Only recently have we begun to clarify these muddy waters by revealing the Demosthenean corpus for what it is: oratory designed to sway public opinio… - Eugene N. Borza

Their daughter, who would be the half-sister of Alexander the Great and, later the wife of Cassander, was appropriately named Thessalonike, to commemorate Philip's victory in Thessaly. In 315 Cassander founded at or near the site of ancient Therme the great city that still bears her name.

Telephone cards now widely used throughout Greece bear the inscription "Macedonia is one and only and it is Greek," in Greek and English, despite the fact that for most of the 2,600 years since the genesis of the ancient Macedonian kingdom ethnic Greeks have been a minority of the population. The overwhelming Hellenic impact on Greek Macedonia is largely the result of the settlements and population exchanges of the early 1920s. Even Thessaloniki, with its rich Byzantine architectural heritage, counted far fewer Greeks than either Sephardic Jews or Turks until after the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

The Macedonians are a newly emergent people in search of a past to help legitimize their precarious present as they attempt to establish their singular identity in a Slavic world dominated historically by Serbs and Bulgarians. One need understand only a single geopolitical fact: As one measures conflicting Serb and Bulgarian claims over the past nine centuries, they intersect in Macedonia. Macedonia is where the historical Serb thrust to the south and the historical thrust to the west meet. This is not to say that present Serb and Bulgarian ambitions, where the past has precedence over the present and future.