off against their Athenian neighbors.
It was, however, an even bigger if more distant neighbor that affected the course of Boiotian history in the early fifth century, putting the brakes on these cooperative developments. All the Boiotian cities except for Plataia and Thespiai supported the Persians when they invaded in 480, and if a small Theban presence at Thermopylai reflects internal divisions over the policy toward Persia, the Persian victory there decided matters for the Boiotians.36 When Xerxes moved through Boiotia, the Thebans exposed the allegiance of Plataia and Thespiai to the allied cause, and their territories were ravaged as a result.37 We do not know whether the rift between Thebes and Thespiai, which had been allies in 506, was caused only by the Persian question or whether it was the result of some local conflict.38
The pro-Persian party at Thebes continued to show its mettle after the Greek victory at Salamis. When Mardonios learned that Spartan forces were headed to occupied Athens to resist him, he withdrew his forces toward Thebes, where the territory was well suited to a cavalry battle and the city was friendly. He was met at Dekeleia, on the border between Attica and Boiotia, by men from the Asopos region, the Boiotian side of the border, who had been sent by the boiotarchs (according to Herodotos 9.15.1) and guided the Persians into Theban territory. What is the significance of these figures, evidently magistrates? The title signifies a leadership role for the whole region, which could point to the existence of formal political institutions comprising the entire region. Even if these boiotarchs are not an anachronism, it remains difficult to take them as incontrovertible evidence for the existence of a fully functional Boiotian federal state with developed state institutions and magistrates for the management of external affairs, fitting the model that is familiar to us from the later fifth century.39 We saw in Herodotos’s narrative of the events at Plataia in 519 that the Thebans at least had put energy behind the idea of the Boiotians as an organized group, and it should not surprise us to see it becoming gradually more formalized. It is thus possible that the boiotarchs were actually Theban magistrates, pursuing the Thebans’ aspirations of regional political unification; the magistrates’ title would then have been more normative than descriptive. We know from Herodotos only that in the spring of 479 boiotarchs had both the power to issue orders to inhabitants of the Asopos district and the authority to be obeyed.
After the battle of Plataia, the allies laid siege to Thebes and “demanded the surrender of those Thebans who had gone over to the Persians,” in particular Timagenides and Attaginos, who are described as archēgetai. Perhaps the most neutral translation is “leaders”; the precise meaning is unclear, but we know that Attaginos hosted a banquet for Persians in Thebes and that Timagenides had advised Mardonios before Plataia.40 Whether ringleaders or appointed officials we cannot tell, but we know of them only in the context of this year. It is possible that it was to these individuals, and perhaps others like them, that the Thebans referred when, defending themselves to the Spartans in 427 over their seizure of Plataia, they described the Theban regime during the Persian Wars as a “dynasteia of a few men.”41 But that defense is rhetorically charged and exceedingly difficult to use as clear evidence for the nature of the Theban regime in 479. In fact Herodotos’s narrative encourages us to think that Theban Medism was not the policy of a single clan, much less that of two individuals, who rather appear to have become scapegoats in a highly emotional event.
The Greeks besieged Thebes for twenty days before Timagenides addressed the Thebans with the suggestion that perhaps their demand for leaders was a pretense and that what the Greeks really wanted was money. “If they want money,” he continued, “let’s give them money from the common treasury [ek tou koinou], for it was with the koinon that we Medized, and not we alone.”42 The first use of the word koinon here certainly refers to the treasury, as is common.43 The second, however, must refer to some state authority, and not again to the treasury.44 The nature of that authority, its institutional structure, is unclear, however, and we should be wary of retrojecting later evidence. The word koinon is frequently used by Herodotos simply to indicate the government in places where there never was a confederate or federal polity, and this is how the word should be taken here.45 The question of how developed Boiotian (not Theban) state institutions were in 479 cannot be answered with this puzzling passage. There is good reason to suspect that plenty of non-Theban Boiotians were within the walls of Thebes when they were besieged by the victorious Greek allied force: Diodoros (11.31.3) reports that “the Greeks serving with Mardonios withdrew to Thebes”; and Herodotos (9.87.2) has Timagenides express a desire that “Boiotia should not suffer further on our account.” When the Greeks made it clear that they really did want traitors and not traitors’ money, they led to Corinth those who were handed over, where they were all executed.46
Herodotos’s mention of boiotarchs and the reference to a koinon in the political sense in 480–479 cannot be taken as certain evidence for a regional state operating just like the one we know in much more detail from the period of the Peloponnesian War. These references do, however, point to the Persian Wars as a crisis in which the tentative moves toward the politicization of Boiotian regional and ethnic identity in the late sixth century received greater impetus, direction, and perhaps organization. The office of boiotarch and other institutions designed to lend authority and permanence to decisions and actions taken jointly by the Boiotians in military and economic matters may, in other words, have been created in this period as a solution, suggested by past experiences and the relational habits the Boiotian cities had to one another, to the immediate crisis of a Persian presence at the borders.
This impression is supported by an inscription (T3) from Olympia recording the outcome of a judicial appeal in a case that was probably judged originally by the Hellanodikai. The original suit found against the Boiotians and apparently also the Thessalians, and in favor of the Athenians and Thespians. The lineup points immediately to an issue arising from the Persian Wars. The appeal was heard by one Charixenos and a body of magistrates called the mastroi, who found that “the previous judgment was not rightly judged” and acquitted the Thessalians of the charges formerly brought against them. It is likely that behind the inscription lies an approach by the Athenians and Thespians to the Hellanodikai shortly after 479 to accuse the Thessalians and Boiotians of violating the Olympic peace of 480 by participating in the sack of the cities’ territories.47 For our purposes what is particularly important about this obscure text is its clue that the Boiotoi were recognized and dealt with as a political entity even at the moment when they were locked in conflict with another Boiotian city, Thespiai. The inscription shows that in a legal context, the Boiotoi constitute not only a recognizable but even a prosecutable group, despite the fact that they manifestly do not represent all the communities that regard themselves as Boiotian. But if the Boiotians were a prosecutable group, what was the nature of their common polity? I have already argued that political cooperation was loose and ad hoc prior to and probably throughout the Persian Wars, although we have seen signs that it was moving toward greater formalization under Theban leadership. Yet this is not enough to support the claim that the Boiotian League was dissolved after the allied reparations against Boiotia in 479.48
The extent to which cooperation—whether formal or informal—occurred after 479 is difficult to discern. Plataia became an autonomous, independent polis, but its geographical position, wedged precariously between Attica and Boiotia, made the long-term maintenance of that status a virtual impossibility.49 There are some indications that the region was riven by stasis in this period, but the details are lost for about two decades.50 In 458, the lights flicker on again, for Boiotia became a battleground for the Spartans and Athenians at Tanagra, where there was no decisive victory.51 According to Thucydides, two months later the Athenians marched against the Boiotians and were victorious in battle at a place called Oinophyta, near Tanagra.52 He ascribes no motive to the attack, which has been seen as part of the Athenians’ brief attempt in the 450s to gain a land empire.53 That may indeed be true but is only part of the story. Diodoros (11.81.1–2) claims that the Thebans, humiliated by their Medism and despised for it by the other Boiotians, sought some means to regain their former influence and prestige.54 They approached the Spartans and made a compact whereby the Spartans would help the Thebans gain the complete hegemony of Boiotia and in exchange the Thebans