Creating a Common Polity. Emily Mackil
see in all these episodes evidence for Theban aggression. Yet when seen from the standpoint of a federal state responding to secession attempts that would yield major breaches of security, all these cases take on a rather different perspective.
Meanwhile, Alexander of Pherai was still causing trouble in Thessaly, and despite Pelopidas’s narrow escape from the region in 367, he agreed to lead an army in 364 in response to a broad Thessalian appeal for help. Although Pelopidas died in the ensuing battle of Kynoskephaloi in 364, the Boiotians and their Thessalian allies enjoyed an overwhelming victory that led to the isolation of Alexander. He was compelled to surrender the other Thessalian cities he had subdued in war, and his rule was restricted to Pherai itself, under the further condition that he make himself an ally of the Boiotians. The Magnesians and Phthiotic Achaians were recognized as Boiotian allies, an alignment that had important ramifications almost a decade later.124
The initial decision to build a Boiotian fleet was mentioned above, and by 364 Epameinondas appears to have been in the Aegean working actively to further Boiotian maritime interests. The primary motive here was to weaken Athenian influence in the region.125 The alliance between Arkadia and Athens in 366, regardless of whether the Athenians partook of the Theban-sponsored peace of that year, was unsettling to the Boiotians, and Athenian support for the revolt of Ariobarzanes, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, combined with a more aggressive approach to their relations with the Aegean states under the Athenian admiral Timotheos above all, meant that both the Thebans and the Persians were keen to change the situation. The Thebans remained the most loyal allies of Persia, and it was with Persian money that the fleet must have been funded. It is precisely in this period that we find the Thebans issuing electrum coinage, a remarkable (and ephemeral) phenomenon for fourth-century mainland Greece, and it can only be associated with the Persian-funded naval program.126 There is no doubt that the appearance of a Boiotian fleet of one hundred triremes on the Aegean in 364 was a remarkable novelty and may initially have been seen by disaffected Athenian allies as potentially capable of improving their situation.
The actual success of the plan was, however, more limited. When the decision was initially undertaken to build the fleet, the Boiotians planned to make overtures to Byzantion, Rhodes, and Chios.127 After sailing past an Athenian fleet unharassed, Epameinondas went to Byzantion, where he achieved the most signal success of the entire campaign. Although Justin, our only detailed source for the campaign, indicates that no formal alliance was made at Byzantion despite generally friendly feelings toward the Boiotians, we know that in this year a citizen of Byzantion was made proxenos of the Boiotians. By 362 Byzantion had broken away from the Athenian alliance and never returned to it, and in the 350s continued to have a close relationship with the Boiotians.128 The alignment was probably accomplished by Epameinondas in 364. Justin tells us that he had no success at Herakleia, Chios, or Rhodes, and no other source contradicts that report.129 But in general Epameinondas’s Aegean campaign must have been more complex than Justin reports. We know that the Athenian general Timotheos relieved a siege at Kyzikos, for which Epameinondas was probably responsible; it would have been a logical target if Byzantion was encouraging.130 A newly discovered proxeny decree of Knidos for Epameinondas (T8) reveals that he had friendly relations with that city and was given the right to sail in and out of its harbor freely. And an Athenian inscription for Keos reveals that the island broke away from the Second Athenian Confederacy, probably in 364/3, and was brought back in only with real difficulty. It is usually inferred, probably rightly, that Epameinondas had something to do with it: the Boiotians had, after all, benefited from the Euboean revolt of 366 and supported the activities of Themison, tyrant of Eretria, at the expense of Athens. Keos, virtually equidistant from the southern tips of Euboia and Attika, would have been an attractive ally if the island could be won.131 Although a careful study of the epigraphic evidence thus suggests a campaign far broader and more complex than literary sources let on, there is still no room to believe that Epameinondas achieved any lasting success in the Aegean in 364, and we never hear of renewed attempts by the Boiotians to exert any significant naval power.
Conflict in the Peloponnese, however, drew them back into action on land and presented the Thebans with another opportunity to show true leadership in Greece beyond the sheer military might they had demonstrated since Leuktra. In 363/2 they became involved in a war between the Arkadians and Elis that had broken out in 365 over the independent regional state of Triphylia and, later, over the use of sacred funds to pay the standing army of the Arkadians, the Eparitoi.132 Claiming that the Arkadians had violated their agreement with the Boiotians by resolving on war with Elis independently, the Boiotians staged a massive invasion of Arkadia with their Euboian and Thessalian allies.133 The defeat they suffered was totally unexpected. The battle of Mantineia in 362 resulted in enormous loss of life on both sides but, symptomatically for the mid-fourth century, had few decisive implications.134 Epameinondas himself was among those who died at Mantineia, and with him the Theban hegemony is conventionally thought to have ended.135 This is overly schematic: the Thebans continued to lead affairs in Boiotia and retained the allegiance of many of their allies. That the Athenians concluded an alliance with the Thebans’ Peloponnesian enemies after Mantineia comes as no surprise and should not be taken as an indication that Thebes was somehow finished. That the Spartans again remained outside the common peace that was concluded in 362/1, in order to fight for control over Messenia, further suggests that little had changed.136 It is easier to argue that the battle of Mantineia itself changed the sociopolitical landscape by forcing upon the Greeks a realization that even with massive bloodshed the differences that divided them could not be reconciled. If indeed they had that realization (and Xenophon certainly did), however, it affected old patterns of behavior little. The experiment with the limits of power held by a regional state like the Boiotian koinon, which was arguably the most innovative attempt to solve the ills that plagued fourth-century Greece, was still being conducted in Arkadia, but the strength of Boiotia and, in the north, of the Chalkideis, could not be ignored.
The Thebans remained committed to their Arkadian allies and to the security of the new Megalopolis, and they were loyal to other allies like the Euboians.137 Here stasis broke out in 357 over the issue of the island’s stance toward Athens and Thebes, and the oligarchs sought help from Thebes. The background to the war can only be inferred: the cities of Euboia were among the first to join the Second Athenian Confederacy, but they had joined the Theban alliance shortly after Leuktra and apparently remained loyal.138 A month of ineffectual fighting on Euboia was ended by the conclusion of an agreement in which the prodemocratic parties on the island clearly prevailed.139 Loss of the Euboian alliance was certainly a blow to the Thebans, but they remained resolute in their attempt to retain a hegemonic position in the wider Greek world, as events of the next decade would clearly show.
The Boiotians found another opportunity to strike at the Spartans and at their Phokian neighbors at the spring meeting of the council of the Delphic Amphiktyony in 356. With their strong Thessalian alliance, the Thebans persuaded the amphiktyony to renew an old indictment against the Spartans for their seizure of the Kadmeia sixteen years before and to pass a new indictment against the Phokians for cultivating the sacred plain of Kirrha. Both carried heavy penalties.140 Both were largely political: the first was a strategy for the further humiliation of the Spartans, while the second was probably motivated by a desire to create a conflict that would allow the Thebans to present themselves as the undisputed hegemonic power of the Greek world—not so much by defeating the Phokians (who were not expected to be a formidable enemy) as by showing themselves to be the defenders of Delphi and the amphiktyony. In the next year the fines had not been paid, and the amphiktyonic council decreed that the territory of Phokis should be laid under a curse and that all who had not paid fines owed to the amphiktyony should incur the hatred of all the Greeks in common.141 The Phokians claimed that the fine and the curse were both unjust and that they had an ancestral right to control the sanctuary of Apollo. Their general Philomelos sought the assistance of the Spartans, likewise implicated in the decrees of the council, but only covert monetary support was initially offered. With few other resources and a strong commitment to fighting the decrees, the Phokians seized the sanctuary at Delphi, and before the year was out they had begun to use the sacred treasuries to pay their mercenary army.142