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interacted intensively, in both hostile and friendly contexts, and never more than in the Hellenistic period.⁹ As such they yield an excellent set of data through which to examine the process by which federal institutions emerged, developed, and were maintained over time. This approach, in short, allows us to avoid overgeneralization while nevertheless pursuing the big questions that have proved so elusive. The conclusions I draw should not be assumed to apply to every koinon that was ever created in the Greek world, but I hope they may establish a set of questions that could profitably be applied to cases like the Lykian koinon, so rich in epigraphic evidence, or indeed the Thessalian koinon that was created near the end of the period I am studying.¹⁰

      

      I have thus far used the modern phrase “federal state” to refer to those states in which political power is distributed among at least two levels of government, but an unreflective application of the term to the Greek world has contributed to the deceptively narrow view of the topic that has prevailed in modern scholarship on the subject for so long. This is partly because we have no ancient analyses of the nature of a koinon to guide us, such as we have for democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. If a few hints have been detected that there was some theoretical discussion about the koinon among Greek authors, most notably Aristotle and Polybios, these accounts have been lost, and we are left largely to fend for ourselves.¹¹ Whether implicitly or explicitly, ancient historians have fallen back on the assumption that ancient federal states are fundamentally like modern ones. They have, furthermore, been heavily influenced by what might be called the old institutionalist approach to modern federalism, marked by a preoccupation with the description of political institutions, which tend to be regarded as static entities. Thus the composition of assemblies and councils, the enumeration of magistracies, and the identification of meeting places and administrative calendars have remained the confining obsessions of the field.¹² And while political scientists studying modern federalism have expanded their approach to consider the impact of federal institutions on public economy, ancient historians have barely begun to take this cue.¹³ There has also been a major transformation in the way that social scientists think about institutions in general, the development of the new institutionalism, which has wide-ranging implications for political historians; this will be addressed in detail below. The interest in federalism as a solution to the challenge of multiethnic nationalism in the modern world points to a fascinating potential for political institutions to address the desires of ethnic groups to retain their identities and deploy them in political contexts, an idea now being explored by ancient historians investigating the link between ethnic identity and political behavior in the ancient world. Although these developments have not yielded a systematic rethinking of the experience of federalism in the Greek world, there is progress, and ancient historians and political scientists studying federalism seem to be working along parallel lines that, in a Lobachevskian manner, intersect only at great distances. In one important respect, however, historical evidence points to a sphere of social action in which federal institutions were deeply embedded but that has drawn no attention from social scientists and little from ancient historians, namely religion. I shall return to this point.

      We need to make room for ourselves to incorporate all the ancient evidence, to see the phenomenon for what it was rather than trying to fit it into a modern concept, and for this reason we should be cautious with our use of the word “federalism” and its cognates, deploying them only when there are truly clear and applicable parallels between modern federalism and ancient political structures. We should take our cue from the language of our sources, but the matter is (alas) not so simple, for the Greeks themselves had a variety of terms for this kind of state. By far the most common are koinon, ethnos, and the simple use of the plural ethnic of the citizen body, as for example “the Achaians” or “the Boiotians.” Both koinon, a substantive adjective meaning “a common thing,” and ethnos are nonspecific, being used for a variety of other things, and the semantic field of both words has been studied extensively.¹⁴ In the Hellenistic period the Greeks’ own political vocabulary expanded and became more technical, but even in the work of a writer such as Polybios, whose father was a high-ranking magistrate of the Achaian koinon and who was outstandingly well informed (if a little biased), we find an array of such words used almost interchangeably. Here we find not only ethnos and koinon, but also koinōnia, emphasizing the aspect of “community,” and sympoliteia, conveying the sense of a shared state or a governing together; similar is koinē politeia, “a common polity,” clearly an elaboration of the simpler, older koinon.¹⁵ Polybios also refers to the Achaian state as a “system,” a word with organic, biological connotations, and an “ethnic standing together.”¹⁶ Most interesting of all, perhaps, is his single use of the phrase polyeides politeuma, “a constitution of many kinds.”¹⁷ We are left with the impression that here, as elsewhere, the Greeks themselves showed “a bold disregard for bureaucratic precision.”¹⁸ My solution has been to use the simple Greek word koinon throughout, primarily because this is the term that appears most frequently in the epigraphic sources for the regions that are the focus of this study. I use “federal” and its cognates only when it is absolutely clear that the ancient institutions and practices being discussed map closely onto the modern concept. This is a strategy of liberation, enabling consideration of the full range of ancient evidence pertaining to the phenomenon, without prejudicing the kinds of questions we should be asking or issues for which we should be looking.

      This liberation has been indirectly facilitated by several important recent developments in ancient history. One is the argument that group identity among the Greeks, typically specified as ethnic identity, was socially constructed, not genetically determined, and that it was highly labile and negotiable, a discourse about the past that was heavily influenced by the present.¹⁹ This set of ideas has been applied with great profit to specific case studies, including, in very different ways, the three regions that form the subject of this book.²⁰ The implications for the study of the koinon are significant. First, insofar as the construction of a shared identity functioned as a powerful mechanism for the integration of people into a single group, it is reasonable to expect that it played a role in encouraging poleis to participate in a koinon. Second, by demonstrating that claims of kinship and ethnic identity are socially constructed, not biologically determined, this set of ideas powerfully refutes the claim that federal states developed directly from tribal states, that the people who eventually participated in a single koinon did so because they belonged to a single population group that occupied, whether natively or by migration, a particular territory.²¹ Although anthropologists discredited the tribal concept a generation ago, it has been the recent work on ethnic identity as a social construct that has caused historians of the koinon to rethink the process by which such identities emerged and were articulated, while the term “tribal state” continues to be applied to entities that appear to have state powers but are organized along the lines of an ethnic group rather than a polis or a koinon.²²

      While these are undoubtedly important gains, the ethnicity approach still leaves the wide gulf between the articulation of an ethnic identity and the formation of the institutions peculiar to the koinon completely unbridged.²³ A sense of group identity will certainly have contributed to a sentiment of belonging and perhaps enhanced a community’s basic willingness to participate in a larger state that would incorporate all members of that group. And its promulgation will certainly have assisted the leaders of a koinon in making claims about the legitimacy of regional power structures that were either new or had come under attack once established. These are themes we shall explore. But the emergence of group identity does not on its own explain why that group should become politicized, should decide to create a particular set of political institutions or agree to proposals to that effect. Nor does ethnic identity explain the shape of those political institutions or their reach. We are left wondering, for example, how and why political powers were so carefully divided among the member poleis and the koinon. There is in this basic fact a need, or a desire, to distinguish poleis from the koinon, the local from the regional group, even as the ethnic and the political groups have become coextensive. And if a sense of identity somehow fostered the creation of regional political institutions, then how do we explain the integration of communities beyond the ethnic group into these states? The remarkable role of the koinon in fostering and protecting a regional economy (a badly understudied phenomenon that will

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