Το παρών άρθρο πρωτοεμφανίστηκε στο περιοδικό Αμέρικαν Κρόνικλ, στις 2 Ιουνίου του 1009.
Μιλτιάδης Ηλία Μπόλαρης
www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/104432
Balkan Illusion - phantasia archaica:
"...it is very interesting to note that many of the authentic ancient Macedonian words, according to their etymology and pronunciation, have a striking resemblance to the appropriate words used in the modern Macedonian language (and other so called "Slav"[sic] languages)." "A very good example is the word "Arotos" which ancient Macedonians used as an epithet to the god Heracles). Its etymology is undetermined to-date, however if the suffix "s" is deleted this word is practically identical with the adjective "aroto" - "the old one" (archaism to a degree) from the present Macedonian language. According to a legend Heracles was considered to be the oldest ascendant of the Macedonians. Can the answer for the etymology of the word "arotos" be located in this legend, by referring to Heracles as "the old one" or "aroto(s)"? "
From: "Similarities between ancient Macedonian and today's Macedonian Culture (Linguistics and Onomastics)" by Aleksandar Donski, celebrity folk "historian" from FYROM.
Heracles Arotos / Ηρακλής Άροτος
When I first entered the gates of the "Center", just outside the picturesque town of Nauplion/Ναύπλιον, I had no idea what was in store for me. The "Basic Training Center"/Κέντρον Βασικής Εκπαιδεύσεως is the main training camp for the Hellenic Army Engineering Corps. What followed was a forty day training in the basics of military drilling. Forty days where you are not allowed to get out of the base, where everyone around you is in their late teens and early twenties, and you see no women, children or older people, you only see people dressed in army fatigues and the predominant colors are army gray, khaki and army green.
Two or four months later the newly trained soldiers are sent to the Tagmata, the frontier battalions by the Turkish border. I also took the train, crossed the Peloponnese, changed train in Athens then crossed central Greece, Thessaly, Macedonia and finally the Thracian town of Xanthe/Ξάνθη was awaiting for me. When you enter the barracks, in my case the Fourth Army Corps headquarters, you bring along a huge army carry-on bag with your uniforms and private items in, and you are immediately identifiable from a mile as the "New one" the "Neos"! You present your papers and you report to an officer who then shows you to your company's building. It is there that you first hear of your new position in life: You may have thought that you are a University educated person, with a degree from an American University...sorry, but here you are just a "psari"! Psari/ψάρι in Greek is a fish! Ok, you put one and one together, you eventually get it: a new soldier is a fish out of water, quite vulnerable: He has to follow the orders of the palioi, the old ones in the company, till other, fresh Neoi show up in two months. But then, college educated and all, you are not ready for the next word describing your new order in society:
Eh, Arouri!, someone calls you. Pause and puzzlement:
Eh...what was it exactly that you called me?
I said "Arouri!" comes the reply.
And...what is an "Arouri"?
Man, you really ARE an Arouri! You have no clue...do you? Don't you have arouria in your village?! Listen: arouri is a field rat!
It took a couple seconds, being a town boy and all, but at last I made the connection...arouri is the neuter form of arouraios/αρουραίος. This is how I knew it being called, anyway. The realization finally struck me: he had just called me a field rat!
It was all clear now: my new position in army life as the Newbie, "o Neous", in 40ME, where I was to stay for the next eight months, before my next transfer, was that of the little abominable creature, the field rat, which any older/palios soldier could sort of step on...pretty graphic!
Let us talk about rats: there is a word in Greek describing all rats: mus/μύς. It is derived from the PIE word *mus. In Greek, Latin and Sanskrit the mouse remains the same: mus. The modern English "mouse" is also derived from that same PIE word: *mus.
Modern Greeks have two more words for the diminutive mammal: one for the urban mouse: pontiki/ποντίκι or pontikos/ποντικός, and a more specific to the field mouse: arouraios/αρουραίος.
Pontikos/ ποντικός in ancient Greek means marine, someone of the sea. Greece being a marine country, always sent and received and exchanged things with other places. One unwelcome product that eventually found its way to Greece was the ship rat (ratus ratus) originally a pest from India. The ship rat in Greek is not surprisingly called a marine rat: mus pontikos/ μύς ποντικός. Οver time the noun mus/μύς=the mouse was dropped and the adjective pontikos/ποντικός=the marine, the one of the sea took its position. The mouse was now called the marine! Writing this, I finally realize that I myself was once among the few, the not so proud, the marines...and I am not talking here of the ones who cross the valleys of modern Bactria/Afganistan or the fertile land of Mesopotamia/Iraq either...you know which "marines/pontikoi" I mean!
Let us now look at our Liddel & Scott Greek English Lexicon under arouraios:
Ἀρουραίος, α, ον, of or from the country, rural, rustic, μύς α. field vole, etc
And in the abridged Liddell & Scott, we read:
Ἀρουραίος, α, ον, belonging to corn land, rustic; μύς Ἀρουραίος a field-mouse.
As we can see, arouraios, the field mouse, had a similar story, linguistically speaking, to the marine mouse: the noun was dropped, becoming irrelevant through constant usage and the adjective took over its meaning. Mus arouraios, the mouse of the fields, became simply arouraios, the fieldmouse.
A related to Ἀρουραίος/arouraios word is arosmos/αροσμός, also written in the female as arosis/ἄροσις, and it means "arable land" but also "ploughing/plowing". Another word for arable land in Greek is Aroura/Ἀρουρα. Τhe original common Indo-European word is *h2e'rh3wr, according to "The Oxford Instroduction to Proro-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World", J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Oxford University Press, 2006 and 2007. In the same book we read that related words are arbor for "seed" in Old Irish, arvum for "ploughed field" in Latin, aroura/άρουρα meaning "field" in Greek, haravunk in Armenian for "field"and probably urva'ra for "fertile soil" in Sanskrit.
The word arosis is still used in modern Greek and with the same meaning, and on a quick internet someone can find a company producing and packaging organic beans of Western Macedonia (not FYROM), by the town of Kastoria/Καστοριά, in Greece named Arosis/Αροσις:
www.arosis.gr
The word arotron/ἄροτρον meaning the plough/plow (it is derived from the PIE word *h2e'rh3w- for "plow") is the tool the arotes/αρότης uses to do the plowing. It is one of those Greek words that appear in Homer and Hesiod, Plato and Aristophanes, among others, and are still in daily usage today. In one of the the Aesop fables, coming to us from Hellenic antiquity we find all three words, arotes/αρότης, aroura/άρουρα and
arotron/ἄροτρον:
Ἀρότης καὶ λύκος
Ἀρότης [arotes] λύσας τὸ ζεῦγος ἐπὶ ποτὸν ἀπῆγε· λύκος δὲ λιμώττων καὶ τροφὴν ζητῶν, ὡς περιέτυχε τῷ ἀρότρῳ, τὸ μὲν πρῶτον τὰς τῶν ταύρων ζεύγλας περιέλειχε, λαθὼν δὲ κατὰ μικρόν, ἐπειδὴ καθῆκε τὸν αὐχένα, ἀνασπᾶν μὴ δυνάμενος, ἐπὶ τὴν ἄρουραν τὸ ἄροτρον [to arotron] ἔσυρεν. Ὁ δὲ ἀρότης ἐπανελθὼν καὶ θεασάμενος αὐτὸν ἔλεγεν· Εἴθε γὰρ, ὦ κακὴ κεφαλή, καταλιπὼν τὰς ἁρπαγὰς καὶ τὸ ἀδικεῖν ἐπὶ τὸ γεωπονεῖν τραπείης.
Οὕτως οἱ πονηροὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, κἂν χρηστότητα ἐπαγγέλλωνται, διὰ τὸν τρόπον οὐ πιστεύονται.
The plowman, and the wolf
A plowman loosed his oxen from the yoke and led them away to be watered. Meanwhile, a hungry wolf, who was looking for something to eat, discovered the plow and started to lick the yoke straps where the oxen had been tied. The unsuspecting wolf slowly but surely slipped his neck beneath the yoke, until he was not able to pull it back out. He then started dragging the plow along the furrow. When the plowman came back and saw what had happened, he said, 'O you wicked creature, if only you would give up your life of theft and crime in order to devote yourself entirely to farming!'
The same is true of wicked people: even when they promise to be on their good behavior, no one believes them because of their bad habits.
Although Aesop/Αίσωπος could never have imagined this in his time, it so happens that his tale fits like a glove some people in Skopje who try to steal the history and culture of others, further south. What instead they achieve is to simply lick off some traces of the taste of that culture, escaping the true essence of it. What started as a simple lie, for internal consumption, to help bring some pride to their people in the attempt to redirect their "false" ethnic identity (Serb, Bulgarian, Greek, Vlach, etc) they ended up like Aesop's wolf, traped in the yoke of their own lies, trying to defend the usurption of a culture that belongs to the Greek Macedonians, in Historic Macedonia. What would the world think is some Caucasian Turkmen would claim Dostojevski and Tolstoy and Alexander Nevski as being their countrymen, and not being Russian? This is precisely the case with the so called "makedonski Macedonians of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Makedonija, FYROM: they are fast achieving world wide ridicule by claiming that Alexander the Great and Aristotle and Homer were Makedonski Slavs. They end up with "empty" names, words whose meaning is alien to them, words like Arotos that have absolutely zero connection to their Slavic dialect, no matter how much tongue twisting professor Donski applies to them trying to make Staro/Старo=old to fit into a pseudolinguistic mold of Arotos/Ἀρoτoς.
Let us keep these two words from Aesop for now:
Ἀρότης / Arotes = the plowman τὸ ἄροτρον / to arotron = the plow
The word arotes, the plowman, was also used as a first name in ancient Greece. Here is an example from an incription from some PanHellenic games held in the Thessalian city of Larissa:
Regions : Central Greece (IG VII-IX) : Thessaly (IG IX,2)
IG IX,2 526 IG IX,2 525 IG IX,2 526a
Pelasgiotis — Larisa — after 196 BC
Ἀ]ρότης Ἀρότου Θάσιος.
ἀγενείους·
Ἰσίδικος Μνασικλέους Κυμαῖος.
ἄνδρας·
5
Διονύσιος Ἡροφίλου Μάγνης ἀπὸ Μαιάνδρου.
παῖδας πανκρατίου·
Δημήτριος Δημητρίου Συρακόσιος.
ἀγενείους·
Ἀριστόδημος Νικομένους Θ{ι}ηβαῖος {²⁶Θηβαῖος}²⁶.
10
ἄνδρας·
etc
Arotes son of Arotos, from Thassos
teenagers
isidikos son of Mnasikles, from Cyme.
men
5
Dionysios son of Herophilos a Magnetan from Maiandros
children, pangration (boxing)
Demetrios son of Demetrios, from Syracuse
teenagers
Aristodemos son of Nikodemos from Thebes.
10
men
etc
We see two different forms of essentially the same name: Arotes/Ἀρότης and his patronym (in genitive form) Arotou/Ἀρότου=Arotos.
The very same name appears inscribed on a handle of an amphora jug, from the Greek city of Histria/Ιστρίη, in today's Romania. The amphora's owner made sure nobody steals it from him, so he scratched his name on the handle: Ἀρ|ότεω/Aroteou (Belonging to Arotos)
Regions : Thrace and the Lower Danube (IG X) : Scythia Minor
Histria VIII,1 558
Stamp of the eponym Arotes. Thasian amphora handle.
Scythia Minor [Thasos] — Istros-Histria — Histria Pod — ca. 329-326 BC
Ἀρότεω. Aroteou.
The word arotron for plow is also encountered in the original text of the Christian bible. When a man told Christ in Luke (9.61-62) that he is ready to follow him, Jesus replied that he should be looking ahead, not back: a complete and immediate break with his past what was expected of him:
Εἶπε δὲ καὶ ἕτερος· Ἀκολουθήσω σοι, Κύριε· πρῶτον δὲ ἐπίτρεψόν μοι ἀποτάξασθαι τοῖς εἰς τὸν οἶκόν μου. 62 εἶπε δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς πρὸς αὐτόν· Οὐδεὶς ἐπιβαλὼν τὴν χεῖρα αὐτοῦ ἐπ´ ἄροτρον [arotron] καὶ βλέπων εἰς τὰ ὀπίσω εὔθετός ἐστιν εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ Θεοῦ.
Κατἀ Λουκάν 9.61-62
And another also said, Lord, I will follow you; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. And Jesus said to him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
Luke 9.61-62
ἄροτρον/arotron=plough, plow
If anyone is wondering how why the New Testament was written in Greek and how Greek ended up being the lingua Franca of the ancient world, especially in the near and middle East, it is the Macedonians that made it so. They exported their Greek language and culture and made them part of the Asian and African cultural landscape, starting from the European river shores of the Danube to the river shores of the Indus and the Nile. This is how the Christian religion ended up adopting Greek as its language of propagation, since most Jews had already adopted it in the Hellenistic times, becoming deficient by then in their native Aramaic or Hebrew. Palestine, Judea, Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor became Greek speaking territories after Alexander conquered them, in the same way Gallia/France and Hispania/Espana/Spain became Latin speaking territories after the Latin-speaking Romans conquered them.
The Slavs had to wait for another 950 years before two Greek monks Constantinos-Cyrillos and Methodios from Thessalonike, on an official mission from Byzantium had to be sent to Moravia (now the Czech republic) and translate the bible from Koine Greek/Κοινή Ελληνική into Old Church Slavonic/Cтарославянский Язык.
Aρόω/arroo is a verb (future tense αρόσω/aroso, spelled also as: αρώσω and αρόσσω, aor. ἤροσα and it means to plough, to till, occasionally also: to sow. Metaphorically it can also be used of a man, meaning the impregnator, as in the example given in our dictionary: ten tekousan erosen/τήν τεκούσαν ἤροσεν:
τί γὰρ κακῶν ἄπεστι; τὸν πατέρα πατὴρ
ὑμῶν ἔπεφνε: τὴν τεκοῦσαν ἤροσεν[erosen],
ὅθεν περ αὐτὸς ἐσπάρη,
Σοφοκλέους, Οιδίπους Τύραννος 1485
Is any evil missing? Your father his father
killed: he tilled the one who gave birth
where he himself was sown.
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1485
Oedipus, as we remember was a man who unknowingly had killed his father and married his own mother.
From Aroo/Aρόω to plow, we have the word Αroter/Ἀρoτήρ meaning the plowman, whose synonym we encountered earlier as Ἀρότης/Arotes. The same word is also found as:
Ἀροτος/Arotοs.
This is the word which professor Aleksandar Donski reminds us the "ancient Macedonians used as an epithet to the god Heracles". So far so good. He then continues: "Its etymology is undetermined to-date...": here now we must disagree, since what might be unintelligible to a Serb and/or Bulgarian speaking professor from FYROM who has no training in the classics, is fairly easily understood by even an untrained in the Classics average Greek Macedonian farmer who goes to the market to buy an arotron/άροτρον to pull behind his tractor. For a locally produced arotron/plow, this same farmer can go to a dealer of the largest company in Greece producing them whose factory is located right there in historic Macedonia, in northern Greece; more specifically at the village Lakoma, in Chalkidice, very close to Thessalonike:
Biomechania Αrotron Afoi Sarapanoi O.E. is the (transliterated into Latin) name of the arotra producing company in Greek:
Plaughs IndustrySarapanis Bros, S.A.
http://www.sarapanis.gr/
But professor Donski is not aware of this, all he wants to "prove" is that the Slavs and the Albanians, the Turks and the Bulgarians and Serbs who live in FYROM are actually direct descendants of the ancient Macedonians, and that the Greek Macedonians do not belong in Macedonia. To him, as to all the apologists of the pseudo-makedonist regime in Skopje, the Macedonian Greeks are the "intruders" that need to be pushed out of northern Greece, the historic land of the ancient Macedonians.
So he continues: "however if the suffix "s" [He means the ending "s" in Arotos] is deleted this word is practically identical with the adjective "aroto" - "the old one" (archaism to a degree) from the present Macedonian language."
We need make note of the contents in parenthesis: "(archaism to a degree)", tells us Aleksandar Donski. This is the falsifier's disclaimer: He cannot prove it, therefore he tells us that it is an "archaism"..."to a degree".
I will not even argue to what degree. All I want to know is, IF it is an archaism, I need to see the proof: where is it written on a Slavonic text, not just on a Slavomacedonian text, a language or a dialect which has only been codified into a language in 1945, but in ANY Slavonic text, of ANY Slavonic language, in ANY area, ANY historic era, ANY text where "aroto", in Slavonic, EVEN as an archaism, means "old".
It is getting very tiring for us to hear all sorts of outrageous and outlandish claims coming out of Skopian falsifiers of legitimate Macedonian history who casually make these pronouncements without any grain of documentation to back them up.
We are not expecting professor Donski or any Skopjan propagandist to come up with the documentation, for if they had it they would have produced it. We need to find the truth or falacity of his claims ourselves. Let us look briefly for what is the word for "old" in the modern Slavic languages:
Belarusian: стары (stari) and as старо (staro) within a larger word, such as: старобелорусскими/starobeloruskimi: Old Belorussian.
Bosnian: star
Bulgarian: стар (star) but also старо- (staro-) within a larger word.
Czech: starý and staro- within a larger word.
Croatian: star and staro- within a larger word.
Polish: stary, and staro- within a larger word.
Russian: старый (starie) and старо (staro) within a larger word.
Serbian: стар (star)
Slavomacedonian: стар (star) but also старо- (staro-) within a larger word.
Slovak: starý and also (staro-) within a larger word
Slovene: star and also(staro-) within a larger word
Ukrainian: старий (Starie) but also старо (staro)within a larger word.
This is strange: the word for "old" in ALL the Slavic languages is everywhere старо/staro or a close derivative of it. It changes only slightly from one language to another. So, then, where does professor Donski find his "aroto"? While many Slavic languages do not use an article, the Slavomacedonians do, and it is the same as in Greek: "to", the difference being that while Greeks use the article in the beginning of the word, and it is a separate word, in Slavomacedonian it is attached at the end of the noun:
Where a Greek would say:
palaio: old
to palaio: the old
a Slavomacedonians will say:
staro: old,
staroto: old the (meaning: "the old")
Staro-to, is not Arotos though. How can we be so sure? Because if professor Donski was right, and "aroto" - "the old one"" was simply an "(archaism to a degree)", then it would have appeared as such in one or more other Slavic languages. As we saw though, they all use "staro" for old, without changes. Words do not usually drop from the sky: they develop, or sometimes they are borrowed. None of above is true with "staro", as we see: it has remained unchanged from Old Church Slavonic (OCL) to today, in ALL the Slavic languages.
When A.Donski tells us that "this word is practically identical with the adjective "aroto" - "the old one" (archaism to a degree) from the present Macedonian language" he has to explain how and why it is an "archaism", what was the original form from which the later developed and how this "archaism" relates to what he calls "the present Macedonian language". We hear none of that. Yet he wrote a whole book trying to convince his receptive readers of the alleged "Similarities between ancient Macedonian and today's Macedonian Culture (Linguistics and Onomastics)". He even had willing accomplices who gleefully translated the professors pronouncements into English for the American, Canadian and Australian Slavomacedonian expatriate community's second generation.
Unfortunately for them, absolutely no connection can be made between "staroto" and Arotos: the nut does not match the bolt, as even professor Dosnki agrees with us: "According to a legend Heracles was considered to be the oldest ascendant of the Macedonians. Can the answer for the etymology of the word "arotos" be located in this legend, by referring to Heracles as "the old one" or "aroto(s)?"". When you are certain of something you do not put a question mark at the end of such a statement. But when you know that you are treading on very thin ice, and your task is to simply create a nationalistic mythology, for your Balkan nation in search of a new identity, then you use a question mark, to salvage some of your professorial self worth.
Ἀροτήρ besides plougher/plower and husbandman has a second, metaphorical meaning as "begeter, father" according to Liddell & Scott Greek English Lexicon.
We remember Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, 1485:
ten tekousan erosen/τήν τεκούσαν ἤροσεν/he tilled the one who gave birth
Now Sophocles' poetry makes a lot more sense: In a less poetic way, Sophocles could have also said more plainly: He fathered children from the one whom he got pregnant.
Let us now take a closer look at the word "arotos". We open the Liddell & Scott Greek English Lexicon and we read:
Ἀρoτoς [ᾶ], o, corn field,... 2. crop,...3. tillage, ploughing,... 4. metaph., procreation of children, ὀ ἀροτος ο εν γυναικί Pl. cra.406b;παίδων ἐπ΄ἀρότωι γνησίων, in Athen. marriage-contracts, etc.
Explanation number four is what catches our attention: Arotos, metaphorically means "the one who procreates children", who impregnates the woman, who fathers his own genuine children (παίδων ἐπ΄ἀρότωι γνησίων/paidon ep' arotoi gnesion, i.e. the woman has not slept with another man that same time, these are his own children, carrying his seed and genes).
On a funerary inscription from Rome of the 3rd c AD, we read the dedication the children of a man named Eutonios wrote in honor of their father:
Regions : Sicily, Italy, and the West (IG XIV) :
Italy, incl. Magna Graecia IGUR III 1218
Italia — Roma — 3rd c. AD — IG XIV 1615 — GVI 2054
τὸν σοφίης προὔχοντα
καὶ εὐτεκνίης ἀροτῆρα,
τὸν πατέρ´ ἡμέτερον
πολλοῖσι χρόνοις γεγαῶτα,
5
τὸν τρὶς ἀριστεύσαντα
σὺν ἐντείμοισι φίλοισι
Εὐτόνιοι παῖδες πατέρ´
Εὐτόνιον τεθνεῶτα
πολλάκις ὑμνήσωμεν
10
ἐναὶ στήλαισι γραφέντα.
To the one who always offered wisdom
and begeter of a multitude of children
(καὶ εὐτεκνίης ἀροτῆρα / kai euteknies arotera)
our father
who lived many years
who thrice won the highest price
among honorable friends
we, Eutonios' children to our father
Eutonios whom we will
praise multiple times
inscribing his image on the stela
The Macedonian dynasty descended from Argos. The first Macedonian king was Caranos the son of the king of Argos Temenos. Temenos in turn was the son of Aristomachos, Herakles´ great-grandson. Aristomachos was the one who led the Heraclidae and the Dorians (Herodotus tells us that the Dorians were originally part of the Macedonian tribes) when the Dorians invaded the Peloponnese. This is the reasons the Macedonian kings claimed to be Temenidae, and Argaeadae, but also Heraclidae. Alexander the Great named his firstborn son, by the beautiful Persian Barsine, Heracles.
It has been said that one of Alexander's great motives and one of the driving forces behind all his actions, was the attempt to surpass the deeds and the glory of his two divine progenitors: Achilles from his mother's side and Heracles from his father's side. The capture of Aornos Petra, an impossibly strong fortified position on a mountaintop now called Pir-Sar, in northern Pakistan, was a case in point, where Alexander surpasses his own progenitor for this was a rock that even Heracles did not succeed in capturing:
ἀπολιπόντες τὰς πόλεις ξύμπαντες ἔφευγον ἐς τὴν πέτραν τὴν ἐν τῇ χώρᾳ τὴν Ἄορνον καλουμένην. Μέγα γάρ τι τοῦτο χρῆμα πέτρας ἐν τῇ χώρᾳ ταύτῃ ἐστί, καὶ λόγος ὑπὲρ αὐτῆς κατέχει οὐδὲ Ἡρακλεῖ τῷ Διὸς ἁλωτὸν γενέσθαι τὴν πέτραν.
For all the inhabitants deserted the cities and began to flee to the rock which is in their land, and is called Aornus. For stupendous is this rock in this land, about which the current report is, that it was found impregnable even by Heracles, the son of Zeus.
Arrian, Alexander Anabasis,
As it turns out, Aornus was associated in local tradition with Krishna, and the Greeks immediately made the identification with his Greek counterpart, Heracles. As it was proven in Aornus, what was impossible to Heracles was now possible to Alexandros:
εἴχετό τε Ἀλεξάνδρῳ ἡ πέτρα ἡ τῷ Ἡρακλεῖ ἄπορος γενομένη
and thus the rock which had been inexpugnable to Heracles was occupied by Alexander.
Arrian, Alexander Anabasis, XXVIII
The coin decorating the begining of this article is a Macedonian Hemiobolos/Ημιόβολος, issued by Alexandros III/Αλέξανδρος Γ', Alexander the Great. He is portrayed as a young Heracles, wearing the characteristic lion skin cup, made of the hide of the lion of Nemea, as worn by Heracles. On the reverse side we see Heracles' weapons: his club and his bow and quiver of arrows, as well as Zeus's thunderbolt. Between Heracles' club and his quiver we see the inscription in Greek: ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ-ALEXANDROY (Alexander's name in genitive form): belonging to Alexandros. This imagery of Alexander as another Heracles was part of an orchestrated deification propaganda on the part of Alexander. Alexander's attempt at deification, while he was still alive (Greeks had no qualms about deifying someone after his death) had already started by the grateful Greek cities of Ionia, whom Alexander had liberated from the Persians. On the other hand, it truly irritated some other descendants of Heracles, the Dorian cousins of the Macedonians, the Spartans. When in 324 BC word from Babylon got to the Spartans that Alexander was asking of the Greek city states to pass a formal decree on the deification of king Alexandros, son of Zeus, the Spartans were not amused. Damis, a Spartan , spitefully declared:
"Συγχωρώμεν Αλεξάνδρω, εάν θέλει, Θεός καλείσθαι!" Πλουτάρχου, Ηθικά
"We grand to Alexandros, if he so wishes, to call himself a God." Plutarch, Moralia
Whether the Spartans liked it or not, they knew they shared the common descent from Heracles with all other Dorians and the Macedonians. Heracles, was considered to be the divine progenitor of Dorians and Macedonians and this was accepted in the common mythology of all the all other Greeks too.
To the Greek speaking Macedonians Heracles was the Tiller-Begeter, Heracles the Founding Father, Heracles the γενάρχης/Genarch of their Makedne tribe. He was Heracles the Progenitor-Father-Procreator of the Macedonians.
He was: Ἠρακλής Ἀροτος - Heracles Arotos!
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