A GENERAL MODEL Of LONG-DISTANCE TRADE 309
identify themselves by patronymic and clan, not as officials.^72 That parallels
known initiatives at Athens by or for Sidonians, Kitians, and Egyptians, where
the ethnic collective denotes an expatriate or peregrine group of merchants,
not the polity.^73 Polities are indeed visible, but as managers of the exchange
system as described by Theophrastus’ informants, as providers of infrastruc-
ture such as the Minaian colonies on the Incense Road, and of course as fiscal
beneficiaries.
Fourthly, if for the sake of argument one takes the 5 dr/mina price of frank-incense as a norm, it allows some assessment of known scales of expenditure.
At one extreme Timon’s minimalist outlay of 1 obol (footnote 66 ) buys a little
over a half-drachma weight of incense, while at the other extreme Alexander’s
gift of 500 talents to Leonidas (footnote 29 ) would have had a ‘street-value’ of
150,000 drachmas or 25 talents in silver. In contrast, the size of the Seleukid
donation to Apollo, with its mere 3,000 drachma-worth of incense (footnote
69 ), looks almost niggardly, and prompts unanswerable questions about the
origins of the content of the gift.
Fifthly, while the devising of the linear model of commodity move-ment sketched herein was a simple matter, that of creating its complement,
a model of what went in the other direction as ‘payment’, is not. Indeed
Plog’s warnings in his classic paper of 1977 against over-simplified models
of exchange are abundantly confirmed. Attestations of the direct traffic of
commodities from the Aegean to Yemen are totally absent, for although
there is ample evidence for Aegean ceramics reaching the Levantine coast,
and even for some of it reaching as far as Ezion-Geber at the north end of
the Gulf of Aqaba, none seems to have penetrated further. Hoard evidence
is similarly silent about the direct penetration of Aegean coined silver,^74
while in contrast ‘Athenian-styled’ coinages came to be minted not merely
in the Phoenician cities but also by the Sabaean states.^75 The model of
direct Greek participation, as attested from the late seventh century BCE
onwards for exchange with Egypt by the trading-stations of Heracleia and
Naucratis in the Delta, is therefore inapplicable.^76 Instead, just as the use
of ‘Syrian’ as a conventional Greek epithet for frankincense (footnote 59 )
will have reflected the role of the Phoenician city-states as intermediary
hubs, so too Ezekiel, composing his sarcastic but elegiac allegory of Tyre in
the 600s or the 590s^77 and reshaping an older Tyrian document for his own
purposes, cited Yawan along with Tubal and Meshech as a source of Tyrian
imports of ‘slaves and vessels of bronze’,^78 thereby obliging us to envisage
tradable commodities of Aegean origin (including trafficked humans) as
reaching the Phoenician coast but no further. In any case, Pliny’s portrait of
the haemorrhage of profit later suffered by transporters along the Incense
Road as various parties took their cut will have applied to all periods of
the traffic.^79