2. Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces
COMPOSING A NARRATIVE
The limits of political narrativesAlthough the grand narratives of classical history, particularly those of
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, refer to the north Aegean region
repeatedly, on occasion extensively, the stories that they contain do not
provide a ready means of understanding the socio-economic history of
Macedonia, Thrace, and their adjacent coastal neighbours. Even if any or
all of these authors had chosen to take a much closer interest in these
areas, it is unlikely that a historical narrative of this kind would provide a
contemporary reader with the sort of material that would help him or her
to construct a convincing or satisfying picture of economic behaviour.
To begin with, ancient historical narratives deal primarily with political
topics (which might have some economic content), but their main focus
was not what we would today consider to be economic issues. This is not
because people in antiquity were not interested in, or did not understand
economic matters; but rather that economic preoccupations were sub-
sumed, in these broad syntheses, under a more abstract meta-narrative,
involving time and the fate of states or empires. These meta-narratives
have been preserved and copied, where other works, whether local
histories or technical treatises, however valuable for their specialist
content, simply did not enjoy wide currency and have disappeared,
except for the occasional title as evidence.^1 Political narratives do
undoubtedly include much useful economic material; but, whilst offering
some necessary foundations, they cannot (as we have seen in Chapter 1,
(^1) Clarke 2008 on local histories, esp. 181–93.