those of Epirus, emphasized "blood and kinship in order to construct for themselves a heroic genealogy that sometimes also functioned as a Hellenic genealogy". Pre-Hellenistic Greek writers expressed an ambiguity about the Greekness of Macedonians specifically their monarchic institutions and their background of Persian allianceoften portraying them as a potential barbarian threat to Greece. For example, the late 5th century sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon wrote, "we Greeks are enslaved to the barbarian Archelaus" (Fragment 2). This fragment is an adaptation of a verse from Euripides' tragedy Telephos which was destined to become a stock expression. Hatzopoulos states that given the fragment's conventional character, it can hardly be taken literally as ethnological or linguistic evidence. The issue of Macedonian Hellenicity and that of their royal house was particularly pertinent in the 4th century BC regarding the politics of invading Persia. Demosthenes regarded Macedonia's monarchy to be incongruous with an Athenian-led Pan-Hellenic alliance. He castigated Philip II for being "not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honor, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave". This was obvious political slander and is regarded as "an insulting speech", but "the orator clearly could not do this, if his audience was likely to regard his claim as nonsense: it could not be said of a Theban, or even a Thessalian", however, he also calls Meidias, an Athenian statesman, "barbarian" and in an event mentioned by Athenaeus, the Boeotians, the Thessalians and the Eleans were labeled "barbarians". Demosthenes regarded only those who had reached the cultural standards of southern Greece as Greek and he did not take ethnological criteria into consideration, and his corpus is considered by Eugene N. Borza as an "oratory designed to sway public opinion at Athens and thereby to formulate public policy." Isocrates believed that only Macedonia was capable of leading a war against Persia; he felt compelled to say that Phillip was a "bona fide" Hellene by discussing his Argead and Heraclean heritage. Moreover, Philip, in his letter to the council and people of Athens, mentioned by Demosthenes, places himself "with the rest of the Greeks". Ancient sources on the Macedonian people The earliest reference about Greek attitudes towards the Macedonian ethnos as a whole comes from Hesiod's Catalogue of Women. The text maintains that the