The Agrianes ( Ancient Greek : Ἀγρίανες, Agrianes or Ἀγρίαι Agriai ) or Agrianians , were a tribe whose country was centered at Upper Strymon , in present-day central Western Bulgaria as well as southeasternmost Serbia, at the time situated north of the Dentheletae . Per Strabo the source of the river Strymon was within Agrianes' territory. In the times of Philip II of Macedon , the territory of the Agrianes was administered by Pella . They were crack javelin throwers and an elite unit of Alexander the Great's light infantry , who fought under the command of General Attalus .
47-701: Their name in Ancient Greek was Ἀγρίανες. The ethnonym is of Indo-European origin, it may have been derived from * agro - "field" (cf. Lat. ager , Grc. ἀγρός agros , Eng. acre ). Irwin L. Merker considers it purely Hellenic , and lists certain Greek cognates such as the ethnonym of the Doric tribe Agraioi in Aetolia and the month Agrianos, which is found throughout the Dorian and Aeolian worlds. An early name of
94-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
141-474: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as
188-549: A light shield but wore no armour, though they sometimes had helmets; they were adept at skirmishing and were often used to guard the flanks of more heavily equipped infantry. They usually adopted an open order when facing enemy heavy infantry. They could throw their javelins at will at the enemy and, unencumbered by armour or heavy shields, easily evade any counter-charges made by heavily equipped hoplites . They were, however, quite vulnerable to shock-capable cavalry and often operated to particular advantage on broken ground where cavalry
235-536: A part of the garrison of Cassandreia at the time of the Third Macedonian War . Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ),
282-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
329-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either
376-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
423-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
470-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
517-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about
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#1732775878884564-668: The Argolid also has the same name. Herodotus described them as a Paeonian tribe , together with the Odomanti and Doberes in the vicinity of Pangaeum . Although the Agrianes, clearly fell within the Thracian sphere of influence, the only writer who describes them as Thracians is Theopompus . Their country was centered at Upper Strymon , in present-day westernmost Bulgaria, and also held areas of southeasternmost Serbia , at
611-677: The Dassaretii and Parthini to the south, the Dardani to the north (from which they were separated by the Skardon (or Scardus) Mountains). In the east, the Penestae were neighboured by Ancient Macedonia . The nearby Stuberra (present-day Čepigovo ) was used by Perseus of Macedon to access Uscana in Penestia from the south-east. The westernmost territory of the Penestae extended to
658-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek
705-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
752-754: The Rhodopes was Achrida, which may also be a cognate. Pausanias described that Paeon , the eponymous ancestor of the Paionians (of whom Agrianes were members), was a brother of Epeius and Aetolus , the eponymous ancestors of the Epeians of Elis and the Aetolians respectively. Their place-name has several cognates in Greece such as Παιονίδαι (Paeonidai) , a deme of the tribe Leontis in Attica . A place in
799-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between
846-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
893-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
940-465: The Agrianes were the elite light infantry of the Macedonian army . They were often used to cover the right flank of the army in battle, being posted to the right of the Companion cavalry , a position of considerable honour. They were almost invariably part of any force on detached duty, especially missions requiring speed of movement. Peltasts were armed with a number of javelins and a sword, carried
987-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
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#17327758788841034-630: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs, Penestae (tribe) The Penestae were an Illyrian tribe dwelling in southeastern Illyria , in an inland region that was called Penestia , which
1081-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for
1128-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
1175-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
1222-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
1269-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under
1316-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at
1363-525: The domains of the Labeatae . The chief settlement of the Penestae was Uscana , most likely located in the valley of the Black Drin in the region of Dibra . The territory of the Penestae appears to have been densely populated, because Livy mentions the existence of eleven fortified settlements, in addition to Uscana, Draudacum and Oaeneum , the latter being a strategically important settlement on
1410-651: The first request, but then he confiscated the soldiers' weapons, took the Romans into custody and brought them to Stuberra. Meanwhile the Macedonian king sold into slavery the Illyrian soldiers and the inhabitants of the town. The Macedonian king aimed also to capture Oaeneum , another Penestian town strategically located on the route to the territory of the Labeatae and the Illyrian kingdom of Gentius . Hence Perseus left Stuberra and returned to Penestia. Proceeding on
1457-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
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1504-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
1551-608: The realm of the Illyrian king Gentius. During the that war the Penestae, alongside the Parthini , remained loyal to Rome . Perseus of Macedon , after his successful diplomatic actions in Epirus and military campaigns against the Dardani , also undertook several campaigns in Penestia. Firstly, he stopped at Stuberra for supplies and equipment, and then he proceeded to Uscana in Penestian territory. The stronghold of Uscana
1598-629: The right to govern themselves, a move that led to a long-lasting and most reliable alliance. At the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BC), during Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia, their contingent of peltasts numbered 1,000 men. During the time of the Seleucid Empire , a crack unit of Antiochus' Agrianes was brigaded together with Persians at Raphia . Contingents from the Agrianes and the Penestae , numbering 800 and 2,000 men respectively, were
1645-645: The route to the tribal region of the Labeatae , over which Gentius ruled. Draudacum and Oaeneum lied within the Pollog Valley region, which was inhabited and ruled by both the Penestae and the Dardanians . In Livy's accounts of the Third Macedonian War , which was fought between the Roman Republic and the Kingdom of Macedon in the years 171–168 BC, the Penestae are not considered part of
1692-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
1739-415: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with
1786-458: The time situated north of the Dentheletae . In the times of Philip II, the territory of the Agrianes was administered by Pella. According to some Bulgarian researchers they inhabited an ethnocultural region known today as "Graovo", whose name probably derives from that of the Agrianes. Its location is in the central and eastern areas of modern-day Pernik Province . The peltasts raised from
1833-478: The way to Oaeneum he captured also Draudacum and eleven other strongholds, mainly without undertaking battles; nevertheless he succeeded in taking 1,500 Roman soldiers prisoner. In order to besiege Oaeneum, the Macedonians built a mound against the city-wall on which ladders were brought up by the soldiers. The city was besieged and subdued by the Macedonians, who murdered the adult males and took into custody
1880-561: The women and children. The booty obtained from the victory over the city was distributed to Perseus' men. The Macedonian victorious army returned to Stuberra, from where Perseus immediately sent envoys to Genthius to inform him about the great successes he achieved that year, and to urge the Illyrian king to join Macedon against Rome . Perseus' ambassadors crossed the Skardus Mountains with great difficulty, then they went down to
1927-591: The Πενέσται ( Penestai ), a Thessalian social class, which can alternatively be considered a simple linguistic change of the Ancient Greek term Μενέσται ( Menéstai , "those who remain"), as already pointed out by Archemachus of Euboea , or related to the Ancient Greek πένης ( pénes , "poor"). The tribe inhabited Penestia, an inland region in southeastern Illyria , located around the Black Drin valley north of Lake Ohrid . The Penestae were bordered by
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1974-677: Was Uscana , most likely located in the valley of the Black Drin in the region of Dibra . The tribe is mentioned only by Livy (1st century BC – 1st century AD) as Penestae (in Latin ). They appear several times in Livy's accounts of the Third Roman-Macedonian War , which occurred in the early 2nd century BC. Based on the presence of the typical Illyrian suffix -st- , the name is considered to be Illyrian, such as Pirustae , for example. The name may also be connected to
2021-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
2068-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in
2115-424: Was located around the Black Drin valley north of Lake Ohrid , between present-day eastern Albania and western North Macedonia . They are firstly mentioned by ancient Roman historian Livy . They appear several times in Livy's accounts of the events concerning the Third Macedonian War (171–168 BC), which was fought between the Roman Republic and the Kingdom of Macedonia under Perseus . Their chief city
2162-437: Was occupied by a mixed force of Romans and Illyrians . The city resisted intensely until its inhabitants realized that they did not have enough grain to counter the siege over a much longer period, noting that Perseus' Macedonian forces brought up to the walls their siege sheds. Therefore the Romans asked the Macedonian king to be allowed to leave with their properties and weapons or with their life and freedom. Perseus granted
2209-622: Was useless and heavy infantry found it difficult to maintain formation. They are first mentioned regarding Megabazus ' campaign in 511 BC. In 429 BC they were subject to the Odrysian kingdom and later, as early as 352 BC, they became allies of Philip II of Macedonia . They fought under king Langarus with the Macedonians against the Triballians in 335 BC and succeeded in protecting the lands of Alexander and were thus rewarded with
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