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The Hellenistic Period

MAINLAND GREECE AND THE WARS OF THE SUCCESSORS, 323–285

During the Hellenistic period, the koina of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese were strengthened and expanded both to achieve greater security against powerful enemies and to gain control over greater and more diversified sets of resources. Attempts to retain regional autonomy led to a series of shifting alliances, especially complex during the wars of Alexander’s successors. The city of Thebes was rebuilt and eventually rejoined the Boiotian koinon, which became robust in this period, with a set of institutions refined to prevent the old hegemon from regaining its former position of dominance over the other member poleis and the koinon as a whole. The Aitolian koinon grew rapidly through much of the third century, acquiring members by an unusual variety of diplomatic means and experimenting with how—and how far—to integrate these newcomers into the Aitolian state. The Achaian koinon was refounded around 280 following the successful expulsion of Macedonian-installed tyrants from the Achaian cities and grew rapidly for the rest of the third century, eventually encompassing almost the entire Peloponnese. Resistance to integration came most notably from Sparta during the reign of Kleomenes, whom the Achaians defeated narrowly and only at the high price of forging an alliance with their longtime enemy Antigonos Doson. The short but bitter Social War (220–217) pitted the Achaians and Aitolians, former allies, against each other and paved the way for Roman intervention in Greece before the end of the third century. The koina of mainland Greece struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to retain their autonomy in the face of increasing Roman power over the next half-century. The means by which they were dismembered tell us a great deal both about what made koina such effective states and about the nature of Roman ambitions in mainland Greece in the second century.

Despite their conciliatory embassies to Alexander after the destruction of Thebes, the Aitolians remained resolutely hostile toward Macedonian rulers. If most Greek cities were hard hit by Alexander’s decree for the restoration of exiles, the Aitolians and Athenians were united in their virulent resistance to the order. The Aitolians had seized the Akarnanian polis of Oiniadai and expelled its entire population (a clear illustration of the Aitolians’ urgent need to gain greater access to the coast in this period), while the Athenians worried that they would lose their cleruchy on Samos.¹ When news of Alexander’s death reached Greece, the Athenian general Leosthenes “went to Aitolia to arrange a common undertaking. The Aitolians gladly acknowledged his request and gave him seven thousand soldiers.”² Whatever the constitutional details, which are unattested for this period, it is clear that the Aitolians were engaged in a politics of cooperation. The aim of the ensuing Lamian War was nothing short of the liberation of all Greece from Macedonian rule.³ The Boiotians initially refused to support the movement, fearing that if it was successful, the Athenians would restore Thebes, but they were eventually persuaded to join.⁴ The Greek forces were finally defeated at the battle of Krannon in September 322.⁵

When Antipater and Krateros forced the Greek allies to come to terms city by city, only the Aitolians and Athenians refused.⁶ For their initial recalcitrance the Athenians paid with nothing less than the loss of their democracy, their Samian cleruchy, and control of Oropos, which became independent until 304.⁷ The Aitolians suffered an abortive invasion of their territory by Antipater and gained and then lost control of much of Thessaly. Two details emerge from the narrative of these years that are important for our purposes: the Aitolians now had citizen forces, suggesting an Aitolian army associated with a single Aitolian state, and they were already interested in trying to acquire control of central Greece east of the Pindos Mountains.⁸

The Lamian War briefly united most of central Greece against Macedonian rule; thereafter they became divided by the wars of Alexander’s successors. The Aitolians, believing in Polyperchon’s declaration that the Greek cities were free to return to the governments they had known under Philip and Alexander, continued to support him even after the murder of his ally Olympias and the rise of Cassander.⁹ They thus became willing allies of Antigonos Monophthalmos in 314/3, when he likewise promised freedom, autonomy, and freedom from garrisons in his bid to challenge Cassander.¹⁰

Cassander found a different strategy for gaining support, declaring his intention in 316/5 to rebuild Thebes.¹¹ Cassander probably had several motives. The only ancient explanation we have is that he acted out of hatred for Alexander. It was certainly, in part, a bid to gain further support in central Greece; his political enemies complained bitterly about it later.¹² The restoration promulgated the message that Cassander was committed to the freedom of the Greek cities, a message that he probably intended to spread beyond central Greece—at least to the Peloponnese, where many cities were under the control of his rival Polyperchon. The profile of supporters for the reconstruction of Thebes is interesting: the Athenians, probably motivated in part by a desire to see the many Theban exiles in Athens return home, were joined by the people of Messene and Megalopolis, two cities that owed their very existence to the Thebans.¹³ Finally, the strategic position of Thebes, situated between the passes of Thessaly and the rest of central Greece, is obvious; the new city retained a Macedonian garrison for many years after its restoration.¹⁴

For our purposes there are two particularly important questions about the reconstruction of Thebes: How did the other Boiotian poleis feel about it, and how did it affect the Boiotian koinon? It is worth remembering that those cities that had most bitterly resented Theban hegemony in the fourth century—Plataia, Orchomenos, and Thespiai—all helped Alexander’s forces to raze the city to the ground in 335. Diodoros says, somewhat ominously, that Cassander persuaded the Boiotians before he began to refound the city, implying that there was serious opposition. This was certainly political, but it was probably also economic: after the city was destroyed, Alexander had distributed the land among the neighboring Boiotians, who were “deriving great proceeds from the land.”¹⁵ It was probably the combination of Cassander’s strategic intentions in refounding the city and the Boiotians’ reticence toward its renewed existence that prevented it from immediately becoming a member of the Boiotian koinon upon its refoundation.¹⁶ It is clear that in 313 the Thebans (still garrisoned by Cassander) and Boiotians were acting independently of each other. Indeed it is likely that it took nearly three decades for the Boiotians to accept the return of Thebes, the old hegemon, into the koinon. I shall return to this later.

The Peloponnesian cities became cruelly trapped between the shifting alliances of the successors in these tumultuous years. Both Polyperchon and Cassander held cities in the region by force, triggering a bloody series of events that resulted, ultimately, in the possession of all Achaia by Antigonos.¹⁷ But the rivals who had garrisoned different cities in the region had violently splintered the recent political unification of Achaia; although we cannot trace that process in detail, these were the conditions that necessitated what Polybios later spoke of as a refoundation of the koinon in the late 280s.¹⁸

The Aitolians did not pin all their hopes on external support; they continued to attempt to build up their power in central Greece. A boundary dispute with their Akarnanian neighbors led to an Aitolian attack on the polis of Agrinion, which may at this time have been incorporated into the koinon.¹⁹ Despite—or perhaps because of—a terrifying invasion by Cassander in 313, the Aitolians formalized their alliance with Antigonos, and the Boiotians followed suit.²⁰ But that was a difficult alliance to preserve with Thebes still garrisoned by Cassander. In a sham gesture of autonomy the Thebans now made a formal alliance with him, while Cassander managed only to squeeze an armistice out of the rest of the Boiotians.²¹ The polis of Thebes and the koinon of the Boiotians remained distinct entities. In 312 Antigonos rewarded the Boiotians with Chalkis and Oropos, seized from Cassander, and then secured his control over the region by expelling Cassander’s garrison from Thebes and professedly freeing the city.²² Although it has frequently been inferred that at this moment Thebes was reintegrated into the Boiotian koinon, there is in fact no solid evidence for the claim, and indeed there are good reasons for thinking that the reintegration occurred significantly later, in or shortly after 287.²³ The Boiotians and Aitolians then operated quite independently of Macedonian intervention, while the poleis of Achaia, under the close watch of Ptolemaic garrisons at Corinth and Sikyon, struggled individually to recover from the violence of the last two decades.²⁴ All were nominally free, but the events of 304 show that old Greece was still regarded as a source of power to the successors.

After abandoning his unsuccessful year-long siege of Rhodes, thanks at least in part to the diplomatic efforts of the Aitolian koinon and the Athenians, Demetrios Poliorketes sailed to central Greece with the intention of undermining Cassander’s power in the region.²⁵ Again the propaganda was that he had arrived to protect the Greeks against the unmitigated depredations of Cassander and Polyperchon.²⁶ His arrival represented a blow to the Boiotian koinon, which lost both Chalkis and Oropos; the latter was given to the Athenians, who retained it until Demetrios lost his kingdom in 287.²⁷ The Boiotians were forced (perhaps without too much difficulty, given their history of hostility) to surrender their allegiance to Cassander and make a new alliance with Demetrios.²⁸ Having secured the allegiance of the Athenians as well, Demetrios moved on to Aitolia, where he found willing allies in his war against Cassander and Polyperchon.²⁹ He then moved into the Peloponnese, where their power was more firmly entrenched, and managed to take both Sikyon and Corinth as well as several Achaian and northern Arkadian poleis.³⁰

The massive defeat suffered by Antigonos and Demetrios at Ipsos in 301 had important ramifications in central Greece. The Aitolians, guessing that it would yield great gains for their longtime enemy Cassander, seem to have in some way taken control of Phokis and forged an alliance “between the Boiotians and the Aitolians and the Phokians with the Aitolians”; fragmentary copies of the treaty were found at both Thermon and Delphi (T53, B10).³¹ It was probably by this means that the Aitolians secured a foothold in the Parnassos region, and particularly at Delphi, which soon gave the persistent Demetrios a specious cause to declare war against them. It should be remembered, however, that the Aitolians’ collective relations with Delphi had been quite close since around 335/4, when the Delphians granted all Aitolians the right of first consultation at the Delphic oracle.³²

The independent alliance of the Boiotians and Aitolians, who now somehow included the Phokians in their state, presented a real threat to those Macedonian rulers now attempting to claim ultimate hegemony over the Greek cities, even as they fought one another to liberate them. The death of Cassander in 298/7, and the restoration of Pyrrhos to his Epeirote kingdom with the assistance of Ptolemy, changed the players on the field, though it did not change the rules of the game. By 294 Demetrios Poliorketes, having recovered from the loss at Ipsos, had himself declared king by the Macedonian army and set about securing control of central Greece, the largest single area of the Greek world not under his direct control.³³ The Boiotian-Aitolian alliance proved remarkably effective: the rebellion from Demetrios began in 293 in Boiotia and was supported by both the Aitolians and their new ally Pyrrhos. The death of Cassander may well have freed the Thebans to pursue a path of greater integration with the rest of Boiotia; if this was a gradual process, the details are lost. What is clear is that in 293 they participated so wholeheartedly in the rebellion that their city was once again besieged, this time by Demetrios. Although the sources focus on this effort, it is clear that the rebellion engaged the entire region.³⁴ And when it was finally quelled, Demetrios left garrisons not only in Thebes but also in the other Boiotian cities.³⁵ Although the Aitolians rendered minimal military assistance to the Boiotians, their opposition to Demetrios was clear, and their strong presence at Delphi, which had become a grievance to the Athenians, now gave him the pretext for an attack in the guise of a sacred war. Probably in 291, the Athenians became anxious about the dedication of the shields at Delphi, and passed a formal resolution to ask Demetrios, whom they called their savior, “how they might most piously, nobly, and swiftly achieve a restoration of the dedications.”³⁶ The shields in question were the same ones that had been the subject of the dispute between the Athenians and Thebans in 339.³⁷ We have to infer that sometime after the Aitolians gained preeminence in if not control over Delphi, around 301, their Boiotian allies asked them to remove the offending shields. Demetrios arrived in Athens at about the time when the Athenians were worrying about this affront; this was the context in which they performed the famous ithyphallic hymn in his honor.³⁸ In it the Athenians plead for nothing less than war against the Aitolians: they wish to see them “flung down” and “reduced to dust.”³⁹ That Demetrios accepted their plea is implied by the fact that he took the unprecedented step of celebrating the Pythian Games of 290 in Athens, “because the Aitolians had a tight hold on Delphi.”⁴⁰ Demetrios accomplished a damaging invasion of Aitolia and negotiated a treaty with them that protected free access to Delphi.⁴¹

Demetrios lost his kingdom in 287, the result of a powerful alliance of his enemies and the exasperation of his own troops. It is a sign of the improvisational nature of early Hellenistic kingship, and its foundation in the support of communities, that the principal means by which he sought to regain power was to canvass support among the Greek cities. One of those we know he visited was Thebes, where according to Plutarch he “returned to the Thebans their politeia.”⁴² Hidden behind this terse allusion appears to be the full reintegration of the Thebans into the Boiotian koinon, contemporary with the revolt of Athens from Demetrios in the spring of 287.⁴³ This implies either that Demetrios exercised power over Boiotia as a whole, which is unlikely given Demetrios’s weak position at this date, or a remarkable unanimity on the part of the Boiotian cities toward the desirability of having Thebes as a part of the koinon again. We simply do not know by what mechanism or mechanisms this change was effected. What is clear is that from this point forward, the Boiotian koinon again included Thebes, but the Boiotians now adopted a strikingly different institutional architecture than the one that had facilitated the Theban hegemony of the fourth century, a change certainly made to prevent that outcome from repeating itself. It is now that we begin to see seven or eight (rather than the eleven of the early fourth century) districts, which ensured the active participation and sovereignty of even the smallest member poleis, and the aphedriates, those representatives of the districts who sacrificed on behalf of their constituencies in koinon-wide rituals and thereby reaffirmed the commitment of those communities to the larger state.⁴⁴ Only a few years later we see that the Boiotian koinon was deploying cavalry in the territories of both Thebes and Oropos, explicitly categorized as being in Boiotia (T15.31–37), which bespeaks not only the reintegration of Thebes and the Boiotians’ commitment to its territorial integrity as part of the koinon, but also the return of Oropos to Boiotia after 287.⁴⁵

INDEPENDENCE AND EXPANSION, 284–245

Demetrios’s bid to regain power was, however, ultimately unsuccessful, and though he was eventually succeeded by his son, Antigonos Gonatas, in 277, the weakness of the interim period had a profound impact on the ability of the communities of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese to pursue a path of independence and, in many cases, of greater regional cooperation. Antigonos’s weakness was quite apparent to the communities of old Greece, who now sought by various means to rebuild the political structures upon which their past glories and quiet periods of independence had rested.

For the Spartans under King Areus this meant a desire to rebuild the Peloponnesian League of the classical period by creating a network of alliances centered around Sparta.⁴⁶ The Aitolians quickly became a target for the energies of Areus and his supporters, probably for several reasons: they perceived the Aitolians as having pro-Macedonian sympathies; they noted that their most powerful ally, Pyrrhos, had departed for Italy; and they knew that the freedom of Delphi, however specious, was a cause around which Greeks could be persuaded to rally. So the Spartans dredged up the usual claim—that the Aitolians had cultivated the sacred plain of Apollo at Kirrha—and with their allies declared a sacred war to dislodge them from Delphi.⁴⁷ But the Spartan alliance collapsed under suspicions of imperialist aims, and the war was a failure.⁴⁸ It was perhaps partly in retaliation for this Spartan-led attack that in 280 the Aitolians took control of Herakleia Trachinia, the old Spartan foundation in Malis, making it a member of their koinon. The background to this move is unclear; that there were simmering boundary disputes between the eastern Aitolian communities and Herakleia is likely, but the timing of the integration of Herakleia has also to be considered.⁴⁹

During this same period, or perhaps immediately after the botched sacred war against the Aitolians, the Achaians sought to free themselves from the garrisons and tyrants installed and controlled by at least one of several Macedonian rulers since the reign of Alexander.⁵⁰ In a process that began in the extreme west in the period 284–280, the Achaian poleis gradually and quite voluntarily rebuilt the koinon they had created in the fourth century.⁵¹ That it remained a very loose organization in its earliest years is suggested by the fact that the only Achaians to go to the aid of Delphi when it was attacked by the Gauls in 279 were the Patraians.⁵² No Achaian federal army was sent, and the armed forces of each polis appear still to have been free to act independently.

The defense of Delphi against the Gauls was manned also by Phokians, Boiotians, and Athenians, but it was the Aitolians who claimed the leading role in saving the sanctuary, and it was they who suffered most directly when a band of the invaders broke off and attacked Kallipolis, in southeastern Aitolia, in an attempt to draw the defenders away from Delphi and Thermopylai.⁵³ In the aftermath of their victory, the Aitolians gained two seats on the amphiktyonic council, probably those formerly belonging to Herakleia Trachinia and to Ozolian Lokris, which were now part of an emergent “greater Aitolia.”⁵⁴ Over the next decades, as we can discern from Delphic inscriptions, the Aitolians gained more seats on the amphiktyonic council, at the expense of traditional members, which may indicate the incorporation of those communities into the Aitolian koinon.⁵⁵ These included Dolopia (by spring 276), Ainis and Doris (by fall 272), and part of Eastern Lokris (by fall 272).⁵⁶ The means by which these regions were incorporated and the precise status they attained once they were is uncertain but will be discussed below.⁵⁷ What is clear is that the Aitolian presence at Delphi became increasingly dominant. The expulsion of the Gauls in 279 was celebrated by an annual amphiktyonic festival, the Sōtēria.⁵⁸ By 246/5, the Aitolians’ control over Delphic politics and their own status around the Aegean led them to transform the festival into a penteteric pan-Hellenic one; embassies were sent throughout the Greek world seeking acceptance of the new Sōtēria, an effort that appears to have been broadly successful.⁵⁹ The decade of anarchy that intervened between the expulsion of Demetrios Poliorketes and the accession of his son Antigonos was vitally important for the koina of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, for it had given them the incentive and the opportunity to regroup, expand, and refine the cooperative institutions by which they had in the classical period created their regional states.

Gonatas’s recognition as king of the Macedonians in 277 was not enough to turn back this tide.⁶⁰ Around 275 a wave of rebellion motivated by a desire for independence rose over Achaia. Aigion, an important member of the fourth-century koinon and the seat of the regionally significant sanctuary of Zeus Homarios, expelled its Macedonian garrison and joined the western Achaian poleis in becoming part of the new koinon.⁶¹ Further to the east, Boura was sufficiently encouraged by this rising to assassinate its tyrant, and then the tyrant of neighboring Keryneia abdicated, sensing what was in store for him.⁶² Polybios does not mention the status of the other three Achaian cities during this period, but inland Leontion and the large eastern coastal poleis of Aigeira and Pellene probably also joined at this time, returning the koinon to its fourth-century size, lacking only Helike and Boura, destroyed in 373.⁶³ Polybios (2.43.1) implies that until 251, membership of the Achaian koinon did not increase again; whether he should be taken literally, on the assumption that he explicitly listed all members, or not is unclear. In the intervening years there is evidence for concerted action on the part of the Achaians, directed consistently toward the goal of total independence from Macedonian control. They welcomed Pyrrhos, coming in 272 ostensibly to undermine Antigonid influence in the Peloponnese, and in 268 they joined the alliance of Greek states being formed against Antigonos, which led directly to the seven-year conflict known as the Chremonidean War.⁶⁴ The exact course of the war cannot be reconstructed with any detail, but Corinth was a major bone of contention and remained in Antigonid hands, making it a focal point in the Achaians’ coordinated struggle for regional independence.⁶⁵

Meanwhile, the persistent opposition of the Aitolians, who appear not to have taken part in the Chremonidean War, effected a remarkable, if ephemeral, change in their relationship with their Akarnanian neighbors, with whom they had a long history of antagonism. An inscription from Thermon (T57) records a treaty and alliance between the Aitolians and Akarnanians, of which no written source provides so much as a hint. The general paucity of evidence for Aitolian activities in this period, aside from the tangled and chronologically challenging evidence of the amphiktyonic decrees and other inscriptions from Delphi, makes this treaty difficult to place in context, but Günther Klaffenbach was probably right to place it at the end of the Chremonidean War and to explain it as a product of the attempt by Alexander of Epeiros, the son of Pyrrhos, to secure local support as a means of regaining his throne from Antigonos.⁶⁶ The treaty was evidently predicated upon a successful and mutually acceptable demarcation of the territories of the two koina, fixing the Achelöos River as the boundary; this meant that the Aitolians would surrender their claims to Oiniadai and Stratos, made by force in 314, but they were allowed to keep Agrinion.⁶⁷ What is truly striking about the agreement, however, is the series of rights that in effect blurred those geographical boundaries: they extend to one another the rights of intermarriage (epigamia) and property ownership (enktēsis), as well as full citizenship, available to any individual who chose to domicile himself in the other region. It is an isopoliteia decree in all but name. The first two are rights that we have seen extended to all members of the expanding koinon of the Chalkideis in the early fourth century, and that, as I shall argue below, were widespread among other koina. They provide us with an important clue to the motivations behind the construction of cooperative political institutions beyond the polis, and their presence in the Aitolian-Akarnanian treaty suggests that the commitment to the idea of regional states not only was deep and widespread but was now beginning to transcend notions of the ethnic fixity of political boundaries to a degree that was previously almost unthinkable. This treaty may give us some indication of the terms upon which other non-Aitolian communities became members of the Aitolian koinon after 279, when our only evidence for the phenomenon consists of the shifting composition of the amphiktyonic council reflected in its now fragmentary and incomplete series of decrees. Throughout the 250s and 240s, the Aitolians pursued this logic of inclusion—or influence by potential inclusion—by granting both isopoliteia and asylia to several communities in western and mainland Greece.⁶⁸

Whether out of an explicit awareness of what the Aitolians were doing in this period or not, the Achaians likewise began to extend beyond the ethnic boundaries of their koinon, as they had done in the 380s with the annexation of Kalydon and Naupaktos across the Corinthian Gulf. The immediate catalyst for this expansion was in both cases opposition to Macedonian control. But we shall see later that the expansion of koinon territories may also have had significant economic effects, which must be considered alongside the more traditional security concerns cited in narratives of third-century expansion.⁶⁹ In the ongoing struggle to dislodge the Macedonian-supported tyrants from the cities of the Peloponnese, the young and ambitious Aratos of Sikyon, the son of a former pro-Macedonian ruler of the city whose family had ties to Antigonos, seized control of his native city with the help of a private band of armed men.⁷⁰ Since the murder of Aratos’s father, Kleinias, Sikyon had endured a series of tyrants and, along with them, significant sociopolitical upheavals that resulted in the exile of many citizens; hundreds poured back into the city upon learning of its liberation by Aratos and attempted to reclaim their property.⁷¹ In response to the internal problems created by the return of some six hundred exiles as well as to the threat of external predation, particularly by Antigonos, Aratos orchestrated the integration of Dorian Sikyon into the Achaian koinon in 251.⁷² Around the same time Megalopolis, the only node of Antigonid control near Sparta, ousted its own tyrant, constituting a further blow to Macedonian power in the Peloponnese.⁷³ Aratos energetically assumed the cause of the expansion of Achaian power. In 249 a new governor was appointed to man the Antigonid garrison at Corinth, and Aratos, sensing the weakness of a new appointee, launched an attack on Corinth.⁷⁴ Although it was unsuccessful, it made clear the commitment of the newly expanded Achaian koinon to a policy of independence.

The first half of the third century in mainland Greece was characterized by the reemergence and strengthening of the cooperative political institutions that developed in the fourth century and by a complete rupture of the idea that a regional polity had to be restricted to members of a single ethnic identity. And while these developments are clearly associated with resistance to Macedonian rule, they cannot be understood purely as a function of that political stance.

SHIFTING ALLIANCES, 245–229

Over the next sixteen years the Achaian koinon under the leadership of Aratos of Sikyon continued to pursue a vigorously anti-Antigonid politics and to welcome new communities into its ranks, while Aitolian ambitions set the two confederacies at odds until they joined forces for over a decade to battle Antigonid power. The Boiotian koinon, comparatively limited in its growth potential by the vigor of its western and southern neighbors as well as by the security of Macedonian control over nearby Athens, was more often than not caught in the middle of larger military and political contests. But its rich epigraphic record belies this impression of unimportance, at least to the history of political cooperation. This was, finally, the last period in which the koina of mainland Greece operated entirely free of the shadow of Rome, the arrival of which radically changed the dynamics of cooperation.

In 245 the Achaians under the leadership of Aratos of Sikyon adopted a policy of hostility toward the Aitolians, and in preparation for war they made an alliance with the Boiotians. The allies invaded Aitolia and Ozolian Lokris, now a part of the Aitolian koinon, but the Aitolians retaliated by invading Boiotia and destroying the Boiotian army at the old battle site of Chaironeia.⁷⁵ The Achaians arrived too late to help, and the Boiotians now joined the Aitolian koinon.⁷⁶ Refocusing, after this defeat, on Achaian expansion in the Peloponnese, Aratos seized Corinth in 243 and immediately brought it into the koinon.⁷⁷ He secured his prize by crossing the isthmus and bringing Megara, the near neighbor of now pro-Aitolian Boiotia, into the koinon, and protected Corinth’s southeastern exposure by winning over Troizen and Epidauros, on the Saronic Gulf.⁷⁸ The introduction of four large poleis, including the vital stronghold of Acrocorinth, dramatically increased the Achaians’ strategic power.

Sometime in the mid-240s, whether in response to the tremendous growth of the Achaian koinon in 243 or slightly before it, the Aitolians and Antigonos Gonatas reportedly “made an agreement to partition the Achaian ethnos between them.”⁷⁹ The Achaians now faced pressure from both enemies on the periphery of their territory. The Aitolians, through the support of their Elian kin, gained influence without formal control in the western Peloponnese in these years.⁸⁰ They and the Elians may also have been involved in the tyrannical coup of one Lydiades at Arkadian Megalopolis.⁸¹ But the Aitolians were still focused on expanding their koinon in mainland Greece. Polybios twice mentions, in connection with the Aitolian-Antigonid agreement to partition Achaia, an agreement made between the Aitolians and Alexander, the king of Epeiros, to partition Akarnania.⁸² This move was a direct violation of the earlier treaty between the Aitolians and Akarnanians (T57), which in the larger history of Aitolian-Akarnanian relations appears to have been truly exceptional. Antigonos may have countenanced such an aggressive strategy of territorial acquisition by both his Epeirote neighbors and the Aitolians in order to palliate any lingering Aitolian concerns about the benefits accruing to them from the agreement to attack the Achaians. It had thus far proved impossible for the Aitolians to exert anything but influence in the Peloponnese, and that only by way of their Elian kin; so what material benefits would they gain?⁸³ The sudden abandonment of the treaty with Akarnania, absent any provocation, may also reflect a change in Aitolian political leadership.⁸⁴ The process by which the acquisition of southern Akarnania was accomplished by the Aitolians is lost to us, but it is clear that by the 230s the important cities of Stratos and Oiniadai, along with lesser settlements like Matropolis, were part of the Aitolian koinon (T59).⁸⁵ The war between the Achaians and Aitolians that should have resulted from the purported Aitolian-Antigonid agreement never materialized. The Aitolians invaded the Peloponnese, but the Achaians refused to meet them in battle, defended Pellene from their attack, and by spring 240 succeeded in winning over Arkadian Kynaitha as a member of the koinon.⁸⁶ The Achaians made peace with the Aitolians and concluded a truce with Gonatas.⁸⁷

The 230s were years of growth for the Achaian koinon under the continued leadership of Aratos, and they brought expansion, albeit on a smaller scale, for the Aitolians as well. This growth was, however, marked in both cases by hostilities with the new Macedonian king, Demetrios II. The Achaians focused on expanding their territory in the directions they had already staked out: the Argolid, which would complete Achaian control over the entire northern Peloponnese, and Arkadia, which would allow for southerly expansion. Peace with the Aitolians meant, at least ostensibly, that the Elians would be friendly, and there was no outright rupture in Achaian-Spartan relations. Opposition to the Achaians remained, however, in the presence of a number of local tyrants, most of them supported, if not installed, by Gonatas and now friendly to Demetrios. Chief among them was Lydiades of Megalopolis, who also controlled Alipheira, together perhaps with Heraia, Telphousa, and Kleitor, thereby extending his territory almost as far as Kynaitha.⁸⁸ This made conflict with the Achaians almost inevitable. Argos, too, was in the hands of a local Macedonian-supported tyrant, and Aratos made his first (unsuccessful) attempt on the city probably around 240.⁸⁹

The peace between the Achaians and Aitolians was converted, around 239, into a formal alliance.⁹⁰ The change may have been motivated by a new alliance between Epeiros and Macedonia that was at least potentially anti-Aitolian.⁹¹ No explicit statement of the terms of the alliance survives, but a careful reading of the slim record of Achaian-Aitolian cooperation over the next two decades suggests that there were at least two: first, that the allies would render military assistance to one another, and jointly to friends who sought it out; and second, that allied troops would be paid according to some predetermined wage.⁹² It was probably in this year that the so-called Demetrian War broke out between the two sets of allies, but our sources are exceptionally scarce.⁹³

Over the next decade the Achaian koinon grew vigorously, while our limited evidence suggests that the Aitolians lost ground in central Greece and struggled to gain it in Akarnania. In the Peloponnese, Aratos continued to lead the Achaians on attacks aimed at ousting the tyrants of Argos and attaching the city to the koinon, won over Kleonai, which now became a member, and accepted the adherence of Megalopolis, where Lydiades surrendered his tyranny in 235 and brought his city into the Achaian koinon.⁹⁴ In the previous year the Achaians had won Arkadian Heraia, which suggests that they had already won over Kleitor and Telphousa.⁹⁵ The admission of Megalopolis brought the Achaians further south into Arkadia, integrating a large and powerful city but one that had pursued, since its foundation in the 360s, a policy of implacable hostility toward the Spartans. It was inevitable that Megalopolis’s membership in the koinon would embroil the Achaians in those same hostilities, particularly in the years 234–230, during which Lydiades was elected stratēgos three times, alternating in years of service with Aratos, and the ambitious young king Kleomenes III had recently come to power in Sparta.⁹⁶ Eastern Arkadia followed quickly, with Orchomenos, Mantineia, Tegea, and probably Kaphyai joining around 233.⁹⁷

In central Greece, meanwhile, Demetrios II was attacking Aitolian interests. Around 234 he invaded Boiotia, which had been an Aitolian ally since the disastrous battle of Chaironeia in 245, and separated the Boiotian koinon from Aitolia.⁹⁸ It was probably during the same expedition that he wrested Opountian Lokris from the Aitolians and attached it to the now-allied Boiotian koinon, where it remained until circa 228.⁹⁹ The Aitolians may, however, have gained some ground against Demetrios in northeastern central Greece.¹⁰⁰ The Aitolian alliance with the Achaians prompted Demetrios to invaded the Peloponnese in 233. The Achaians under the leadership of Aratos suffered a serious defeat at Phylakia, just south of Tegea.¹⁰¹ It may have been as a result of this defeat that the Achaians became willing to cede their newest Arkadian members—Orchomenos, Mantineia, Tegea, and Kaphyai—to the Aitolians, who may have offered to help the Achaians stabilize the area.¹⁰²

Whatever the nature of their gains in Arkadia, the Aitolians continued to wage war against Demetrios’s interests and to pursue their own agenda of westward expansion in mainland Greece. In 232 the Aiakid dynasty that had ruled Epeiros for centuries came to an end, and the inhabitants of both Epeiros itself and the Epeirote part of Akarnania chose to form independent koina by which they planned to govern themselves.¹⁰³ The Aitolians seized the moment to attack western Akarnania, hoping to gain access to the Adriatic. In the autumn of 231, they laid siege to Medion, a small Akarnanian polis south of the Ambrakian Gulf, having been “unable to persuade the Medionians to join their politeia.”¹⁰⁴ But Medion was protected by the Illyrian king Agron, in the service of Demetrios, and the siege was unsuccessful.¹⁰⁵

The Aitolians’ failure to take Medion was not, however, decisive. Around the same time they gained control of Ambrakia, the capital of the old Aiakid dynasty, and with it Amphilochia, the territory east of the Ambrakian Gulf.¹⁰⁶ If they struggled to gain southwestern Akarnania, at least they now had complete access to the ports of the gulf. Illyrian forces now began to threaten the islands and coastal settlements of the Ionian Sea. Apollonia, Epidamnos, and Kerkyra appealed to the Achaians and Aitolians, whose combined fleet was defeated by the Illyrians in a naval battle off Paxos.¹⁰⁷ The Aitolian-Achaian alliance did not last much longer, and some historians have attributed the rupture to the losses they sustained at the battle of Paxos, but there is evidence that subsequent events in the Peloponnese down to 224 are rather to be blamed.¹⁰⁸ The Illyrians did not remain a threat to the western Greek communities for long, because their piratical raids drew the hostile attention of the Romans in 229. For a moment, though, they seemed to have replaced the threat of Macedon itself.

THE ROMAN ENTRANCE AND THE WAR AGAINST KLEOMENES, 229–222

The accession of Antigonos Doson in 229 did not resolve the conflict between the allied koina and Macedon, and the threat posed by Illyrian piracy to seaborne traffic in the Adriatic was in no way diminished. The Aitolians supported the revolt of Thessaly from Macedonian control, provoking a vigorous response from Doson that stripped them not only of their hopes of controlling Thessaly but also of eastern Phokis.¹⁰⁹ The Boiotians also lost Opountian Lokris.¹¹⁰

Phokis appears to have regained its political independence as a koinon and now made an alliance with the Boiotians. The first lines of the inscription recording the Boiotian-Phokian alliance (T28), which may have delineated obligations for defensive or offensive cooperation, are missing, but what survives is striking for its provision of safekeeping of goods in the other’s territory, presumably in the event of a hostile invasion (ll. 1–6). Each koinon preserved its own officials, elections, and oaths; Phokis clearly preserved its independence from Boiotia, while both states essentially committed to preserving each other’s autonomy in the tumultuous atmosphere of the early 220s. This alliance was strengthened by the inclusion of the Achaians not much later (T42). The Achaian polity continued to grow: Aigina, Hermione, and most of Arkadia, according to Plutarch, now joined the koinon.¹¹¹ After years of Achaian attempts, Argos finally joined and was followed by neighboring Phleious.¹¹²

In the spring of 228, the Aitolians and Achaians received embassies from unaccustomed visitors: the Romans sought to “explain the causes of the war and their crossing [to Illyria], and then gave an account of what they had done.”¹¹³ Both ethnē, according to Polybios, received the ambassadors with philanthrōpia. The episode provides our first evidence for direct contact between the Romans and the Aitolian and Achaian koina, at this time the most powerful states in mainland Greece. It is likely that the embassy was motivated in part by an awareness of the Aitolian-Achaian involvement in the Illyrian War, which preceded the Roman arrival, but it also reveals a cautious approach: the Romans were aware that they needed to explain their presence in an area where they had previously had no established interests.

The resolution of the Illyrian conflict was well timed for the Achaians, for it freed them to focus on the new threat posed by Kleomenes III in Sparta. Sometime in 229, the Spartans seized the eastern Arkadian cities of Tegea, Mantineia, Orchomenos, and Kaphyai. These cities had joined the Achaian koinon in 235 but had then switched allegiance to become members of the Aitolian koinon perhaps around 233. According to Polybios, the Aitolians approved Kleomenes’ seizure of these cities as a means of weakening Achaian power, but the claim is highly dubitable.¹¹⁴ When Kleomenes attacked a fortification in the territory of Megalopolis, a prized part of Achaia since 235, the Achaians declared war.¹¹⁵ The struggle focused initially around control of Arkadia, where the Achaians had limited success until spring 227.¹¹⁶ Despite a serious setback in open battle against Spartan forces at Mount Lykaion, the Achaians managed to regain Mantineia, lay siege to Orchomenos, and protect Megalopolis against Spartan incursions, while Kleomenes dealt ruthlessly with ongoing challenges to his political authority at home and dramatically increased Spartan military strength.¹¹⁷ Kleomenes put relentless pressure on Arkadia, and particularly Megalopolis, while political tensions were straining the hastily stitched seams of the Achaian koinon, which had expanded so rapidly in the previous decade and a half. In response to these pressures, Aratos took a step in winter 227/6 that had previously been unthinkable: he approached the reigning Macedonian king, Antigonos Doson, seeking his military support if the pressing need should arise. But political pressure made it impossible for him to do this directly, so he persuaded several family friends in Megalopolis, including the Cynic philosopher Kerkidas, to approach the Achaians and, citing the hardships being endured by the city, seek their permission to send an embassy to Antigonos.¹¹⁸ Polybios claims that Aratos and the Achaians as a whole were motivated by the pressures of the war against Kleomenes and by fear of Aitolian territorial depredations in the Peloponnese.¹¹⁹ It is difficult to determine how objective this claim is, for we have no independent evidence of Aitolian activity in the area in this period or of a rupture in the Achaian-Aitolian alliance concluded upon the accession of Demetrios in 239. In any case, the embassy was warmly received by Antigonos, who offered his help as soon as the Achaians should formally request it; Aratos nevertheless encouraged the Achaians to resolve the war on their own.¹²⁰

In the summer and autumn of 226, however, the Achaians suffered three major setbacks that together made independent success in the war seem unlikely: Ptolemy withdrew the subsidies his kingdom had been providing since 251/0, choosing instead to fund the Spartans as being more likely than the Achaians, now, to oppose Antigonos; Kleomenes regained control of Mantineia, expelling the Achaians’ mercenary garrison and slaughtering the entire population of Achaian settlers in the town; and finally, Kleomenes inflicted a heavy defeat on the full Achaian military levy at a site called Hekatombaion in western Achaia, in the territory of Dyme, thus moving the conflict out of Arkadia and into the heart of Achaian territory.¹²¹ The Achaians spent the first half of 225 in negotiations, first with Kleomenes and then with Antigonos. Tension within the koinon was palpable. A pro-Spartan faction encouraged treating with Kleomenes, while other groups in Achaia were bitterly opposed to the pursuit of Macedonian support, and socioeconomic unrest was widespread.¹²² In this atmosphere of factionalism, Aratos was either unable or unwilling to engage the Achaians in an open debate about inviting Doson to assist them; instead he is reported to have used covert methods to ensure a breakdown of the renewed negotiations between the Achaians and Kleomenes.¹²³ So it is not surprising that Kleomenes made so much headway in detaching member poleis from the koinon: in the summer and autumn of 225, he took control of Pellene, Pheneos, and Kaphyai, which sundered the territory of the koinon in two, and then worked systematically to seize the entire eastern portion of it, including Kleonai, Argos, Epidauros, Hermione, and Troizen.¹²⁴ Meanwhile the Achaians, under increasing pressure, consented to an alliance with Antigonos, but his demand for Acrocorinth, the old Macedonian garrison that Aratos had fought for years to take, was a sticking point. When, however, the citizens of Corinth ordered Aratos out of their city and invited Kleomenes in, the Achaians, further pressed by Kleomenes’ three-month siege of Sikyon, felt justified in granting Antigonos what he wanted, thereby reversing the anti-Macedonian stance that had guided Achaian policy for more than twenty-five years.¹²⁵

In the spring of 224, Antigonos arrived in the Megarid with a large force, but these were prevented from entering the Peloponnese by Kleomenes, who set up a strong line of defense across the isthmos and around Corinth, which Antigonos initially found impossible to break.¹²⁶ Megara, the most northerly of all the members of the Achaian koinon, was thus cut off from the larger regional state, and Antigonos transferred it to the Boiotian koinon, apparently after securing the consent of the Achaians.¹²⁷ The war against Kleomenes took a sudden and unexpected turn when the Argives decided to revolt from Kleomenes with an appeal to the Achaians and Antigonos, who immediately rallied to their aid. With hostile forces at his back, Kleomenes was forced to abandon Corinth and retreat to 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 anti-Aitolian bias is palpable.¹⁵² Despite this difficulty, it is certain that the rupture between the Aitolians and Achaians was complete by 222/1 and led within a year to the conflict known as the Social War. Despite its brevity, the ramifications of the war endured: the Aitolians and Achaians never again regarded each other with anything but distrust or hostility; the fabric of the Achaian koinon was very nearly torn asunder, and the war was largely responsible for creating the conditions in Greece that paved the way for Roman intervention only a few years later.

Doson was succeeded by Philip V the son of Demetrios II, in the summer of 221.¹⁵³ The new king was young but showed himself—at least initially—to be a ruler of sound judgment and superb military skill. Along with the Macedonian throne he inherited the role of hēgemōn of the Hellenic Alliance and was immediately drawn into the maelstrom of Peloponnesian politics. The Aitolians and their Elian allies were plundering Achaian territories from Triphylian Phigaleia, which had remained friendly to the Aitolians since about 240.¹⁵⁴ Polybios’s claim that these actions were prompted by Aitolian isolation during the 220s is probably overstated, as we have seen; that they regarded the accession of the young Philip as an opportunity to pursue a more aggressive agenda may well be true.¹⁵⁵ The Aitolians were probably motivated by a desire to protect their territory from Macedonian and allied depredations, a very real threat since the Akarnanians and Epeirotes were members of the Hellenic Alliance; it must have become more urgent when the Illyrian Demetrios of Pharos took refuge with Philip after violating his agreement with the Romans in 220.¹⁵⁶ But there is no denying the evident zeal of individual Aitolians for plundering Achaian territory or the willingness of the Aitolian koinon to be led in its public policy by these private economic demands.¹⁵⁷

The Aitolians’ aggressive policy in the Peloponnese was, according to Polybios, led by two politicians from Trichoneion, Dorimachos and Skopas. Dorimachos, “sent to Phigaleia on behalf of the koinon, on the pretext of guarding the territory and city, but in reality to spy on Peloponnesian affairs,” found himself pressured by a group of Aitolian pirates who were looking for an excuse to plunder the area.¹⁵⁸ He granted them permission, and the raids extended even to the private houses of the Messenians, friends and allies of Aitolia. Dorimachos was upbraided by the Messenians and was reportedly so stung by a personal insult he received there that he went back to Aitolia and engineered a declaration of war against the Messenians, on the grounds that they were constantly threatening to ally themselves with the Achaians and Macedonians.¹⁵⁹ But the aim was clearly to declare war on the entire Hellenic Alliance, for their first acts of official hostility, late in 221, were to seize a Macedonian ship off the coast of Kythera, to plunder the coast of Epeiros with the help of the Kephallenian fleet, and to make an attempt on Akarnanian Thyrrheion.¹⁶⁰ In the Peloponnese, they moved against hard-won allied strongholds, including a fortification in the territory of Megalopolis and the garrison at Arkadian Orchomenos.¹⁶¹ In the early spring of 220 the Aitolians, having mustered a full military levy, crossed the Gulf of Corinth and invaded western Achaia via Elis, plundering the territories of Patrai, Pharai, and Tritaia before moving on to Messenia, the alleged casus belli.¹⁶² These westernmost of the old Achaian poleis bore the brunt of the invasion, as they did repeatedly throughout the Social War.

At a regular meeting of the Achaian assembly, after hearing complaints from the Patraians, Pharaians, and Messenians, the koinon voted to muster a full military levy, which went to the assistance of the Messenians but was completely routed by the Aitolians at Kaphyai, northwest of the garrison at Orchomenos.¹⁶³ Further outrages against the allies began to mount, and in summer 220 war was declared against the Aitolians.¹⁶⁴ Polybios, certainly using the official decree of the alliance as his source, reports that it included the following declaration of intentions (Polyb. 4.25.6–7):

that they would restore for the allies any territory or city held by the Aitolians since the death of Demetrios, the father of Philip; likewise concerning those who had been compelled by circumstances to join the sympoliteia of the Aitolians against their will, that they would restore all these to their ancestral constitutions [patria politeumata], and possessing their own territories and cities, these should be ungarrisoned, free from tribute, and independent, enjoying their ancestral constitutions and laws [politeiais kai nomois . . . tois patriois].

The decree has two distinct parts. The first clause refers explicitly and exclusively to fellow members of the alliance and can only apply to territories to which they believed they had a claim but that were seized by the Aitolians after 229. The only logical candidates are Ambrakia, formerly a part of Epeiros but which may, as we saw above, have joined the Aitolians when the Molossian dynasty crumbled around 230, and which was certainly in Aitolian hands in 219; and perhaps Phthiotic Achaia, in Thessaly, which they took upon the news of Doson’s accession, and which he may never have managed to regain.¹⁶⁵ But the second clause appears to have a much broader rubric, applying to all those who had joined the Aitolian koinon unwillingly, regardless of the date at which they did so. Akarnania certainly applies here, as probably does western Phokis, both of which in their partitioned state belonged to the alliance. Most important, however, it left open the possibility of allied action on behalf of any member of the Aitolian koinon that now professed its participation to have been involuntary.

During the next three years, there were hostilities in each of these regions, but the Peloponnese remained the heart of the conflict. Here the Achaians were pressed from the northwest, by Aitolians invading from Elis and the Corinthian Gulf coast, and from the south by the Spartans, who were now fully committed to an alliance with the Aitolians.¹⁶⁶ In the spring of 219 the Spartans made an attack on southeastern Argos and then seized a fortification in the territory of Megalopolis, while the Aitolians invaded western Achaia, devastating the territories of Dyme, Pharai, and Tritaia, defeating a local force that marched out to oppose them, and seizing fortifications in the territories of Dyme and Telphousa.¹⁶⁷

The Achaians’ principal ally, Philip, was during this same period prosecuting the war in the northwest, returning towns in Epeiros and Akarnania that had been seized by the Aitolians, in accordance with the terms of the declaration of war, and then moved against Aitolia itself, ravaging the territories of Stratos and Kalydon and seizing Oiniadai.¹⁶⁸ In the winter of 219/8 he turned his attention to the Peloponnese, making small gains in northwestern Arkadia and conquering Triphylia, which had long been in the control of Elis.¹⁶⁹ The Macedonian army also managed to regain Teichos Dymaion.¹⁷⁰ Even Philip, however, was running short of both money and grain for his forces by the spring of 218, and the Achaians made a financial arrangement with Philip whereby the Achaians would pay salaries and provide grain for the Macedonian army during the entire period of campaigning in the Peloponnese.¹⁷¹ The funding for the Macedonian army in accordance with this agreement came from taxes paid by the members of the Achaian koinon and from war booty; by late in the year, the burden on member poleis had become very heavy and led, temporarily, to significant military weakness.¹⁷²

The year 218 was one of expensive, highly destructive, and ultimately ineffectual warfare. Western Achaia was repeatedly devastated; Messenia remained in the hands of the recalcitrant Spartans; and two venerable sanctuaries—that of Zeus at Dion, in Macedonia, and that of Apollo at Thermon, in Aitolia—were brutally sacked.¹⁷³ The result was widespread disaffection: the members of the Achaian koinon were disinclined to pay their eisphora, seeing no clear results from the contributions they had already made, and the soldiers, whose pay was in arrears, were not eager to serve.¹⁷⁴ Under these conditions the elder Aratos was again elected stratēgos for the year 217/6 and immediately deployed his political clout to address the problem. He persuaded the Achaians to pass a decree (dogma) committing themselves to the maintenance of a specific military force: of mercenaries, eighty-five hundred infantry and five hundred cavalry; of citizens, three thousand infantry and three hundred cavalry; and a total of six ships with their crews, three to be stationed off the Argolid and three off the coast of Patrai and Dyme.¹⁷⁵ The resolution suggests that the problem was one of will rather than a true shortage of resources. The challenge of meeting the financial obligation implicit in such a troop commitment was not tested for long. In the late spring and summer of 217 the Achaians enjoyed a string of victories that yielded enough booty to obviate the need for another eisphora levy and at the same time brought the Aitolians to their knees.¹⁷⁶ Another Aitolian force invaded western Achaia but was forcefully attacked, with some two thousand men taken prisoner and their arms and baggage captured as plunder; the Achaian admiral crossed the Corinthian Gulf and seized a body of slaves and three ships with their crews.¹⁷⁷ The Achaians were now fighting fire with fire, using the very methods favored by their enemies to defeat them. They followed up these seizures with plundering expeditions to two of the richest and most strategic of the coastal poleis of Aitolia, Kalydon and Naupaktos.¹⁷⁸ Philip, meanwhile, made important gains in central Greece at the Aitolians’ expense, winning control of Phthiotic Thebes, which he renamed Philippi, and by the late summer of 217 he had gained control of western Phokis, thus fulfilling some of the principal aims of the war on behalf of the allies.¹⁷⁹

From a position of strength and expansion in the 220s, the Aitolians had suffered considerable losses by 217. Far from gaining a stronger foothold in the Peloponnese, they lost control of vital areas in central Greece and suffered depredations in Aitolia proper. It was in this context that they appear to have rewarded, if not directly commissioned, the work of several poets to promulgate a message of Aitolian unity throughout the koinon. Aristodama of Smyrna, an epic poetess, was praised by the city of Lamia in a decree of the Aitolian koinon dated to 218/7 for having “commemorated the ethnos of the Aitolians and the ancestors of the people.”¹⁸⁰ Another decree in her honor, issued by the Lokrian polis of Chaleion, survives from a copy erected at Delphi and must belong to the same year.¹⁸¹ It is clear, then, that Aristodama was making the rounds, performing poems that commemorated the Aitolians. The fact that both honorific decrees attesting to her activities survive from member poleis that were not ethnically Aitolian may suggest that a particular emphasis was placed on encouraging loyalty in these areas, where the risk of defection in the crisis conditions of the Social War was very high. But it would be surprising if she did not travel to the Aitolian heartland as well.¹⁸² Similar work appears to have been carried out by the epic poet Nikander of Kolophon, who was active either in the last quarter of the third century, and so a contemporary of Aristodama, or in the second quarter, when the Aitolians capitalized on their victory over the Gauls to establish themselves at Delphi and expand their koinon vigorously.¹⁸³ He was the author of an Aitolika, a lost regional epic about the Aitolians, as well as other works that recounted traditional Greek myths in emphatically Aitolian settings, including not only ancient Aitolian places like Kalydon but also newer members of the koinon like Malis.¹⁸⁴ Whether Aristodama continued the work of Nikander or was his contemporary, the apparent content of her poetry and the evident itinerary she followed in performing it suggest that at the end of the Social War the Aitolians sought to bolster the unity and integrity of their koinon by elaborating, if not developing, a history of the Aitolian ethnos through poetic performance. It is a striking response to crisis.

At the Nemean Games in the summer of 217, Philip received a letter informing him of Hannibal’s overwhelming victory over the Romans at Lake Trasimene. According to Polybios, the king showed the letter only to Demetrios of Pharos, who had taken refuge with him after violating his own treaty with the Romans in 220; it is likely that Demetrios had more experience with the Romans than anyone else present, and he had more than his share of ambition. The story goes that he whispered these ambitions into the ear of the still young king and urged him to end the war with the Aitolians.¹⁸⁵ The timing was fortuitous: the Achaians had not lost any ground in the war; Akarnania and Epeiros, although they had suffered a recent Aitolian invasion, were significantly better off than they had been in 220, and Philip had succeeded in wresting western Phokis and Phthiotic Achaia from the Aitolians. None of the Allies, then, had any significant motivation to continue what had turned out to be a costly war; the Aitolians, smarting from the recent Achaian depredations in their own territory and their losses in neighboring regions, were also eager for peace. A conference was held at Naupaktos in the late summer of 217, at which peace was concluded on the simple condition that each party should retain those territories of which they were at that time in possession.¹⁸⁶ Polybios gives us few details, preferring instead to record a rousing speech by one Agelaos of Naupaktos, who warned the assembled Greeks to cease making war on one another, for there was a dark cloud rising in the west: whether Hannibal or the Romans won the war in which they were then engaged, the victor would not be content with sovereignty over Italy and Sicily.¹⁸⁷ If the speech is genuine, it was prophetic. But the Romans became involved in the affairs of the Greek koina long before they were able to end the war with Hannibal.

THE FIRST AND SECOND MACEDONIAN WARS: ROME, AITOLIA, AND PHILIP V, 215–196

The first Greek state with which the Romans made a treaty was the Aitolian koinon, but it was probably concluded, from the Roman perspective, for largely negative reasons: to break the power of Philip in Greece and the Adriatic, and to prevent the restoration of Demetrios of Pharos to Illyria.¹⁸⁸ It was only insofar as the Aitolians shared these aims, for entirely different reasons, that these strange bedfellows formed a partnership in 212 or 211.¹⁸⁹ The treaty, as recorded by Livy, committed the Aitolians to attacking Philip by land, while the Romans would support their efforts at sea. Akarnania was promised to the Aitolians, and both parties were effectively prohibited from making a separate peace with Philip.¹⁹⁰ A fragmentary copy of the inscribed treaty was found at Thyrrheion in Akarnania, and from it we learn important details: the Aitolians were free to act as their leaders (archontes) saw fit, and they were to gain possession of any poleis taken by the Romans in the war, while the Romans would control the territory (chōra) of such communities. The last complete clause of the inscription explicitly allows for expansion of the membership of the Aitolian koinon: “If any of these poleis revolt or advance against the Romans or the Aitolians, their men, cities, and territories shall be added to the Aitolian state [politeuma] for the sake of the Romans.”¹⁹¹ The promise of Akarnania and the recognized right of the Aitolians to expand their state, together with the Aitolians’ continued isolation from the Hellenic Alliance, made the conflict almost a continuation of the costly but ineffective Social War. The only significant change was the presence of the Romans, who nevertheless committed few resources to the war against Philip, focusing their energies instead on the much nearer and more immediately threatening enemy, Hannibal.

The Aitolians immediately set about attacking the most strategic and valuable places in Akarnania, winning control of Oiniadai and Nasos as well as Zakynthos.¹⁹² Philip’s attacks on Aitolian interests centered on Thessaly, which experienced almost constant hostilities. The Romans’ only significant intervention in the war came in 211/0, when by joint actions with the Aitolians the Opountian Lokrian coastal polis of Antikyra and the entire island of Aigina were seized. Although the Romans took the booty from these victories, the places themselves belonged to the Aitolians, who then sold Aigina to Attalos of Pergamon at the meager price of thirty talents.¹⁹³ The real price was perhaps higher, for in the autumn of 210 Attalos was elected stratēgos of the Aitolian koinon, an office that although honorific still signified a major development in the political alignments of the period.¹⁹⁴ Around the same time, the Aitolians persuaded the Spartans to join their alliance, which made Spartan opposition to the Achaian koinon explicit.¹⁹⁵ Like the Social War, this one inflicted significant collateral damage: over the next three years, Greeks who were not directly involved sought on two separate occasions to introduce negotiations to end the war but were unsuccessful.¹⁹⁶ Achaian military weakness was becoming costly even to Philip, who encouraged the Achaians to strengthen their own military, thereby reducing their dependence on his own forces.¹⁹⁷ It was through his Achaian supporter, Philopoimen, elected as stratēgos for the first time in 208/7, that a major reform of the Achaian military was undertaken.¹⁹⁸ This newly trained Achaian army inflicted a decisive defeat on the Spartans and their allies at Mantineia in 207, which proved the success of Philopoimen’s military reforms and encouraged a waxing desire for Achaian independence from Philip, reversing the policy of accommodation to Macedon that had been established by Aratos in order to save the Achaians from Kleomenes.¹⁹⁹ Philip’s delicate bargain of promoting Achaian military self-sufficiency to enable him to wage war against the Romans had backfired. It may have been his own realization of this fact that made him refuse to hand over the western garrisons to the Achaians as he had promised.²⁰⁰ The Achaian victory at Mantineia was of course also a defeat for Sparta’s Aitolian allies, who earlier in the same year met with two signal reverses at the hands of Philip: they lost Zakynthos again and saw their regional sanctuary at Thermon plundered by Macedonian troops for a second time.²⁰¹ Having lost almost everything they had gained in the previous six years, and despairing of substantial help from the Romans, who remained heavily committed to the Hannibalic War, the Aitolians made a separate peace with Philip in the autumn of 206.²⁰² It was probably shortly after this treaty was concluded that the Aitolians, apparently overwhelmed by both public and private debt, appointed the leading politicians Dorimachos and Skopas as nomographoi, apparently to revise the laws in the direction of debt relief.²⁰³ The war had clearly hit them hard; these measures suggest that their willingness to make peace with Philip in contravention of the terms of their alliance with the Romans was motivated at least in part by economic pressure. Nor were they to be coaxed from their new position of quietude by the Romans, who concluded peace with Philip in the following year at Phoinike, under Epeirote encouragement, with all the koina of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese on his side.²⁰⁴

Despite ongoing skirmishes, the broad-based coalition created by the Peace of Phoinike certainly facilitated the adoption of something like a common peace, but it also meant that as soon as any hostility flared up again, it was likely to consume the whole group in a single conflagration.²⁰⁵ So when the Romans, after hearing complaints from the Athenians, Attalos, and the Rhodians, resolved on another Macedonian War, Philip’s allies were faced with a new conflict.²⁰⁶ The Roman legates paid visits to the Aitolian and Achaian koina. We have no record of the Achaians’ response to the Roman embassy that visited Aigion in the spring of 200, but there are reasons to believe that it was divided, some remaining committed to the pro-Macedonian position that had prevailed since 235 while others saw alliance with Rome as a means of regaining independence from the Macedonian kings.²⁰⁷ The latter group must have gained credibility when in the autumn of 200 Philip presented himself to the Achaian assembly and offered to fight the war against Nabis and the Spartans for them on the condition that they provide troops for his garrisons at Oreus, Chalkis, and Corinth. The Achaians quickly realized that his intention was to prevent them from siding with the Romans in the war he was already waging against them and that these troops would act as hostages to that end; they politely declined and raised a citizen levy to battle against Nabis’s attacks on Achaian towns.²⁰⁸

The Roman army arrived in Greece in 199 under Flamininus to wage war against Philip. Hostilities unfolded around central Greece, with Thessaly bearing a particularly heavy burden, and Phokis, Lokris, and most of Euboia captured by the Romans by the spring of 198.²⁰⁹ The Aitolians had been persuaded to join the Romans in 199; in Livy’s portrayal their role was largely limited to plundering those territories still loyal to Philip. In the autumn of 198, while Flamininus was besieging Phokian Elateia, the Achaians received embassies from the Romans and their Greek allies. In an impassioned speech Aristainos, the Achaian stratēgos, reminded his assembled citizens of the Achaians’ vulnerability if they should refuse to join the Roman cause: the Roman and allied fleet would attack the northern shore of the Peloponnese, where the oldest cities of the koinon were situated, driving the population into the interior, while Nabis and his forces would attack them from the south. After several days of discussion and negotiation, the Achaians voted to abandon Philip and conclude alliances with the Romans, Attalos, and the Rhodians.²¹⁰

During the course of the war itself, the Achaians and Aitolians suffered only losses. Both Corinth and Argos were lost to Philip in the autumn of 198, and it was only when Nabis joined the Roman alliance in the spring of 197 that the threat from the south was temporarily neutralized.²¹¹ The Aitolians lost Lysimacheia, Keos, and several Thessalian cities that had been members of their koinon since the early third century, including Phthiotic Thebes, Larisa, and Pharsalos. But by that time the majority of central Greece was under the control of the Romans and their allies, including Boiotia, which joined with some reluctance.²¹² The war ended on the battlefield at Kynoskephalai in the summer of 197, where Philip was soundly defeated by the Romans.²¹³ The terms of the peace treaty were on the whole favorable to the victor, but the Achaians received Corinth, having to accept the temporary presence of a Roman garrison in the citadel, while the Aitolians, who were now punished for abandoning their early alliance with the Romans, were allowed to keep only Phthiotic Thebes of all the Thessalian communities that had been members of their koinon.²¹⁴ Despite the mistrust that prevailed between them, the Romans allowed the Aitolians to control Phokis and Lokris, thus representing a return to the earlier third century.²¹⁵ It is worth noting that Aitolian control of these regions was regarded as being compatible with the public proclamation at the Isthmian Games that the Phokians and Lokrians would be “free, without garrison or tribute, and subject to their own laws.”²¹⁶ “Their own laws” had become the laws of the Aitolian koinon.

The Boiotians had, during the war, remained loyal to Philip, but unanimous support for this pro-Macedonian position was lacking, and as soon as the Macedonian king was defeated at Kynoskephalai, the matter was violently disputed and brought a suspicion upon the Boiotians which the Romans were never able to dismiss. After the battle, the Boiotian koinon sent an embassy to Flamininus requesting the safe return of those Boiotian citizens who had fought on Philip’s side. The request was granted, but rather than undertake a political shift in favor of the Romans, they quickly appointed as boiotarch a man named Brachylles, who like his father and grandfather was a staunch Macedonian partisan.²¹⁷ The leaders of the pro-Roman faction within Boiotia, led by one Zeuxippos, were struck with anxiety, anticipating that they would be harshly treated when the Romans withdrew from Greece, and upon Flamininus’s advice sought the assistance of the Aitolian stratēgos Alexamenos in perpetrating the murder of Brachylles.²¹⁸ When the deed was done by some Italian and Aitolian assassins, Zeuxippos and his supporters were immediately suspected and fled into exile.²¹⁹ The Boiotians, however, assumed that the Romans had actually incited the murder. “Having neither men nor a leader for rebellion,” they simply began to rob and murder all the Roman soldiers they could find. A strategy that was initially motivated by political interest was soon driven by economics: brigandage against Roman soldiers was quite profitable. Enough men were killed to justify a Roman inquiry, in the course of which bodies were dredged up from the swamps of Kopaïs and “other crimes were found to have been committed at Akraiphia and Koroneia.”²²⁰ If the political dispute originated at Thebes, it is clear that it quickly occupied much of Boiotia. Outraged, Flamininus ordered the Boiotians to surrender those responsible and to pay a fine of five hundred talents, one talent for each of the Roman soldiers whom he claimed had been killed. To judge from the response, the order was issued to the koinon: “The cities made the excuse that no deed had been done by public resolution.”²²¹ The consul declared war and moved troops against Akraiphia and Koroneia, apparently regarded as hotbeds of anti-Roman activity; it may not be coincidental that Koroneia was home to the sanctuary of Athena Itonia, which had retained its regional and political significance since the battle of Koroneia in 446 and may thus have represented a strike against the koinon itself.²²² The Boiotians quickly sought to come to terms and after negotiations they agreed to pay the Romans a fine of thirty talents; their rebellious polity was, however, left entirely intact, a measure of Flamininus’s ideological commitment to the freedom of the Greeks.²²³

Since the beginning of the First Macedonian War, the foreign policies of both the Aitolian and the Achaian koina had undergone major changes. While the Aitolians persisted in their hostility to the Macedonian kingdom, their relations with Rome soured but were nevertheless still operable. In Achaia, an increasing commitment to the cause of Achaian independence from Macedon led to an alignment with the Romans. It was only in Boiotia that anti-Roman sentiment was strong enough to lead to direct hostilities. The treaty concluded after Kynoskephalai was on the whole advantageous to the koina of mainland Greece: although they lost many of their Thessalian possessions, the Aitolians regained control of Phokis and Lokris, while the Achaians at last were freed of Macedonian garrisons in the western portions of their territory, regained Corinth, and eagerly expected the departure of the Roman garrison troops from Acrocorinth. These changes were not, however, accompanied by institutional change or political reform. It was only the pressure of mounting debt in Aitolia that drove some legal reforms, the contours of which are entirely lost to us. There is little doubt that the Boiotian cities were experiencing similar problems, but we lack any evidence of a response at the level of the koinon. The relative stability of the koina of Achaia, Aitolia, and Boiotia in the midst of such massive upheavals was perhaps a testament, in Roman eyes, to the success of this form of state in the politically fragmented Greek mainland, for part of the settlement after Kynoskephalai involved the creation of a new koinon in Thessaly.²²⁴

THE FREEDOM OF THE GREEKS AND THE DISMANTLING OF REGIONAL COOPERATION, 196–167

The Achaians had successfully resisted the socioeconomic reforms championed by Spartan leaders since Agis and longed for by plenty of citizens within the Achaian koinon. But they had not solved a more immediate problem: by 196 the Achaian koinon incorporated virtually all the Peloponnese, with the notable exceptions of Elis, Sparta, Messene, and Argos, which were all aligned with one another in their hostility to Achaia. So when Flamininus, with authorization from the Roman senate as well as from the Hellenic Alliance, declared war against Nabis in 195, it was natural for the Achaians to be keen to help.²²⁵ The war, which left Nabis in power in Sparta but in a significantly weakened state, returned Argos to the Achaian koinon and placed the coastal towns of Lakonia under Achaian control.²²⁶ The Achaians were not, however, the only ones to feel discontented by the settlement of the Roman war against Nabis; for the Aitolians it was yet another piece of evidence to support their case that the Romans were trying to enslave the Greeks, not to liberate them. In response to the displeasure expressed by members of the Hellenic Alliance in the spring of 194, Flamininus announced his intention to evacuate the garrisons at Demetrias, Chalkis, and Acrocorinth, to hand the latter over to the Achaians, and to withdraw the entire Roman army from Greece.²²⁷

Not even this, however, was enough for the Aitolians, who began almost immediately to agitate for a war against the Romans. In the spring of 193 they sent ambassadors to those rulers whom they suspected would be most amenable to their plan: Nabis, Philip, and Antiochos III. The Spartan tyrant responded eagerly to their provocation and moved to regain the Lakonian coastal towns that had been stripped from him by Flamininus in 195. Philip had learned a harder lesson and was noncommittal. Antiochos, who had his own grievances against the Romans, was eventually won over to the Aitolian position and made an alliance with them for war against Rome.²²⁸ The Achaians, incensed by Nabis’s attacks on the Lakonian coastal towns and on their own land, voted once again to go to war. In a single campaign Nabis was defeated and driven back within the walls of the city, but it remained beyond their authority to strip him of his formal powers.²²⁹ While Flamininus was making the diplomatic rounds in Greece, trying to prevent widespread disaffection, the Aitolians heard reports at the Panaitolika of 192 from their own ambassador to Antiochos, one Thoas, who had recently returned and brought with him an ambassador of Antiochos, and they voted “to invite Antiochos to liberate Greece and to arbitrate between the Aitolians and Romans.”²³⁰ As they awaited the king’s arrival, according to Livy, in closed deliberations the apoklētoi of the Aitolian koinon resolved simultaneously to invade Demetrias and Chalkis, two of the old Macedonian fetters that had recently been evacuated by the Roman army, and Sparta itself.²³¹ They managed to capture Demetrias, but at Chalkis they had no success.²³² Nabis himself was of course no friend of the Romans, but the Aitolians plotted to assassinate him on the assumption that doing so would endear them to the Spartan populace and create in the city a certain ally for their war against Rome. After running the tyrant through with spears on an occasion when none expected hostility from this quarter, the small Aitolian force that had been sent to commit the murder turned to plundering Nabis’s palace and the city of Sparta itself. It quickly became apparent that their promise of liberating the city was sham, and those Aitolians who were not killed in Sparta took flight into Achaia, where they were captured and sold into slavery by the Achaian magistrates.²³³ Despite their coordinated opposition to the Aitolian assassins, the Spartans were in complete disarray following the sudden death of Nabis, and Philopoimen seized the opportunity to attach Sparta to the Achaian koinon.²³⁴ Although the Achaians had for decades sought the incorporation of Sparta into the koinon, the circumstances by which it was accomplished almost guaranteed that Philopoimen’s would be a pyrrhic victory.

Despite the limited success of their initial moves, the Aitolians pressed ahead with their war against the Romans and their Greek allies, placing most of their hope in the forces of Antiochos III, whom they persuaded to cross to Greece in the autumn of 192.²³⁵ He arrived with a disturbingly small force and the promise of a much larger one in the following spring; the Aitolians welcomed Antiochos into their general assembly and voted to prosecute hostilities with Antiochos as their leader.²³⁶ But few Greeks were persuaded by the claim that Antiochos had come to liberate them: the Chalkidians were resolutely unimpressed; the Boiotians remained neutral; the Achaians, instead of accepting the Aitolians’ overtures, declared war on them; and their erstwhile enemy Philip V offered to assist the Romans.²³⁷ The resistance effort ended in defeat at Thermopylai in April 191.²³⁸

The Aitolians had perhaps gone too far in their attempt to drive the Romans out of Greece to surrender the cause easily, enduring several sieges before realizing that they would have to resort to diplomacy with Rome in 190.²³⁹ A terrifying round of negotiations ended when L. Cornelius Scipio arrived in Greece and, with his sights set on the incomparably richer target of Asia, granted the Aitolians a truce of six months.²⁴⁰ Yet despite—or perhaps because of—the fear the Aitolians had experienced in their attempts to negotiate with the Romans, they were unable to remain at peace during the armistice. While Scipio and the Roman army were in Asia fighting Antiochos III in 189, the Aitolians intervened in a quarrel between Philip V and his former ally Amynander, who had taken refuge in Aitolian- controlled Ambrakia when his kingdom of Athamania was handed over to Philip.²⁴¹ Aitolian support for Amynander was regarded by the Romans as a rebellion not just against their ally Philip but against themselves as well.²⁴² Amynander sought to placate the Romans through diplomacy, but the Aitolians, having expelled some Macedonian garrisons for him, now regained some of the territories that they had incorporated into their koinon in the past—Amphilochia, Aperantia, and Dolopia.²⁴³ The areas were strategic, creating a buffer zone between the Aitolian heartland, Macedonia, and the newly independent Thessaly. If the Aitolians derived some sense of security from these victories, it must have vanished with the news that the Romans had defeated Antiochos at Magnesia and were now sending an army under Marcus Fulvius Nobilior to attack them for their violation of the armistice.²⁴⁴ Fulvius laid siege to Aitolian-controlled Ambrakia while the Achaians and Illyrians harried coastal Aitolia and the Macedonians plundered Amphilochia and Dolopia.²⁴⁵ The Aitolians, unable to defend themselves on so many fronts at once, sought to make peace. The terms that they finally accepted mandated a dramatic reduction of the territory of the koinon and a permanent prohibition on expansion: they were neither to retain nor to accept into their state in the future any of the communities that had been taken by the Romans or entered into alliance with them since 190, when Scipio had first crossed to Greece.²⁴⁶ When this condition was presented to the Aitolian council, there was some dispute, for “they endured with difficulty the proposal that cities that had been under their jurisdiction should be torn off as if from their own body.”²⁴⁷ They had, however, no choice but to agree, consenting also to pay a war indemnity of five hundred Euboian talents, to restore all Roman prisoners and deserters, to surrender their control over the island of Kephallenia, and to have the same friends and enemies as the Romans.²⁴⁸ In addition to major territorial losses, the Aitolians’ ability to conduct interstate relations on an independent basis was entirely hobbled, and the war indemnity imposed a major economic hardship. Although the Aitolian koinon was not formally dismantled by the Romans, it was almost entirely subordinated to them and can from this historical moment no longer be analyzed as an independent state.

Most other Greeks, and above all the Achaians, had had nothing but scorn for the Aitolians, and it was perhaps this attitude that prevented them from seeing the fate of the Aitolian koinon as a warning sign. While the Aitolians had been rushing headlong to their ruin, the Achaians continued their struggle to incorporate the entire Peloponnese within their koinon. The main stumbling block was Sparta. Despite having been integrated into the Achaian koinon in 192 by Philopoimen after the assassination of Nabis, opposition remained in Sparta and sparked a brief rebellion in 191 when news came that Philopoimen had not been elected stratēgos.²⁴⁹ The Spartans decided to involve the Romans in the winter of 191/0, establishing a pattern that persisted for nearly fifty years. They sought the restoration of hostages sent to Rome after Flamininus’s war against Nabis in 195, the restoration of Spartans exiled by the Achaians, and the restoration of their traditional control over the coastal towns of Lakonia.²⁵⁰ The hostages were returned by the Romans, but the other matters had more to do with Achaia than with Rome. Philopoimen, under some duress, agreed to allow the return of those Spartans who had been exiled by the Achaians.²⁵¹

With the Spartans somewhat mollified, it remained only for the Achaians to persuade the Elians and Messenians to join the koinon in order to achieve the goal of a politically united Peloponnese. While the Elians expressed openness to the possibility, the Messenians refused, and the stratēgos of 191/0, Diophanes of Megalopolis, led the Achaian army against the city. Before hostilities had progressed very far the Messenians surrendered themselves to Flamininus, who was at Chalkis again in an unofficial diplomatic role. In a bizarre sequence of decisions that highlights both the ambiguity of the Romans’ authority in Greece in this period and the distrust that prevailed among Greek states, Flamininus ordered the Achaians to withdraw and then ordered the Messenians to join the Achaian koinon.²⁵²

The pattern repeated itself in 189/8, when the Spartans again revolted from Achaia and handed their city over to Fulvius Nobilior. At his suggestion, both parties sent ambassadors to Rome, where it was resolved that “nothing should be changed with regard to the Lacedaemonians.”²⁵³ The Achaians took this to mean that they could deal with the Spartans as they would deal with any other member of their own polity, namely with complete autonomy. So Philopoimen, as stratēgos, led the Achaian army, its ranks swelled by pro-Achaian Lakedaimonian exiles, against Sparta in the spring of 188. As the force reached the city, the exiles attacked their compatriots, and some seventeen Spartans, held responsible for the revolt, were killed in a riotous encounter; on the following day an additional sixty-three were killed after a brief trial before some sort of Achaian tribunal. The Achaians demanded that the Spartans tear down their city wall and expel their mercenaries and those helots who had been liberated by the tyrants. Finally, they revoked the ancestral Lykourgan constitution and replaced the Spartan with Achaian laws.²⁵⁴ If this seemed to Philopoimen and his supporters like a final settlement of the Spartan issue, they were mistaken. The Achaians had been unable to eradicate all opposition within Sparta, and those who still sought independence attempted to accomplish it by Roman intervention. In a series of embassies and letters, complaints were lodged with the Romans about the cruelty of the Achaians’ behavior, requests were made by exiled Spartans for restoration, rebukes were sent from Rome to the Achaians, and the Achaians themselves became divided over the question of how they should respond to ostensible Roman requests. The emergence of this internal rift was perhaps more damaging to the Achaian koinon than anything else in this period, for it created political opportunities by which Achaian independence was eventually undermined.²⁵⁵ The full cost of Philopoimen’s decision to align the Achaians with Rome in order to secure their independence from Macedon was now being revealed. The Romans expected that their resolutions would be followed, but doing so sometimes required the Achaians to violate their own laws and reverse their own ratified decisions. They had indeed achieved independence from Macedon but were quickly becoming subordinated to the Romans.²⁵⁶

Although the Achaians had finally succeeded in creating a single state from the complex political mosaic of the Peloponnese, they did not succeed at quelling all disaffection among their newest members. Messene revolted in 183 in circumstances that are largely lost to us but was brought back into the koinon in the following year, in the course of which the great Achaian leader Philopoimen died.²⁵⁷ Just as the Messenian War was being resolved, internal unrest at Sparta led to another temporary secession from the Achaian koinon. When Sparta’s leaders sought to restore it, the major stumbling block in negotiations was the problem of how to handle a group of pro-Achaian Spartans who had been exiled when the city first revolted from the Achaian koinon in 189/8 and had been restored by the Achaians after the massacre of Spartan rebels at Kompasion in 188, but who subsequently sent embassies to Rome complaining of Achaian behavior and were therefore viewed by the Achaians as ungrateful.²⁵⁸ Sparta was readmitted when its citizens agreed to bring back from exile those Spartans who “had not been guilty of any ingratitude to the ethnos of the Achaians.” The decision was inscribed on a stele and had the binding force of law.²⁵⁹

The issue is highlighted by Polybios, for in his analysis it led to a deepening of the internal political rift in Achaia, which had disastrous results: his own father, Lykortas, as stratēgos of the koinon in 182, advocated and achieved the reintroduction of Sparta and the restoration only of those exiles who had not shown ingratitude to the Achaians, but in early 180 the Achaian council and assembly were called to a meeting to discuss a letter from the Roman senate requesting the restoration of all the exiles. Lykortas, according to Polybios, exhorted the Achaians to explain to the Romans that accommodating their request was impossible, for doing so would “violate our oaths, our laws, our stelai, which hold together our common polity.”²⁶⁰ His political opponents Kallikrates and Hyperbatos, however, argued that “neither law nor stele nor anything else is more compelling” than the Romans’ request. The resolution of the debate is unclear, but Kallikrates went to Rome, exposed the political fault lines in Achaia, and urged the senate to express their disapproval of those Achaian leaders who valued their own laws and treaties as more binding than the will of the Romans. The Roman response was to ask the Achaians, once again, to restore the exiles; but this time the request was accompanied by letters to Aitolians, Epeirotes, Athenians, Boiotians, and Akarnanians, apparently requesting their assistance in putting pressure on the Achaians to comply with their demand.²⁶¹ The Romans’ communication with the Achaians apparently also praised Kallikrates, according to Polybios increasing the esteem in which the Achaians held him; in 180/79 Kallikrates served as stratēgos of the Achaians and effected the return not only of the Spartan but also of the Achaian exiles.²⁶² Polybios charges Kallikrates with being the “instigator of great evils for all the Greeks, but especially for the Achaians” and with ushering in a “turn for the worse” in Achaia at the very moment when it had, at least in territorial terms, reached its greatest strength.²⁶³ That assessment is clearly colored by a strong bias, and there is no doubt that Achaian internal affairs, as well as Achaian relations with Rome, had been flirting with disaster for at least a decade.²⁶⁴ Assessing the immediate impact is, however, extremely difficult, for the texts of both Polybios and Livy are lacunose at this crucial juncture, and we can discern little of what happened in Achaia again until 174.

We know, however, that in the intervening years Philip V died and was succeeded by his son Perseus, whose energetic attempts to regain the power and resources of the Macedonian kingdom before his father’s defeat at Kynoskephalai had attracted the hostility and suspicion of the Romans. Among other strategies, Perseus courted the favor of the Greeks of the mainland, but in this he had mixed success: by 174 the Achaians and Athenians were staunchly opposed to him, but it was perhaps in the following year that the Boiotian koinon concluded an alliance with Perseus, a move that brought about the complete destruction of the oldest koinon in the Greek world.²⁶⁵ The Romans, having declared war on Perseus in 172, sent legates to Greece in advance of their forces to muster support for their cause. While in Thessaly, they received a number of envoys from the Boiotians, anxious about the Roman response to their alliance with Perseus. According to Polybios, ambassadors came from Thespiai, Chaironeia, Lebadeia, and several other cities seeking to hand their individual cities over to the Romans, while one Ismenias, a leader in the pro-Macedonian politics of Boiotia, sought “in accordance with the koinon to place all the poleis in Boiotia together at the discretion of the legates.”²⁶⁶ The Roman legates, in Polybios’s words, thought it “most suitable to break up the Boiotians into their constituent poleis,” so they neglected Ismenias and received the other ambassadors warmly.²⁶⁷

The Romans had certainly learned from the endless internal disputes of the Achaians, their dodges and feints over the issue of the Spartan exiles, that in a large and complex state like one of the Hellenistic koina, unanimity of opinion, and therefore loyal allegiance to Rome, was exceedingly difficult to secure. Fragmentation would create a far more tractable political situation for the Romans. Word of the legates’ position circulated in Boiotia, and a violent dispute arose over whether they should effectively dismantle their own state and present themselves to the Romans as individual cities or whether they ought to remain loyal to the Macedonian alliance and accept a war with Rome.²⁶⁸ Opinion gradually shifted toward making an alliance with the Romans, and in a final act of communal decision making the Boiotians resolved on a policy that they knew would lead directly to the dissolution of their koinon. Those leaders who had effected the Macedonian alliance were ordered to go to the Roman legates to explain and defend their actions, and the Boiotians in a formal assembly tasked their magistrates with securing an alliance with the Romans.²⁶⁹ Immediately thereafter, it appears that the cities began acting individually: we learn that the Thebans sent envoys to the legates to hand their city over and voted to recall those Thebans who had been exiled for their pro-Roman sympathies.²⁷⁰ The legates received the envoys from Thebes and other cities “and exhorted them immediately to send embassies from the individual poleis to Rome, each one handing itself over to their care individually. . . . Everything proceeded according to their preference, this being to dissolve the Boiotian ethnos and weaken the goodwill of the masses toward the house of Macedon.”²⁷¹ Polybios, a proud citizen of the Achaian koinon that later chose to fight to utter destruction rather than accept dissolution by fragmentation, had nothing but scorn for the Boiotians, who “having protected for a long time their common polity [koinē sympoliteia]” allowed the “Boiotian ethnos [to be] destroyed and dispersed among the several poleis.”²⁷²

Unanimity was, however, evidently lacking in the vote that went in favor of a Roman alliance and the dissolution of the koinon. Perseus learned that some Boiotian cities were still favorably disposed toward him and sent an ambassador to Koroneia, Thisbe, and Haliartos, encouraging them to remain loyal, and they sought his protection against the powerful pressure being exerted by the Thebans to support the shift in favor of Rome.²⁷³ Although Perseus was unable to offer these cities military aid, they continued to resist.²⁷⁴ Haliartos was besieged in 171 by Roman and Boiotian pro-Roman forces; the city was captured and razed to the ground, its surviving citizens, some twenty-five hundred individuals, sold into slavery.²⁷⁵ The siege and destruction of Haliartos put an end to active anti-Roman sentiment in Boiotia and informed the inhabitants of the region by its brutality and sheer efficacy that their ancient koinon, as an autonomous state, had been permanently dismantled.²⁷⁶ This meant that the Boiotian poleis dealt on an individual basis with all foreign states as they did with the Romans, and there was no longer either instrument for joint decision making or regional laws that bound every Boiotian polis and its citizens alike. This meant, in short, political fragmentation and weakness, which the Romans had learned, especially from their experience with the Achaian koinon since 196, was most advantageous to them.

The Achaians must have been watching these events carefully. At the beginning of the Romans’ war against Perseus, they had bristled at Roman behavior that carried hints of a desire to diminish the authority of the Achaian koinon, if not to dismantle it entirely, but after the defeat of Perseus at the battle of Pydna every caution was taken to avoid meeting a fate like the Boiotians’.²⁷⁷ The Achaians now readily complied with a Roman request for a garrison force to hold Chalkis against Macedonian seizure until the arrival of the Roman army in the following spring.²⁷⁸ Two years later, after the destruction of Haliartos but while the Romans’ war against Perseus was still in full swing, Roman legates toured Greece with the object of stemming defections to Perseus and announcing the recent senatorial decree that “no one should contribute anything to Roman officials for the war except what the senate had approved.”²⁷⁹ In the Peloponnese the legates visited numerous individual cities, in each place announcing that they knew who was withdrawing from politics and who remained active, making clear that the former were suspected of using their withdrawal to mask anti-Roman sentiments.²⁸⁰ The decision to visit individual cities was, strictly speaking, unnecessary, since the Romans should have interacted only with the Achaian koinon itself rather than its member states, which had no independent authority to conduct relations with foreign states. It is almost certain, particularly in the aftermath of Haliartos, that the Romans by this means sought if not to encourage secession then at least to express their preference for dealing with the poleis as individual states rather than as members of a koinon.²⁸¹

According to Polybios, he himself, along with his father, Lykortas, and their supporter Archon, were suspected of anti-Roman sentiments when the legates came before a meeting of the Achaian assembly in 170, but with no pretext for making an accusation they kept quiet.²⁸² Similar suspicions arose when the legates subsequently visited Aitolia and Akarnania.²⁸³ If indeed the Romans suspected Archon and his supporters in 170, the Achaians were extraordinarily bold to elect him stratēgos for 170/69, from which position he took what might be described as a soft pro-Roman policy.²⁸⁴ After Pydna, the Achaians continued to wish to assert their authority to act as a fully autonomous state by conducting independent relations with foreign powers.²⁸⁵ At the same time, the Romans persisted in their practice of visiting multiple cities in the koinon whenever legations took them to the Peloponnese, a not too subtle expression of mistrust and a stubborn preference to place political authority where local laws did not recognize it.²⁸⁶ Suspicions of anti-Roman activity remained high throughout Greece, and the Romans conducted a series of inquiries in Aitolia, Akarnania, Epeiros, and Boiotia; names were provided, frequently by political enemies, and men were sent to Rome to stand trial.²⁸⁷ In Achaia they allowed Kallikrates, the politician who had distinguished himself by his willingness to accuse his countrymen to the Romans, to provide the names of all those Achaians under suspicion. He provided a thousand names, including Polybios himself, and they were all deported to Italy, where instead of standing trial they lived as de facto hostages for the good behavior of the Achaian koinon.²⁸⁸

Yet all this was secondary to the main object of the Romans’ presence in Greece in the early 160s: to put an end to the Macedonian threat. And their solution, in the aftermath of their victory on the battlefield at Pydna, reveals indirectly the remarkable strength of the koinon as a form of state in Hellenistic Greece. The Romans had forcibly extinguished the political authority of the Macedonian kingship, and in its place they fostered four Macedonian republics. And as they did so, they put in place prohibitions that would prevent these small Macedonian states from forming a state like a koinon: not only were they subordinated to Rome in all their foreign affairs but they were prohibited from trading, intermarrying, or owning land in the other states, all distinctive practices of the koinon as a kind of state since at least the early fourth century, and which, as we shall see below (chapter 5), were central to its success.²⁸⁹ The Romans’ efforts to prevent the Macedonian kingdom from becoming a Macedonian koinon in 167 bespeaks the power and efficacy of the koinon as a state in the Hellenistic world. But it was now a dying breed in mainland Greece.

BARGAINING WITH ROME, THE STRUGGLE FOR SPARTA, AND THE END OF THE ACHAIAN KOINON, 167–146

The negotiations that took place between the Romans and Achaians throughout the course of the Third Macedonian War, including their surrender of hostages, carved out a space within which the Romans were apparently willing to allow the Achaian koinon to continue to function. Internally, the Achaians remained divided over the question of Roman involvement in their affairs.²⁹⁰ The loss of the continuous narratives of both Polybios and Livy after 167 makes a detailed reconstruction of the history of this period impossible, but several episodes attest to the autonomy of the koinon, the lingering uncertainty on the part of both the Achaians and the Romans over the precise role the Romans should play in Achaian affairs, and the willingness of competing political agents in Achaia to exploit that uncertainty to further their own ends.

The eruption of a long-standing boundary dispute between Megalopolis and Sparta boiled over around 164, and both parties appealed to the Romans, who charged the legates of 163 with the task.²⁹¹ The Roman decision, effected as a third-party arbitration, was rejected by the Spartans.²⁹² Despite the fact that this was tantamount to a violation of Achaian laws, the koinon responded not with violence but rather with a second round of arbitration, in accordance with “the laws of the Achaians,” this time between the koinon itself and Sparta.²⁹³ The purpose of this legally required recourse to arbitration is made explicit in an inscription set up at Olympia: “so that the Achaians, having a democratic constitution and being in agreement amongst themselves, may continue for all time to live in peace and good order.”²⁹⁴ The process by which the disputes between Megalopolis, Sparta, and the Achaian koinon were resolved demonstrates that the Achaians were not only fully autonomous in the aftermath of the Romans’ war against Perseus but also that they continued to refine their institutions in the interests of achieving internal peace and civic order.

The Romans’ settlement of Greece after Pydna instigated a series of local conflicts, in which we nevertheless find the Romans continuing to recognize and uphold Achaian autonomy. Two episodes illustrate the point. The first is a dispute between the Athenians and Achaians that was taken to Rome in 159/8 over the right of the Delians, who had been expelled when the Romans handed their island over to the Athenians in 166 and given citizenship in Achaia, to sue Athenians for loss of property in accordance with an existing symbolon between Athens and Achaia. The Romans found that “all arrangements made about the Delians by the Achaians according to their laws were valid,” which amounts to an affirmation of the Delians’ right as Achaian citizens to be covered by the existing Achaian-Athenian symbolon.²⁹⁵ The Romans continued to uphold Achaian autonomy, but the episode must have soured Achaian-Athenian relations. They deteriorated further still when the Achaians responded to a call for help from the city of Oropos sometime shortly after 160. Oropos had been made independent when the Boiotian koinon was dismantled in 171, but for reasons that are unclear the Athenians invaded and sacked the city.²⁹⁶ Outraged by this treatment, the Oropians sought redress from the Romans, who merely asked Sikyon, a member of the Achaian koinon, to arbitrate. When the Athenians balked at the fine imposed by the arbitrators and perpetrated further violence, it appears from an honorific decree of Oropos (T46) that the Achaians swung into action to restore the hapless Oropians to their city.²⁹⁷ Again we see the Achaian koinon acting with full autonomy in relation to other states, with evident awareness of the Romans. In short, although our evidence for the period after 167 is scant, it all points to a fully autonomous Achaian koinon. Nothing, then, seems to have prepared the Achaians for the overwhelmingly violent Roman response to a flare-up of the old quarrel between them and the Spartans.

Despite those long-standing tensions, Spartan commitment to the koinon must have appeared serious in 151/0, for in that year a Spartan, Menalkidas, was elected to the office of stratēgos for the first—and last—time in Achaian history.²⁹⁸ With historical hindsight it is clear that the appointment exacerbated those tensions rather than soothing them. When Menalkidas laid down his office, he was accused by Kallikrates of having sought permission from the Romans for Sparta to secede from the koinon.²⁹⁹ When precisely this happened is unclear, but it must have predated 150.³⁰⁰ It is described by Pausanias as a capital charge, but Menalkidas was acquitted despite the hostility of most Achaians to his case. In order to deflect the Achaian suspicions that were incited by this acquittal, Diaios encouraged them to prosecute Spartan dissidents, those implicated in seeking Roman support for their cause in the still-simmering boundary dispute with Megalopolis. Diaios levied the Achaian army to make war “not on Sparta itself, but on those who were disturbing it.”³⁰¹ He declared twenty-four leading Spartan citizens guilty of what he claimed was a capital crime, and the Spartans chose to exile them in an effort to prevent a war with Achaia. Both sides sent ambassadors to Rome, the Achaians represented by Diaios and Kallikrates (who died en route), the Spartans by Menalkidas, the erstwhile Achaian stratēgos. According to Pausanias, the Romans promised to send an arbitrator, but he was slow to arrive, so the ambassadors returned, and each told his home audience what it wanted to hear: the Achaians that they had been given permission to bring the Spartans under complete subjection; the Spartans that they had been separated from the koinon.³⁰²

Acting on this notion, the Achaians proceeded to levy their army against Sparta, now under the leadership of the stratēgos Damokritos, who ignored the stay of attack ordered by Roman envoys.³⁰³ Damokritos won a victory in pitched battle against the Spartans but refused to attempt a siege of the city. For that failure he was fined by the Achaians, and his successor, Diaios of Megalopolis, appears to have persecuted those in Achaia whom he believed to have pro-Spartan sympathies.³⁰⁴ In the spring or summer of 147 the Roman legate L. Aurelius Orestes, who had been promised in 149 to arbitrate in the dispute between Achaia and Sparta, finally arrived in Corinth and summoned “those who held office in each city.”³⁰⁵ Orestes reported the decision of the Roman senate that Sparta, Corinth, Argos, Herakleia Trachinia, and Arkadian Orchomenos were to be immediately released from the synedrion of the Achaians on the grounds that they were not ethnically Achaian and had joined the koinon relatively recently.³⁰⁶ This announcement was clearly a tremendous shock, for Sparta had been the only member polis in open dissent. After a hastily summoned assembly meeting, the Achaians arrested and imprisoned all the Spartans they could seize in Corinth. According to some sources, which Polybios regarded as exaggerated, Orestes and his colleagues themselves faced considerable personal danger, and their complaints to the senate on this score only further entrenched Roman hostility to the Achaians.³⁰⁷

In the autumn of 147, Diaios was succeeded as stratēgos by the resolutely anti-Roman Kritolaos. The Romans sent another embassy to the Achaians, with orders, according to Polybios, to deliver a mild reproof and to ask the Achaians to hold those directly responsible for mistreatment of the Roman ambassadors accountable for their crimes. Whether in fact they did not “wish to tear the [Achaian] ethnos asunder” at this point is unclear; Polybios finds himself in the awkward position of being an Achaian apologist for Rome, blaming his countrymen for allowing themselves to be misled by “the worst men, hated by the gods, bringing ruin upon the ethnos.”³⁰⁸ The Roman ambassadors sought to negotiate an end to the war between Achaia and Sparta, which was derailed by Kritolaos’s refusal to cooperate.³⁰⁹ That small war had been fully subsumed by a much larger one. Kritolaos spent the winter of 147/6 drumming up support for war against Rome and proposing financial measures that would enable the Achaians to fund the war that now appeared inevitable.³¹⁰

By the spring of 146, Achaian opposition to Rome was widespread. Despite an apparently mollifying embassy from the Romans, war was declared by the Achaians, “in word against the Spartans, but in reality against the Romans.”³¹¹ At the behest of Kritolaos, who stood to gain all as the current stratēgos, the Achaians voted extraordinary and complete authority to those who were elected as stratēgoi.³¹² As the conflict shifted away from Sparta and toward Rome, the Achaians were joined by numerous other Greek cities.³¹³ Direct hostilities ensued so quickly, however, that if there was a formal alliance, it never had time to organize an effective defense. A Roman army was already present in Macedonia under the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, having finally quelled the revolt of Andriskos, a claimant to the Macedonian throne. Metellus, motivated by a desire to end the war before his successor, Mummius, should arrive, encouraged the Achaians to release Sparta and the other cities named by Orestes, and went himself to Herakleia Trachinia, which was under siege by Kritolaos and the Achaian army for its willingness to abandon the koinon after Orestes’ embassy declared that it should be independent. As the Roman army descended across the Spercheios Valley, Kritolaos led the Achaians in flight to Skarpheia in Lokris, where he himself died and the Achaians suffered a massive defeat.³¹⁴ A full military levy was raised throughout Achaia, with orders to muster at Corinth. The peace overtures offered by Metellus were refused.³¹⁵ So the war with Achaia became the prize of Mummius, who mustered his massive force at Corinth and overwhelmed the Achaian defenders. The city was abandoned by its inhabitants and burned to the ground. The men who remained were killed; the women and children, sold into slavery. Ancient works of art, many of them sacred, were plundered and pillaged.³¹⁶ The walls of all those cities that had defied the Roman decrees were destroyed. Democracies were replaced by oligarchies. And just as they did when they sundered the Macedonian kingdom into four distinct republics, the Romans undermined the material foundations of political cooperation by making property ownership outside one’s own polis illegal. Finally, not only the Achaian koinon but all ethnic confederacies throughout Greece were henceforth strictly prohibited.³¹⁷

1. Diod. Sic. 18.8.2–7; Plut. Alex. 49.14. Mendels 1984: 130 discusses the strategic importance of Oiniadai. Foundation of Athenian cleruchy on Samos: Isoc. 15.11; Dem. 15.9–10; Diod. Sic. 18.18.9; Nep. Timoth. 1.2. Cf. Jehne 1994: 241–43.

2. Diod. Sic. 18.9.5.

3. Aim: Diod. Sic. 18.9.5, 10.2. Participants: Diod. Sic. 18.10.5, 11.1–2.

4. Diod. Sic. 18.11.3–5.

5. Melitaia: Diod. Sic. 18.15.1–7. Naval defeats: Diod. Sic. 18.15.8–9; Plut. Demetr. 11.4; Marm.Par. (IG XII.5.444 l. 110). Krannon: Diod. Sic. 18.16.4–17.5.

6. Diod. Sic. 18.17.8.

7. Diod. Sic. 18.18.1–6. Moretti 1967–76: I.8 l. 14; Habicht 1997: 77.

8. Invasion: Diod. Sic. 18.24.1–5. Thessaly: Simpson 1958: 359 implies that they were motivated only by stubborn opposition to those in power in Macedon; but the Aitolian occupation of the Parnassos region by about 301 (to be discussed below) does require some background explanation. The two goals are not mutually exclusive. Citizen forces: Diod. Sic. 18.38.5–6.

9. Declaration: Diod. Sic. 18.56.1–8. Aitolian support for Polyperchon: Diod. Sic. 19.35.2, 52.6, 53.1.

10. Declaration: Diod. Sic. 19.61.1–3; Justin 15.1.3. Alliance with Aitolia: Diod. Sic. 19.66.2. Cf. Simpson 1958: 359.

11. Diod. Sic. 19.53.2; Marm.Par. (IG XII.5.444) l. 117).

12. Hatred: Paus. 9.7.2. Complaints: Diod. Sic. 19.61.2; Justin 51.3.

13. Paus. 9.7.1. The importance of the message sent to the Peloponnesian cities has been stressed by Bearzot 1997. The enthusiasm of the Athenians for the project is to be explained in part by the fact that by this time Cassander had already wooed Athens away from Polyperchon (Diod. Sic. 18.74.3).

14. Knoepfler 2001c: 12.

15. Diod. Sic. 18.3–4. The comment is made by way of explanation for Boiotia’s opposition to Athens in the Lamian War, for which see also Paus. 1.25.4. Boiotian opposition is highlighted by Knoepfler 2001c: 12.

16. Contra Beloch 1912–27: IV.2.427; Gullath 1982: 112. Contributions to the rebuilding effort were made by several kings and communities of mainland Greece and the Aegean: IG VII.2419.

17. Stasis at Dyme: Diod. Sic. 19.66.2–6. Antigonid victory: Diod. Sic. 19.74.1–2.

18. Polyb. 2.41.11.

19. Agrinion: Diod. Sic. 19.67.3–5, 68.1. It may be in connection with this attack that we have an epigram, found at Palairos, honoring Deinias the son of Learchos, who died defending the Akarnanians against the “hubris of the Aitolians”: Peek 1955: I.1458 (IG IX.1² 462; Moretti 1967–76: II.89).

20. Invasion: Diod. Sic. 19.74.3–6, 75.6 with Billows 1990: 122 n. 52.

21. Diod. Sic. 19.77.4–6, 78.3.

22. Diod. Sic. 19.78.3–5, 20.100.6. Ptolemaios went on to dislodge Cassander’s forces from the cities of Phokis and from Lokrian Opous. It is likely that he received Boiotian assistance at least for the latter campaign, to judge from a decree set up at Delphi to honor one Peisis of Thespiai for having liberated Opous: FDelph III.4.463 = Moretti 1967–76: II.71; cf. Flacelière 1937: 71–72.

23. Holleaux 1885, using the assumption to date the four aphedriate dedications that he found at the Ptoion (T16–19) to the period 312–304, which has now been proved too early. (See comm. ad locum.) Cf. Prandi 1988: 150, relying heavily on Paus. 9.3.6, which in fact allows no chronological specificity. The problems with the argument are discussed in detail by Knoepfler 2001c: 13–16.

24. Ptolemaic garrisons: Diod. Sic. 20.37.1–2.

25. Aitolian efforts: Diod. Sic. 20.99.3; Athenian efforts: Plut. Dem. 22.8. The claim of Aitolian diplomatic activity at Rhodes, if true, may provide some of the background to the otherwise surprisingly sudden prominence of the Aitolians in central Greece (particularly Phokis and Thessaly) after 301. See Mendels 1984: 178–79.

26. Diod. Sic. 20.100.6.

27. Chalkis: Diod. Sic. 20.100.6. Oropos: Moretti 1967–76: I.8 ll. 13–14; Habicht 1997: 77.

28. Diod. Sic. 20.100.6; Plut. Dem. 23.3.

29. Diod. Sic. 20.100.6.

30. Sikyon now became known for a brief period as Demetrias: Diod. Sic. 20.102; Paus. 2.7.1; Str. 8.6.25; Thür 1995. Corinth, Achaian Boura, Arkadian Skyros, and Orchomenos: Diod. Sic. 20.103.

31. Flacelière 1930 and 1937: 49–91, esp. 57–68; Gullath 1982: 195–96. Knoepfler 2007a has proposed a later date for this treaty, ca. 274–272, on the grounds of his restoration of line 4, which would require the existence of a statue of Aitolia, known to have been erected at Thermon only after 279. If this is correct, we would need to find another way to explain the coordination between Boiotia and Aitolia in the war against Demetrios in 293 (in which the Aitolians rendered admittedly little material assistance to the Boiotians) and Aitolian support for the Boiotians in the matter of the Athenian inscription accompanying the rededication of Persian shields at Thermon ca. 291 (on which see below).

32. FDelph III.4.399 (SEG 17.228). See above, p. 89.

33. Plut. Demetr. 36–37 and 39.1, Pyrrh. 7.2; Justin 16.1.18–19.

34. Plut. Demetr. 39.2, 5 (on the leading role of Peisis of Thespiai in orchestrating and executing the revolt); Polyaenus, Strat. 4.7.11. Cf. Roesch 1982: 432–33.

35. Plut. Demetr. 39.4, Pyrrh. 7.3

36. Plut. Demetr. 13.1–3.

37. See above, p. 85. The shields were apparently left hanging, and the Thebans made their second appeal to have them removed ca. 291, hoping for support from the Aitolians.

38. Douris of Samos FGrHist 76 F 13 apud Ath. 6.253b–f. Habicht 1970: 232–33; Scholten 2000: 22 with n. 90.

39. Habicht 1970: 34–44 and 1997: 92–94.

40. Plut. Demetr. 40.7–8 with Kuhn 2006: 269–72.

41. Plut. Demetr. 41.1–3, Pyrrh. 7.4–10; Flacelière 1937: 76–78. The treaty has been fairly recently discovered, but the stone is highly fragmentary, and the text has been heavily restored: Lefèvre 1998 (SEG 48.588).

42. Plut. Demetr. 46.1.

43. Roesch 1982: 435–39; Knoepfler 2001c: 15–19, using epigraphic evidence to support the late date for reintegration. Ma 2008: 84 suggests that the lion monument built atop the burial mound for the Theban dead at Chaironeia was built either when Cassander refounded Thebes or now, when the city rejoined the koinon. A date of 287 seems to me more likely, in that the monument was erected at Chaironeia and required the consent of the other Boiotians. It would be a splendid means for the Thebans to reestablish themselves as members of the koinon (they suffered heavily in the Boiotian attempt to defeat the Macedonians), in addition to the monument’s immediate role in commemorating the battle itself.

44. The districts in general are discussed below, pp. 370–84; on the aphedriates, see below, pp. 221–24.

45. Cf. Roesch 1979: 246.

46. Justin 24.1.1–2.

47. Justin 24.1.2–4.

48. Justin 24.1.7.

49. Paus. 10.20.9; Scholten 2000: 24. See below, p. 360.

50. Polyb. 2.41.10; cf. 9.29.5–6.

51. Polyb. 2.41.1, 11–12; cf. Str. 8.7.1.

52. Paus. 7.18.6; cf. F. W. Walbank 1957–79: I.233.

53. Paus. 10.3.4 (Phokian participation); IG VII.2537 = Moretti 1967–76: I.68 (Boiotian participation); Syll.³ 408 (Athenian participation). Paus. 10.19.5–23.14 is the fullest ancient narrative. The Aitolian defense of Delphi is treated in full by Flacelière 1937: 93–112; Nachtergael 1977: 137–75; Scholten 2000: 31–37.

54. The phrase is Scholten’s (2000: 29–58 passim). The status of Ozolian Lokris relative to Aitolia is difficult to determine, but it appears to have enjoyed greater independence than Herakleia did: IG IX.1² 1.12.

55. For the problems with this approach, and detailed analysis of the documents, see Grainger 1995: 318–20; Lefèvre 1995; Scholten 2000: 55, 235–52.

56. Scholten 2000: 240–43.

57. See below, p. 360.

58. Syll.³ 398.

59. Seven recognition decrees survive: Syll.³ 408 (Athens) and 402 with Robert 1933: 535–37 (Chios); FDelph III.1.481 (a Kykladic island), III.1.482 (Tenos), III.1.483 (Smyrna); Delph. inv. 6377 + 2872 (Abdera) and 6203 (unknown origin). The Smyrna decree must be slightly later than the first four, which all date to 246/5: Elwyn 1990. See Flacelière 1937: 133–38; Nachtergael 1977: 71–73 (for the date of the first four decrees), 435–37; Champion 1995.

60. Diog. Laert. 2.141; Nachtergael 1977: 167–68 with references to previous scholarship.

61. The sanctuary is discussed in greater detail below, pp. 199–200. T34, the only surviving decree of the koinon from the fourth century, was found at Aigion and is generally thought to have been set up in the Hamarion.

62. Polyb. 2.41.13–15.

63. Haussoulier 1917: 157; F. W. Walbank 1984a: 244; Rizakis 1995: 308 and 2008a: 146–47 (Leontion), 227 (Aigeira), 258 (Pellene).

64. Pyrrhos: Plut. Pyrrh. 26.14–24; Justin 25.4.4–7. Athenian alliance: IG II² 686–87 (Syll.³ 434–35; Staatsverträge III.476). Achaian embassy and participation: l. 24. Cf. Heinen 1972: 117–42; Knoepfler 1993b.

65. Heinen 1972: 95–212, esp. 167–81.

66. Klaffenbach 1955; see comm. to T57.

67. Diod. Sic. 19.67.3–68.1.

68. Isopoliteia decrees: SEG 2.258 + SEG 18.245 (Chios = FDelph III.3.214 + BCH 23 [1959]: 435 with BE 77.231, 247/6?); possibly Syll.³ 472 = Staatsverträge III.495 (isopoliteia between Phigaleia and Messene, shortly before 240, brokered by Aitolians, may imply existing isopoliteia between Messene and Aitolia, though ll. 19 and 25 speak only of philia; cf. Polyb. 4.6.11, ca. 220, for the claim that there existed “for a long time” a symmachia between Messene and the Aitolians). Kephallenia is perhaps to be added to this list: Flacelière 1937: 284 with n. 3.

69. See below, pp. 284–89.

70. Plut. Arat. 4.1–9.3; Paus. 2.8.3.

71. Plut. Arat. 9.4–5; Paus. 2.8.3.

72. Plut. Arat. 9.6–7; cf. Polyb. 2.43.3. The emphasis on homonoia as an Achaian virtue is especially Polybian; see Champion 2004: 122–29.

73. Polyb. 10.22.2; cf. Plut. Arat. 5.1, Philop. 1.3–4; Paus. 8.49.2, all with slight variations on the names. On the installation of Aristodemos see Paus. 8.27.11.

74. Plut. Arat. 12.1–14.4; Cic. De off. 2.23, 81–82. The attack may have been undertaken as an obligation to Ptolemy II, who had given Aratos forty talents (of 150 promised) to settle the demands of the returning Sikyonian exiles; might the attack on Corinth have been the condition for payment of the balance? The episode is cited by Bringmann 2001: 206 as an example of kings’ inability to meet all their financial obligations at once. F. W. Walbank 1984a: 247–48 more optimistically (and politically) supposes that Ptolemy sought a demonstration of Aratos’s good faith before the gift would be paid out in full.

75. The motive of the Achaian attack on Aitolia is said to have been retribution for an Aitolian attack on Sikyon before 251: Plut. Arat. 4.1. The date of that attack is unclear, so interpretation is difficult. See Will 1979–82: I.316; Buraselis 1982: 171–72; Urban 1979: 14–16 with F. W. Walbank 1984a: 147; Scholten 2000: 85–86. Invasion of Boiotia: Plut. Arat. 16.1; Polyb. 20.4.5.

76. Polyb. 20.5.2. Boiotian membership in the Aitolian koinon did not entail the loss of Opous to the Aitolians: Étienne and Knoepfler 1976: 288–92, 331–37, contra F. W. Walbank 1984a: 249–50; Le Bohec 1993: 162–63.

77. Polyb. 2.43.4; Plut. Arat. 18.2–22.9, 23.4, 24.1.

78. Polyb. 2.43.5; Plut. Arat. 24.3 with T37, T38.

79. Polyb. 2.43.9–10; cf. 9.34.6, 38.9. For the date of the Aitolian-Antigonid agreement, see F. W. Walbank 1936: 69.

80. Aitolians as friends of Triphylian Phigaleia, now part of Elis: IG V.2.419 (Staatsverträge III.495); Ager 1996: 119–24; Harter-Uibopuu 1998: 47–50. Scholten 2000: 118–23 provides a detailed discussion of Aitolian influence in the western Peloponnese.

81. Polyb. 4.77.10; Urban 1979: 87 n. 412.

82. Polyb. 2.45.1–2, 9.34.7; cf. Justin 28.1.1. Cf. Staatsverträge III.485. Cabanes 1976: 91–93 dates the partitioning to the period 253–251, but this may be too early; it neglects the chronological hints given by Polybios. See F. W. Walbank 1957–79: I.240 with references. Schoch and Wacker 1996 date the partitioning very broadly, in the period ca. 258–230. Dany 1999: 87–89 finds it impossible to narrow down a date more precisely than the period 251–243; cf. Scholten 2000: 88–91. If Justin 28.1.1–4 is accurate, the partitioning must predate 239.

83. Flacelière 1937: 206; Will 1979–82: I.319; F. W. Walbank 1984a: 251.

84. Scholten 2000: 88–89 with Phlegon of Tralles FGrHist 257 F 36 II.

85. A statue group dedicated at Delphi (FDelph III.4.178 [FDelph II.312 with fig. 254]; Paus. 10.16.6 with Jacquemin 1999: 63–64 with cat. no. 290) may commemorate this victory over Akarnania.

86. Refusal to engage, associated by Plutarch with Achaian distrust of Agis’s socioeconomic reforms: Plut. Agis 14.1–5, 31.1–2. Defense of Pellene: Plut. Arat. 31.3–32.3; Polyaenus, Strat. 8.59. See Urban 1979: 57 and Scholten 2000: 125–26 for the chronology of the attack; Plutarch’s account is compressed. Kynaitha as member of Achaian koinon: F. W. Walbank 1936: 70.

87. Plut. Arat. 33.1–2; Polyb. 2.44.1; Justin 28.1.1–4. Cf. Larsen 1975.

88. Alipheira: Polyb. 4.77.10; Heraia, Telphousa, and Kleitor: F. W. Walbank 1936: 68.

89. Plut. Arat. 25.1–6, 27.1–3. The tyrant, Aristippos, having survived the attempt with his power intact, charged the Achaians with attacking the city in time of peace. The Mantineians were asked to arbitrate in the dispute, and the Achaians received a rap on the knuckles in the form of a tiny monetary fine. See Will 1979–82: I.305 for discussion of the date.

90. Polyb. 2.44.1; Plut. Arat. 33.1. Cf. Scholten 2000: 134–36.

91. Justin 28.1.1–4.

92. Scholten 2000: 141–44. The arrangement for payment of troops may have been similar to that preserved in T57.35–40; Scholten further suggests that such pay may explain the ephemeral Aitolian issue of Attic-standard tetradrachms, found mostly in Peloponnesian hoards, in this period.

93. The outbreak of the war is dated by IG II² 1299.56–7 to the archonship of Lysias at Athens, which is not securely dated: Habicht 1979: 134 and 1997: 164. Evidence for hostilities in Aitolia: Str. 10.2.4 claims that Old Pleuron was ravaged by Demetrios “Aitolikos,” which caused the inhabitants to settle at New Pleuron—Demetrios II, or Demetrios Poliorketes? Attacks on Akarnania: Front. Strat. 1.4.4; Justin 28.1.1–2.14, on which see Holleaux 1921: 5–22; F. W. Walbank in Hammond et al. 1972–88: III.322; Dany 1999: 98–119; Scholten 2000: 147.

94. Unsuccessful attacks on Argos: Plut. Arat. 28.1–3, 29.1–4. Lydiades’ surrender and the introduction of Megalopolis into the Achaian koinon: Polyb. 2.44.5; Plut. Arat. 30.1–4, Mor. 552b.

95. Polyaenus, Strat. 2.36. Telphousians appear in the list of Achaian judges who arbitrated the dispute between Arsinoe and Epidauros (T40, A.9, B.19–33).

96. Plut. Arat. 30.5 for Lydiades’ initial attempt to lead an Achaian expedition against Sparta.

97. Polyb. 2.46.2, reporting their seizure from the Aitolian koinon by Kleomenes in 229; see F. W. Walbank 1957–79: I.242–43. Mantineia was Achaian before it became Aitolian (Polyb. 2.57.1), as was Orchomenos (Polyb. 4.6.5; Livy 32.5.4; T38, which must postdate Megalopolis’s entry to the koinon in 235). Cf. F. W. Walbank 1984b: 451.

98. Polyb. 20.5.3 with Moretti 1967–76: I.25, implying Aitolian control of Boiotia in 236/5. The precise date of the Macedonian invasion is not at all certain: Scholten 2000: 272–73.

99. Étienne and Knoepfler 1976: 331–41.