that they knew would lead directly to the dissolution of their koinon. Those leaders who had effected the Macedonian alliance were ordered to go to the Roman legates to explain and defend their actions, and the Boiotians in a formal assembly tasked their magistrates with securing an alliance with the Romans.269 Immediately thereafter, it appears that the cities began acting individually: we learn that the Thebans sent envoys to the legates to hand their city over and voted to recall those Thebans who had been exiled for their pro-Roman sympathies.270 The legates received the envoys from Thebes and other cities “and exhorted them immediately to send embassies from the individual poleis to Rome, each one handing itself over to their care individually. . . . Everything proceeded according to their preference, this being to dissolve the Boiotian ethnos and weaken the goodwill of the masses toward the house of Macedon.”271 Polybios, a proud citizen of the Achaian koinon that later chose to fight to utter destruction rather than accept dissolution by fragmentation, had nothing but scorn for the Boiotians, who “having protected for a long time their common polity [koinē sympoliteia]” allowed the “Boiotian ethnos [to be] destroyed and dispersed among the several poleis.”272
Unanimity was, however, evidently lacking in the vote that went in favor of a Roman alliance and the dissolution of the koinon. Perseus learned that some Boiotian cities were still favorably disposed toward him and sent an ambassador to Koroneia, Thisbe, and Haliartos, encouraging them to remain loyal, and they sought his protection against the powerful pressure being exerted by the Thebans to support the shift in favor of Rome.273 Although Perseus was unable to offer these cities military aid, they continued to resist.274 Haliartos was besieged in 171 by Roman and Boiotian pro-Roman forces; the city was captured and razed to the ground, its surviving citizens, some twenty-five hundred individuals, sold into slavery.275 The siege and destruction of Haliartos put an end to active anti-Roman sentiment in Boiotia and informed the inhabitants of the region by its brutality and sheer efficacy that their ancient koinon, as an autonomous state, had been permanently dismantled.276 This meant that the Boiotian poleis dealt on an individual basis with all foreign states as they did with the Romans, and there was no longer either instrument for joint decision making or regional laws that bound every Boiotian polis and its citizens alike. This meant, in short, political fragmentation and weakness, which the Romans had learned, especially from their experience with the Achaian koinon since 196, was most advantageous to them.
The Achaians must have been watching these events carefully. At the beginning of the Romans’ war against Perseus, they had bristled at Roman behavior that carried hints of a desire to diminish the authority of the Achaian koinon, if not to dismantle it entirely, but after the defeat of Perseus at the battle of Pydna every caution was taken to avoid meeting a fate like the Boiotians’.277 The Achaians now readily complied with a Roman request for a garrison force to hold Chalkis against Macedonian seizure until the arrival of the Roman army in the following spring.278 Two years later, after the destruction of Haliartos but while the Romans’ war against Perseus was still in full swing, Roman legates toured Greece with the object of stemming defections to Perseus and announcing the recent senatorial decree that “no one should contribute anything to Roman officials for the war except what the senate had approved.”279 In the Peloponnese the legates visited numerous individual cities, in each place announcing that they knew who was withdrawing from politics and who remained active, making clear that the former were suspected of using their withdrawal to mask anti-Roman sentiments.280 The decision to visit individual cities was, strictly speaking, unnecessary, since the Romans should have interacted only with the Achaian koinon itself rather than its member states, which had no independent authority to conduct relations with foreign states. It is almost certain, particularly in the aftermath of Haliartos, that the Romans by this means sought if not to encourage secession then at least to express their preference for dealing with the poleis as individual states rather than as members of a koinon.281
According to Polybios, he himself, along with his father, Lykortas, and their supporter Archon, were suspected of anti-Roman sentiments when the legates came before a meeting of the Achaian assembly in 170, but with no pretext for making an accusation they kept quiet.282 Similar suspicions arose when the legates subsequently visited Aitolia and Akarnania.283 If indeed the Romans suspected Archon and his supporters in 170, the Achaians were extraordinarily bold to elect him stratēgos for 170/69, from which position he took what might be described as a soft pro-Roman policy.284 After Pydna, the Achaians continued to wish to assert their authority to act as a fully autonomous state by conducting independent relations with foreign powers.285 At the same time, the Romans persisted in their practice of visiting multiple cities in the koinon whenever legations took them to the Peloponnese, a not too subtle expression of mistrust and a stubborn preference to place political authority where local laws did not recognize it.286 Suspicions of anti-Roman activity remained high throughout Greece, and the Romans conducted a series of inquiries in Aitolia, Akarnania, Epeiros, and Boiotia; names were provided, frequently by political enemies, and men were sent to Rome to stand trial.287 In Achaia they allowed Kallikrates, the politician who had distinguished himself by his willingness to accuse his countrymen to the Romans, to provide the names of all those Achaians under suspicion. He provided a thousand names, including Polybios himself, and they were all deported to Italy, where instead of standing trial they lived as de facto hostages for the good behavior of the Achaian koinon.288
Yet all this was secondary to the main object of the Romans’ presence in Greece in the early 160s: to put an end to the Macedonian threat. And their solution, in the aftermath of their victory on the battlefield at Pydna, reveals indirectly the remarkable strength of the koinon as a form of state in Hellenistic Greece. The Romans had forcibly extinguished the political authority of the Macedonian kingship, and in its place they fostered four Macedonian republics. And as they did so, they put in place prohibitions that would prevent these small Macedonian states from forming a state like a koinon: not only were they subordinated to Rome in all their foreign affairs but they were prohibited from trading, intermarrying, or owning land in the other states, all distinctive practices of the koinon as a kind of state since at least the early fourth century, and which, as we shall see below (chapter 5), were central to its success.289 The Romans’ efforts to prevent the Macedonian kingdom from becoming a Macedonian koinon in 167 bespeaks the power and efficacy of the koinon as a state in the Hellenistic world. But it was now a dying breed in mainland Greece.
BARGAINING WITH ROME, THE STRUGGLE FOR SPARTA, AND THE END OF THE ACHAIAN KOINON, 167–146
The negotiations that took place between the Romans and Achaians throughout the course of the Third Macedonian War, including their surrender of hostages, carved out a space within which the Romans were apparently willing to allow the Achaian koinon to continue to function. Internally, the Achaians remained divided over the question of Roman involvement in their affairs.290 The loss of the continuous narratives of both Polybios and Livy after 167 makes a detailed reconstruction of the history of this period impossible, but several episodes attest to the autonomy of the koinon, the lingering uncertainty on the part of both the Achaians and the Romans over the precise role the Romans should play in Achaian affairs, and the willingness of competing political agents in Achaia to exploit that uncertainty to further their own ends.
The eruption of a long-standing boundary dispute between Megalopolis and Sparta boiled over around 164, and both parties appealed to the Romans, who charged the legates of 163 with the task.291 The Roman decision, effected as a third-party arbitration, was rejected by the Spartans.292 Despite the fact that this was tantamount to a violation of Achaian laws, the koinon responded not with violence but rather with a second round of arbitration, in accordance with “the laws of the Achaians,” this time between the koinon itself and Sparta.293 The purpose of this legally required recourse to arbitration is made explicit in an inscription set up at Olympia: “so that the Achaians, having a democratic constitution and being in agreement amongst themselves, may continue for all
