occupation. It must also accommodate the aspirations of people less
directly affected by the logistics of military requisitioning. The vegetarian
habits of the Mysians and their less well-known northern neighbours
mustfind a place, as well as the cosmic preoccupations of the followers of
Zalmoxis and other chthonic cult followers, which generated investment
in funerary hardware. Whilst the lifestyles of country landowners dis-
tributed human investment in rural estates and their associated cult sites,
the gradual nucleation of populations around some civic centres encour-
aged urban infrastructure. Urban centres of the pre-imperial age in the
eastern Mediterranean were, with a very few exceptions, small by histor-
ical standards. The two territorial kingships of our story, Argead Mace-
donia and Odrysian Thrace, emerged as important political entities
because there was a genuine demand, in the wake of the Persian occupa-
tion, for organizing mechanisms that could provide military and admin-
istrative support for communities that were widely distributed in
substantial land areas, separated by forests, mountain ranges, and lakes.
These royal authorities had tofind ways of developing a discourse of
kingship that would speak to the communities of the region, notwith-
standing linguistic and cultural differences.
At the same time, the harbour towns of the north Aegean coast that
had played such a significant role in the story of the Persian occupation
began, from 479bconwards, to be drawn into a naval network with the
states that founded the Delian League. Thus began the tension between
two adversarial trajectories—a landward-orientated one, which sought to
cement the infrastructure and articulation of neighbouring inland com-
munities; and a maritime one, linked by naval communications. The
coastal harbour towns of the north Aegean were organically linked to
their hinterlands. They depended on inland resources for minerals,
building materials, and transport. The communities that lacked coastal
outlets were in turn dependent on the harbours and markets of their
coastal neighbours for the supply of indispensable materials, which were
determined as much by socially driven perceptions of appropriate life-
styles, as they were by perceived ideas of needs. Attempts by various
powers to monopolize, whether partly or wholly, the maritime and
landward networks—by the Argeads under Philip II and Alexander III;
by Lysimachos and successive Ptolemaic, Antigonid and Seleukid rulers
in the third centurybc—were at best only partially successful. The
economic wellbeing of the region depended on the free interchange of
resources between coastal hubs and inland areas. The Roman authorities
who negotiated peace terms with Antiochos III after the battle of
Magnesia and with Perseus after his defeat at Pydna had evolved a
strategy of separating key coastal cities, including Lysimacheia, Ainos,
Societies and economies 125