Creating a Common Polity. Emily Mackil
only marginally involved in the Peloponnesian War, and although the evidence is limited, it is nevertheless clear that the Achaian poleis did not act with unanimity throughout the conflict. As the Spartans and Athenians assembled their allies in 431, the only Achaian polis to join either side was Pellene, the easternmost of the Achaian coastal communities, which became a Spartan ally.140 Where we have evidence, it appears that other Achaian poleis were friendly to the Spartans but in every case acted independently, with no sign of an Achaian state that transcended polis boundaries in this period. So in 429 the Peloponnesian fleet took refuge at Patrai and Dyme, and later was allowed to anchor at Rhion while the land army assembled at Panormos.141 These latter places appear both to have been in the territory of Patrai. Pro-Spartan sympathy in the Achaian poleis is further evidenced by the appearance of an “Achaian from Olenos” contributing to the Spartan war fund in the period 425–416.142 Thus far the Achaian poleis appear to have been friendly to the Spartans, but every indication we have suggests that this orientation was assumed voluntarily and individually rather than collectively or under compulsion.143 In 419, however, the situation changed. The Patraians accepted the overtures of Alkibiades and the Athenians to extend their city walls down to the sea in order to exclude the Peloponnesian fleet, which they had hosted only six years before, as part of the overall Athenian strategy of winning allies in the heart of the Peloponnese.144 It seems likely that at least some other Achaian communities followed suit in establishing friendlier relations with Athens at the expense of Sparta, for in 417, Thucydides reports, the Spartans “arranged affairs in Achaia in a way more congenial to themselves than hitherto.”145 This may imply the Achaians’ membership in the Peloponnesian League, but their status within that organization is entirely obscure. Equally unclear is the question of whether all Achaia as a political unit was a single member, or whether participation was formally conducted via the poleis.146 In short, throughout the Peloponnesian War the Achaian cities were friendly to the Spartans, though only Pellene was a formal ally. The brief period of pro-Athenian sympathies, at least in western Achaia, is largely attributable to the energies and vision of Alkibiades. But while it is clear that other Greeks perceived of Achaia as a territory united by the shared ethnicity of its inhabitants, there is no reason to believe that the Achaians themselves had channeled this group identity into political institutions that transcended polis boundaries in the region.
AITOLIA
While archaeological evidence from the sanctuaries at Thermon and Kalydon (map 4) indicates communities in the region that were both prosperous and precocious in the early archaic period (see below, pp. 178–84), we know nothing about how these communities organized themselves or related to one another, and the little material evidence we have from other sites in the region offers little help. Fifth-century literary sources give us our first glimpse, but it is one that is narrowly restricted to the coastal area of eastern Aitolia and is for the most part refracted through the lens of Athenian and Messenian history.
In 456/5, the Athenians settled those Messenians who had survived the helot revolt on Mount Ithome, at Naupaktos (map 4), a place they had recently captured from the Ozolian Lokrians.147 The Messenians and Naupaktians immediately began to cooperate with each other and acted as staunch allies to the Athenians.148 Both groups made attacks on ethnically Aitolian communities: in 456/5, the Athenians seized Chalkis, which Thucydides describes as a polis of the Corinthians, although in early literary sources the city is resolutely Aitolian.149 It is possible that Athenian control of Naupaktos and Chalkis entailed control of the smaller communities of Molykreion and Makyneia situated between them.150 Around the same time the Messenians and Naupaktians dedicated a monumental pillar at Delphi as a tithe of spoils taken “from the Kalydonians” (T47), peopling a city central to the early mythic history of Aitolia.151
These attacks may have been the origin of the hatred that existed between the Aitolians and Naupaktians several decades later (Th. 3.94.3), and they may help to explain why Thucydides appears to report that Kalydon and Pleuron were not part of Aitolia in 426.152 More immediately, the Athenian and Messenian attacks on coastal Aitolia may have been the occasion for the conclusion of a treaty between the Aitolians and the Spartans, an inscribed copy of which was discovered on the Spartan akropolis (T48).153 The treaty establishes friendship, peace, and alliance between the Aitolians and Lakedaimonians (ll. 1–3), but the detailed terms of the treaty reveal an asymmetrical relationship that is in no way surprising:154 the Aitolians must follow wherever the Lakedaimonians lead (ll. 4–7) and have the same friends and enemies as they do (ll. 7–10). They are further prohibited from concluding separate peace agreements (ll. 10–14). The only recorded obligation of the Lakedaimonians to the Aitolians is that they will succor them with all their strength if anyone should attack “the territory of the [–]rxadieis” (ll. 16–19). The identity of the [-]rxadieis is uncertain, but as we shall see below, they are probably a population group within Aitolia. One further clause in the treaty points to the period after 456/5 as a likely context: the Aitolians are prohibited from receiving “fugitives who have committed any wrongdoing” (ll. 14–16). The only group of fugitives whom the Spartans were concerned about, to our knowledge, was the rebel Messenians. Their residence in Naupaktos, on the border with Aitolia, may have made the Spartans concerned about Messenian flight into their territory. The treaty, it should be underscored, is a treaty of friendship and peace, which should entail some prior conflict. We have no information about such a conflict in any surviving source, but it seems possible that the Aitolians had harbored some rebel Messenians and brought on Spartan hostility, which was subsequently settled. In the midst of the larger conflict between Athens and Sparta in this period, it is not surprising that the Aitolians may have pursued or agreed to an alliance with the Spartans after experiencing the attacks of the Athenians and Messenians. The inscribed treaty between the Spartans and Aitolians raises one big question that we cannot satisfactorily answer: What kind of political entity is signified by “the Aitolians”? In the complete absence of any other evidence for a formally organized and institutionalized Aitolian state in the mid-fifth century, we can say only that the Aitolians were a juridically and diplomatically recognizable entity. We do not know the territorial extent of this entity or anything about its internal organization. Thirty years later, as we shall see below, we find the Aitolians adopting a kind of loose representative structure, again in the context of interstate diplomacy, combined with evidence of internal cooperation but none of formal state institutions; at this time Thucydides calls the Aitolians an ethnos, and we should probably follow suit; but it is worth specifying to the extent possible what that meant in practice. We should perhaps see the Aitolians’ cooperation in the conduct of relations with foreign states as an early context in which their group identity was formalized in order to accomplish a shared goal, in this case one of preventing further territorial losses to the aggression of the Athenians, Messenians, and Naupaktians.
This situation appears not to have changed much by 426, when Thucydides’ detailed narrative, along with several important but difficult inscriptions that seem to cluster around the same date, shed welcome light on conditions in Aitolia. In the summer of that year, the Athenian army and navy were at Leukas under the general Demosthenes, attempting to take the island for their Akarnanian allies. With all his forces assembled, Demosthenes’ Messenian allies from Naupaktos approached and encouraged him to invade Aitolia, which they said was hostile to them. Buoyed by hopes of an easy victory that would pave the way to Athenian control of northwestern mainland Greece and provide him with an alternative land route into Boiotia, Demosthenes agreed.155 At this point Thucydides pauses to give a description, from the Messenian perspective, of conditions prevailing in Aitolia, upon which their invasion strategy should be based (Th. 3.94.4–5):
The ethnos of the Aitolians, they said, was great and warlike, but they lived in unwalled villages, which were widely scattered, and they used only light arms, so that it would not be difficult to overwhelm them before help could arrive. They bade him first to attack the Apodotoi, then the Ophiones, and after them the Eurytanes, which is the largest part [meros] of the Aitolians. They speak an unintelligible language and are eaters of raw meat, so they said.
While the report about linguistic isolation and an uncivilized diet can readily be understood as the bias of enemies exhorting their allies to attack, much