Herodotos tells us, and sought assistance from a Spartan force led by Kleomenes that happened to be in the area.29 Kleomenes refused the Plataians’ request and referred them to the Athenians, on the grounds that they lived too far away to be helpful but really, Herodotos says (6.108.3), out of a desire to embroil the Athenians in a conflict with the Boiotians. The Plataians went to Athens as suppliants, and when the Thebans learned of this they marched against Plataia. The Athenians went to their assistance, but an engagement was avoided by an eleventh-hour Corinthian arbitration of the dispute by which the borders of Plataia were fixed (with the Asopos River as the basic natural boundary line) and the Thebans were prohibited from pressuring “any of the Boiotians who were not willing to contribute to the Boiotians,” es Boiōtous teleein (6.108.5). This puzzling phrase has not attracted much attention; most scholars and translators assume that it means “to join the Boiotian League.”30 That is, however, to assume more about the nature of Boiotian interpolis relationships and regional power structures in the late sixth century than the evidence really permits, and I shall argue later (chap. 5) that it means rather “to make contributions to the Boiotians.” For now I take it as certain that the Thebans were pressing the Plataians to contribute to the Boiotians in 519, but that is no indication of a fully fledged federal state in Boiotia in the period.31 It is, however, an indication that the Thebans were attempting to create some kind of regional power structure, which they were calling “the Boiotians,” rather than simply trying, as a polis, to subordinate their neighbors.
The possibility that armed fighting men may have been part of a community’s contribution to the Boiotians is confirmed by a second passage in Herodotos. When the Spartan king Kleomenes invaded Athens in 506, he had among his allies the Boiotians and the Chalkidians from Euboia.32 According to Herodotos (5.74.2), Kleomenes took Eleusis while the Boiotians seized Oinoe and Hysiai and the Chalkidians attacked other parts of Attica. But the Peloponnesian army, camped at Eleusis, crumbled with the sudden departure of the Corinthians and Kleomenes’ fellow king, Demaratos, and the Athenians took quick vengeance on the Boiotians and Chalkidians. They engaged the former at the Euripos River, “killing large numbers and taking seven hundred prisoners,” then crossed the strait, defeated the Chalkidians in battle, and took more prisoners.33 With a tithe of the ransom from these prisoners the Athenians dedicated a victory monument on the akropolis, a four-horse chariot in bronze. The epigram on the base celebrates the “taming of the ethnea of the Boiotians and Chalkidians”; it is recorded by Herodotos (5.77.4), and fragments of two different copies have been found on the akropolis (T1). An inscribed votive column (T2) recently discovered on the outskirts of Thebes seems to confirm the broad outlines of Herodotos’s account but suggests that the Boiotians may have taken Oinoe and Phyle, not Hysiai. The very fact that a monument was dedicated in this connection at Thebes at all suggests that the Boiotians may have had a victory that Herodotos fails to relate, or that they took their success in the outer demes of Oinoe and Phyle to be a victory worth commemorating, a territorial gain to be strengthened by ritual means. The Athenians’ description of their enemy on this day as the ethnea of the Boiotians and Chalkidians shows that by the end of the sixth century outsiders could view Boiotia as an entity unified by a common identity and by concerted action on the part of its multiple poleis, if not by any formally institutionalized political structure.
Herodotos’s continued narrative of the episode shows that the Boiotian ethnos was a loose organization existing at least in part for warfare and economic cooperation. The Thebans sought revenge for the defeat they had suffered and the added insult of heavy ransom fees. A Delphic oracle advised them not to act alone but to “ask those nearest.” The Thebans, in an assembly at home, asked in puzzlement, “But are not those nearest to us the Tanagrans and Koroneians and Thespians? And these men, already fighting eagerly, wage war with us.”34 Herodotos’s account of the assembly is ambiguous but seems to imply a deliberative body attended by multiple Boiotian poleis, hence the care to report that it was the Thebans who raised the question about the meaning of “those nearest,” and the use of the demonstrative “these men” when mentioning the Tanagrans, Koroneians, and Thespians, as though the speaker were pointing toward men of those communities as he spoke. When several communities jointly undertake a war, it is absolutely necessary to assume some kind of economic arrangement for the joint funding of a campaign. The cooperative coinage described briefly above—in which Tanagra, Koroneia, and Thebes participated—was probably developed at least in part to facilitate the joint military action so clearly attested by Herodotos. The oracle puzzling the Thebans in 506 was finally interpreted as a suggestion that they should ally themselves with the Aiginetans, on the grounds that they were “those nearest to them,” not in geographical but in genealogical terms.35
By the end of the sixth century, then, we can see the outlines of a loose regional organization centered on joint military action and the integration of local economies within the region. We shall see below (chap. 4) that there is clear evidence within the religious sphere of an emergent Boiotian identity in this period as well. Historical hindsight allows us to see that these were among the earliest stages in the process of regional state-formation in Boiotia, but it is important not to collapse a process that in fact took around three-quarters of a century into a single moment in the late sixth century when the Boiotian League suddenly emerged in the form in which we know it after the mid-fifth century. Rather, profound and violent disagreements between the poleis of Boiotia continued even as most of the region became aware of the need to square off against their Athenian neighbors.
It was, however, an even bigger if more distant neighbor that affected the course of Boiotian history in the early fifth century, putting the brakes on these cooperative developments. All the Boiotian cities except for Plataia and Thespiai supported the Persians when they invaded in 480, and if a small Theban presence at Thermopylai reflects internal divisions over the policy toward Persia, the Persian victory there decided matters for the Boiotians.36 When Xerxes moved through Boiotia, the Thebans exposed the allegiance of Plataia and Thespiai to the allied cause, and their territories were ravaged as a result.37 We do not know whether the rift between Thebes and Thespiai, which had been allies in 506, was caused only by the Persian question or whether it was the result of some local conflict.38
The pro-Persian party at Thebes continued to show its mettle after the Greek victory at Salamis. When Mardonios learned that Spartan forces were headed to occupied Athens to resist him, he withdrew his forces toward Thebes, where the territory was well suited to a cavalry battle and the city was friendly. He was met at Dekeleia, on the border between Attica and Boiotia, by men from the Asopos region, the Boiotian side of the border, who had been sent by the boiotarchs (according to Herodotos 9.15.1) and guided the Persians into Theban territory. What is the significance of these figures, evidently magistrates? The title signifies a leadership role for the whole region, which could point to the existence of formal political institutions comprising the entire region. Even if these boiotarchs are not an anachronism, it remains difficult to take them as incontrovertible evidence for the existence of a fully functional Boiotian federal state with developed state institutions and magistrates for the management of external affairs, fitting the model that is familiar to us from the later fifth century.39 We saw in Herodotos’s narrative of the events at Plataia in 519 that the Thebans at least had put energy behind the idea of the Boiotians as an organized group, and it should not surprise us to see it becoming gradually more formalized. It is thus possible that the boiotarchs were actually Theban magistrates, pursuing the Thebans’ aspirations of regional political unification; the magistrates’ title would then have been more normative than descriptive. We know from Herodotos only that in the spring of 479 boiotarchs had both the power to issue orders to inhabitants of the Asopos district and the authority to be obeyed.
After the battle of Plataia, the allies laid siege to Thebes and “demanded the surrender of those Thebans who had gone over to the Persians,” in particular Timagenides and Attaginos, who are described as archēgetai. Perhaps the most neutral translation is “leaders”; the precise meaning is unclear, but we know that Attaginos hosted a banquet for Persians in Thebes and that Timagenides had advised Mardonios before Plataia.40 Whether ringleaders or appointed officials we cannot tell, but we know
