379 (Aitolia); Nielsen 1996b and 1997; Nielsen and Roy 1998 (Arkadia). Many scholars (above all Morgan 2003) now prefer to use the Greek ethnos, which avoids the inevitable connotations of primitiveness; cf. Archibald 2000; Davies 2000; Morgan 2000b. Cf. Yoffee 2005, who in a similar vein exposes the problems with putative “chiefdoms” and their place in early state formation, rejecting the argument that they were an early evolutionary stage and showing instead that they represent an alternative trajectory.
23. Beck 2003: 179–83, despite his enthusiasm for the work of the ethnicity school, notes (p. 182) how much it leaves unanswered.
24. A. D. Smith, whose work heavily influenced that of Hall and others on ethnic identity in the Greek world, after defining six criteria of an ethnic group (his ethnie), notes that economic unity, common legal rights, and a common polity are not among them (A. D. Smith 1986: 86).
25. The restrictions placed on poleis by membership in a koinon appear to have been much weaker for the Cretan koinon, which in many ways differs from the koina of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese studied here; see Ager 1994. For autonomy as a term in political discourse, not a definable juridical status: Ostwald 1982: 41–46; Raaflaub 2004: 147–60. Autonomy as a formal juridical status: Hansen 1995a: 34–39, 1995b, and 1997b; Hansen 1996 contra Keen 1996; Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 87–94. Beck 2003: 184 (cf. Beck 1997: 235–49) suggests that these views can be reconciled, with the result that “federalism and polis-autonomy were compatible.” The debate then becomes one about the meaning of autonomia. My concern is to explain why so many poleis in the Greek world became willing to give up their ability to control certain aspects of their political lives, like determining foreign policy; whether this should be called autonomia or not is immaterial.
26. For autonomy as fundamental: Jehne 1994.
27. Hansen 1997b; Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 87–94 list fifteen different conditions under which a polis became dependent or nonautonomous.
28. E.g., Larsen 1953, citing Th. 1.111.2–3, Diod. Sic. 11.85, and Plut. Per. 19, recording the participation of the Achaians in Perikles’ expedition against Akarnanian Oiniadai in 455.
29. See R. Parker 1998, esp. 27–33.
30. Hell.Oxy. 16.3–4 (Bartoletti).
31. Cf. Murray 1990: 10–11 for the view that the institutions of the polis were a product of the rational and self-conscious recognition of the reasons for change and the consequences of reform, not a “jumble of traditional practices.”
32. This demonstration has been approached from several different perspectives; see P. A. Hall and Taylor 1996.
33. J. W. Meyer and Rowan 1977; J. W. Meyer and Scott 1983; DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 1–40. Socially embedded: Parsons 1990 (a paper originally written ca. 1934–35 but published for the first time only in 1990); Williamson 1975; Granovetter 1985.
34. North 1990; cf. Williamson 1975.
35. North 1990: 1.
36. Cf. Thelen 2003: 208.
37. On the fundamental condition of interstate anarchy in classical Greece see A. M. Eckstein 2006: 37–78. On norms governing interactions between poleis see Sheets 1994; Chaniotis 2004.
38. Greif 1989, 1993; Greif, Milgrom, and Weingast 1994.
39. See Greif 2006: 8–9.
40. Greif 2006: 30.
41. Greif 2006: 187–216. In this way the model expands upon Giddens’s structuration theory (Giddens 1984), the idea that agent and social structure are recursively related to each other, individual actions contributing to social structure while that structure in turn guides individual actions.
42. Greif 2006: 190.
43. Greif 2006: 194–99.
44. The concept of path dependence is drawn from evolutionary biology; see Gould 1985: 53. For its application to political and social life see Krasner 1988: 66; North 1990: 92–104; Levi 1997: 28; Pierson 2000.
45. This phenomenon is sometimes described as a process of increasing returns: Arthur 1994; Pierson 2000: 253–57.
46. Pierson 2000: 251. Cf. Pierson and Skocpol 2002; Thelen 2003.
PART ONE
Cooperation, Competition, and Coercion
A Narrative History
1
The Archaic Period and the Fifth Century
Signs of cooperation among communities within particular regions appear at different moments in the archaic and early classical periods. Across regions, however, evidence for an emergent group identity, articulated around descent from a common ancestor and the occupation of a shared territory, tends to precede evidence for active cooperation among communities. While this similarity is highly significant for our understanding of how the koinon developed, divergences in other respects command our attention. The process of urbanization that is a central part of polis development occurred differently in each of the three regions that form the core of this study, and this development appears to be correlated to the emergence of cooperation among communities, accounting at least in part for the distinct developmental trajectories we can trace in each region. We have glimmers of evidence for an active sense of group identity and for conflict as well as cooperation among the early-developing poleis of Boiotia in the archaic period. But in Achaia and Aitolia these are largely developments of the fifth century, during which time the Boiotians develop a sophisticated set of formal state institutions at the regional scale, incorporating established poleis as members of a koinon. Similar institutions appear in Achaia and Aitolia only in the fourth century, although there is much less evidence for these areas, and we can trace the process with considerably less detail than is possible for Boiotia. As a result, each region will be treated separately in the first chapter. It is only in the fourth century, the subject of chapter 2, that the histories of the mainland Greek koina can be integrated into a more coherent narrative.
BOIOTIA
Despite some evidence for an emerging Boiotian identity that comprised the region’s many poleis as early as the eighth century (map 2), relations between those poleis were characterized as much by competition as by cooperation.1 We shall see that both forms of engagement contributed to the development in the classical period of political institutions at the scale not of the single polis but of the region.
In the late eighth century a hierarchy of communities seems to have emerged, partially at least through the absorption and subordination of smaller communities.2 This process is evident in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which represents the village (kōmē) of Askra as being in some way subordinate to a larger polis, typically assumed to be Thespiai. All we can learn of the nature of this subordinate relationship from the poem is that judges in the polis had, or claimed, the authority to resolve disputes arising in the village.3 If the polis alluded to by Hesiod was in fact Thespiai, it is likely that the subordination of Askra was accomplished by coercion rather than cooperation, for both Plutarch and Aristotle report the slaughter of its inhabitants by the Thespians sometime after the death of Hesiod.4
Whether it was by the absorption of smaller communities or other means, by the early sixth century the Thebans had enough strength to begin making claims to regional leadership. The Shield of Herakles, preserved among the manuscripts of Hesiod, provides good evidence
