asymmetrical relationship to relations during life. The intense invest-
ment in mortuary arrangements—the treatment of the corpse; the dis-
posal of the physical remains; the creation of specialized mortuary
containers (caskets, coffins, burial chambers), are all part of a language
of the dead that is palpably not the same as the treatment of the same
individuals in life. At the same time, the conscious incorporation of ideas
about rank in these contexts underscores the social dimensions of the
dead; individuals and groups whose importance did not just matter to
their nearest and dearest, but to the community of the living. This
language of commemoration needs to be understood as part of the
conscious allocation of resource for social as well as metaphysical
reasons.
The ‘paradynasteuontai’ and ‘gennaioi’ of Thucydides’ Odrysian
leadership, like their opposite numbers in Macedonia, the cavalrymen
who constituted the closest supporters of the Argead ruling dynasty,
were not well-defined groups. None of our Greek or Latin narrative
accounts provide much evidence for a dispassionate analysis of who
belonged to these distinguished social circles. In Macedonia the term
hetairoscould refer to the king’s personal friends, to those who assisted
the king in his everyday duties, but also to a wider group of supporters.
The terminology seems to conceal a chronological evolution in the
application of this concept, with a narrower meaning in the fifth
centurybc, when it referred to the monarch’s immediate entourage,
and a broader application in the fourth, when the king needed a
stronger sense of loyalty within a wider social network, exemplified
in the extension of the term to his‘Foot Companions’(pezhetairoi).^69
Perhapshetairosfunctioned as an aspect of the‘transactional order’in
Macedonia, just asmetriosdid in Athens; but we lack the range of
contemporary literary references to show how far the notion ofhetairos
was applied, and how it did come to be used, by extension, among
serving Macedonian citizens at least.
The precise nuances of the term are hard to tease out, but there must
always have been a more limited group of trusted individuals, who were
the king’s companions from his youth and who provided a pool of talent
from which the king could choose those who would carry out particular
(^69) Pezhetairoi: Harpokration s.v.Pezhetairoi,citing Anaximenes of Lampsakos (FGrH
72 F4); on the formation of a military elite: Hatzopoulos 1994a, 87–111; Savalli-Lestrade
1998, esp. Ch. 3,‘L’institution desPhiloiroyaux: du Compagnonnage à la formation d’une
bureaucratie de cour’, 289–307 (evolution ofhetairoiinfifth- and fourth-centurybc
Macedonia); for the probability of a‘council’ofhetairoi, Savalli-Lestrade 1998, 293, citing
Hdt. 8.138; cf. Carlier 2000, 261–2.
112 Societies and economies