Thyrea(i) and Thyreatis. The Alternating Centrality of a Contested Border Zone and its Settlements

There is quite extensive evidence on the border wars between Argives and Spartans. The sources agree on many details but not on one fundamental point, i.e. the name and extent of the disputed border territory. Is it Thyrea? Thyreai? Thyreatis? Kynouria? In some cases the contested border zone seems more local in scope, in others micro-regional, in still others regional tout court. Two fundamental issues in the study of border wars in ancient Greece overlap with this case: the relevance of border zones (rather than border lines), and the extent to which their peripherality (in relation to the contested cities: a ‘situational peripherality’) comes to be periodically central (again, a ‘situational centrality’), as a result of the emergence of a settlement's identity in this very border zone. By combing through the sources separately, this article tries to reconstruct the various stages over time that marked the emergence of the name ‘Thyreatis’ for the region at the expense of ‘Thyrea’ which comes to denote a smaller, emerging settlement becoming more and more central. This centrality, however, proves to be fluctuating and is connected in its dynamism to the political prominence it first assumes and then again loses.