Creating a Common Polity. Emily Mackil

      MAP 9. The Boiotian districts circa 287–171BCE.

      Introduction

      Federal political structures, characterized by a division of sovereignty among multiple levels of government, have proved tremendously attractive in early modern and modern history for two basic reasons. First, their careful distribution of power gives them tremendous advantages for the governance of extremely large territories with disparate resources and highly localized economies; for this reason federalism has allowed the United States, Canada, and Australia to function successfully as single states.¹ Second, and more recently, the preservation of political entities below the national level has made them appealing to multiethnic states such as India, Belgium, and Spain; the ability to foster political cooperation and deliver public goods while nevertheless protecting the character, interests, and independence of different ethnic communities makes federalism a promising option for multiethnic states in transition.² And while federalism tends to be understood as a phenomenon of the modern world, it is widely recognized as having its origins in Greek antiquity.

      Here, by the late fourth century, close to half the poleis of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese had become part of one federal state or another.³ 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