History books are actually a horible source for history. At best they give a decent overview, but often have a great many number of inaccuracies due to poor fact checking, new evidence, politcal reasons and a number of other things. For example it's never mentioned that in the US revolutionary war the British abolished slavery and had the slaves fight in there armies while the south didn't let the US let blacks serve in the revolutionary war officially.
In other worlds the US winning the revolutionary war postponned slavery. (A war that the US didn't really have solid ground to fight on anway in my opinion.)
Best to go with dedicated books. Perhaps all the different Plutarch and other conteporary books i've read have been "mistranslated" in their talking and treating of macedonians as not greeks and barbarians. I find it hard to believe though since those translating would have no gain to it.
One interesting Alexander the Great fact by the way is that his rule didn't actually spread greek culture. Infact greek culture already spread to a number of areas alexander was given credit for "hellenizing" and infact may have retarded it's spread a bit.
For what it's worth i think Yugoslavia calling it's Macedonia is stupid. As I don't believe the Macedonians were slavs either.
As I said I simply that the Macedonians were seen as barbarians or at best semi-barbarians by the greeks who did not accept them in the same way they did each other. They did not see in Macedonia what Athens saw in Sparta and instead saw them as pretenders who adopted there culture. Every contemporary source i've seen has made this seem to be the case.
Had this continued for a while, one could argue that the Macedonians would of been assimilated by greek culture, but this was prevented when the Macedonians "unified" the greeks.
Full macedonian assimilation didn't take place until after the macedonians were defeated during the rise of the roman empire.
Keep in mind many greeks actually helped the Romans fell the Macedonians in the Macedonian wars. Not quite the thing you would expect the hellenistic people to do as many have mentioned they usually would work together vs outsiders.
It's not like Macedonia not being an ancient greek group really matters since during the periods after the macedonians have since assimilated into greek culture and are currently modern greeks, giving greeks the claim to anient macedonian hertiage as well.
It still doesn't make those ancient macedonians ancient greeks.
Of course I find the whole national pride thing kind of silly, as while history is important, i find heritage kind of stupid. You could be descended from every great man in the world, yet the only thing that is going to make you personally a great man is yourself.
As for the rest of it though, I'll wait for him to get the book and see what he thinks is mistranslated, and if he sees it as mistranslated perhaps i'll upack and look up the other books i've read and used on studies of Alexander the Great and the history of the region.
