Keywords
livestock breeding pasture transhumance
salt supply Epirote tribes
Prostatai political constitution
commodity exchange coast hinterland
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Abstract
The hegemony of the Chaonians in ancient Epirus has been a long-disputed question in scholarship. Strabo's brief testimony, attributing a position of supremacy to the Chaonians before it passed to the Molossians, was explained by Treidler through proximity to the colonies of Apollonia and Orikos, by Klotsch through the influence of nearby Korkyra, while Franke doubted the Chaonian hegemony altogether. None of these interpretations fully exploits the available source material.
This article aims to establish the historical reality of Chaonian hegemony and to identify its economic foundations. The study draws on ancient sources - Thucydides, Strabo, Pseudo-Aristotle, Pliny, Appian, Hecataeus, Proxenus, Stephanus of Byzantium, Hesiod, and Varro - combining philological source criticism with analysis of the geographical and economic conditions in Epirus.
The analysis shows that livestock breeding - particularly cattle-rearing and the associated pasture-based transhumance - constituted the principal economic occupation of all Epirote tribes.
The Chaonians held decisive advantages in this regard: their territory of Kestrenia was renowned for the so-called Lariner herd, counted among the finest grazing lands of ancient Epirus, and also possessed its own salt springs in Chaonia. The salt supply held exceptional economic and political importance for pastoral economies - disputes over salt could lead to inter-tribal warfare, as attested by Pseudo-Aristotle and Strabo for the Illyrian tribes of the Autariatae and Ardiaei. The Chaonians also benefited from a favorable geographic position for commodity exchange between the coastal zone and the hinterland, and from an advanced political constitution that replaced tribal monarchy with the institution of annually elected Prostatai. The register preserved by Proxenus indicates that the Chaonians exercised control over a series of neighboring tribes. The Chaonian hegemony most likely dates to the second half of the 5th century BCE.
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