in the market by distributing their production and gaining the resulting
profit, which was expropriated by the Odrysian rulers’.^53 No specific
evidence, historical, literary, or epigraphic, is adduced to demonstrate
how royal powers were asserted. Nevertheless, the capacity of rulers to
implement their policies is perhaps ultimately less significant to eco-
nomic analysis than the denial of community autonomy at any level. The
idea of‘royal cities’is an attempt to square the application of royal power
with the manifest evidence of urban nuclei, notably at Adjiyska Vode-
nitsa, near Vetren, at Philippopolis, Seuthopolis, Kabyle, Sboryanovo,
and elsewhere.^54 Nevertheless, the relationship between the inhabitants
of these‘royal residences’and the central power has not been examined.
Porozhanov has identified sites as different as Kypsela, Doriskos, and
Ganos as‘royal residences’.^55 The history of these sites shows that they
underwent various changes over the course of their history and a single
designation does not cover the changing dynamics of the region.
One independent source of information about place names in inland
Thrace has been the series of inscriptions on silverware, particularly
silver bowls. Thefind spots have a rather localized distribution in
northern Thrace and include the hoard found at Rogozen, in north-
west Bulgaria, of 165 gilded silver vessels now usually thought to have
been among the items stolen from the baggage train of Philip II by the
Getae, in the wake of Philip’s Scythian campaign in 339bc.^56 Hatzopou-
los used these place names (some of which coincide, as we have seen,
with Porozhanov’s‘royal residences’), to argue that there were no polit-
ically autonomous civic communities in Odrysian Thrace:‘Àl’intérieur
du royaume, Pistiros, siège desemporitaigrecs, n’était pas plus unepolis
que Béos, Apros, Sauthaba, ou Ergiskè, quifigurent toujours sur la
vaisselle d’argent sous forme toponymique, en tant que localités, et
jamais sous forme d’ethniques, témoignant de l‘existence d’une commu-
nauté civique. Le royaume odryse manquait la culture politique qui eût
permis l’éclosion des communautés civiques en son sein et à plus forte
raison qui lui eût donné l’occasion de fédérer lespoleisdéjà existantes’.^57
(^53) Tacheva 2007, 593. (^54) See eg. Porozhanov 2009.
(^55) Inventory,no. 645, Kypsela; pre-Hellenistic sites not attested aspoleis:Inventory, 871,
Doriskos, called ateichos basileionand aPerseōn phrourēby Herodotus at 7.59.1; 913,
Apros, Ergiske, Ganiai, Ganos.
(^56) Just. 9.3.1–3; G. Mihailov,BullÉp1988, 259; 528); Archibald 1998, 121fig. 4.4
(distribution of named sites), 237–9 on the incident with the Triballians, 265–8 for discus-
sion of the hoard; Loukopoulou 2008, 139–69, esp. 158–63. The association with Triballian
booty wasfirst proposed by M. Hatzopoulos in 1987 and Loukopoulou has developed this
thesis.
(^57) Hatzopoulos 2002, 267.
Regionalism and regional economies 215