ABSTRACT
But for most of the king’s vassals, who did not inhabit the Iranian heartland, the benet took the form of gifts of land like medieval efs, in return for which the man ‘enfeoed’ was expected to maintain a levy of troops. Such were the troops who fought Alexander at the Granikos. In the late fth century ‘bow land’ and ‘chariot land’ were given away on condition that the owners for the time being paid for soldiers or cavalry. e system goes back to the sixth century, when the founder of the Persian empire, the great Cyrus, presented seven cities in northern Anatolia to Pytharchos of Kyzikos (FGrHist 472 F6, cp. Fornara 46 for the signature of a man called Pytharchos found at Persepolis; perhaps a descendant rather than Cyrus’ friend). e astonishingly well-preserved sarcophagus found not far away in the Granikos valley in 1994, with a relief of the sacrice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena on one side (Fig. 6.2), perhaps comes from a Greco-Iranian milieu of the Pytharchos sort; the tomb seems, unusually, to have been intended for a woman (below p. 78 and n. 25). ere is literary and epigraphical evidence for women holding power in Asia Minor, see below p. 78 for Mania in just this region, or Artemisia and Ada further south in Karia.
