Macedon was a kingdom of northern Ancient Greece which existed from 808 to 168 BC and from 150 to 148 BC, with Aigai (Vergina) serving as its capital until 399 BC and Pella until 168 BC. The original Macedonians were a barbaric and pastoralist people who lived in the Orestian Highlands, and they were divided into several small tribes and clans. In 700 BC, the Argive brothers Perdiccas, Gauanes, and Aeropas united the Macedonian tribes, and Perdiccas established the city of Aigai and became the first Macedonian king of the Argead dynasty. The Macedonians were only considered semi-Greek, but, when Alexander I of Macedon sought to compete in the Olympic Games footrace in 504 BC, he was allowed to participate due to his Argive descent and won equal first. However, the common people of Macedonia were alien to the Greeks, and Herodotus referred to Macedon as a kingdom of Macedonians ruled over by Greeks. Most Macedonians were rural village-dwellers who lived in the highlands, hunted dangerous game such as boars and lions, drank undiluted wine, and lived under kings, all of which were unfathomable to the Greeks, especially to the democratic and urban Athenians. However, the Macedonians revered the same gods, especially Zeus and his sosn Heracles, whom they claimed as their ancestor. The native Macedonian tongue was rooted in Greek, but other words were of Illyrian and Thracian origins.
In 510 BC, King Darius the Great of Persia led a campaign to subdue the Scythian tribes of the central Balkans, and, when he returned home, he left his general Megazabus to finish the task. Megazabus subdued the Paeonians and the nearby tribes, and King Amyntas I of Macedon presented earth and water to the Persians to show his submission, hoping to guarantee his kingdom's survival. Macedon remained a Persian vassal during the Greco-Persian Wars. During that war, King Alexander I of Macedon secretly played both sides, persuading the Greeks to withdraw from Thessaly to avoid annihilation, whilst also peacefully surrendering Thessaly to the Persians. He later helped the Greek alliance to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, freeing Macedon of Persian overlordship. Macedonia exploited the ensuing power vacuum by expanding his borders threefold.
In the years leading up to the Peloponnesian War, Macedon had taken a greater interest in the Greek world, becoming a friend and ally of Athens; the Athenian navy was built by Macedonian timber. In 437 BC, however, the greedy Athenians established the colony of Amphipolis at the doorstep of Macedonia, and, when the Spartans declared war on the expansionist Athenians, Perdiccas sided with Sparta in order to curb Athenian influence. King Perdiccas II of Macedon allied with the Thracian king Sitalces, ending Athenian hopes of convincing Sitalces to ally against him, but he earned Sparta's wrath when he and his army abandoned the Spartan general Brasidas in battle with Illyrian barbarians. The enraged Spartans pillaged the Macedonian countryside, forcing Perdiccas to realign with the Athenians. By 414 BC, he had taken part in an Athenian expedition to retake Amphipolis. His son Archelaus I of Macedon succeeded in phasing Macedon out of the war, and he oversaw the extensive Hellenization of the kingdom by moving his capital to Pella (which became a world city), building a Greek-style palace, and patronizing Greek artists such as Euripides at his Athenian-style theatre. Macedon fell into an interregnum from 399 to 393 BC, but Amyntas III of Macedon restored order, and Argead rule resumed. Under his youngest son Philip II of Macedon, from 359 to 336 BC, Macedon ended Greek freedom during the Third Sacred War and the Philippic Wars. His son Alexander the Great went on to crush Theban resistance, unite the Greek cities under Macedonian rule, and create an empire which stretched from Ancient Greece and Egypt in the west to Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent in the east. He combined local customs with Hellenic culture, creating the new "Hellenistic" culture and spreading Greek culture across his empire's vast lands. Alexander appointed Greek and Macedonian satraps to rule his newly-conquered provinces, while he had the children of the native elites given Greek educations. When Alexander died in 323 BC, this short-lived Macedonian empire fragmented amid the Wars of the Diadochi as his generals carved up his territories, and Macedon was reduced to its original homeland; first under the rule of Antipater and his son Cassander, and later under the rule of the Antigonid dynasty. The Antigonids were rivals with Ptolemaic Egypt across the Mediterranean to the south, and they also fought against the neighboring Balkan state of Epirus and the Greek Cities. Macedon reached another peak of its power under Philip V of Macedon, who ruled over almost all of Greece, built a strong military, made incursions into Illyria, controlled the Aegean with his navy, and allied with Carthage against the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War. Unfortunately for Macedon, the rising imperial power of Rome defeated Carthage and then subdued Macedon in the Second Macedonian War, destroying Philip's army at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BC. Macedon was reduced to a client kingdom of Rome, but, under his anti-Roman son Perseus of Macedon, it began to rebuild its military strength. Rome took preemptive action and defeated Perseus at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC, and, after Perseus' surrender, Rome divided Macedon into client republics and ended the kingdom's long existence. From 150 to 148 BC, the imposter Andriscus, claiming to be Perseus' son, led a Macedonian revival in the Fourth Macedonian War, but, after another battle at Pydna twenty years after the first one, Rome defeated the Macedonians and formally annexed Macedon, dividing it into the provinces of Achaea and Epirus.
