ntercourse between the dwellers in the
various cantons. The wide and fertile valleys, however, and the mountain
slopes abounding in extensive forests, the haunts of wild game, mark the
land as the country of a great people, who by generations of seclusion
were storing up strength and vitality to be of vast influence whenever
they should break through their narrow confines.

Such a people dwelt there, but it required strong leaders to bring them
in touch with the rich Hellenic life to the south of them and to make
them a powerful factor in the history of the world. Philip, lord of
Macedon, and his mightier son, Alexander, were the great men who were to
accomplish the work of grafting the new blood and energy of Macedon
upon the decaying stock of Greek culture, and to diffuse the spirit of
Hellenism throughout the civilized world. With them the old order of
things, as represented in Athens and Sparta, passed away, and a new
order, with new ideals, new motives, new views of life, was born. Hence,
the people of Macedon, themselves Greek by race, have a large place in
the consideration of any phase of Greek life. When the Hellenes
originally migrated into Greece, a branch of the race found its way into
the southwestern part of Macedon behind the barriers of Olympus, and
later, by intermixture with the Illyrians and other barbarous races,
these invaders lost some of their national characteristics and, shut off
as they were, failed to share in the history and development of their
kinsmen to the south. In language, in institutions, and in aspirations,
however, they gave indisputable evidence of their right to be considered
as members of the great Hellenic family.

The people were a hardy, peasant folk, devoted to hunting, to grazing,
and to agriculture, and they preserved the patriarchal institutions
which obtained among the earliest Greeks. They were divided into many
tribes, each with its own chief and leader. Among some of the hardier
tribes, the man who had not slain a wild boar was not allowed to recline
at table with the warriors, and not to have slain an enemy was regarded
as a mark of disgrace. In the tribal organization and in the institution
of the kingship, we are carried back to the society of Homeric times,
and in manifold ways the public and private life of the Macedonians
reflects the life portrayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Aristotle remarks that the ancient kingship survived only among the
Spartans, the