probably in this context that he had promised the Aitolians that he would hand over Naupaktos to them; it was apparently back in Achaian hands.165 The Aitolians duly fought on Philip’s side at Chaironeia, but after the battle, when he was finally in a position to make good on his promise, he apparently failed to do so. Theopompos tells us that Philip captured Naupaktos and slaughtered the garrison at the behest of the Achaians, probably in the winter of 338/7; the certain implication is that it was now given to the Achaians. We are probably to infer that in the interim the Aitolians had seized Naupaktos on their own initiative when Philip reneged on his promise to give it to them.166 The episode triggered a long-held Aitolian opposition to Macedonian kings.
Aside from the garrisoning of Thebes, Philip’s efforts were focused on minor corrections and adjustments with the goal of securing a broad base of support in Greece for his planned campaign against Persia. His major innovation was the creation of the so-called League of Corinth, essentially a large military alliance in which the troop obligations of each member state were probably spelled out.167 But Philip’s sudden death in 336 created an opportunity for the Greeks to challenge these arrangements. In this effort the Thebans and Aitolians joined the Athenians in playing a leading role.
While the Aitolians undertook the restoration of anti-Macedonian exiles, the Thebans waited until they had heard a rumor of the death of Alexander, Philip’s son and successor, in Illyria in 335 to attempt to expel the Macedonian garrison from their own city.168 The Thebans sought help from several quarters, but they were matched in their enthusiasm only by the Aitolians.169 Fearing that the revolt could easily spread, Alexander rushed into mainland Greece with terrifying speed at the head of his army. After inflicting a battlefield defeat the Macedonians entered the city of Thebes and destroyed it utterly. Women and children were raped and enslaved; men were slaughtered or captured, and following a vote by Alexander’s Greek allies, who cited the Theban Medism of the previous century as an excuse, the ancient city was razed to the ground.170 The Thespians, Plataians, and Orchomenians, whose cities had all been destroyed by the Thebans in the last century, took the opportunity for revenge by participating in the Macedonian attack.171 Survivors of the attack scattered, some going to Akraiphia and others to Athens, while at least a few able-bodied Thebans who sought some means of continuing their struggle against Alexander joined the Persian army.172 The remains of the city were held by a Macedonian garrison, which presumably also policed the way in which the other Boiotians responded to the sudden appearance of this gaping hole in their political and economic landscape.173 For Alexander portioned out the territory of Thebes to the neighboring Boiotians, who by 323 were deriving great revenues from it; in the same period a contemporary witness could report that “the city of Thebes . . . is being plowed and sown.”174
The effects of the Theban revolt and destruction of the city rippled outward. Alexander advanced the process of rebuilding Orchomenos and Plataia begun by Philip after Chaironeia. In doing so he strengthened old opponents of Thebes and provided a vision of a Boiotia without its leading city.175 The Athenians had, however, to be rewarded for staying out of it, and it was probably now that they received Oropos at Boiotian expense.176 The Aitolians, conspicuous for their support of the Thebans, now sent embassies to Alexander “by ethnos, seeking pardon for having revolted, in response to the news brought from Thebes.”177 The dispatch of multiple embassies has signaled to some that the Aitolian koinon had been dismantled, perhaps by Philip in retaliation for the Aitolians’ attempted seizure of Naupaktos after Chaironeia.178 The conclusion is hardly inevitable: not only is the dismantling of a sovereign state by Philip otherwise unparalleled, but what Arrian, at a considerable remove, interpreted as separate embassies sent by ethnos may well have been simply a group of ambassadors who represented the several ethnē of which the Aitolian koinon was composed.179 We simply do not know enough about Aitolian diplomatic practices in the fourth century to conclude that embassies sent by ethnos are unusual and signal a collapse of the koinon. Ultimately what matters is that in their revolt, as in their attempt at conciliation, the Aitolians were united, and in these years were treated by outsiders as a single state. So the Aitolians received a collective grant of promanteia from the polis of Delphi in 335 or 334.180 Although the real motives for the grant are difficult to divine, it is nevertheless significant as the first clear evidence we have for any relationship between the Aitolians and Delphi, and it helps to contextualize the apparent interest of the Aitolians in Delphi and the amphiktyonic world in the early third century, which will be explored in the next chapter. In short, if Philip had in fact dismantled the koinon, the measure had virtually no effect; we know that the Aitolian koinon, like the Arkadian and Boiotian koina, was very much in existence in 323.181
When Alexander left Greece to conquer the Persian empire in 334, he took the attention of Greek writers with him. We have little evidence for developments among the koina of mainland Greece in this period. The ephemeral revolt from Macedonian control led by the Spartan king Agis in 331/0 attracted some Peloponnesian support, including the participation of the Achaians, and it may have been as punishment that so many of the Achaian poleis were now saddled with tyrants installed by Alexander (or his agents).182 The struggle to expel them is part of the story of the next chapter, inextricably bound up with the story of the redevelopment of the institutions of the Achaian koinon. Resistance to Macedonian rule remained strong in Aitolia.183 The Boiotians were less restive, relieved to be rid of the Thebans who had determined regional politics since the end of the Peloponnesian War and grateful to Alexander for having brought about such a drastic change. The history of Boiotia in the fourth century is, effectively, a history of Thebes and the demands it placed on its fellow Boiotian poleis, which were, in the period after 379, virtually its subjects. The history of the region in the Hellenistic period is a different story altogether, a story of remarkably equitable institutions, which included Thebes on an equal footing with the other poleis after the city was rebuilt and, eventually, accepted as a member of the koinon again. It is in the Hellenistic period that we finally begin to see the internal structures of the Achaian and Aitolian koina in some detail, just as we are at last able to follow much more closely the histories of their interactions with the rest of the Greek world, tracing lines of sight rather than simply noticing scattered points of light.
1. Diod. Sic. 14.17.7; cf. Xen. Hell. 3.2.25. Xenophon dates the war to 398/7, and Diodoros to 402/1. Diod. Sic. 14.17.9–10 reports that the Aitolians assisted their kin the Elians in this war, evidence, if in fact T48 (see comm.) belongs to the fifth century, that despite their alliance with Sparta they remained independent. The notice seems to reflect a troop commitment by a single Aitolian state authority, not mercenaries, but we have no contemporary evidence that might shed light on the nature of the Aitolian state that sent them out.
2. Hell.Oxy. 17.2 (Bartoletti) with Lendon 1989.
3. Spartan war against Persia: Xen. Hell. 3.1.1–2.20. Boiotian disapproval: Xen. Hell. 3.5.1–2; Hell. Oxy. 7.5 (Bartoletti) with Rung 2004. Spartan imperialism: Andrewes 1978; Hornblower 2002: 183–86; Cawkwell 2005.
4. Thessaly: Ps.-Herodes Peri politeias 6, 24 (advocating a Spartan-Thessalian war on Macedonia); Diod. Sic. 14.38.3–4 for Spartan involvement in stasis at Herakleia Trachinia (on which more will be said below) and 14.82 for a Spartan garrison at Pharsalos. Sicily: Diod. Sic. 14.10, 63, 70 (for Spartan support to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, in a local stasis and against the Carthaginians). Egypt: Diod. Sic. 14.79. On all this see Hornblower 2002: 181–91.
5. Xen. Hell. 3.5.1–2 reports bribery; Hell.Oxy. (Bartoletti) 7.5 with Rung 2004.
6. The accounts differ in their details, but the basic outlines are the same: Xen. Hell. 3.5.3–4 (dispute over taxes); Hell.Oxy. 16.1 (Bartoletti), 18.2–5 (rustling sheep); Paus. 3.9.8 (Lokrians harvesting crops and stealing sheep from Phokian territory). There is debate over which Lokris was involved, Ozolian (Hell.Oxy. 18.3 [Bartoletti]; Paus. 3.9.9) or Opountian (Xen. Hell. 3.5.3). See Lendon 1989: 311–13; R. J. Buck 1994: 30–35; Buckler 2004: 402–4.
7. Hell.Oxy. 17.2 (Bartoletti);
