Note 22 — Chapter XXV · ILLYRIANS, MACEDONIANS, PÆONIANS.

I have followed Herodotus in stating the original series of occupants on the Thermaic gulf, anterior to the Macedonian conquests. Thucydidês introduces the Pæonians between Bottiæans and Mygdonians: he says that the Pæonians possessed “a narrow strip of land on the side of the Axius, down to Pella and the sea,” (ii, 96.) If this were true, it would leave hardly any room for the Bottiæans, whom, nevertheless, Thucydidês recognizes on the coast; for the whole space between the mouths of the two rivers, Axius and Haliakmôn, is inconsiderable; moreover, I cannot but suspect that Thucydidês has been led to believe, by finding in the Iliad that the Pæonian allies of Troy came from the Axius, that there must have been old Pæonian settlements at the mouth of that river, and that he has advanced the inference as if it were a certified fact. The case is analogous to what he says about the Bœotians in his preface (upon which O. Müller has already commented); he stated the emigration of the Bœotians into Bœotia as having taken place after the Trojan war, but saves the historical credit of the Homeric catalogue by adding that there had been a fraction of them in Bœotia before, from whom the contingent which went to Troy was furnished (ἀποδασμός, Thucyd. i, 12).

On this occasion, therefore, having to choose between Herodotus and Thucydidês, I prefer the former. O. Müller (On the Macedonians, sect. 11) would strike out just so much of the assertion of Thucydidês as positively contradicts Herodotus, and retain the rest; he thinks that the Pæonians came down very near to the mouth of the river, but not quite. I confess that this does not satisfy me; the more so as the passage from Livy by which he would support his view will appear, on examination, to refer to Pæonia high up the Axius,—not to a supposed portion of Pæonia near the mouth (Livy, xlv, 29).

Again, I would remark that the original residence of the Pierians between the Peneius and the Haliakmôn rests chiefly upon the authority of Thucydidês: Herodotus knows the Pierians in their seats between Mount Pangæus and the sea, but he gives no intimation that they had before dwelt south of the Haliakmôn; the tract between the Haliakmôn and the Peneius is by him conceived as Lower Macedonia, or Macedonis, reaching to the borders of Thessaly (vii, 127-173). I make this remark in reference to sects. 7-17 of O. Müller’s Dissertation, wherein the conception of Herodotus appears incorrectly apprehended, and some erroneous inferences founded upon it. That this tract was the original Pieria, there is sufficient reason for believing (compare Strabo, vii, Frag. 22, with Tafel’s note, and ix, p. 410; Livy, xliv, 9); but Herodotus notices it only as Macedonia.