Was looking for a book on Phillip as it always seemed to me that what he accomplished was in many ways more impressive and complex than his more famous son. This book does a great job of telling that story in an easy to read narrative form, while giving you a great understanding of the source material. ( )

I have yet to read the bulk of this, having started with the appendices. (Method and some issues of detail interest me more in this case.) Worthington is an impeccable scholar, of course. His review of the sources is quite good.

For what it's worth, however, I object to his short essay on the ethnicity of the Macedonians. It's not that he isn't right in at least the way he intends to mean it, but that, like many, he takes a naive approach to what "right" means. That the ancient Macedonians spoke Greek and were ethnically ancient Greeks—to the extent that statements like that can have meaning—is well established. But we don't have an accurate picture of what ancient ethnicity translates into on a biological level, and less as to what that means 2,400 years later. Any intelligent person would suspect it means nothing at all.

But these aren't questions of biology. Ethnic politics in the Balkans is a dangerous, high-stakes affair. Greece and its neighbors have frequently sought to deport or strip the culture from citizens who don't fit the official ideology of a ethnically and linguistically pure state. Wars have been fought over this stuff, always with high levels of historical justification in the rhetoric that leads to and sustains the war. Balkan nationalism loves "Who is an X?" questions, and not because they're intellectually stimulating. Worthington and other classics scholars who think it's just a scholarly game, and they are defending accuracy on a scholarly topic, should step back and think about how their scholarly conclusions about people 2,400 years ago will be used in the streets, at the tip of an official's pen—or at the end of a gun. ( )