Signs of cooperation among communities within particular regions appear at different moments in the archaic and early classical periods. Across regions, however, evidence for an emergent group identity, articulated around descent from a common ancestor and the occupation of a shared territory, tends to precede evidence for active cooperation among communities. While this similarity is highly significant for our understanding of how the koinon developed, divergences in other respects command our attention. The process of urbanization that is a central part of polis development occurred differently in each of the three regions that form the core of this study, and...

During the first half of the fourth century the loose cooperative practices of the Achaians and Aitolians were transformed into a set of formal political institutions that bound the poleis and communities of each region together into regional states. Although the evidence is not plentiful, it is unmistakable. For Boiotia rich literary sources allow us to trace the struggle against Sparta and the unambiguous domination of the Boiotian koinon by Thebes, which itself begins to reveal the remarkable fragility of the koinon as a set of institutions, a theme we shall pick up in greater detail in chapter 6. The...

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...

Few would argue with the claim that religion was a powerful mechanism for social cohesion in the ancient Greek world, both within an individual state and between communities that retained distinct political identities. The former is captured, negatively perhaps but quite sharply, by the extreme reactions to perceived religious irregularities in moments of political crisis: the charges of impiety leveled against Alkibiades and others in connection with the Profanation of the Mysteries and the Mutilation of the Herms, actions interpreted by many as indicative of an attempt to overthrow the democracy, were made as the Athenians embarked on an expedition...

Shortly after the conclusion of the King’s Peace, ambassadors from the northern Greek poleis of Akanthos and Apollonia went to Sparta to appeal for help in combatting the expansion of the koinon of the Chalkideis under the leadership of Olynthos. Having seized control of significant portions of Macedonia, including Pella itself, the leaders of the koinon were pressing on those poleis of the Chalkidic Peninsula, like Akanthos and Apollonia, that were not members. Xenophon gives us a speech by one Kleigenes, the Akanthian ambassador to Sparta, in which Kleigenes enumerates the resources and advantages that he believes make the koinon...

If the religious and economic origins of the koinon and the state’s ongoing engagement with those spheres of social action highlight its complexity and suggest that it was more multifaceted than what we tend to think of as a federal state, its political structures are indubitably akin to those we recognize in modern federal states. We need now to turn to this arena, where the label “federal” is more immediately applicable than it has been until this point in the argument.

At the heart of the Greek koinon, as in all federal political structures, lies a pair of dilemmas. First,...