Creating a Common Polity - Emily Mackil Hellenistic Culture and Society

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of the puzzle: we do not know whether the Orchomenians won their victory over Thebes or some other enemy, and we certainly cannot ascertain what was happening at Tanagra in the period.22 Four bronze plaques recently discovered in Thebes appear to record the settlement of land disputes between Boiotian poleis in the late sixth century; they may eventually shed some light on the conflicts that until now have been recorded for us only by the series of arms dedicated at Olympia.23

      

      But before we conclude from these hints of interpolis competition that Boiotia was riddled with strife in the second half of the sixth century, we have to account for the appearance circa 525–500 of a series of coins minted in Boiotia on the same standard with similar types, and legends pointing to multiple polis mints.24 Initially only Thebes, Tanagra, and Hyettos participated—precisely the cities that, along with Orchomenos, were engaged in active conflict in the previous quarter-century. Orchomenos remained aloof from the cooperative minting arrangement of the other Boiotian cities until the fourth century, but Hyettos may have been compelled to join this minting union by the Thebans in the victory they commemorated at Olympia, and the shields dedicated at Olympia from fighting over Tanagra may reflect the struggle that finally brought that city into the minting union. Within a short period, these three monetary partners were joined by Akraiphia, Koroneia, Mykalessos, and Pharai. Until quite recently this numismatic evidence has been interpreted by historians as incontrovertible proof of the existence of a fully functional Boiotian League or koinon.25 Implicit in that argument is the claim that a coordinated coinage issued by multiple poleis can only have been produced by a fully developed political entity that encompassed them all. However, the assumption that coinage functioned primarily as a symbol of political autonomy is questionable, and it is clear that such coinages, whether produced under voluntary or compulsory conditions, must be understood as economic instruments above all, with their political import a secondary indicium of the coinage itself.26 That argument is based in part on the underappreciated fact that coinages issued by multiple poleis with common types on a common standard are a widespread phenomenon of the classical Greek world, in no way limited to regions in which we know a koinon later developed. The coinage of late sixth-century Boiotia, then, cannot be taken as evidence for the existence of a koinon.27

      It does, however, provide excellent evidence for economic cooperation among the Boiotian poleis in the same period. The purposes for which the coinage was initially created are unclear, but the usual guess is that coins were produced to meet military needs and state pay, as well as to facilitate exchange in those cases in which small denominations appear early.28 In chapter 5 I shall discuss in detail the kinds of interpolis, regional economic interactions that may lie behind this innovation, but for now two interesting passages in Herodotos may shed some light on the question and also begin to nuance our understanding of the development of regional cooperation. In 519 the Plataians were being pressed by the Thebans, Herodotos tells us, and sought assistance from a Spartan force led by Kleomenes that happened to be in the area.29 Kleomenes refused the Plataians’ request and referred them to the Athenians, on the grounds that they lived too far away to be helpful but really, Herodotos says (6.108.3), out of a desire to embroil the Athenians in a conflict with the Boiotians. The Plataians went to Athens as suppliants, and when the Thebans learned of this they marched against Plataia. The Athenians went to their assistance, but an engagement was avoided by an eleventh-hour Corinthian arbitration of the dispute by which the borders of Plataia were fixed (with the Asopos River as the basic natural boundary line) and the Thebans were prohibited from pressuring “any of the Boiotians who were not willing to contribute to the Boiotians,” es Boiōtous teleein (6.108.5). This puzzling phrase has not attracted much attention; most scholars and translators assume that it means “to join the Boiotian League.”30 That is, however, to assume more about the nature of Boiotian interpolis relationships and regional power structures in the late sixth century than the evidence really permits, and I shall argue later (chap. 5) that it means rather “to make contributions to the Boiotians.” For now I take it as certain that the Thebans were pressing the Plataians to contribute to the Boiotians in 519, but that is no indication of a fully fledged federal state in Boiotia in the period.31 It is, however, an indication that the Thebans were attempting to create some kind of regional power structure, which they were calling “the Boiotians,” rather than simply trying, as a polis, to subordinate their neighbors.

      The possibility that armed fighting men may have been part of a community’s contribution to the Boiotians is confirmed by a second passage in Herodotos. When the Spartan king Kleomenes invaded Athens in 506, he had among his allies the Boiotians and the Chalkidians from Euboia.32 According to Herodotos (5.74.2), Kleomenes took Eleusis while the Boiotians seized Oinoe and Hysiai and the Chalkidians attacked other parts of Attica. But the Peloponnesian army, camped at Eleusis, crumbled with the sudden departure of the Corinthians and Kleomenes’ fellow king, Demaratos, and the Athenians took quick vengeance on the Boiotians and Chalkidians. They engaged the former at the Euripos River, “killing large numbers and taking seven hundred prisoners,” then crossed the strait, defeated the Chalkidians in battle, and took more prisoners.33 With a tithe of the ransom from these prisoners the Athenians dedicated a victory monument on the akropolis, a four-horse chariot in bronze. The epigram on the base celebrates the “taming of the ethnea of the Boiotians and Chalkidians”; it is recorded by Herodotos (5.77.4), and fragments of two different copies have been found on the akropolis (T1). An inscribed votive column (T2) recently discovered on the outskirts of Thebes seems to confirm the broad outlines of Herodotos’s account but suggests that the Boiotians may have taken Oinoe and Phyle, not Hysiai. The very fact that a monument was dedicated in this connection at Thebes at all suggests that the Boiotians may have had a victory that Herodotos fails to relate, or that they took their success in the outer demes of Oinoe and Phyle to be a victory worth commemorating, a territorial gain to be strengthened by ritual means. The Athenians’ description of their enemy on this day as the ethnea of the Boiotians and Chalkidians shows that by the end of the sixth century outsiders could view Boiotia as an entity unified by a common identity and by concerted action on the part of its multiple poleis, if not by any formally institutionalized political structure.

      Herodotos’s continued narrative of the episode shows that the Boiotian ethnos was a loose organization existing at least in part for warfare and economic cooperation. The Thebans sought revenge for the defeat they had suffered and the added insult of heavy ransom fees. A Delphic oracle advised them not to act alone but to “ask those nearest.” The Thebans, in an assembly at home, asked in puzzlement, “But are not those nearest to us the Tanagrans and Koroneians and Thespians? And these men, already fighting eagerly, wage war with us.”34 Herodotos’s account of the assembly is ambiguous but seems to imply a deliberative body attended by multiple Boiotian poleis, hence the care to report that it was the Thebans who raised the question about the meaning of “those nearest,” and the use of the demonstrative “these men” when mentioning the Tanagrans, Koroneians, and Thespians, as though the speaker were pointing toward men of those communities as he spoke. When several communities jointly undertake a war, it is absolutely necessary to assume some kind of economic arrangement for the joint funding of a campaign. The cooperative coinage described briefly above—in which Tanagra, Koroneia, and Thebes participated—was probably developed at least in part to facilitate the joint military action so clearly attested by Herodotos. The oracle puzzling the Thebans in 506 was finally interpreted as a suggestion that they should ally themselves with the Aiginetans, on the grounds that they were “those nearest to them,” not in geographical but in genealogical terms.35

      By the end of the sixth century, then, we can see the outlines of a loose regional organization centered on joint military action and the integration of local economies within the region. We shall see below (chap. 4) that there is clear evidence within the religious sphere of an emergent Boiotian identity in this period as well. Historical hindsight allows us to see that these were among the earliest stages in the process of regional state-formation in Boiotia, but it is important not to collapse a process that in fact took around three-quarters of a century into a single moment in the late sixth century when the Boiotian League suddenly emerged in the form in which we know it after the mid-fifth century. Rather, profound and violent disagreements between the poleis of Boiotia continued even

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