Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon

In Honor of beloved Virgil—

O degli altri poeti onore e lume . . .

—Dante, Inferno

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Classical Literature Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Joan Palevsky.

The publisher also thanks the following for generous contributions to this book:

The Loeb Classical Library Foundation

The Committee on Research, University of California, Berkeley

The Abigail Reynolds Hodgen Publication Fund in the Social Sciences at University of California, Berkeley

Creating A Common Polity

HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY

General Editors: Anthony W. Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A.A. Long, and Andrew F. Stewart

Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, by Peter Green

Hellenism in the East: The Interaction of Greek and Non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander, edited by Amélie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White

The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, edited by J.M. Dillon and A.A. Long

Antigonos the One-Eyed and the Creation of the Hellenistic State, by Richard A. Billows

A History of Macedonia, by R. Malcolm Errington, translated by Catherine Errington

Attic Letter-Cutters of229to 86 B.C., by Stephen V. Tracy

The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, by Luciano Canfora

Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, by Julia E. Annas

Hellenistic History and Culture, edited by Peter Green

The Best of the Argonauts: The Redefinition of the Epic Hero in Book One of Apollonius’s Argonautica, by James J. Clauss

Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics, by Andrew Stewart

Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World, edited by Anthony W. Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A.A. Long, and Andrew Stewart

From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire, by Susan Sherwin-White and Amélie Kuhrt

Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent Delos, 314–167B.C., by Gary Reger

Hegemony to Empire: The Development of the Roman Imperium in the East from148to62B.C., by Robert Kallet-Marx

Moral Vision in The Histories of Polybius, by Arthur M. Eckstein

The Hellenistic Settlements in Europe, the Islands, and Asia Minor, by Getzel M. Cohen

Interstate Arbitrations in the Greek World,337–90B.C., by Sheila L. Ager

Theocritus’s Urban Mimes: Mobility, Gender, and Patronage, by Joan B. Burton

Athenian Democracy in Transition: Attic Letter-Cutters of340to290B.C., by Stephen V. Tracy

Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the Jews: Legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora, by Bezalel Bar-Kochva

Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World, by Kent J. Rigsby

The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, edited by R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé

The Politics of Plunder: Aitolians and Their Koinon in the Early Hellenistic Era, 279–217B.C., by Joseph B. Scholten

The Argonautika, by Apollonios Rhodios, translated, with introduction, commentary, and glossary, by Peter Green

Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography, edited by Paul Cartledge, Peter Garnsey, and Erich S. Gruen

Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible, by Louis H. Feldman

Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context, by Kathryn J. Gutzwiller

Religion in Hellenistic Athens, by Jon D. Mikalson

Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition, by Erich S. Gruen

The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, by Shaye D. Cohen

Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria, by Frank L. Holt

Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323B.C.E.–117C.E.), by John M.G. Barclay

From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context, edited by Nancy T. de Grummond and Brunilde S. Ridgway

Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition, by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes

Stoic Studies, by A.A. Long

Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, by Susan A. Stephens

Athens and Macedon: Attic Letter-Cutters of300to229B.C., by Stephen V. Tracy

Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus, by Theocritus, translated with an introduction and commentary by Richard Hunter

The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, by Kathy L. Gaca

Cultural Politics in Polybius’s Histories, by Craige B. Champion

Cleomedes’ Lectures on Astronomy: A Translation of The Heavens, with an introduction and commentary by Alan C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd

Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context, by Sara Raup Johnson

Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions, by Frank L. Holt

The Horse and Jockey from Artemision: A Bronze Equestrian Monument of the Hellenistic Period, by Seán Hemingway

The Hellenistic Settlements in Syria, the Red Sea Basin, and North Africa, by Getzel M. Cohen

Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan, by Frank L. Holt

Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome, by Arthur M. Eckstein

Hellenistic Egypt: Monarchy, Society, Economy, Culture, by Jean Bingen, edited and introduced by Roger S. Bagnall

Jewish Perspectives on Hellenistic Rulers, edited by Tessa Rajak, Sarah Pearce, James Aitken, and Jennifer Dines

The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature: The Hellenistic Period, by Bezalel Bar-Kochva

From Alexander to Jesus, by Ory Amitay

The Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan, by Frank L. Holt

The Hellenistic Settlements in the East from Armenia and Mesopotamia to Bactria and India, by Getzel M. Cohen

Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon, by Emily Mackil

Creating a Common Polity

Religion, Economy, and Politics in the

Making of the Greek Koinon

Emily Mackil

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mackil, Emily Maureen.

Creating a common polity : religion, economy, and politics in the making of the Greek koinon / Emily Mackil.

p.cm. — (Hellenistic culture and society; 55)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27250-7 (cloth, alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95393-2 (ebook)

1. Greece—Politics and government—To 146 B.C 2. City-states—Greece—History. 3. Religion and state—Greece—History. I. Title.

JC73.M3372013

320.938—dc232012012446

Manufactured in the United States of America

22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with its commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post–consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free, Ecologo-certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

For Max

CONTENTS

Preface

Abbreviations

Maps

Introduction

Strategies Old and New

Institutions

An Example

A Road Map

PART I. COOPERATION, COMPETITION, AND COERCION: A NARRATIVE HISTORY

1.The Archaic Period and the Fifth Century

Boiotia

Achaia

Aitolia

2.The Fourth Century

Common Wars, Common Peaces, Common Polities, 404–371

Theban Hegemony and the Hegemony of the Koinon, 371–346

A New Macedonian Order, 346–323

3.The Hellenistic Period

Mainland Greece and the Wars of the Successors, 323–285

Independence and Expansion, 284–245

Shifting Alliances, 245–229

The Roman Entrance and the War against Kleomenes, 229–222

The Rise of Philip V and the Social War, 221–217

The First and Second Macedonian Wars: Rome, Aitolia, and Philip V, 215–196

The Freedom of the Greeks and the Dismantling of Regional Cooperation, 196–167

Bargaining with Rome, the Struggle for Sparta, and the End of the Achaian Koinon, 167–146

PART II. INTERACTIONS AND INSTITUTIONS

4.Cultic Communities

Building Regional Communities

Politicizing Regional Communities

Legitimating and Celebrating the Power of the Koinon

Reproducing the Power of the Koinon

5.Economic Communities

Cooperative Coinage and Early Forms of Economic Cooperation

Protecting and Promoting Economic Mobility

Resource Complementarity and Economic Interdependence

Winning the Battle for Resources

Taxation and Regional State Revenues

Managing Economic Crises and Disputes

6.Political Communities

Coercion and Cooperation in the Formation of the Koinon

The Terms of the Federal Compromise

Enforcement, Negotiation, and Institutional Stability

Conclusion

Appendix: Epigraphic Dossier

I. Boiotia: T1–T33

II. Achaia: T34–T46

III. Aitolia: T47–T61

Bibliography

Index of Subjects

Index Locorum

PREFACE

This book trades in a currency that is not widely accepted beyond the relatively small scholarly circle of classicists, ancient historians, and Greek epigraphers. Yet in the course of writing it I have learned a great deal from work done in fields well beyond theirs, including geography, economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology. I have therefore attempted to write in such a way as to keep my account accessible to the interested nonspecialist, in the hope that the intellectual exchange may be reciprocal. At the same time, the full scholarly apparatus of ancient historical research, especially that based in ancient documents, has been retained in the notes and above all in the appended epigraphic dossier, which collects, translates, and comments upon sixty-one Greek inscriptions of particular relevance to the argument that is sustained over the course of this book. I hope that, in offering this book for exchange with specialists and nonspecialists alike, I have not unwittingly debased my currency with both.

It is with a view to accessibility beyond classical circles that all Greek is transliterated (except in the epigraphic dossier), according to what I readily admit is a somewhat arbitrary system. I have preferred the Greek to the Latin system of transliteration, except where the result is an offense to normal English usage. So, for example, Achaia, Aitolia, Boiotia, Orchomenos, and Polybios are as close as possible to the Greek spelling, but Athens, Attica, Carthage, Cassander, Corinth, Crete, Macedonia, Thebes, and Thucydides are preferred over Athenai, Attike, Karchedon, Kassandros, Korinthos, Krete, Makedonia, Thebai, and Thoukydides, against which my spirit simply rebels.

The abbreviations of ancient authors and texts are in general those given in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition (OCD³), occasionally with familiar variations; and references to secondary scholarship generally take the form of author-date citations, but abbreviated references have often been more convenient. For full details, see the headnote to the list of abbreviations used in this book.

This book has been more than a decade in the making, during the course of which time I have incurred significant debts. It is a great pleasure now to acknowledge them. Josiah Ober, who supervised the 2003 Princeton PhD dissertation to which this book is distantly related, has been an invaluable interlocutor, reader, critic, and friend. Nicholas Purcell, my first teacher of ancient history in Oxford, was also a member of the Princeton dissertation committee, and though he has not read a draft of this book and will, I am sure, not agree with everything I say here, the lessons I have learned from him, in tutorials, conversations, and print, have left their imprint on every page. Simon Hornblower, my tutor in Greek history in Oxford, first awakened my interest in the subject of Greek federal states by posing a question that I found impossible to answer in a tutorial essay.

The University of California, Berkeley, has been my academic home during the entire period of writing this book. Here I have been blessed with wonderful colleagues who have been cheerful discussants, critical readers, and friends: Susanna Elm, Erich Gruen, Leslie Kurke, Maureen Miller, Carlos Noreña, Michael Nylan, Nikolaos Papazarkadas, Andrew Stewart, and Ronald Stroud. Mary Elizabeth Berry has offered support and guidance of a different and invaluable kind. Three Berkeley graduate students—Eric Driscoll, John Lanier, and Michael Laughy—offered research assistance and saved me countless hours and the commission of innumerable mistakes. I have learned much from the comments and questions of Ryan Boehm, Lisa Eberle, Noah Kaye, and Joel Rygorsky, Berkeley graduate students with whom I have had the privilege to work closely. Their challenges and observations have significantly improved some of the ideas and arguments I have presented.

Many friends and colleagues beyond Berkeley have read and commented on one or more chapters of the book: Lisa Kallet, Barbara Kowalzig, Jack Kroll, Josh Ober, Gary Reger, Peter van Alfen, and Barry Weingast. Athanasios Rizakis has been a stimulating interlocutor on all things Achaian and has generously shared his unpublished work with me. The curatorial staff at the American Numismatic Society, above all Peter van Alfen and Ute Wartenberg Kagan, have welcomed me on repeated visits and generously made their holdings available to me for study. I am grateful to them also for permission to reproduce on the cover a photograph of an Achaian coin in their collection.

Some of the ideas and arguments of this book were presented in papers delivered at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, the University of Oxford, and the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, as well as at two annual meetings of the Association of Ancient Historians. I am grateful to the hosts who invited me and the audiences who, on all these occasions, offered comments and criticism. I express my profound and humble thanks to all, and absolve everyone but myself of responsibility for the errors and missteps that inevitably remain.

Thanks for financial support in the form of research leaves are due to the Department of History, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Committee on Research, all of the University of California, Berkeley. A grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation contributed to an uninterrupted one-year sabbatical during which major portions of the book were written. Research travel was funded by a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy at Berkeley. An early stage of my work in Greece was generously supported by the Fulbright Foundation and a Whiting Honorific Fellowship in the Humanities from Princeton University.

Erich Gruen first encouraged me to submit my book for consideration as part of the series Hellenistic Culture and Society published by the University of California Press. I owe him thanks not only because it is a privilege to see it become a part of this estimable series but also because everyone involved with the process at the Press has been so tremendously helpful. Alain Bresson and Jeremy McInerney took on the task of reviewing a massive manuscript for the University of California Press, and for their thoughtful and detailed comments and criticisms I am deeply grateful. Their suggestions have made this a much better book. My editor at U.C. Press, Eric Schmidt, has been unfailingly helpful and patient with an overly ambitious first-time author. His good advice and tireless advocacy at every stage are deeply appreciated. The work of Paul Psoinos, a meticulous and indefatigable copyeditor, has saved me from innumerable blunders. Cindy Fulton ushered the book through production carefully and thoughtfully. I am most grateful to Roberta Engleman for preparing the index and to Eric Driscoll for assistance with the proofreading. Subventions to meet the high cost of publishing a book of this size and complexity were generously granted by the Abigail Reynolds Hodgen Publication Fund and the Committee on Research, both of the University of California, Berkeley, and by the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.

My family never stopped offering encouragement, although they may have begun to believe that the project would never reach its completion, and whether they realized it or not, the regular queries about progress helped to keep me on track. My daughter, Lydia, has been an incomparably enlivening and enlightening companion since the day of her arrival. My husband, Max Christoff, has lived with this project virtually since its inception, listening patiently as I tried to work out innumerable problems and bearing the inevitable ups and downs with alacrity and good humor. It is in gratitude for all this and much more that I dedicate the book to him.

ABBREVIATIONS

Throughout this book’s footnotes and bibliography, the abbreviations used for the names of ancient authors and the titles of their works are in general those shown in the frontmatter list in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (OCD³: Oxford, 2003), supplemented where necessary by the corresponding list in Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition (abbreviated LSJ: Oxford, 1996). Abbreviations used for the titles of modern works of scholarship or reference, or both, and for the titles of scholarly periodicals, are in general those given by L’Année philologique. Apart from these, the abbreviations listed below are used in this book.

MAPS

Full-color, high-quality versions of these maps may be downloaded from the book’s permanent website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520272507.

MAP 1. Mainland Greece and the Peloponnese in the classical and Hellenistic periods.

MAP 2. Boiotia in the classical and Hellenistic periods.

MAP 3. Achaia in the classical and Hellenistic periods.

MAP 4. Aitolia in the classical and Hellenistic periods.

MAP 5. Aitolian population groups in the classical period.

MAP 6. Resource complementarity in preindustrial modern eastern Aitolia, circa 1821–1940.

MAP 7. Market networks of preindustrial modern Aitolia, circa 1821–1940.

MAP 8. The Boiotian districts circa 395 BCE.

MAP 9. The Boiotian districts circa 287–171BCE.

Introduction

Federal political structures, characterized by a division of sovereignty among multiple levels of government, have proved tremendously attractive in early modern and modern history for two basic reasons. First, their careful distribution of power gives them tremendous advantages for the governance of extremely large territories with disparate resources and highly localized economies; for this reason federalism has allowed the United States, Canada, and Australia to function successfully as single states.¹ Second, and more recently, the preservation of political entities below the national level has made them appealing to multiethnic states such as India, Belgium, and Spain; the ability to foster political cooperation and deliver public goods while nevertheless protecting the character, interests, and independence of different ethnic communities makes federalism a promising option for multiethnic states in transition.² And while federalism tends to be understood as a phenomenon of the modern world, it is widely recognized as having its origins in Greek antiquity.

Here, by the late fourth century, close to half the poleis of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese had become part of one federal state or another.³ The scale of the phenomenon is truly remarkable. And yet we have no adequate understanding of why a federal political structure should have been so attractive to so many Greek communities. It is generally supposed that federalism arose among the small poleis of Greece as a means of achieving security that would otherwise have been unavailable to them against hostile neighbors and grew in the Hellenistic period as a defensive response to the volatile circumstances of this new world, providing an effective means for small poleis to deal with imperial superpowers.⁴ While defense was certainly among the goods delivered by these states from the earliest stages and was indubitably one of the motives for poleis to cooperate with one another, this explanation on its own does not get us very far. For the Greeks had an admirable institution for the defensive (and offensive) military cooperation of states: the symmachia or military alliance. But the institutions that governed these states encompassed far more than the provision of defense, and the military-diplomatic explanation for their existence fails to account for numerous prominent features: their deep engagement in the religious practices of member communities and the region as a whole; their profound impact on the economic structures that influenced the welfare of their citizens, their constituent communities, and the entire region; and the extraordinarily fine-grained attention paid to the distribution of political powers throughout the state. Why, then, did so many Greek poleis find it so attractive to become part of a federal state in the classical and Hellenistic periods? And how do we account for the full range of these states’ competencies and engagements as evidenced by the ancient sources?

STRATEGIES OLD AND NEW

This book is an attempt to answer the questions raised above. The scale of the phenomenon and the complexity of the evidence make the task a daunting one, and it is probably for this reason that no one has undertaken a systematic study of the subject, covering the whole of Greek antiquity, since 1968.⁵ Instead, work has proceeded via focused studies of particular cases, often in particular periods.⁶ While a great deal of progress has thus been made on detailed and specific questions, this method produces scattered points of light while leaving the larger, pressing issues I have just outlined very much in the dark. The strategy adopted here is intended to blend the advantages of the analytic and synthetic approaches. While training my sights on the questions of the origins and true nature of the Greek federal state, I restrict my analysis to evidence from three regions: Achaia, in the northern Peloponnese; Aitolia, in western Greece; and Boiotia, in central mainland Greece (map 1).⁷ These are the three best-attested instances, supported by rich literary, epigraphic, archaeological, and numismatic evidence. Federal institutions appear to have developed first in Boiotia, and this alone makes it a vital case for a larger study of how and why federalism emerged in the Greek world. These three were also the most powerful federal states to emerge in the classical period, and each for a time attained a leadership position within the wider Greek world. But they are also markedly different from one another. Urbanization and the entrenchment of statehood at the city scale, for example, occurred in Boiotia in the seventh and sixth centuries, while in Achaia and Aitolia it was a process of the fifth and fourth centuries.⁸ The emergence of federal institutions in each region was the result of distinct sets of pressures and opportunities, and the economies of these three regions are highly differentiated. These three case studies provide rich but varied evidence for the adoption of similar (but not identical) political institutions that contributed—if it did not lead directly—to the achievement of hegemony in remarkably different geographical, economic, religious, and cultural contexts. The Boiotian, Achaian, and Aitolian koina also create a superregional cluster around the Gulf of Corinth; across and around its waters they interacted intensively, in both hostile and friendly contexts, and never more than in the Hellenistic period.⁹ As such they yield an excellent set of data through which to examine the process by which federal institutions emerged, developed, and were maintained over time. This approach, in short, allows us to avoid overgeneralization while nevertheless pursuing the big questions that have proved so elusive. The conclusions I draw should not be assumed to apply to every koinon that was ever created in the Greek world, but I hope they may establish a set of questions that could profitably be applied to cases like the Lykian koinon, so rich in epigraphic evidence, or indeed the Thessalian koinon that was created near the end of the period I am studying.¹⁰

I have thus far used the modern phrase federal state to refer to those states in which political power is distributed among at least two levels of government, but an unreflective application of the term to the Greek world has contributed to the deceptively narrow view of the topic that has prevailed in modern scholarship on the subject for so long. This is partly because we have no ancient analyses of the nature of a koinon to guide us, such as we have for democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. If a few hints have been detected that there was some theoretical discussion about the koinon among Greek authors, most notably Aristotle and Polybios, these accounts have been lost, and we are left largely to fend for ourselves.¹¹ Whether implicitly or explicitly, ancient historians have fallen back on the assumption that ancient federal states are fundamentally like modern ones. They have, furthermore, been heavily influenced by what might be called the old institutionalist approach to modern federalism, marked by a preoccupation with the description of political institutions, which tend to be regarded as static entities. Thus the composition of assemblies and councils, the enumeration of magistracies, and the identification of meeting places and administrative calendars have remained the confining obsessions of the field.¹² And while political scientists studying modern federalism have expanded their approach to consider the impact of federal institutions on public economy, ancient historians have barely begun to take this cue.¹³ There has also been a major transformation in the way that social scientists think about institutions in general, the development of the new institutionalism, which has wide-ranging implications for political historians; this will be addressed in detail below. The interest in federalism as a solution to the challenge of multiethnic nationalism in the modern world points to a fascinating potential for political institutions to address the desires of ethnic groups to retain their identities and deploy them in political contexts, an idea now being explored by ancient historians investigating the link between ethnic identity and political behavior in the ancient world. Although these developments have not yielded a systematic rethinking of the experience of federalism in the Greek world, there is progress, and ancient historians and political scientists studying federalism seem to be working along parallel lines that, in a Lobachevskian manner, intersect only at great distances. In one important respect, however, historical evidence points to a sphere of social action in which federal institutions were deeply embedded but that has drawn no attention from social scientists and little from ancient historians, namely religion. I shall return to this point.

We need to make room for ourselves to incorporate all the ancient evidence, to see the phenomenon for what it was rather than trying to fit it into a modern concept, and for this reason we should be cautious with our use of the word federalism and its cognates, deploying them only when there are truly clear and applicable parallels between modern federalism and ancient political structures. We should take our cue from the language of our sources, but the matter is (alas) not so simple, for the Greeks themselves had a variety of terms for this kind of state. By far the most common are koinon, ethnos, and the simple use of the plural ethnic of the citizen body, as for example the Achaians or the Boiotians. Both koinon, a substantive adjective meaning a common thing, and ethnos are nonspecific, being used for a variety of other things, and the semantic field of both words has been studied extensively.¹⁴ In the Hellenistic period the Greeks’ own political vocabulary expanded and became more technical, but even in the work of a writer such as Polybios, whose father was a high-ranking magistrate of the Achaian koinon and who was outstandingly well informed (if a little biased), we find an array of such words used almost interchangeably. Here we find not only ethnos and koinon, but also koinōnia, emphasizing the aspect of community, and sympoliteia, conveying the sense of a shared state or a governing together; similar is koinē politeia, a common polity, clearly an elaboration of the simpler, older koinon.¹⁵ Polybios also refers to the Achaian state as a system, a word with organic, biological connotations, and an ethnic standing together.¹⁶ Most interesting of all, perhaps, is his single use of the phrase polyeides politeuma, a constitution of many kinds.¹⁷ We are left with the impression that here, as elsewhere, the Greeks themselves showed a bold disregard for bureaucratic precision.¹⁸ My solution has been to use the simple Greek word koinon throughout, primarily because this is the term that appears most frequently in the epigraphic sources for the regions that are the focus of this study. I use federal and its cognates only when it is absolutely clear that the ancient institutions and practices being discussed map closely onto the modern concept. This is a strategy of liberation, enabling consideration of the full range of ancient evidence pertaining to the phenomenon, without prejudicing the kinds of questions we should be asking or issues for which we should be looking.

This liberation has been indirectly facilitated by several important recent developments in ancient history. One is the argument that group identity among the Greeks, typically specified as ethnic identity, was socially constructed, not genetically determined, and that it was highly labile and negotiable, a discourse about the past that was heavily influenced by the present.¹⁹ This set of ideas has been applied with great profit to specific case studies, including, in very different ways, the three regions that form the subject of this book.²⁰ The implications for the study of the koinon are significant. First, insofar as the construction of a shared identity functioned as a powerful mechanism for the integration of people into a single group, it is reasonable to expect that it played a role in encouraging poleis to participate in a koinon. Second, by demonstrating that claims of kinship and ethnic identity are socially constructed, not biologically determined, this set of ideas powerfully refutes the claim that federal states developed directly from tribal states, that the people who eventually participated in a single koinon did so because they belonged to a single population group that occupied, whether natively or by migration, a particular territory.²¹ Although anthropologists discredited the tribal concept a generation ago, it has been the recent work on ethnic identity as a social construct that has caused historians of the koinon to rethink the process by which such identities emerged and were articulated, while the term tribal state continues to be applied to entities that appear to have state powers but are organized along the lines of an ethnic group rather than a polis or a koinon.²²

While these are undoubtedly important gains, the ethnicity approach still leaves the wide gulf between the articulation of an ethnic identity and the formation of the institutions peculiar to the koinon completely unbridged.²³ A sense of group identity will certainly have contributed to a sentiment of belonging and perhaps enhanced a community’s basic willingness to participate in a larger state that would incorporate all members of that group. And its promulgation will certainly have assisted the leaders of a koinon in making claims about the legitimacy of regional power structures that were either new or had come under attack once established. These are themes we shall explore. But the emergence of group identity does not on its own explain why that group should become politicized, should decide to create a particular set of political institutions or agree to proposals to that effect. Nor does ethnic identity explain the shape of those political institutions or their reach. We are left wondering, for example, how and why political powers were so carefully divided among the member poleis and the koinon. There is in this basic fact a need, or a desire, to distinguish poleis from the koinon, the local from the regional group, even as the ethnic and the political groups have become coextensive. And if a sense of identity somehow fostered the creation of regional political institutions, then how do we explain the integration of communities beyond the ethnic group into these states? The remarkable role of the koinon in fostering and protecting a regional economy (a badly understudied phenomenon that will be explored in depth in chapter 5) is likewise inexplicable from the perspective of ethnic identity.²⁴ These are only examples to illustrate the broader point that while the construction and articulation of ethnic identity certainly contributed to the process of koinon formation, it does not on its own explain that phenomenon.

The Greeks had other ways of grouping communities together, which had more to do with power than with a sense of belonging, and this brings us to a second development in ancient history that has indirectly facilitated the approach to the koinon developed in this book. The ability of one polis to subordinate another to its control resulted in the frequent creation of complex political entities that incorporated multiple poleis but never became more than a polis, a city-state. It has always been clear that becoming a member of a koinon significantly restricted a community’s ability to determine its own laws, and whether or not autonomia was a formal juridical status of a polis, in modern terms it is clear that this meant a loss of partial autonomy.²⁵ This fact, combined with the orthodox principle that absolute autonomy was a central value of the polis, has always made the phenomenon of federalism in the Greek world seem particularly strange.²⁶ But recent work has shown that Greek poleis were quite frequently in positions of dependence and subordination to other poleis; becoming part of a koinon was only one way in which this happened.²⁷ If this work on the dependent polis changes the perspective from which we view the koinon, it still does not explain the phenomenon. Instead, it invites us to consider in detail the ways in which political power was distributed among member communities and the koinon and the processes by which such arrangements were produced. Were they the result of coercion, or of cooperation? And what role was played by the sense of belonging that stemmed from a shared identity?

If these major changes in our understanding of the Greek world have raised new questions and invited fresh perspectives on the development and nature of the koinon, so too has the discovery of a considerable amount of new evidence. Most of it is epigraphic. New inscriptions have been found and recently published that shed light on each of the koina that form the core of this study. Texts discovered long ago but published in obscure and inaccessible journals and books are also beginning to receive fresh attention from scholars. Because of their detailed archival quality—their recording of the internal workings of koina that are rarely exposed by literary sources—these texts are of tremendous importance and provide clues that enable a complete reevaluation of the koinon as a phenomenon. And although archaeological evidence rarely exposes anything about institutional arrangements, new discoveries have significantly affected our understanding of the relationship between settlement patterns and the emergence of regional political structures. All this must be taken into account. The subject is ripe for fresh consideration.

There are two major questions before us: How did the koinon develop? And why did so many poleis become part of a koinon? They are, I suggest, best answered in tandem. The obvious way to approach the first question is simply to trawl through the ancient sources looking for evidence of political or military cooperation among communities in a region later known to have formed a koinon. The results of such an approach are, however, disappointing, not only because the sources make it impossible to determine what kind of political institutions lie behind such cooperative acts.²⁸ They are disappointing also because the approach works on the assumption that the koinon was a purely political entity that governed the joint military undertakings of its member communities; but the explicit evidence for the koinon in later years, when its institutions were fully developed, suggests that the koinon was much more than that, and we should entertain the possibility that it was also more complex from the beginning. This is where we return to the relationship between religion and the koinon. In Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia, we have clear evidence that sanctuaries served as archives for the koinon, repositories of its decrees, and frequently as meeting places for its deliberative assemblies. This is well known.²⁹ We also have evidence, less familiar, that these states themselves made dedications, in at least two cases extending the pervasive political strategy of representation into the sphere of ritual action, and seeking in religious practices both the legitimation and the protection of their institutional arrangements. Other evidence points to an engagement by the koinon in facilitating regional exchange and promoting a unified regional economy. These are hints that we should not be looking only for political and military cooperation, perhaps undergirded by myths promulgating a claim of ethnic unity. We should rather be asking how far back we can trace the evidence for interactions of all kinds—religious, economic, social, and political—among communities that later became part of a koinon. If we can detect this evidence prior to or coincident with early political and military cooperation and the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon, then we shall have good reason to hypothesize that such interactions contributed significantly to the willingness of independent communities to become part of a larger state. But all hypotheses need to be tested, and the only way to do so in this case is to ask whether, on purely theoretical grounds, it would make sense for a state with an essentially federal character to have its origins in shared religious and economic interactions as well as a need or a desire to develop greater military strength. What, in other words, could religious and economic interactions between communities have done to encourage the formation of political institutions of a federal kind, and why should the state, having developed those institutions, have had an interest in becoming directly involved in regulating those interactions, whether by reinforcing them, shutting them down, or repatterning them?

Tracking the totality of interactions between communities prior to the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon, analyzing their function and impact, and then asking how the koinon as an emergent state responded to that history of interactions is one productive way to proceed. But in order to understand why, we need to pause to think carefully about the nature of institutions and how they emerge and develop over time.

INSTITUTIONS

The emergence of formal institutions is tremendously complex, a process that is particularly difficult to understand when, as in the case of the Greek koinon, we have no direct account of it. The very complexity and precision of these institutions in their fully developed state belie the possibility that they developed in an entirely accidental and ad hoc manner. To take only the most obvious example, around the turn of the fourth century the Boiotian koinon was governed by a council, to which representatives were sent by districts. These districts were composed in such a way that they had roughly equal populations, and they formed the basis for the appointment of judges to Boiotian courts, the payment of taxes, and the provision of manpower to the Boiotian army.³⁰ This arrangement can only be the outcome of a deliberate and probably difficult process involving high-level planning by magistrates and political leaders as well as negotiation between the poleis and the koinon.³¹ Yet there are good reasons to think that these institutions were rooted in a history of cooperative interactions and arrangements—indeed, that they could only have emerged from that history. In order to explain why, we need to dwell momentarily on the nature of institutions more generally and the processes by which they emerge and evolve.

Institutions are typically, and are certainly in our case, endogenous to the society that uses them. Where the old institutionalism treated institutions as static entities that affected outcomes, scholars working in the field of the new institutionalism have shown that they are highly dynamic, humanly devised constraints that structure and pattern social interactions of all kinds.³² Sociologists have shown that institutions reflect the assimilation of cultural norms and practices into organizations of all kinds, including states; they are, in other words, socially embedded.³³ The economist Douglass North has argued that institutions are created by actors in order to guide or constrain human action, to secure the cooperation of others in collective action, and to reduce the inefficiencies (or transaction costs) that would ensue if they were to attempt a particular activity without such an institution.³⁴ Once created, on this view, institutions tend to structure individual behavior and are conceived as the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, . . . the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.³⁵ They are analyzed primarily as structural elements in society, and institutional development is rarely given another look.³⁶ While the idea that institutions are imposed from the outside, or from the top down, captures something of the process that must have lain behind the remarkably refined arrangements just described for Boiotia, in a political context such as the one that is our central concern it is difficult to accept the power implications of this claim. For actors to impose institutions that will govern the actions of others, they must either use (or have) overwhelming force, or they must secure the consent of others. But if they can secure the consent of others, should we not expect that those others would want to have a significant role in shaping the institutions? In a political context, in other words, institutions are more likely to be exogenous in imperial situations than in contexts of endogenous state formation.

One of the most intriguing facets of the process of state formation is the emergence of formal institutions from a situation in which there was no universally recognized system for the distribution of power or the resolution of disputes—only competing individuals and, in the case of the koinon, competing poleis interacting in a world governed by norms but not laws.³⁷ In similar circumstances in the medieval Mediterranean, it has been shown that formal institutions emerged from arrangements made by merchant guilds, nonstate agents, to enforce contracts in the absence of state legal provisions. These institutions laid the framework for later economic growth.³⁸ And the conception of institutions as rules cannot account for this phenomenon, for it assumes that the state has a monopoly on coercive power and can enforce its rules. But the very ability for a state to do this can only be seen as an outcome of institutional development.³⁹

In an important recent book, the economist and historian Avner Greif has proposed an alternative approach to institutions that lends itself extremely well to the problem of institutional dynamics—the emergence and change of institutions over time—as well as to thinking about how institutions affect the behavior of groups, not just of individuals. Greif defines institutions as systems of rules, beliefs, norms, and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior.⁴⁰ This definition incorporates both informal (rules, beliefs, and norms) and formal (organizations) institutions under the central fact that they all contribute to producing regular behavior, eliciting predictable responses and choices from individuals and groups. The claim that rules, beliefs, and norms play a role in generating regular behavior is superficially obvious, but the role of such informal institutional elements is largely ignored by most economists and political scientists, which is why institutional dynamics have been so difficult to understand. But if we see these institutional elements as contributing to the regularity of behavior, then we can see individual actions and the social and political conditions to which they respond as being recursively related and mutually constitutive.⁴¹ And this allows us in turn to see how institutions emerge gradually and endogenously. Change occurs when old institutions become inadequate, whether because of endogenous or exogenous factors. Yet those old institutions have a powerful effect on the direction of institutional change, for they provide a cognitive framework, information, normative guidance, and a way to anticipate what others may do to coordinate their behavior with their responses.⁴² Change tends thus to be incremental; the rootedness of institutions in the past, the way in which they are internalized by individuals such that they affect their understanding of the world, makes comprehensive, wholesale institutional change difficult and rare. Refinement will always be preferred to revolution.⁴³ For this reason institutions are path-dependent and sticky.⁴⁴ And the farther one travels along a particular path, the more attractive that path becomes relative to others, and the more costly it becomes to turn in another direction.⁴⁵ But revolution—wholesale change—can occur when crises reveal the complete deficiency of old institutions, and when it does the path ramifies; such moments are critical junctures.⁴⁶

AN EXAMPLE

Let me return from theory to history and offer one example (undocumented and undetailed for now) that anticipates the argument sustained over the course of this book. The belief that the Boiotians were a distinct population group contributed to a norm of cooperation, despite significant competition, among the many communities that comprised this group in the archaic period. This belief was promulgated above all by myths and by rituals that enacted those myths in sanctuaries common to all Boiotians. The norm of cooperation in turn facilitated exchange between individuals from different Boiotian communities, despite the lack of any formal means of enforcing contracts or recourse in the event of goods being stolen or buyers or sellers being cheated. In the late sixth century exchange between Boiotian communities was facilitated by the production of a cooperative coinage, a coinage produced by multiple poleis on the same weight standard with a common type, again despite the lack of a state encompassing all these communities that could have demanded their cooperation in this matter or simply issued the coins itself. The norm of cooperation was reinforced by the same religious interactions that generated it as well as by the interactions and cooperation of individuals and communities in the economic sphere; it also contributed to military cooperation. Despite all this cooperation, the Boiotian communities were distinct state entities; they were poleis with their own laws, magistracies, and identities, although the details of these are rarely evident to us for the archaic period. And this fundamental fact strongly influenced the way in which the Boiotians cooperated; entrenched polis interests made the possibility of a unified Boiotian state, or the political synoikism of all the Boiotian communities into a single polis on the Attic model, highly unlikely. Thus we find resistance to early proposals that communities should contribute to the Boiotians.

An exogenous shock exposed the profound deficiencies of the Boiotians’ loose cooperative institutions: the region was conquered by the Athenians in 457, and at least some of its communities appear to have been subjected to tribute payment. At this critical juncture, it became apparent that the costs of developing new institutions to strengthen the ties between Boiotian communities, to regularize their old habits of cooperation, and to prevent departures from these habits were less than the cost of attempting to operate in the old ways despite the dramatically changed environment. When the Athenians were expelled from the region a decade later, the Boiotians developed a new set of institutions that regularized their cooperation. A new political entity, the koinon, was created that incorporated the old poleis. The poleis persisted as both states and social entities, but some of their powers were shifted to the koinon, which was governed by representatives of the poleis. Although this was a wholesale innovation, rather than an incremental change, the path was still influenced by the old institutions. Religion had always been a context for interaction, and it was by means of an essentially religious discourse that the Boiotians had articulated their group identity; as a result, the new koinon quickly made itself a part of the religious life of Boiotia and availed itself of the power of religious ritual to integrate and legitimate. At the same time it used its powers to strengthen and facilitate old patterns of economic interaction that had occurred spontaneously but at some risk when there was no state entity to govern and protect exchange between individuals of different states. As the evidence becomes richer and more detailed over the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods, we see the Boiotian koinon investing its authority in these spheres of behavior in complex and fascinating ways. The biggest innovation, of course, lay in the way that public decisions were made, above all relating to the conduct of interstate relations, diplomacy, and warfare. But the political innovation, the creation of what we can recognize as federal institutions, occurred against a backdrop of spontaneous cooperation and competition, frequent religious and economic interactions. It is for this reason that the koinon in Boiotia was never a narrowly political phenomenon: this was a state with a deep engagement in the religious and economic lives of its citizens and member communities.

This critical juncture of the mid-fifth century determined the path on which the Boiotians traveled for the rest of their independent political existence. There were incremental adjustments and refinements to the set of institutions established in this period, which accommodated both exogenous and endogenous change over the course of the fourth century and the early Hellenistic period. But the Boiotians had constructed their political reality as one in which poleis would retain local autonomy and an institutional presence in the direction of public affairs at the regional level, while the koinon would direct interstate relations and commit itself to protecting not only the political but also the religious and economic unity of the region. The process can be seen overall as one in which the behavior of individual agents generated norms of cooperation that became inadequate in the challenging political climate of fifth-century mainland Greece and were for that reason formalized in an innovative set of political, economic, and religious institutions. The behavior guided by these formal institutions recursively encouraged cooperation rather than competition among the Boiotian poleis.

Studying the institutional dynamics of the koinon, as revealed by a comprehensive analysis of the interactions of the communities that became its member poleis, reveals a great deal about how the koinon emerged and developed over time and about why being a member of a koinon was so attractive to so many poleis in the Greek world. Along the way, it exposes the koinon as a much more complex entity than previous studies have suggested: far from serving a narrowly political and military purpose, the koinon was a religious and an economic institution as well—a reality that was social as much as it was political. It is in this sense that the federal label is misleading, for it captures a part of the reality but misses the rest.

A ROAD MAP

All this needs to be explored and documented in detail, and in order to make any claims about koina in general the process needs to be examined in several other regions as well. The book is divided into two parts. Part I (chapters 1–3) provides a historical narrative of the development of the koinon in Boiotia, Aitolia, and Achaia. Widespread familiarity with the history of political cooperation in central Greece and the northern Peloponnese tends to be limited to one or two of several notorious periods: the so-called Theban hegemony of 371–362; and the wars of the Achaian and Aitolian koina with the Romans from the late third to the mid- second century BCE. Yet the internal histories of political cooperation in mainland Greece, and the relationship between those internal developments and the interstate relations that are the subject of the familiar grand narratives, have received less attention. Chapters 1–3 therefore present a narrative overview of the emergence and development of political cooperation that transcended polis boundaries and assumed the formal apparatus of a koinon, providing an historical context for the analysis and explanation of these developments in Part II.

Building on this narrative framework, Part II concentrates on exposing patterns and explaining them, isolating the religious (chapter 4), economic (chapter 5), and political (chapter 6) factors that contributed to an initial willingness to forge and participate in a koinon and that then went on to shape the nature of that state over time. These categories are in some ways artificial: they represent a strategy for breaking the problem up into manageable and intelligible pieces. But they have also been isolated in separate chapters because the ways in which interactions in these different spheres affected member communities and the koinon itself are qualitatively different. It is not enough simply to point, for example, to the presence of economic interactions between poleis prior to the emergence of koinon institutions, or to the engagement of the koinon in the management of a regional economy. We need to ask how and why such interactions would have facilitated the integration of member poleis while simultaneously requiring the maintenance of their identity as distinct states. We need to ask whether, why, and under what circumstances it would have been economically advantageous for poleis to become members of a koinon, and we need to understand how predatory or benevolent the koinon was with respect to the resources of its member poleis. Only then will we begin to answer our twin questions: How did the koinon develop, and why was it so attractive to so many Greek poleis? There are different questions to be asked about religion, economics, and politics. Their treatment in separate chapters facilitates the isolation of different factors that contributed to the larger phenomenon at the heart of this book. These threads are drawn together in the conclusion.

The arguments advanced in this book rely heavily on the evidence of inscriptions from areas of the Greek world that have not in recent years received sustained attention from epigraphers and historians. The fragmentary condition of many of the stones on which these documents are inscribed makes analysis of their content difficult; historical arguments based on such sources will be only as compelling as the readings of the documents are careful. Nor have these sources ever been collected in one place, although they are vital for our understanding of the koinon. For these reasons the epigraphic texts that are of central importance to the study of the koinon in Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia are gathered together in the epigraphical dossier comprised in the appendix. Throughout the book, references are made to texts in the dossier with the simple notation T (Text) and the number. (E.g., T23 indicates Text 23 in the dossier.)

The dossier does not make any pretensions to comprehensiveness. The selection is certainly idiosyncratic, reflecting those practices and institutions that seem to me most important for a full and nuanced understanding of both the nature of the Greek koinon and its developmental trajectory over the course of the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods. It is also selective in its geographical focus: excluding interesting and comparable texts from Lokris, Thessaly, and the Chalkidike, among other regions, in favor of a fairly representative collection of relevant documents from the three koina that form the focus of this study and that also happen to provide us with the richest epigraphic evidence. Nor have I attempted to place in the dossier every epigraphic source I discuss in the body of the book, but I have rather limited inclusion to those texts that are particularly important and revealing; or pose challenges of interpretation that require detailed discussion of issues that may be ancillary to the main argument and are therefore relegated to the commentary on the text in the dossier; or else are of such significance on a variety of issues that they are discussed at some length in several different places in the main body of the book. It is hoped that readers with a particular interest in the epigraphic evidence that is so central to this study will find in the dossier the technical and bibliographic details they seek, while more general readers and those interested in the larger argument will profit from a text relatively unencumbered by such technical details.

1. Riker 1987: 6–7.

2. G. Smith 1995; Stepan 1999; Kymlicka 2007. On the limitations of this approach see de Schutter 2011.

3. If we may use Hansen and Nielsen 2004 as a comprehensive list of poleis in existence by this period, 183 of the 456 poleis of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese (40%) certainly belonged to one koinon or another. This does not include poleis that were situated within regions where koina developed but whose participation is not clearly attested; in most cases their membership is likely, and if these cases were included, the total percentage would be in the range of 46–50 percent. Cf. Mackil 2012: 305–6. All dates are BCE unless otherwise noted.

4. McInerney 1999: 156, 173–78 (Phokis, in response to Thessalian hostility); Lehmann 1983b (Boiotia, also in response to Thessalian hostility); Scholten 2000: 2 (Aitolia, in response to outside attacks from several quarters); F. W. Walbank 1976–77: 51; Roy 2003 (Hellenistic Achaia).

5. Larsen 1968, itself the first systematic approach to the subject since Freeman 1893. Beck 1997 provides a systematic analysis but does so largely case-by-case and limits his chronological scope to the fourth century. Note that a multiauthored volume attempting to update Larsen with fresh considerations of every federal state in Greek history is now in progress: Beck and Funke 2013.

6. E.g., Nottmeyer 1995a, b, Morgan and Hall 1996, Rizakis 2008b (Achaia); Funke 1985, Scholten 2000 (Aitolia); Schoch 1996, Dany 1999 (Akarnania); Nielsen 1996c (Arkadia); P. Salmon 1978, Buckler 1980b, R. J. Buck 1994 (Boiotia); Zahrnt 1971, Psoma 2001 (Chalkideis); Nielsen 2000 (Lokris); Behrwald 2000, Domingo Gygax 2001 (Lykia); McInerney 1999 (Phokis). The proceedings of several conferences on the topic, spurred by the emergence of the European Union, have also been published: Buraselis 1994; Aigner Foresti et al. 1994; Buraselis and Zoumboulakis 2003.

7. Sidelong glances will nevertheless be taken on occasion at other cases where the evidence is particularly rich or clear and seems for that reason to shed light on murkier hints in the evidence for our central case studies.

8.