Creating a Common Polity - Emily Mackil Hellenistic Culture and Society

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Spartans were not opposed to koina in principle, for just as they were challenging the integrity of the Boiotian state, they actively supported what must have been a similar form of state in Achaia. In 389, Xenophon tells us, the Achaians were in possession of Kalydon, on the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf in territory that was once Aitolian, and had made the Kalydonians Achaian citizens.19 The place was attacked by the Akarnanians, Boiotians, and Athenians, so that the Achaians were compelled to garrison the city and summon Agesilaos for assistance. We do not know when Kalydon was taken by the Achaians, but it is clear that Naupaktos, formerly an Athenian stronghold occupied by both Messenians and Naupaktians, was likewise under Achaian control by 389.20 The Achaians appealed to the Spartans for assistance, and together with other Peloponnesian allies they invaded Akarnania. This experience prompted the Akarnanians to make peace with the Achaians and alliance with the Spartans in the spring of 388.21 With this Spartan assistance the Achaians were able to retain control of both Kalydon and Naupaktos until 367 but failed to achieve any further expansion, if indeed that was their purpose.22 Behind the original Achaian seizure of Kalydon and Naupaktos, which the Aitolians had lost sometime in the fifth century but never surrendered their aspiration to regain, must lie hostility if not outright conflict between the Achaians and the Aitolians. We may detect a trace of this hostility in the tradition recorded by the contemporary historian Ephoros that the Achaians controlled the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia before being driven out by the Elians at the head of Oxylos and the Herakleidai.23 The claim would have angered not only the Elians but also their constant allies and putative kin the Aitolians. Circulating such a claim in the early fourth century, when tensions between Achaia and Aitolia must have been elevated, would have been highly effective.

      The episode reveals not only that the Achaians had by 389 developed a political organization in which citizenship was bound up with the political coherence of the entire region, comprising still multiple poleis, but also that it was robust enough to seize and incorporate non-Achaian communities.24 If a sense of Achaian identity was all that bound the Achaian cities together throughout most of the fifth century, it clearly did not impose any restrictions on the limits of their new state, for Kalydon was an old Aitolian polis, and Naupaktos was inhabited by a mix of Lokrians and Messenians. Xenophon’s description of the Achaians’ response to this attack on their northern coastal possessions reveals a few clues about the operation of the Achaian koinon in the early fourth century: it maintained an alliance with Sparta, which may have gone back to the years of the Peloponnesian War, and had some institutional mechanism for the dispatch of ambassadors representing the entire Achaian state and for the levying of an army from all the Achaian member communities.25

      The Corinthian War was fought primarily in the eastern Aegean, a contest more between Athens and Persia than between the allies at Corinth and the Spartans. Mainland activity centered around a struggle for control of the Corinthian Gulf, though none of these actions was decisive in bringing about a conclusion to the war. In 386 all parties were more committed to the peace, and the terms eventually dictated by Artaxerxes were essentially those offered in 392 at Sardis: the poleis in Asia were to belong to the king; all other Greek poleis both large and small were to be autonomous, with the exception of the Athenians’ old cleruchies Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, which they were allowed to keep.26 The Thebans were, infamously, hesitant to accept these terms and did so only in response to the real threat of a Spartan invasion of Boiotia.27

      

      The autonomy clause of the King’s Peace is generally regarded as the death knell for states comprising multiple poleis like the Boiotian koinon and the recent sympoliteia of Argos and Corinth, as well as for nascent imperial structures like that being built in these years by the Athenian general Thrasyboulos. This is certainly an overstatement. We have already seen that the meaning of autonomy in this period was slippery. Precisely what Artaxerxes and Agesilaos expected would result from this agreement is unclear: Was polis autonomy at odds even with voluntary membership in a koinon or a sympoliteia? Probably not: Mogens Hansen has shown that the concept was contoured around consent.28 The ambiguity of the term “autonomy,” and as a result the difficulty of interpreting the actions surrounding its implementation, has prompted much debate about whether the actual treaty contained a full definition (like that in the Aristoteles Decree of 377) and what such a definition may have been.29 But the problem of ambiguity is not all: the autonomy clause of the King’s Peace actually affected only those political structures that had become involved in the war against Sparta, which in the immediate term meant only Boiotia.30 It had no discernible effect on Achaia. It is, however, clear that it brought about some change in Boiotian political organization, but this change is typically described with undue confidence.31 The college of boiotarchs may have been abolished, for in the period 382–379/8 officials called polemarchs appear to have held the highest office at Thebes, but this change is likely to have been more a function of the Spartan occupation of Thebes in those years (on which more below) than of the demands of the King’s Peace.32 Our ignorance of what happened in the other Boiotian cities in the same period is so profound that we simply do not know how the King’s Peace affected them.33

      If the college of boiotarchs was in fact disabled in this period and the Boiotians were unable to make joint decisions and undertake joint actions within the framework of a regional state recognized as valid by outsiders, this does not mean that they were not interacting. Indeed, religious interactions and trade relations (about which there will be much more to say in chapters 4 and 5) must have continued almost undisturbed, and as we shall see these kinds of quotidian relations between individuals of different poleis within the region constituted the real core of the koinon; it was these relations that necessitated the development of state institutions to protect and promote them. So it is partly misleading to speak of the dissolution of the Boiotian koinon in 386; we should rather speak of a temporary institutional crippling enabled by the King’s Peace but enforced by Agesilaos’s interpretation of it.

      The advantages that could stem from integrating poleis into a single regional state were apparently becoming clear, and the Chalkideis, under the strong leadership of Olynthos, were working hard in this period to expand theirs. The origin of this koinon is uncertain but may be associated with the synoikism of Olynthos in 432.34 For the late fifth century we know only that the Chalkidian poleis cooperated militarily, made some treaties as a single state, and had ambassadors and proxenoi who represented them in their relations with other states.35 It is only in the early fourth century that we begin to see how this state was organized and what made it powerful. The Chalkidians had joined the Boiotians, Athenians, Corinthians, and Argives in a treaty to fight against the Spartans at the outset of the Corinthian War, and probably around 393 they made a treaty with Amyntas, the Macedonian king.36 So when in 382 a number of poleis in the Chalkidike resisted membership in the koinon of the Chalkideis, and Amyntas needed assistance to regain a number of Macedonian communities he had lost to them, the Spartans were an obvious source of help, not only because they had a history of opposition to the Chalkideis but also because in Boiotia they had demonstrated their willingness to apply the terms of the King’s Peace in such a way as to restrict federal authority.37 According to Xenophon, ambassadors were sent from Akanthos and Apollonia to alert the Spartans to the alarming growth of the Chalkideis and to seek their support in their efforts to avoid becoming part of the state. From a speech attributed by Xenophon to Kleigenes of Akanthos, we learn that the Chalkideis, under Olynthian leadership, had a single set of laws for all the poleis within the state, and a single citizenship just as the Achaians had in this period.38 Diodoros, who makes no mention of the Chalkideis, claims that the appeal was made by Amyntas.39 Whoever actually sent the embassy, the outcome was the same: the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies launched a major expedition and an advance force to prevent any cities in the region from being brought by coercion into the koinon.40 Kleigenes claims that the Olynthians sought an alliance with both Athens and Thebes; diplomacy fell short of this aim, but the Thebans passed a decree prohibiting any Theban citizen from participating in an expedition against Olynthos.41

      Internal support for the Thebans’ decree was far from unanimous. Xenophon paints a picture of severe political infighting at Thebes that continues the story told by the Oxyrhynchos Historian

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