functions. These men were the Macedonian‘nobility’, the‘principes
Macedonum’referred to by Qu. Curtius, whose sons became royal
pages, educated at court between 14 and 18 years of age, graduating to
military training as ephebes from 18 to 20 years.^70 The social system of
training royal companions seems to have survived into the kingdoms of
Alexander the Great’s Successors, although the‘King’s Friends’orphiloi
of the early Hellenistic age were recruited from a much wider pool of
talent than the hetairoiunder the Argead monarchs had been. The
deliberate change of term is therefore significant.^71 Prosopographical
studies of surviving personal names suggest that those selected for key
offices were hand picked, and were not necessarily limited to a narrow
group of hereditary landowners in Macedonia, even in thefifth century
bc.^72 The 800hetairoireferred to by Theopompos as recipients of land
grants in the reign of Philip II (Theop.FGrH115 F224, 225), represent
an overlapping social group with the‘noble’families, though distinct
from them, not least because they included non-Macedonians. We are
told that this group derived revenues from estates equivalent in size to
those of‘10,000 of the wealthiest Greeks’(F 225b). In numerical terms
the group would represent the same proportion of‘rich’people per head
of population as there were in the city of Athens, if the population of
Macedonia in the fourth centurybcamounted toc.500,000; a smaller
proportion if the overall head count was substantially greater. At present
there is no satisfactory way of deciding how realistic thisfigure is; it
might even need to be doubled.^73 The fourth centurybcwas a period of
immense social and demographic change in the north Aegean area,
(^70) Curt. 5.1.42 (50 sons of Macedonian noblemen brought by Amyntas, son of Andro-
menes, to Alexander III at Babylon, to serve as a bodyguard):‘These act as the king’s
servants at dinner, bring him his horses when he goes into battle, attend him on the hunt
and take their turn on guard before his bedroom door. Such was the upbringing and
training of those who were to be great generals and leaders.’(Tr. J. Yardley); cf. 8.6.2–6.
For similar accounts of the lifestyle of royal pages, cf. Arr.Anab.4.13.1; Ael.VH14.48;
Diod. 17.65.1; Liv. 45.6.7–8.
(^71) Savalli-Lestrade 1998, 291–306, 322–33, 355–68; Paschidis 2008; Ma 2011, 529–33.
(^72) Paschidis 2006, 255–68; Mari 2002, 291–329; Karamitrou-Mentessidi 2011, 95–6 (on
Elimiothetairoi).
(^73) Ellis 1976, 34 (c.500,000); Billows (1990, 202–4) would raise the population numbers
to 1.5 million, using proxy data from nineteenth-century Macedonia. Hamilton (1999)
follows Bosworth in arguing for a demographic decline after Alexander, but takes no
account offield data. Faraguna accepts that this is feasible (2006, 133). However, his overall
assessment rests heavily on the evidence of intensive surveys. The Langadas survey suggests
a lower overall global populationfigure for Macedonia in the pre-Hellenistic period, if site
numbers are compared with Ottoman ones (Andreou and Kotsakis 1999, 40–2,fig. 3.7).
Bintliff (1997, 3;fig. 3, and discussion 28–33) suggests other ways of interpreting demo-
graphic change, which are explored further in Ch. 4.
Societies and economies 113