Herodotus, as we have seen at the end of Chapter 3, has quite a lot to
say about the economic consequences of the Persian presence in Thrace
and Macedonia; but the historian’s focus is largely on the territories
south of Rhodope, unless we follow the view that one of the three
columns of Xerxes’Persian troops went much farther inland in 480
bc.^62 What the historian has to say about these peripheral areas of his
narrative is partly shaped by the underlying spatial pattern of his
account; that is, Herodotus’approach to the‘ethnographic geography’
of the Greco-Persian Wars.^63 Herodotus’way of thinking about ethnog-
raphy has been analysed in terms of a division of the known world into
three parts, which were applied to his three continents—the ordered and
familiar centre, the intermediate zone, and the unfamiliar fringes. He was
dependent for information about the most remote areas on travellers’
tales, but interpreted these according to his three-fold classification.
Thrace and Macedonia are not well defined within this scheme. In
some respects, both regions are assumed to belong to the familiar sphere
of settled communities, built houses, and comprehensible rites. In other
ways they offered interesting material for his audience, notably in the
stories about Macedonian royal origins and Thracian élite attitudes to
agricultural work (5.6), religious ideas, and funerary practices (5.4–7).
Farther away to the north, there was more exotic value in the Getic
stories about Zalmoxis.^64 Inland Thrace is more clearly defined (com-
pared with Macedonia) as part of the‘intermediate’zone, between the
familiar world of Greek-speaking farmers and the unfamiliar fringe of
nomadic pastoralists.
Herodotus’detailed narrative of military preparations and encounters
merges with his ethnographic construction, which creates a texture of
bright, colourfully sketched spaces, separated by deep shadow. The
shadowy areas include much of the north Aegean region, particularly
south-eastern Thrace, the Thermaic Gulf, and Rhodope. This is because
they do not play a significant enough role—either in the war narrative or
in his three-fold ethnographic scheme—not because they did not deserve
objective treatment in some other memorial.
Persian documents provide a wholly different way of approaching
‘ethnographic geography’. In a recent review of the evidence for Greeks
in the Persian Empire and Persians in the Aegean, Robert Rollinger
has criticized the scholarly tradition that studies relations within the
(^62) Salviat 1999, 267–71; on the Persian presence in the north Aegean, Archibald 1998,
79 – 90; Tuplin 2003.
(^63) Karttunen 2002, esp. 457–66, 472–4. (^64) See Ch. 8.
218 Regionalism and regional economies