classical state. 419 (66 per cent) of the 635poleisor historically attested and
spatially documented self-organizing communities listed inAn Inventory
of Archaic and Classical Poleis(2004) managedc.200 km^2 of territory or
less, and 321 (50.5 per cent) of them controlled 100 km^2 or less. At various
times in the second half of thefirst millenniumbcsuch a territory might
sustain between three and 50 people per square kilometre, and therefore
theoretically between 300 and 5,000 people within the 100 km^2 area.
In fact most population projections for this time-span bunch strongly at
the lower end of this scale, because of the comparatively low density of
people in the landscape of classical antiquity, with small population groups
living in a highly dispersed pattern.^7 The main exceptions to this pattern
were larger aggregates of land, which had accumulated or been merged
through historical processes.
Thessaly: between north and southThe region of Thessaly is the most useful example of such an aggregate in
the present context. The modern administrative district of Thessaly
occupiesc.14,037 km^2 , just over ten per cent of the land area of the
Greek state. The place nameThessaliawas often applied as a rather loose
geographical term, which could cover some or all of the area included in
the modernnome, although in essence it refers to the four‘tetrads’that
contributed troops to the collective army of‘Thessalia’. In this stricter
sense it corresponds to the principal lowland plains, or some of the best
agricultural land. These‘tetrads’were: Hestiaiotis and Thessaliotis in the
north-west of the region, between the foothills of the Pindhos range and
the tributaries of the upper Peneios River, the former on the northern
reaches, the latter to the south; Pelasgiotis, the area between the lower
estuary of the Peneios and the Larissaian Plain, which extends, in
geological terms, as far as the Gulf of Pagasai; and Phthiotis, south-
west of the Pagasitic Gulf. Two alleged fragments of Aristotle’sConsti-
tution of the Thessaliansreport the structure of military organization
within the tetrads as consisting of subdivisions based on land units, each
(^7) Fentress 2009, esp. 141–7 discusses Cosa, the well-studied urban nucleus of the third-
centurybcRoman colony, alongside data garnered in the Albegna valley survey (the
hinterland of Cosa orager Cosanus), as well as Jerba, Tunisia. The raw data from 839
sites in theager Cosanusindicates 3.3 people/km^2 , which might translate, if adjusted for
missing sites, into 27/km^2 (p. 147); cf. Andreou and Kotsakis 1999, 39–40 (1.4 sites/km^2 in
the Langadas survey) and Bintliff 1997, 3, 5 andfig. 3; 25–7; see now Price 2012. For further
discussion see below and Chapter 3 on population matters.
42 Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces