symbolic as well as realistic, although scholars have tended to focus on
the possible significance of human portraits rather than the meaning of
the animal representations.^64 The iconography of hunting, which occu-
pies a key role in Macedonian royal coinage, plays an even more prom-
inent role in Thracian toreutics, particularly on horse gear, with boars,
stags, bears, and other less easily identifiable creatures.^65
The repertoire of hunting allusions on the walls of a vaulted tomb at
Alexandrovo, near Haskovo, is one apposite example. This late fourth- or
early third-century series of tomb painting echoes features of contem-
porary Macedonian funerary art, whilst retaining distinctive local elem-
ents. The circular burial chamber has two friezes, an upper one showing
hunters pursuing four quarries (two stags, or a stag and a hind, and two
boars); while the lower frieze is less well preserved but includes a scene of
seated and standingfigures (diners and those serving them) around at
least two tables piled with vessels and food, but between thefigures is the
carcass of a bull.^66 The hunting scene shows independent figures,
arranged serially, against a white background, rather than juxtaposed—
four hunters on horseback with raised spears, four hunters on foot, and
the four quarries beset by dogs. So the scene is intentionally much more
symbolic than real, even if real prey is represented here, as in the dining
scene below it.
CONCLUSIONS
The traditional cuisine of the east Balkan region, consisting of cereals,
pulses, fruit, and nuts, a diet which had evolved over several thousands
of years, was still the basis of diet in the second half of thefirst
millenniumbc. There is quite a lot of circumstantial evidence that
suggests meat from domesticated species including sheep, goats, pigs,
and cattle may have been consumed by a proportion of the population at
least quite frequently. If Athenian citizens were eating meat on average
once a week, through festival fare, then consumption in the northern
Aegean is likely to have been at least as common and probably more so.(^64) Saatsoglou-Paliadeli 2011, 282–4, summarizes the different views of who the protag-
onists were intended to represent; Briant 1991 and 1994a; Étienne 2000 and Étienne 2002,
253 – 8, explore the zoomorphic vocabulary.
(^65) Archibald 1998, 249–51; Marazov, 2011.
(^66) Kitov 2001; Kitov 2004, 43fig. 3; cf. Stoyanov 2008, 58; this tomb has not been fully
published. The details of the surviving images are difficult to verify.
Dining cultures 295