10) GREEK CLAIM: "The famous ancient Greek play writer Euripidis wrote and originally presented most of his plays in Pella, the capital of Macedonia

10) GREEK CLAIM: "The famous ancient Greek play writer Euripidis wrote and originally presented most of his plays in Pella, the capital of Macedonia. How was that possible if the audience spoke a different language?"

REPLY:

There is nothing strange that the Macedonian kings and the Macedonian nobility in Pella attended Euripides’s Greek play. After all, they admired the Greek culture, spoke the Greek language (next to Macedonian), and commissioned Euripides to write the play. From Curtius Rufus and the trial of Philotas, we know that next to Macedonian, the Greek language was also spoken as a second language at the Macedonian court, and used in diplomacy. Nothing strange in that, since Greek was an international language in antiquity, just like English is today. There are other such examples in the world. The Russian czars and the Russian nobility admired the French plays and spoke French at their court, and today many plays in English are performed in many non-English speaking countries, since the audience would understand it. Some operas are in Italian, and yet are performed everyday in many different countries and in front of audiences that do not speak Italian at all. In the heart of the German-speaking world, in Vienna, the Italian Sallieri wrote his plays in Italian. Therefore, the above Greek claim does not prove that the Macedonians were Greek, just like the Russian czars were not French, and the Austrians were not Italian. We should also add that the Macedonian king Archelaus, which commissioned Euripides to write the play for him, was not considered to be Greek. The Greeks called him a barbarian, a label that they reserved to all non-Greeks. Please see Thrasymachus on that matter.