03-01-2006, 08:43 AM
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 | Macedonian | | Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Hellas
Posts: 4,518
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 Caranos and Pheidonas
In 500 BC, flush with his country’s new-found wealth and importance, the young Makedonian prince Alexander I had presented himself at the Olympic Games as a contestant in the men’s foot race. His Greek competitors had tried to have him excluded on the grounds that as a Makedonian he was a non-Greek and therefore ineligible under the rules to enter any panhellenic contest. Alexander, however, proved to the satisfaction of the games’ marshals that he was of Argive descent and he was accordingly accepted by them as a bona fide competitor. In the race itself he came in equal first (Herodotus 5.22), making one suspect that the original protest by his rivals may well have a claim to be regarded as one of the earliest recorded examples of those ‘dirty tricks’ which so beset modern sport. What Alexander had been able to demonstrate was something which, if not unique in Greek history, must nevertheless be regarded as extremely unusual. He was an Argive Greek ruling over a Kingdom. His descent, he claimed, could be traced back to Temenus, a legendary king of Argos who was himself a descendant of Heracles, the son of Zeus. Herodotus (8.137-8) tells a charming folktale of how three brothers of that line, who had been exiled from Argos, had ended up in Lebaea in Upper Makedonia. Herodotus recited the Macedonian pedigree as it was known to him: Perdiccas -- Argaios -- Philippos -- Aeropos -- Alcetas -Amyntas -- Alexander. The alleged Argive connection began with Perdiccas: who obtained the royal power in Macedon as I shall show. Three brothers of the lineage of Temenos, Gouanes, Aeropos and Perdiccas were banished from Argos to Illyria; they crossed into Macedonia and took service as bondsmen with the king for an agreed wage. The story goes on as a fairy-tale, with the deception of the brothers by the wicked king and their magical deliverance by the youngest, who received with open arms the sunbeam offered to them by the king. A later enlargement of the pedigree is more plausible as a narrative but no more credible as history. Perdiccas is there fourth in descent from Caranos(Κάρανος), a reputed brother of Pheidon (Φείδων) of Argos, of whom Georgius Syncellus reports: He raised a force from his brother ( Pheidon) and the whole of Peloponnese, with which he made an expedition against the regions above Macedonia and took half the country. Who was the Pheidon of Argos ? more in http://www.macedoniaontheweb.com/articles/?p=29
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