Creating a Common Polity - Emily Mackil Hellenistic Culture and Society

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behalf.55 If this diplomatic rapprochement in fact occurred after Tanagra, the most immediate cause for Spartan suspicion of Athens was probably the unclear outcome of that battle, as well as anxiety about Athens’ control of Megara.56 Such a bargain would make better sense of the Athenians’ motivation for their invasion of Boiotia leading up to the battle of Oinophyta, as narrated by Thucydides. Before that engagement, however, Diodoros says that the Spartans “expanded the city wall of Thebes, and compelled the poleis in Boiotia to submit themselves to the Thebans.”57 This single sentence has prompted numerous historians to posit a refoundation of the Boiotian League, which, on this view, had been dissolved since 479.58 Whatever gains the Thebans made with Spartan help were short-lived: the Athenian victory over the Boiotians at Oinophyta certainly put an end to the new arrangements. The Athenians pulled down the walls of Tanagra and, according to Diodoros, “going through all Boiotia cut and destroyed crops.”59 They took complete control of all the poleis in the region.60 It is impossible to regard the two-month interval between Tanagra and Oinophyta as in any meaningful sense a period in which the Boiotian League was refounded.

      For the Athenians, the victory at Oinophyta must have been enormously important. As we shall see below, there is epigraphic evidence to support the claim that the loss of Boiotia eleven years later constituted a very real blow to the Athenians. In the interim the region, one of the richest for agriculture in all Greece, certainly constituted a significant economic resource for Attica. So it was quite likely after Oinophyta that the Athenians set up on the akropolis a new copy of the bronze quadriga that they had dedicated to Athena in 506 following their retaliatory victory over the Boiotians and Chalkidians, which had been damaged in the Persian sack of Athens.61

      

      The internal affairs of Boiotia in the period from 457 to 446 are quite obscure. Aristotle says that after Oinophyta “the democracy [at Thebes] was destroyed as a result of bad government.” If correct, this would point to an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Athenians to influence local governance at Thebes, but it is also true that, in this period as always, they were pragmatic enough to support whatever party would support them in return—including what must have been the vilest of political species to an Athenian, Boiotian oligarchs.62 The Boiotians certainly felt some Athenian pressure: in 456/5 Tolmides settled the rebel Messenians at Naupaktos, and the Athenians probably felt that control of Boiotia was central to the security of that arrangement.63 The Boiotians were required to serve in an Athenian expedition against Pharsalos, and at least some of the Boiotian poleis may have paid tribute to Athens.64 Beyond this it is extremely difficult to say anything about Boiotian affairs, whether internal or external, in the period of Athenian control.

      In the winter of 447/6, Thucydides tells us, Boiotian exiles seized Orchomenos, Chaironeia, and some other places.65 These exiles had presumably been driven out by the Athenians as opponents to the new order they imposed, and it is important to recognize that the revolt was staged from the north by these outsiders. They established themselves so quickly and firmly as a group, with their action so focused on Orchomenos, that they became known as “the Orchomenizers.”66 In the spring of 446 the Athenians sent a force of a thousand hoplites under Tolmides to deal with the revolt; they managed to regain Chaironeia, at the cost of the citizens’ freedom, and held it with a garrison. They must have been attempting to return to Athens, or to a base in a loyal part of Boiotia where they might await reinforcements, when they turned southeast and were met at Koroneia by the Orchomenizers and “others who were of the same mind.”67 In the battle that ensued the Boiotians and their allies had an overwhelming victory; the Athenian hoplites were all either killed or taken prisoner. This forced the Athenians’ hand, and they surrendered control of Boiotia. Thucydides reports that the exiles returned and “all the others became autonomous again.”68

      The Athenians’ defeat at Koroneia was a major blow, not only in itself but also because of its consequences, for it probably sparked the coordinated revolt of Megara and Euboia, which itself encouraged many other cities to follow suit.69 In the same year the Athenians and Spartans concluded a thirty-year treaty that ended the First Peloponnesian War.70 But the Athenians may have retained some friendships with Boiotians: an Athenian decree of roughly this period records the bestowal of proxeny on four individuals of Thespiai.71 Without a more specific date it is difficult to place this evidence, but if it belongs after 446 it may reflect a new attempt on the part of the Athenians to maintain ties to those Boiotian cities with which they were closest. In this connection the sending out of settlers to reinforce Thourioi, in southern Italy, in 446–444 is of interest: in an Athenian-led expedition with participation from numerous Greek cities, the ten tribes of the new polis were comprised of the several ethnic groups represented by the colonists, including Boiotians.72 We know too that Thourioi at its inception was governed by a democracy, and it is possible that pro-Athenian partisans in Boiotia opted to leave when the Athenians were expelled after Koroneia and most of the democracies were overturned.

      The impact on Boiotia of the Athenian defeat at Koroneia was tremendous. In 427, when defending themselves to the Spartans on the charge of an unjust attack on Plataia, the Thebans spoke of Koroneia as a victory that liberated Boiotia (Th. 3.62.4; cf. 67.3), and though tendentious it is an unproblematic account of Theban perceptions of the importance and impact of the battle twenty years later. What happened in the interim? Freed of external constraints and imposed governments, the Boiotian poleis could pursue their own policies. In theory, they were free to pick up where they had left off in 457, before the Athenian victory at Oinophyta. Most historians have assumed that this meant refounding the koinon that was dismantled by the Athenians a decade before.73 For neither part of that assumption, however, is there any solid evidence.74 The Thebans, it is quite clear, were for much of the late sixth and early fifth century working to gain a leading position in the region and in any regional state apparatus that could be developed for the governance of the whole. The boiotarchs who make a brief appearance in Herodotos’s narrative of 479 may be a reflection of such an apparatus at an early stage of development, if they are not a mere anachronism. The sources suggest, however, that the Thebans themselves had nothing to do with the liberation of Boiotia in 446, which was led rather by political exiles with strong support from Orchomenos, and this may reflect the weakness of Thebes after a series of failures—the attempt on Plataia in 519, the attack on Athens in 506, their shameful record in the Persian Wars, and the disaster at Oinophyta in 457.75

      Thucydides’ full and rich narrative of the Peloponnesian War reveals the existence and operation of institutions of a regional state in Boiotia that are described yet more fully by the Oxyrhynchos Historian in his account of the year 395.76 We must infer that at least some of those institutions were created immediately after 446 in order to promote and protect the tentative steps taken toward the formation of a regional state in the period from roughly 520 to 457. The victory at Koroneia certainly provided the regional security and independence that are necessary preconditions for this particular sort of institutional development, and the experience of an eleven-year Athenian occupation, combined with plentiful evidence of the ongoing imperialist aims and practices of their southern neighbor, must have provided the Boiotians with the motivation they needed to undertake it. The formal federal institutions that were established after 446 bear the hallmarks of voluntary participation and bargaining: the political rights and fiscal and military obligations of each polis were clearly established and protected by a system of districts, which went a long way toward preventing Boiotia from becoming a unitary state—like its southern neighbor Athens—under the hegemony of its single most powerful polis, Thebes.

      The Boiotian cities, with the exception of Plataia and eventually Thespiai, were resolutely opposed to Athens during the Peloponnesian War and for that reason if for no other firmly allied with the Peloponnesian League. Their opposition was probably a response to the Athenian domination of Boiotia from 457 to 446 as well as being a function of oligarchic sympathies.77 There was stasis in the cities of Boiotia during the Peloponnesian War, and Thucydides presents it as revolving around the political struggle between oligarchs (allied with the Thebans and favoring the strengthening of a regional state apparatus) and democrats (looking to the Athenians and seeking greater autonomy at the polis

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