and how much they received. The larger the event, the less likely was the
chance that all who were eligible would receive a portion of any size.
The simple answer to the question posed above, regarding sacrificial
regimes in the northern Aegean, should be yes—with one caveat.
Although there is no document from the north comparable to those
from Athens, Delphi, Delos, and other mainland sanctuaries which
would illuminate the connection between sacred lands and sacrifice,
festivals analogous to those that existed farther south took place, prob-
ably following an annual pattern that resembled better-known civic
calendars. An inscription from Beroia, dating from the second half of
the third centurybc, refers to sacrifices,thusia, and the revenues accru-
ing therefrom to the priests of Asklepios.^54 This is the closest we get to a
process that echoes the increasingly lucrative nature of sacrificial
beasts.^55 The letter of Andronikos to the sanctuary of the Egyptian
gods in Thessalonike, conveying thediagrammaof Philip V, which
guarantees the rights and property of the sanctuary, refers to money
(chremata:ll. 12, 24) and to treasuries (thesauroi:l.22), but not to land as
such. Nevertheless, if we accept the logic already described about the
nexus between sanctuaries and sacrifices, then the processes of sacrificial
consumption can be assumed to have been much the same and the
revenues for the Egyptian gods would have resembled the revenues of
other priesthoods, with hides playing a significant role among the per-
sonal perquisites of priests and priestesses.
The caveat that should be added to this hypothesis concerns the part
played by other sources of meat in northern diets. McInerney is con-
vinced that although benefactors did contribute to the supply of sacrifi-
cial beef, little of this came from private sources, in Athens at least.^56 If he
is right, and the demand for festival meat at Athens—beef in particular—
did create a need tofind suitable animals from far afield through
commercial methods (because other avenues, including making max-
imum use of dependent territories, had already been pursued), then the
market for beef was just as insistent (albeit for cultural rather than
biological reasons), in the major conurbations of southern Greece
(Athens, Corinth, in particular), as was the demand for cereals to
supplement local production. The appearance of liberal quantities of
meat in front of a bunch of hungry mercenaries must have come as a
particularly welcome surprise to Xenophon’s soldiers, at a dinner laid on
by prince Seuthes, which was nothing particularly out of the ordinary;
(^54) Hatzopoulos 1996, II, no. 82; I. Beroia, no. 16.
(^55) McInerney 2010, 182–94.
(^56) McInerney 2010, 179–82.
290 Dining cultures