The Vocabulary of the City in Macedonia from Archelaos to Kassandros

Until Philip II Macedonia was a northern periphery of Greece, where the urban phenomenon was essentially represented by the several colonies established by Greeks along the coasts of the region. The Chalcidic peninsula, in fact, takes its name from the city of Chalcis on Euboea, that, as Karsten Dahmen (The Numismatic Evidence, in J.Roisman, I. Worthington (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Macedonia, Oxford - Malden MA 2010, 47) says, “settled two daughter-cities there, Olynthus and Torone, while Chalcis' neighbor Eretria founded Dicaea, Mende and Methone (this last in Pieria). Potideaea was the only colony of Corinth in this region, and Acanthus and Stagira were founded by Andros ". In Macedonia itself there are three main centers, Dium (religious ritual), Aigae (royal ritual) and Pella (royal court), but for the rest we can say that Macedonian population lived mostly in villages scattered around the territory: these communities hardly impinge on the literary or even epigraphic record. The article aims to analyze the terminology that the Greek sources, starting from Thucydides, use to indicate the progressive urbanization of Macedonia, in a long process culminating in the neo-foundations wanted by the Diadochi, in the last twenty years of the fourth century, to celebrate their power.