in the case of Rostovtzeff’sSEHHW) provide a sufficient basis for
economic analysis. There may be other political narratives that could
add a good deal to our understanding of economic relations. Narratives
relevant to the present book are the stories that explain how coastal and
offshore communities developed conversations with the indigenous
herdsmen, miners, and farmers, in order to give themselves a bit of
longer-term security. Examples might be those about the Parian adven-
turers on Thasos, or the Tean settlers of Abdera, or the motley bunch of
Megarians, followed by other neighbouring Peloponnesians, who set a
foothold on the Golden Horn that was to become Byzantion. These
stories have to be pieced together from various disparate kinds of
evidence—inscriptions that overwhelmingly commemorate individuals,
not social groups; occasional public decrees that reflect various insti-
tutional practices; a palimpsest of local tales, whose origins remain
intractably obscure; and an expanding canvas of residual material
culture.
Thefive hundred or so years that are reviewed here provide a broad
enough canvas to evaluate the development of long-term assets, as well as
short-term tactics, in a rapidly changing cultural and economic environ-
ment. In thefirst decades of thefifth centurybc, Macedonia and Thrace
could be thought of as regions, but also as kingdoms within regions.
Before 500bc, there is virtually no formal information about either
kingdom, whether in terms of origins, area, or constituents. True, the
major narrative histories of the period insert occasional digressions
about the north into the larger canvas of international affairs. One of
the most notorious examples is Herodotus’story about the Macedonian
royal dynasty. In the middle of an exciting story about the behaviour of
Alexander I of Macedon during Xerxes’invasion of Greece, Herodotus
interrupts the narrative, just as Alexander is mounting his horse on his
way to Athens, in order to relate the curious tale of how three brothers
came to inherit the kingdom of Macedon (8. 137–138)—but the historian
does not really tell the reader what the connection is between the story
and the ruling dynasty. This is one of a number of‘origin myths’about
the emergence of these kingdoms, which occupy a parallel, imaginative
space alongside the demonstrably recent evidence of Herodotus’and
Thucydides’near-contemporaries. The kinds of analyses which can be
applied to contemporary information cannot be applied in the same way
to these‘origin myths’, which have a different status as narratives. The
tale of Perdikkas and his brothers belongs to a recognisable folktale
motif, in which inanimate objects or natural signs act as prophetic
indications of future power. In the case of Perdikkas, the components
38 Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces