and enabling Macedonian influence to spread over the Cyclades. AntigonusIII Doson used the Macedonian navy to invade Caria, while PhilipV sent 200 ships to fight in the Battle of Chios in 201BC. The Macedonian navy was reduced to a mere six vessels as agreed in the 197BC peace treaty that concluded the Second Macedonian War with the Roman Republic, although Perseus of Macedon quickly assembled some lemboi at the outbreak of the Third Macedonian War in 171BC.

Society and culture

Language and dialects

Following its adoption as the court language of Philip II of Macedon's regime, authors of ancient Macedonia wrote their works in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Rare textual evidence indicates that the native Macedonian language was either a dialect of Greek similarto Thessalian Greek and Northwestern Greek, or a language closely related to Greek. The vast majority of surviving inscriptions from ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek and its successor Koine. Attic (and later Koine) Greek was the preferred language of the Ancient Macedonian army, although it is known that Alexander the Great once shouted an emergency order in Macedonian to his royal guards during the drinking party where he killed Cleitus the Black. Macedonian became extinct in either the Hellenistic or the Roman period, and entirely replaced by Koine Greek.

Religious beliefs and funerary practices

By the 5th century BC, the Macedonians and the southern Greeks worshiped more or less the same deities of the Greek pantheon. In Macedonia, political and religious offices were often intertwined. For instance, the