aspects of everyday material culture; in the avoidance of ostentatious
dress, funerary apparel, or grave markers.
This new reading of Athenian values can help us think in new ways
about Athenian attitudes to societies of the north Aegean. Behind the
anti-Macedonian rhetoric of Attic orators we catch a hint of a conflict of
values.^61 Different values can also be detected in the social messages that
northern societies projected. Unlike their southern counterparts, north-
erners shared distinctive attitudes to rank, social commemoration, and
the treatment of deceased members after death. Macedonians and Thra-
cians were still burying arms, armour, and favourite animals with their
respected dead, when central and southern Greeks had long ceased to
dispose of valued and valuable items in this way. Some of these cultural
traits are also evident in Thessaly, so there is no clear cultural boundary
between‘north’and‘south’in the distinctions elaborated here.^62 The
liberal use of gold, in the form of hammered sheets in various shapes,
jewellery, and dress attachments, has sometimes been interpreted as a
bizarre sign of‘barbaric’wealth.^63 This is to misunderstand the social
value of rank and the symbolic value of imperishable gold.^64 Gold has no
intrinsic worth; its social value is driven by highly particular social rules.
It is easy to assume that because we consider gold to be highly valuable,
that past societies treated this rare metal in much the same way. The
special role ascribed to gold by Macedonian and Thracian societies has
arguably contributed to the metal’s continuing value into modern times,
through the creation of iconic pieces of jewellery, as well as through the
issue of the Philippic gold coins, which in turn became models for
Western European societies. These were later developments, however,
which, as we shall see below, had a very different prehistory.
A factor that still constitutes a challenge to our understanding of
exchange values is the degree to which certain commodities did not
circulate in market conditions. Gold objects in Macedonia and other
Balkan regions occupy a peculiar position in this regard. It is instructive
to consider the significance of gold artefacts in these northern regions
with what we know about the metal in early literary sources. Hélène
(^61) See e.g. Badian 1982 for an exposition of the polarities between (southern) Greeks and
Macedonians; Hall 2001 for a critical evaluation of contemporary approaches to ancient
Macedonian identity; Hatzopoulos 2011b for a comprehensive review, comparing the
relationship of ancient Macedonia to Greece with Prussia in relation to the rest of‘Ger-
many 62 ’in the nineteenth century (73–4).
On the historiography of‘north’and‘south’in the archaeology of Greece, Kotsakis
- 63
Hammond, HM II, 186; cf. Hammond 1989, 43.
(^64) Nicolet-Pierre 2006; Archibald 2012c.
110 Societies and economies