The large and comparatively productive region covered by the various sections of Macedonians, helps to explain that increase of ascendency which they successively acquired over all their neighbors. It was not, however, until a late period that they became united under one government. At first each section, how many we do not know, had its own prince, or chief. The Elymiots, or inhabitants of Elymeia, the southernmost portion of Macedonia, were thus originally distinct and independent; also the Orestæ, in mountain-seats somewhat north-west of the Elymiots,—the Lynkêstæ and Eordi, who occupied portions of territory on the track of the subsequent Egnatian way, between Lychnidus (Ochrida) and Edessa,—the Pelagonians,[21] 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 includes 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 Ægæ, or Edessa,—the lofty, commanding, and picturesque site of the modern Vodhena. And though the residence of the kings was in later times transferred to the marshy Pella, in the maritime plain beneath, yet Edessa was always retained 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 Roman 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 Haliakmôn 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 Tempê. [21] Strabo, lib. vii, Fragm. 20, ed. Tafel.