the similarities between Macedonian, Greek and Brygian, Fanula Papazoglu wrote that she formed an Indo-European macro-dialectical group, which, according to Georgiev, split before circa 14th–13th century BC before the appearance of the main Greek dialects. The same data has been analyzed in an alternative manner, which regards the formation of the main Greek dialects as a later convergence of related but distinct groups. According to this theory, Macedonian did not fully participate in this process, making its ultimate positionother than being a contiguous, related 'minor' languagedifficult to define. Hatzopoulos, who offers a critical review of recent research on Macedonian speech, argues that all available evidence points to the conclusion that Macedonian is a Greek dialect of the North-West group. Another source of evidence is metalinguistics and the question of mutual intelligibility. The available literary evidence has no details about the exact nature of Macedonian; however it suggests that Macedonian and Greek were sufficiently different that there were communication difficulties between Greek and Macedonian contingents, necessitating the use of interpreters as late as the time of Alexander the Great. Based on this evidence, Papazoglou has written that Macedonian could not have been a Greek dialect, however, evidence for non-intelligibility exists for other ancient Greek dialects such as Aetolian and Aeolic Greek. Hornblower suggests that Greeks were intelligible to Macedonians without an interpreter. Moreover, according to the Athenian orator Aeschines, Livy wrote that when Aemilius Paulus called together representatives of the defeated Macedonian communities, his Latin pronouncements were translated for the benefit of the assembled Macedonians into Greek. According to Hatzopoulos, the sole direct attestation of Macedonian speech preserved in an ancient author, is a verse in a non-Attic Greek dialect that the 4th century BC Athenian poet Strattis in his comedy 'The Macedonians' places a character, presumably Macedonian, to give as an answer to the question of an Athenian: – (‘the sphyraena, what's that?’) – (‘it's what ye in Attica dub cestra’). Georgios Giannakis writes that recent scholarship has established the position of ancient Macedonian within the dialect map of North-West Greek. Identity Nature of sources Most ancient sources on the Macedonians come from outside Macedonia. According to Eugene N. Borza, most of these sources are either ill-informed, hostile or both, making the Macedonians one of the "silent" peoples of the ancient Mediterranean. Ernst Badian notes that nearly all surviving references to antagonisms and differences between Greeks and Macedonians exist in