Argead dynasty

Origin

About the origin of the Argeads and the foundation of the Macedonian kingdom attributed to them, two divergent accounts are available, both of doubtful value. Both agree that the dynasty came from Argos in the Peloponnese and from the Temenid dynasty that ruled there.

Perdiccas

The oldest known founding mythology of the Argeads is handed down by the historian Herodotus (5th century BC) in the eighth book of his Histories (§ 137 f.). According to this, the three brothers Gauanes, Aëropos and Perdikkas were descendants of Temenos, who had to flee from their hometown Argos for unspecified reasons. They first settled in Illyria, but then moved on to the Upper Macedonian countryside and entered the service of the king of the city of Lebaia, whose horses, cattle, and small livestock were tended by one of each of them. Because of the barrenness and poverty of the country, it was customary there for even the king's wife to bake the bread for her servants herself, and the loaf intended for Perdiccas turned out larger than intended each time. The worried king interpreted this as a miraculous sign of a forthcoming important event, whereupon he ordered the three brothers to leave his city. The latter, however, first demanded their due reward, whereupon the king pointed to the sun, which was just shining through the chimney of his house, and pronounced it to be their due reward. While the two elder brothers, Gauanes and Aëropos, thereupon remained perplexed, Perdiccas took a knife, circled with the same the region of the screed which was shone upon by the sun, and three times symbolically scooped the sunlight into his puff. He then left Lebaia with his brothers, but the king sent horsemen after them to have them killed, having become aware of the again ominous significance of these actions of the youngest of the brothers. However, the three brothers had crossed a small river on their way, which shortly after swelled to such a size that their pursuers could no longer chase them. (The descendants of the three founding fathers would make regular offerings to the same river as the savior of their race). Now the brothers reached another countryside of Macedonia, and there settled near the gardens of Midas, son of Gordias, at the foot of the mountain called Bermion. From thence they now began to subdue the rest of Macedonia to their dominion, and thus founded their own kingdom, the descendants of Perdiccas, who was favoured by the sun, forming the royal family.

In its core, this saga obviously describes the emergence of the Macedonian kingdom, according to which the Macedonians, as later described by Thucydides, originally had their first residences in the mountainous Upper Macedonian landscapes (Orestis, Lynkestis, Elimiotis, Pelagonia and Eordaia), characterized by inhospitable savagery and poverty, and from there finally expanded into the fertile Lower Macedonian landscapes at the Thermaic Gulf. The actual ancestors of the Argeads would then have distinguished themselves particularly successfully as leaders of one of the advancing tribes, and with the fortress of Aigai, strategically exposed between the High and Low Macedonians, they would have built an important power base from which they could establish a kingship over the peoples settling in the Low Macedonians, of which only the tribal cousins who had remained behind in Upper Macedonia were initially not included.

Herodotus explicitly located the city of Lebaia in "Upper Macedonia" and the "other Macedonian landscapes" described by him, where the Temenid brothers moved to after leaving Lebaia, might have been the fertile regions of Lower Macedonia, which is indicated by the "Garden of Midas" overgrown with ever blooming roses. The river that the brothers had to cross to escape their pursuers could be the Aliakmonas, on the upper and lower reaches of which lay the Upper Macedonian regions of Orestis and Elimiotis. And in Orestis, not far from the river, there are the ruins of the place Argos Orestikon, which according to Appian had been the home of the Argeads. Even if the majority of historians consider this claim to be implausible, it is nevertheless recognized as an awareness by the later Macedonians of the origin of their people and royal house from the Upper Macedonian mountain lands. The "Bermion Mountains" are further identified as the modern Vermio, at the foot of which, running out to the Macedonian lowlands, lies the city of Beroia (now Veria), which was one of the oldest Macedonian royal seats of all.

Thucydides also apparently assumed King Perdiccas I as the founder of the dynasty. The younger historian counted eight other rulers before Archelaus I, all of whom were named in Herodotus' list of kings as descendants of Perdiccas I.

Karanos

It was not until about half a century after Herodotus and Thucydides that historians began to expand the tribal saga of the Argeads and, with Karanos, to place a new first king of Macedonia living before Perdiccas and thus a new founder of a dynasty. The beginning was made by the poet Euripides, who in his drama Archelaos, completed around 410 BC in honour of King Archelaos I, praised him as "Karanos, son of Temenos" and had him found the Macedonian kingdom. This literary fiction quickly entered the historical canon, first in Theopompos (4th century BC), writing in the time of King Philip II, according to whom Karanos had been a son of King Pheidon. This patronym was later adopted by Diodorus, while in Satyrus the king Aristodamidas is the father of Karanos. However, Diodorus also mentioned the descent of Karanos from Poeas, which would make him belong to an alternative line of the Temenid dynasty than that of Pheidon and Aristodamidas.

The story of how Karanos founded the Macedonian kingdom has been told in several variations. According to Diodorus, even before the first Olympic Games, Karanos gathered around him a band of warriors from Argos and the Peloponnesus to come to the aid of the harassed king of Orestis in his battle against the king of Eordeia, for which he received from the latter as a reward half of the kingdom of Orestis, which eventually became Macedonia. In Justin, Karanos followed an oracle at Delphi by going with a party of Greeks, following the tracks of a herd of goats, into the country of Emathia, occupying the city of Edessa, and renaming it Aigai. From there he drove out Midas and the other kings of the region, creating the kingdom of Macedonia. According to Pausanias, Karanos defeated the tribal prince Kisseus, who ruled in a borderland, thus laying the foundation for his kingdom. The Byzantine author Georgios Synkellos (8th century AD) adhered to Diodorus' account and wrote how Karanos, with his warriors from Argos and the Peloponnese, conquered Macedonia with the help of the king of Orestis. Also in Synkellos, Karanos was a descendant of Poeas, a genealogical line already known to Diodorus.

Karanos was also accepted by Marsyas, Plutarch and Eusebius as the founder of a dynasty.

Sinking

The end of the Argeadian dynasty was sealed with the early death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, barely having conquered the Persian Empire in the previous ten years (Alexander's campaign). It is true that he left two heirs for the Persian Empire, his half-brother Philip III Arrhidaios and his son Alexander IV. Aigos, who, however, perished in the battles of the Diadochi due to mental and age-related incapacity to govern. Philip III Arrhidaios was assassinated by his stepmother Olympias in 317 BC, and Alexander IV. Aigos as the last king of the Argeades in 310 BC by Cassander. The last male scion of the dynasty Heracles, an illegitimate son of Alexander the Great, was murdered by Polyperchon already in the following year. The same happened to all female members of the family, Kynane († 323 BC), her daughter Eurydice († 317 BC), as well as Cleopatra († 308 BC) and Thessalonike († 295 BC), the last of whom was also the last member of the Argeades.

Through Thessalonica the kings of the short-lived dynasty of the Antipatrides, as their mother, could refer to the Argeads by kinship.

Also the ancestral mother of the Antigonids, the third and last Macedonian royal dynasty, Stratonike is occasionally associated with the Argeads in historical research. However, only because her name was also used in this dynasty.