with its eastern rather than its southern neighbours. These can partly be
explained in historical terms and, to a lesser extent, in ecological or
geographical terms. The interior of Thessaly had natural outlets to the
sea along the Pagasitic and Malian Gulfs. It is true that mountain passes
linked northern Thessaly with Macedonia, such as the Volustana Pass
(between Elimeia and northern Perrhaebia), the Petra Pass (northern
Pieria and northern Perrhaebia), and the Vale of Tempe, where the River
Peneios has cut a channel between the massif of Mount Olympus to the
north and Mount Ossa to the south. These were certainly used by
military units as well as by herdsmen, and the ease of penetration into
northern Perrhaebia may explain why the three cities of the‘Tripolis’
(Doliche, Pythion, Azoros), as well as a more southerly outlier, Gonnoi,
became effective Macedonian strongholds when central Macedonian
authority was at its strongest in the third centurybc.^12 Nevertheless,
despite the political connections that brought Macedon and Thessaly
closer together in the second half of the fourth and throughout the third
centurybc, and although there undoubtedly were artefacts and com-
modities that travelled through these passes, the general movement of
commodities, whether in Macedonia or in Thessaly, was between inland
areas and the Aegean coastline, rather than through the mountains that
separated the two regions. The mountain passes were not the easiest
routes of penetration. Patterns of ceramic exchange in thefirst half of the
first millenniumbcshow that there are shared forms of certain everyday
items, which reflect closely related technological traditions in lowland
Thessaly and in lowland Macedonia, with some evidence of penetration
through the Petra (and perhaps the Volustana) Pass.^13 Nonetheless,
prevailing patterns of economic exchange in thefifth tofirst centuries
bcseem to reinforce the framework of the narrative adopted here.
Economic networks operated between inland and coastal districts,
which reinforced west–east relations and those between Thessaly and
its southern neighbours. Farther north the pattern of contacts was also
predominantly, though by no means exclusively, between coastal and
inland areas. In this south-easternmost corner of Europe, geography
reinforced patterns of trade across language groups and across cultural
boundaries, to enable those living inland to benefit from resources
delivered by sea and, in turn, for coastal communities to make the
most of resources to which they had no access on the sea shore.
(^12) Graninger 2010, 323.
(^13) Gimatzidis 2010, 272–3 with comments in nn. 973, 979, and references listed in the
Appendix; see further discussion in Ch. 4.
Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces 45