The scale of the phenomenon is truly remarkable. And yet we have no adequate understanding of why a federal political structure should have been so attractive to so many Greek communities. It is generally supposed that federalism arose among the small poleis of Greece as a means of achieving security that would otherwise have been unavailable to them against hostile neighbors and grew in the Hellenistic period as a defensive response to the volatile circumstances of this new world, providing an effective means for small poleis to deal with imperial superpowers.4 While defense was certainly among the goods delivered by these states from the earliest stages and was indubitably one of the motives for poleis to cooperate with one another, this explanation on its own does not get us very far. For the Greeks had an admirable institution for the defensive (and offensive) military cooperation of states: the symmachia or military alliance. But the institutions that governed these states encompassed far more than the provision of defense, and the military-diplomatic explanation for their existence fails to account for numerous prominent features: their deep engagement in the religious practices of member communities and the region as a whole; their profound impact on the economic structures that influenced the welfare of their citizens, their constituent communities, and the entire region; and the extraordinarily fine-grained attention paid to the distribution of political powers throughout the state. Why, then, did so many Greek poleis find it so attractive to become part of a federal state in the classical and Hellenistic periods? And how do we account for the full range of these states’ competencies and engagements as evidenced by the ancient sources?
STRATEGIES OLD AND NEW
This book is an attempt to answer the questions raised above. The scale of the phenomenon and the complexity of the evidence make the task a daunting one, and it is probably for this reason that no one has undertaken a systematic study of the subject, covering the whole of Greek antiquity, since 1968.5 Instead, work has proceeded via focused studies of particular cases, often in particular periods.6 While a great deal of progress has thus been made on detailed and specific questions, this method produces scattered points of light while leaving the larger, pressing issues I have just outlined very much in the dark. The strategy adopted here is intended to blend the advantages of the analytic and synthetic approaches. While training my sights on the questions of the origins and true nature of the Greek federal state, I restrict my analysis to evidence from three regions: Achaia, in the northern Peloponnese; Aitolia, in western Greece; and Boiotia, in central mainland Greece (map 1).7 These are the three best-attested instances, supported by rich literary, epigraphic, archaeological, and numismatic evidence. Federal institutions appear to have developed first in Boiotia, and this alone makes it a vital case for a larger study of how and why federalism emerged in the Greek world. These three were also the most powerful federal states to emerge in the classical period, and each for a time attained a leadership position within the wider Greek world. But they are also markedly different from one another. Urbanization and the entrenchment of statehood at the city scale, for example, occurred in Boiotia in the seventh and sixth centuries, while in Achaia and Aitolia it was a process of the fifth and fourth centuries.8 The emergence of federal institutions in each region was the result of distinct sets of pressures and opportunities, and the economies of these three regions are highly differentiated. These three case studies provide rich but varied evidence for the adoption of similar (but not identical) political institutions that contributed—if it did not lead directly—to the achievement of hegemony in remarkably different geographical, economic, religious, and cultural contexts. The Boiotian, Achaian, and Aitolian koina also create a superregional cluster around the Gulf of Corinth; across and around its waters they interacted intensively, in both hostile and friendly contexts, and never more than in the Hellenistic period.9 As such they yield an excellent set of data through which to examine the process by which federal institutions emerged, developed, and were maintained over time. This approach, in short, allows us to avoid overgeneralization while nevertheless pursuing the big questions that have proved so elusive. The conclusions I draw should not be assumed to apply to every koinon that was ever created in the Greek world, but I hope they may establish a set of questions that could profitably be applied to cases like the Lykian koinon, so rich in epigraphic evidence, or indeed the Thessalian koinon that was created near the end of the period I am studying.10
I have thus far used the modern phrase “federal state” to refer to those states in which political power is distributed among at least two levels of government, but an unreflective application of the term to the Greek world has contributed to the deceptively narrow view of the topic that has prevailed in modern scholarship on the subject for so long. This is partly because we have no ancient analyses of the nature of a koinon to guide us, such as we have for democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. If a few hints have been detected that there was some theoretical discussion about the koinon among Greek authors, most notably Aristotle and Polybios, these accounts have been lost, and we are left largely to fend for ourselves.11 Whether implicitly or explicitly, ancient historians have fallen back on the assumption that ancient federal states are fundamentally like modern ones. They have, furthermore, been heavily influenced by what might be called the old institutionalist approach to modern federalism, marked by a preoccupation with the description of political institutions, which tend to be regarded as static entities. Thus the composition of assemblies and councils, the enumeration of magistracies, and the identification of meeting places and administrative calendars have remained the confining obsessions of the field.12 And while political scientists studying modern federalism have expanded their approach to consider the impact of federal institutions on public economy, ancient historians have barely begun to take this cue.13 There has also been a major transformation in the way that social scientists think about institutions in general, the development of the new institutionalism, which has wide-ranging implications for political historians; this will be addressed in detail below. The interest in federalism as a solution to the challenge of multiethnic nationalism in the modern world points to a fascinating potential for political institutions to address the desires of ethnic groups to retain their identities and deploy them in political contexts, an idea now being explored by ancient historians investigating the link between ethnic identity and political behavior in the ancient world. Although these developments have not yielded a systematic rethinking of the experience of federalism in the Greek world, there is progress, and ancient historians and political scientists studying federalism seem to be working along parallel lines that, in a Lobachevskian manner, intersect only at great distances. In one important respect, however, historical evidence points to a sphere of social action in which federal institutions were deeply embedded but that has drawn no attention from social scientists and little from ancient historians, namely religion. I shall return to this point.
We need to make room for ourselves to incorporate all the ancient evidence, to see the phenomenon for what it was rather than trying to fit it into a modern concept, and for this reason we should be cautious with our use of the word “federalism” and its cognates, deploying them only when there are truly clear and applicable parallels between modern federalism and ancient political structures. We should take our cue from the language of our sources, but the matter is (alas) not so simple, for the Greeks themselves had a variety of terms for this kind of state. By far the most common are koinon, ethnos, and the simple use of the plural ethnic of the citizen body, as for example “the Achaians” or “the Boiotians.” Both koinon, a substantive adjective meaning “a common thing,” and ethnos are nonspecific, being used for a variety of other things, and the semantic field of both words has been studied extensively.14 In the Hellenistic period the Greeks’ own political vocabulary expanded and became more technical, but even in the work of a writer such as Polybios, whose father was a high-ranking magistrate of the Achaian koinon and who was outstandingly well informed (if a little biased), we find an array of such words used almost interchangeably. Here we find not only ethnos and koinon, but also koinōnia, emphasizing the aspect of “community,” and sympoliteia, conveying the sense of a shared state or a governing together; similar is koinē politeia, “a common polity,” clearly an elaboration of the simpler, older koinon.15 Polybios also refers to the Achaian state as a “system,” a word with organic, biological
