This chapter provides the historical and scholarly context to the book’s main argument, and hence treats the military and economic developments that engulfed the Greek world in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods. arguing that these should be seen as intrinsically connected. Following discussion of scholarly approaches to the economic transformation of the Greek world at this time, paying special attention to the old formalist–substantivist debate, the chapter advocates a closer look at the types of markets available, especially the market for labour. This market, the book contends, first appeared in a full form in the military sphere; accordingly, the chapter questions scholarly approaches and attitudes towards paid military service, debating especially the notion of ‘mercenary’ soldiers, who should better be conceived of as military wage labourers.

This book is concerned with a region, and a regional culture, which in antiquity neither formed a distinct political unit nor served as a focus of local identity; the region is therefore designated with an invented name, ‘Hieradoumia’. The boundaries of Hieradoumia in time and space are defined on the basis of a distinctive shared set of commemorative practices. The institutional history of the region in the pre-Roman period is described in detail, with emphasis on the unusual political organization of the region in the later Hellenistic period into two large federal associations of villages (the koinon of the Maionians in the Katakekaumene and the dēmos of the Mysoi Abbaitai). The polis was a late and marginal development in Hieradoumia, and the village continued to be the primary focus of local identity and loyalty down to the end of antiquity. The difficulty of disentangling ethnically Lydian, Mysian, Macedonian, Phrygian, and Greek elements in the region’s population and cultural practices is emphasized.