Creating a Common Polity - Emily Mackil Hellenistic Culture and Society

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Sparta, while some other cities apparently returned to the Achaian koinon.128

      The revolt of Argos from Kleomenes was a turning point in the war. At the Achaians’ regular autumn council meeting in 224, according to Polybios, Antigonos was made hēgemōn of all the allies.129 This is in all probability an allusion to the so-called Hellenic Alliance. All our evidence for the nature of this alliance comes from Polybios’s narrative of the Social War (220–217), but it can be retrojected with some confidence to the Kleomenean War. In addition to the Macedonians and the Achaians, the members of this alliance were the other koina of mainland Greece that were already on good terms with the two principal members: the Epeirotes, Phokians, Boiotians, Akarnanians, and Thessalians.130 It was, in other words, an alliance of koina. It is impossible to know who was responsible for developing this idea; one immediate inspiration may have been the realization, implicit in the consensual transfer of Megara from the Achaian to the Boiotian koinon, that interstate cooperation might be achieved on a very large scale indeed by a partnership of the several koina of mainland Greece. The organization is sometimes compared to the League of Corinth developed by Philip II and to the Hellenic Alliance organized by Demetrios Poliorketes in conscious imitation of Philip’s League, but those were both instruments of Macedonian domination, and it is clear that the new alliance left the autonomy of the allies intact and in the end worked more to the advantage of the Achaians than the Macedonians. Although a law was passed obligating the Achaian magistrates to summon an assembly upon the request of the Macedonian king, the allies had nevertheless to grant their consent to all common courses of action, including the integration of new members and the declaration and resolution of war.131 And even when in an assembly the representatives of the allies met and issued a decree, it still required ratification by each member state, certainly at the level of the koinon rather than the polis.132 Underlying this alliance is a strong awareness that the koinon rather than the polis had become the major political structure of Hellenistic mainland Greece; we can also detect an optimism that this building block, so much larger than the polis, might provide stability to structures of interstate cooperation in such a turbulent period.

      In the short term, the alliance served as an instrument for the defeat of Kleomenes and his Spartan revolution. The struggle continued to revolve around control of Arkadia and the Argolid. In the spring of 223, Antigonos led the allied troops into Arkadia, where during the campaigning season they regained control of Tegea, Orchomenos, Mantineia, Heraia, and Telphousa.133 In the autumn, Kleomenes learned that Antigonos had dismissed his Macedonian troops for the winter, and he took the opportunity to move against Megalopolis, which he seized by night and then systematically destroyed.134 The Achaians and their allies were unable to act immediately in retaliation, and Kleomenes continued to move swiftly: in early spring 222 he ravaged the Argolid before retiring to Lakonia.135 In early summer the Achaians, Macedonians, and other allies invaded Lakonia and defeated Kleomenes decisively at Sellasia.136 Kleomenes fled to Egypt, while Antigonos seized Sparta, canceled Kleomenes’ reforms, abolished the kingship by which the polis had been ruled for centuries, and appointed a Boiotian, Brachylles the son of Neon, as governor of the city.137 Sparta now became a member of the alliance, but it was not made a member of a more restricted club—the Achaian koinon. It was inevitable that the issue would arise, insofar as many of the Achaians, having expanded their territory so significantly under Aratos, regarded the logical boundary of their polity as coterminous with the Peloponnese itself.

      From its inception, however, there was a notable absence in the list of members of Antigonos Doson’s alliance of koina: the Aitolians. This was certainly no accident. Antigonos must have harbored some resentment over the Aitolians’ refusal to grant him passage through Thermopylai as he descended through mainland Greece with his army in 224 to answer the Achaians’ call for help against Kleomenes.138 And the Achaians cannot have forgotten the Aitolians’ refusal to provide assistance against Kleomenes when they asked for it in 225, a refusal that may have been grounded in resentment over the Achaians’ seizure of Triphylia from the Elians, age-old friends and allies of the Aitolians.139 Polybios claims that the exclusion had left the Aitolians in a state of isolation with both economic and political implications. Economically, he claims that it prevented them from engaging in their customary acts of piracy and brigandage, with disastrous results at home.140 But this picture may be overdrawn, for the Aitolians were wealthy enough to produce large quantities of both gold and silver coinage in these years.141 There is more plentiful evidence to suggest that the Aitolians were not at all politically isolated during the 220s, though their attested activities took them beyond mainland Greece, suggesting that they may have been avoiding Doson and his powerful alliance. Other factors may also have been at work. We can detect three principal areas in which the Aitolians developed new relations, all probably in the course of the 220s: the Ionian island of Kephallenia; the island of Crete, and particularly the polis of Knossos, which was attempting at this time to unite the entire island under its hegemony; and the Attalid kingdom.

      Around 223, the Aitolians sent a colony to Same, one of four poleis on Kephallenia; the inscription that records this settlement, entirely unique in the history of the Aitolian koinon, is regrettably fragmentary, and only limited information can be extracted from it.142 But it appears that the Aitolians were taking measures to ensure the permanence of the settlement. Close relations with other Kephallenian poleis paved the way for the full integration of all the poleis on the island into the koinon by 220.143 The integration of Kephallenia may have been motivated by the Aitolians’ experience of increased Illyrian piracy under Demetrios of Pharos, which probably began around 225 and eventually led the Romans, a few years later, to engage in the Second Illyrian War.144 That the move also gave them access to a regular fleet can have been no disadvantage.

      The Aitolians must also have developed close relations with some Cretan poleis in the 220s, for in 219 we find in operation a formal military alliance between the Aitolians and the powerful polis of Knossos.145 And although the Knossians deployed their Aitolian allies to fight an unsavory war against the little polis of Lyttos, the Aitolians did have regular relations with some other Cretan poleis in this period.146 The motive behind these alliances is unclear. Both the Cretans and the Aitolians were heavily engaged in piracy in this period, in ways that affected the direction of state affairs: Was the alliance born of an awareness that mutual assistance might be advantageous in this enterprise? Or were the Aitolians attempting to combat Doson’s inroads on the island, made by treaties with both Hierapytna and Eleutherna?147 Perhaps, but the chronology of these decrees is uncertain, and we cannot discern the direction of causation.148 Aitolian connections with Crete are part of a broader pattern of granting asylia and isopoliteia to states in the eastern Aegean in the last two decades of the third century.149

      Finally, the Attalids. While close Aitolian-Attalid relations are explicitly attested by 212/1, there are good reasons to think that they developed in the late 230s or 220s. In this period Attalos dedicated an enormous stoa at Delphi, still firmly under Aitolian control, and more important, in Polybios’s narrative of 219 we learn of a fortification at Elaos, in the territory of Kalydon, that had been funded by Attalos I; its size suggests that it cannot have been built overnight.150 It has been surmised that the relationship could have been grounded in mutual distrust of Doson, sparked for the Attalids by his Karian expedition of 227.151

      What is entirely clear is that, despite the almost complete silence of Polybios and Plutarch on Aitolian affairs in the 220s, and Polybios’s implication of the Aitolians’ total isolation by 222, they were in fact actively engaged in the broader Greek world, despite having largely withdrawn from the Peloponnese itself. This engagement was characterized by a cooperation that surpassed old ethnic boundaries to integrate new members of the Aitolian polity. The friends and alliances they made in this period, regardless of how murky their motivations are to us, remained staunch ones. As it turned out, that was a great boon, for in the next few years the alliance of koina organized by Doson turned against the Aitolians as its principal enemy.

      THE RISE OF PHILIP V AND THE SOCIAL WAR, 221–217

      We must rely for this development on the accounts of Polybios and Plutarch, in which

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