Carthage and Macedonia were not literary cultures, and did not leave a body of writing about themselves. Or if they did it has not survived. Their history has been written by other cultures, and much of what we know about them comes from their enemies. In Macedonia's case, much of our knowledge comes from the ancient Romans, who defeated it, and the ancient Greeks, who were rivals with the ancient Macedonians for power in the eastern Mediterranean until Macedonia conquered Greece and ruled it for almost 200 years. Neither the Romans nor the Greeks were what modern historians would call ideal or objective observers. Nor at the time did history as an objective academic discipline exist in the way that modern people understand it.