main scene in a manner more appropriate for an aristocratic landowner
of the north Aegean region. The lowest register shows a group of eight
slaves, chained together, led by a supervisor, and preceded by another
man (perhaps the honorand himself?), whilst two women and two little
girls follow at the rear. The middle frieze shows two pairs of slaves in
tunics, each pair carrying a heavy, round-bottomed container on a pole
(perhaps baskets of grapes, rather than cauldrons), while afifth, on the
far right-hand side, has a pointedamphoraon his back and a jug in his
left hand, undoubtedly alluding to wine. Hervé Duchêne, whose study of
thesteleincludes photographs taken for the original publication in 1945,
considers this scene to be the celebration of a new vintage, and wonders
whether the juxtaposition of the new wine and the slave cordon was
a conscious attempt to show not just the ways in which this freedman
had made himself rich, but also to show the deliberate interchangeability
of the one form of commodity for the other; wine for slaves, in the manner
of Gallic traders, exchanging a barrel of wine for a single young slave
(Diod. 5.26.3). He cites the traffic of wine, garments, and other‘civilized’
products, in exchange for slaves and hides, at theemporionof Tanais,
on the estuary of the River Don, where the nomads of Asia and
Europe met merchants from Bosporus (Str.Geogr. 11.2.2).‘Amphipolis,
sur la Via Egnatia et presque aux confins de l’Empire, n’est-elle pas
de même une zone de contact entre le monde gréco-romain et la Thrace
barbare?’^98
My answer to this question is two-fold. First, the thesis of this book is
that there was no such thing as a‘contact zone’between two compart-
mentalized worlds, the‘civilized’world and the‘barbarian’world, only
many networks of exchange, commercial, cultural, and intellectual. The
idea of a cultural divide may have existed at an abstract, intellectual level,
but it did not exist in spatial terms. Places of exchange were quite
common and determined by reasonable travelling distances. Far from
being at the boundary of the civilized world, Amphipolis was a hub, on
Xerxes’road and later the Via Egnatia, but also linked to its hinterland
along the Strymon valley, the mining zone in the foothills of Rhodope,
and thence to central Europe. Second, the exchange of one commodity
for another is a form of exchange that we should expect to have been
normal at any time in classical antiquity, though Diodorus’equation of
one slave for a barrel (or anamphora) of wine is the kind of loose
equivalence that belongs more comfortably at the anecdotal than the
(^98) Duchêne 1986, 526.
Societies and economies 127