mediated by aristocratic individuals who owned slaves and other prop-
erty.^46 In this interpretation, ancient references to economic‘enterprise’,
such as the Pseudo-Aristotelian anecdote concerning rural workers being
urged to sow cereals for export to coastal towns, were interpreted in a
similar light, as evidence of control over subject populations rather than
as a partnership between the king and his subjects, which is, nevertheless,
an equally valid understanding of the same passages.^47
At the western end of our‘super-region’, there has been a marked
increase, during the last twenty-five years, in the number of epigraphic
documents dealing with land sales—mainly, but by no means exclusively
in the‘new’provinces of Macedonia, east of the River Axios. These deeds
of sale, which date from thefifth to third centuriesbc, provide some
explicit evidence of land prices, as well as details about the mechanisms
of sale.^48 In fourth-centurybcMacedonia, royal power and prerogatives
coexisted with independent, private sales and community transactions.
There does not seem to be any incompatibility between the allocation of
resources to royal appointees, as occurred, for example, at Amphipolis
after its appropriation by Philip II, and the sales instigated by private
landowners in the same city, whatever the immediate motives.^49 The
implications of the evidence on land sales in Macedonia and the‘new’
territories east of the Strymon have yet to be applied to Thrace. Tacheva’s
radical distinction between Macedonian and Greek forms of landholding
on the one hand, and Thracian practices on the other, was based on an
interpretation of Macedonian institutions that no longer has the support
of many scholars of the region.^50
The dominant post Second World War trend in Bulgarian scholarship
on Thracian society and economy has also been underfire from archaeolo-
gists. The principal excavator of the early Hellenistic city of Seuthopolis,
(^46) Tacheva 1997, 99–101.
(^47) Archibald 1998, 226; [Ar.]Oec. II.26 1351a 26 refers to an incident involving the
Athenian general Iphikrates, who was short of pay for his mercenaries and set them to sow
threemedimnoiof corn seed; another similar anecdote is recorded by Polyaenus (7.32), in
which a king Seuthes providedfivemedimnoiof seed per farmer, within a group of farmers,
with a view to selling the proceeds‘on the coast’for a large sum of money. The very
similarity between these stories belies a significant gulf in economic mechanisms between
Iphikrates’men and Seuthes’farmers.
(^48) Hatzopoulos 1988b; 1991; 2011a.
(^49) See esp. Hatzopoulos 2011a and his discussion of property in Mieza.
(^50) Hatzopoulos has been the leading exponent of a less rigid and doctrinaire view of
Macedonian society, but his views are founded on a growing body of epigraphic evidence;
see Hatzopoulos 1988a; 1988b; 1991; and esp. 1997; 1999b; Faraguna (1998; 2006) and Mari
(1999; 2002; 2011a) accept his interpretation; King 2010 for a more sceptical position
regarding royal power (though the evidence of land sales is not in question).
Regionalism and regional economies 213