Creating a Common Polity. Emily Mackil
for that reason formalized in an innovative set of political, economic, and religious institutions. The behavior guided by these formal institutions recursively encouraged cooperation rather than competition among the Boiotian poleis.
Studying the institutional dynamics of the koinon, as revealed by a comprehensive analysis of the interactions of the communities that became its member poleis, reveals a great deal about how the koinon emerged and developed over time and about why being a member of a koinon was so attractive to so many poleis in the Greek world. Along the way, it exposes the koinon as a much more complex entity than previous studies have suggested: far from serving a narrowly political and military purpose, the koinon was a religious and an economic institution as well—a reality that was social as much as it was political. It is in this sense that the federal label is misleading, for it captures a part of the reality but misses the rest.
A ROAD MAP
All this needs to be explored and documented in detail, and in order to make any claims about koina in general the process needs to be examined in several other regions as well. The book is divided into two parts. Part I (chapters 1–3) provides a historical narrative of the development of the koinon in Boiotia, Aitolia, and Achaia. Widespread familiarity with the history of political cooperation in central Greece and the northern Peloponnese tends to be limited to one or two of several notorious periods: the so-called Theban hegemony of 371–362; and the wars of the Achaian and Aitolian koina with the Romans from the late third to the mid- second century BCE. Yet the internal histories of political cooperation in mainland Greece, and the relationship between those internal developments and the interstate relations that are the subject of the familiar grand narratives, have received less attention. Chapters 1–3 therefore present a narrative overview of the emergence and development of political cooperation that transcended polis boundaries and assumed the formal apparatus of a koinon, providing an historical context for the analysis and explanation of these developments in Part II.
Building on this narrative framework, Part II concentrates on exposing patterns and explaining them, isolating the religious (chapter 4), economic (chapter 5), and political (chapter 6) factors that contributed to an initial willingness to forge and participate in a koinon and that then went on to shape the nature of that state over time. These categories are in some ways artificial: they represent a strategy for breaking the problem up into manageable and intelligible pieces. But they have also been isolated in separate chapters because the ways in which interactions in these different spheres affected member communities and the koinon itself are qualitatively different. It is not enough simply to point, for example, to the presence of economic interactions between poleis prior to the emergence of koinon institutions, or to the engagement of the koinon in the management of a regional economy. We need to ask how and why such interactions would have facilitated the integration of member poleis while simultaneously requiring the maintenance of their identity as distinct states. We need to ask whether, why, and under what circumstances it would have been economically advantageous for poleis to become members of a koinon, and we need to understand how predatory or benevolent the koinon was with respect to the resources of its member poleis. Only then will we begin to answer our twin questions: How did the koinon develop, and why was it so attractive to so many Greek poleis? There are different questions to be asked about religion, economics, and politics. Their treatment in separate chapters facilitates the isolation of different factors that contributed to the larger phenomenon at the heart of this book. These threads are drawn together in the conclusion.
The arguments advanced in this book rely heavily on the evidence of inscriptions from areas of the Greek world that have not in recent years received sustained attention from epigraphers and historians. The fragmentary condition of many of the stones on which these documents are inscribed makes analysis of their content difficult; historical arguments based on such sources will be only as compelling as the readings of the documents are careful. Nor have these sources ever been collected in one place, although they are vital for our understanding of the koinon. For these reasons the epigraphic texts that are of central importance to the study of the koinon in Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia are gathered together in the epigraphical dossier comprised in the appendix. Throughout the book, references are made to texts in the dossier with the simple notation T (Text) and the number. (E.g., T23 indicates Text 23 in the dossier.)
The dossier does not make any pretensions to comprehensiveness. The selection is certainly idiosyncratic, reflecting those practices and institutions that seem to me most important for a full and nuanced understanding of both the nature of the Greek koinon and its developmental trajectory over the course of the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods. It is also selective in its geographical focus: excluding interesting and comparable texts from Lokris, Thessaly, and the Chalkidike, among other regions, in favor of a fairly representative collection of relevant documents from the three koina that form the focus of this study and that also happen to provide us with the richest epigraphic evidence. Nor have I attempted to place in the dossier every epigraphic source I discuss in the body of the book, but I have rather limited inclusion to those texts that are particularly important and revealing; or pose challenges of interpretation that require detailed discussion of issues that may be ancillary to the main argument and are therefore relegated to the commentary on the text in the dossier; or else are of such significance on a variety of issues that they are discussed at some length in several different places in the main body of the book. It is hoped that readers with a particular interest in the epigraphic evidence that is so central to this study will find in the dossier the technical and bibliographic details they seek, while more general readers and those interested in the larger argument will profit from a text relatively unencumbered by such technical details.
1. Riker 1987: 6–7.
2. G. Smith 1995; Stepan 1999; Kymlicka 2007. On the limitations of this approach see de Schutter 2011.
3. If we may use Hansen and Nielsen 2004 as a comprehensive list of poleis in existence by this period, 183 of the 456 poleis of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese (40%) certainly belonged to one koinon or another. This does not include poleis that were situated within regions where koina developed but whose participation is not clearly attested; in most cases their membership is likely, and if these cases were included, the total percentage would be in the range of 46–50 percent. Cf. Mackil 2012: 305–6. All dates are BCE unless otherwise noted.
4. McInerney 1999: 156, 173–78 (Phokis, in response to Thessalian hostility); Lehmann 1983b (Boiotia, also in response to Thessalian hostility); Scholten 2000: 2 (Aitolia, in response to outside attacks from several quarters); F. W. Walbank 1976–77: 51; Roy 2003 (Hellenistic Achaia).
5. Larsen 1968, itself the first systematic approach to the subject since Freeman 1893. Beck 1997 provides a systematic analysis but does so largely case-by-case and limits his chronological scope to the fourth century. Note that a multiauthored volume attempting to update Larsen with fresh considerations of every federal state in Greek history is now in progress: Beck and Funke 2013.
6. E.g., Nottmeyer 1995a, b, Morgan and Hall 1996, Rizakis 2008b (Achaia); Funke 1985, Scholten 2000 (Aitolia); Schoch 1996, Dany 1999 (Akarnania); Nielsen 1996c (Arkadia); P. Salmon 1978, Buckler 1980b, R. J. Buck 1994 (Boiotia); Zahrnt 1971, Psoma 2001 (Chalkideis); Nielsen 2000 (Lokris); Behrwald 2000, Domingo Gygax 2001 (Lykia); McInerney 1999 (Phokis). The proceedings of several conferences on the topic, spurred by the emergence of the European Union, have also been published: Buraselis 1994; Aigner Foresti et al. 1994; Buraselis and Zoumboulakis 2003.
7. Sidelong glances will nevertheless be taken on occasion at other cases where the evidence is particularly rich or clear and seems for that reason to shed light on murkier hints in the evidence for our central case studies.
8. Bintliff 1999; Bintliff, Howard, and Snodgrass 2007; Morgan and Hall 1996; Petropoulos and Rizakis 1994; Funke 1987, 1991.
9. See Freitag 2000: 309–406 on the interactions and mobility facilitated by the Gulf of Corinth.
10. Graninger 2011 appeared too late for proper consultation.
11. Larsen 1968: xi–xii and F. W. Walbank 1970a note the almost complete absence of federal theory. Lehmann 2000: 34–61 detects hints of a response to lost passages of Aristotle in