The Role of Thessaly in Argead Foreign Policy and a Case of Invented Tradition

In antiquity, the Thessalians and the Macedonians, neighbors on the periphery of the Greek world, were perceived as primitive uncultured boors, whose political instability and proclivity to luxury left them open to collaboration with the Persians, the archetypal foreign enemy of the Greeks. As time went on, these stereotypes gradually shaded into hostile caricatures bearing little relation to reality, a process that heated up after Philip II of Macedon began to replace the Persians as a direct threat to the continued autonomy of the Greek poleis. In this contribution, I re-examine the role that the traditional Argead alliance with the Aleuads of Thessaly played in Philip’s ultimate conquest of Greece, thereby contributing to the development of the unflattering stereotypes that they both shared. The close connection between Philip and the Aleuads is also responsible for the retrojection to his Argead predecessor, Archelaos, of an intervention in Thessaly actually waged by Philip’s brother, Alexander II.