Preface
Most visitors to the northern Aegean today approach it (whether phys-
ically or in virtual and abstract terms) from the south, that is, from the
Aegean Sea. In this book I have attempted not just to look at this part of
southern Europe from the familiar, southerly perspective, but to imagine
it from other angles. The chapters are organized to reflect these different
approaches, which do deliver different impressions. They are compatible
impressions, but nonetheless rather unfamiliar to most Classicists and
historians, those of classical antiquity as of more recent times.
I might begin with maps. The map that forms the frontispiece to
the book is a unique creation. I could notfind a map that provided the
physical environment of my story, so it had to be created. Modern
national boundaries are powerful drivers of the available geographical
information, so most attempts to make use of what is available tend to
follow patterns created by convenient, readily accessible parameters.
These parameters are of little use when mapping the remote past,
which blissfully ignores modern boundaries. Older maps are another
matter. Nineteenth-century maps of southern Europe give a far broader
perspective, but populate the landscape with unfamiliar names and
habits of mind. Travelling about the region certainly helps to provide a
better sense of local ecologies; but modern geography conceals as much
as it reveals. The great river courses of the east Balkan area have changed
their beds and altered the immediate landscape in ways that require big
team projects to disentangle. What we see is not what used to be there.
So this book is consciously arranged like a series of successive stage
sets, which gradually reveal the full perspective of the remote past. First,
there is a preliminary summary, in Chapter 1, intended to explain what
the story is about. The players are not just characters and choruses from
antiquity, since the story is told through the voices of contemporary
historians, geographers, and archaeologists. We need to hear their
accounts, but must also manage to discern the fact that they speak in
different registers. Modern political configurations of the region have
divided up its history into a mass of separate, sometimes quite contra-
dictory interpretations. The stories are not the same, nor are the inter-
pretations compatible. They cannot all be equally valid. Somehow,
choices have to be made and readers need to know what these choices
are. The introductory chapter tries to see the past through the eyes of a