The talent for command was so much more the attribute of the Greek mind than of any of the neighboring barbarians, that we easily conceive a courageous Argeian adventurer acquiring to himself great ascendency in the local disputes of the Macedonian tribes, and transmitting the chieftainship of one of those tribes to his offspring. The influence acquired by Miltiadês among the Thracians of the Chersonese, and by Phormion among the Akarnanians (who specially requested that, after his death, his son, or some one of his kindred, might be sent from Athens to command them),[28] was very much of this character: we may add the case of Sertorius among the native Iberians. In like manner, the kings of the Macedonian Lynkêstæ professed to be descended from the Bacchiadæ[29] of Corinth; and the neighborhood of Epidamnus and Apollonia, in both of which doubtless members of that great gens were domiciliated, renders this tale even more plausible than that of an emigration from Argos. The kings of the Epirotic Molossi pretended also to a descent from the heroic Æakid race of Greece. In fact, our means of knowledge do not enable us to discriminate the cases in which these reigning families were originally Greeks, from those in which they were Hellenized natives pretending to Grecian blood. [28] Thucyd. iii, 7; Herodot. vi, 34-37: compare the story of Zalmoxis among the Thracians (iv, 94). [29] Strabo, vii, p. 326. After the foundation-legend of the Macedonian kingdom, we have nothing but a long blank until the reign of king Amyntas (about 520-500 B. C.), and his son Alexander, (about 480 B. C.) Herodotus gives us five successive kings between the founder Perdikkas and Amyntas,—Perdikkas, Argæus, Philippus, Aëropus, Alketas, Amyntas, and Alexander,—the contemporary and to a certain extent the ally of Xerxês.[30] Though we have no means of establishing any dates in this early series, either of names or of facts, yet we see that the Temenid kings, beginning from a humble origin, extended their dominions successively on all sides. They conquered the Briges,[31]—originally their neighbors on Mount Bermius,—the Eordi, bordering on Edessa to the westward, who were either destroyed or expelled from the country, leaving a small remnant still existing in the time of Thucydidês at Physka between Strymon and Axius,—the Almopians, an inland tribe of unknown site,—and many of the interior Macedonian tribes who had been at first autonomous. Besides these inland conquests, they had made the still more important acquisition of Pieria, the territory which lay between Mount Bermius and the sea, from whence they expelled the original Pierians, who found new seats on the eastern bank of the Strymon between Mount Pangæus and the sea. Amyntas king of Macedon was thus master of a very considerable territory, comprising the coast of the Thermaic gulf as far north as the mouth of the Haliakmôn, and also some other territory on the same