the people who were directly involved in the running of country estates
and daily services to the owner, they suggest some organizational limits
on the social units centred on wealthy European landowners of premo-
dern times. Other retainers might be called upon for other part-time
services, including military service. We do not have a concrete yardstick
for such a household in classical antiquity. What we can say is that royal
households in Macedon or Thrace did not adopt the Persian system of
rations, allocated to individuals, who then provided for a range of other
dependents.^13 These European courts operated on a different principle. It
has always been clear that kings retained a close relationship with
individual communities, an aspect of royal administration that remained
highly characteristic throughout thefinal three centuriesbc. This is what
made it possible for Roman officials to interpose themselves as rival
bidders for the interests of specific communities, a system that could
not have emerged had there been a stricter administrative hierarchy
along the lines of Achaemenid satrapies. Neither in Macedon, nor in
Thrace, was there a well-defined distance between rulers and ruled,
articulated by a distinct intervening stratum of regional administrators,
responsible for tax collection and military authority, with their own
retainers and satrapal courts, echoing the style and protocol of royal
palaces.
Judging by the dinner held by the Odrysian prince Seuthes, Thracian
rulers dined, on an everyday basis, like their Macedonian peers, facing
their guests in a circular or near-circular plan. Distinguished native
guests were invited, alongside visiting Greeks and others, with the king
or prince offering unleavened bread and meat to whoever he wished,
whilst keeping his own portion modest (Xen.Anab. 7.3.21–24).^14 The
etiquette described here reinforces the idea of the prince as facilitator as
well as benefactor—the individual with the pre-eminent capacity to
redistribute food—for the benefit of the community as a whole. Food
distribution thus acts as an archetype for the dissemination of other
goods and services. Dinners, whether in tents or in the open air (Theop.
FGrH115 F31 ap. Athen. 12.531e), were perhaps much more common
than formal assemblies in halls and purpose-built chambers, not least
(^13) Lane Fox (2007, 287 and further refs n.146), cites Polyaen. 4.3.32, where Alexander is
said to have destroyed a bronze pillar at Persepolis, bearing a list of contributions to the
king’s dinners; cf. Lane Fox 2011, 365:‘Philip introduced no complex Persian“ration
system”at court, no secluded style of dining, nochiliarch, no ushers armed with whips,
no graduatedproskynesis’. The closest we come to a direct statement about Thracian
redistribution is Gnesippos’statement in Xenophon’sAnabasis, who talks of royal‘gifts’
that might have included food, since the context is a meal (see Ch. 5 n.77).
(^14) Stronk 1995, 208–11.
Dining cultures 275