from Xenophon’s account of the breakdown of peace talks at Sardis that the main principle of the proposed agreement was universal polis autonomy: the Argives were unwilling to surrender Corinth, which they had seized in 393; the Athenians feared the loss of their cleruchies on Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, and the implications of full autonomy for the Greek poleis of Asia Minor; and the Thebans were unwilling to allow the Boiotian poleis to become autonomous.16 The Persian King Artaxerxes was likewise unwilling to accept Sparta’s terms. Implementing the concept of autonomy in interstate agreements was always a slippery business, and the difficulty of it has led to debates over whether it was a clearly designated political status with legal backing or something more akin to an ideological concept around which partisans could rally.17 The problem seems in fact to lie somewhere between these positions: as Martin Ostwald demonstrated, the concept developed over time, and the mistake seems to be in assuming that by the early fourth century it had assumed a fixed meaning independent of context. The Sardis negotiations were derailed in part by the Boiotians’ refusal to grant the autonomy of their poleis, which would not have resulted in the immediate dissolution of the koinon, as is so often repeated, but in the Boiotians’ being compelled to allow any member polis to break away if it no longer wished to be a part of the regional state. A second conference was apparently held at Sparta, where a concession was made to the Boiotians’ understanding of polis autonomy: they would have only to renounce their claim to Orchomenos and allow the city to be autonomous.18 This second attempt foundered too, at least in part because the Athenians refused to sign what had to be a multilateral agreement. The Boiotians could continue to fight for a unified regional state incorporating every polis that was conceived of as belonging (ethnically, culturally, politically, and economically) to Boiotia.
The Spartans were not opposed to koina in principle, for just as they were challenging the integrity of the Boiotian state, they actively supported what must have been a similar form of state in Achaia. In 389, Xenophon tells us, the Achaians were in possession of Kalydon, on the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf in territory that was once Aitolian, and had made the Kalydonians Achaian citizens.19 The place was attacked by the Akarnanians, Boiotians, and Athenians, so that the Achaians were compelled to garrison the city and summon Agesilaos for assistance. We do not know when Kalydon was taken by the Achaians, but it is clear that Naupaktos, formerly an Athenian stronghold occupied by both Messenians and Naupaktians, was likewise under Achaian control by 389.20 The Achaians appealed to the Spartans for assistance, and together with other Peloponnesian allies they invaded Akarnania. This experience prompted the Akarnanians to make peace with the Achaians and alliance with the Spartans in the spring of 388.21 With this Spartan assistance the Achaians were able to retain control of both Kalydon and Naupaktos until 367 but failed to achieve any further expansion, if indeed that was their purpose.22 Behind the original Achaian seizure of Kalydon and Naupaktos, which the Aitolians had lost sometime in the fifth century but never surrendered their aspiration to regain, must lie hostility if not outright conflict between the Achaians and the Aitolians. We may detect a trace of this hostility in the tradition recorded by the contemporary historian Ephoros that the Achaians controlled the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia before being driven out by the Elians at the head of Oxylos and the Herakleidai.23 The claim would have angered not only the Elians but also their constant allies and putative kin the Aitolians. Circulating such a claim in the early fourth century, when tensions between Achaia and Aitolia must have been elevated, would have been highly effective.
The episode reveals not only that the Achaians had by 389 developed a political organization in which citizenship was bound up with the political coherence of the entire region, comprising still multiple poleis, but also that it was robust enough to seize and incorporate non-Achaian communities.24 If a sense of Achaian identity was all that bound the Achaian cities together throughout most of the fifth century, it clearly did not impose any restrictions on the limits of their new state, for Kalydon was an old Aitolian polis, and Naupaktos was inhabited by a mix of Lokrians and Messenians. Xenophon’s description of the Achaians’ response to this attack on their northern coastal possessions reveals a few clues about the operation of the Achaian koinon in the early fourth century: it maintained an alliance with Sparta, which may have gone back to the years of the Peloponnesian War, and had some institutional mechanism for the dispatch of ambassadors representing the entire Achaian state and for the levying of an army from all the Achaian member communities.25
The Corinthian War was fought primarily in the eastern Aegean, a contest more between Athens and Persia than between the allies at Corinth and the Spartans. Mainland activity centered around a struggle for control of the Corinthian Gulf, though none of these actions was decisive in bringing about a conclusion to the war. In 386 all parties were more committed to the peace, and the terms eventually dictated by Artaxerxes were essentially those offered in 392 at Sardis: the poleis in Asia were to belong to the king; all other Greek poleis both large and small were to be autonomous, with the exception of the Athenians’ old cleruchies Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, which they were allowed to keep.26 The Thebans were, infamously, hesitant to accept these terms and did so only in response to the real threat of a Spartan invasion of Boiotia.27
The autonomy clause of the King’s Peace is generally regarded as the death knell for states comprising multiple poleis like the Boiotian koinon and the recent sympoliteia of Argos and Corinth, as well as for nascent imperial structures like that being built in these years by the Athenian general Thrasyboulos. This is certainly an overstatement. We have already seen that the meaning of autonomy in this period was slippery. Precisely what Artaxerxes and Agesilaos expected would result from this agreement is unclear: Was polis autonomy at odds even with voluntary membership in a koinon or a sympoliteia? Probably not: Mogens Hansen has shown that the concept was contoured around consent.28 The ambiguity of the term “autonomy,” and as a result the difficulty of interpreting the actions surrounding its implementation, has prompted much debate about whether the actual treaty contained a full definition (like that in the Aristoteles Decree of 377) and what such a definition may have been.29 But the problem of ambiguity is not all: the autonomy clause of the King’s Peace actually affected only those political structures that had become involved in the war against Sparta, which in the immediate term meant only Boiotia.30 It had no discernible effect on Achaia. It is, however, clear that it brought about some change in Boiotian political organization, but this change is typically described with undue confidence.31 The college of boiotarchs may have been abolished, for in the period 382–379/8 officials called polemarchs appear to have held the highest office at Thebes, but this change is likely to have been more a function of the Spartan occupation of Thebes in those years (on which more below) than of the demands of the King’s Peace.32 Our ignorance of what happened in the other Boiotian cities in the same period is so profound that we simply do not know how the King’s Peace affected them.33
If the college of boiotarchs was in fact disabled in this period and the Boiotians were unable to make joint decisions and undertake joint actions within the framework of a regional state recognized as valid by outsiders, this does not mean that they were not interacting. Indeed, religious interactions and trade relations (about which there will be much more to say in chapters 4 and 5) must have continued almost undisturbed, and as we shall see these kinds of quotidian relations between individuals of different poleis within the region constituted the real core of the koinon; it was these relations that necessitated the development of state institutions to protect and promote them. So it is partly misleading to speak of the dissolution of the Boiotian koinon in 386; we should rather speak of a temporary institutional crippling enabled by the King’s Peace but enforced by Agesilaos’s interpretation of it.
The advantages that could stem from integrating poleis into a single regional state were apparently becoming clear, and the Chalkideis, under the strong leadership of Olynthos, were working hard in this period to expand theirs. The origin of this koinon is uncertain but may be associated with the synoikism of Olynthos in 432.34 For the late fifth century we know only that the Chalkidian poleis cooperated militarily, made some treaties as a single state, and had
