Aeginion

Aeginium (Latin) or Aiginion (Ancient Greek: ) was an ancient Greek settlement in the northwest of Thessaly. By the 19th century, evidence of its existence had been reduced to scant mention in several literary fragments from the encyclopedic classical authors: Strabo, Livy, Ptolemy, Pliny the Elder, Stephanus of Byzantium. It appeared to have been troublesome to the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar said it was "over against Thessaly." Strabo said it was at "the confluence of the Ion River with the Peneus, which was in Thessaly. Pliny the Elder said it was in Pieria, but he didn't say which. Ptolemy gave coordinates, but his coordinates produce a map that is grossly distorted. In short, no one knew any longer where Aeginium had been, or how long it had been there. The same case was true of Agassae, which seemed to be equally troublesome to Rome.

Fortuitously William Martin Leake in 1835 was able to publish the results of some military intelligence surveys he had made in Greece 1804 - 1810. The Duke of Wellington was head of the British army at that time. They were anticipating a campaign in Greece against the French forces under Napoleon. The British had the support of the Ottoman Empire (but not for long). Leake was to survey the place. Events did not turn out as expected. In essence the British were more in support of the rebellious Greeks than the Ottomans desired. The revolution that followed was aided and abetted by the British. In the conflict of 1807 Leake was interned by the pasha of Greece. The Ottomans preferred to lease out their colonial holdings to the highest bidder, who would then hire mercenaries (bashi bazouks) to keep order. Greece was being policed by Albanian troops, who did not endear themselves or the Turks. Leake was soon free. He was impressed into service to negotiate with the Turks. In 1815 he retired as a colonel to pursue a scientific and literary career. Meanwhile, the Greek revolution transpired. When it was over at last a newly independent Greece was created in 1832. Leake now felt free to release the results of his surveys as travel journals. These became a major historical source of unimpeachable credibility. His style is reminiscent of Pausanias (geographer).

Leake wrote a multi-volume work describing northern Greece. He never defined northern Greece, however. His table of contents covers Epirus, Aetolia, Acarnania, Macedonia, Illyria and Thessaly. As modern Greece has been patched together since then from various territorial units by various agencies, the term Northern Greece has come to have different meanings in different contexts.

There are some commonalities. Thrace and Macedonia are always northern Greece, to which Epirus is often joined. The fact that Thessaly is often split points to geophysical reasons for the split. Those reasons are anciently impassible contiguous mountain ranges consisting of Mount Olympus, the Pierian Mountains, the Vermio Mountains, and others, trending NW to SE from Mount Pindus to the Thermaic Gulf. In ancient times that gulf extended northwestward to the feet of the mountains, leaving the settlements of Lower Macedonia squeezed onto the shore. Over the succeeding two millennia that part of the gulf became a lake. In modern times the lake was filled leaving a river through it, while the resulting infilled space became the plain of central Macedonia. Representing extra new land, it is gradually becoming urbanized.

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).