Creating a Common Polity. Emily Mackil
Siphai and Chaironeia were secured by the Boiotians because Hippokrates, the general who was supposed to seize Delion and thereby distract any possible defenders in the south and west, was planning his attack for the wrong day.96 He did invade, unopposed, and with a large levy spent three days fortifying Delion. The Boiotians were not unaware of what was happening; during this time they were mustering their army at Tanagra, a slow process because the soldiers had to “come in from all the poleis.” By the time they were prepared to fight, the Athenian forces had withdrawn just past the Boiotian border and into Oropos.97 At this point we learn from Thucydides of a well-organized set of institutions for the control of the entire region: not only was there a regional levy, but the army was led by eleven boiotarchs, the same officials who cropped up so briefly in the narrative of the Theban attack on Plataia in 431 as representatives of the Thebans. We can combine these two pieces of evidence and assert with confidence that the college of boiotarchs was a regional, representative body by the time of the Peloponnesian War.
At Tanagra in 424 the boiotarchs were at odds: ten of the eleven urged that the army should be disbanded because the Athenians had already crossed out of Boiotia. One, Pagondas of Thebes, opposed them.98 His speech to the assembled army, fascinating but generally neglected, is particularly interesting for our purposes. He begins by reminding the Boiotians of their tradition of opposing the invasion of foreigners (Th. 4.92.2) and asserts that freedom consists in readiness to contest with one’s neighbors (4.92.4). The Boiotians’ neighbors happen to be the Athenians, the worst neighbors one could possibly have, because they are trying to enslave everyone; by a sidelong allusion to Euboia (which had suffered the imposition of Athenian cleruchies in 446 after its revolt) he invokes the truly terrifying possibility that Boiotia could become, effectively, a part of Attica, with no meaningful boundary between them (4.92.4). He then reminds the Boiotians of their victory at Koroneia, which brought security to the entire region (4.92.6). In the battle that ensued the Boiotians were victorious, and after a protracted struggle over the fortifications the Athenians were resolutely chased out of Boiotia.99 The human cost of this victory was heavy, but its significance was enormous, as is attested by the individual public funerary monuments for Boiotian casualties from Thespiai and Tanagra.100
The Thebans followed this victory with a move to shore up internal weaknesses threatening the integrity and success of an independent Boiotian regional state. In the summer of 423 the Thebans accused the Thespians of Atticism and tore down their walls.101 This was certainly in part a response to the involvement of Siphai in the plot to betray Boiotia to Athens in the previous year, and according to Thucydides the Thebans took advantage of Thespiai’s heavy manpower losses at Delion to attack the city.102 Although Thucydides does not record any Theban response to the other leaders of the democratizing movement there is some evidence that they took measures to reduce the manpower base of Orchomenos and Chaironeia by reorganizing the districts and making coordination between the two poleis more difficult.103
When the Athenians and Lakedaimonians made peace in 421, the Boiotians refused to join.104 A series of diplomatic negotiations resulted only in the conclusion in 420 of a separate treaty between Boiotia and Sparta that violated the terms of the Peace of Nikias and contributed to its speedy dissolution.105 Until the end of the war the Boiotians remained loyal allies of Sparta.106 There was, however, not complete internal harmony. In 414 some democrats at Thespiai attempted to stage a coup against the oligarchs in power, but a quick Theban response helped break it.107 We hear little else of Boiotia until 413, when the Spartan fortification of Dekeleia, on the Boiotian-Attic frontier, gave the Boiotians an unsurpassed opportunity to ravage Attic land and harass their hated neighbors ceaselessly.108 The Spartan-Boiotian alliance showed signs of pending rupture, too.109 Yet the Boiotians remained staunchly opposed to Athens: in 404 they (along with the Corinthians and other Peloponnesians) proposed at a meeting of the Peloponnesian League that the great city should be razed to the ground and its land used as pasture. The proposal was so outrageously pugnacious that not even the Spartans could support it: they refused on the grounds that Athens had done too much for the Greeks when the Persians invaded, and this comment, with its silent allusion to Theban Medism, reveals that at least part of their refusal lay in fear that the Boiotians would simply replace Athens.110
The Boiotians’ response to the civil war that erupted in Athens after the city’s surrender to Sparta complicates the picture significantly and provides us with hints of internal discord in Thebes. When the Thirty Tyrants seized control in 404, the democrats in Athens were forced into exile, and the Spartans decreed that they should all be returned to the Thirty, the Thebans in response decreed that “every house and polis in Boiotia” should provide complete support for the exiles.111 This shift of policy is certainly to be attributed in part to abhorrence of what unfolded in Athens under the Thirty and a desire to prevent Sparta from becoming too strong by effectively ruling an oligarchic Athens. It is also to be attributed in part to a change in internal Theban politics, which we can detect only in outline. The Oxyrhynchos Historian (17.1) tells us that around 395 there was stasis in Thebes: one faction, led by Ismenias, Antitheos, and Androkleidas, was accused by the other of Atticizing. The other faction was led by Leontiades, Asias, and Koiratadas. In 395 “and a little before” the supporters of Ismenias were dominant in Thebes, but those of Leontiades had previously been in control of the city for a long time (12.2). The rise of Ismenias and his supporters clearly occurred sometime shortly after 404; their influence certainly lay behind the decree in favor of the exiled Athenian democrats.112 Whoever was calling the shots in the very last years of the fifth century, they were charting a careful course, attempting to assert Boiotian independence from Sparta without stirring up a war against their former ally. The Oxyrhynchos Historian was also, however, right in saying that the faction of Ismenias, despite being accused of Atticism, was “not especially concerned for the Athenians” (17.1). For in 402 stasis erupted at Oropos, an important city and healing sanctuary of the hero Amphiaraos on the Attic-Boiotian border that was a regular bone of contention between the two states.113 The exiles appealed to the Thebans, who sent an army and took the city by force. They then moved the whole community inland, and after a period in which they experimented with self- government, “gave them citizenship, and made their territory Boiotian.”114 It is important to emphasize that the Thebans did not make the territory Theban; they made it Boiotian: it now became a member polis of the Boiotian koinon.
With the exception of three brief democratic movements within Boiotia in the course of the Peloponnesian War, at Orchomenos and (twice) at Thespiai, the region was united in its opposition to Athens until the oligarchic coup that put the Thirty Tyrants in power. This hostile stance they carried forward from the shocking events of 506 and the even more painful Athenian occupation of the region from 457 to 446. The battle of Koroneia became a deeply significant event for both victor and defeated. Thucydides’ detailed narrative reveals that by the early years of the Peloponnesian War the Boiotian regional state had created its central institutions, their significance recognizable from the fuller description of the Oxyrhynchos Historian of 395: eleven boiotarchs, serving as representatives of the various Boiotian communities; clusters of cities that facilitated the payment of taxes to the federal treasury and commitment of manpower to the Boiotian army; and four councils with final authority in deciding matters of regional and foreign policy. Of these institutions prior to the battle of Oinophyta we hear only of the boiotarchs, mentioned by Herodotos en passant; and we can see clear evidence of the clustering of communities in hierarchical relationships, a reflection of the process by which Boiotian poleis expanded. Clear evidence for moves toward regional cooperation appears in the late sixth century. But it was only after 446 that the Boiotians began to develop the institutions of a regional state to support and protect the relations of their poleis with one another, a move that was certainly taken (and accepted) as a response to the very real fear that the Athenians might return and occupy the region again, as indeed they tried to do in 424. By the 430s the Thebans were pushing hard for a position of leadership within Boiotia that was resisted with equal ferocity at Orchomenos, Thespiai, and Plataia. It is striking that by 404/3 the Thebans had the authority to issue decrees that were binding on every house and polis in Boiotia, and to incorporate the territory of Oropos into Boiotia. This is perhaps the most unmistakable mark of highly developed institutions of a regional state with