process. The different revenue streams, which would have amounted to a
sum of the order of 800–1,000T per annum, can be considered alongside
the 600T that the historian gives as annually accruing to Athens from her
allies in the same period (2.13.3).^85 The most striking feature of the
Odrysian revenue-raising system is its reliance on a commodity-based
network that maximized a range of specialist materials.
There is no digression in Thucydides’work that could give us a
comparable picture of Macedonian revenues in thefifth centurybc.
Most of our information, aboutfinancial, as about political matters,
dates from a hundred or so years later. Philip II is said to have received
1,000T (per annum? Diod. 16.8.6–7), from a mine in the vicinity of
Mount Dysoron.^86 This notorious anecdote marks a step change in
Argead royal revenues, and gives little indication of what income the
crown may have had in the previous century and a half at least. There are
sound reasons for thinking that a system of royal administration had
evolved in that time, which is partly reflected in the nomenclature of
offices, surviving in distinctive dialect forms as indicators of earlier
practice, once the Attickoinebecame progressively established during
Philip’s reign.^87 This administrative machinery was perhaps introduced,
or expanded, to enable the collection of various taxes and tolls on behalf
of the crown, a topic that will be explored more fully in the next chapter.
‘Royal’ economies are more difficult to manage that civic ones,
according to the anonymous author of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise
on economic management,Oeconomica(1345b 13–15). He does not
explain why there is a step change, in terms of complexity, between
civic and royal administration. The reader is led to assume that this
complication follows automatically from the kinds of decisions that have
to be made in the royal chancery—about when to mint coins; about how
expenses should be paid for (in coin or in kind); and about how to deal
with revenues accumulating from regional sources (1345b 22–27). This
(^85) Cf Xen.Anab. 7.1.27 (the overall revenues of Athens, from home and abroad, during
the Peloponnesian War, amounted to no less than 1,000T). The sums presented in the
Athenian Tribute Lists nevertheless do not indicate that annual tributes exceeded
400T. This base line (if that is what it was) dropped to 130Tc. 350 bc(Dem. 10.37–38) and
reverted to the previous level as a result of the intervention of Euboulos; Lykourgos raised this
to 1,200 or even 1,575 ([Plut.]Xorat.842F, 852B; cf Migeotte 2009, 53; Nixon and Price’s
(1990) pioneering exploration of the economic implications of variable amounts of the
Athenian tribute has not been followed up (see further discussion below and in Ch. 5).
(^86) For the possible location of Mt. Dysoron, see further discussion on mining and mines
in Chs. 5 and 6.
(^87) Hatzopoulos 1996, I, 431–42, on royalfinances; 78–104, 482: on the offices ofskoidos
andpeliganes;on the dissemination of Attickoinedialect in Macedonia:idem1988a, 55–61;
idem1988b, 40–50;idem1998, 79–80.
76 Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces