to pay for royal expenditures. ArchelausI increased the silver content of his coins as well as minting copper coins to promote foreign and domestic commerce. The minting of coinage significantly increased during the reigns of PhilipII and Alexander the Great, especially after the increase in state revenues following the seizure of the Pangaion Hills. During the Hellenistic period the royal houses of Macedonia, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Kingdom of Pergamon exercised full monopolistic control over mining activities, largely to ensure the funding of their armies. By the end of the conquests of Alexander the Great, nearly thirty mints stretching from Macedonia to Babylon produced standard coins. The right to mint coins was shared by central and some local governments, i.e. the autonomous municipal governments of Thessaloniki, Pella, and Amphipolis within the Macedonian commonwealth. The Macedonians were also the first to issue different coins for internal and external circulation.

State revenues were also raised by collecting produce from arable lands, timber from forests, and taxes on imports and exports at harbors. Some mines, groves, agricultural lands, and forests belonging to the Macedonian state were exploited by the Macedonian king, although these were often leased as assets or given as grants to members of the nobility such as the "hetairoi" and "philoi". Tariffs exacted on goods flowing in and out of Macedonian seaports existed from at least the reign of AmyntasIII, and Callistratus of Aphidnae (d.c.350BC) aided PerdiccasIII in doubling the kingdom's annual profits on customs duties from 20 to 40 talents.

After the defeat of Perseus at Pydna in 168BC, the Roman Senate allowed the reopening of iron and copper mines, but forbade the mining of gold and silver by the four newly established autonomous client states that replaced the monarchy in Macedonia. The law may originally have been conceived by the Senate due to the fear that material wealth gained from gold and silver mining operations would allow the Macedonians to fund an armed rebellion. The Romans were perhaps also concerned with stemming inflation caused by an increased money supply from Macedonian silver mining. The Macedonians continued minting silver coins between 167 and 148BC (i.e. just before the establishment of the Roman province of Macedonia), and when the Romans lifted the ban on Macedonian silver mining in 158BC it may simply have reflected the local reality of this illicit practice continuing regardless of the Senate's decree.

The reigns of Philip II and Alexander the Great witnessed the demise of Classical Greece and the birth of Hellenistic civilization, following the spread of Greek culture to the Near East during and after Alexander's conquests. Macedonians then migrated to Egypt and parts of Asia, but the intensive colonization of foreign lands sapped the available manpower in Macedonia proper, weakening the kingdom in its fight with other Hellenistic powers and contributing to its downfall and conquest by the Romans. However, the diffusion of Greek culture and language cemented by Alexander's conquests in West Asia and North Africa served as a "precondition" for the later Roman expansion into these territories and entire basis for the Byzantine Empire, according to Errington.
The ethnic Macedonian rulers of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid successor states accepted men from all over the Greek world as their "hetairoi" companions and did not foster a national identity like the Antigonids. Modern scholarship has focused on how these Hellenistic successor kingdoms were influenced more by their Macedonian origins than Eastern or southern Greek traditions. While Spartan society remained mostly insular and Athens continued placing strict limitations on acquiring citizenship, the cosmopolitan Hellenistic cities of Asia and northeastern Africa bore a greater resemblance to Macedonian cities and contained a mixture of subjects including natives, Greek and Macedonian colonists, and Greek-speaking Hellenized Easterners, many of whom were the product of intermarriage between Greeks and native populations.

The deification of Macedonian monarchs perhaps began with the death of PhilipII, but it was his son Alexander the Great who unambiguously claimed to be a living god. Following his visit to the oracle of Didyma in 334BC that suggested his divinity, Alexander traveled to the Oracle of Zeus Ammon — the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian Amun-Ra — at the Siwa Oasis of the Libyan Desert in 332BC to confirm his divine status. Although the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires maintained ancestral cults and deified their rulers, kings were not worshiped in the Kingdom of Macedonia. While Zeus Ammon was known to the Greeks prior to Alexander's reign, particularly at the Greek colony of Cyrene, Libya, Alexander was the first Macedonian monarch to patronize Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian priesthoods and deities, strengthening the fusion of Near Eastern and Greek religious beliefs. After his reign, the cult of Isis gradually spread throughout the Hellenistic and Roman world, while beliefs in the Egyptian god Sarapis were thoroughly Hellenized by the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt before the spread of his cult to Macedonia and the Aegean region. The German historian Johann Gustav Droysen argued that the conquests of Alexander the Great and creation of the Hellenistic world allowed for the growth and establishment of Christianity in the Roman era.

Online
Print

Nike and her siblings were close companions of Zeus, the dominant deity of the Greek pantheon. According to classical (later) myth, Styx brought them to Zeus when the god was assembling allies for the Titanomachy against the older deities. Nike assumed the role of the divine charioteer, a role in which she often is portrayed in Classical Greek art. Nike flew around battlefields rewarding the victors with glory and fame, symbolized by a wreath of laurel leaves (bay leaves).
Nike is seen with wings in most statues and paintings, with one of the most famous being the "Winged Victory of Samothrace". Most other winged deities in the Greek pantheon had shed their wings by Classical times. Nike is the goddess of strength, speed, and victory. Nike was a very close acquaintance of Athena, and is thought to have stood in Athena's outstretched hand in the statue of Athena located in the Parthenon. Nike is also one of the most commonly portrayed figures on Greek coins. After victory at the Battle of Marathon, Athenians erected the Nike of Callimachus.

Nike (mythology)

In ancient Greek religion, Nike (;, "Victory" ) was a goddess who personified victory. Her Roman equivalent was Victoria.
The word νίκη "nikē" is of uncertain etymology. R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin. Others have connected it to Proto-Indo-European *"neik"- (“to attack, start vehemently”), making it cognate with Greek νεῖκος ("neikos", "strife") and Lithuanian "ap-ni̇̀kti" ("to attack").

Nike was variously described as the daughter of the Titan Pallas and the goddess Styx, and the sister of Kratos (Strength), Bia (Force), and Zelus (Zeal). ""And Styx the daughter of Ocean was joined to Pallas and bore Zelus (Emulation) and trim-ankled Nike (Victory) in the house. Also she brought forth Cratos (Strength) and Bia (Force), wonderful children.""In other sources, Nike was described as the daughter of Ares, the god of war.""Ares... O defender of Olympos, father of warlike Nike (Victory).""

Names stemming from Nike include among others: Nikolaos, Nicholas, Nicola, Nick, Nicolai, Niccolò, Nikolai, Nicolae, Nils, Klaas, Nicole, Ike, Niki, Nikita, Nikitas, Nika, Nieke, Naike, Niketas, Nikki, Nico, and Veronica.

Greek version- Prometheus and Zeus
In the Greek version, the god Prometheus confronts is in fact the main head of the patriarchal pantheon, Zeus, who is almost always viewed in a positive light, as the loving All-Father, as the wise ruler of all, etc. The tale of Prometheus is one of the few instances where he is viewed negatively. Zeus guards the fire to keep humanity down, because he knows that once humanity has fire, it can make weapons, and progress, leading eventually to an ability to overthrow his rule. In some versions he also reasons that humanity is better off in ignorance and backwardness, without fire, often symbolized by its destructive nature contrasting its use for industry.

Pkharmat

Pkharmat (, Creator of the nation, language or land) is a legendary hero of the Vainakh people who brought fire to mankind and was chained to the Mount Kazbek. This allowed them to forge metal, cook and illuminate their houses. As a result of this, the people united and became a nation. Pkharmat is the Vainakh equivalent of the Greek hero Prometheus and the Georgian mythology hero Amirani, among others.

Pkharmat was a demi-god, or Nart, who loved and pitied his people, for they had no fire. The fire was kept by the cruel god Sela in his realm to show the Narts his strength and power and to suppress them. Sela, the god of the stars, thunder and lightning, drove his fire-chariot about the heavens and criss-crossed the Sky, making a terrible noise. With his bow he fired bolts of lightning down to earth.

Because they had no fire, Narts ate raw food and cold milk, and had no agriculture. For a long time the Narts led a miserable life. Sela knew it and was glad to see them so miserable as all the other gods were except Sela's wife "Sata". Sata cared for Narts, but she was afraid of her husband.

One day, there appeared a brave hero, Pkharmat. Pkharmat knew of the fire in hell () on the top of Mount Bashlam, thought to be a volcano. One day he decided to steal it. He forged without heat for his journey a coat, a sword and a shield out of Bronze. He mounted his horse "Turpal" and began his journey.

Sata took bird's form and alighted upon the mount's summit. She spoke to Pkharmat with a human voice: ""O powerful Nart, you have not reached the summit of Bashlam by chance. You have come to fetch Fire."" Pkharmat answered ""The people are in need of heat, of light. I shall only return to Earth to bring back Fire!"". Having seen how strong the Nart and his horse were, Sata promised to help him in his quest for Fire. She advised him how to go about obtaining some, and warned him of the possible danger and of Sela's cruelty.

Pkharmat also received help from his older brother, who Pkharmat informed of his quest. He gave his dear younger brother the "carz", a reed-like plant with a soft-inner core, with a piece of coal in it. The coal was very much attracted to the fire, and it burned, and with its sparks boring into the "carz", eventually boring eight holes of different length. Finally, the "carz" had been made into the reedpipe, which could make music, formerly unknown to the Narts. It was eventually given to the Narts.

Pkharmat leaped over hell and seized a burning piece of wood. Sela was angered that a Nart acted against his will and tried to catch him. Because he was unable to reach him, he untied his skein in which he kept night. Pkharmat quickly lost his way in the darkness, but "Sata" came to help, guiding him in bird form. Sela saw Pkharmat escaping and untied two skeins in which he kept storm and terrible cold. Pkharmat overcome these difficulties and struggled to the great cave in all Narts were gathered together for protection from cold, storm and darkness. He gave them the fire and told ""Here is Fire for you! Multiply and become a great tribe. Warm yourselves; illuminate your homes, the caves, the towers; cook, prepare food from now on. Rejoice!""

After that Sela sent his servant cyclops "Uja" to punish the unfaithful Pkharmat. "Uja" chained Pkharmat to the peak of Mount Bashlam with chains of bronze. The falcon "Ida" comes to Pkharmat every morning. According to the will of Sela, it sits upon Pkharmat's knees and tears at his liver with his beak.

"Turpal" was a legendary horse capable of outrunning lightning, which always roamed free, grazing among seven mountains, and drinking sea-water. Pkharmat wanted Turpal as his horse. Not even Sela's lightning bolts allowed Pkharmat to catch Turpal, which forced him to untie his skeins. Another miracle of "Turpal"'s miracles was leaping over burning hell on Bashlam's peak when Pkharmat took fire. "Turpal" means "Hero" in Nakh languages and is used as a male name.

Bashlam is known to most of the world as Mount Kazbek. Nowadays frozen Mount Bashlam is the place on top of which Sela's burning hell was placed. Bashlam is a dormant stratovolcano and one of the chief mountains of the Caucasus located in Georgia. Bashlam's last eruption was circa 750 BC. Events occurring in the legend may be memories of the chaos reigned in those days. Bashlam is the Nakh name of the Mount Kazbek, translated as Molten Mount. Bashlam has always been a sacred site for the Nakh and home of the Akkhi and Nart-Orsxtoi Tukkhums.

Pkharmat is usually identified as the Vainakh equivalent of similar figures in various other traditions (Greek, Armenian, Circassian, Abkhaz, Georgian, Ossete, Roman and so on).

There are notable differences between the different versions of the so-called "Prometheus".

In all versions, the "Prometheus" figure fights against a powerful god who has denied humanity fire. However, other characteristics of this god vary:

Greek version- Kronos and Ouranos
In another Greek tale, Ouranos, Zeus' grandfather was originally the ruler of the universe. He ruled with an iron fist and had a paranoid fear of being overthrown, leading him to oppress his own children, the First Generation Titans (6 males-including Kronos, the youngest- and 6 females). This tale did not involve any stealing of fire, but, rather, the overthrow of Ouranos by Kronos (Uranus by Saturn in the highly similar Latin version) brought the knowledge of agriculture to humankind. For Greeks and other Indo-Europeans, agriculture did not require fire, so the tales of how humankind acquired them are separate.

Vainakh version
For the most part, the Vainakh version is extremely similar to the Greek version of Prometheus. However, rather than the head of the pantheon, as Zeus is, Sela is a major god, but he is not the head of the pantheon (which would be Dela). Like Zeus, Sela owns thunder and lightning and uses lightning as a weapon. However, he shares certain characteristics with the Greek Uranus: he is the god of stars and the sky. Sela's personality also resembles that of Uranus.

The Pkharmat-character is variously a god, a demigod or a mortal.

Vainakh Version
Humankind attains both fire and agriculture as a result of the conflict between Pkharmat and Sela. Humankind also attains its first instrument- the reedpipe - from the affair, and with it, music, which in Vainakh culture is considered very important and was thought to have mystical properties. In addition to fire, agriculture, the reedpipe, and music, the origin of coal (given to Pkharmat while inside the "carz") and how man obtains it is also explained.

Greek Version
Humankind is only given fire- with which it can make tools. This exemplifies the importance of the forge in Indo-European culture.

All the indigenous religious traditions with a figure equivalent to Pkharmat were practiced by peoples of the Caucasus and some Indo-European peoples (who sometimes resided in the Caucasus, as is the case with the Armenians and Ossetes, but often didn't, as is the case with the Greeks, Latins, Celtic peoples, etc.). This seems to support the hypothesis that the original homeland of the Indo-European peoples lay to the immediate north of the Caucasus touching both the Black and Caspian Seas and possibly extending north along the Volga some length as well as somewhat west into Ukraine. This hypothesis is now the most widely accepted, rather than the hypotheses that the Indo-European languages originated in the Anatolian plains, in the Armenian highland, India, Balkans or the ancestral Slavic homelands, or that they were a sprachbund. Comparison of the various versions of the stories also support that the original Indo-Europeans probably had more intense cultural exchange with the North Caucasus than the South Caucasus- the forms most close to the Indo-European versions of the tale are, in fact, the Circassian version and the Vainakh version. The Circassian and Abkhaz name for the hero is Pataraz, which shows very noticeable similarity to the Greek name Prometheus, which is similar to most other Indo-European versions; comparing these two, it is also possible to note Pkharmat's similarity. It is possible that Pataraz, Prometheus, Pkharmat and possibly others are all roots from the same original name.