Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/31

SECTIONS OF THE MACEDONIAN NAME. Ifl miots, the Lynkestse and Eordi, who occupied portions of territory on the track of the subsequent Egnatian way, between Lychnidus (Ochrida) and Edessa, the Pelagonians, 1 with a town of the same name, in the fertile plain of Bitolia, and the more northerly Deuriopians. And the early political union was usually so loose, that each of these denominations probably in- cludes many petty independencies, small towns, and villages. That section of the Macedonian name who afterwards swallowed up all the rest and became known as The Macedonians, had their original centre at -^EgJfi, or Edessa, the lofty, commanding, and picturesque site of the modern Vodhena. And though the resi- dence of the kings was in later times transferred to the marsny Pella, in the maritime plain beneath, yet Edessa was always re- tained as the regal burial-place, and as the hearth to which the religious continuity of the nation, so much reverenced in ancient times, was attached. This ancient town, which lay on the Ro- man Egnatian way from Lychnidus to Pella and Thessalonika, formed the pass over the mountain-ridge called Bermius, or that prolongation to the northward of Mount Olympus, through which the Haliakmon makes its way out into the maritime plain at Verria. by a cleft more precipitous and impracticable than that of the Peneius in the defile of Tempe. This mountain-chain called Bermius, extending from Olympus considerably to the north of Edessa, formed the original eastern boundary of the Macedonian tribes ; who seem at first not to have reached the valley of the Axius in any part of its course, and who certainly did not reach at first to the Thermaic gulf. Between the last-mentioned gulf and the eastern counterforts of Olympus and Bermius there exists a narrow strip of plain land or low hill, which reaches from the mouth of the Peneius to the head of the Thermaic gulf. It there widens into the spacious and fertile plain of Salonichi, comprising the mouths of the Ha- liakmon, the Axius, and the EcheidOrus : the river Ludias, which flows from Edessa into the marshes surrounding Pella, and which in antiquity joined the Haliakmon near its mouth, has now altered its course so as to join the Axius. This narrow strip, between 1 Strabo, lib. vii. F:agm. 20, cd. Tafel.