together.”16 Most interesting of all, perhaps, is his single use of the phrase polyeides politeuma, “a constitution of many kinds.”17 We are left with the impression that here, as elsewhere, the Greeks themselves showed “a bold disregard for bureaucratic precision.”18 My solution has been to use the simple Greek word koinon throughout, primarily because this is the term that appears most frequently in the epigraphic sources for the regions that are the focus of this study. I use “federal” and its cognates only when it is absolutely clear that the ancient institutions and practices being discussed map closely onto the modern concept. This is a strategy of liberation, enabling consideration of the full range of ancient evidence pertaining to the phenomenon, without prejudicing the kinds of questions we should be asking or issues for which we should be looking.
This liberation has been indirectly facilitated by several important recent developments in ancient history. One is the argument that group identity among the Greeks, typically specified as ethnic identity, was socially constructed, not genetically determined, and that it was highly labile and negotiable, a discourse about the past that was heavily influenced by the present.19 This set of ideas has been applied with great profit to specific case studies, including, in very different ways, the three regions that form the subject of this book.20 The implications for the study of the koinon are significant. First, insofar as the construction of a shared identity functioned as a powerful mechanism for the integration of people into a single group, it is reasonable to expect that it played a role in encouraging poleis to participate in a koinon. Second, by demonstrating that claims of kinship and ethnic identity are socially constructed, not biologically determined, this set of ideas powerfully refutes the claim that federal states developed directly from tribal states, that the people who eventually participated in a single koinon did so because they belonged to a single population group that occupied, whether natively or by migration, a particular territory.21 Although anthropologists discredited the tribal concept a generation ago, it has been the recent work on ethnic identity as a social construct that has caused historians of the koinon to rethink the process by which such identities emerged and were articulated, while the term “tribal state” continues to be applied to entities that appear to have state powers but are organized along the lines of an ethnic group rather than a polis or a koinon.22
While these are undoubtedly important gains, the ethnicity approach still leaves the wide gulf between the articulation of an ethnic identity and the formation of the institutions peculiar to the koinon completely unbridged.23 A sense of group identity will certainly have contributed to a sentiment of belonging and perhaps enhanced a community’s basic willingness to participate in a larger state that would incorporate all members of that group. And its promulgation will certainly have assisted the leaders of a koinon in making claims about the legitimacy of regional power structures that were either new or had come under attack once established. These are themes we shall explore. But the emergence of group identity does not on its own explain why that group should become politicized, should decide to create a particular set of political institutions or agree to proposals to that effect. Nor does ethnic identity explain the shape of those political institutions or their reach. We are left wondering, for example, how and why political powers were so carefully divided among the member poleis and the koinon. There is in this basic fact a need, or a desire, to distinguish poleis from the koinon, the local from the regional group, even as the ethnic and the political groups have become coextensive. And if a sense of identity somehow fostered the creation of regional political institutions, then how do we explain the integration of communities beyond the ethnic group into these states? The remarkable role of the koinon in fostering and protecting a regional economy (a badly understudied phenomenon that will be explored in depth in chapter 5) is likewise inexplicable from the perspective of ethnic identity.24 These are only examples to illustrate the broader point that while the construction and articulation of ethnic identity certainly contributed to the process of koinon formation, it does not on its own explain that phenomenon.
The Greeks had other ways of grouping communities together, which had more to do with power than with a sense of belonging, and this brings us to a second development in ancient history that has indirectly facilitated the approach to the koinon developed in this book. The ability of one polis to subordinate another to its control resulted in the frequent creation of complex political entities that incorporated multiple poleis but never became more than a polis, a city-state. It has always been clear that becoming a member of a koinon significantly restricted a community’s ability to determine its own laws, and whether or not autonomia was a formal juridical status of a polis, in modern terms it is clear that this meant a loss of partial autonomy.25 This fact, combined with the orthodox principle that absolute autonomy was a central value of the polis, has always made the phenomenon of federalism in the Greek world seem particularly strange.26 But recent work has shown that Greek poleis were quite frequently in positions of dependence and subordination to other poleis; becoming part of a koinon was only one way in which this happened.27 If this work on the dependent polis changes the perspective from which we view the koinon, it still does not explain the phenomenon. Instead, it invites us to consider in detail the ways in which political power was distributed among member communities and the koinon and the processes by which such arrangements were produced. Were they the result of coercion, or of cooperation? And what role was played by the sense of belonging that stemmed from a shared identity?
If these major changes in our understanding of the Greek world have raised new questions and invited fresh perspectives on the development and nature of the koinon, so too has the discovery of a considerable amount of new evidence. Most of it is epigraphic. New inscriptions have been found and recently published that shed light on each of the koina that form the core of this study. Texts discovered long ago but published in obscure and inaccessible journals and books are also beginning to receive fresh attention from scholars. Because of their detailed archival quality—their recording of the internal workings of koina that are rarely exposed by literary sources—these texts are of tremendous importance and provide clues that enable a complete reevaluation of the koinon as a phenomenon. And although archaeological evidence rarely exposes anything about institutional arrangements, new discoveries have significantly affected our understanding of the relationship between settlement patterns and the emergence of regional political structures. All this must be taken into account. The subject is ripe for fresh consideration.
There are two major questions before us: How did the koinon develop? And why did so many poleis become part of a koinon? They are, I suggest, best answered in tandem. The obvious way to approach the first question is simply to trawl through the ancient sources looking for evidence of political or military cooperation among communities in a region later known to have formed a koinon. The results of such an approach are, however, disappointing, not only because the sources make it impossible to determine what kind of political institutions lie behind such cooperative acts.28 They are disappointing also because the approach works on the assumption that the koinon was a purely political entity that governed the joint military undertakings of its member communities; but the explicit evidence for the koinon in later years, when its institutions were fully developed, suggests that the koinon was much more than that, and we should entertain the possibility that it was also more complex from the beginning. This is where we return to the relationship between religion and the koinon. In Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia, we have clear evidence that sanctuaries served as archives for the koinon, repositories of its decrees, and frequently as meeting places for its deliberative assemblies. This is well known.29 We also have evidence, less familiar, that these states themselves made dedications, in at least two cases extending the pervasive political strategy of representation into the sphere of ritual action, and seeking in religious practices both the legitimation and the protection of their institutional arrangements. Other evidence points to an engagement by the koinon in facilitating regional exchange and promoting a unified regional economy. These are hints that we should not be looking only for political and military cooperation, perhaps undergirded by myths promulgating a claim of ethnic unity. We should rather be asking how far back we can trace the evidence for interactions of all kinds—religious, economic, social, and political—among communities that later became part of a koinon.
