it was to these individuals, and perhaps others like them, that the Thebans referred when, defending themselves to the Spartans in 427 over their seizure of Plataia, they described the Theban regime during the Persian Wars as a “dynasteia of a few men.”41 But that defense is rhetorically charged and exceedingly difficult to use as clear evidence for the nature of the Theban regime in 479. In fact Herodotos’s narrative encourages us to think that Theban Medism was not the policy of a single clan, much less that of two individuals, who rather appear to have become scapegoats in a highly emotional event.
The Greeks besieged Thebes for twenty days before Timagenides addressed the Thebans with the suggestion that perhaps their demand for leaders was a pretense and that what the Greeks really wanted was money. “If they want money,” he continued, “let’s give them money from the common treasury [ek tou koinou], for it was with the koinon that we Medized, and not we alone.”42 The first use of the word koinon here certainly refers to the treasury, as is common.43 The second, however, must refer to some state authority, and not again to the treasury.44 The nature of that authority, its institutional structure, is unclear, however, and we should be wary of retrojecting later evidence. The word koinon is frequently used by Herodotos simply to indicate the government in places where there never was a confederate or federal polity, and this is how the word should be taken here.45 The question of how developed Boiotian (not Theban) state institutions were in 479 cannot be answered with this puzzling passage. There is good reason to suspect that plenty of non-Theban Boiotians were within the walls of Thebes when they were besieged by the victorious Greek allied force: Diodoros (11.31.3) reports that “the Greeks serving with Mardonios withdrew to Thebes”; and Herodotos (9.87.2) has Timagenides express a desire that “Boiotia should not suffer further on our account.” When the Greeks made it clear that they really did want traitors and not traitors’ money, they led to Corinth those who were handed over, where they were all executed.46
Herodotos’s mention of boiotarchs and the reference to a koinon in the political sense in 480–479 cannot be taken as certain evidence for a regional state operating just like the one we know in much more detail from the period of the Peloponnesian War. These references do, however, point to the Persian Wars as a crisis in which the tentative moves toward the politicization of Boiotian regional and ethnic identity in the late sixth century received greater impetus, direction, and perhaps organization. The office of boiotarch and other institutions designed to lend authority and permanence to decisions and actions taken jointly by the Boiotians in military and economic matters may, in other words, have been created in this period as a solution, suggested by past experiences and the relational habits the Boiotian cities had to one another, to the immediate crisis of a Persian presence at the borders.
This impression is supported by an inscription (T3) from Olympia recording the outcome of a judicial appeal in a case that was probably judged originally by the Hellanodikai. The original suit found against the Boiotians and apparently also the Thessalians, and in favor of the Athenians and Thespians. The lineup points immediately to an issue arising from the Persian Wars. The appeal was heard by one Charixenos and a body of magistrates called the mastroi, who found that “the previous judgment was not rightly judged” and acquitted the Thessalians of the charges formerly brought against them. It is likely that behind the inscription lies an approach by the Athenians and Thespians to the Hellanodikai shortly after 479 to accuse the Thessalians and Boiotians of violating the Olympic peace of 480 by participating in the sack of the cities’ territories.47 For our purposes what is particularly important about this obscure text is its clue that the Boiotoi were recognized and dealt with as a political entity even at the moment when they were locked in conflict with another Boiotian city, Thespiai. The inscription shows that in a legal context, the Boiotoi constitute not only a recognizable but even a prosecutable group, despite the fact that they manifestly do not represent all the communities that regard themselves as Boiotian. But if the Boiotians were a prosecutable group, what was the nature of their common polity? I have already argued that political cooperation was loose and ad hoc prior to and probably throughout the Persian Wars, although we have seen signs that it was moving toward greater formalization under Theban leadership. Yet this is not enough to support the claim that the Boiotian League was dissolved after the allied reparations against Boiotia in 479.48
The extent to which cooperation—whether formal or informal—occurred after 479 is difficult to discern. Plataia became an autonomous, independent polis, but its geographical position, wedged precariously between Attica and Boiotia, made the long-term maintenance of that status a virtual impossibility.49 There are some indications that the region was riven by stasis in this period, but the details are lost for about two decades.50 In 458, the lights flicker on again, for Boiotia became a battleground for the Spartans and Athenians at Tanagra, where there was no decisive victory.51 According to Thucydides, two months later the Athenians marched against the Boiotians and were victorious in battle at a place called Oinophyta, near Tanagra.52 He ascribes no motive to the attack, which has been seen as part of the Athenians’ brief attempt in the 450s to gain a land empire.53 That may indeed be true but is only part of the story. Diodoros (11.81.1–2) claims that the Thebans, humiliated by their Medism and despised for it by the other Boiotians, sought some means to regain their former influence and prestige.54 They approached the Spartans and made a compact whereby the Spartans would help the Thebans gain the complete hegemony of Boiotia and in exchange the Thebans would wage war against the Athenians on the Spartans’ behalf.55 If this diplomatic rapprochement in fact occurred after Tanagra, the most immediate cause for Spartan suspicion of Athens was probably the unclear outcome of that battle, as well as anxiety about Athens’ control of Megara.56 Such a bargain would make better sense of the Athenians’ motivation for their invasion of Boiotia leading up to the battle of Oinophyta, as narrated by Thucydides. Before that engagement, however, Diodoros says that the Spartans “expanded the city wall of Thebes, and compelled the poleis in Boiotia to submit themselves to the Thebans.”57 This single sentence has prompted numerous historians to posit a refoundation of the Boiotian League, which, on this view, had been dissolved since 479.58 Whatever gains the Thebans made with Spartan help were short-lived: the Athenian victory over the Boiotians at Oinophyta certainly put an end to the new arrangements. The Athenians pulled down the walls of Tanagra and, according to Diodoros, “going through all Boiotia cut and destroyed crops.”59 They took complete control of all the poleis in the region.60 It is impossible to regard the two-month interval between Tanagra and Oinophyta as in any meaningful sense a period in which the Boiotian League was refounded.
For the Athenians, the victory at Oinophyta must have been enormously important. As we shall see below, there is epigraphic evidence to support the claim that the loss of Boiotia eleven years later constituted a very real blow to the Athenians. In the interim the region, one of the richest for agriculture in all Greece, certainly constituted a significant economic resource for Attica. So it was quite likely after Oinophyta that the Athenians set up on the akropolis a new copy of the bronze quadriga that they had dedicated to Athena in 506 following their retaliatory victory over the Boiotians and Chalkidians, which had been damaged in the Persian sack of Athens.61
The internal affairs of Boiotia in the period from 457 to 446 are quite obscure. Aristotle says that after Oinophyta “the democracy [at Thebes] was destroyed as a result of bad government.” If correct, this would point to an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Athenians to influence local governance at Thebes, but it is also true that, in this period as always, they were pragmatic enough to support whatever party would support them in return—including what must have been the vilest of political species to an Athenian, Boiotian oligarchs.62 The Boiotians certainly felt some Athenian pressure: in 456/5 Tolmides settled the rebel Messenians at Naupaktos, and the Athenians probably felt that control of Boiotia was central to the security of that arrangement.63 The Boiotians were required to serve in an Athenian expedition against Pharsalos, and at least some of the Boiotian poleis may have paid tribute
