“a quantum leap in the understanding of ancient perceptions of federalism”), it tells us nothing more than that the topic was on the agenda. It does not help us to understand what the Greeks thought a koinon really was. Cf. Funke 1998. The demonstration that particular ancient authors detected what we can see as fundamental political principles of the koinon, like the division of authority between polis and koinon, and the extension of the political power of a koinon by means of the integration of new member poleis (Beck 2001), is more productive.
12. Thus for many years the biggest debate about the Achaian federal state has been the composition of its assemblies: Aymard 1938; Larsen 1955: 165–88 and 1972; Giovannini 1969; F. W. Walbank 1957–79: III.406–14 and 1970b; O’Neil 1980; Lehmann 1983a: 251–61, 2000: 70–81. Similar efforts were expended on the Aitolian assemblies: Mitsos 1947; Larsen 1952. A recent preoccupation with the composition of the college of boiotarchs, the highest magistrates of the Boiotian federal state in the fourth century, shows that this focus persists: Knoepfler 1978: 379 and 2000; Buckler 1979 (reprinted in Buckler and Beck 2008: 87–98); Bakhuizen 1994; Beck 1997: 103.
13. Oates 1972, 1991, and 1999; Weingast 1995; Rodden 2007. Reger 1994: 165–66, 170, is exceptional in seeing the economic effects of an institution (the Koinon of the Islanders or Nesiotic League) that was created as a mechanism for political control.
14. F. W. Walbank 1976–77: 29–32; Tréheux 1987; Sordi 1994: 4; C. P. Jones 1996; Lehmann 2000: 19–20; Bearzot 2001; Rzepka 2002; Vimercati 2003; Debord 2003. One of the more baffling uses of ethnos in an apparently political sense is Arist. Pol. 1261a27, a passage that has elicited a tremendous amount of inconclusive discussion (most recently Hansen 2000b; F. W. Walbank 2000: 21; Lehmann 2000: 35–36; Consolo Langher 2004: 316, with references to earlier work).
15. Ethnos and koinōnia: Polyb. 2.37.7–11, followed by the famous claim that the whole Peloponnese was united, as if in a single polis, by the shared institutions of the Achaians. Sympoliteia: Larsen 1968: 7–8 deemed this the only Greek word that properly describes a federal state but realized that it was a late development, appearing first in a Lykian inscription of the early second century (SEG 18.570) and in Polybios; recent work shows that it was not applied exclusively to federal contexts (Reger 2004). Giovannini 1971: 22–24; F. W. Walbank 1976–77: 32–35. Koinē politeia: Polyb. 2.50.8 (cf. Lehmann 2000: 35).
16. Systēma: Polyb. 2.41.15, 9.28.2; cf. Str. 8.3.2, 14.2.25. Biological use: Arist. Gen.An. 740a20. Ethnikē systasis: Polyb. 30.13.6.
17. Polyb. 23.12.8. The phrase here seems to allude to the many communities of which the Achaian (or any other) koinon is composed. Cf. F. W. Walbank 1957–79: III.242.
18. R. Parker 2009: 187 on synoikism and sympolity.
19. Morgan 1991, 2003; J. M. Hall 1997, 2002; McInerney 1999; Malkin 2001; Derks and Roymans 2009.
20. Roussel 1976 is an early move in this direction, focused on the genē, phratries, and phylai of Attica but incorporating material from other poleis. Achaia: Morgan and Hall 1996; Morgan 2002. Aitolia: Antonetti 1987a, 1990; Antonetti and Cavalli 2004. Boiotia: Larson 2007; Kühr 2006a, b.
21. Larsen 1968: 3–7, 28, 40–42, etc.; Koerner 1974: 476; Grainger 1999: 29.
22. The tribal concept was discredited by anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s as inherently linked with a deeply flawed teleological view of the development of political organization and as neither logically nor theoretically necessary to bridge the gap between local settlement and larger-scale power structures like nation-states and confederations: Fried 1968, 1975; Southall 1969, 1996. Persistence of tribal state (or Stammstaat) in this adjusted sense: Funke 1993; Freitag, Funke, and Moustakis 2004: 379 (Aitolia); Nielsen 1996b and 1997; Nielsen and Roy 1998 (Arkadia). Many scholars (above all Morgan 2003) now prefer to use the Greek ethnos, which avoids the inevitable connotations of primitiveness; cf. Archibald 2000; Davies 2000; Morgan 2000b. Cf. Yoffee 2005, who in a similar vein exposes the problems with putative “chiefdoms” and their place in early state formation, rejecting the argument that they were an early evolutionary stage and showing instead that they represent an alternative trajectory.
23. Beck 2003: 179–83, despite his enthusiasm for the work of the ethnicity school, notes (p. 182) how much it leaves unanswered.
24. A. D. Smith, whose work heavily influenced that of Hall and others on ethnic identity in the Greek world, after defining six criteria of an ethnic group (his ethnie), notes that economic unity, common legal rights, and a common polity are not among them (A. D. Smith 1986: 86).
25. The restrictions placed on poleis by membership in a koinon appear to have been much weaker for the Cretan koinon, which in many ways differs from the koina of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese studied here; see Ager 1994. For autonomy as a term in political discourse, not a definable juridical status: Ostwald 1982: 41–46; Raaflaub 2004: 147–60. Autonomy as a formal juridical status: Hansen 1995a: 34–39, 1995b, and 1997b; Hansen 1996 contra Keen 1996; Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 87–94. Beck 2003: 184 (cf. Beck 1997: 235–49) suggests that these views can be reconciled, with the result that “federalism and polis-autonomy were compatible.” The debate then becomes one about the meaning of autonomia. My concern is to explain why so many poleis in the Greek world became willing to give up their ability to control certain aspects of their political lives, like determining foreign policy; whether this should be called autonomia or not is immaterial.
26. For autonomy as fundamental: Jehne 1994.
27. Hansen 1997b; Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 87–94 list fifteen different conditions under which a polis became dependent or nonautonomous.
28. E.g., Larsen 1953, citing Th. 1.111.2–3, Diod. Sic. 11.85, and Plut. Per. 19, recording the participation of the Achaians in Perikles’ expedition against Akarnanian Oiniadai in 455.
29. See R. Parker 1998, esp. 27–33.
30. Hell.Oxy. 16.3–4 (Bartoletti).
31. Cf. Murray 1990: 10–11 for the view that the institutions of the polis were a product of the rational and self-conscious recognition of the reasons for change and the consequences of reform, not a “jumble of traditional practices.”
32. This demonstration has been approached from several different perspectives; see P. A. Hall and Taylor 1996.
33. J. W. Meyer and Rowan 1977; J. W. Meyer and Scott 1983; DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 1–40. Socially embedded: Parsons 1990 (a paper originally written ca. 1934–35 but published for the first time only in 1990); Williamson 1975; Granovetter 1985.
34. North 1990; cf. Williamson 1975.
35. North 1990: 1.
36. Cf. Thelen 2003: 208.
37. On the fundamental condition of interstate anarchy in classical Greece see A. M. Eckstein 2006: 37–78. On norms governing interactions between poleis see Sheets 1994; Chaniotis 2004.
38. Greif 1989, 1993; Greif, Milgrom, and Weingast 1994.
39. See Greif 2006: 8–9.
40. Greif 2006: 30.
41. Greif 2006: 187–216. In this way the model expands upon Giddens’s structuration theory (Giddens 1984), the idea that agent and social structure are recursively related to each other, individual actions contributing to social structure while that structure in turn guides individual actions.
42. Greif 2006: 190.
43. Greif 2006: 194–99.
44. The concept of path dependence is drawn from evolutionary biology; see Gould 1985: 53. For its application to political and social life see Krasner 1988: 66; North 1990: 92–104; Levi 1997: 28; Pierson 2000.
45. This phenomenon is sometimes described as a process of increasing returns: Arthur 1994; Pierson 2000: 253–57.
46. Pierson 2000: 251. Cf. Pierson and Skocpol 2002; Thelen 2003.
PART ONE
Cooperation, Competition, and Coercion
A Narrative History
1