Inventorythat emerged as the Centre’s crowning achievement has never-
theless concealed some of the more problematic aspects of the project’s
publication. The template applied to entries suggests a degree of homo-
geneity or equivalence about the sites referred to, which the evidence
belies. Individual contributors to this tome have wrestled with intractable
material that did notfit this template particularly well. The relationship
between terms that often appear alongside references topoleis,including
emporion/emporia, explored elsewhere under the Centre’saegis,hasno
place in the main compilation.^33 Although the editors recognize thatpoleis
were found in many regions outside the Greek mainland, they have chosen
to focus on Hellenicpoleis, even though non-Greekpoleisare referred to in
periploiand other works describing Mediterranean topography and geog-
raphy.^34 If the termpoliscould be applied to non-Greek sites, not just by
narrative historians, but by geographers, including Hekataios, Strabo, and
Ptolemy, as well as the authors ofperiploi, then the choice of terminology
for non-Greek places becomes significant. Geographers were involved, by
definition, in a task that demanded a more technical language and
approach than did history writing, and one requiring cross-cultural com-
parisons that would be meaningful to contemporaries.
The reluctance of theInventory’s editors to engage with the potentially
broader cultural ramifications of the termpolisbecomes quickly appar-
ent when we consider inland areas, on the one hand, which are much less
well represented in surviving documentary resources than coastal ones;
and, on the other, liminal regions of the Greek mainland. In simple
numerical terms, coastal regions tend to score higher (in terms of the
gross number ofpoleis) than inland areas (Fig. 2.2). Since the numbers
only tell us about documented sites, (particularly, though not exclusively
those known from ancient written records), the grossfigures need to be
scrutinized. A glance at the relative numbers of recordedpoleisin
different areas shows that the names are far from regularly distributed.
There are 65 recorded in various written sources for the Chalkidic
peninsula, excluding four that cannot be located on the ground. This
contrasts markedly with the 17 that can be identified with some
(^33) Notwithstanding the brief discussion inInventory, 41.
(^34) Inventory, 34 – 7 and 150–3 for the rationale of what has been included; objections to
the unnecessarily restrictive cultural definition accepted by the Copenhagen Polis Centre
(with partial but incomplete responses inInventory29, 35) are voiced by Davies 2000;
Archibald 2000; Morgan 2000; Lomas 2000, esp. 173–85; for a more general critique of the
narrow definition ofpolis, Vlassopoulos 2007, esp. 79–84 and P. J. Rhodes’s qualifications in
his review,JHS125 (2005) 171–2. Thefinal compilation thus excludes more detailed earlier
discussion, such as Hansen’s statement about non-Hellenicpoleis(1996, 204), which is
referred to below in Ch. 4.
58 Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces