strategies also help to frame the particular events and relationships that
provide some of the incidental detail that emerges from my story.
The deeply rooted ecologies of the south-east Balkan and north
Aegean area have to be understood in terms of particular communities
and traditions. Perhaps the hardest task for any historian who wants to
make this region better known is to create the kinds of associations that
come so easily to more southerly and easterly locations, whose names
echo down the centuries through the poetry of Homer and the rhetoric of
orators. The place names of this region are often strange modern ones,
and rural mysteries at that. The best kept secret of the east Balkans are its
rural retreats. Modernity has gloried in the urban landscape of antiquity,
whilst ignoring its equally impressive contributions to the management
and construction of the rural landscape.
The scene-setting that each chapter tries to create results in a series of
filters through which various historical identifiers–ethnic groups,
peoples, archaeological sites, artefacts, and commodities–are viewed in
turn. Thesefilters include demography, geology, ecology, languages, and
epigraphy. Filters of this kind employ different methods and produce
different results, which must nevertheless be factored into the overall
narrative of the past. Beyond thesefilters rises the broader discourse
about the nature of ancient societies, their organization and structure. I
have tried to keep discussion of social mattersfirmly in touch with
economic ones and have chosen paradigms that seem to reflect the
close connection between the material and the social that is such a
striking component of any encounter with the artefacts and monuments
that these societies created. It makes a very different environment in
which to evaluate some of the familiar and established models for
conceptualising classical antiquity—including the paradigms invented
by Moses Finley; the overriding preoccupation with coastal locations
against inland ones; the‘polis’of the Copenhagen project;‘regionalism’,
national boundaries.
Handbridge, Chester, May 2013
Preface vii