number of key modern personalities, whose research has created much
of the modern architecture of the subjects explored here.
Other themes introduced in Chapter 1 are gradually developed in later
chapters. Political history is almost always a key component of big
narratives; but whose politics may be in question is not easy to discern.
The politics of the powerful in southern Europe during the second half of
thefirst millenniumbcis both more noticeable than it is in central and
southern Greece and less so. The actions of powerful individuals, rulers,
princes, and landowners are manifested in all kinds of ways, which also
leave visible traces—structures, monuments, public statements, in the
form of stone inscriptions and funerary architecture. For a variety of
reasons, modern access routes into the region, even today, tend to avoid
the inland trajectories that linked the continental heartlands of princes
and landowners to coasts and harbours, and thus to the more familiar
landmarks and place names of classical maritime itineraries. This may
explain why some of these monumental power statements have only
been discovered comparatively recently. Yet the stories about the power-
holders of the region do survive and can be reinstated, if wefind a
method by which this can be done.
If we make an effort of imagination to resurrect the landward power-
holders of southern Europe, we can begin to see patterns in the geopolitical
landscape. The Greco-Persian wars emerge as a significant driver of social
and economic changes that refashioned existing hierarchies and thereby
introduced new fashions and customs. Understanding the social param-
eters of the region is therefore thefirst task to be explored. This cannot, of
course, be done without also considering how these social entities have
been described and interpreted as modern scholars have sought to gloss
and project the disparate evidence about ancient societies in the region
into recognizable and coherent social forms. The communities that
emerge from historical accounts and archaeological vestiges in Chapter 2
have thus to be made into identifiable economic agents in Chapter 3,
before the focus returns in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 towards the ways in which
the landscape has become a canvas for human discovery and use.
Most scholarly works on classical antiquity stick to a limited chron-
ology, well supported by ancient literary or other written texts. I have
delved much further back into the past. It is no longer uncommon tofind
ancient historians acknowledging the importance of long-term pro-
cesses. I want to emphasize this deep perspective. Subsistence patterns
in southern Europe have very deep roots indeed, which partly explain the
robustness of the mixed agricultural economies that become discernible
in rural establishments of thefifth to third centuriesbc. The long-term
vi Preface