dedicatory inscriptions indicates a regional organization offifty units (Pl.
HN4.40). Exactly how these regional units might be reconstructed in
terms of actual modern topography is still unclear. Nevertheless, this
prior system was superseded, at some point in Vespasian’s reign, by a
reduction to fourteen regional units (Ptol. 3.11.8–10).^140 Thefifty divi-
sions that are variously recorded in the earliest inscriptions of the late
republican period reflect the deep roots of regional administration in the
days of Odrysian rule, when territories were organized along‘tribal’lines.
By thefirst centurybc, the fulcrum of royal authority had moved from
the middle Hebros and Tonzos river valleys to Bizye/Vize, in south-
eastern Thrace (Pl.HN. 4.47), where the princes of the Sapaian dynasty
had created an impressive civic centre, regional capital of the Astai,
with a theatre and other civic amenities.^141 The intensity of economic
activities in and around the Bosporus may well have contributed to this
relocation of the centre of power in the south-east Balkans. The kinds of
predatory relationships that existed between Byzantine‘protectors’and
the ships whose security they protected were paralleled by predatory
relationships from the landward side, represented most vividly in the
tribute demanded of Byzantion by Galatians from their enclave in south-
eastern Thrace. Nevertheless, coinage circulating in the region shows
that market relations also operated between the different political entities
of the interior, on both sides of the Bosporus, with coin types and
counter marks signalling the acceptability of specific issues. The very
success of Byzantion made its buying power a magnet for many social
and ethnic groups in the northern Aegean. The city’s economic success
and dominance of the Black Sea trade also enhanced its political stature.
Byzantion found itself among the key partners in major international
negotiations, as we have seen in the case of Philip V of Macedon. The
Ptolemies had courted Byzantion from the 270sbconwards. This inter-
national dimension gave the city further assets, which the formerly
dominant landward powers—the Odrysian kings of Thrace, the Anti-
gonid kings of Macedon—and would-be powers, such the Galatians on
either side of the Straits, could no longer compete with.
(^140) Parissaki 2009, 337–50.
(^141) Dawkins and Hasluck 1905, 175; Parissaki 2009, 324–6, 1/4–1/7, dedicated by
Apollonios, son of Eptaikenthos, of Bizye, strategos in the environs of Anchialos.
248 Regionalism and regional economies