welfare and other social payments in the twentieth, although the pattern
in other parts of the globe has been different.^81
Thucydides’description of Odrysian revenues presents a picture in
which the relationship between payers and recipients is quite different
from structures familiar in contemporary societies. He emphasizes the
exceptional economic status of the Odrysian kingdom, second to none
among European powers in its resources and its revenues, yielding to the
Scythians only in the global numerical strength of its military.^82 The
historian distinguished between formal‘tribute’, using the same term,
phoros,as he used in connection with the tribute paid by her allies to
Athens.^83 What makes the account doubly interesting is the coexistence
of what seem to be two parallel but different modes of operation—a
formalized method of revenue raising,phoros, with a known gross
threshold, expressed in silver talents, and a less formal system of‘gifts’,
which are not the same as‘tribute’, but are nevertheless perceived by the
historian as constituting income. Thucydides evidently wanted his
readers to see both revenue sources as comprehensible parts of a single
system, even if he thought that the‘gift-giving’was a less usual method of
raising capital. The‘gift-giving’is something that the modern reader
associates with the anthropology of Marcel Mauss and his seminal work,
Essai sur le don.^84 Yet here Thucydides presents gift-giving as an alter-
native or additional source of income. The one form does not exclude the
other. This parallelism is quite at odds with the polarity more usually
identified by historians and anthropologists between money-based econ-
omies and gift-based systems. Thucydides implies nevertheless that the
‘gifts’were, in a very real sense, revenue, not just presents; nor is there
any suggestion that there was anything underhand or covert about the
(^81) Ferguson 2001, 43–53, esp. Table 1; Goldsmith 1987, 22, 31, 48–51, 79.
(^82) Thuc. 2.97.5:SóôåKðdìݪÆâÆóغåßÆqºŁåíNóåýïò.ôHíªaæKíôBfi ̄PæþðÅfi ‹óÆØ
ìåôÆîfôïF’IïíßïıŒüºðïıŒÆdôïF ̄PîåßíïıðüíôïıìåªßóôÅKªÝíåôïåæÅìÜôøíðæïóüäøfi ŒÆd
ôBfi ¼ººÅfi åPäÆØìïíßÆfi,NóåýØäbìÜåÅòŒÆdóôæÆôïFðºÞŁåØðïºfäåıôÝæÆìåôaôcíÓŒıŁHí.
(‘This is how the [Odrysian] kingship came to have great power. Of the [states] in Europe
between the Ionian Gulf and the Euxine, it was the greatest in terms offinancial revenues
and of all other forms of prosperity, although in the strength and number of its military
forces it was decidedly behind that of the Scythians’).
(^83) Hornblower, 1991, 371; cf. also Papazarkadas 2009 for recent refinements of chrono-
logical problems connected to the epigraphic data; Loukopoulou 2002 on the Odrysian
phoros.
(^84) Mauss 1923–24; for a nuanced exposition of why‘gift-giving’in pre-modern societies
may have been misunderstood by Mauss and others, see Wagner-Hasel 2006; Stronach and
Zournatzi 2002, 335–9, explain how Odrysian tribute and gift-giving resembled Near
Eastern practices (and why the heightened tensions of the Peloponnesian War may have
inclined Thucydides to imply that there was something peculiar about these customs).
Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces 75