Basking in the Shadow of Kings: Local Culture in the Hellenistic Greek Mainland

Home , 205 BC, 208 BC, 223 BC, 300s BC (decade), Amarynthos, Anthas

Basking in the Shadow of Kings: Local Culture in the Hellenistic Greek mainland

Alexander J. McAuley Department of History and Classical Studies Faculty of Arts McGill University

August, 2015 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Table of Contents Abstract ...... 4 Abrégé ...... 5 Preface & Acknowledgements / Avant-propos et remerciements ...... 6 Notes on Scholarly Conventions ...... 8 Introduction: Re-connecting the Dots ...... 9 A Brave New World? The Hellenistic Problem ...... 9 An Empty Region? ...... 20 Progressive Conservatism? ...... 25 Archaic Beginnings, and Classical Ends? ...... 38 No Baggage to Check: The Hellenistic ‘Greeks’ ...... 49 Ethnicity Now & Then, and the Identity of Identity ...... 60 From the Negative to the Positive: Re-approaching Local Culture ...... 69 Chapter I Hellenistic Antiquity: The Argolid ...... 88 Introduction: Impressions and Illusions ...... 88 More than just a Region: The Scholarly Tradition of Argos ...... 97 Déjà vu: The Argolid in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries ...... 105 The Argolid and Monarchy in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries ...... 113 The Argolid and Monarchy in the Hellenistic Period: ...... 121 External and Diplomatic Relations of the Hellenistic Argives: ...... 131 Deceptive Antiquity: The Cultic Traditions of the Hellenistic Argolid ...... 145 The Asklepieion at Epidauros ...... 149 The Heraion ...... 153 The Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea and the Nemean Games ...... 158 Changes ...... 163 Land & Settlement Patterns ...... 166 Greek Conclusions, Roman Epilogue ...... 169 Chapter II Practically the Middle of Greece: Euboea ...... 173 Introduction: Cursed Geography ...... 173 Not Athens: Euboea in Contemporary Scholarship ...... 183 A Preferable Imperialism: Euboea under the Athenian Yoke ...... 189

Calm amidst the Storm: 340-267 BC ...... 198 Macedonian Sunrise: Euboea in the Third Century ...... 210 The Very Local Level: Carystos and the Carysteia ...... 227 Conclusions ...... 231 Chapter III Stability and Innovation: Hellenistic Boeotia ...... 239 Introduction: The Greek Countryside ...... 239 Impending Doom: Scholarship on Hellenistic Boeotia ...... 250 The Best of Times, or the Worst of Times? Boeotia under Thebes ...... 262 The Beginning of the End? Dispelling the Archaeological Fog ...... 270 From Thebes to Macedon: Politics in Hellenistic Boeotia ...... 276 Good Credit: Boeotia’s Economy ...... 294 From the Cradle: The Ephēbeia in Hellenistic Boeotia ...... 301 The Religious Landscape of Hellenistic Boeotia ...... 316 Conclusion and Epilogue: Sub Imperium Populi Romani Dicionemque ...... 327 Conclusion: The Horizon of the Immediate ...... 339 The Opinio Communis ...... 339 The Argolid: ...... 343 Euboea: ...... 346 Boeotia ...... 350 Currents and Trends ...... 354 Kings & Cities ...... 354 Civic and Regional Government ...... 357 Land, Demography, and Settlement ...... 360 Religion...... 362 All Roads Lead to Magnesia ...... 365 The Horizon of the Immediate, Then & Now ...... 374 Epilogue: Contemporary Echoes ...... 380 Bibliography ...... 387

Abstract

This thesis examines the local culture of the mainland Greek regions of the Argolid, Euboea, and Boeotia with an eye to reconsidering two preconceptions regarding the period: first, that there is fundamental discontinuity between the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, and second, that the Hellenistic Period was marked by widespread demographic, social, and economic decline in mainland Greece. Considering each of these regions on the local revel instead reveals, I argue, that the rule of Macedon did not disrupt the local traditions and lifestyles of its subject communities. During the third and second centuries BC, each region exhibits a flurry of activity on the economic, religious, political, and social realms, and this local vitality endures as wider networks of extra-regional connections are established. The introduction provides an overview of the opinio communis regarding the Hellenistic Period, and argues against the supposition that there was a large-scale emigration of Greeks from the mainland at its outset. I also review the evidence for continuity of Greek civic traditions outside Greece itself, before turning to a review of scholarly literature on ethnicity, identity, and certain problems that arise from the analytical construct. I propose a turn towards local culture as a means of overcoming the abstract ambiguity of ethnic scholarship. Chapters I-III comprise regional case studies of the Hellenistic Argolid, Euboea, and Boeotia, respectively. In each chapter I review the geography and topography of the region, and sketch its broader history leading up to the opening decades of the Hellenistic Period. I review how broad scholarly preconceptions of the period manifest themselves and influence the more specific literature on each region. The late-Classical trajectory of each region is reconsidered before analysing its Hellenistic trajectory in the realms of relations with the monarchy, external relations, civic and regional politics, economy, settlement patterns, and religion. In each study I consider the region’s longer development under the dominion of Rome by means of contrast and epilogue. My conclusion synthesises the regional findings of each case study and uses them to propose some observations on the period as a whole. Using the base of my regional findings, I re-examine the character of relationships between king and city, regional and civic government, demography and settlement patterns, and religion. I chart the intersection of these various elements using the case study of Magnesia on the Meander’s quest for asylia in 208 BC. Finally, I use my findings as evidence for the fundamental conservatism of Greek social thought, and provide some comments on the relevance of this study in the context of contemporary approaches to globalisation and cultural change.

Abrégé

Cette thèse vise à examiner la culture locale de trois régions de la Grèce – l’Argolide, l’Eubée, et la Béotie – afin de reconsidérer deux idées préconçues sur la caractère générale de l’époque Hellénistique : la première est qu’il y a une rupture fondamentale entre la période classique et celle qui a suivi, et la deuxième est que la période hellénistique dans la Grèce continentale est marquée par son déclin démographique, social, et économique. Une considération de chaque région à son tour au niveau de la culture locale révèle, je propose, que la suprématie de Macédoine n’a pas profondément perturbé les traditions locales et modes de vie de ses territoires sujets. Au fil des IIIe et IIe siècles av. J- C, chacune de ces régions présente une effervescence d’activité au niveau local dans les domaines de la religion, la politique, et la culture, et cette vitalité se poursuit sans entrave au sein du grand réseau des liens extrarégionaux qui s’est alors établi. L’introduction fournit un bilan de l’opinio communis quant à l’époque hellénistique en générale, et conteste la supposition qu’une vague d’émigration hors de la Grèce continentale s’est passée au début de l’époque. J’offre également une synthèse de l’évidence indiquant la continuité des traditions civiques dans les nouveaux coins du monde hellénistique, avant de présenter un bilan de la littérature scientifique portant sur l’ethnicité et l’identité. Je constate quelques problèmes analytiques soulevés par le modèle, par conséquent je propose de s’orienter vers la culture locale afin de surmonter la caractère abstraite et théorétique de nos analyses ethniques. Les chapitres I-III comprennent donc les études de cas régionales de l’Argolide, l’Eubée, et la Béotie durant l’époque sous considération. Au fil de chaque chapitre je donne un aperçu de la géographie et la topographie de chacune, et j’esquisse son histoire à long terme qui mène vers les premières décennies de l’époque. Je considère comment les préconceptions et suppositions concernant la période en générale se manifestent dans les études plus particulières et précises dans le cadre de chaque région. Le développement de chacune pendant la fin de l’époque classique est ensuite récapitulé avant d’analyser sa trajectoire hellénistique dans les domaines suivants : les relations monarchiques, les relations externes, la politique civique ainsi que régionale, l’économie, et la démographie. Dans chaque étude de cas je considère l’expérience de chaque région sous la domination de Rome comme épilogue révélateur. La conclusion rassemble les résultats des trois études de cas régionales, et les utilise comme base de données pour formuler quelques hypothèses concertantes la période d’une manière générale. Je reconsidère donc le caractère des relations entre rois et cités, le gouvernement régional et civique sous les Macédoniens, l’évolution de la démographie et le peuplement de la Grèce continentale, ainsi que les traditions religieuses. Ensuite je trace l’intersection de ces divers éléments à travers de l’épisode de l’asylia de Magnésie-du-Méandre en 208/7 av. J-C. Enfin, je me servis de mes conclusions pour faire ressortir le conservatisme inhérent à la culture grecque, et je fais quelques commentaires sur la pertinence de cette étude dans le milieu actuel de globalisation.

Preface & Acknowledgements / Avant-propos et remerciements

«Nulle chose n’est compréhensible que par son histoire», selon Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; il en va de même pour les thèses de doctorat. Nulle thèse n’est rédigée par un auteur, tout seul en isolation, et je dois donc plusieurs remercîments profondes à plusieurs personnes, sans lesquelles cette œuvre – aussi imparfaite et insuffisante soit-t-elle – n’aurait jamais vu le jour. Je leur suis vraiment redevable, et la liste suivante est par sa nature incomplète. Au niveau financier, cette thèse ainsi que la formation qu’elle signifie n’aurait jamais été possible sans le soutien de quelques institutions. Tout d’abord je dois reconnaître la générosité du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du gouvernement du Canada (CCRSH / SSHRC) pour la bourse doctorale qui m’a été accordée, ainsi que les fonds de recherche et voyage que j’ai reçu de la part de l’université McGill. Je remercie également l’école française d’Athènes et tous ses bibliothécaires pour toute leur assistance, financière ou autre, pendant les divers séjours que j’y ai fait. Several individuals at McGill University in Montreal are likewise owed my sincerest thanks and admiration for countless instances of insight, encouragement, and, when necessary, chastisement. This thesis, it will become obvious, has an implicit bearing on the present, and without nearly a decade of guidance and inspiration from my supervisor, Prof. Hans Beck, I would have never been struck by the relevance and meaning of ancient history in the first place. His patience and his mentorship are appreciated beyond words. Other members of the Department of History and Classical Studies have likewise been generous supports throughout, particularly Prof. Bill Gladhill for his indispensable critique and perspective, and John Serrati for his friendship, collegiality, and humour. I owe particular thanks as well to Prof. Tassos Anastassiadis, without whose help I would have never been able to discover Greece first-hand. His professional guidance will always be an asset that I treasure, as is his reminder that Greek history does not end with antiquity. I would also like to thank the internal and external reviewers of this thesis, Profs. Michael Fronda and Andrew Erskine, respectively, for their detailed feedback and criticism. Numerous colleagues outside McGill have been inestimable resources throughout my experience as a graduate student. I am proud to call Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones of Cardiff University a mentor as well as a friend; the same is true of Prof. Monica Cyrino of the University of New Mexico. I continue to be flattered by their generosity. In other realms of research, I must also thank Dr. Kyle Erickson (Wales Trinity St. David), Prof. Altay Coskun (Waterloo), Dr. Richard Wenghofer (Nipissing), and Dr. Monica D’Agostini (Milan Sacro Cuore). Je remercie également Prof. David Engels (Université Libre de Bruxelles) pour son étude qui a si profondément inspirée la mienne, et surtout pour son amitié au fil des années. À tous les autres étudiants et étudiantes des cycles supérieurs partout au Canada et en Europe, surtout à l’université McGill, que j’ai le privilège de connaître, j’envoie ma gratitude sincère et mes meilleurs vœux pour l’avenir. It has been said recently, with ever-greater frequency and conviction, that history – particularly Ancient History – is a hollow and gratuitous inquiry with no bearing on the complexities of the present.

What we need now, we are told, is not the study of the past, but the study of the present – something with utility, tangibility, or above all, practicality. This thesis, like most works of history, has not been written against a backdrop of contemporary tranquility. The conflicts of the past decade, especially the divisions which emerge with ever greater prominence in the post-9/11 milieu, have recurrently proven that there is far more at work in the world than simply the nationalism of the present. The world is much more complex than the sum of its contemporary practicalities. We have been told with less ambiguity than ever that the present is a time of conflict: religious, economic, nationalistic, whichever of the usual causes one may choose; the pattern, it seems, remains. Yet none of these can be happily divorced from history, the legacy of past injustices, the hope of future retributions, or even the perception that the past should or should not run through the present in a certain way, all of these lie at the core of the struggles which continue to unfold in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, North America, and elsewhere. They take any forms, and play out in many arenas, but the common thread of history, I believe unites them. We too would do well to bear in mind the relevance of our subject matter, firm in the conviction, as so many of its detractors are to the contrary, that «nulle chose n’est compréhensible que par son histoire». In the twenty-first century world, what could be more necessary than understanding the past to gain some measure of insight into the divisions of the present. Whether I have succeeded or failed in bringing this to light I leave up to the reader, but I hope that the effort is worthwhile. All of its errors and misjudgements remain mine alone, and it owes much of whatever perspicacity it has to the labours and genius of generations of previous scholars. In this, as ever, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Sur le plan personnel, je ne saurais conclure sans mentionner ma famille et mes proches. Je remercie mes parents : ma mère pour sa constance et gentillesse, mon père pour sa sagacité et son humanité, tous les deux pour l’inspiration qu’ils m’ont fourni tout au long de ma vie. My partner Lauren deserves thanks too numerous to mention. I would like to dedicate this thesis to my grandfather, Hubert John McAuley (1923-2013). He was a teacher once, and remained so throughout the rest of his life. I hope that he is proud of the fruits of his instruction. Requiescat in somno pacis.

-AJPM Montréal August, 2015.

Notes on Scholarly Conventions

I have followed the lead of the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD4) for authors and books, and of L’Année philologique for journals (although in some cases fuller versions are used). Many of the compendia are listed here for the sake of redundancy. In general with regards to citations I have erred on the side of conservatism, finding it unhelpful to repeat a mass of scholarly literature when one more pertinent and comprehensive resource may be given.

Unless otherwise indicated, all ancient texts in Greek in Latin and their translations are taken from their respective Loeb Classical Library editions. The text of Greek inscriptions has been taken from the version provided in the SEG or the relevant IG volume, again unless otherwise indicated. Quotations of scholars writing in languages other than English have been preserved in their native tongue.

The transliteration of Greek names and terminology is a contentious issue that remarkably has yet to be resolved. In transliterating Greek I have aimed for consistency and clarity instead of orthodox adherence to one of individual schemes. The irony, perhaps, is that in the midst of various systems aimed at standardising transliteration of Greek, the Latinised version of the word is often much more consistent across various publications.

I have thus adhered to the Latinised form of many names both personal and geographical – hence Macedonia and not Makedon, Euboea and not Euboia, and Achaea rather than Achaia, and Athens instead of Athenai. At any rate, I believe that there is little ambiguity in the text.

Greek terms have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet when they appear singly, and phrases or sentences of Greek texts have been reproduced in the text in the Greek alphabet.

Unless otherwise indicated, all dates are BC.

Introduction: Re-connecting the Dots

A Brave New World? The Hellenistic Problem

At the dawn of the Hellenistic Age the world of Classical Greece ended “not with a bang, but with a whimper,” to borrow the words of T.S. Eliot. Or so the traditional story goes. Whatever specific event scholars have chosen as marking the birth of the Hellenistic Period is equally held to be the death of the Classical; be it Chaeronea (Glotz 1928, 448), the foundation of the League of Corinth, the death of Philip II, the meteoric rise and descent of Alexander (Shipley 2000), even the death of

Demosthenes (Plut. Dem. 3), in the eyes of each beholder any of these events signals the moment at which the tired old man that was mainland Greece was snuffed out by the Macedonians. Whatever was left standing after Philip and Alexander’s campaigns had shaken the foundations of the

Mediterranean world must have been different. The charred ruins of Thebes or Persepolis stood now only as memories of old orders that had been eclipsed by a brighter sun, against whose light they now seemed deserted and lifeless.

This opinion has been prevalent since the dawn of Hellenistic scholarship. Droysen’s first words in the first history of the period’s origins have set an enduring precedent: ‘Der Name Alexander bezeichnet das Ende einer Weltepoche, den Anfang einer neuen’ (Droysen 1833, 1.1). That this change occurred on a global, and not just a Hellenic, scale is a sentiment echoed neatly by Edwyn Bevan in

1902: ‘It would not be easy to name any other period of ten years in the history of the world beside the

9 reign of Alexander in which as momentous a change passed over as large a part of the earth – a change which made such difference in the face of things’ (Bevan 1902, 1.28).

Whether this change was for the better or worse depends on the vagaries of opinion and trend, but the connotations of Droysen’s terminology – Greek but not quite Greek, videri quam esse – remain difficult to dislodge despite several decades of subtler arguments to the contrary. The Period has been variously seen through the lenses of European imperialism, cultural confrontation, economy and dominance, synthesis and rivalry, individualism and opportunity.1 The perception of change and discontinuity is one of the principle ties that binds various inquiries in the Hellenistic World. That there was some inevitable dilution of Greek culture as it was splashed out of its classical well in the mainland and sprinkled across Egypt and the Middle East up to the foothills of the Hindu Kush is such a prevalent sentiment as to seem fatalistic. Mahaffy went so far as to define ‘Hellenism’ in precisely these terms: “I intend to use the word in the latter sense, and to speak of that diffusion of Greek speech and culture through Macedonia and the Nearer East which, while it extended the influence, could not but dilute the purity of Hellenic civilization’ (Mahaffy 1905, 3). Across the realms of art, literature, material culture, architecture, even dialect and language, the traditional foundations of the Classical Period were changed as a generic ‘Greekness’ surged into new channels carved by the Macedonians. It is the fundamental presumption on which much of Hellenistic scholarship rests.

This thesis, however, seek to re-examine these assumptions of Hellenistic discontinuity by looking at the period through lens of the Greek mainland. As I shall explain below in greater detail, the

Greek mainland tends to be conspicuously absent from discussions of the Hellenistic Period, yet it is

1 The list, of course, could go on at great length, but in the interest of brevity I provide a sampling of each. European Imperialism: Bevan 1902; cultural synthesis: Tarn 1933, Tarn & Griffith 1952; cultural confrontation: Prost 2003, driven by economy Rostovtzeff 1941 and Scholten 2000; for a more complete bibliography of cultural and ethnic dynamics refer to the works cited later in this chapter. 10 perhaps the best region in which to gauge the lasting impacts of Macedonian imperialism. I shall do so by comparing three regional case studies – the Argolid, Euboea, and Boeotia – with the prevailing opinions of the period as a whole. Before turning to these studies, however, we must explore the current state of scholarship on the Greek world after Alexander in more detail, and reconsider some basic scholarly assumptions regarding the period as a whole and the mainland in particular. From there we shall transition to a methodological discussion of the ethnic paradigm that has emerged so prevalently in the past decades and some of the problems that arise from the approach. This will then situate my emphasis on local culture in the Greek mainland, and colour my choice of regional case studies. All of this broader tableau must be borne in mind before zooming in to the local corners of theses regions of the Greek mainland in an effort to see whether they exhibit immediate and enduring change in response to the reign of the Macedonian kings.

The Hellenistic World in Contemporary Scholarship

Unsurprisingly scholarly attention has been drawn to the more glamorous corners of this new

Hellenistic world, to the locales into which ‘Greekness’ was transplanted rather than whence it was torn. The earliest dynastic studies of the period focussed on the exoticism of the houses of Ptolemy and Seleucus, subsequent treatments turned their gaze farther East to Bactria and India, and in more recent years regional studies of the Greeks in the Fertile Crescent, Near East, the Levant, Anatolia, and elsewhere have proliferated.2 Papyrology and a wealth of material remains has given Ptolemaic Egypt

2 Bevan 1902 and Bouché-Leclercq 1913-1914 are the pioneering studies of the Seleucids; Mahaffy 1895 and Bouché-Leclercq 1903 on the Ptolemies. In concert with the aforementioned works on Alexander and on Hellenism in particular, the absence of Greece itself becomes conspicuous from the earliest days of Hellenistic 11 perhaps a disproportionate presence in Hellenistic historiography, as has the epigraphy of Asia Minor.

The past two decades have produced dozens of ethnic studies of the period to which we shall shortly turn; all have considered the mutual impact of Greek and Non-Greek interaction, and the enduring ramifications of their cultural contact.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union it has become trendy to see an early outline of globalization in the period, driven by the assumption that more contact breeds more exchange, and more exchange invariably reduces the cultural distance between two distinct peoples.3 The intercultural poetics of

Alexandria, the artistic flourish in Pergamon, religious syncretism in Babylon or Aï Khanoum have been taken as beacons of a cultural milieu whose diversity naturally led to cultural melding as divergent traditions were brought into immediate contact with one another.4 In much the same way as J. Hector

St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782 that the new American is one who ‘leaving behind him and all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives the new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced’, or as Israel Zangwill put it more metaphorically in 1905 that America is ‘the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming’, now one contemporary Hellenistic Institute praises the period as one in which ‘Greek ideals dominated a melting pot of cultures from the Mediterranean to India to Africa. The influences of this cultural fusion have stood the test of time and carried over into our modern world’.5

scholarship. See notes later in this chapter for an extensive bibliography of subsequent studies of the diverse corners of the Hellenistic World. On Pergamon see Radt 1999 and Kunze 1997. 3 The impact of the fall of the Soviet Union on Classical studies is something best touched on by Cartledge 1990 in his introduction. Proponents of the ‘old binary’ of competing political ideologies defining the Classical world are best represented by G.E.M. de Ste Croix 1981. 4 Poetics of Alexandria: Stephens 2003. Babylon and ethnic contact: Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993; Boiy 2004; Briant 1985; Monérie 2012; Aï Khanoum: Mairs 2006; Martinez-Sève 2010; Coloru 2009. 5 Crèvecoeur 1793: 46-47; The Melting Pot script taken from Zwangwill’s 1908 version; the Hellenistic World as the melting pot of cultures is taken from the Waterloo Institute for Hellenistic Studies brochure available at 12

The notion that the Hellenistic world laid the intercultural framework that would subsequently enable first the rise of the Roman Empire and, much later, such varied projects as European

Imperialism or postmodern economic globalization, tends to have drawn the interest of scholars to the period’s antecedents rather than its precedents.6 That this cultural melting represents some form of inevitable progress has long been tacit sentiments. T.E. Lawrence, a figure perhaps unrivalled save by

Alexander in his ability to straddle East and West, praises the Syrians for having done precisely this as he wrote of them in 1926 ‘The people of this stranger-colony were not Greek – at least not in the majority – but Levantines of sorts, aping a Greek culture, and in revenge producing, not the correct banal Hellenism of the exhausted homeland, but a tropical rankness of idea, in which the rhythmical balance between Greek art and Greek ideality blossomed into novel shapes tawdry with the larded passionate colours of the East’ (Seven Pillars, 13.9.17).

The implication of the numerous studies of this international ‘Hellenism’ has been that this transplantation of Greek culture came at the expense of Greece itself. The old world of Classical Greece had to die so that the new pluralism of the Hellenistic world could be born, and the old ways of its parochial attachments had to vanish to make room for the new cosmopolitanism of the cultural koinon.

In his wake, the exhausted mainland, as Lawrence would have it, was left a withered husk, a reservoir emptied of the energy and manpower that had sustained its ancestral vigour. The polis was sacrificed

https://uwaterloo.ca/waterloo-institute-for-hellenistic-studies/sites/ca.waterloo-institute-for-hellenistic- studies/files/uploads/files/wihs_brag_sheet_final_jan_2013.pdf 6 To Droysen in particular, the Hellenistic Period resulted in a fusion of Oriental and Greek cultures that laid the social framework in which Christianity was later able to flourish, a sentiment echoed by Bevan 1902 when he writes that it behooves us ‘as Christians and as Englishmen’ to consider the period, and the Seleucids specifically. In the same vein, contemporary interest in the period as an ideological predecessor to the Principate and Roman Imperialism has further pulled our gaze forward. Meanwhile, Erskine 2005, 2 notes the tendency of historians to view the Hellenistic Period as simply an epilogue to a more glorious Classical past, hence we are drawn in both chronological directions and seldom consider the period in and of itself. 13 on the altar of the Hellenistic comospolis, particularism gave way to syncretism, and autonomia cowered in the face of Hellenistic basileia.

Many have either explicitly or implicitly endorsed this implication of mainland decline, particularly among the earliest scholars of the period, and while voices to the contrary have been raised since the 1920s they have generally not overcome the prevailing interpretation of the period.

Picking up more on Droysen’s Ende than his Anfang, in 1928 Gustave Glotz wrote that the battle of

Chaeronea and the foundation of the League of Corinth ‘donnent une date précise à ce grand

événement, la fin de la cité grecque’ (Glotz 1928, 448). Tarn and Griffith took this one step further to state outright that ‘man as a political animal, a fraction of the polis or self-governing city-state, had ended with Aristotle’ (1952, 79). This interpretation of decline, of course, is predicated on considering the health of the mainland almost exclusively through generalizations about the polis, whose autonomy is held to be one of the first casualties of Philip. But not just the polis itself was lost in translation between the two periods: religious traditions, civic government, local particularism, regional tradition, all were cast to the side as Greeks from Boeotia to Bactria embraced the emerging

Hellenistic koinon.7 ‘Without roots,’ one textbook has it, ‘the Greeks after Alexander felt particularly vulnerable to the constant wars and changing alliances among the major powers, as well as to the normal experiences of everyday life’ (Nagle 2013, 151). According to this logic, Macedonian hegemony did not suddenly shatter the old Greek world,but rather put an end to a gradual period of decline.

Graham Shipley in particular notes this in his authoritative 2004 survey as he writes ‘the Hellenistic

7 The generic ‘hellenicity’ of Hellenistic literature is mentioned and discussed by Gelzer 1993, along with Parsons 1993. Consequences of the rise of monarchy and the perception of Hellenistic basileia as ushering in an age of Tyranny are mentioned by Gruen 1993 and Bringmann 1993. 14

Period embodies a paradox: the extension of the culture and influence of Greece into the non-Greek speaking world took place after the decline of the major Greek states’ (2004, 22).

Some descriptions of local life in Hellenistic Greece seem akin to that of post-Famine Ireland.

Adalberto Giovannini captures this so succinctly as to merit quotation in full, and I take it here as a a summation of the opinio communis in relation to which I shall argue:

It is a fact that the conquest of Asia and the creation of the Hellenistic kingdoms only

accelerated the decline of Greece. Its fate no longer depended on the deliberations of

the assemblies at Athens, Sparta, or Thebes; the real decisions were now taken at the

courts of Pella, of Antioch, or of Alexandria. Many of the ablest men left their country to

take up rewarding positions in Asia or Egypt. The poor left, too, in order to find living as

mercenaries or a piece of land as colonists. The proud cities of Greece became beggars

who asked for material help from the kings, for corn, for schoolmasters, or for the

building of porticoes. They flattered them, they voted them divine honors, and they

tried to play one power off the other in order to preserve a minimum of independence

(Giovannini 1993, 266; my emphasis)

Glory and riches for king and commoner alike outside Greece translated into desolation of body and spirit in Greece itself. Sustaining the birth of Hellenism brought along, as it were, an Gorta Mór – ‘The

Great Hunger’ – for Greece itself, a literal hunger as well as a hunger for the manpower, influence, tradition, and the past which they had lost.8 The rise of the Macedonian hegemony, according to such an analytical perspective, rendered all of the internal and external struggles of the polis, and its

8 Giovannini 1993 264-272 provides an excellent overview of the ‘traditional’ treatments of the Hellenistic polis, with detailed notes. 15 delicate processes of decision-making and arbitration, even the tenets and ideology of civic participation, irrelevant.

Depopulation, impoverishment, political enfeeblement all stemmed from a demographic crisis that became a social crisis. From this irrelevance arises the perceived primacy of the individual in

Hellenistic historiography: faced with the disintegration of more traditional ways of life, the horizon of the individual became paramount, and something like a postmodern disenfranchisement or ennui grips them as they are increasingly jaded by their own inability to impact political events greater than themselves - ‘People swept along by the torrent of events without the sustenance of the old customs and institutions of the city state could only pray for deliverance’ (Nagle 2009, 175). In response, we see the rise of the ‘Hellenistic aesthetic’, (Fowler 1989) the fascination with the quotidian, the common, the realistic, and the domestic that some have seen to dominate the sculpture and literature of the period (Gelzer 1993, Bieber 1981, Pollitt 1986). This is at least in part a side effect of our evidentiary material: the epigraphic evidence on which so much of our understanding of mainland Greece is based provides only episodic and narrow glimpses of events at the level of an individual issue within an individual city, and the lack of an equivalent sweeping narrative like Herodotus or Thucydides forces us to focus on only that which is visible – a conundrum to which we shall return.

The debate over the status of the Hellenistic polis has raged since the era of Glotz, and certainly continues to do so. The subtle implication of the voluminous works of the Copenhagen Polis Centre and the resultant Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis is that the Hellenistic Period was an epilogue to the golden age of the polis which had preceded it. Even among those proponents of a more empowered Hellenistic polis such as Gruen (1993) and Ma (2000), Greek cities were no longer capable of deriving their influence from the same sources that had enabled their bygone prominence.

Greece itself, to borrow David Engel’s turn of phrase regarding the contemporary European Union, had become ‘une sorte de musée de son propre histoire,’ as if the zōon politikon of Aristotle had been reduced to nothing more than a quaint exhibit (Engels 2012, 15).

Yet ‘change, of course’ as Andrew Erskine sagely remarks, ‘is always easier to notice than continuity and it is important not to overlook the latter. To understand the Hellenistic world it is essential to grasp both’ (Erskine 2005, 3). It would be a fool’s errand to argue that nothing changed during the Hellenistic Period, but it would be equally quixotic to seek only what was new and innovative at the expense of what remained the same. For all of the ease with which clean and precise lines are drawn to separate one time from another and brand it as a different period, the reality is seldom as neatly episodic or compartmentalized. This is not to say, however, that similarities between the Classical and Hellenistic Periods have gone unnoticed.

Juxtaposed against these proponents of Hellenistic discontinuity is a group of scholars who have been advocating the opposite stance since for nearly a century, though these views have yet to completely infiltrate prevailing opinions. This school of thought emphasizing Hellenistic civic continuity first emerged in Germany in the 1940s and stood against the general deprecating view of the period that then prevailed. First and most notable among them is Wilhelm’s magisterial article (1942)

‘Proxenie und Euergesie’ which argued for the persistence of a Classical civic ideology in these

Hellenistic institutions, rather than the bankruptcy of the Classical polis. Wilhelm was examining the same body of epigraphic evidence as his contemporaries, but drawing vastly different conclusions. His work heavily inspired Louis Robert and his successor Philippe Gauthier, who then rehabilitated, as it were, the massive epigraphic corpus of proxeny decrees by arguing that their prevalence did not imply the dilution of the institution. Paul Roesch, in a seldom-quoted passage from the introduction to his

17 comprehensive Études Béotiennes, argues that the real force behind Boeotia’s ‘rare stabilité’ during the first half of the period was thanks to ‘la sagesse de ses citoyens’ (Roesch 1982, vi). In the vast documentation of the civic processes of Hellenistic Boeotia afforded by the epigraphic record, Roesch sees the perpetuation of a culture of civic engagement among the citizens of Boeotia that is distinctly classical – or at the very least consistent across the two eras (1982, vi-vii).

In more recent decades, Attica has likewise been cast in a more continuous light. Christian

Habicht’s numerous studies of Hellenistic Athens culminated in his 1997 monograph Athens from

Alexander to Antony. He notes that many aspects of civic life, ranging from the organs of government to festivals, contests, celebrations, even daily life in Attica’s garrisons are far better attested for the

Hellenistic Period than they were for the Classical. He writes unequivocally that ‘‘the most lasting impression produced by a study of the inscriptions is that of a community regulating its own affairs in exemplary fashion’ (1997, 2), later going on to rank Athens among Greek poleis that ‘remained stable and vital organisms’ (1997, 366). It is noteworthy that he arrives at these conclusions – in no small part following a trail that was first blazed by William Ferguson in 1911 - in the context of the city that ostensibly was the first victim of Hellenistic decline after the collapse of its overseas possessions.

Graham Oliver has followed this thread with a very different methodology in his fascinating 2010 study

War, Food, and Politics in Early Hellenistic Athens. Eschewing more commonplace considerations of external possessions and influence, Oliver instead focuses on the more mundane details of how Athens secured Attica itself and thus its own grain supply. In his analysis there is a shift in Athenian policies away from external affairs and towards the management of the city and its immediate countryside, as well as the functioning of the city’s economy under the Macedonain garrison. Broader debates of ideology and policy, he argues, would be inconsequential if the city were starving, and thus he

18 prioritises precisely those thing which were of the most import to the Athenians themselves. He concludes that Athens was persistently interested in the defence of its chora and grain supply, and it was thanks to this immediately local fixation that the city managed to endure the difficulties of the period. The experience of Athens leads him to conclude that the polis in Attica as elsewhere was ‘an entity that thrived after the death of Alexander’ (2010, 7).

Since the 1990s numerous studies of other aspects of Hellenistic Athens have increasingly emphasized continuity over rupture, among them the volumes of Frosen (1998), O’Sullivan (2009),

Bayliss (2011), and Mikalsson (1988). The same can be said of various other regions of Greece, as the chorus of voices emphasizing its continuity continues to swell. Graham Shipley’s work on the

Peloponnese (2005) adds survey archaeology into the mix, and sees continuity in settlement patterns across the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. We shall shortly turn to his more specific conclusions, but the manner in which Shipley seeks to unite epigraphic and archaeological evidence has greatly influence my own approach to the Argolid and elsewhere. Susan Alcock’s 1993 Graecia Capta adopts a somewhat wider perspective as she considers the evolution of the mainland’s settlement patterns under Roman dominion. Her studies of settlement nucleation and agricultural patterns suggest that the real rupture occurred during the Imperial Period, when the economy of the mainland was reoriented towards roman exports. In her chronological construct, the Late Classical and Hellenistic

Periods are treated as one continuous epoch which is then compared to the Roman Period. There are other such scholars to whom we shall turn in the regional case studies, suffice to say for the moment that this study is highly inspired by those who have observed more vectors of continuity between the

Classical and Hellenistic Period than discontinuity; while this tide has largely reversed in the case of

Attica, the rest of the Greek mainland remains remarkably under-discussed. What is perhaps

19 frustrating in the overview I have provided above, though, is that despite a tradition emphasizing

Hellenistic continuity which dates back nearly a century, these works have not diffused into other realm’s of the period’s scholarship and the generalizations of Glotz and Droysen remain powerful.

Before turning to our more specific regional studies, however, we must address two generalizations about the Hellenistic mainland and the Hellenistic Greeks from a broader perspective. The first is the question of how many Greeks remained in the mainland after the wars of the Diadochoi, and the second is the assumption that on a cultural level the Greeks were more inclined to innovation than tradition.

An Empty Region?

Much of the Greek landscape that Giovannini, among others, has described above is drawn from the assumption that the Greek mainland was rapidly and rampantly depopulated in the early decades of the Hellenistic Period. In this scenario, the numerous city foundations of Alexander and his successors in the terra incognita (though not terra deserta) of the Middle and Near East drew successive waves of Greek émigrés out of the mainland. This occurred with such prevalence that

Greece itself suffered a demographic crisis which, to again resurrect the Famine analogy, would have been akin to Ireland in the 1860s. The economic opportunities, the appeal of klēros and other royal benefactions would have provided too attractive an alternative for many Greeks to remain in the now- impoverished mainland, and those left behind would have been at an economic and political disadvantage by virtue of their geography. Our ancient evidence, however, does not permit such sweeping conclusions. We have no reliable figures for the rate or exact provenance of Greek

20 emigration from contemporary ancient authors, and the chronological remove of many of our other sources – particularly the geographers – further skews our demographic perspective. Epigraphy provides no reliable equivalent of census data, and the frequent terminological confusion of

Greek/Macedonian – and the use of such ethnics in reference to legal or fiscal status rather than heredity - further compounds the issue.9 The classification of individuals in Ptolemaic papyri brings with it similar ambiguities (Lewis 1986, 1-25). In short, the evidence is either ambiguous or misleading, and easily steers one towards greatly magnifying scale of emigration from Central Greece.

Take, for instance, Richard Billow’s case study of the demographic impact of Alexander’s campaigns on Macedonia itself. Here we see a similar analytical conundrum, in which previous scholars had blamed Philip and Alexander for robbing Macedon itself of two generations of its young men, thereby greatly altering the demography of the region’s military (and thus aristocratic) class (Billows

1995, 183-186). While Billows is perhaps overly reductionist at times, even taken with a grain of salt his conclusions are striking in the context of our broader inquiry. He asserts that between 334 and 319, the period of the first and by far largest wave of Macedonian invasion and then settlement, a total of c.35,000-40,000 Macedonian men of military age either died or settled in Asia (Billows 1995, 216-217).

Compared to the natural death rate of the already-expanding population of Macedon this was hardly a catastrophic loss or displacement, and he goes on to argue that the military class of Macedonia would not have been thrust into a demographic crisis of depopulation by the campaigns. If Macedon itself, the tip of the spear that was Greek expansion into Asia, was not seriously impacted on a demographic

9 The ambiguity and difficulty of classifying someone as ‘Macedonian’ or ‘Greek’ or ‘other’ is best exemplified by the Ptolemaic context. The identification of such individuals is the principal investigative goal of Goudriaan’s 1988 study, and in his introduction (1-25) he discusses the scholarly and conceptual history of the issue which dates back to Bickermann’s 1927 study in APF 8. The Egyptian case can be taken as emblematic of the general problem of classification through the Seleucid realm and elsewhere. 21 level by the death and migration of its soldiers, then we can certainly presume the same of other cowed regions of mainland Greece who were hardly enthusiastic supporters of the Argead campaigns in terms of either manpower or materiel.

The expedition of colonization and city-foundation instigated by Alexander and perpetuated by the first generations of diadochoi should fundamentally be understood as a Macedonian, rather than a

Greek, affair. The two terms are, however, all too often conflated or viewed as synonymous when referring to the settler populations of Hellenistic foundations.10 It would be greatly misleading to state that the Greeks, proprement dits, comprised the citizen population of the dozens of city foundations in

Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, and the Near East. The Hellenistic foundations were initially populated predominantly by retired or veteran soldiers, and while some civilians were certainly attracted to these new cities they remained fundamentally military settlements (Cohen 1978, 4-6; Grainger 1990, 56-64).

Again according to Billows, who provides what is in all likelihood an overly conservative though nonetheless illustrative estimate, roughly 30,000 Macedonian soldiers comprised the bulk of the initial population of the Asian and Egyptian settlements.

Given the figures cited above, this is neither a cataclysmic figure for Macedon itself, nor the

Greek mainland as a whole. ‘Macedonian’ is an equally misleading appellation, as in such Hellenistic settlements it referred vaguely to anyone who was in the military and fought using Macedonian formations and equipment, regardless of their actual descent.11 The actual number of truly

‘Macedonian’ settlers in each city would have thus been much lower, and the number of resident

Greek civilians lower still. In each of the settlements, the Macedonian population was a minority: they

10 Cohen 1995, Cohen 2006, and Cohen 2013 remain the defining studies of Hellenistic colonization and city foundation, as well as his earlier 1978 study of the Seleucid context. Briant 1982a and 1982b remain indispensable in the francophone realm. 11 Billows 1995, Cohen 1978, 62-64; Grainger 1990, 64-68 and 121-142. 22 existed visibly at the top of the civic hierarchy, but did not comprise the majority of the urban population.12 Pierre Briant in 1999 has argued that many of the ‘Greek’ settlers of these Eastern foundations would have been drawn from the resident Greek population on the Ionian Coast and interior of Asia Minor, not from the Greek mainland itself.

Similarly, the adopted toponyms of new Macedonian settlements in the East and in Egypt suggest that the origin of most of their settlers was not mainland Greece, but rather Macedonia and regions immediately south. In his magisterial study of the Hellenistic settlements in Syria, the Red Sea

Basin, and North Africa – one of, if not the, principle foci of Macedonian settlement – Getzl Cohen makes the following remark about the origin of the region’s transplanted populations:

We may note in passing that settlement names of Thracian, Macedonian, and Thessalian

origin tend to predominate. Undoubtedly this reflects the background of the settlers.

Incidentally, the (practically complete) absence of Attic toponyms is noticeable.

Presumably this reflects the absence of Athenians among the Hellenistic settlers in the

region (Cohen 2006, 27)

The traditional centres of the Classical Greek world: Attica, the Peloponnese, Boeotia, thus do not figure with any prominence in the push to settle these far-flung corners of Alexander’s empire. I ought to note that most of the above observations concern the first two or three generations after Alexander, during which time the vast majority of Hellenistic settlements were founded and such colonization

12 Such is particularly the case when we consider that by as early as the second century BC the term ‘Macedonian’ had almost entirely ceased to have an ethnic association and was rather an indicator of civic or fiscal status. 23 efforts were at their zenith.13 The initial wave of settlers in most cities arrived between 320-270 BC, with only episodic groups of fewer new arrivals in the centuries that followed.14 In the same vein, the number of Hellenistic ‘foundations’ which in actuality amounted to little more than the re-naming or expansion of existing settlements, particularly in Egypt and Asia Minor, further serves to inflate the appearance of the emigrant population figures. If the people of mainland Greece are not significantly represented in the main thrust of this emigration when it was at its peak, then it follows logically that they were not drastically affected in the centuries that followed when this torrent slowed to a trickle.

Athens, to provide one brief and passing example, did not suffer any appreciable demographic decline during the second half of the fourth century; if anything, Mogens Herman Hansen’s study instead suggests a gradual increase in the male citizen population between 330 and 307/6 that necessitated an increase in the size of the boulē from 500 to 600 (1986, 43-68). That Athens was steadily growing precisely when conventional wisdom would have it at its most under-populated gives us cause to pause and reconsider where else in the mainland this may have been the case.

As we shall see in our examinations of each region, mainland Greece was not as deserted and depopulated during the outset of the period as it may seem at first glance. Of course the privations of war against Philip and uprisings against Alexander and his successors would have taken their toll as armies campaigned through the countryside and poleis were caught on either side of conflicts much

13 A conclusion based on synthesis of Cohen’s 1978, 1995, 2006, and 2013 studies, along with trends remarked on by Billows 1995, 81-110. Also Fraser 1996, and Grainger 1990 for city foundations during, respectively, the reigns of Alexander and the first Seleucid kings. Briant 1982a & b remain authoritative, Refer to each for a complete bibliography on the topic, and for the specifically Anatolian context see Briant 1999. Coloru 2013 discusses the dynamics of city foundations in the Seleucid Near East during the first three generations of Seleucid kings, and concurs with Briant that many of the Seleucid settlers originated from Ionian cities. 14 Cohen 1978, 32 does identify two distinct phases of Seleucid colonization efforts – the first during the reigns of Seleucus I and Antiochus I, and the second during the reigns of Antiochus III and IV – but the limited territorial scale of the former, and the lack of a concurrent revival of colonization efforts among the Ptolemies and Antigonids, strengthens our generalization that the majority of such efforts would have been finished by the 270s. 24 larger than themselves, but when had such not been the case? The brutality of the Classical Greeks on each other far outshone the brutality of the Macedonians, if anything the advent of the latter meant a reprieve for many of the mainland’s smaller communities, as we shall see in the cases of Boeotia and

Euboea. It is not as if a quarter or a half of the traditional population of Greece suddenly departed from an exhausted mainland in pursuit of wealth or opportunity in a more exotic locale opened during or after the conquests of Alexander. The adventure, as it were, was rather reserved for their neighbours to the North, either in Macedon itself or in its immediate tributaries. The vast majority of mainland

Greeks would have remained where they were, precisely where they had been for centuries. For few, the world had changed profoundly; for most, though, it remained much the same.

Progressive Conservatism?

Much as the communis opinio presupposes that mainland Greeks were ready and eager to leave their traditional communities, so too does it suppose they were equally avid to dispose of their ancestral traditions with preference for the new over the old. Hence we find the perceived emptiness of old civic deities and the turn towards personal devotion to mystery cults and newly imported gods and goddesses. The notion that the Hellensitic Greeks embraced the cosmopolis of the Hellenistic koinon is contingent on an inherent progressivism on the part of the Greeks that I believe stands in stark opposition to the numerous symptoms of a deep conservatism exhibited by some of the period’s most defining features, particularly in its opening centuries.15 This conservatism of course is aptly

15 A distinct summation of this is offered by Bilde 1991, 178-179 at the close of his article on religious syncretism in Syria. Patterson 1998, 191 and Shipley 2000, 105-106 also advocate this position in which the individual’s attention was drawn away from the polis and towards the family, with some measure of Hellenistic 25 attested throughout the Archaic and Classical Periods by the dozens of ethnic studies to which I shall shortly turn, but again some general remarks situate the case studies that will follow. We shall see this manifest itself in various tiers of the mainland’s communities, but certain general tendencies of the mentality are most conspicuous in other corners of the Hellenistic world. That this conservatism is so visible so far outside the mainland, precisely where we would least expect to find it, in turn feeds back into our understanding of their origin.

I ought to note that when I employ the term conservatism, I do not do so with an eye to equating the habits of the Hellenistic Greeks to the ideological tenets of contemporary conservatism and neo-conservatism in the Western World. Rather I use it out of its Latin root – conservatio – connoting instead an attitude of preservation, conservation, and the observance or maintenance of duty and tradition. It is meant to imply the present protection of what is seen to be the integrity of the past, devoid of the reductionism, isolationism, or religious nationalism of contemporary brands of conservatism.

The case of Ptolemaic Egypt as elucidated in 1983 by Alan Samuel with his gravely underappreciated study From Athens to Alexandria is particularly illustrative. Beginning with the theoretical underpinnings of the Ancient Greek economy, Samuel reveals the fundamental error on the part of modern scholars of assuming that the ancient economy was driven by the same prioritization and valuation of growth as the modern. While the modern economy has a compulsive need for growth and uses it as the primary index for judging success or failure, the Classical Greek economy, he demonstrates, instead held that stability was the intrinsic goal. Carefully analysing the case of

Ptolemaic Egypt, he concludes that although the economy in Alexandria and beyond was quite active cosmopolitanism in the backdrop. More generally there are volumes such as that edited by Prost 2003 that contain numerous analyses of cultural fusion and syncretism. 26 and prosperous, neither industry nor agriculture show any significant innovation or increase in productivity (Samuel 1983, 39-54). Land expansion was not a priority, nor was increasing trade output.

Instead in their new milieu the Greeks of Ptolemaic Egypt perpetuated their economic mechanisms and sensibilities that they had brought with them from the mainland; they continued to do as they had always done, simply in a new locale.16 The Greek economy, like society, was geared towards continuity.

This economic conservatism among the Greeks in Egypt is only one facet of what Samuel proceeds to elaborate as the inherent conservatism of Greek culture writ large, which he sees manifesting itself everywhere from literature to religion (Samuel 1983, 63-100). Despite the proliferation of Hellenistic literature in Alexandria and elsewhere, at no point did this emergent corpus supersede or replace the Classical canon. Classical texts were – and remained – far more popular than contemporary offerings, and as late as the first century BC works such as the hymns to Isis or Isidorus were written in epic style and dialect, not in the koinē (67-74). Despite being surrounded by a new swathe of literary and broadly ‘cultural’ influences, little was borrowed from the environment or its distinct traditions – for the retrospection of Hellenistic, especially Alexandrian, poetry we need look no further than the idealised pastoralism of Theocritus or Callimachus’ attachment to his native Cyrene.

Disturbances of the literary status quo were rare. The same is true of religion: despite the prominence of new deities like Isis or Serapis, the Greeks of Egypt continued to approach and interact with them as they did with more traditional Greek deities (75-100). New gods, yes, but they were greeted same as the old gods. The same religious mentality and sensibility is at work, just with new

16 This often comes to the contrary of what scholars would expect – or hope – to find. To quote Samuel, ‘Although modern scholars have sifted the evidence again and again in search of a demonstration of an outburst of energy and creativity, they have not been able to show that Ptolemaic Egypt added much to what had already been developed in Greek agriculture. The evidence, although well known and often cited, is limited enough to be reassessed in light of the characteristics of the economy and economic theory already noted’ (1983, 47). 27 objects of devotion, and Ptolemaic patronage of the Egyptian pantheon can be seen as part of the long-established Greek habit of paying due homage to local deities.

The Greeks similarly showed no desire to change or actively ‘Hellenize’ Egypt as part of a programme of cultural realignment. Samuel describes the Egyptians, for their part, as being just as conservative as their new Greek cohabitants. In stark contrast to the numerous (though by no means common) instances of ‘Hellenized’ Egyptians rising in the ranks of Ptolemaic administration, we have no hint of Greeks reciprocating by adopting Egyptian traditions (105-118). Regardless of whether this was inspired by passive ambivalence or the more active contempt of the colonizer for the colonized, it does insinuate a Greek preference of what was their own (110-116). The great theoretical advancements in Alexandria were seldom if ever put into practice in the countryside even though they may have improved productivity. New or novel solutions were not sought and instead tried-and-true methods of management were sustained, and the Greeks by and large seemed quite content to go about as they always had. ‘Stability was the good, and stability reigned’ and this taste for continuity was borne of an enduring proclivity for the traditional, informed by the Classical Period and imported into the Hellenistic (123). Thus even those relatively few, as mentioned above, Greeks who left the mainland persisted in their ancestral habits in this perhaps most unlikely of locations.

It is easy and indeed tempting to make much of the less numerous (though certainly glamorous) instances of syncretism – Atargatis, Serapis, the temple at Aï Khanoum, the cylinder of

Antiochus I at Ezida entre autres – while overlooking much longer and more enduring lines of continuity among the Greeks even as far East as Bactria.17 Hence the Delphic maxims so carefully

17 Syncretism of Atargatis see Bilde 1990, along with an interesting conclusion at 178-179 in which he argues for the cosmopolitan civilization of the Hellenistic world, and the ‘crisis of identity’ in which ‘the traditional, local, static civic structures and cults were eroded by the encroachment of new ways of thinking’ (178). Also Bilde ed. 28 preserved in the most Eastern reaches of the Hellenistic world, hence the innumerable bouleutēria or agorai, the temples and dedications, the theatres and prytaneia, the statues and civic monuments, and hence the persistence of an urban sensibility that was so patently Greek in concept and execution that it remains so immediately identifiable in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, the Holy Land, and points in between and beyond. Both ancient and modern authors, intentionally or not, argue for this assiduous fidelity of the Hellenistic Greeks to the perceived model of the Classical polis. Billows’ overview of

Hellenistic cities captures this nicely as he writes ‘Several authors – Dio Chrysostom (Or.48.9) and

Pausanias (10.4.8) most notably – present what is virtually a checklist of the physical infrastructure a city must have to be considered worthy of the term polis’ (Billows 2005, 197). Even the Hippodamian plan of urban organization, so common in the cleanly regimented geography of Hellenistic foundations, is itself the product of a trend that had become commonplace by the close of the Classical Period

(Owens 1991, 74-83). In the same manner as ‘foreign’ locales in newly-conquered territories were familiarised by giving them ancestral toponyms borrowed from Greece or Macedonia, such physical mimicry of the mainland urban precedent was similarly meant to be reassuring to the newly-arrived populace. The newfound prevalence of this Classical model over a vast geographical span ought not be understood as innovation, but rather conscious imitation driven by the same dispositions that guided the economic sensibilities of the Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt.

Beyond the physical topography of these Greek foundations, we can see numerous vectors of civic structural continuity which similarly manifest the persistence of ‘older’ understandings of the relationship between individual or family and the polis community. Grainger and Cohen’s

1996 for the Seleucid context. On Serapis the dominant study remains Hornbostel 1973. On the Temple at Aï Khanoum see Mairs 2013; Martinez-Sève 2010; Coloru 2009. Cylinder of Antiochus I at Ezida, Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1991 provide the most authoritative treatment. 29 aforementioned studies of the new foundations in Asia Minor and Syria note the prevalence of a traditional hierarchy of civic classification – phratriai, phylai, dēmos, politeuma – according to which citizens were organized. Concepts of citizenship (politeia and isopoliteia) and the laws governing its conferral similarly endured throughout and are well-attested epigraphically. Citizens served in the same types of assemblies as they had during the Classical Period: boulai, ekklēsiai, gerousiai, ephorates, and other bodies were as common in Halicarnassus, Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, or Kolophon, as they were in the Classical constitutions of Athens, Corinth, or even Cyrene.18 Civic affairs were overseen by citizens selected by any number of familiar mechanisms to serve in magistracies that were equally familiar to the Classical Period; astynomoi, nomphylakes, tamiai, stratēgoi in Hellenistic foundations served precisely the same functions as their antecedents in Classical poleis.19 Precisely the same mentality that had reigned over the division of civic labour and responsibility continued to do so with unabated dominance both among Hellenistic cities that were created e nihilo and older poleis alike

(McAuley 2013). Although the Athenian model of civic hierarchy was the preferred object of Hellenistic imitatio, the underlying mentality that had formed such a hierarchy was hardly exclusive to the

Athenians.

While new magistrates such as the royal epistatēs were grafted on to the very top of many new urban hierarchies, everything below the level of royal interface in these cities is clearly intended to be evocative - if not an outright imitation - of the Classical civic precedent that has been the subject of so

18 Gauthier 1984, 96-7 Gruen 1993, 354, Billows 2005, 211. Jones 1940 211-250 enumerates the various magistracies of several Hellenistic cities, including more specific and exotic offices like the nuktostratēgoi and sitophylakes. For an illustrative example of the complexity of Hellenistic civic administration, see the administrative code of Pergamon in OGIS 483, Klaffenbach 1954, Austin 216. The mechanism of office-holding, though, remains the same. 19 Billows 2005: 208-212 provides an excellent overview of the depth of civic activity in the Hellenistic Period, with citations. 30 much scholarly focus over the past decades.20 When we consider that such civic structures were in many ways ill-suited to the new foundations onto which they were imposed because they (consciously) excluded sizeable native populations and the non-Greek countryside from the umbrella of civic administration, the choice to adhere to them becomes yet more telling.21 The system was not broken in the eyes of the Hellenistic Greeks, and it did not need to be fixed. If there had been this pervasive compulsion to innovate, and to disregard the old in search of the new that many have thrust into the mentality of the Hellenistic Greeks, then I believe we would hardly see such dogged fidelity to the physical geography and civic hierarchy of the ‘traditional’ Greek polis.

As we shift our gaze from the politikon (communal/civic) to the idion (individual/private) we can see a similar conservatism at work. Although it has been variously asserted that the political vagaries of the period drove a wedge between the world of the oikos and the polis that created an insurmountable rift between the public and the private, Riet van Bremen’s recapitulation (2005, 314-321) hints at much the opposite. Drawing on the example of several Carian cities – Latmos, Pidasa, and Miletos – and their various decrees regarding epigamia and the civic status that resulted from various attempts at sympoliteia, she poignantly concludes that ‘there is much evidence to show that, within the cities themselves, rather than a weakening of the continuum between “old” family ties and old “polis” structures, there was a continuation or even a reinforcing of the essential relationship between the two spheres throughout much of the Hellenistic Period’ (2005, 320). She is one among many in the past decade who have reconsidered decrees and other epigraphic evidence that had once been held as

20 The numerous acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre immediately come to mind as the best exemplars of this trend, including the 7 volumes of ‘Acts of the CPC’ and their other publications. Most notable, and most monolithic, is the Inventory edited by Hansen and Nielsen. 21 Cohen 1978, 35 goes so far as to argue that ‘the colony maintained its stability both by excluding the native population and by attracting future colonists with the same national background.’ 31 proof positive of the ‘deracination’ of Classical models, and instead seen in the same evidence a thematic and ideological thread that leads back much farther than it may have first appeared.22 The

Classically civic function and importance of the Hellenistic oikos is similarly patent in the elaboration of magistracies like the gymnasiarchia, paidonomia, and gynaikonomia (van Bremen 2005, 323), which served to oversee the public role of women and young men that had been inherent in Greek society since the Archaic Period.23 Of course the precise form in which such Classical civic sensibilities presented themselves varied as ever in accordance with exigency and circumstance, the ideology remained the same. The sheer prevalence of offices such as those mentioned above in epigraphic dossiers leads one to reconsider the abandon with which Hellenistic families are said to have turned their back on the civic and embraced the individual. The old ways rather continued to present themselves, only in new ways.

‘Deracination’ is a term that has been frequently used to describe the process of Greek emigration during the Hellenistic Period, in which the traditional attachments of Greeks who were torn from their ancestral roots invariably withered and died after they had been planted elsewhere in the

Hellenistic World. Accordingly, physical separation from one’s traditional home and affiliated kinship or ethnic groups inevitably leads to a weakening of traditional attachments, leaving the individual in a sort of purgatory in which they feel grounded by neither whence they came nor where they now found themselves, or so the presumption goes. The process has been used to account for such perceived

Hellenistic phenomena as the demise of the polis, the decay of amateur participation in government by

22 Among them Gauthier 1972 and 1988, Savalli 1985, Jones 1987, and of course van Bremen 2005. 23 Take, for instance, the illustrious example from Alexandria cited by van Bremen 2005 in which the gynaikonomos testifies to a young man’s heredity and eligibility for citizenship by virtue of his matrilineal descent as part of an Alexandrian dokimasia. Also discussed by Wehrli 1962; Vatin 1970, 254-261; Ogden 1996, 364-375. 32 citizens, the primacy of the horizon of the individual, decline of patrilineal transmission of status, the empowerment of women, and the preference for the abstract cosmopolis over the immediate polis

(Pomeroy 1997 109-112, for instance). But this presumes much of the Greeks specifically, and the process of immigration in general. Anthropological studies of the contemporary identity dynamics of the experience of immigration have shown ‘deracination’ to have quite the opposite effect: groups of immigrants who now find themselves a minority in a new milieu tend to cling rather more desperately to the local culture of their country of origin.24 If anything the smaller the group of emigrants, the stronger the sense of perceived sense of solidarity and the more enduring the sense of ancestral attachment even over the course of generations.

In the specific context of Hellenistic Greek immigration and emigration, Tanja Scheer’s studies of myth and local tradition show that the modern anthropological generalizations hold true among the

Ancients as well (1993, 2000, 2005). Given the pre-eminently determinative role played by heredity and civic origin throughout the Archaic and Classical Periods, it is hardly surprising that Greek émigrés continued to value their origins so highly. We see this ancestral attachment expressed in the speed and enthusiasm with which the mythohistory of new Hellenistic foundations was written and interwoven with traditions from the mainland. The sheer diversity of the mythohistorical tradition of Antioch-on- the-Orontes is perhaps the best, though by no means sole, exemplar of this.

Each Greek ethnic group that came to comprise the diverse population of Antioch was careful to incorporate their own individual traditions and heroes into the broader civic tradition of the new city. In so doing they sought to ground the city’s present existence firmly in the mythological past of their ancestral homes. Cretan mercenaries in the city claimed that the hero Kasos and the most noble

24 There is a wealth of scholarly literature, but, for instance: Kearney 1995; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Brettell 2000. 33 of the Cretans had ventured into the region of what would become Antioch and founded a settlement in the dim archaic past, (Lib.11.52-5; Malalas 8.15), Antioch’s Cypriots held that the Amuk plain – originally a Syrian name meaning ‘dry’ or ‘barren’ – was actually derived from a visit by the Cypriot

Amyke (Ibid), and the Argives spun an intricate narrative web involving Io, Inachos, and Triptolemos founding a settlement called Iopolis (Strabo 16.2.5). The story involving Apollo chasing the nymph

Daphne all the way to her eponymous suburb was contrived to bolster the prominence of the Seleucid

Temple of Apollo at Daphne, and further grounded the otherwise foreign region deeply in the Greek mythical past.25 Such complex mythohistorical elaboration served to provide a sense of authenticity and tradition to a city that in reality existed because of the whim of a king, but for the populace of

Greek settlers it also allowed them to see no inherent contradiction in claiming that they were both

Argive and Antiochene, or Cypriot, or Elean, or Heraklid.

Antioch was hardly alone in doing so, and we can see numerous mythic parallels in Tarsus,

Pergamon, Mysia, and elsewhere. Cities from throughout the Hellenistic world claimed ancestral descent from locations in mainland Greece as a means of establishing some kind of precedent for their contemporary claims to authentic Hellenicity. Argos, thanks to the ambiguity and diversity of its mythical past, was a conspicuously popular region from which a city outside Greece may claim descent

– and indeed many did (Scheer 2005). The deeper and more elaborate the connection, and the more prominent a god or hero that could be claimed as ktistēs, the better.

I mention all of the above examples not so much to demonstrate the enduring Hellenicity of the diasporic Greeks themselves, but moreso the enduring prominence with which the mainland figured in

25 As discussed by Buraselis 2010, 269-273, and Ogden 2011. For other discussions of the ethnic and mythic traditions of Antioch see Grainger 1990, 20-25; Downey 1961, 50, Haddad 1949, 38-9. On the Argive ethnos in new Hellenistic foundations Scheer 2005, 226-229; for the Herakleid myth and regional connection see also Downey 1961, 50-55 and Haddad 1949, 38-44. 34 the cultural imagination of the Greek koinon.In these instances we witness the transplantation of the dynamics of local culture from the Greek mainland into the most diverse corners of the Hellenistic world, and if we see these local transplants thrive among the recipients, then they must have remained dear to the donors.

The fervency with which these ancestral local cultures were consciously replicated, in all of their religious, mythical, political, and physical diversity, must reflect not only the enduring importance of such specific attachments, but moreover the continuing prominence of local attachment as a wellspring of communal identity. How these putative mainland attachments impacted those extra- mainland cities that claimed them has been the subject of much discussion (Scheer 1993, 2005). What has received less consideration is how the original cities from which descent was being claimed internalized such contacts. This will be one of our principal considerations, particularly in the case of

Argos, while elsewhere we shall see the persistent engagement of such Hellenistic communities with other regions of the mainland.

These diverse symptoms of what I label here as the fundamental conservatism of the Hellenistic

Greeks are of course only few among many. We might equally point to further continuities in

Hellenistic literature, to the enthusiasm with which Hellenistic kings traced their own lineages back to mythical heroes or the gods themselves, or to the point that despite their dialect having long been surpassed as au courant or immediately useful the Homeric epics remained the basis of Greek education.26 The studies that I have mentioned above regarding the civic culture of the Hellenistic

26 Gelzer 1993 mentions the attempt of Hellenistic monarchs to re-create the crisis of the city-state in their patronage of Hellenistic literature. Schultz 2011, 313-319 analyzes certain examples of Hellenistic sculpture and argues convincingly for what he sees as the classical continuity of the Hellenistic ‘baroque;’ the classicizing tendency of which is also noted by Bieber 1981. Hunter 2005 neatly summarizes the ever increasing popularity of ‘canonical’ texts like Homer and Euripides in both didactic and popular circles, as well as the tendency of 35 mainland are likewise grounded in the notion of Greek conservatism. The list could and indeed shall go on as we shift to how these trends betray themselves at the smaller level of the region or city and vice versa. But it was precisely there, on the local level, that these enduring attachments were forged and refined over the course of centuries, and it was on this smallest scale of Greek society that they were learned and lived, experienced and remembered. Despite assertions that the Hellenistic world was fundamentally different, Greece itself remained as it had been: a patchwork mosaic of different communities and institutions, interacting on various levels (Malkin 2013). It is to these constituent tiles of the larger picture that we ought to look to see how the whole is reflective of the character of its parts.

It has become fashionable in some scholarly circles to describe the Greeks as precursors of contemporary neoliberal ideology, in the same vein as the Hellenistic Period has been described as a precursor to contemporary globalization. The image of them that has emerged, particularly since the attacks of September 11th and the War on Terror, perhaps better reflects idealized aspirations than their historical reality, as they have been turned to with increasing optimism as holding the remedies to our contemporary ills.27 Consequently the thought of the Greeks as being rather timid in the face of

Hellenistic literature to re-appropriate and re-analyze such texts. Hunter 2004 discusses the lasting impact of Homer on the Hellenistic and later literary traditions, and for Hellenistic poetry more broadly see Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004. Samuel 1983 on the prevalence of the Iliad in education, especially in Ptolemaic Egypt. For the divine ancestry of, for instance, the Seleucid kings and their mythical engineering see Ogden in Erickson and Ramsey 2011, and for ancient mentions of the divine or heroic ancestry of the Ptolemies: Curtius 9.8.22, Pausanias 1.6.2, 1.6.8, Suda s.v. Λάγος (quoted above); unpublished Ptolemaic inscription at Errington 1990: 265 n.6: Ἡρακλείδας Ἀργεάδας. Antigonids: IG xi.4 1096 (Gonatas’ “forefathers” monument on Delos), Polyb. 5.10.10, Plut.Aem.12.9. 27 Holt 2005 typifies this trend perfectly, as his analysis is predicated on gaining some measure of contemporary insight into the War in Afghanistan through the campaigns of Alexander. Quotations such as ‘the experiences of Alexander the Great, though long ago, still resonate, and they suggest that America’s resolve will be sorely tested in that truculent land.’ (xii). The manner in which he views the fall of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom as spelling the death of ‘civilization’ in the region has more in common with Bevan than contemporary scholarly trends. Though not Hellenistic, Holland 2007 similarly discusses the Persian Wars in a post-9/11 lens, and seeks 36 profound change or great diversity, of more eagerly looking backward than forward for inspiration, or feeling more secure in emulation than in innovation, is one that sits ill at easy with many modern preconceptions. I hope to have begun to show with the above examples that the Greeks, when confronted with the uncertainty of where they were going, embraced where they had come from more tightly – with all its complex civic, religious, mythical, and economic traditions.

It is understandable to think such things would have provided a sense of continuity and reassurance in a world that was, we can only concede, changing at a rapid pace Some commentators would have hoped or preferred that the Greeks would have eagerly adapted what was best and brightest in their new and exotic environs. The reality, perhaps, is rather less inspiring. They were a conservative and tradition-bound people, their mentality had more in common with a Middle-Eastern shame-honour culture than a Western European democracy, and as Herodotus reminds us, each individual, city, or region naturally thought and continued to think that its own ways were the best.28

Old habits died hard, but before considering its maturity we first turn to its adolescence. ‘Hellenicity,’

Jonathan Hall described in 2002, ‘refused to melt in cauldron of the Hellenistic World’ (2002, 221-2).

But how had it become so resilient?

some measure of insight into the contemporary conflict through examining fifth century Greece. The general tendency of, viz the Waterloo Hellenistic Brochure and textbooks such as Nagle 2013 and Pomeroy et al., to view the Hellenistic Period as the ancient precursor to globalization are similarly laced with idealism. The predominant shift in our contemporary perception is that multiculturalism has taken the place of Hellenistic cosmopolitanism as an implicit ideal. 28 Hdt. 3.38.1; for the similarity of contemporary Middle Eastern cultures to the social climate of Classical Athens see the introduction to Llewellyn-Jones 2003, 4-9. Llewellyn-Jones goes so far as to write ‘The truth of the matter is that the Greeks were indeed part of the Oriental ‘Other’’ (2003, 7). Others, such as Whitley 1991, have gone so far as to claim that Greece was merely an outpost of the Oriental/Near-Eastern World, as mentioned in Llewellyn-Jones 2003, 7. Cairns 1993 provides a detailed and fascinating analysis of the concept of aidos, in and itself a pivotal concept of shame-honour cultures more generally. 37

Archaic Beginnings, and Classical Ends?

We have come to appreciate the Classical Greek world as a haphazard patchwork of intersecting and competing local cultures thanks to the ‘ethnic turn’ taken by Classical scholars in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and into the early new millennium, and more recent work on the Archaic Period as seen through the lenses of environmental history (Horden and Purcell

2000) and network theory (Malkin 2013). I shall begin with an examination of the ethnic paradigm and its resonance for the study of Hellensitic localism, and then propose an alternative approach to the mainland.

As ethnicity migrated from the analytical realm of anthropology into the social sciences with increasing visibility in the 1980s, Classicists were similarly quick to perceive its potential utility as a category of analysis of the Greek world. The fall of the Soviet Union and ensuing outbreak of ethnically- charged violence in the former Yugoslav Republics made such concerns ever more pressing, leading several scholars to discard a view of the Greek world as being defined by a binary opposition of competing political ideologies in favour of a more nuanced and layered approach to questions of identity and association.29 The early 1990s showed with increasing clarity that neither nationalism nor ideological conviction alone inspired the sense of fervent attachment that fuelled such conflicts. Rather, traditional extra-governmental sources of identity had just as much bearing on present dispositions.

The lure was thus dangled for Classicists who sought to identify what such strongly binding extra- institutional ties as had been seen in the Balkans might have been similarly present among the Greeks.

29 The impact of the fall of the Soviet Union on Classical studies is something best touched on by Cartledge 1990 in his introduction. Proponents of the ‘old binary’ of competing political ideologies defining the Classical world are best represented by G.E.M. de Ste Croix 1981. 38

The line of inquiry gradually led an increasing number of scholars to a social distinction that was at once nebulous but remarkably suffuse: the ‘ethnic group’, or ethnos. But as we follow the path of ethnic scholarship in the Classical world, we come to see that the scholarly corpus at once necessitates, and further complicates, our investigation of these concerns in the Hellenistic Period. In short, it seems that the far-reaching conclusions of the past two decades have generally not crossed the threshold and made an equivalent mark on Hellenistic historians.

The term itself merits pause and consideration before delving in to its complicated history in scholarship, given how frequently it has been used as the lynchpin of far-reaching analytical constructs.

Much has been made, as we shall see, of the importance of ethnos to understanding Greek social thought and its resultant political structures. However, we must bear in mind the ambiguity and polyvalence of the term throughout antiquity, as well as the vast disconnect between what is signified by ‘ethnos’ and our cognate adjective ‘ethnic.’ The term meant far more, in far more contexts, than simply ‘ethnic group.’ The noun ἔθνος in the Homeric epics refers simply, as the LSJ notes (s.v. ἔθνος), to a number of people or animals living or working together. Among humans this generally means a body of men, company of warriors, or band of comrades.30 It can refer to a group of men generically in the singular (ἔθνος λαῶν at Il. 1.495) or plural (ἔθνεα πεζῶν at Il.11.724) or a specific group of men from a certain tribal or regional background (Ἀχαιῶν ἔθνος at Il. 17.552). Among animals it similarly means a pack, group, swarm, or flock (viz. of bees at Il.2.87, of birds at 2.459). In Homer, however,

ἔθνος also requires a genitive plural modifier, and never appears on its own. By the Classical Period

ἔθνος continued to refer to both men and animals, as Sophocles (Ant. 344) identifies groups of birds and wild bests with ἔθνος, while Herodotus employs it in a more anthropological sense as ‘a group of

30 For instance, at 3.32 (‘ἂψ δ᾽ ἑτάρων εἰς ἔθνος ἐχάζετο κῆρ᾽ ἀλεείνων) and 7.112 (ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲν νῦν ἵζευ ἰὼν μετὰ ἔθνος ἑταίρων). 39 people,’ perhaps what we would tentatively consider a ‘nation’, to use anachronistic terminology. At

1.101 he refers to ‘τὸ Μηδικὸν ἔθνος’ and its subdivisions which he labels as γένεα, hence the former takes on a more generic meaning. Elsewhere he refers to the Greeks who had chosen to side with the

Persians as ‘τῶν μηδισάντων ἐθνέων τῶν Ἑλληνικῶν’ (9.106), vaguely describing diverse groups of people without using more explicit political terminology. Again, ἔθνος requires either an adjectival or genitive modifier to convey any sense of specific meaning, and does not appear alone.

The term remained ambiguous in the fifth and fourth century, but still retained its general meaning of ‘group.’ Plato (Leg. 776d) discusses the caste or class of the Penestae (serfs) of the

Thessalians as an ‘ἔθνος’, and the term does not have an explicitly ‘ethnic’ connection as we would understand it. Elsewhere the generic and malleable character of ἔθνος is reinforced by Plato’s mention of the social class of heralds as the ‘ἔθνος κηρυκικόν’ (Plat.Stat. 290b), and by apposition we can also count groups clerks and public servants. This professional connotation of ἔθνος also appears in the

Gorgias, with doctors or shipbuilders or ‘any other group of craftsmen’ (περὶ ἄλλου τινὸς

δημιουργικοῦ ἔθνους Gorg.455b). Xenophon echoes this usage by referring to the ‘group of rhapsodes’

(οἶσθά τι οὖν ἔθνος, ἔφη, ἠλιθιώτερον ῥαψῳδῶν Xen.Sym. 3.6). Aristotle (Arist.Pol. 1324b10), interestingly, generally employs ἔθνος to refer to non-Greeks, juxtaposing their habits against the social organization of the Greeks themselves. To further complicate the picture, Xenophon also employs ἔθνος as simply ‘sex, gender’ when discussing the biological difference between males and females. (Xen.Oec. 7.26).

The point of the above review is to highlight the multiple meanings of this word which is often taken as unambiguously referring to a group of people that we would classify as an ‘ethnic group.’ The term ἔθνος in the Greek context carries with it biological considerations in certain situations, referring

40 to groups or species of birds or animals, but equally describes groups that are distinguished by their training, political allegiance, social function, or profession. The best translation, thus, is likely also the simplest: ‘group.’ This imprecision of the term must be borne in mind in our subsequent review of how it has been employed among contemporary scholars, who have transformed ἔθνος into a normative political and social construct. All the while, it has been conflated with our adjective ‘ethnic.’

Jonathan Hall first blazed the trail in 1997 with his fittingly-titled study of the Argolid, Ethnic

Identity in Greek Antiquity. If I discuss Hall with more brevity than his successors it is not a sign of dismissal, but rather an acknowledgement of the subsequent revisions to the general base that he provided in his initial study. His monograph is meant to be a methodological experiment (14-15), with the intent of seeing what happens when a model of ethnicity derived from contemporary anthropology is applied to the study of one such group in Greek antiquity - in this case, the Dorians. Hall describes contemporary anthropological models at great length and with great erudition, though in general he tends simply to graft the modern anthropological model onto the ancient world with little or no revision (i.e., 17-32). Nevertheless, his dismissal of older biologically-based notions of ethnic ties among the Greeks and preference of the more fluid social construct of contemporary ethnicity derived from anthropology was a substantial step in the right direction. For a more detailed recapitulation of the scholarly history of ‘ethnicity’ among ancient historians, I instead turn to a book that appeared two years later and delves into the scholarly tradition with rather more gusto.

Jeremy McInerney’s 1999 study The Folds of Parnassos was among the first standalone investigations after Hall into how the ethnos and koinon were equally important sources of social cohesion as the polis, taking the region of Phokis as the illustrative case study. The ethnos had previously been popular among German and Prussian historians during the tumultuous period of

German unification in the latter half of the 19th century, and McInerney’s recapitulation of the longer tradition of ethnic scholarship is so complete as to make its repetition here redundant.31 Two comments, however, ought to be made and borne in mind. First, the German school of ethnographic analysis takes ethnicity, and its constituent unit the ethnos as a predominantly racial rather than cultural grouping. Hence biology and heredity figure more prominently into their analyses than our more abstract preoccupations (9-18). Second, they treat the ethnos rather fatalistically as a vestige of a more primitive tribal age in Greek society that is useful mainly as a signpost of the longer trajectory that led inevitably towards what they held to be the pinnacle of Greek social evolution: the polis (18-

22). Thus an ethnos was by nature a more rudimentary grouping whose crude bonds of loyalty were thankfully superseded by the wellspring of socio-political unity that was the Greek city-state. If an ethnos persisted in the Classical Period in certain regions, it was taken as an implicit indication of their backwardness or lack of sophistication, a vestige that would be done away with as soon as said region progressed further.

McInerney and Hall’s most important innovation in the conceptual approach to ethnicity was to replace the racial/biological understanding of an ethnos with one inspired by a model derived from contemporary anthropology which views ethnicity as a predominantly sociocultural unit. Thus ethnē were no longer closed groups independent from one another in which membership was determined exclusively by heredity, but rather an open and changeable structure defined by the elective affiliation of its constituent members. Rather than being bound by brick walls, ethnē were now understood to have semi-permeable borders across which individuals or groups might traverse at different times for

31 McInerney 1999 8-18 provides an excellent account of the political and social context in which ethnicity was first discussed in late 19th century Germany, and the motives which underlay studies by Müller 1820-1824 and Curtius 1857. Though contemporary scholars universally disparage Müller, Hall 1997, 8-14 argues convincingly for the lasting formative legacy of Die Dorier on much later interpretations of Greek ethnicity. 42 different reasons. The dynamic, fluid process of ethnic formation came to the fore, as did the largely putative character of ethnic attachment. It was precisely this flexibility and responsiveness that caused the ethnos as a fundamental social unit to survive well into the Classical Period and beyond, outlasting and at times overshadowing the bonds of solidarity forged by the polis. Rather than disappearing or fading into obscurity with the advent of the city-state, ethnic identity instead paralleled the cohesive force of citizenship in a way that was not contingent on the physical confines of the polis, yet was still a viable and identifiable political unit. Yet for all of the thoughtfulness with which McInerney weaves together the methodological threads of Classics and social anthropology, he raises a critically important point which I do not believe has yet received due consideration, and remains as true now as it was then. Before his survey of contemporary anthropological thought, he notes ‘it is apparent therefore that there is a wide gap between what the Greeks meant by an ethnos and what most Greek historians have chosen to study under that name’ (1999, 25).

Numerous scholars quickly followed suit and produced dozens of studies that came to similar conclusions in different places and on different scales of analysis. It is not my intention to resurrect the findings of each, but rather to select certain works that exemplify important schools of thought or broader analytical conclusions that will figure prominently once we move cross the frontier into the

Hellenistic Period. Whereas McInerney saw ethnicity from the narrow vantage point of a single region,

Catherine Morgan’s sweeping 2003 study Early Greek States Beyond the Polis repeated the same method of inquiry at scale over several regions. Morgan acknowledged that the various tiers on which

Greek identity construction operate – ethnos, polis, and smaller groupings – were not mutually exclusive, and that one could identify with several simultaneously, though in different ways (4-16). The polis is thus not the only beacon of political solidarity, nor the ethnos the exclusive source of a

43 perceived sense of commonality (2003, 202-222). The chronological simultaneity of this is paramount: her studies reveal that there is no appreciable time lag in the relative prominence of ethnos or polis ties; in other words, the Greeks did not make a linear transition (or any transition, for that matter) from exclusively regional to civic attachments. Thus perished the neat progressivism of the evolutionary trajectory outlined by German scholars of the 19th century Stadtsgeschichte.

In such a framework the interaction between these different registers of identity becomes paramount to understanding ethnicity as a process, not an end result. In her words, ‘[ethnicity] is process of choice by which a tier of identity is constructed or prioritized for perceived group advantage’

(14) while ethnē themselves are the resultant units, they are the ‘outcomes of such processes and entities which are rooted in time and space’ (14). Making room for the sundry ways in which this identity can be expressed – in particular its physicality in monuments, architectural styles, or common sanctuaries – she considers when and how such senses of commonality presented themselves in each region of the mainland (cf. her methodology on 16-18). The findings confirmed the conclusions of

McInerney: senses of regional community and solidarity had clearly emerged and begun to be politicised as early as the late 6th and early 5th century, and this could go hand-in-hand (though not necessarily so) with gradual urbanization. Thus as by the late Archaic and early Classical Periods, the

Greeks had begun to address certain common decisions and issues on a wider level than that of the individual city, and felt inclined to do so by the unity of such regional ethnogenesis. This process in turn provided the framework of various identities that persisted well into the Classical Period and beyond.

At roughly the same time as Morgan, Jonathan Hall was asking similar questions on a yet larger scale: the community of the Greeks as a whole, and how these regions outlined by Morgan gradually came to think of themselves as being part of a broader group. There is much to admire in Hall’s work

Hellenicity, but also some unsettling preconceptions regarding the nature and study of Greek ethnicity that I shall elaborate more fully when we turn shortly to the modern genesis of the concept. I need not repeat Hall’s definition of ethnicity here both in the interest of brevity (cf. 9-19), and because he has essentially borrowed the definitions of roughly a dozen anthropologists in sequence from the 1980s with little modification.32 And such was precisely his intent. In response to the objection that we cannot easily graft an analytical model derived from contemporary observation onto the Ancient world and expect it to be equivalent, Hall essentially admits that it is better to understand the Greeks on our own terms than on theirs:

The truth is that an analytical tool that allows itself to be moulded to the contours of its

object quickly becomes a blunt instrument. A near-universal working definition of

ethnicity provides a neutral yardstick by which the Greek case may be compared with

other societies, historical or otherwise (2002, 18)

It is an odd concession to make. Ethnicity, in this framework, is only useful as a comparative tool rather than a truly investigative category of analysis – a problem to which we shall return shortly. Yet he employs this approach to great effect: this comparative vector leads Hall to conclude, through an examination of a plethora of literary and archaeological material, that a concept of ‘hellenicity’ – viz. general and distinct Greekness – did not emerge until much later than scholars had previously thought

(125-170). What used to be held as the primordial ethnic groups of Archaic Greece – Achaeans, Ionians,

Aetolians, and Dorians – did not emerge as self-identifying groups until the 8th or 7th century, and the

32 That his ‘definition of ethnicity’ is ten pages long is in and of itself cause for concern, and Hall admittedly borrows and summarises his own definition from 1997 with little modification – the tentative character of his examination in 1997 is also worrisome. A variety of questions and objections concerning the contemporary schools of thought regarding anthropological ethnicity are raised but never fully resolved to satisfaction. 45 gradual transition from thinking of Hellenicity as a cultural rather than purely ‘ethnic’ category did not occur until the fifth century. Such distinction did not emerge in the mainland regions themselves, but rather were negotiated in response to the contact and exchange that were the products of colonization movements in the Mediterranean. What was forged on the periphery eventually trickled back to the centre with profound effect, and hence Hall argues for a reversal of what was once the orthodox view of the origins of Greekness.

And so with the preceding three studies that I have highlighted we see the at times daunting scales at which these senses of communal attachment operate: the ethnos, the polis, the koinon, the region, the supra-region, all in some manner feeding into a sense of perceived commonality that we have branded ‘Hellenicity’. These various tiers of identity are constructed and negotiated in response to internal and external developments, making it difficult or impossible to pin down what precisely was a region’s or polis’ ‘ethnic identity’ at any given moment due to the dynamism of the construct itself.

McInerney, Morgan, and Hall are of course only three among many, and the studies of ‘ethnic identity in _____’ have multiplied over the last twenty years.33 A concurrent multiplicity of source material and analytical vectors has also been thrown into the mix: permutations of ethnic identity in regional sanctuaries, mythology and mythohistory, coinage and its symbolism, civic monuments and architecture, local or federal magistracies or hierarchies, dialectical shifts, among sundry others have greatly broadened the potential field on which we can witness the manifestation of ethnicity.

33 For a small and select list of instances: Derks and Roymans 2009, Zacharia 2008, and Malkin 2001 for ethnicity generally; Gruen 2011 on ‘cultural’ identity in the ancient Mediterranean that frequently brushes against ethnic questions; Harrison 2002 and Mitchell 2007 on the Hellene-Barbarian dichotomy; Konstan and Saïd 2006 on Greekness; Kühr 2006 along with Larson 2007 and Mafodda 2000 for Boeotia; The number of smaller-scale or article-length treatments is too vast to be reproduced with any purpose here. Interestingly, comparative cross- cultural studies have begun to emerge as well, among them Kim 2009’s comparison of ethnicity and identification of foreigners in Ancient Greece and Han China. 46

Of particular note is a volume edited by Peter Funke and Nino Luraghi (2009), which bears greatly on our subsequent regional case studies. The various contributions considering the dynamics of ethnicity amidst what they entitled “the Crisis of the Peloponnesian League” deserve our attention because many of the cases discussed occur in the middle of the fourth century. The brief independence of the region of Pisatis after its separation from Elis in 365, for instance, led to an evanescent flurry of regional solidarity among the newly-detached cities and communities, who struck coins, developed federal iconography and symbolism, and signed treaties as a coherent group for the first time in their common history (Giangiulio 2009, 66-70; Roy 2009).

The same had occurred with the region of Triphylia after the Spartan-Elean War in c.400, when communities which were newly liberated from Elean control fused their respective local traditions into what was claimed to be an authentically ancient ‘Triphylian’ heritage, replete with its own

(embellished) mythohistory and (fabricated) eponymous hero, Triphylos.34 This was then used as the ideological basis of an emergent Triphylian state, organised into a federal assembly with federal coins and a cultic centre. What is remarkable about the two aforementioned examples is that, in the

Peloponnese at any rate, the processeses of regional coalescence and ethnogenesis described in the

Archaic period by McInerney and Morgan were still freshly occurring as late as the closing decades of the Classical Period. New local communities were emerging out of a synthesis of older traditions, heretofore unattested regions were organising themselves into local federations boasting a freshly

34 Ruggeri 2009 on Triphylia from Elis to Arcadia, especially 49-53 for the emergence of the ethnos-state. Also Nielsen 1997 discusses the process which he labels ‘an experiment in ethnic construction’, especially at 133-135. For the pre-4th century ethnic composition of the region see Roy 2009, 31, Nielsen 1997, 144, and Hdt 4.148; compared with Paus. 5.1.3-8. 47 minted heroic ancestry.35 All of this occurred in regions like Pisatis and Triphylia as they were being intermittently dominated by competing hegemonic entities. We shall see similar processes occurring in other corners of the Peloponnese and beyond at the same point in time.

This perceived flurry of ‘ethnic’ activity noticed by several such studies during the middle of the fourth century leads me to one of the frustrating characteristics of the ‘ethnic turn’ as a whole in the Classical Period. Nearly all such studies of Archaic and Classical Period ethnicity simply end at the dawn of the Macedonian Hegemony, and the Hellenistic Period is only discussed, if at all, as a brief epilogue.36 In many cases, particularly in Phocis, just at the moment when as the various trends of identity formation leading back to the Archaic Period are coming together, the analysis stops, and the next two centuries tend to be casually summarised as gradual decline leading towards Roman rule. It is the prime directive of my current project to pick up where they have left off, by continuing to follow the leads as they have been spun in a direction that they have not yet been pursued. This innocuous tendency, of course, is most likely the product of editorial concerns mated with the natural constraints of scope and chronology, but it is not without its consequences. That such studies abruptly end just as the Hellenistic Period begins in turn feeds back into the fundamental perception of the period’s discontinuity that I have outlined above. That such ethnic studies of the mainland are so numerous for the Archaic and Classical Periods, and generally absent the Hellenistic, has the side effect of making the former seem like the ‘Age of Ethnicity’ which had already run its due course by the dawn of the latter.

35 For the patently fictive hero Triphylos see Strabo 8.3.13 and Parker 2009, 196-199; Ruggieri 2009, 61 for the ‘re-branding’ of Triphylos as Arcadian. A similar mythical creativity can be seen in Pisatis with the re-engineered genealogy and narrative of the eponymous hero Pisos, in Diod.15.78.2 and Giangiulio 2009, 70. 36 see Beck’s review of McInerney 1999 in SIC, and for a fitting example of the brief Hellenistic epilogue see Hall 2002, 218ff. McInerney 1999 has a similar tendency to summarise roughly two centuries of Phocian history in a remarkably short span, with the predominant theme being gradual subjugation. 48

In short, the impression that the era ends gains such traction because no one has yet suggested with any poignancy that it continues.

Altogether this serves to make the proliferation and elaboration of such regionalism in the mainland seem like a distinctly Classical phenomenon. When the aforementioned perception of

Hellenistic ‘individualism’ and the quick death or slow stagnation of the polis are added into the equation, it seems that ‘ethnicity’ as a Greek phenomenon was past its prime or utility by the 3rd century.37 This idea that the Greeks after Alexander ceased to be fiercely parochial and became more generically Greek is in no small part buttressed by the ‘us-and-them’ ethnic geography of the period as sketched by those who have studied the Hellenistic Greeks outside Greece. Having considered the

Classical paradigm, we shall now turn to ethnicity as it is understood by Hellenistic historians. To understand the experience of the Greeks at home, we must examine how they have been viewed abroad.

No Baggage to Check: The Hellenistic ‘Greeks’

Since the dawn of Hellenistic historiography, authors have described the period with varying degrees of subtlety as being driven by ethnic confrontation between the Greeks and the ‘not Greeks’ – not necessarily in an aggressive sense, but by the necessity of immediate proximity and quotidian interaction. The words ‘ethnicity’ and ‘identity’ have not been absent among treatments of the period, particularly in the last two decades – so much so that in his epilogue, Jonathan Hall says of an equivalent Hellenistic treatment that ‘the endeavour is not entirely necessary since the topic of

37 Richter 2011’s study of the ideological history of cosmopolis in late Classical and Hellenistic thought is the most thorough introduction to the subject and concept. 49 ethnicity in this time period has, if anything, received rather more attention in recent years (2002,

220)’.

Hall is correct in that there are dozens of studies of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘identity’ in the Hellenistic

Period, though he and others tend to overlook the vastly different approach to ethnicity taken by such studies. The idea of the Greeks spreading and settling as far as Bactria or India has long captivated the imagination of 19th and 20th century European authors, particularly among the Colonial Powers. The

Hellenistic Greeks became an idealized model thanks to what such authors held to be the genteel civility and noblesse obligé of Hellenic porticoes and theatres of the diadoch foundations in the most

‘barbarian’ of locales. Edwyn Bevan, ever a rich vein to be mined for eloquent quotations, captures this with a candour and conviction that makes the contemporary reader uneasy:

We may say then with perfect truth that the work being done by European nations and

especially by England in the East is the same work which was begun by Macedonia and

Rome and undone by the barbarian floods of the Middle Ages. The civilization which

perished from India with the extinction of the Greek kings has come back again in the

British official (1902, 1.19)

Bevan is but one of many to whom the presence of the Greeks in the former domains of the Persians brought with it all of the connotations which juxtaposed Western liberty, democracy, and individualism against Eastern despotism and servility. . Colonialism and imperialism have long gone hand-in-hand in studies of Hellenistic ethnicity, which wrestle with a dynamic in which a minority non-native population

50 is held to be socially, economically, and militarily dominant over a far more populous – though frustratingly invisible - body of indigenes.

The rise of (Post-) Colonial studies in the 1970s and 1980s buoyed interest in certain aspects of the Hellenistic Period, above all in precisely this interaction between the minority Greek elite and the majority non-Greek subject populations of the Successor Kingdoms. The majority of these ‘colonial’ ethnic studies take the form of the ‘The Greeks in ______,’ and tend to consider the dichotomy between hellene and non-hellene as being semi-permeable with varying degrees of penetrability depending on the perspective and criteria of each scholar.38 Unsurprisingly, the Ptolemaic kingdom dominates the corpus given the abundance of papyrological evidence and the relatively clean and clear distinction between Greek and non-Greek in the Empire. Goudriaan’s 1988 monograph largely set the trend for those that followed on the level of methodology, and the narrative he constructs is one in which the Greeks are at first distinct from their local Egyptian counterparts, though these sharp divides were somewhat eroded by the coalescing pressures of cohabitation and social proximity. Nevertheless his assertion that ethnicity must not be viewed as objective or legalistic and instead is a category implied by actors in social interaction is one that ought to be borne in mind when resisting the temptations of deceptively clear distinctions in the source material (Goudriaan 1998, 96-120).

His distinction between ethnicity as a bureaucratic classification and a social identifier is similarly indispensable, and he elaborates at length a point that I have mentioned only in passing above. He was by no means the last to tackle the glamorous milieu of Egypt, though subsequent works

38 For instance, Cohen 2006; Grainger 1990; La’da 2007; and Derks and Roymans 2009. Among other studies of the Greeks in various regional contexts we might also count Billows 1995, Bilde ed. 1990, Cohen 1978, Fowler 1997, Grainger 1990, Holt 1999, Prost 2003. The list could and indeed does go on. 51 predominantly differ only in scale and regional focus, and not in their overarching approach.39 But it is precisely the character of the same evidence which so naturally lends itself to studying ground-level interaction between Greeks and Egyptians that limits its utility: the clean distinction between ‘Greek’ and ‘Egyptian’ in such papyri affords us no further insight than that, and the ethnic ambiguity of the referents themselves only compounds the issue. Beyond onomastics – which in and of itself is limited given the Egyptian propensity to use a Hellenized name in certain circumstances – our analytical scope of ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt is severely hampered (Goudriaan 1998, 1-14). Once an individual is identified as Greek or Egyptian, in the vast majority of cases there is little more that can be said.

Though there was, as Goudriaan and others have identified, a grey area between the binary of Greek and Egyptian, it remains a scale defined by the two opposite poles.40

While this clean dichotomy holds for Ptolemaic Egypt, when we turn our gaze farther East we are confronted with a rather more complicated situation. The vast geographical majority of the

Seleucid Empire, by far the largest of the Successor Kingdoms, lay outside what is traditionally held to be the Greek world, yet at the same time the successors of Nicator were the most prolific city-founders and colonizers of the Hellenistic Near East.41 Unlike the Ptolemies who simply added a new Greek stratum on top of an otherwise largely unchanged Egyptian social structure, the Seleucid Empire had no such natural homogeneity (Engels 2011). Instead, their complicated inheritance of a vast array of distinct cultural traditions stretching from the Ionian Coast to modern-day Afghanistan presents a much more fragmented ethnic landscape whose diversity was the subject of Sherwin-White and

39 Other Egyptian ethnic studies: Bagnall 1997; Bilde et al 1992; La’da 2007; Derks and Roymans 2009; Bingen 2007; Chauveau 2000; Lewis 1986; Thompson 2011, etc... 40 A sentiment also echoed by Chauveau 2000, who argues against cultural syncretism or osmosis in Ptolemaic Egypt and instead favours a model of distinct bicultural interaction. 41 See notes on city foundations above. 52

Kuhrt’s landmark 1993 study From Samarkhand to Sardis. Focussing primarily on Babylon and the

Fertile Crescent, their inquiry naturally concentrates on the upper echelons of Seleucid society but the impression that one gains of the Greeks from their analysis is one that is neither as culturally domineering nor ethnically haughty as more traditional views would have held.42 Rather than the

Greeks arriving and rapidly imposing themselves and their ways onto the traditions of the Near East, instead they are shown to be more than happy to leave well enough alone by maintaining and even promoting existing traditions, political and otherwise (1993, 28-42). Aside from royal patronage of traditional Babylonian cults, most Greeks in Babylon and elsewhere were content to reside in their own districts of cities and did not attempt to ‘convert’ their non-Greek cohabitants to the Hellenic way of life.

An impression of a ‘separate but equal’ cultural dynamic emerges in which Greeks and non-

Greeks did not communicate as easily as we had thought, but this comes without the perceived self- superiority of the Hellenes claimed by earlier colonial studies. There was no ‘global hellenizing crusade’, neither was there even an attempt to impose Greek as the only language of administration. Instead, as we have seen with Samuel’s study of Hellenistic Egypt, the Greeks stuck to their own, and Babylonian economic, political, and bureaucratic systems continued as normal (Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993,

144-159). There were instances of acculturation in which these cultural divides were traversed, but predominantly such processes occurred by the agency of an individual or small group, not any

42 Such is the theme that dominates the work, but particularly at 22, 141-148, and 149-159. 53 formalized policy.43 The same kind of conservatism that was seen in Egypt seems to be also present in the Near East.

Other ethnic studies of the Near East, Anatolia, and the Levant have similarly flourished over the past decade, with an emergent focus on the city as the primary venue for ethnic interaction in the

Hellenistic world.44 Of them, Rachel Mairs’ dissertation (2006) on ethnic identity in Bactria and

Sogdiana merits particular mention by virtue of its smooth combination of archaeological and literary evidence, and above all for the accommodation she makes for the agency of individual in selectively navigating ethnic divides in a bifurcated society. How and why, when and where an individual would put on one of their ethnic masks – and to what perceived end – introduces a situational variation to ethnic identity that makes the concept seem at once less monolithic, and more human (or, perhaps, believable).45 These cultural divides were not hard and fast distinctions, nor were they mutually exclusive, as she describes fascinating instances of individuals acting in a ‘Greek’ manner in certain civic contexts with language and cultic practices, and ‘Eastern’ in others.

Such situational use of culture was the natural product of cohabitation and intermarriage, and instead of cultural mixing as the inevitable outcome of this exchange we have a group of individuals who flip between either separate culture in the service of their own interests. They may speak and behave in a Greek manner for commercial concerns, but then interact with their family in a traditional

Bactrian manner in private. As with Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Babylon, the cultural inheritance of the Greek settlers in these regions did not ultimately disappear, rather it cohabitated in what by all

43 For further studies of the Babylonian context and ethnic segregation therein, see Van der Spek 2004 and 2009; Boiy 2004. Van der Spek in particular highlights the dynamics of what he calls ‘ethnic segregation’ in certain quarters of the Hellenistic city. 44 ex) Billows 1995; Bilde et al 1990; Cohen 1978; Fowler 1997; Granger 1990; Holt 1999; Prost 2003. 45 Mairs 2006 particularly chapters 1 and 4. See also Mairs 2008, 2010, and 2013. 54 accounts seems to be a pacific manner with their new non-Greek contemporaries. The Greeks did not do so out of a sense of imperial arrogance, but apparently out of preference. The perceived melting pot of the Hellenistic world thus gives way to the mosaic model of multicultural interaction.

In addition to the works I have mentioned above discussing the Hellenistic mainland we may also add Christian Habicht’s numerous papers on Hellenistic monarchs and Greek poleis, along with

Bulloch and Ogden’s edited volumes. Such works discuss the nuances of this interaction though tend to address the issue with regards to the ages-old question of whether or not we can speak of Greek civic autonomy surviving into the Hellenistic Period.46 While these papers and monographs are indispensible to understanding the interaction of Greek cities with the broader civic network of the Hellenistic koinon, the only vectors of interaction discussed are between cities and cities, and cities and monarchs.

Discussions of ethnicity or ‘identity’ reorientation below or above the level or of the individual polis are by and large conspicuously absent, as is discussion of these cities’ evolving interaction with their established regional networks. Even revisionist models such as John Ma’s Peer Polity Interaction (2003) are still predicated on the assumption that the city is the principal constituent unit of the period.47

There are indeed other studies, and their exclusion from discussion here is not an indication of either their quality or utility. I shall recapitulate the scholarly history of each region under our consideration in its respective chapter, but as with the various studies of Archaic and Classical ethnicity that I have discussed above, the overall body of such Hellenistic scholarship permits me some critical observations.

46 Habicht 2006, Bulloch 1994, Ogden 2002, Scholten 2000, and on Hellenistic cities, Ma 2000 and 2003. 47 In some ways we can also consider Giovannini to proffer a revisionist model, though certainly not in the same way as Ma. 55

First, all such ethnic studies discuss the period solely in terms of a Greek/non-Greek binary.

Although the ‘non-Greek’ side of the opposition varies according to the specific focus of each study, throughout the corpus of Hellenistic ethnic studies the Greeks themselves are discussed as if they were a monolithic, homogeneous group with little variety in its internal composition. Once outside the confines of the mainland, Greeks (and Macedonians) of any geographical or ethnic provenance are treated as if they had shed their more specific ancestral attachments and are simply lumped into the

‘Greek’ category. Even the distinction between Macedonian and Greeks tends to blur over time, as the

Greeks are unbranded and ‘deracinated’ by their transplantation from their communities of origin. To me this seems an oversimplification: if nothing else, the vast swathe of Classical Period ethnic studies has shown us that the Greeks cannot simply be lumped together and called ‘Greek’, and that a panhellenic sentiment was only one star in a much larger constellation of communal attachments.

I find it difficult to hold as axiomatic the idea that these ‘ethnic’ traditions, whatever their precise guise may be, that were developed and elaborated over centuries simply evaporated at the outset of the period, particularly when we bear in mind the flurry of ethnogenesis in the fourth century.

The Classical and Archaic periods have demonstrated that we cannot paint the Greeks with such broad strokes and instead must make room the intricacy of such attachments that would not have vanished with the rise of Philip II and campaigns of Alexander. It would seem hasty to think that just as these attachments were reaching the pinnacle of their intricacy and politicisation, they would have crumbled all the faster.. Hence it is my intention here to build on these Classical Period studies by examining how these attachments continued to develop in response to the vagaries of the period.

Second, as I hope my brief geographic survey has shown, such ethnic studies cover essentially every corner of the Hellenistic world except for Greece itself. This comes as little surprise that scholars

56 would be more interested in studying the new tributaries into which Hellenism flowed rather than its font, but thus far this has come at the expense of Greece itself. Despite the strong and consistent group of scholars from Wilhelm to Mack (2015) who have advocated for civic continuity in the mainland, the opposing opinion remains dominant – particularly when it comes to highly specific epigraphic or numismatic studies. Greece itself continues to languish in the background, and it is presumed to have continued along the path of what most see to be the gradual political and social disintegration that had begun at the outset of the fourth century.

The general absence of the Greek mainland from general treatments of the period seems, to me, to be a glaring omission, while the fact that the conclusions of Wilhelm and his successors have yet to infiltrate mainstream thought on the period is troubling. As in the Classical Period, the Hellenistic

Greeks of the mainland ought to be treated as a complex network of distinct communities. It is perhaps an overly facile observation to note that there are no city decrees or benefactions, royal letters, or other epigraphic evidence that are signed in the name of oi hellēnes; throughout the period the principal vector of identitification was and remained the city ethnic or regional ethnic. Though individuals and cities of course ascribed with greater frequency to a sense of panhellenic appurtenance, the primary index of self-identification was substantially narrower.

Third, both the ‘international’ ethnic studies and the few treatments of the mainland itself take the primacy of the polis as paradigmatic, and treat it as the primary referent by which to judge relative success or failure. Nearly all of the studies which argue for the decline of the Greek mainland do so by means of the polis, the ‘decline’ of which becomes the perceived decline of Greece itself. What are said to be the political weakening, disappearance of civic tradition, impoverishment, and impotence in

57 foreign affairs that characterise the Hellenistic mainland are all glimpsed exclusively through the lens of the polis.

This again represents another case in which one of the principal conclusions of Classical ethnic studies has not crossed the paradigmatic border into the subsequent period: Morgan’s study (2003), in particular, has clearly demonstrated that the polis was not the sole or even predominant source of social distinction and communal identity during the Classical Period, so why then is it presumed to be so for the Hellenistic with such little discussion? The centrality of the Hellenistic polis is predicated on its ancestral primacy in the Classical Period, but given that more contemporary scholarship has disproved the latter presumption, suddenly the analytical bottom falls out of the former.48 Again, all that we need to do to remedy the situation is to take the summary conclusions and paradigmatic observations that held true at the end of the Classical Period and begin with them as our starting assumptions for the Hellenistic. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

Finally – and this is an observation which applies equally to Classical-period scholarship – even though all involved use the term ‘ethnicity,’ it does not always refer to the same thing. On closer examination there are various competing definitions and considerations of ethnicity. Some, like Hall

(1997 and 2002), employ it as a purely comparative category, others, like Morgan (2003) and Malkin

(2001), use it as shorthand for the process of local identity construction, yet others as a purely social or political signifier. In some cases it is the product of local and non-local interaction, whereas elsewhere it appears as something that is negotiated internally as a result of extra-local contact and then advertised elsewhere (Roy 1999, Luraghi 1999). It is either a domestic or extra-domestic phenomenon,

48 Ma 2000 and 2003, Gruen 1993, and Giovannini 1993 all neatly encapsulate this trend, which seems to go stretch back to Glotz’s aforementioned identification of Chaeronea as the death of the Greek city. The idea of the transition from polis to cosmopolis held by some to be paradigmatic is also predicated on the primacy of the Classical polis. 58 and there is a particular distinction between ethnicity as elaborated by the ‘international’ Hellenistic

Period studies, and those concerned with the Archaic and the Classical Periods. In the former, it is used to consider a group that is the economically and politically dominant minority in a foreign milieu, a

‘colonial setting’. In the latter, it is used to differentiate groups within a larger, partially homogeneous cultural collective.49 These two very different models are conflated into the same term, even though they are used to very different analytical ends. The tendency of ethnic studies to compartmentalize these fundamental methodological questions into a first chapter that is easily flipped through without due consideration only compounds the issue.

The problem of ethnicity’s methodological disparity among ancient historians is two sided, and both edges of the sword are more easily avoided than directly sharpened. On the one hand, we have the issue that many authors write ‘ethnicity’ but are not always on the same conceptual page – especially when we factor in the vastly different definition of the concept held by the earliest 19th and

20th century scholars of the topic. That there are so many competing approaches to ethnicity whose differences are similarly couched in the common language of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ has provoked a variety of responses which have been expressed in methodological chapters that tend to be overlooked by the general reader, piquing only the specialist’s interest. The diversity of ethnic analytical constructs has recently led some editors to simply concede defeat and accept the impenetrability of the concept’s precise characteristics, and relations to ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ more generally. This is aptly captured by the introduction to Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex’s edited

49 The irony, perhaps, is that given the analytical framework of ethnicity in contemporary anthropology, the Hellenistic studies of the Greeks in an ‘international’ milieu is a more apt borrowing of anthropological methodology. That the Greeks are outside of their homeland, in the demographic minority, and surrounded by a foreign culture renders their experience much more similar to the dynamics of contemporary ethnicity than the dominant and partially homogeneous groups of the Classical Period. 59 volume on Late Antiquity: ‘Since definitions of ethnicity and culture are bound to be subjective, there is a particular value in the pluralistic approach of an academic conference which does not seek to harmonise views of approaches to the subject’ (Mitchell and Greatrex 2000, xiv). That the conference just referred to was entitled ‘Race, Religion, and Culture in Late Antiquity’ furthers serves to demonstrate how knotted the terms have become.

On the other hand is the problem to which McInerney alluded earlier: the disconnect between what we consider to be ‘ethnicity’ and what the Greeks consider to be ‘ethnicity’; the vast gap between our ethnic group and their ethnos. Rachel Mairs articulates this problem with straightforward eloquence when she remarks ‘our perceived cultural indicia of ethnic identity may not coincide with the indicia selected or emphasized by the agents themselves’ (2006, 14). To ensure that this will not happen to us as it has to so many others, we must go back to the beginning, as it were, to the intellectual milieu in which the word ‘ethnicity’ made its first appearance. The outcome is as useful to our current project as it is surprising, and we must use this conceptual overview of ethnicity as a pied à terre for the reconsideration that follows.

Ethnicity Now & Then, and the Identity of Identity

Shortly after I finished presenting a condensed version of this proposed line of inquiry at

McGill University I was left rather baffled by a question posed during the ensuing discussion period.

One of those present, a specialist in contemporary East Asia, rose and pointedly asked ‘can we even speak of ethnicity in the ancient world?’ Though at first I shook off the question as merely a pointed barb from one to whom Classics was perhaps a impracticable line of enquiry, on deeper reflection in

60 the weeks that followed the question became as pressing as it was inexorable. Can we really speak of ethnic identity in the ancient world, or is this all a self-fulfilling prophecy, a fanciful retrojection? The question is one that we would do well to address head-on, especially given how many have grafted what seems to be an unproblematic conception of ethnicity developed by modern anthropologists onto the ancient world. The introductory chapters in which authors outline their construct of ethnicity make the concept seem far more certain amongst contemporary anthropologists than a closer examination reveals it to be, and thus a brief re-examination of the anthropological underpinnings of ethnicity, and the debate it continues to inspire, becomes necessary.50

Ethnicity as a category of anthropological or sociological analysis is a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon that emerged in earnest during the second half of the century. Considering the term’s diachronic evolution is the most expedient approach. From the Homeric ἔθνος derived the later adjective ἐθνικός, which in the later Imperial and Byzantine Periods came to denote ‘a pagan,’

‘outsider,’ or ‘one who did not share the dominant faith.’51 In short it came to mean ‘minority’. And so the connotation persisted as the term first entered modern usage at the hands of Robert Park and the

Chicago School of Sociology in 1914, when it was employed as a sociological designator for immigrant groups from Europe.52 That European immigration to the United States had peaked in 1914 was no coincidence, and consideration of an ‘ethnic group’ came to be equivalent to analysing an

50 Hall’s (2002) introductory chapter is a fitting exemplar of this trend, though the problem can be identified in virtually every ethnic study I have cited above. 51 ἐθνικός in New Testament Greek tends to refer to nations or groups of people (Galatians 2.14, Matthew 5.47), and often is how New Testament authors refer to the gentiles or foreigners. By the times of Codex Justinianus, ἐθνικός had already begun to refer to ‘country dweller’ or ‘provincial,’ as at 12.63.2.6. After the rise of urban Christianity is eventually became synonymous with ‘pagan’ and then its trajectory continues as described above. See also LSJ s.v. ‘ἐθνικός’. 52 This summary of the evolution of the term ethnicity is largely adapted from Schaefer 2008 s.v. ‘ethnicity’, 457- 9; also Glazer and Moynihan 1975, 2-7. 61 unassimilated and identifiable minority. Ethnic groups as identified by the Chicago School, and also by

Max Weber, were defined by traits that we would now consider racial rather than ethnic, and physical criteria were more authoritative of group membership than the cultural traits which we now privilege.

‘Ethnic Group’ did not appear in any English dictionary until 1961 in Webster’s, and was not incorporated into the OED until 1972 when the supplement attributes its first usage to David Riesman in 1953.53 Caveat lector, then, that when considering the historiographical evolution of ethnicity all authors are not on the same page, nor are they speaking the same language.

As tensions among what we would later consider the ‘ethnic groups’ that comprised the populations of several Western nations – Canada, Northern Ireland, several Soviet Republics - in the

1960s escalated to the point of violence, the dynamics of ethnic factionalism became of more immediate interest to anthropologists and sociologists. Instead of considering the development of ethnic characteristics as being a process which occurs in an isolated group of people, in 1969 Barth’s volume set the standard analytical definition of ethnicity as a culture-bearing unit whose identity is constantly negotiated through nuanced interaction – pacific or otherwise – with other identifiable groups (1969, 9-11). In short, ethnicity is continually developed on the boundaries between groups, not internally, and the pressure of interaction necessitates the self-reflection that forms and perpetuates a group’s sense of itself. Ethnic identity becomes a cultural narrative, not a static monolith defined by physiology (Barth 1969, 11-13). Ethnicity is inconsistent and dynamic, the traits by which it is defined are given variable priority in response to the exigencies of circumstance, and the historical consciousness of a distinct group is paramount throughout.54 In a similar vein his contention that ‘by looking at the regional subsets of the culture we can get some insight into the culture as a whole’

53 Ibid, 457. 54 On such narrativity, Barth 1969, 28-35. 62 seems as aptly suited to Greece as it is to his study of African tribal dynamics (1969, 9) If we are searching for a time in which there were more boundaries between ethnic groups being negotiated simultaneously on sundry levels, then perhaps we need look no further than the Hellenistic Period.

An edited volume by Glazer and Moynihan published in 1975 further refined the key considerations introduced by Barth with an eloquence and sagacity that in some way precludes synopsis. Yet their analysis of various case studies drawn from the post-Modern world – the Québec

Question, Italo-Irish American conflict, Northern Ireland, etc… - brought the political dynamics of ethnicity to the fore in a way that had yet to be seen. The notion that a set of perceived political rights and entitlements derive from membership to an ethnic group is one that we have recently seen come to prominence in Canada with considerations over Aboriginal entitlement to Federal health care, while at the same time smacks of the sort of requests by Greek cities and groups for preferential favours from Hellenistic monarchs by virtue of their ancestral claims that we see so prominently in the epigraphic record (7-8).

The idea that an ethnic group is an interest group is one that merits further reflection, as is the disparity they see between the perceived (ideological) difference between two ethnic groups, and their otherwise overwhelming similarity (15-16). Even if the actual differences between two groups have eroded over time, the groups still see themselves as distinct, and this carries the weight of reality in their interactions with each other and the government. Finally, Glazer and Moynihan’s careful disentanglement of ethnicity from other groups or identities with which it is so often confused is an approach I aim to replicate in this project.55 Their methodological disclaimer, as it were, stands as a

55 Ibid, 2-9, and Isaac in Glazer and Moynihan 1975, 30. 63 stark reminder of the necessity of positive rather than normative consideration of ethnicity, as they write:

we do not celebrate ethnicity as a basic attribute of man, which when suppressed will

always rise again: such a position is for advocates, not for analysts. Nor do we dismiss

ethnicity as an aberration on the road to rational society in which all heritages of the

past will become irrelevant to social and political action (20)

Dozens of volumes devoted to analysing specific manifestations of ethnic identity abound, and the modern corpus has been bolstered by a proliferation of works – notably by Charles Taylor (1989), among others – considering the development of individual identity, and the relationship thereof to a social group. In the former group we can list Isaacs, Eriksen, and Fawcett along with many others, and while they have given invaluable insight into their specific case studies they tend to lack the broad theoretical scope of their predecessors.56 Nevertheless with these more recent works included in our consideration there are some general scholarly trends which emerge that, though of great import to the Classicist discussing ancient ethnicity, have by and large evaded discussion or response.

The tie that binds most of the works I have listed above is that they consider ethnicity to be an inherently modern phenomenon - more specifically that it is a source of social cohesion that could only have been formed in the crucible of modernity and as a by-product of colonialism or immigration.57

The groups such authors discuss are all minorities in their respective environments, and in the last few decades the scholarly literature has focussed on their inclusion in quasi-integrative ‘open’ societies like

56 Gutman 1994; Eriksen 2010; Fawcett 2000, for instance. Taylor’s 1989 study Sources of the Self has an enduring impact on anthropology and philosophy alike. 57 The modernism implicit in ethnicity is best captured by Eriksen 2010, 95-106. 64

Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Ethnic studies continue to be resonant with minority studies, and an ethnic group as they describe it is only formed when removed from its native milieu and transplanted into a new environment. Ethnicity thus becomes the effect caused by imperialism, emigration, and relocation.58 By virtue of their chosen subjects of study, the ethnic opposition such anthropologists adumbrate is a clean binary divide between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or ‘we’ and ‘you;’ the differences between the two groups – real or imagined – are clear thanks to unambiguous categorization. The primary agents of this binary interaction are the ethnic group itself, and the centralized nation state of post-Enlightenment modernity. Given this specifically modern context of essentially all authoritative works on ethnicity, one wonders to what extent the theoretical generalizations they put forward can be applied to earlier time periods. Eriksen himself picks up on this temporal issue when he remarks ‘it could be argued that pre-colonial notions of cultural difference refer to different kinds of phenomena all together’ (95-96).

The decidedly negative connotations of the word ‘ethnic’ in contemporary media and society only serve to compound the terminological problem, and make our present biases an ever more onerous burden to shake off. Ethnicity was and remains a loaded term, and whenever it graces the headlines of newspapers or websites it by and large does so in the context of stories that narrate the worst excesses of human sectarianism. The adjective ‘ethnic’ all too often modifies nouns like

‘violence,’ ‘division,’ ‘warfare’ and, perhaps most chillingly from the 1990s, ‘cleansing’. ‘Ethnic’ violence in the Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, with hundreds of thousands slaughtered because of the preference of a precious few divisive traits over far more numerous indices of commonality have equally left their mark in the popular and academic psyches. Africa is of course not the only victim: the

58 Eriksen 2010, 95-6. 65 internecine warfare among the former Yugoslav Republics, and the Troubles in Ireland that have yet to be fully resolved, the Somalian conflict, persecution of the Kurds in Iraq, along with other horrific instances from southeast Asia all join its ranks as twisted paragons of the dark side of strong ethnic attachments. The term is so loaded as to have led Renfrew and Bahn to state that ‘the perversion of ethnicity is the curse of our age’ (2000, 189).

Such strong ethnic attachments in the Western World tend to be seen in much the same way as their ancient equivalents among early Prussian scholars: primitive bonds from an earlier age, which must be shaken off on the path to nationhood, lest their destructive power take hold. It is only with great infrequency that we see the term ‘ethnic’ appear in the media in a pacific context, and ‘ethnic contact’ leads us to presuppose either friction or outright violence. Contemporary manifestations of

‘ethnicity’ are exclusive, they are divisive, they are shown to be all too inflexible. That inflexibility is the impetus behind the dozens of conflicts mentioned above that have required various degrees of mediation from nations that have somehow ‘overcome’ such ethnic divides. Ethnicity, by and large, has little place in the developed world, and if it does, only as a benign vestige. If it is difficult for us to speak or conceive of ethnicity in the contemporary world without such strong associations, so much goes for its ancient analogue as well. Perhaps then it would be best to move away from using such words that are dripping with so many extraneous connotations, and towards a vocabulary that is more accurately circumstantial, and rather more straightforward.

We thus have a problem. Modern ethnicity, in short, develops and is studied under vastly different circumstances than ancient ethnicity; it exhibits certain traits and functions in a manner that is alien to its ancient counterpart, yet many contemporary scholars have taken the two to be equivalent. But they have done so in different ways, and with different priorities, and so we are

66 confronted with the issue of one word being used variously to describe many different notions in many different contexts.

My point with the above observations is to illustrate the complexity and delicacy of a process that is often described in simple terms. As I hope to have shown with my overviews of ancient and modern scholarship above, ethnicity, though unquestionably an invaluable category of historical analysis, does not come without its risks. If we simply graft a modern analytical concept applied to the study of contemporary nation states formed by immigration and emigration onto the ancient Greeks with no modification, we gain little more than a comparative device that spans the gap between two eras only awkwardly. If we directly equate ancient terminology like ethnos to its contemporary equivalent then we likewise may be seeing two somewhat divergent lines as parallel.

In either case ones run the risk of building for oneself little more than an elaborate house of analytical cards. When concepts like ethnicity, identity, and culture are treated in purely abstract terms, the product of our analysis is similarly an abstraction, and it becomes all too easy to lose sight of the concrete manifestations of these abstract attachments. Speculative history, as David Aberbach (1996,

4) once wrote, ‘gains us little, but costs us nothing’, and it is worth considering what the ancient Greek response would be to any of our elaborate theoretical studies of their own ethnicity and attachments.

Would their priorities, would their emphases, and their preference of certain aspects over others be the same as what contemporary scholars have described? Would they agree with precisely how they have labelled and described them as an ‘ethnic’ people?

The immediate temptation to resolve the ethnic problem is to simply substitute the word

‘ethnicity’ for its more accommodating cousin, ‘identity’. But to do so would simply be to avoid one minefield and run directly into another, as identity runs the risk of being an equally hollow term in

67 contemporary social sciences and anthropology. Much like ethnicity, ‘identity’ is used with great variety but little precision, though it is precisely its imprecision that contributes to its popularity. In

2005 Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker published a scathingly erudite indictment of the

Humanities and Social Sciences for its (ab)use of the term ‘identity’ over the past three decades, arguing that the prevalence of the term comes with great intellectual and political costs (59-60).

Identity tends to mean too much in a strong sense, too little in a weak sense, and the claim that it is fluidly and constantly negotiated and re-negotiated makes it too slippery of a concept to ever pin down in analytical practice. ‘If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere. If identity is fluid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden or crystallize?’ (59).

The sociological and psychological origins of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis beginning in earnest in the 1960s were predicated on studying the relationship of the individual actor with a perceived social group, not necessarily for unravelling the mechanism of self-understanding within that group itself (60-61). Whenever one tries to qualify ‘identity’ with a string of modifiers – as is done

Classics with words like ‘ethnic’, ‘hellenic’, ‘panhellenic’, etc… - these vectors are perhaps made to seem more compartmentalized then they were in actuality, which runs the risk of making them axiomatic. To group all of these various levels of attachment, the individual opinions, preferences, and inclinations, and the resultant choices that are made, under the flat and undifferentiated rubric of

‘identity’ is a great oversimplification (60-63). In other words, with increasing frequency scholars have been clumping diverse vectors of personal attachment – political, religious, social, local, even familial – under the one overarching umbrella of ‘identity’ or ‘ethnicity’ without fully teasing out the nuance of each (67-75). Identity writ large, as with ethnicity, is a thoroughly contemporary concept that does not

68 fit into the ancient mould as clearly as we would like, and its prevalence conceals an abundance of differentiated meanings and suppositions.

Thus considering the ‘ethnic identity’ of a region, place, or group presents a double ambiguity when we combine these two obscurities into one analytical term. Yet to me the solution to these complex problems of nuance and terminology seems fairly straightforward, and necessitates little more than trimming the ontological fat by taking a more direct approach.

From the Negative to the Positive: Approaching Local Culture

For all of their lucid elaboration of the theory and experience of ethnicity in their pioneering edited volume, perhaps Glazer and Moynihan’s most pertinent observation is among their most simple: ‘we are all beginners here’ (1975, 29). In the context of Classical and Hellensitic scholarship, conflicting definitions of ethnicity and the interrelation between tiers of ethnic identity, as well the relationship between ethnicity and identity, and identity and culture, have made for an analytical impasse in which much ink is spilled but little is resolved. The vastly different approach to ethnicity in the Hellenistic Period only compounds the problem, so in the spirit of Glazer and Moynihan’s admonition it seems useful to start from the beginning, and return to the evidentiary fundaments on which much broader contemporary abstractions of identity are based. From there we can gain a firmer grasp on our approach and method, and then apply it to the subject with which I began this chapter.

First, the ethnos should be considered as an analytical unit in and of itself, but only as one among many. The confused relationship between ethnicity, culture, and identity that I have discussed above has made the discourse impenetrable and greatly hindered the scope or comprehensibility of its

69 considerations. The most salient conclusion and lasting impression to be drawn from the ‘ethnic turn’ is that the polis was neither the sole nor the dominant source and unit of social cohesion in the Ancient

Greek world. The Greeks were not an exclusively urban people either in their civic or social thought, or their everyday lifestyle. The polis was indeed important, but was surrounded by other vertical and horizontal sources of attachment.

Ethnic attachment, viz. a sense of appurtenance between an individual and a larger social group with putative common descent, was indeed an important vector of social cohesion, but it was not alone. It stood along with family and civic bonds, panhellenic ideals which recognised a partially homogeneous cultural commonality, and other senses of belonging either to common cult or a larger feeling of regional solidarity. We should not focus on ethnic ties and presuppose their primacy when they were but one strand in a larger web of interrelations, rather the complexity of the identiary landscape identified by the ethnic turn during the Archaic and Classical Periods should be brought forward into the Hellenistic Period. Ethnicity’s indispensability as an analytical concept should not be dismissed, but its primacy should likewise not be taken for granted. At the very least, however, the considerations that drive ethnic analyses are invaluable in considering other vectors of social community among the Greeks. Rather than branding all of the various bonds of civic, social, religious, and hereditary solidarity, as ‘ethnic’ and stopping there, such complexity calls for a more nuanced approach. I aim here to sidestep the methodological quagmire by shifting my focus to the relationship between the local and the extra-local at several different levels of scale – the sub region, the region, and the ‘international’ milieu outside of Greece itself, and consider how all feed into each other. In the unique climate of the Hellenistic Period, we must also add the stratum of royal interaction. I am not the first to do so, and shall shortly develop the intellectual context of this local approach.

Move away from ethnicity and towards a more parochial or local focus makes the entire avenue inquiry far more direct and straightforward, and less hindered by conceptual baggage. We can take the same sensitivity to the dynamics of group interaction highlighted by Barth, and the mélange of social and political concerns that drive shifts in a group’s composition identified by Glazer and Moynihan, but do so without also borrowing terminology and analytical models that are ill-suited to our object of study.

Some scholars – Hall and McInerney, among others – have followed ethnic strands to the smallest levels of Greek community and seen identifiable ethnic groups in each tiny village of, for instance, the Argolid or Phocis. Yet such precision, and such remarkably small-scale compartmentalization, seems at once impractical and too static, as well as too inflexible when compared against regional or supra-regional attachments. The way in which the Greeks partially differentiate themselves, while at the same time acknowledge an overarching cultural community, renders them less relevant to the contemporary ethnic paradigm than we may have thought Mitchell

2007). Instead, broadening our consideration of group dynamics at various strata of the Greek world allows for more analytical freedom of movement, without running the risk of treating any one of them as overly dominant.

Second, some scholars have been all too eager to delve into abstractions and theoretical treatments of Greek communal attachments (at any level) and have done so at the expense of recognising the physical, concrete manifestations of these attachments. Instead of considering the identity politics of one group or another, or how ideologies clashed in various circumstances, I instead aim to consider how such senses of attachment guided and resulted in choices and actions made at any level of Greek society. Rachel Mairs’ dissertation (2006) that I have mentioned and quoted above

71 represents a great step forward in the study of intercultural interaction in the ancient world because it allows for a more human sense of preference, circumstance, and choice. Mairs’ analysis re-introduces the concept of personal agency and perceived advantage in the selective exhibition of ethnic attachments in certain circumstances, allowing for a fluidity and dynamism that is absent in other more heavy-handed models.

Individuals are not monoliths, neither are their choices and actions always in perfect conformity with a perceived ideal; different situations merit different responses informed by different concerns.

An ‘Aetolian’ Greek did not act in a quintessentially Aetolian manner at all times and in all places, instead an individual’s sense of polis attachment would have arisen at certain times, their familial solidarity at others, and their sense of belonging to a larger region or even to a common Greek community in still other contexts. It is not as if all members of a community always made certain religious consecrations because they felt that they were constantly Heracleidai or Dorian, rather we must allow them the room to put on a certain ethnic face in particular situations. The same, of course, is true of groups and cities as a whole: a village or polis would not have toed the party line as Arcadian or Boeotian with perfect consistency; at a given moment their more exclusive concerns might shine through, in another circumstance their panehllenism, or their regional solidarity. Rather than seeking a universal ideal of local or regional ‘identity’ and branding that as a norm, it would seem more helpful to track and consider when and where different levels of attachment manifested themselves, and in response to what.

Abstractions of identity or senses of solidarity at any level are hollow concepts if one does not consider how such concerns guided and informed the actions and decisions of individuals and communities, and thus the concrete and the tangible must always be borne in mind. How and why

72 certain styles became popular, shifts in housing or agriculture, settlement patterns, all can serve as ready indicators of trends that operate on much larger scales. By focussing on the practical rather than the abstract we may gain some measure of insight into the ‘real’ – i.e. observable – manifestations of otherwise putative attachments. All of this elaborate analytical framework that we have constructed for ourselves with the ethnic paradigm is for nought if we fail to keep sight of the practicality of these cerebral notions. We also must be careful not to put the analytical cart before the horse. There has been a sense in recent years that ethnic and identity scholarship is perhaps too quick to pick and choose evidence which conforms well to its preconceived mould, and is at times too fatalistic with its narrative trajectory. It would seem both more pertinent and more useful to take the opposite approach: instead of viewing a temple dedication as a manifestation of an extent Ionian identity, we should rather consider how such a dedication among many other events feeds into the construction or evolution thereof.

Third, we must allow the Greeks to speak to us on their own terms. The Greek world did not abide by the same consistent divides of groups and places and cities to which we are unknowingly accustomed, they were not completely rational nor were they consistent in their actions or their attachments. In spite of the emphasis many have placed on the pluralism and interculturalism of the

Hellenistic Period in light of contemporary trends, I aim instead to examine it on a much smaller level in order to identify how these regions responded to the Hellenistic world.59

With all of this elaborate methodological preface in mind, we arrive at our specific task. The

Archaic and Classical Periods witnessed the effervescence of several different tiers of individual

59 For one instance Walbank 1991/2, 91 as quoted by Mairs 2006, 13 states that interest in the period has been ‘fuelled by widespread experience of multiracial societies and the problems they can create.’ Also Cartledge et al 1997, 5, and Green 1990, xxi for the multicultural model. 73 attachment to a collective that resulted in a remarkably complex and enduring sense of community at various levels among the Greeks of the mainland and beyond (Malkin 2011). Among them we can count the oikos, the ethnos, the polis, the region, the koinon, and by the fifth and fourth centuries, the community of oi hellēnes. Each of these was negotiated in response to another, and each informed a vast variety of actions on the local and extra-local levels which in turn exercised a reciprocal impact on other groups. A wealth of scholarship on the Greek mainland has considered the evolution of these attachments throughout the Classical Period and has demonstrated their enduring vitality, but all conclude their respective analyses at the rise of the Macedonian Hegemony, with little or no comment on what followed during the Hellenistic Period.

Nearly every corner of the diverse Hellenistic world has been an object of consideration with the exception of Greece itself. This is both the product and the symptom of the prevailing view of the period as being marked by the effluence of Greek culture in non-Greek locales and the concurrent stagnation of the ancestral Greek mainland. Various Greek communities during the period have been commonly grouped as one in a manner that glosses over their ancestral senses of distinction. The

Greeks of the mainland have generally been held to be impoverished both economically and demographically. Old civic traditions, ancestral religious attachments, even civic and cultic activity gradually diminished because, the logic goes, the Hellenistic landscape of power made such old sources of cohesion seem ever more impotent in the face of first Macedonian and then Roman domination.

Change, however, is infinitely more seductive than continuity, and the exception always easier to perceive than the rule. In the sense of Braudel’s longue-durée of local history (1967), in which certain entrenched social traditions persist even when they seemingly defy all logic and immediate utility, the Hellenistic Period presents use with something of a two-sided coin. On the one hand, in the

74 regional case studies that follow I argue for the persistence of many local ways of life across the

Classical and Hellenistic Periods in a manner that supports Braudel and the Annales school of historiography. On the other hand, though, the presence of Greek cities such as Aï Khanoum, Seleucia- on-the-Tigris, Antioch, Alexandria, and dozens of other foundations stretching from Ukraine to North

Africa must be taken as a profound change on a structural level. Yet bearing in mind the conservatism of these foundations and their fidelity to older Classical Greek models of state and society, perhaps there is another strand of continuity to be found. But, as the old adage goes from Karr, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, and I hope to follow in the footsteps of those who have sought vectors of continuity in the Greek mainland with equal interest as change.

Consensus and assumption are remarkable in their potency, in Hellenistic historiography as elsewhere, and it is striking how certain presuppositions of the period trickly down to studies of quite narrow focus. The Period is viewed as one of fundamental change because this was the trend set by its earliest modern historians, and the weight of their precedent is difficult to shake loose. A concept or supposition that has infiltrated the footnotes, as it were, has a remarkable longevity. Such is the case with the presumption of change, and the corollary juxtaposition of the dynamism of new Hellenistic regions against the depopulation and impoverishment of the Greek mainland. But I hope to have shown that this perception of Hellenistic discontinuity is far from being unanimous, and in this thesis I aim to unify the strands of Wilhelm, Robert, Gauthier, Habicht, and Alcock in order to consider the mainland against a different analytical backdrop. My brief demographic review above attempted to show that mainland Greece was not as critically depopulated as we may have presumed, that the best and brightest of entire generations of Greeks did not eagerly uproot themselves and abandon their homeland in pursuit of a new life elsewhere.

In the same vein, the presumptions that the Greeks were inherently progressive in their social, political, and economic sensibilities, and that they readily discarded their ancestral traditions in favour of a new cosmopolitanism, are called into question by the numerous symptoms of a deep conservatism among the Greeks in the most far-flung locales of the Hellenistic world. Instead of creating a completely new society, we rather see devoted attempts to recreate their ancestral model in foreign locales in which it fit only awkwardly.

The innovation, progress, and cultural evolution that many have claimed define the period are invisible on any appreciable generalizing scale. That such assiduous continuity required far more energy and effort than acculturation is similarly telling. The repeated attempts of cities that were either new foundations or extant cities located throughout the Hellenistic world to claim and maintain ancestral links to mētropoleis in the mainland reveals, if nothing else, the endurance of such attachments and the persistent importance of the Greek heartland in ideology, at the very least (e.g.,

Ager 1998; Perlman 1976; Scheer 2005). If the most basic character traits of the period anew, then a vastly different picture begins to emerge. Balancing our perspective of change versus continuity in the period is thus one of my underlying methodological goals throughout.

My guiding question is thus succinct: how did mainland Greece respond to the vagaries of the

Hellenistic Period? What happened to those who were ‘left behind’, as it were, after the wave of

Macedonian conquest rolled through Greece and then finally broke against the Persian East? Included in this are various concerns spanning from society to politics, religion and literature, the quotidian and the mundane, all of which in concert provide some measure of insight into the various levels at which a given region respond to a world that, we can only concede, had a vastly different geopolitical

76 landscape than the Classical Period. In so doing, I hope to fill the gap, and what better place to gauge the enduring legacy of a period than precisely whence it originated.

When one considers the practical impact of the campaigns of Alexander and the incessant warfare among his successors, Greece itself presents us with something of a conundrum. I would be misled if I were to adopt the typical revisionist stance and say that nothing changed. Kings and potentates whose names had never been heard in Greece would have become commonplace in inscriptions, dedications, and coinage, not to mention in the more evasive milieux of rumour and gossip. Within a generation such names had become dynastic, and the weight of their riches and pressure of their entreaties for favour must have been felt throughout Greece with varying degrees of subtlety. Some measure of awareness that the arena of ‘Hellenic’ politics had swollen to previously inconceivable proportions, that wars were being fought and territory claimed by men who spoke their language and purported to share their culture, must have emerged within the first generations of the period. Beyond such generalizations we can say little, and any more direct ways in which individuals or cities were touched by the drama of the period remain shadows.

Yet at the same time it would be erroneous to underestimate the domineering horizon of the immediate. In spite of the vicissitudes of conquest and the reports of remote locales, for the vast majority of those in the mainland life would have gone on. Their communities, their families and homes, farmsteads and workshops, their cities and regions all remained, with such immediacy as to naturally be their preoccupation. Perhaps there was a more expansive backdrop against which they considered themselves, but the immediate always took priority.

Much had changed in the abstract, but more had remained the same, and from our perspective of the globalised 21st century it is easy to presume that our facility of travel, frequency of immigration,

77 and rapidity of communication were somehow present among them as well and that the scattered corners of the Hellenistic world enjoyed constant communication with each other. The situation on the ground, to our eyes, would have perhaps have been anti-climactic. It is, as I have mentioned before, to this that we must look to gauge the tangible impact of the period with any measure of effectiveness.

And thus we depart from the realm of ethnicity and cross instead to local culture, which is at once more familiar and more daunting.

The vibrancy of local culture – the traits, characteristics, and habits, putative or practical, that allow for a location, region, or place and its inhabitants to be seen as distinct in some manner – has long been correctly held to be one of the unwavering constants and defining characteristics of the

Greek world, and there is no need for us to presume that this ceased to be the case with the Hellenistic

Period.60 While questions of the ‘global’ interactions of the ancients have received a great deal of attention in contemporary scholarship (Hingley 2005, Engels 2013), the attractive force of localism in the Greek world has remained underexplored. The local has long been dominant in Greek thought and practice: Hesiod wrote in Works & Days that the farthest he was willing to travel was from Askra to

Chalcis across the Gulf of Euboea (517-667). In the sixth century BC, Phokylides of Miletus wrote that ‘a small and orderly polis on a rock is better than foolish Nineveh’, implying that a humble local community is inherently more desirable than wealth or power (fr. 4 Gentili/Prato). The comments of both authors seem to point towards an early conception the primacy of polis in Greek life and thought, and subsequent scholars have viewed the Greek city-state itself as a vibrant expression of the local with its sense of community, participation, and autonomy (Ostwald 1982, Beck and Funke 2015,

Raaflaub 2004). Many contemporary studies, among them the many works of the Copenhagen Polis

60 Goldhill in Whitmarsh 2010 provides an enlightening overview of the concept of local identity in the Greek world, and the performative characteristic of asserting what is epichorios. 78

Centre and various federal studies (Beck and Funke 2015) examine various local cultures and political regimes with an eye to identifying their common characteristics, my approach instead emphasizes their differents and idiosyncrasies. Throughout this thesis I shall examine what made these cultures distinct and identifiable, and whether these local traits disappeared or were reinforced after the campaigns of

Alexander and his successors. It is here, I believe, that we can see the local push back in response to the global, and see these small communities react to broader developments in the Hellenistic world.

The study of localism has already yielded fascinating insights into other regions of the Greek world in different time periods. Hans-Joachim Gehrke was among the first to consider local cultures beyond Athens and Sparta in 1986, though he does so almost exclusively through the lens of politics.

His work has in no small way influenced the study of local and regional histories of the Greek world, among them Graham Oliver’s 2010 study of Attica referred to above, as well as Hodkinson’s 2009 edited volume on Sparta in a comparative context. On a broader plane, the work of Irad Malkin (2011) to which I referred above describes the Archaic Greek world after colonization as being a mosaic of small communities interacting with one another, and while they participate in a common sphere, in the end they are distinct entities who have long thought of themselves as such. Horden and Purcell (2000) arrived at a similar conclusion roughly a decade earlier, though with greater emphasis on environment as determining the local particularities of Mediterranean communities with a focus that follows

Braudel. In a different chronological context, Tim Whitmarsh’s 2010 edited volume Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World sought to examine the tangible impact of Roman imperialism on the local communities of the Greek mainland. The various case studies presented therein, particularly Simon Goldhill’s analysis of the politics of cultural mapping and the Greek notion of epichorios, are as poignant for the Imperial Period as they are for the Hellenistic. Also in the Roman

79 context, Radboud University’s Impact of Empire research network and associated publication series have been continuing the work of understanding global changes through a local lens. Against this scholarly backdrop, then, I aim to bring the same local approach as has been applied to the Archaic and

Imperial Periods into the Hellenistic. The methodology has proven itself to be broadly applicable, and provides us with a fascinating way in which to glimpse the local response of the Greeks to ‘global’ changes in power.

To gauge how these local cultures responded to the vagaries of the period we must cast a wide analytical net and consider a broad array of evidentiary material. Part of the principal aim of this study is to de-compartmentalize extant numismatic, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence by viewing these otherwise isolated categories of consideration in concert with one another, all against the backdrop of our literary sources and the sundry smaller-scale analyses of contemporary scholars. I begin where others have left off, and their accounts of such local concerns through to the end of the

Classical Period provide our point of departure – fortunately we do not need to begin from scratch, and are privileged to be able to use such a vast base of research as a starting point from which to move forward chronologically. The narrative, it would seem, ought to be continued.

The various – though isolated – realms of evidence and scholarship that I have mentioned above will then provide the referents by which we might track the evolution of these local cultures diachronically, all the while bearing in mind broader political and social developments in Greece and elsewhere with an eye for dynamism and responsiveness. Everything from the character of monuments in civic spaces, architecture of prominent buildings, temples, houses, the artistic styles that informed them, the dialect and content of inscriptions, evolving numismatic patterns, economic trends of importation and exportation, to name but a few among many, all will provide varying

80 measures of insight into how the local cultures of the mainland responded to each other, and the numerous new influences of the Hellenistic world. Actions, of course, speak louder than words and ultimately resulted in these more physical kinds of evidence, so the dynamics of individual and collective agency figure with equal prominence.61 What cities and regions did in the political sphere both internally and externally, how they related with their neighbours, the other communities and powers with which they had contact, and interacted among themselves are equally useful indicia. How these local cultures situated themselves in the changing horizontal and vertical structures of power that defined the period are of similar utility, as are the more social and cultural considerations of cultic patterns, theatrical performances, literature, and the various other facets of the local Greek life that when combined made for such a singular lifestyle among the ancients.

In order to organise such a vast and disparate body of data, I shall consider the experience of each region through four main categories: 1) demography, settlement, and economy, 2) civic and regional government, 3) local and regional religion, including civic and extramural cults, and 4) external relations, be they with kings, neighbouring regions, or other polities. The barriers between each are flimsy, but nonetheless these categories provide a helpful way to compare the experience of different regions in similar realms of interaction. I shall unite the various strands of this approach in the conclusion.

One cannot, of course, simply write a history of ‘Greece’ in the Hellenistic Period with any hope of practicality or methodological soundness; casting such a wide gaze would invariably cause certain details to slip out of sight as they faded against too vast of a background. Instead I approach Greece

61 In this I am more in line with the approach of Morgan 2003 and 2009, in her prioritization of archaeological and physical evidence, than the more abstract mythohistorical approach of Hall 1997 and 2002. The two, however, need not be exclusive. 81 vis-à-vis what over the past decade has become increasingly clear was the fundamental unit of the mainland: the region. By approaching each region as a more-or-less coherent geographic and social unit we can break the whole into more manageable pieces, while still affording ourselves the luxury of considering local culture at a variety of scales. Thus each region in this study will have its own treatment, and the same questions will be asked of each with the same overarching goal in mind.

Our course through Hellenistic Greece will pass through three distinct regions, each with their own unique history and characteristics. We shall begin with the Argolid, a region with a long and storied history of settlement dating back to the House of Tiles at Lerna and continuing with a network of palaces and citadels in the Mycenaean Period, notable among them Mycenae itself along with Tiryns.

The region remained inhabited during the Dark Ages, as the post holes of Nichoria demonstrate, but despite this continuous habitation the region did not naturally coalesce towards political or ethnic unity. Instead it remained peopled by distinct communities through the Classical Period and well into the Hellenistic, and thus has a diversity of local traditions living in close proximity with one another.

Despite the interior fragmentation, however, the Argolid is a region with deep connections through the

Greek mainland. The Argive Plain forms part of the ‘Hellenic Highway’ leading from Sparta through

Corinth and into Attica, and thus had always seen heavy traffic and easy contacts with the exterior. The sanctuaries of Zeus at Nemea, Asklepios at Epidauros, and the Argive Heraion had been drawing visitors since the sixth century. This long tradition of local diversity and external contact makes it an ideal candidate for my inquiry.

Euboea, the massive island lying off the northwest coast of Attica, provides an equally appealing but vastly different case study. The island and its comparatively small communities were buffeted by waves of external interference, first with the Persians and then with the Athenians and

Boeotians, meaning that even these humble locales consistently had to negotiate domestic and external influences. In the century and a half preceding the campaigns of Philip, Euboea was a colonial possession of the Athenians and was directly administered by Athenian colonists; it was only in the

340s that the island gained some measure of autonomy. Comparing the response of a newly liberated region such as this with Boeotia and the Argolid provides invaluable contrast. Yet throughout its history

Euboea’s geography was critical: on the one hand it faced the Attic coast and provided easy access to the mainland across a short gulf, while on the other hand it provided the gateway to the Aegean to the

West. Mapping how these external connections were re-oriented after the Athenians lost control of the island will reveal whether this was a new network of power, or a more continuous set of relationships.

Finally, Boeotia, the rural region to the North of Attica, will be our third regional case study.

Boeotia has an equally long history of settlement as the Argolid, but followed a vastly different trajectory. As early as the seventh or sixth century hints emerge of cooperation among Boeotian communities, first in the realm of common religious dedications but then in poetry, song, and ultimately genealogy and heroic descent. This longstanding sense of commonality gave rise to the various koina of the Boeotians, formalizing regional integration in a way that few corners of the ancient world had seen. All the while the region was highly fertile, largely rural, and yet still poised on at a crossroads between Attica, the North, and Delphi, and thus was no stranger to outside visitors.

Considering how such a tightly-knit region as Boeotia responded to the collapse of the Theban hegemony and the rise of the Macedonians provides a singular case study for the dynamics of regional interaction both in the interior and exterior spheres. Determining whether such entrenched cults and

83 traditions disappeared during the Hellenistic Period or strengthened has ramifications beyond the scope of this study.

All three of these regions, to put it bluntly, have been chosen in no small part because they are not Athens or Sparta. The former, I believe, did not require its own analysis of Hellenistic localism because in no small part this has already been brilliantly done by Graham Oliver in 2010, and the various studies of Habicht. Sparta continues to be a subject of interest to Graham Shipley, and there have been many more discussions of localism in this region than there have for any of our present case studies. The shadow of Athens and Sparta looms large in Hellenistic scholarship as it does in Classical, and it seems to me that the relative health of either has too often been taken as indicative of the mainland as a whole. I believe we are better served by looking to other, humbler corners of the Greek world that are not bound by the same expectations as thse two infamous antagonists.

I shall pose the following guiding questions for each case study. How did each region respond to the political upheavals of the Hellenistic Period? How did the communities of mainland Greece respond to the relative diminution of their own strategic importance while cities such as Antioch in Syria,

Alexandria in Egypt, and Pergamon in Asia Minor arose as the most prominent bastions of Hellenicity?

How did they cope with the notion that the centres of the Greek world were no longer in Greece? How did the centuries-old identities of these Greeks respond to the dominion of Hellenistic monarchs, and the increasingly ominous spectre of Roman dominion? How did they consider themselves in relation to the much broader, multicultural, and pluralistic world of which they were now part? How did they respond to pleas of ethnic kinship emanating from cities in Asia Minor and Syria? In short, how did they internalize the much larger world of which they were now, perhaps unwillingly, part?

I should hope that this double gap in our understanding of such a critical period in the history of the Greek mainland justifies a study such as this, but more can be said. In his biography of Pompey the

Great, Robin Seager explains the necessity of his own task by remarking that there was currently no biography of Pompey in English, and thus ‘a book in English on Pompeius should need no justification’

(Seager 2008, ix). Perhaps it should not, but in the contemporary climate of the Humanities in general and Classics in particular, claiming that we ought to compose some specific piece of work simply because it does not yet exist is not good enough. It would seem that the discipline deserves better reasoning lest its alleged irrelevance be confirmed.

During the Hellenistic Period the Greeks of the mainland found themselves in a position that evokes some measure of sympathy in us, or at least familiarity. The Greek world of the Classical Period had been a much smaller and more familiar milieu in which Greek regions, cities, and groups all spoke in the same language of political and social interaction, with a commonly intelligible grammar. In retrospect the past always seems simpler, and perhaps such was true of the Classical Period in which trends towards coalescence and refinement of a sense of what it meant to belong to a certain region or city had begun to crystallize with a visibility that shaped everything from political structures to architecture. Though some were subject to the whims of other Greek hegemons or dominant leagues, it was a Greek world that was generally subject to the whims of the Greeks themselves; they were, to some meaningful extent, masters of their own domain.

And while much of the day-to-day affairs of Greece would have remained the same after the transition to the Hellenistic Period, and the status quo easily perpetuated, the backdrop of the traditional Greek stage had changed. Regardless of to what degree their daily lives were impacted by the manner in which power and influence sloshed back and forth in the Hellenistic Period, at least on

85 some level the Greeks of the mainland would have been aware that they were now part of a much larger world, both in terms of geography and of culture. We cannot deny that the centres of political and military power, as well as economic prominence, had marched out of Greece along with the columns of the Macedonian armies that invaded the East. Greece was now but one speck in a much larger cosmos, one that had a much larger smattering of stars than the narrower constellation of the

Classical Period. One wonders, then, how such a proudly self-aware group of people responded to the caprice of a world that was more expansive than they had yet been able to imagine. What of themselves did they see in the skewed reflection of Greek foundations among what had been the ancestral enemies of the mainland, and how did they respond to the exportation of their culture and tradition throughout such a vast swathe of territory? How did they, in what was once seen to be the centre of their universe but now was admittedly only one piece of a bigger geographic expanse, perhaps even a backwater, negotiate the sheer scale of this pluralistic world in which so much seemed to be happening so quickly.

The story, as it were, of the Greeks of the Hellenistic Period is one of the at times desperate attempt to maintain the continuity of local life in the midst of profound change on a far larger scale.

The farthest corners of the Greek world witnessed the dawn of a new and confusing order, the likes of which the world had perhaps never seen in scale or complexity. But on the local level, life went on. The horizon of the immediate continued to dominate and preoccupy, and for many the world at least did not seem to be a much larger place than it had before. What was near and dear remained such, but no region or people could be fully isolated from the storms of power that ravaged the enlarged Greek sphere. From their perspective, though, what we would brand the Classical, the Hellenistic, and the

Roman blended together seamlessly in the relentless repetition of the quotidian; they themselves

86 would not have been aware from one day to the next that so much had ostensibly changed. The experience of the Greek mainland is thus about the gradual confrontation of the old with the new, or at least the old with the rapidly changing, when one is no longer the driving force of that change. It is about trying to cling to some sense of stability while being swept along by the tide, and what these furtive grasps reveal with the candour that can only be borne of exigency. They were not, I believe, the only ones to have been confronted with such a situation, and if as Cicero held (De.Or. 2.9.36), historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis, then their experience must in some small measure inform ours.

Chapter I

Hellenistic Antiquity: The Argolid

Ἑλλήνων οἱ μάλιστα ἀμφισβητοῦντες Ἀθηναίοις ἐς ἀρχαιότητα καὶ δῶρα, ἃ παρὰ θεῶν φασὶν

ἔχειν, εἰσὶν Ἀργεῖοι, καθάπερ βαρβάρων Φρυξὶν Αἰγύπτιοι.

Those of the Greeks who most dispute the Athenian claim to antiquity and to the gifts they say they have received from the gods are the Argives, just as among the barbarians the Egyptians compete with the Phrygians

Pausanias 1.14.2

Introduction: Impressions and Illusions

Argos has rightly been counted as one the most storied regions of the Greek heartland by authors ancient and modern, but it is precisely because of its long presence in the literary tradition that we presume that some of its communities are much older, and more constant, than many were in reality. The fabled Argos of myth and legend lavishes in the bronze-age renown of nearby Mycenae and

Tiryns, and all of the scholarly attention of which both have justifiably been subjects. The enthusiasm of Schliemann and his successors is contagious, as thanks to these Mycenaean sites we consciously or otherwise presume that the Argolid has a timeless quality as the heartland of Greece itself. It seems,

88 with the tholos tombs that dot the countryside along with the monumental citadels at both sites, that the Argolid has always been coherent, and that there has been some kind of unity to the region since the dawn of Greek civilisation.

This Mycenaean antiquity of the region is magnified through the Dark Ages and the Archaic

Period by Homer, who sings of the Argolid as the home of the gods and men who cast the heroic model for centuries of Greeks. ‘Wheat-growing Argos’ (Ἄργεΐ περ πολυπύρῳ 15.372) occupies a central if imprecise place in the Homeric epics as home of Diomedes, part of the greater territory of

Agamemnon, and the favourite city of Hera. Agamemnon, discussing the compensation he will offer to

Achilles as recompense for Briseis, says at Il.9.141-142‘εἰ δέ κεν Ἄργος ἱκοίμεθ᾽ Ἀχαιϊκὸν οὖθαρ

ἀρούρης / γαμβρός κέν μοι ἔοι’ (And if we return to Achaean Argos, the most fertile of lands, he shall be my son). The fertility of Argos is further emphasized in the epic tradition by the epithet ἱπποβότοιο

(‘grazed by horses,’ ‘horse-feeding’), which appears at Il. 2.287 and Od. 3.263, echoing the pastoral imagery evoked by the Poet’s metaphorical use of ‘οὖθαρ’ that I have cited above – literally meaning

‘udder,’ but taken as ‘rich, fertile, fattening’ in this instance. The Homeric imagery is clear and consistent: Argos is wealthy, fecund, and desirable as a territory.

Precisely where and what Argos was, however, were rather more nebulous in the ancient tradition, and there is an ambiguity inherent in the term that continues to plague modern scholars.

Argos refers to several different locations in various Homeric contexts, and subsequent authors continued to debate the precise location of each. ‘Achaean’ (‘Ἀχαιϊκόν’, Hom.Il. 9.141 ) Argos is conventionally taken to refer to the north-eastern corner of the Peloponnese that was the kingdom of

Agamemnon, stretching from Naphlion to Corinth. Pelasgian (‘Πελασγικόν’, Hom.Il. 2.681) Argos refers to Thessaly, though several Pelasgians are held to have come and settled the acropolis of Achaean

Argos (Strabo.8.6.9). Strabo 8.6.5-7 provides the best ancient recapitulation of the variety of meanings associated with the term, which can include the regions I have mentioned above, but can also refer generically to the entire Peloponnese (also in Apoll.Bibl. 2.3, see Allen 1909, 81-84). While in Homer the term Argos refers only to the regions, the plain, or the kingdom of Agamemnon, later authors begin to refer to the city itself, with the citadel at Larisa, as being ‘Argos’ (viz. Strabo 8.6.7, discussing πόλις ἡ

τῶν Ἀργείων). To further compound the issue, the Poet, as Strabo notes, uses the term Argive

(Ἀργεῖος) to refer to the Greeks in general, though he frequently adds a modifier to clarify their precise origins (Allen 1909, 88-98). The subsequent literary tradition retains and debates this ambiguity, but the polyvalence of the terms Argos and Argive remains obvious throughout.

I review the ancient tradition surrounding Argos in such detail for two reasons. First, the region’s long and enduring presence in ancient sources, particularly the Homeric epics, gives it the impression of hallowed antiquity. Because Argos has always been present in the most celebrated works of the Greeks themselves, there is a presumption that the region had some kind of political unity to match. This, as I shall show, is misleading, as the political coherence of the Argive plain did not begin to emerge until the fifth century, and only crystallized in the fourth. Second, the ambiguity of Argos and Argives often makes it unclear whether a given author, ancient or modern, is referring to the plain, to the region, to the city, to the Peloponnese, or some portion thereof. We must bear in mind this nebulous character of Argos in our evidentiary record, and take care not to conflate its many meanings.

The reality, as it were, of historical Argos as compared to its multifaceted literary equivalent is equally complicated, if somewhat less glamorous. It would be misleading to adopt this impression of timeless Argive regional consistency and internal homogeneity that seeps from the realm of myth into history. Well into the Hellenistic Period many of the inhabitants of the region that we have come to

90 identify as the Argolid would not have instinctively identified themselves as Argives, and neither would they have been content to be branded as such.62 Literary or administrative delineations should not be equated with allegiance and community, and the Argolid remained, like so many corners of the Greek mainland, a region peopled by sundry communities. These groups, varied in size and scale, did not automatically coalesce and think of themselves as one simply because of their geographical proximity.63 Several cities of the Argolid were mutually antagonistic throughout the Archaic and

Classical Periods and so they remained in the Hellenistic.

Before moving forward, I must clarify my definition of the Argolid for the purposes of our present inquiry, and I combine the description proposed by Piérart (2004) in the Inventory of Poleis with topographical observations from my own experience in the field. The modern city of Argos lies on the eastern edge of the plain that would have been the region’s heartland in antiquity, and which formed the immediate chōra of the city. The location is a natural choice: the modern site of Larisa castle, 289 metres above the plain, sits on top of the ancient city’s acropolis and provides a naturally defensible position from which much of the region can be surveyed. The agricultural heartland of the plain stretches from the bay of the Argolic gulf in the south to the outskirts of Mycenae to the north; its fertility and productivity are as obvious now as they were to Homer. North of Mycenae are the sites of Cleonai and Nemea, which lay along the northern border with Corinth marked by the Tretos pass. To the east and west the plain is fenced in by the Arcadian and Arachnaion massifs, respectively, and the passage through either is circuitous and arduous. The isolation of the plain makes for a natural network

62 Piérart 2004 provides a compendium of the Archaic and Classical poleis of the region at 599-620 and lists all attested instances of various city ethnics being used – many of which are not first attested until the late Classical Period. The common theme throughout is the survival and persistence of distinct communities within the region that nevertheless share some underlying commonalities. 63 Take, for instance, the numerous instances of regional conflict and stasis within the city itself that propelled the fifth century and spilled into the fourth, discussed in McAuley 2008, Kritzas 1996, and Hall 1997. 91 of cities that stretches from Naphlio (Nauplia) in the south, and then includes Tiryns, Argos itself,

Mycenae, Cleonai, and Nemea, with the Heraion sitting in the middle.64 Standing at any of the sites, the interconnectivity of the region’s communities is easy to see, as are natural lines of communication and transport.

The distances separating the sites are not vast: Argos is barely five kilometres from Nauplia, and roughly ten kilometres south of Mycenae. The rivers Inachos and Charadros cut through the region and water the valley, enabling its agricultural fertility. This corridor of the Argive plane is the principal stage on which the region’s history develops from the Bronze Age through to the Hellenistic Period, and comprises one of the two principal sub-regions of the Argolid. As we shall see with Euboea and

Boeotia, the contemporary geography of the region reveals much of its character in antiquity. The

Argolid lies along the natural land route connecting the communities of the southern Peloponnese to the Isthmus and thus the Megarid and Attica. As with Boeotia, the region was a prominent thoroughfare and would have seen a high volume of trade and travel throughout antiquity.

Contemporary highways connecting the region to the Peloponnese’s communities lie along these traditional routes: Highway 7 winds through the heart of the plain from Myloi through Argos to the north and then Mycenae and Nemea. The newer highway, E65, links Sparta and the southeast

Peloponnese with Corinth by traversing the northern Argolid as it heads towards the Isthmus. We see in these how the region lies at the convergence of two major overland routes from the two of the three southern fingers of the Peloponnese. This first geographical region, the central plain of the

64 The region’s borders as here defined are based on those provided by Piérart 2004, 599-600 with accompanying citations. The ancient limits of the plain are enumerated by Ephor. fr. 18c; Diod. 12.43.1; Pol. 5.91.8; and Ps-Skylax 49,50. Some ancient authors like Pausanias use the term in of a vague sense to refer to the entire north-eastern Peloponnese, as in 8.1.1-2. 92

Argolid, is thus on the one hand naturally defensible, but hardly cut off from broader networks of communication and trade.

The other identifiable geographic zone is the Akte peninsula, which the Argives intermittently controlled during the Classical Period and came to dominate more securely during the Hellenistic. The peninsula has a very different topography than the plain: the interior is rocky, mountainous, and not overly fertile while its principal cities and settlements are scattered along the coast. The easiest passage north towards Corinth and the Isthmus is through the Argive plain, hence we see the natural connection between the two zones. Epidauros lies roughly 30 km from Argos itself, while the Methana peninsula lies off the eastern coast near Poros.

Throughout both zones, save for some coastal settlements whose productivity was more dependent on fishing, the majority of the Argive economy was focussed on agriculture and stockbreeding. The fertility of the plain itself made it well-suited to more-or-less intensive agriculture, while the less arable mountainous land of the border regions lent itself well to grazing livestock. Even today the region’s principal exports are oranges, olives, and wine, and grazing land is still abundant. It thus comes as little surprise that access to and control of such grazing land was hotly contested within and without the Argolid, and territorial disputes on the frontier are one of the long-enduring features of Argive history – certainly one that continues into the Hellenistic Period.

During the Archaic and Classical Periods we can count eleven clearly identified and attested poleis, as well as twenty-nine named settlements and a further thirty-two unnamed nucleated settlements which cannot be convincingly identified.65 The polis was thus neither the sole nor necessarily dominant type of settlement preferred by the region’s inhabitants even well into the

65 Piérart 2004, 599-605 for the complete list. 93

Classical Period.66 The principal protagonists on the Argolic stage were the cities of Epidauros, Halieis,

Cleonai, Orneai, Phleious, Methana, and Troezen, as well as the spectres of Mycenae and Tiryns. The latter two cities were destroyed by Argos during its fifth century expansion, though their populations were resettled in the plain and many of their traditions endured. Argos, of course, figures most prominently in the cast but we must bear in mind that it was not the only city in the region. On a topographical level, though, its importance is obvious: Argos lies at a natural choke point on the plain and thus controls traffic flowing north towards Mycenae and Corinth, and south towards the Akte peninsula. It forms a node between two otherwise strikingly different regions.

Given the geography I have just described, it comes as little surprise that the political history of the region from the Bronze Age through to the Hellenistic Period is characterized by various attempts

(and reactions thereto) at exerting control over the entire plain and its constituent communities. From there, the Akte falls in and out of Argive control as a natural extension of the plain. Despite these attempts at hegemony, as we shall see, the region remains fractious. The economic and strategic importance of the Argolid made it a desirable commodity to powers outside the region, and we come across various attempts by the Spartans, Corinthians, and Athenians to gain some measure of influence over it. There are thus always two different dynamics at work: competition among its own communities for or against regional hegemony, and the encroachment of external regions and powers.

All the while, the region draws a large number of visitors and pilgrims thanks to its numerous festivals and prominent sanctuaries, which we shall consider in greater detail later. But thanks to these two dynamics, the internal and the external, we can see here the intersection of local cultures and politics on the smallest scale with the broader currents of Hellenism.

66 A point also highlighted by Hall 1997. 94

Many roads, in antiquity as I have described today, lead to Argos – particularly in the Hellenistic

Period. We thus come to grapple with the fundamental questions of this chapter: how did this complex region, with a long and complicated history of settlement and interaction among its various communities, respond to the advent of the Macedonians? Did their hegemony shatter these parochial distinctions, traditions, and rivalries, or were they exacerbated? How did the Argives interact in the broader Greek world of the period, and how did they respond to the diplomatic overtures of communities and dynasties that claimed to have been descended from the region? In order to resolve these questions, we must consider the geographic, cultic, and political diversity of the Argolid, and see how such far-reaching developments played out in a variety of locales. As we shall see, the impression that we gain from extant scholarship on the Hellenistic Argolid is that the region was slowly stifled during the third and second centuries, and gradually bled dry by kings and tyrants before the arrival of

Rome. Considering these various regional dynamics reveals this impression to be greatly misleading.

Given that the rise of Macedon is held to be the root cause of this economic, demographic, and civic decline in the Argive plain, we must take a closer look at the practical impact of Macedonian rule on the region’s communities. The gaps and fissures in our evidentiary record are too expansive to allow for a seamless narrative reconstruction, so I must instead take a more thematic approach. I shall begin by considering the region’s external relations with neighbouring states and potentates. From the character of monarchical rule in the region and Argive interaction with various other polities, I shall shift to the region’s interior and delve into more specific realms of local culture which are held to have suffered under the Macedonians. The region’s cultic and agonistic landscape provides fertile ground for such parochial considerations, and so the principal sanctuaries and festivals of the Argolid will fall

95 under close scrutiny. Finally, we shall end with the internal organization of the Argive plain to gauge how enduring a mark the period left on the smallest level of the farm or homestead.

When preconceptions of the period as a whole are removed in favour of taking a closer look at its constituent communities, a vastly different picture of the region’s Hellenistic experience becomes visible. Underneath the broader struggles for power that defined the Hellenistic world, in the Argolid, at least, life went on. This is not to say that nothing changed: in what follows I shall argue that the various communities of the Argolid were abuzz with cultic, civic, and economic activity, but this energy was directed towards very traditional endeavours. Old cults were given new or refurbished sanctuaries, old gods were celebrated at revamped festivals, local tradition reigned in so many arenas of everyday life.

Across these various topics, the chronology of the region’s development is noteworthy: much of what we think was Archaic or Classical emerged to prominence in the Hellenistic Period. Cities, sanctuaries, and communities which had been extant for centuries reached their heyday in terms of physical expanse and popularity not in Classical Period, but in the Hellenistic. All of this, of course, transpires under the ever-encroaching shadow cast by the cloud from the west that is Rome.

Accordingly we must briefly consider the advent of Roman rule as an epilogue to better situate the longue-durée of regional developments that have generally been attributed to the Hellenistic Period.

By contrast, the preceding years of Macedonian domination take on a very different tone. To examine this, I shall focus first on the diplomatic and external relations of the Argives, particularly with monarchy, and then consider the evolution of the region’s cults and sanctuaries. I shall then turn to a review of the data regarding its land and settlement patterns, before considering the lasting impacts of the period on its civic communities. Before doing so, however, we must re-examine the scholarly

96 history of Argos, and cast a brief glance at the long-trajectory that it followed into the Age of the

Successors.

More than just a Region: The Scholarly Tradition of Argos

The first modern scholars to consider the history of the Argive plane were influenced by the

Homeric allure of the region and dedicated their archaeological and historiographical efforts primarily to its earliest origins and development.67 This is unsurprising, given the enthusiasm with which

Schliemann tore through the region in 1874-1876 in search of Homeric Mycenae, and then subsequent

American and later French excavators were also drawn to dig in the Argive Heraion and the city itself.

The region’s rich literary and mythological legacy has consistently drawn the gaze of scholars back to its Bronze Age and archaic origins rather than forward to its Hellenistic development.68 Accordingly studies of the ethnic, cultic, and political history of the Argive plain abound for the Archaic and Classical

Periods.69 Among scholars of Greek ethnicity from the Prussians to Hall (1997) it has long been a favourite subject of the sort of ethnic analyses that I have just discussed in the preceding introduction.

I shall shortly provide a more detailed account of the region’s longer trajectory through to the 4th

67 I should note here before proceeding one of the persistent problems with studying the Argolid. Charalambos Kritzas, in conjunction with the French School at Athens, has been working for some decades on translating and analysing hundreds of blonze plaques which have been discovered throughout the Argolid. I mention later his publication of some of these in 1996, but a comprehensive approach to the region is frustrated by the fact that his corpus of inscriptions has yet to be published. Among them will be hundreds of materials, many of htem Hellensitic, and thus for the moment our hands are somewhat tied. 68 Hall 1997, 4-26 provides a detailed history of Argive scholarship and the evolution of various ethnic models as applied to the region’s constituent communities. 69 For instance, Tomlinson 1972 is generally focused on the Classical and Archaic Periods, as is the volume of Bearzot and Landucci 2006. Piérart 1997 and 2005 generally end at the fourth century, while Kelly’s 1976 history of the region only extends to 500. The same is true of Piérart 2004, which only extends to the Classical Period of the city. de Polignac’s magisterial 1995 study of cult and city does not extend to the Hellenistic Period, and we shall shortly turn to Hall’s treatments. 97 century, but in general the body of scholarship on the Argolid tends to be divided between archaeological and epigraphic studies on the one hand, and mytho-historical surveys informed by literary evidence on the other.70 The two, however, seldom meet, and what results is a chronological as well as thematic compartmentalization of Argive scholarship that has recently been decried by Graham

Shipley (2005, 315-316). In conformity with the motif I have elaborated above, both kinds of studies of the region occupy themselves with the Archaic and Classical Periods, while the Hellenistic Period is treated only in closing chapters or epilogues. There is no comprehensive study of the region after the

Battle of Chaeronea.

The region as characterised by those who have discussed its trajectory after the dawn of the

Macedonian hegemony aligns neatly with the scholarly stereotypes of mainland Greece that I have mentioned in my introduction. With few exceptions Argos has been ranked among those regions of

Greece that were the most visible victims of the Hellenistic kings: the prevailing view holds that the economy of Argos was impoverished, its countryside, abandoned, its armies, weakened, and its resources of manpower depleted. After the Macedonian conquest, in relation to their new monarchs the Argives are variously described as servile (Plut. Arat. 25.5) or collaborators (Tomlinson 1972, 150-

70 The body of Argive studies is vast, but rather disparate. Among studies of the early Argolid during the Mycenaean to Archaic Period, we find the works of Darcque 1998, Foley 1988, Hope Simpson and Dickinson 1979, Piérart 1991, 1997, and 2004, Renaudin 1928 on the Mycenaean necropolis in the plain, and Zangger 1993 on its geoarchaeology. On Argos itself, see Corbin 1974 on the geometric tombs of the city during the Dark Ages, and the volume of Piérart and Touchais 1996 on its long-term history. Sjöber 2004 has studied Asine and the region during the Late Helladic Period, and other regional archaeological studies include Dabney 1999, Casselmann et al 2004, Athanassopoulos 2010, and Alcock 1991. Survey work also includes Wells and Runnels 1996, van Andel et al 1990, Mee and Forbes 1997 on the Methana peninsula, Marchand 2002 on the Bronze Age in Corinthia, and Jansen 2002 on the region’s road networks. For the political and social history of the city itself, see Bernardini 2004’s edited volume on the myths and traditions of Argos, along with Bearzot and Landucci’s 2006 volume on Argive democracy. See below for a more specific treatment of the major narrative histories of the region. 98

157) by ancient and modern authors alike.71 We have already seen such language used either scathingly or lamentingly by Giovannini and others when describing the Greek mainland, and we can hear their echoes in the opinio communis regarding Hellenistic Argos.72 I do not mean to compromise the integrity of the numerous studies of the Argolid, rather I aim to display how preconceived notions of Hellenistic decline manifest themselves in highly specific contexts. I take a few key examples to prove the point in the Argive context.

Richard Tomlinson’s authoritative survey of Argos and the Argolid is a fitting exemplar of how

Hellenistic Argos is compared to its Classical predecessor. Tomlinson’s work remains the only narrative treatment of the city and region’s history up to the Roman annexation. While it is magisterial for the

Archaic and Classical Periods, when it comes to the Hellenistic Era Tomlinson is much more cursory: from the fourth century to the Roman Imperial Period comprises roughly thirty pages in a 260 page work. The narrative of the fourth century onwards is one of ‘sad decline’ (1972, 143) as Argos squabbles over a diminishing inheritance. As early as the 360s ‘Argos had essentially disappeared from the list of significant Greek cities’, (142) and over the following centuries politics was more driven by individualism and factional interest. This in turn bred civic unrest and constitutional fluctuation as traditional Argive practices were either manipulated or abandoned outright: ‘it seems not unlikely that the fluctuations in policy resulted from the existence in Argos of individual politicians who tried to take

71 As we shall see with Boeotia, much of the disdain of modern scholars towards Argos is fed by Plutarch’s observation in the Life of Aratus 25.5, which merits quotation in full: τῶν δὲ πολλῶν ἤδη διὰ συνήθειαν ἐθελοδούλως ἐχόντων καὶ μηδενὸς ἀφισταμένου πρὸς αὐτόν, ἀνεχώρησεν ἔγκλημα κατεσκευακὼς τοῖς Ἀχαιοῖς ὡς ἐν εἰρήνῃ πόλεμον ἐξενηνοχόσι. But since most of them were by this time habituated to slavery and willing to endure it, so that not a man came over to his side, he retired, after involving the Achaeans in the charge of having gone to war in time of peace. 72 See the introduction for more detailed citations of the opinio communis of the Hellenistic mainland and the perceived decline thereof in the Hellenistic Period. 99 advantage of changes in public opinion now for, now against the Macedonian supremacy, to further their own careers’ (147).73

Macedonian supremacy, as the analysis goes, smothered any hopes for the survival of Classical

Argive autonomia. In this new constellation of power Argos and its fellow Greek cities ‘were now pawns in the hands of Macedonian generals, and the question of their freedom or subjugation was a matter to be decided by Macedonian policies’ (150). Dominated from above, the conclusion logically follows that the local traditions and concerns of the Argives would have perished, and the perception of political impotence correlates to the prioritization of the individual sphere. A re-examination of such a conclusion will, I hope, reveal quite a different state of affairs on the ground. Tomlinson is not alone in perceiving this widespread decline, as he is joined by Pierre Amandry’s conclusion regarding the regional sanctuaries of the Argolid during the period. He writes

un siècle après l’expédition d’Alexandre, les temps étaient révolus. La simplification de

la géographie politique, la croissance des villes principales, l’effacement relative de la

vielle Grèce dans le nouveau monde, la construction de théâtres et de stades de pierre

dans les grands centres, condamnaient ces sanctuaires à une mort lente, ou de moins à

une léthargie prolongée (Amandry 1980, 250)

73 In the interest of fairness to Tomlinson, I should note here that he presents his analysis of Hellenistic Argos by focussing on the city under one particular monarch or tyrant, and then analysing the relative autonomy the city enjoyed at the time. There are fluctuations in this among the monarchs: some were beneficial to the city, other detrimental, and while Tomlinson describes moments of success and light rule, in general his account is dominated by decline. The above quotations are drawn from his chronological narrative, but this decline presents itself in his subsequent thematic chapters as well. 100

These notions of civic disenfranchisement, of Macedonian domination stifling freedom and autonomy, and of the resultant abandonment of local traditions and attachments in the face of the broader

Hellenistic world here described at Argos have been equally applied to many other regions of the

Greek mainland. We shall see such rhetoric again in the cases of Euboea and Boeotia.

On the demographic level, Tomlinson writes of the third century that ‘as the population dwindles as a result of economic and other pressures, so the size of the citizen force became more and more restricted’ (186). Yet he provides no footnote or citation to support this rather strong assertion of the depleted reserves of civic manpower, and none of the region’s archaeological surveys clearly indicate this.74 Shortly thereafter he is quite comfortable in his speculation: ‘a decline of fifty per cent from the figures of six thousand for the fifth century is not impossible’ (186). If anything, indirect hints point us towards a different conclusion: as we shall discuss in more detail below, if the reorganization of civic hierarchies and the persistently fierce competition over land and borders suggest anything, it is population growth rather than decline.

Tomlinson is of course not the only scholarly voice, and other, narrower, studies of Hellenistic

Argos are numerous. The epigraphic studies of Michel Piérart (1980) and Pierre Amandry (1980) are prolific and erudite, but they tend to consider individual inscriptions or groups of two or three documents in a narrow context that does not directly engage with broader historiographical concerns of the period. Such articles tend to appear either on their own in learned journals, or as part of broad edited volumes on the region.75 For lack of a revised narrative of the period which includes recent epigraphic finds and archaeological data, such smaller-scale studies tend to fall back on conclusions

74 See above for a list of surveys of the region, and the following discussion on settlement patterns. 75 For instance the volume Études Argiennes (1980) and Polydipsion Argos (1992), both produced by the école française d’athènes. The French School figures quite prominently in the excavation and publication of Argive history. 101 that are by now somewhat out of date. As I have mentioned previously, the coutner-arguments of those who advocate Hellensitic continuity generally have not infiltrated scholarship of Hellenistic Argos.

Synthesis of our diverse source material is likewise lacking.

Other studies, however, such as those of Tanja Scheer (notably 2005) have considered the foreign relations of Argos and its mythological realignment during the period with great effect, and we shall subsequently turn to the broader ramifications of her conclusions. Her treatment of Argos’ role in

Asia Minor greatly informs our understanding of the region’s self-representation in the international arena, and thus its internal dynamics in turn. Nonetheless, Argive scholarship as a whole remains compartmentalized.

Graham Shipley was quite right to lament this lack of interaction between epigraphic, archaeological, and ‘historical’ studies of the period when he called for the gap to be bridged in his

2005 study of the Hellenistic Peloponnese. Shipley’s recapitulation gives us cause to reconsider the suppositions that had been held as dogmatic by Tomlinson and others. His guiding methodological premise has greatly informed mine: ‘historians have been far too ready to assume that periods which are essentially arbitrary constructs must have a distinct social and cultural character’ (317). Hence our proclivity for change at the expense of drab continuity. His assertions regarding the Peloponnese as a whole hold fast for its constituent Argos as well.

The possible evidence for demographic loss in the region is, at best, inconclusive, and the factors that are held to have been its accelerating causes are negligible.76 The exportation of young men as mercenaries, he argues, neither necessarily reduces the population of the city which provided

76 On the demographic trends elsewhere in the Peloponnese, see Roy 1999, and the rest of the edited volume by Roy and Nielsen 1999. Also Foxhall 1993 on the impact of regional warfare on agricultural productivity and demography. 102 them, nor does it categorically insinuate domestic impoverishment (2005, 316-318). Warfare, so often cited as ravaging countryside and city alike by proponents of mainland decline, in practicality had more limited and transient effects.77 Battles were fought more frequently in the chōra than in the polis itself, and although such clashes were frequent, their casualty rates were hardly on a catastrophic scale

(Shipley 2005, 318-320). In a broader context, Billows’ (1995) statistical re-evaluation of casualty rates in general Hellenistic warfare again comes to mind, and we are led to question the presumption that each engagement on a city’s territory automatically implied the decimation of its population.

Shipley’s reconsideration of demography brings to light another methodological susceptibility: despite the highly critical approach of those who study the Classical Period and its texts, Hellenistic scholars are often keen to embrace without comment the numbers given by ancient sources for victims of battles or stasis. Treating such preconceived demographic notions and allegations of widespread slaughter like that exacted on Argos by Apollonides with rather more scepticism gives us the impression of a much more constant population of the Argive plain well into the period than some scholars may have presumed or desired (Diod.18.57.1, 69.3-4). The rivers of blood were perhaps little more than an intermittent trickle.

Shipley similarly leads us to question the accompanying physical decline of the city that is presumed to have gone hand-in-hand with its depopulation. The cities of the Peloponnese did not all succumb to atrophy during the period, if anything quite the opposite: ‘Argos, for example, revived after the late fourth century, reach its maximal urban extent in the mid third, and continued to have surrounding towns dependent on it in the early second century’ (Shipley 2005, 318). The same is true

77 We shall discuss the intermittent and transient character of warfare in the Hellenistic region in greater detail below. 103 of Sparta, which similarly did not hit its urban peak until the third century.78 This trend towards urban development and concentration of population is one that is also identified by Susan Alcock’s brilliant study Graecia Capta (1993), to which we shall intermittently turn throughout this chapter. Suffice it to revive for the moment, though, her salient conclusion: the widespread impoverishment of the countryside and urban decline that many have attributed to the Hellenistic Period did not begint o present itself until after the Roman consolidation of the province of Achaea in the Late Republican and

Early Imperial Periods.

While the advent of Macedonian monarchy is often held as the catalyst for regional decline, a closer examination of how the Antigonid kings interacted with the region casts their rule in a different light. Shipley reconsiders the prevailing logic with more of a practical perspective: the Macedonian kings were never willing or even competent micro-administrators, and ‘were not interested in running southern Greece as a province within an empire’ (2005, 321).79

Examples of direct local intervention by Macedonian kings are so few as to be inherently exceptional.80 The message of such episodic violence, though, was still abundantly clear: revolts against

Macedonian rule will be dealt with harshly, and we must remember that the memory of Thebes’ destruction by Alexander would have lingered in the minds of the Argives who were confronting the

78 For the Argive instance, Shipley is here relying on the summation provided by Barakari-Gléni & Pariente 1998, 170-178, which combines our diverse archaeological data into a fairly coherent narrative. Accordingly, the urban core of the city did not hit its zenith until well into the Hellenistic Period, and the process of urban consolidation and nucleation of settlement had only begun in earnest in the fifth century. For the Spartan context, Shipley is relying on as yet unpublished field reports which are currently unavailable to me. 79 Rostovtzeff was the first to make this observation in SEHHW, 35-38. 80 318 saw the persecution by the Macedonian vice-regent Polyperchon of many supporters of his enemy Cassander Diod. 18.57.1, 69.3-4, and then three years later, 500 supporters of Polyperchon were burnt alive by Cassander’s general Diod. 19.63.2; Mantineia in Arcadia was attacked around 240 by the Aetolians, (discussed at Shipley 2005: 318). Sicyon revolted against the Macedonians several times, and was finally taken by Antigonus III Doson in 223 (Pol. 2.54.12, 56.6-7 etc…). Yet these examples are essentially the only attestations that we have of large scale interventions.

104 successor dynasties. These kings, however, generally preferred to rule via local proxy, delegating authority and oversight to local potentates who are generally labelled as tyrants. The tyrants were in and of themselves local politicians with local interests who functioned as intermediaries rather than governors, and Shipley’s semantics capture the nuance perfectly as they ‘probably presided over local politics rather than suspending them’ (320). There is no evidence of brutal or oppressive rule by such tyrants on a massive scale, and this propitiation follows logically when we consider Macedonian ambitions. The Macedonians, particularly the Antigonids who held sway over much of the Peloponnese, desired only to hold quiescent regions, not conquer and reshape them in order to fit into some kind of idealized imperial fold (Strootman 2005).

Theirs was a territorial, not a cultural, game, and hence the principal objective here is precisely that which we have identified in Ptolemaic Egypt: stability (Samuel 1983). The radical and forcible modification of local culture would have been too conspicuous and disruptive for the Argives or others to brook peaceably, and would have only served to foment the kind of unrest that the Macedonians so eagerly avoided. The irony, perhaps, is that the persistence of civic and local tradition directly served royal interests. Before considering the Argive experience of the Macedonian hegemony, though, we must briefly review the region’s preceding centuries in order to set the stage.

Déjà vu: The Argolid in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries

As I mentioned in the outset of this chapter it would be misleading to think that the Argolid was a consistently unified region in the political sense since the Archaic Period. Its early history was more marked by grudging cohabitation rather than any coalescing trend towards synoikismos; efforts at

105 exerting some form of hegemony or integration were met with fleeting success by the Argives themselves and others who made the attempt. The occasional intervention of outside powers – most notably Sparta, but not least among them Athens – only served to compound the issue. In Argos, as we have seen elsewhere, the internal divisions which persisted in the region throughout the Archaic and

Classical Periods must have endured into the Hellenistic as well. A longer look at the region’s history from the sixth to the fourth centuries, however, reveals just how deep such divisions ran.

Despite the regional connotation of the term ‘Argos’ in our ancient literary sources, the city of

Argos itself had neither an ancestral nor consistent claim over the entire region of the Argolid. Instead it was only one among many distinct communities that peopled the region well into the Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Period. At the dawn of the fifth century Argos held a loose hegemony over the plain more by means of military supremacy than more formal bonds of alliance. The other communities of the region had long-entrenched traditions, and old claims on their respective territories. While the Argives themselves identified as Dorian, the surrounding communities of

Mycenae, Tiryns, and Midea were almost entirely Heraclid in their composition and exhibition, and the two predominant groups had their respective principal deities of Apollo and Hera, respectively, along with the various particularities of myth and festival that were entailed.81 Our ancient sources further add small groups of Achaeans, Pelasgids, and Dryopes throughout the rural communities of the Argolid along with minor populations of Ionians in Hermione and Epidauros.82 Each of course maintained their own mythic and heroic traditions well beyond the fifth century. The point to be gleaned from this ethnic diversity is that unlike Boeotia, for instance, there is no underlying sense of unity among the

81 McInerney 1999, 4-8, Hall 1997, 69-70, Kritzas 1996, 239. 82 Hdt 6.77-8 and 127. Aris. Pol. 1302b33, Paus. 2.20.8-10, Diod. fr.7.13.2; Plut. Lyc. 7. 106 region’s various communities, and thus no extra-political foundation for subsequent collaboration that we see in Aetolia, Achaea, or elsewhere.

This loose Argive dominion of the plain at the beginning of the fifth century was quickly shattered by the disastrous outcome at the Battle of Sepeia which saw a Spartan victory come at the expense of a substantial portion of the Argive hoplite class.83 The subsequent transition from oligarchy to democracy which took place in the city itself – labelled the ‘servile interregnum’ by some – brings to the fore deep factional divides within the Argive citizenry that will continue to influence its Hellenistic politics (Robinson 1998, 83-85). In the aftermath of the defeat, Argos’ regional hegemony shattered, and the region’s reaction to the Persian Wars illustrates its diversity of policy and tradition: the enfeebled Argos remained neutral, though this did not prevent Mycenae and Tiryns from siding with the Greeks and sending detachments of troops (Diod. 11.3.3-6; 11.65; Kritzas 1992, 232-233).

The region’s other communities quickly seized the opportunity offered by a weakened Argos.

Spearheaded by the Mycenaeans ‘on account of their country’s ancient high repute’, according to

Diodorus, a revolt against Argive rule involving Myceanae, Tiryns, and Midea broke out in 478, though the attempt was quelled by the Argives.84 Mycenae and most likely Tiryns as well were sacked by the

83 Hdt. 6.77-8, Aris. Pol. 1302.b.33; Paus. 2.20-8-10, Robinson 1997, 85. 84Kritzas 1992, 232. The account of Diodorus 11.65.3-6 : τὸ δὲσύνολον ὑπώπτευον αὐτούς, μήποτε ἰσχύσαντες ἐπὶ πλέον τῆςἡγεμονίας ἀμφισβητήσωσι τοῖς Ἀργείοις δι ὰ τὸ παλαιὸν φρόνημα τῆςπόλεως. διὰ δὴ ταύτας τὰς αἰτίας ἀλλοτρίως διακείμενοι, πάλαι μὲνἔσπευδον ἆραι τ ὴν πόλιν, τότε δὲ καιρὸν εὔθετον ἔχειν ἐνόμιζον,ὁρῶντες τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους τεταπεινωμένους καὶ μὴ δυναμ ένους τοῖςΜυκηναίοις βοηθεῖν. ἀθροίσαντες οὖν ἀξιόλογον δύναμιν ἔκ τε Ἄργουςκαὶ ἐκ τῶν συμμαχίδων πόλε ων ἐστράτευσαν ἐπ᾽ αὐτούς, νικήσαντες δὲμάχῃ τοὺς Μυκηναίους καὶ συγκλείσαντες ἐντὸς τειχῶν ἐπολιόρκουν τὴν πόλιν. οἱ δὲ Μυκηναῖοι χρόνον μέν τινα τοὺς πολιορκοῦνταςεὐτόνως ἠμύνοντο, μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα λειπόμενοι τῷ πολέμῳ, καὶ τῶνΛακεδαιμονίων μὴ δυναμένων βοηθῆσαι διὰ τοὺς ἰδίους πολέμους καὶτὴν ἐκ τῶν σεισμῶν γενομένην αὐτοῖς συμφοράν, ἄλλων δ᾽ οὐκ ὄντωνσυμμάχων, ἐρημίᾳ τῶν ἐπικουρούντων κατὰ κράτος ἥλωσαν. οἱ δὲἈργεῖοι τοὺς Μυκηναίους ἀνδραποδισάμενοι καὶ δεκάτην ἐξ αὐτῶν τῷθεῷ καθιερώσαντες, τὰς Μυκήνας κ ατέσκαψαν In a word, the Argives were suspicious of the Mycenaeans, fearing lest, if they got any stronger, they might, on the strength of the ancient prestige of Mycenae, dispute the right of Argos to the leadership. Such, then, were 107 victorious Argives, who sought to ensure that such uprisings would not occur again by destroying the physical cities and relocating their communities (Strabo 8.6.11; Paus. 8.27.1). Argos would proceed to consolidate the region over the next several decades in a process which some have viewed as a model of either synoecism or desertification (Kritzas 1996). To me, however the persistence of some of these regional communities into the Hellenistic Period calls into question the degree to which the plain was actually unified.85

The predictable regional squabbles over territory and dominance that continued to plague the

Argolid are not so much noteworthy because of their familiar mechanism, but the late date at which they transpired. Argos had only begun consolidating its hold on the region barely a century before the rise of the Macedonians, and thus any sense of Argive solidarity among local communities would have been fledgling after only three or four generations. Many of the traditions, sanctuaries, and festivals which the Argives themselves and others dated to the Archaic Period were instead much younger, dating to the middle of the fifth century at the earliest. Jonathan Hall, for instance, aptly discusses the illusory antiquity of the Heraion as a regional sanctuary along with its associated festivals, which only emerged to regional prominence after the 470s, instead of the much older 7th century dates with which they were typically associated (Hall 1995, also Auffarth 2006). This stands in stark contrast, for

the reasons for the bad blood between them; and from of old the Argives had ever been eager to exalt their city, and now they thought they had a favourable opportunity, seeing that the Lacedaemonians had been weakened and were unable to come to the aid of the Mycenaeans. Therefore the Argives, gathering a strong army from both Argos and the cities of their allies, marched against the Mycenaeans, and after defeating them in battle and shutting them within their walls, they laid siege to the city. The Mycenaeans for a time resisted the besiegers with vigour, but afterwards, since they were being worsted in the fighting and the Lacedaemonians could bring them no aid because of their own wars and the disaster that had overtaken them in the earthquakes, and since there were no other allies, they were taken by storm through lack of support from outside. The Argives sold the Mycenaeans into slavery, dedicated a tenth part of them to the god, and razed Mycenae. 85 Piérart identifies the two models at 1997, 329-330, also discussed by Diod.11.65.2-3 and Strabo 8.6.11 108 instance, to the character of Boeotia in the Archaic Period, where regional sanctuaries, festivals, and heroic traditions had emerged as early as the seventh century.

It was only then that the Argives themselves begin spreading around the plain. Our first attestation of the ‘antique’ Argive procession to the Heraion dates only to Pindar’s 10th Nemean Ode in

464 (Hall 1995, 590-597). Our first archaeological evidence of the games of Hera dates to 460, and it is only then that Argos built the processional way linking the city itself to the sanctuary that had only recently passed into its hands.86 The first solid attestation of Epidauros as a polis does not come until

449, and thus we see that many of the region’s poleis only began emerging as such in the mid-Classical

Period.87 As we shall see with Euboea in the following chapter, many of these communities that are prominent in the Hellenistic Period seem much older than they actually were. Argos’ hold over the region was often fleeting and episodic: as quickly as it had gained control of certain communities, others came to intervene in contestation: Halieis, for instance, was the subject of a violent struggle between the Athenians and Peloponnesians in 460-459 (Thuc, 2.56.5, 4.45.2). Here we see our first example of a pattern that will become familiar throughout this study: for many corners of the Greek mainland the Classical Period was more violent and disruptive to local communities than the Hellenistic

Period. Cities are sacked, populations relocated, and warfare more common in the countryside during the fifth and first half of the fourth centuries than they would be in the years of the Macedonian hegemony. The pax macedonica often put an end to such internecine regional strife.

Argos itself was not a beacon of tranquillity amidst the region’s fifth-century upheaval: its grand alliance with the Athenians and others against the Spartans around 420 was frustrated in its invasion of

86 Hall 1995 for the full history of the sanctuary with conflicting mythical and archaeological traditions. 87 NIEpi 10.5–5; other attestations include ML 27.4 (479); IG iv².1 47.2–3; Hdt. 5.82–84; and on the serpent column in Delphi ML 23.4. See Piérart 2004 for further discussion of the city’s early attestation. 109

Epidauros and was subsequently defeated by the Lacedaemonians at Mantinea in 418. Defeat on the battlefield unsurprisingly translated into stasis in the city: an oligarchic revolution in 417 undertaken with the assistance of Sparta was short-lived, and resulted in the resurgence of a democratic regime and the exile of accused philo-laconians by the Athenians at the command of Alcibiades.88 Nonetheless, the episode reveals the endurance of deep divisions within the civic body of Argos throughout the fifth century. This vacillation between oligarchy and democracy will persist into the Hellenistic Period.

Outside intervention in Argive civic politics, again, was hardly a Hellenistic phenomenon but instead is a regular occurrence in the fourth century as it was in the fifth. In 395 Argos formed a quadruple alliance with Boeotia, Athens, and Corinth which represented the first time (though not the last) that the city entered into a treaty structure that was governed by a synedrion (Diod.14.82.1).

Instances of Argive federal integration in the Achaean League during the following century were not as unprecedented as they may seem. External intervention unilaterally determined the extent of Argive territory with the King’s Peace in 387/6, whose terms stipulated that the Argives lost their recently acquired foothold in Corinth as the latter was restored to independence and autonomy. (Xen.Hell.

5.134-136).

Membership in common leagues and alliances, participation in broadly ‘federal’ organs, and the resolution of territorial disputes by external, ostensibly monarchical, arbitration are thus business as usual during fifth and fourth centuries. Yet such mechanisms are held to be quintessentially Hellenistic, not Classical, and often serve to distinguish the former period from the latter. In this recapitulation of the fifth and fourth centuries, however, we see that these structures and patterns have early origins

88 Thuc. 5.84.1, Diod. 12.81.2-3, David 1986, 113. 110 which persist after the reign of Alexander, marking one of many vectors of continuity between the two periods.

Some Hellenistic scholars, as we have seen above, have taken the humility with which the

Argolid appears in the period’s record as indication of its contemporary obscurity. But if we follow such logic then Argive decline had already begun long before Chaeronea. ‘Argos’ role after the downfall of

Sparta is strangely subdued’ Tomlinson notes on the political scale, and from 360s until Chaeronea he paints a picture of frustrated ambitions and ineffectual alliances (1972, 142). The archaeological and epigraphic record, however, tells a very different story which we will shortly address as we turn to the cultic and agonistic landscape of the region.

On closer inspection, Argive developments of the 360s-330s can be characterised as a turn inwards, away from broadly ‘external’ politics and towards immediate regional and Peloponnesian concerns. This is simply a shift in strategic perspective, not an indication of widespread decline or impotence. Divisions within the Peloponnese spilled into the Argolid as late as 351 when Sparta attacked Megalopolis, prompting the Megalopolitans to call for support from the Argives and other neighbours who sent their forces to counter this local Spartan aggression (Diod. 16.24.2; Tomlinson

1972, 143-4; Spawnforth and Cartledge 1989, 10-15). The Spartans emerged victorious, though, and after invading the Argolid they seized and sacked Orneiai. The mechanism rather than the details is telling: such a typical local conflict over territory had been seen dozens of times before Chaeronea and would certainly be seen again after, and such immediate concerns do not become any less pressing under the Macedonian hegemony (Piérart 2004). This territorial fixation of Greek communities in general, and of the Argolid in particular, is no less prominent in the Hellenistic Period as it was in the

Classical and Archaic periods. The back and forth of conflicts on a more local scale was as important in

111 the 350s as it had been in the 460s, and would continue to be so throughout the third century and beyond. This provides yet another vector of structural continuity between the Classical and Hellenistic

Periods, in the Argolid as we shall see elsewhere.

I resurrect the above events in the Argolid’s longer trajectory in order to introduce the dominant themes from the centuries and decades leading up to the victory of Philip II which persist until the advent of the Romans – and in some cases, beyond. The political landscape of the Argolid is one that remained fractured and diverse, and it is not as if the region’s constituent communities inevitably coalesced into one.

The two-way street of Argive regional history is equally evident in this preceding period as it will be during the pax macedonica. On the one hand, there were attempts by the Argives themselves and others within the region to glue its pieces into a coherent whole; these met with little lasting success, though, as old divisions quickly resurfaced. On the other hand, though, as much as the inhabitants of the Argolid had fought among each other, so too had the influence of external powers – be it Sparta,

Corinth, Athens, or others – long been felt in the region’s affairs. The clash of such vying powers on

Argive soil was nothing new by the time of Chaeronea. The fourth-century appearance of many cultic centres and festivals is one of many symptoms of the endurance of localism, which will continue unabated into the Hellenistic Period.

The contemporary disappearance of the Argolid from the broader arena of Greek interstate politics is not indicative of the exhaustion of its political energy, only its reorientation (pace Tomlinson

1972, 142-144). The trends and characteristics which we have discussed above will recur with equal frequency throughout the third and second century; Argos during the Hellenistic Period remained, in many ways, as it was and had been.

112

When the Macedonians descended on the Argolid, they came across a region that was still divided among rival cities and communities, some of which had only begun to coalesce into poleis, and others which had long tried to be dominant. All, however, were united by their preoccupation with local affairs, and so they would remain. Although much has been made of the sudden impact of

Macedonian monarchy on the regional and civic affairs of the Hellenistic mainland, this region, at least, had a long history with the northern kings. In considering the impact of monarchy on the Hellenistic

Argolid, we must look to the region’s preceding interaction with Argead kings and others, and realise that this would not have been its first encounter with the institution of one-man rule. From there, we shall chart the course of Argive interaction with Hellenistic monarchs and their subordinates in the third and second centuries. While we realise that the character of monarchic involvement with the

Argolid certainly changed after Philip and Alexander, this did not always come to the detriment of the region’s communities.

The Argolid and Monarchy in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries

Philip II and later his son Alexander were certainly not the first monarchs with which Argos had ever interacted, and they were not the first of their dynasty to have maintained contact with the region and its communities. While perhaps a flippant observation, if we consider the longue durée of

Argive history without undue privilege accorded to the Classical Period then we may note that monarchical rule or hegemony is chronologically more common than not. Monarchy, again, is so often considered a Hellenistic hallmark, but in Argos it has a much longer history than elsewhere in the mainland. The rule of the Temenid dynasty – the archaic kings of Argos who claimed descent from the

113 mythical Temenos - persisted from the Dark Ages until the mid to late sixth century.89 The kings’ haughtily abusive behaviour led the city’s populace to rise up against their rule – though Herodotus’ mention of a basileus who continued to exert some measure of military control at the time of the

Persian Wars hints at the persistence of some vestige of monarchical privilege.90 Varying degrees of specificity among the ancients regarding the date at which the monarchy fell prevent us from saying anything more than that it had been overthrown by 500, though it is not unreasonable to classify the

Argive polity of the fifth century as a constitutional hybrid of monarchic and oligarchic institutions

(Robinson 1997, 82-88).

The period of ‘independent’ or ‘democratic’ Argive rule that stretched from roughly 470 until

Chaeronea is thus in some ways exceptional. Regardless of the precise weight given to such considerations, on a constitutional level the title basileus was neither alien nor abhorrent to the

Argives themselves. Despite the fact that the region and the city of Argos in particular had a longer history with monarchy than democracy or oligarchy, many historians nevertheless assume that democracy is the norm, and periods of monarchic rule are somehow an aberration.91 This assumption is particularly inapplicable in the Argolid, which perhaps more than any other region of Greece had a long tradition of kingly rule. The return of monarchical oversight to the region in the Hellenistic Period thus marks its reversion to a form of rule with which it had been familiar since the Mycenaean Period.

Neither monarchy in general, nor the Macedonian kings were unknown to the Argives by the time of Philip’s rise to power in the mainland. Since the fifth century the region had provided the

Macedonian kings with their entry ticket to the ‘Greek’ world. This is thanks in no small part to the

89 For ancient sources on the Dorian dynasty, see Diod. 4.57-58, Paus. 2.13.18, 4.3, 5.3, and Robinson 1997 82-86. 90 Hdt. 6.127; Diod. Fr.7.13.2; Plut. Lyc. 7, for the persistence see Robinson 1997, 83 and Hdt. 7.149. 91 Robinson 1997 is dominated by such a tone in which he casts the trajectory of archaic Argos as leading inevitably to the realization of the democracy. 114

Argives’ ancestral – and highly malleable (Scheer 2005, 216-219.) – traditions of heroic and divine descent. Herodotus relates the famous story of Alexander I’s (r.498-454) desire to compete in the

Olympic Games being realised only because his Hellenicity was recognised by the Elean hellanodikai, who found his claim of Argive descent via Herakles justified.92 One cannot speculate what role the

Argives themselves would have played in corroborating his ethnic origins, save to say that the general acceptance of the Argive origins of the Agreads by the reign of Philip II without any protest on their part suggests that they were at most happy, and at least untroubled, by such an affiliation. Perhaps more than anybody else, the Argives provided the Argead dynasty with their first – and most enduring

– link to the southern mainland, and to the general community of the Hellenes. Interestingly, this early establishment of Macedonian ties took place barely decades after the overthrow of the Temenid kings of Argos. This in turn again hints that the Argives had no conceptual aversion to monarchy in and of

92 Hdt. 5.22 on the Olympic question of Alexander I: ὁ μέν νυν τῶν Περσέων τούτων θάνατος οὕτω καταλαμφθεὶς ἐσιγήθη. Ἕλληνας δὲ εἶναι τούτους τοὺς ἀπὸ Περδίκκεω γεγονότας, κατά περ αὐτοὶ λέγουσι, αὐτός τε οὕτω τυγχάνω ἐπιστάμενος καὶ δὴ καὶ ἐν τοῖσι ὄπισθε λόγοισι ἀποδέξω ὡς εἰσὶ Ἕλληνες, πρὸς δὲ καὶ οἱ τὸν ἐν Ὀλυμπίῃ διέποντες ἀγῶνα Ἑλληνοδίκαι οὕτω ἔγνωσαν εἶναι. Ἀλεξάνδρου γὰρ ἀεθλεύειν ἑλομένου καὶ καταβάντος ἐπ᾽ αὐτὸ τοῦτο, οἱ ἀντιθευσόμενοι Ἑλλήνων ἐξεῖργόν μιν, φάμενοι οὐ βαρβάρων ἀγωνιστέων εἶναι τὸν ἀγῶνα ἀλλὰ Ἑλλήνων: Ἀλέξανδρος δὲ ἐπειδὴ ἀπέδεξε ὡς εἴη Ἀργεῖος, ἐκρίθη τε εἶναι Ἕλλην καὶ ἀγωνιζόμενος στάδιον συνεξέπιπτε τῷ πρώτῳ. Now that these descendants of Perdiccas are Greeks, as they themselves say, I myself chance to know and will prove it in the later part of my history. Furthermore, the Hellenodicae who manage the contest at Olympia determined that it is so, for when Alexander chose to contend and entered the lists for that purpose, the Greeks who were to run against him wanted to bar him from the race, saying that the contest should be for Greeks and not for foreigners. Alexander, however, proving himself to be an Argive, was judged to be a Greek. He accordingly competed in the furlong race and tied step for first place. This, then, is approximately what happened. On the ancient tradition linking the early settlers of Macedonia to the ‘Son of Temenos’ see Hdt. 8.137-139, particularly 8.138.1-2: ποταμὸς δὲ ἐστὶ ἐν τῇ χώρῃ ταύτῃ, τῷ θύουσι οἱ τούτων τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἀπ᾽ Ἄργεος ἀπόγονοι σωτῆρι: οὗτος, ἐπείτε διέβησαν οἱ Τημενίδαι, μέγας οὕτω ἐρρύη ὥστε τοὺς ἱππέας μὴ οἵους τε γενέσθαι διαβῆναι. οἳ δὲ ἀπικόμενοι ἐς ἄλλην γῆν τῆς Μακεδονίης οἴκησαν πέλας τῶν κήπων τῶν λεγομένων εἶναι Μίδεω τοῦ Γορδίεω, There is, however, in that land a river, to which the descendants from Argos of these men offer sacrifice as their deliverer. This river, when the sons of Temenus had crossed it, rose in such flood that the riders could not cross. So the brothers came to another part of Macedonia and settled near the place called the garden of Midas son of Gordias 115 itself – a point supported by the subsequent frequency of their peaceable interaction with the

Macedonians and other potentates.

As mentioned, the fifth century claims of ancestry between the Macedonian house and the

Argives came to enjoy popular recognition in the generations that followed: Thucydides reiterated this without trouble, and Isocrates later goes to the point of painting Philip II as the ideal progenitor of his heroic ancestor Heracles.93 Even before the reign of Philip there is evidence of more formal interaction between the Argolid and the Macedonian monarchy: in the spring of 359 a theōria was dispatched from Epidauros to central and northeast Greece and beyond into Macedon and Thrace in support of the new sanctuary of Asklepios. The theōria dates to the final year of the reign of Perdiccas III and we can safely surmise that the ambassadors reached his court, and there is further reason to speculate that the theōria of 359 was not the first such expedition into the north.94

Perdiccas himself appears on the list of theōrodokoi and thus it seems that the embassy was well-received, and the Macedonians happy to be recognized.95 Neither was it to be the last: another list of theōrodokoi from Epidauros in 355 followed a similar itinerary to announce the games of 354 which would have again brought them to the court at Pella.96 That this was undertaken by Epidauros, not Argos, demonstrates that the latter was not the only city in the Argolid to foster some form of ties

93 Hdt. 5.22, 8.137-139, Thuc 2.99.3, Isoc.Philip.Panth. 76-77, Scheer 2005, 216-217. 94 The theōrodokoi for Epidauros are listed by Perlman 2000, Ep.Cat.E 1, Kabbadias 1891, 105-6, IG IV, 1504 = IG IV2 1,95. The list itself is fragmentary and incomplete, and we shall discuss it in greater detail below in our consideration of the Asklpieion and the Heraion in the Hellenistic Period. Nonetheless, Perlman 2000, 103 concludes based on the fragmentary and incomplete nature of the inscription that: ‘requires the conclusion that the Argives adopted the institution of the theorodokia considerably earlier than the final quarter of the fourth century BC, Argos and not Epidauros might have been the earlier of the two communities to have followed the lead of the organizers of the Olympic games in the appointment of theorodokoi.’ Such theoric ties with Macedon would have first been initiated by the Argives, and then perpetuated by the Epidaurians – even though the latter were still an independent polis. 95 Ep. Cat. E. 1, frg. b, line 9; Perlman 2000, 69 on the date 96 Perlman 2000, 70-74 for a full recapitulation of the decrees and bibliography. 116 with the Macedonian monarchy prior to the reign of Philip. It merits note that the names of prominent monarchs such as Perdiccas, unlike other theōrodokoi, were not removed after their death, nor were they modified in subsequent addenda (Perlman 2000, 80-82). The Epidaurians were eager to advertise their cultic connections with such eminent potentates, living or dead (Perlman 2000, 110). Although our surviving equivalent lists from Argos date to a few decades later (331/0 BC), we can safely surmise that Argos had been appointing theōrodokoi much longer than Epidauros and thus would have had similar contact with the court in the north and beyond.97 Though I shall soon elaborate on this further, it is interesting to note that Argive contacts with regions beyond the pale of the traditional Greek world were forged and cultivated before the reign of Philip II and campaigns of Alexander, not after.98 The expansion of Argive contacts with Sicily, Macedon, Epirus, and Asia Minor is thus a late-Classical process, not strictly Hellenistic. On the internal level, in the similarity of the theoric routes of

Epidaurian and Argive sanctuaries we see a high degree of cooperation among the region’s cultic centres, even though their associated poleis were often political rivals.

This interaction with the Macedonians, however, did not automatically equate to Argive subservience. As we shall see in the century and a half that follows, neutrality and the desire to remain so, rather than collaborationism, is how we might best characterise Argive interaction with the

Macedonian kings.

Unfortunately for the Argives, on several occasions neutrality was a luxury they could ill afford as conflicts among rival kings and powers played out in the region itself. Nonetheless, with this longer

97 A sentiment Perlman 2000. 101-104 develops based on common theoric itineraries. 98 The list from Argos dates from 330-324, found in the agora of the city and now in the Argos Museum Ed. Pr. P. Charneux BCH 90 (1966), 159-239, SEG 23.189, 33.289, subsequently Perlman 2000 Ep. Cat. A.1 on which I base this reconstruction.

117 precedent of purported kinship and theoric interaction with the Argeads borne in mind, the neutrality of the Argives during the early years of Philip’s invasion of Greece from 340-338 becomes all the more striking. Their precise motivations remain mysterious, but the fact that the region’s communities neither followed their neighbours against Philip nor threw in their lot with a monarchy and state with which they were no doubt familiar perhaps suggests a sense of pragmatic self-interest. In spite of their neutrality the war followed its course, and in its aftermath Argos had little choice but to side with the victors. Argive membership in the League of Corinth in 337 (Arr.Anab. 1.17.8) simply acknowledged a political reality to which acquiescence was the only pragmatic option. Tomlinson’s accusations that

Philip was the man ‘responsible for the destruction of Greek freedom’ and that the League of Corinth was ‘little more than a cynical sham disguising the reality of Greece’s subjugation’ are at once hyperbolic and unhelpful (1972, 145). A closer examination reveals that all was not doom and gloom for the regions under his control, and our treatment of Argive arbitration of a territorial dispute among the League’s members will cast the organism in a very different light.

A detail which is frequently and easily overlooked in this turbulent decade is that Argos, in spite of its neutrality, directly benefitted on a local scale from the advent of Macedon – specifically from the largesse of Philip. A different king, settling a different peace to that of 387/6 in this instance ruled in the favour of the Argives: Philip’s post-Chaeronea arbitration via the League allowed Argos to recover

Thyrea, and the city may well have dominated Epidauros (and hence the Asklepieion) for a short period afterwards (IG IV2.1.69 and SEG.11.400). In the opening salvo of the Macedonian barrage on the

Peloponnese, Argos benefited despite having done nothing to contribute to the war effort. We are led to suspect that perhaps some measure of favour would have been derived from Argive acknowledgements of Argead kinship in the preceding two centuries. Yet this all rests too heavily on

118 the subjunctive rather than the indicative to be taken with any certainty. Interestingly, though, Argos briefly – though inconsequentially – entertained the idea of revolt after the death of Philip but like much of Greece was cowed by the brutal sack of Thebes (Tomlinson 1972, 148; Diod. 17.11-14.1).

Argos thus demonstrated its willingness to play Philip’s game, but this did not translate into unconditional loyalty. The point is reinforced by the observation that, after neutrality towards and territorial benefit from Philip and his son, the Argives did join the broader Greek revolt against

Macedon (Tomlinson 1972, 148-149).

Argive interaction with contemporary monarchs was not exclusively limited to the Macedonians.

During and immediately after the reign of Alexander the Great the Argives cultivated and maintained contact with other notables outside ‘traditional’ Greece. Among our surviving theōdorokoi lists found at Nemea and at Argos we find the peculiar figure of Cleopatra, widow of Alexander I of Epirus and thus de facto queen of the Molossians from roughly 331-325. It thus becomes clear that the theōria had established cultic relations with not only Macedon but also its wider northern contemporaries. If she appears on this list dated roughly to 330 then we must presume that there was a sacred embassy despatched to Macedon and Thrace in the preceding years.99 That Cleopatra was on such lists within the first decade of what we have come to identify as the Hellenistic Period reveals that her presence cannot be written off as part of a later motif, and instead must have had late-Classical origins.100

99 Charneux in BCH 90 (1966, 156-239), The Nemean list was first published by S.G. Miller in Hesperia 48, 1979, 78-80, subsequently commented by Amandry 1980 and Perlman 2000, 101-102. The text is now SEG 36.331, and Perlman 2000, Ep.Cat. N.1, whose text I follow here. 100 Perlman 2000, 75 argues that the theoric itineraries of these lists likely are well-established by the time of the inscriptions: ‘during a period more than seventy years, while their rosters are not identical they are remarkably similar and seem to reflect and established itinerary for the purposes of festival epangelia…. it is reasonable to imagine that the theoroi from Epidauros in 360-259 followed much the same route as those from Argos in the fourth and third centuries BC.’ 119

Another early votive statue is equally telling. Honouring the euergetism of monarchs seems to have also been a late-Classical development in Argos as evidenced by the inscription on the base of a statue of King Nicocreon of Salamnia in Cyprus (r.332-310). Nicocreon is praised by the Argives for his generosity in sending them the materials necessary to provide the prizes for the games of Hera.101 The king similarly appears in the aforementioned lists of theōrodokoi at Nemea.102 The presence of

Nicocreon’s statue makes us consider the dynamics of such benefaction. The remarkably early date of such a royal benefaction, made at a time when Argos was territorially stronger than it had been in decades, shifts the agency behind it to Nicocreon. It was desirable for him to make such a benefaction, and this recognition doubtless played into some form of Hellenic aggrandizement on his part.

In the text of the inscription, the appeal of Argive ties for a monarch such as him is obvious. As with the Argeads, Nicocreon claims Argive descent and this is advertised in the epigram which the

Argives inscribed in his honour: lines 1-3 identify him as a Pelasgian Argive, descended from Aiachus and thus in supporting Argive festivals he is contributing to his ancestral metropolis. This, as with the

Macedonians, provided him with a ticket of entry into the Greek world proper, and he does so by resurrecting much older ties between the Argolid and Cyprus that had long lay dormant (Bing 2013, 40-

41). In contributing Cypriot bronze which would be used to forge the shield given away as the games’ prize, Nicocreon was following a trend of royal benefaction that had been readily set some decades

101 The full text of the inscription (IG IV.583): μ̣ατρ[όπο]λ̣ίς μοι χθὼν Πέλοπος τὸ Πελαζγικὸν Ἄργος, Πνυταγόρας δὲ πατὴρ Αἰάκου ἐκ γενεᾶς· εἰμὶ δὲ Νικοκρέων, θρέψεν δέ με γᾶ περίκλυστος Κύπρος θειοτάτων ἐκ προγόνων βασιλῆ, στᾶσαν δ’ Ἀργεῖοί με χάριν χαλκοῖο τίοντες, Ἥραι ὃν εἰς ἔροτιν πέμπον̣ [ἄε]θλα νέοις. 102 IG IV 583, Amandry 1980, 219-220; for Nicocreon in the Nemean theōrodokoi lists see citations at Perlman 2000, 109-116. 120 previously by the Argeads. The Antigonid monarchs who would follow in his footsteps in the decades to come would perpetuate the mechanism. The presence of various basileis in such inscriptions ought to be construed as a mark of the growing vitality and dynamism of the region’s cultic activities, not the beginning of their impoverishment. Nicocreon, for his part, stood to benefit immensely from such ties and Argive recognition thereof: as Bing notes (2013, 42), ‘in the form of this status, a representative of

Cyprus would forever after be present at one of the most venerable Greek festivals’. He, like the

Argeads that had preceded him, would not have involved himself with Argive festivals if he did not have something to gain by the interaction.

The Argolid and Monarchy in the Hellenistic Period:

In the closing decades of the fourth century and throughout the third we witness a different form of royal interaction with the Argolid. The nature of Argive interaction with monarchy is two-sided, even though it is often presented as being unilaterally hegemonic. On the one hand, particularly in the early decades of the period the region is drawn into violent conflicts between vying successors over which it has little control. On the other hand, though, when we look beyond these intermittent episodes of bloodshed Argive interaction with Macedonian monarchy is often peaceful, and comes to their benefit. The rule of the tyrants whom the kings appointed as their proxies in the region’s communities was often more placid than it seems at first glance, and royal benefaction allowed many of the Argolid’s cities to hit their urban zenith in the third century. We shall briefly consider the development of monarchical and tyrannical rule in the Argolid before presenting some thematic observations.

121

As I have mentioned above, the Argives along with much of Greece joined the anti-Macedonian revolt that ensued following the death of Alexander. But Argos did not really suffer from Antipater and

Polyperchon’s reprisal, as the Athenians and the Aetolians bore the brunt of the fighting. The

Peloponnese, for the most part, remained untouched by the conflict – largely because Aetolia and

Attica figured more prominently in the rebellion.

Even though I argue for a longer, largely peaceful, tradition of Argive interaction with monarchy,

I must acknowledge that the opening decades of the Hellenistic Period were tumultuous for the Argolid.

From 322 until 307 BC the Argolid indeed was, as Tomlinson (150) has it, among the ‘pawns in the hands of Macedonian generals’. The region’s cities were caught in the midst of a much larger conflict in which they had precious little agency or control. The ‘generals’ to which Tomlinson refers were emerging kings in their own right, and Argos was buffeted by their internecine conflict more than almost any other region of Greece. Royal interaction with the region in this period was violent, as it was subject to episodes of vengeance that were exacted for the crime of little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although the precise casualty figures are perhaps dubious, the pattern is clearly important.

Those Argives who were put into power by Antipater, or who favoured Cassander, were exiled or slaughtered by Polyperchon (Diod. 18.57.1, 69.3-4). Some years later the pendulum swung in the other direction as the supporters of Polyperchon were burned alived by Cassander’s general Apollonides

(Diod. 19.63.2). We can also presume that similar violence followed another regime change as the

Antigonids took the city roughly a decade later. These conflicts, though, were fought over far more than just the Argolid, and Argos seems to have suffered damage that was mainly collateral. The region and the city were not the focus of the struggles among the successors, and after over a decade of

122 bloodshed the city itself had neither gained nor lost anything. Throughout, the Argolid was an unfortunate bystander. While this decade of conflict among the successors was certainly harmful, it would be the last time that such intervention would be beyond the control or invitation of the region’s communities. In the clashes that followed in the subsequent decades, local concerns would solicit such external intervention. This rash of violence at the hands of monarchs over whom the Argolid had precious little control was an exceptional phase in its longer Hellenistic history.103

After the city was re-taken – or liberated depending on one’s perspective – by the ‘insincere crusade’ of the Antigonids in the Peloponnese, as Tomlinson would put it, the region largely disappears from the literary record as it finds a more calm rhythm under the light rule of tyrants favoured by the

Antigonids. What emerges is a model which resembles the Persian satrapal system: the king nominates a local potentate who ostensibly rules in his stead, and the royal touch is generally soft. As I mentioned earlier, tyrannical rule does not necessarily imply bloodshed and oppression. The power of the tyrants was generally light, their interests were local, and any violence under their reign was usually very limited in scope. We do not generally see widespread death and destruction follow in the wake of the region’s Hellenistic tyrants (Shipley 2005, 319-322).

It was interestingly under the rule of the Macedonian kings and their proxies that the city of

Argos hit its urban peak, and the community benefitted from such hegemony on a material level.

Between 294 and 288 the city underwent a massive building campaign that was most likely sponsored by Demetrius I (Tomlinson 1972, 150-152), whose largesse revamped the urban core as well as the sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea which boasted a new stadium, xenon, palestra, and other buildings

(Amandry 1980, 249). That this benefaction occurred during a period in which there was not a

103 Following Shipley 2005, 319 and the list of similarly exceptional events he lists for the rest of the Peloponnese. 123

Macedonian garrison in Argos itself is noteworthy, and greatly changes the perceived tone of the region’s interaction with the Antigonids (Tomlinson 1972, 153-155). Demetrius seems to have gone out of his way to support the Argives, and his generosity was not limited to the city itself. The sanctuary of

Zeus at Nemea, located roughly 35km from Argos at the northern end of the plain, and the city of

Cleonai would have benefitted from the benefaction as well. This geographical observation demonstrates that the Antigonids patronised the region as a whole, not just one city.

Argos itself figured prominently in the conflict between Pyrrhus of Epirus and Antigonus. The city provided the unwilling stage on which Pyrrhus met his dramatic end. Despite the sincerest efforts of some Argive tyrants to draw the city into the conflict, the citizenry attempted to remain neutral in this struggle as they had in so many before. They despatched ambassadors to the rival kings, asking both to withdraw so the city would not be forced to pick one side or the other (Tomlinson 1972, 152-

153). Such neutrality was made impossible by the betrayal of Aristeas, who permitted the occupation of Pyrrhus (Plut.Pyr. 21.9-23.6). Argos was then subjected to a long siege by the Antigonids, which finally ended a conflict in which the city had been an unwilling participant. In this instance, again the

Argives were unable to avoid being drawn into a much larger struggle.

The decades of tyrannical rule that followed are noteworthy for several reasons. First, the rule of such tyrants is remarkably light, and the expression of their civic power is fairly subdued. There are no honourary inscriptions to such tyrants, they did not mint their own coinage, they do not, generally, make profound administrative changes in the civic structure of the region’s constituent communities, and they do not leave a profound imprint on cultic or civic patterns – and neither do their Macedonian overlords (Tomlinson 1972, 156-162). Their presence in the literary tradition is exaggerated by the personal drama of their conflicts which, it should be noted, are strictly local in character (Shipley 2005,

124

320-321). The tyrants are generally not disruptive; as Shipley summarises, ‘the precise effects of

Macedonian rule, or a pro-Macedonian regime, upon a local community are not often considered, but there are hints that these local dictators were relatively quietist’ (2005, 320).

Even though the literary sources would have us assume that such inter-tyrannical conflict in the region blazed a path of desolation and devastation, a very different pattern emerges from the archaeological record. The record of abandoned poleis is spotty at best under Macedonian rule, both in the Argolid specifically and in the Peloponnese more generally. Sicyon and Dyme were rebuilt at royal expense, Argos continued to expand as did its rival Sparta, and it is during this period that the city reaches the maximum urban extent in its archaeological history (Shipley 2005, 321).104 Elsewhere in the region eleven cities have new houses dating to the period, new theatres are built in the first half of the third century, new stoai appear at Corinth, Sicyon, Argos, and elsewhere (Shipley 2005, 322-325).

Many of these were financed by royal benefactions. We are quick to forget that many communities benefitted, economically and otherwise, from the tyrants who were empowered by the Macedonians – their frequent pardons and returns to power suggest that they were not universally hated or feared by their own communities (Shipley 2005, 325). Given the tumult at the beginning of the Hellenistic Period, it perhaps comes as little surprise that the communities of the Argolid would only engage in smaller- scale, local conflict over territory and trade.

The closing decades of the third century are marked by precisely this kind of ancestral conflict against Argos’ old nemesis, Sparta. Here again, though, both sides of the conflict acted with decidedly local concerns in mind: attacks and retaliations are traded back and forth between Argos and Sparta,

Megalopolis and Corinth are drawn into such conflicts by regional gravity, and the Achaean League

104 Wells 1982, 119-128 and 120n.8; Gléni and Pariente 1998, 165-178. 125 enters the fray with gradually more panache.105 Throughout these struggles, and particularly in the subsequent war between Philip V and the Romans, the loyalty of the Argives towards the Antigonids and their broader interests is consistent, and makes us suspect that the region was not simply cowed into submission. Despite the encroachment of the Romans onto Argive territory, they remain loyal to

Philip – who previously in his reign had been honoured as the agonothetēs of both the games at

Nemea and the games of the Heraia in June and July of 209 (Liv. 27.30-31).

Accounts of Argive relations with Philip V tend to be dominated by the king’s spectacular lapse in judgement in making the city subject to the whims of Nabis of Sparta – as well as, more disastrously, to the vindictive tendencies of his wife. Resistance to the latter is perceived as opposition to the former.106 But such a perspective loses sight of the preceding two decades of, if not outright loyalty, then at least sympathy with the Antigonid dynasty which is all the more remarkable given that a direct

Antigonid presence in the Peloponnese collapsed after the death of Antigonus III. We shall later turn to the long-term ramifications of Roman control over the region.

105 Narrative of events with ancient citations provided by Tomlinson 1972, 160-172. 106 See Pol. 13.6-7 for the Achaean’s account of the atrocities of Nabis against those who refused his rule in Sparta and elsewhere, also 13.6.8.3-7 for his campaign in the Peloponnese. See Livy 34.22-27 for the Roman response to the incursion of Nabis, which is in no small part motivated by the great antiquity and renown of the city itself. Of particular note is the rhetoric of Flamininus at Liv. 34.22.10-13: refero enim ad vos, utrum Argos, sicut scitis ipsi, ab Nabide occupatos pati velitis sub dicione eius esse, an aequum censeatis nobilissimam vetustissimamque civitatem, in media Graecia sitam, repeti in libertatem et eodem statu quo ceteras urbes Peloponnesi et Graeciae esse. haec consultatio, ut videtis, tota de re pertinente ad vos est; Romanos nihil contingit, nisi quatenus liberatae Graeciae unius civitatis servitus non plenam nec integram gloriam esse sinit. I lay before you the question whether you wish to permit Argos, which, as you know, has been seized by Nabis, to remain under his control, or whether you think it proper that this most famous and ancient city, situated in the heart of Greece, should be restored to liberty and enjoy the same condition as the other cities of the Peloponnesus and Greece. This question, as you see, is one-which is altogether your concern; it does not touch the Romans at all, except in so far as the slavery of one city of liberated Greece does not permit their fame to be perfect and complete. 126

Contrast, however, is perhaps the most revealing method of gauging the character and legacy of Macedonian control of the Argolid. If we look to the contemporary experiences of Methana and

Sicyon it becomes even more apparent that the royal touch in the Argolid was light – or at least certainly lighter than it had been elsewhere. Though not very far from the Argolid in geography, since the outset of the Hellenistic Period Sicyon had a far more transformative relationship with Hellenistic monarchy, which left enduring marks on the city. As early as the reign of Demetrius Poliorcetes the location of the city changed: Diodorus relates how the Antigonid’s largesse financed the relocation of the city and its reconstruction, for which he received divine honours from the Sicyonians as their ktistēs. The dēmos, Diodorus continues, voted to perform sacrifices to their saviour every year along with a festival and games in his honour, and in the culmination of their royal flattery they further changed the name of the city to Demetrias (Diod. 20.102-3).107 That Demetrius had won the city in the first place by besieging Ptolemaic forces barricaded within the city’s acropolis and then, with his victory secured, proceeded to raze the quarter of the city that was adjacent to its harbour only adds to the gravity of this royal intervention. Several generations later the Sicyonans would again change their civic

107Especially Diod. 20.102.2-3: ὁ δὲ Δημήτριος τοὺς Σικυωνίους εἰς τὴν ἀκρόπολιν μετοικίσας τὸ μὲν τῷ λιμένι συνάπτον μέρος τῆς πόλεως κατέσκαψεν, ἀνοχύρου παντελῶς ὄντος τοῦ τόπου, τῷ δὲ πολιτικῷ πλήθει συνεπιλαβόμενος τῆς οἰκοδομίας καὶ τὴν ἐλευθερίαν ἀποκαταστήσας τιμῶν ἰσοθέων ἔτυχε παρὰ τοῖς εὖ παθοῦσι: Δημητριάδα μὲν γὰρ τὴν πόλιν ὠνόμασαν, θυσίας δὲ καὶ πανηγύρεις, ἔτι δ᾽ ἀγῶνας ἐψηφίσαντο συντελεῖν αὐτῷ κατ᾽ ἐνιαυτὸν καὶ τὰς ἄλλας ἀπονέμειν τιμὰς ὡς κτίστῃ. ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μὲν ὁ χρόνος διαληφθεὶς πραγμάτων μεταβολαῖς ἠκύρωσεν, οἱ δὲ Σικυώνιοι πολλῷ κρείττονα μεταλαβόντες τόπον διετέλεσαν ἐν αὐτῷ μέχρι τῶν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς χρόνων ἐνοικοῦντες. After Demetrius had moved the people of Sicyon into their acropolis, he destroyed the part of the city adjacent to the harbour, since its site was quite insecure; then, after he had assisted the common people of the city in building their houses and had re-established free government for them, he received divine honours from those whom he had benefited; for they called the city Demetrias, and they voted to celebrate sacrifices and public festivals and also games in his honour every year and to grant him the other honours of a founder. Time, however, whose continuity has been broken by changes of conditions, has invalidated these honours; but the people of Sicyon, having thus obtained a much better location, continue to live there down to our times. 127 traditions with the addition of the festival of the Antigoneia in honour of their latest benefactor,

Antigonus III Doson.108

Methana had a similar experience. The peninsula struck the interest of the naval-minded

Ptolemies at some point in the middle of the third century, who annexed the town itself and its environs as a naval base in service of their designs in the Peloponnese and beyond. In keeping with the

Ptolemaic penchant for being more heavy-handed with the traditions of their subjects, the city was unsubtly renamed Ἀρσινὀε ή ἐν Πελοποννἠσωι– a name that is later attested epigraphically (OGIS 102,

SNG Cop.Argolis 147). The same second-century inscription also implies the presence of a Ptolemaic bureaucracy in what was once Methana, hence civic administration changed along with name.

Though Methana is poorly documented following its transfer into Ptolemaic hands, if we take the experience of the cities of the Cyrenaïca and elsewhere as even partially paradigmatic then we can safely presume that some aspects of Ptolemaic royal cult and statuary would have been imported, as well as festivals and sacrifices in honour of the dynasty (Marquaille 2003 and 2008).109 We may remark

– though by no means conclude with any certainty – that decline in the peninsula’s rural settlement pattern and the abandonment of certain agricultural sites in the century that followed may have the result of the city’s reoriented function as a Ptolemaic naval base.110 The examples of Methana and

Sicyon present a stark reminder that the continuity and stability for which I argue in the Hellensitic

Argolid are not found everywhere in the mainland.

108 The festival, perhaps ironically, was inaugurated after Antiognus III retook the city after a series of Sicyonian revolts against the Macedonians narrated by Pol. 2.54.12, 56.6-7. See also Griffin 1982, 70-81. 109 The example of the Cyrenaica, discussed by Marquaille 2003 and McAuley 2015, is a fascinating example of the dynamics of Ptolemaic regional intervention. Particularly during the reign of Ptolemy III and Berenike II, numerous aspects of its civic and religious life were changed by the imposition of a Ptolemaic bureaucracy. The region’s exemption from various taxes was revoked, certain towns were renamed after members of the royal family, and the royal cult was quickly instituted in the years following 250. 110 Bagnall 1976, 135-136 for the Ptolemaic strategy and administration of Methana. 128

In Argos, none of this happened. For all of the pomp, circumstance, and intermittent violence with which the Macedonian kings and their enemies strutted through the Argolid and its cities, we find no such lasting modification of the fundamental fabric of civic life. Methana and Sicyon so clearly betray the potency of royal interaction as the communities’ names were changed along with their cultic festivals. Though the cities of the Argolid changed royal hands on as many, if not more, occasions as these two exempla, they did not bear such lasting scars.

There is a very different dynamic of royal interaction in the city of Argos itself. It and its sanctuaries grew with the largesse of Demetrius, its games were overseen by Philip V, who himself was perpetuating a centuries-long trend of Macedonian involvement in the religious traditions of what they held to be their ancestral homeland. The same, as we shall see, can be said of the cities of Epidauros and Cleonai, along with their associated sanctuaries. Civic and religious life went on. The tyrants who had been delegated royal power in the communities of the Argolid were more interested in preserving their station rather than changing the fabric of their society. This gives the impression that Plutarch was writing injudiciously when he accused the Argives of being all too accustomed to the yoke of monarchical servility.111

Asserting that monarchy, or the rule of its proxies, was always peaceful and beneficial to the

Argives without fail would be excessive. But the same holds true of arguing that monarchy automatically sowed civic bloodshed and division. Nothing in the Hellenistic world is so black and white: the campaign of Philip II had little to no negative impact on the Argives, though the decades of infighting among his son’s immediate successors played out with a vindictive brutality born of desperation that we cannot deny. The Argolid was frequently cowed by the threat or reality of royal

111 As we have discussed above, Plut.Arat, 25.5: ‘but they had been long accustomed to the yoke, and were willing to be slaves.’ 129 military might, but fear was not the only emotion that was capable of driving the region. Room ought to made for the possibility of good intentions or perceived mutual benefit on either side of the interaction; Nicocreon of Cyprus and Alexander I had something to gain from the goodwill of the

Argives, and so too did the Argives themselves from the protection of Philip or the intervention of

Antigonus. All is not fear and submission; Hellenistic kings were not always addressed from one’s knees.

Such interaction with royalty was not a purely post-Alexander phenomenon. Our survey of the longer trajectory of Argive history reveals that that Argolid had, in various capacities and at various times, been establishing and reinforcing contacts with monarchs both to the north and elsewhere since well before the Macedonian hegemony. The inhabitants of the region both directly and indirectly prospered during what many have dismissed as a period of subservience shows that local fluorescence and monarchy are not mutually exclusive, and neither does the dominance of the latter always come at the expense of the former. Rather the region’s interaction with monarchy is one of several vectors by which we can glimpse the persistence of its local attachments.

As we shall shortly see when we turn to the Argive experience of Roman domination, it was not so much the Macedonian kings as their Roman successors who put a damper on such localism. But even in their rule we see many Hellenistic parallels. A base of a statue erected in honour of the conqueror of Greece, L. Mummius in 146 honours the roman magistrate in Greek terms, and is but one of many indications that the Argives were then speaking to the Romans in the same language as they had to the Antigonids before them.112 While the grammar may have remained the same, the Argives

112 The statue base in question is inventory E.303 in the museum at Argos, listed and described by Parient, Piérart and Thalmann 1998, 276-278. The base honours L. Mummius, who had made dedications to Zeus and other deities, as the stratēgos of the Romans. The dedication was made shortly after the sack of Corinth in 146. 130 were now honouring a different kind of ruler, one who, unlike his Macedonian predecessors, came from a stock that would not be so inclined towards such passive governance of the region.

External and Diplomatic Relations of the Hellenistic Argives:

Despite the changes to the vertical hierarchy of the Greek world brought by Macedonian monarchy, Greek communities continued to communicate with each other on a horizontal plane as they had for centuries in a process that John Ma (2003) identifies as Peer Polity Interaction. Having considered Argive interaction with its monarchic hegemons, we now turn to how the Argolid interacted with its fellow Greek cities and regions.

The Hellenistic Argives manoeuvred in a world of Greek politics which was greatly enlarged by the campaigns of Alexander, but still was defined by the interaction of similarly-structured polities. The scope of the sphere of interaction had broadened, but the mechanisms generally remained the same.

Given the region’s place in various mythological traditions it comes as little surprise that Argos would figure prominently in this expanded Greek world. We have already seen the potential benefits to kings like Perdiccas and Nicocreon of cultivating Argive attachments; such links were equally desirous to many cities as well. This ideological prominence of the Argolid in the broader Greek arena, however, did not have any tangible effect on the region’s local attachments; they did not suddenly embrace a generic for of panhellenism. The evidence for studying such interaction is intermittent and troublesome, but still affords enough insight to extrapolate the general pattern. The epigraphical remains are weighted heavily towards the earliest decades of the period, before an unsettling silence falls over most of the third century only to be broken by the advent of the Romans. Accordingly we are

131 given insight only into the dawn and dusk of the epoch with little sense of its meridian. Nonetheless, we can still see the shadows of the networks that Argos and the other communities of the region established in the Hellenistic milieu.

One of our best case studies for Argive external relations has already been mentioned above: the theōriai sent to the courts of various monarchs in propagation of the sanctuaries of Asklepios, Hera and Zeus at Nemea. The embassies, so critical to the development of Greek diplomatic and philosophical thought, were also welcomed in cities of varied size throughout the breadth of the Greek world (Nightingale 2004). That such lines of communication were initiated somewhere between 375-

350 means that this zone of exchange had been widened well before the outset of the Hellenistic

Period, and this network, like the theōria itself, becomes a late Classical development.113 If we bear in mind Perlman’s hypothesis (2000, 102-103) that such theoric routes had been well travelled by Argive ambassadors earlier than our first attestation of Epidaurian embassies in 359, then the region had been in cultic and diplomatic communication with a vast swathe of territory stretching from the Greek heartland through Thrace and Macedon, across the Aegean and as far into Asia Minor as Kolophon and

Magnesia for possibly generations before the birth of Alexander.114

113 This early instance of theōria in the Argolid is frequently overlooked by contemporary researchers of the institution. Rutherford 2014, 42-44, for instance, holds that the theōria is a fundamentally Hellenistic institution characterized by the interaction between theoric embassies and the courts of Hellenistic monarchs. Here we see a very different dynamic emerge, in which the Argive theōria mixes civic and monarchic links, and various cities in the region follow a similar itinerary which is presumably based on ethnic ties. 114 See my discussion of Perlman above, as well as 2000, figures 7, 10, 11 and, 12. The overlap in the theoric lists from Epidauros, Argos, and Nemea is striking: several theōrodokoi are listed on more than one list, and the regional itineraries of the embassies are remarkably similar. All of this leads me to conclude that the first theoric embassies were despatched by Argos in the late fifth century. I shall develop this argument further in a forthcoming contribution to the volume that will result from the Ethnos States conference held at Delphi in May, 2015. The Argive itinerary, I believe was then copied and expanded by Epidauros, and the subsequent Argive and Nemean lists are addenda to an already well-trodden path. See also Charneux 1966, 159-239 who first introduced the notion that the Argos was behind the initial theōria. 132

This horizon of Greek interstate interaction had thus, to the Argives at least, been expanding since the late Classical Period and was not only opened to them after Alexander. That Epidauros and

Argos were sending different embassies at different times speaks to the local diversity of this theoric interaction that was not simply undertaken through the mouthpiece of Argos on behalf of all of the

Argolid. At the same time, however, the similarity of routes and the presence of several theōrodokoi on the Argive and Epidaurian lists suggest a degree of regional collaboration in the promotion of otherwise independent sanctuaries (Perlman 2000, fig. 13). We shall turn to the specifics of these blossoming cultic practices, some of which were still relatively recent developments in the 350s, when we consider the cultic landscape of the Argolid. For now, though, the timing and geography of this interaction reveal the character of Argive external relations.

Much has been made, most recently by Tanja Scheer (1993, 2005), of the symbolic prominence of Argos in Asia Minor as holding the genealogical key with which an Anatolian city or region could gain access to the Hellenic world, proprement dit (Scheer 2005, 227). This is indeed true of the Hellenistic

Period, but we should also bear in mind that such pleas of common descent between Argos and peoples that we would typically hold to be on the margins of the Greek world had been made long before Alexander’s ‘liberation’ of the region. As early as in the Iliad we find attestation that Rhodes had

Argive descent through Tlepolemos.115 Herodotus records an interesting, though often overlooked, anecdote set during the tense days before the Persian war in which Persian envoys enthusiastically come to Argos and attempt to win the Argives over to their side by appealing to their common mythical ancestor of Perseus.116 The Persians themselves thus held that they had some measure of

115 Hom.Il.2.653-654: Τληπόλεμος δ᾽ Ἡρακλεΐδης ἠΰς τε μέγας τε / ἐκ Ῥόδου ἐννέα νῆας ἄγεν Ῥοδίων ἀγερώχων, 116 Braun 1928, 31 and Speyer 1989; Scheer 2005, 216-217. The passage of Herodotus merits reproduction here, 7.150: 133 consanguinity with the Argives, and if such a claim was possible for the most patently un-hellenic of peoples then it was certainly so for the more ambiguous cities of the Ionian coast in the century that followed.

The Argives become involved in interstate arbitrations outside Greece itself at a time that is earlier than we would typically expect. At the request of the League of Corinth at some point slightly after 337 BC, Argos was called in to mediate a dispute between Melos and Kimolos, two islands in the

Cyclades, over three small islands located nearby (Ager 1996, no.3).117 The mechanism and timing of

αὐτοὶ μὲν Ἀργεῖοι τοσαῦτα τούτων πέρι λέγουσι: ἔστι δὲ ἄλλος λόγος λεγόμενος ἀνὰ τὴν Ἑλλάδα, ὡς Ξέρξης ἔπεμψε κήρυκα ἐς Ἄργος πρότερον ἤ περ ὁρμῆσαι στρατεύεσθαι ἐπὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα: ἐλθόντα δὲ τοῦτον λέγεται εἰπεῖν ‘ἄνδρες Ἀργεῖοι, βασιλεὺς Ξέρξης τάδε ὑμῖν λέγει. ἡμεῖς νομίζομεν Πέρσην εἶναι ἀπ᾽ οὗ ἡμεῖς γεγόναμεν παῖδα Περσέος τοῦ Δανάης, γεγονότα ἐκ τῆς Κηφέος θυγατρὸς Ἀνδρομέδης. οὕτω ἂν ὦν εἴημεν ὑμέτεροι ἀπόγονοι. οὔτε ὦν ἡμέας οἰκὸς ἐπὶ τοὺς ἡμετέρους προγόνους στρατεύεσθαι, οὔτε ὑμέας ἄλλοισι τιμωρέοντας ἡμῖν ἀντιξόους γίνεσθαι, ἀλλὰ παρ᾽ ὑμῖν αὐτοῖσι ἡσυχίην ἔχοντας κατῆσθαι. ἢν γὰρ ἐμοὶ γένηται κατὰ νόον, οὐδαμοὺς μέζονας ὑμέων ἄξω.’ ταῦτα ἀκούσαντας Ἀργείους λέγεται πρῆγμα ποιήσασθαι, καὶ παραχρῆμα μὲν οὐδὲν ἐπαγγελλομένους μεταιτέειν, ἐπεὶ δὲ σφέας παραλαμβάνειν τοὺς Ἕλληνας, οὕτω δὴ ἐπισταμένους ὅτι οὐ μεταδώσουσι τῆς ἀρχῆς Λακεδαιμόνιοι μεταιτέειν, ἵνα ἐπὶ προφάσιος ἡσυχίην ἄγωσι. Such is the Argives' account of this matter, but there is another story told in Hellas, namely that before Xerxes set forth on his march against Hellas, he sent a herald to Argos, who said on his coming (so the story goes), “Men of Argos, this is the message to you from King Xerxes. Perses our forefather had, as we believe, Perseus son of Danae for his father, and Andromeda daughter of Cepheus for his mother; if that is so, then we are descended from your nation. In all right and reason we should therefore neither march against the land of our forefathers, nor should you become our enemies by aiding others or do anything but abide by yourselves in peace. If all goes as I desire, I will hold none in higher esteem than you.” The Argives were strongly moved when they heard this, and although they made no promise immediately and demanded no share, they later, when the Greeks were trying to obtain their support, did make the claim, because they knew that the Lacedaemonians would refuse to grant it, and that they would thus have an excuse for taking no part in the war. 117 The full text of the inscription, following IG XII,3 1259 and the translation of R&O 82: θεός. ἔκρινε ὁ δᾶμος ὁ τῶν Ἀργείων κατὰ τὸ δόκη- μα τοῦ συνεδρίου τῶν Ἑλλάνων, ὁμολογη- σάντων Μαλίων καὶ Κιμωλίων ἐμμενέν, ἇι κα δικάσσαιεν τοὶ Ἀργεῖοι περὶ τᾶν [ν]άσων, Κιμωλίων ἦμεν Πολύαιγαν Ἑτήι- 134 the episode narrated by the decree are helpful for our reconstruction of Argive external relations as well as the inner workings of the League of Corinth established by Philip. The League’s synedrion saw

Argos as a fitting arbitrator (l.3-5: κατὰ τὸ δόκημα τοῦ συνεδρίου τῶν Ἑλλάνων) for this Cycladic maritime dispute. The matter at hand concerned three small islands (Ager 1996, 44), and the dēmos of the Argives ruled in favour of Kimolos (l.23: ἔκρινε ὁ δᾶμος ὁ τῶν Ἀργείων). That the decree itself was unearthed as far away as Smyrna tells of the reach of Argive diplomatic influence, especially at a time when the city is thought to have been in a state of political isolation.

Given the Argives’ fixation with territorial disputes in their own backyard they would seem to be an apt choice for an arbiter, while their panhellenic appeal also made them a likely candidate for such a resolution. In this document Argos engages with the arena of peer-polity interaction – interstate arbitration perhaps being the most prominent example of which – as early as 337, precisely when the

League of Corinth is supposed to have stifled such interaction among its constituent members. But here we witness the intersection of many strata of the nascent Hellenistic world in one single decree: the dēmos of Argos, with the body itself acting as the arbiter in this instance, is asked by the assembly of the Greeks (l.3-5) to rule on a dispute among two islands (who are also member states) on the other side of the Aegean. Such an episode simultaneously reveals the smooth functioning of the civic bodies within Argos itself, as well as the interaction among the League’s constituent poleis. All of this comes at

ρειαν Λίβειαν. ἐδί- κασσαν νικῆν Κιμωλ[ί]- [ο]υς. Ἀρήτευε Λέων· [β]ωλ[ᾶ]ς σευτέρας· Ποσιδά- ον γρο[φ]εὺς βωλᾶς· Πέριλ- λος πεδιο̑ν. God. The people of Argos judged in accordance with the resolution of the council (synedrion) of the Greeks (the Melians and the Cimolians having agreed to abide by whatever verdict the Argives gave about the islands), that Polyaega, Heterea, and Libea should belong to Cimolus. Their verdict was that the Cimolians should be victorious. Leon of Posidaum was chairman of the second council; Perillus of Pediurn was secretary of the council. 135 a remarkably early date in the Macedonian hegemony. A functioning, if not flourishing, civic culture and common investment in civic affairs among all parties involved are prerequisites of this sort of arbitration; its mere incidence speaks to the perpetuation of such mechanisms. In Argos as well as in the Cyclades, local concerns persisted and indeed were heightened by the advent of Macedonian hegemony. That the two islands sought justice through the mechanism of the League of Corinth testifies to the body’s importance to its member states, and the lack of reference to royal dictates makes us reconsider how practically involved Philip would have been in the League’s workings.

Elsewhere in the realm of inter-city politics business continued as usual for the cities of the

Argolid, and in this we see no profound change from the late Classical Period. A proxenia decree for

Pamphylos of Athens (SEG 30.355) dates to 330/329, and further attests to the smooth functioning of civic bodies and the importance of such privileges in the early years of the decade.118 Similar decrees from Epidauros attest to continued differentiation of local citizenship, and independent diplomacy on the part of the region’s individual cities.119 The civic bodies which granted these decrees are all functioning smoothly, and in this respect, at least, all is well within the borders of the region.

118 The institution of proxenia has a long complex history in contemporary scholarship that has most recently been recapitulated by Mack 2015, 1-9. Among early German and Prussian scholars, particularly Gschnitzer, the institution was dismissed as being essentially empty by the Hellenistic Period, though Wilhelm’s 1942 article which I had discussed above argues convincingly to the contrary. He was then followed by Philippe Gauthier in 1985 who dismisses the general narrative of institutional decline. Mack 2015 provides the most thorough and recent analysis of the institution as a whole, but a point raised by Lynette Mitchell (1997, 22-41) merits repetition here. According to her analysis there is a great deal of continuity between Archaic/Homeric xenia and later Classical and Hellensitic proxenia, thus we see this institution as having deeply traditional roots. Also, both she and Mack highlight that proxenia was inherently a forward-looking institution: with the recognition and privileges granted by the polis came the expectation and presumption that the person being honoured would continue to work for the benefit of the polis who was honouring him. Accordingly, decrees such as these imply future communication and interaction between the two cities, rather than just capturing a snapshot of momentary relations. 119 Epidauros often granted proxeny to its theōrodokoi, and thus our epigraphic evidence is fairly rich. See the relevant sections of Perlman 2000, especially Ep.Cat. E6 for a parallel list of proxenoi and theōrodokoi, and 136

The external relations of the Hellenistic Argolid were not always conducted on such a distant scale. Closer to home, we have a fascinating instance of the Argives interacting simultaneously with a fellow polis and a Hellenistic potentate, seemingly bridging the gap between the two systems of power.

The Arcadian Pallantians asked the Argives to intervene on their behalf with Polyperchon in order to gain the remission of their men captured as prisoners of war.120 The Argives pleaded their case successfully, and reaffirmed their long-standing philia and ancient consanguinity with the Pallantians in a publicised decree that flaunted their city’s influence and benevolence. The incident is telling on several levels: as early as 318 B.C. Argos already had an intermediary capacity with Polyperchon, who could and indeed did lend his ear to Argive requests even though his conquest of the region was barely settled. Second, such monarchical intervention in local affairs was not always brutal or suppressive but could be benevolent; cities did indeed have recourse to monarchs on local affairs (Bielman 1994, no.14), and rulers such as Polyperchon could be inclined to grant their requests. Third, and perhaps most interestingly, even in the midst of what I have just described as a bloody and tumultuous period we can still witness the normal functioning of civic government and inter-city diplomacy at the smallest level. Even with such upheaval on a large scale, local preoccupations were precisely that –preoccupying

- and in another testament to Ma’s Peer-Polity model this mechanism of horizontal communication between cities continued to function even when the vertical hierarchy was its most unstable.

Unfortunately our most indispensable piece of evidence concerning Argive foreign relations can only be attributed to a vague chronological timeframe – by all accounts to anywhere between c. 330 to

255/4 B.C. Yet this large temporal window is interesting in and of itself: the processes, decisions, and

Ep.Cat.7-11 for other similar decrees. Argos often grants proxenia in this religious context as well, as in Ep.Cat.A2-9, 11-20, 22-23, 25-27. 120 SEG 11.1084; Bielman 1994 no.14. 137 mechanisms that are brought to light by the decree were present and functioning during a broad part of the period. The decree of Argos found at Nemea concerning the Pamphylian state of Aspendos is a text that recognises the latter as sharing common descent with the Argives, and then outlines the legal and political rights that stem from such shared ancestry.121 The small details of the opening lines show the wheels of civic government to be turning smoothly: traditional Argive dating formulae are used, traditional names of the Argive months are present, and the decree lists a presiding officer along with his phratry and kome. All these conventions are as they were, unchanged, in the traditions of the

Classical Period; the routine went on (Stroud 1984, 196-198 on l.1-5).

The people of Aspendos – yet another state in Asia Minor to claim descent from the Argives – are recognised as συγγενέσι and accordingly given the Argive citizenship to which they are entitled by hereditary right (l.4-8). Yet this is not all just diplomatic gentility, as the decree goes to great pains to stipulate the precise rights of the Aspendians in Argos with such precision that it seems to anticipate that a number will actually relocate to their newly-recognized homeland. In this sense the decree seems to be regulating a population settlement, though we can only speculate as to its size. Regardless, the Aspendians have the same local rights as any native-born Argive: they will not be metics, they will not pay the tax of the μέτοικοι, they will be subject to the same financial obligations as any everyone else from the city.

These are not the kind of equal regulations that we would expect if we hold this decree to be simply a ploy on the part of the Argives to generate revenue by purported kinship (l.13-15). Religious,

121 The inscription survives on three fragments of a limestone stele that were excavated near the Temple of Zeus at Nemea by the American School’s excavation under the direction of S. G. Miller. The dumped filling in which they were found likely dates to the second half of the 3rd century B.C. and provides the terminus ante quem. The preliminary report was first published by S.G. Miller in Hesperia 48 (1979), 77-21, pl.22b. My discussion here draws on Stroud 1984’s extremely thorough publication of the decree which includes substantial background on Hellenistic Argive epigraphically more generally. 138 as well as financial, equality with the Argives is mandated in a manner that speaks to the continued importance of local cultic traditions: Aspendian theōroi are sent to Nemea to sacrifice to Zeus, and to

Argos to make offerings to Argive Hera. The Aspendians that make the journey are invited to join their kinsmen in the front of the procession from Argos proper to the Heraion that has occurred every year since the mid fifth century. This, to the Aspendians, would have been a great honour: they are invited to participate fully in the vibrant local traditions of the Argives, so this is not simple economic window dressing but rather such conferrals must have had been implicitly valued (Stroud 1984, 202-203). Not only did such festivals, to which we shall soon turn, continue to be held, their popularity grew steadily during the early Hellenistic Period. This decree further demonstrates the continued intersection of local politics and local religious traditions: the grant of citizenship and economic rights goes hand in hand with their participation in the community’s most important festivals. When considered in the context of the proxenic decrees that I have mentioned above, this episode too seems inherently forward looking, as it implies a great deal of subsequent interaction between the Aspendians and the

Argives (Mitchell 1997, 29-40).

The decree itself makes it clear that the Aspendians were not the only community to receive such recognition from the Argives. Early lines of the inscription (10-13) allow us to reconstruct a much older inscription concerning the people of Seriphos – another Aegean island – that granted similar rights. The uncertainty of the dates of both decrees make it possible that such a decision was made before the beginning of the Hellenistic Period.122 Previous decrees conferring citizenship to the people

122 Stroud 1984, 205. The decree of Seriphos is one of the more frustrating pieces of Argive evidence: found near the Temple of Zeus at Nemea in 1884 it was subsequently lost, with no photographs or line drawings. What we have of the inscription was published as IG 4.480. The similarity of this decree’s phraseology with that of our Aspendian decree hints that they were contemporary. The Seriphos decree is, unfortunately, quite fragmentary: [— — — — — — σ]θαι δὲ τὸν 139 of Rhodes and Soloi are cited as precedent and equivalence; that both are again in Asia Minor is yet more indication of Argive prominence across the Aegean.123 The rights of the Aspendians are supposed to be καθάπερ καὶ τοῖς σολευσι (l.7), which we can presume to be roughly equivalent to those of the

Rhodians and Seriphans and thus Argos seems to have been more than happy to bask in the attention of its ancestors in Anatolia. The Rhodian instance, I should mention, was motivated by rather more pragmatic means: another inscription (SEG 19.317) reveals that Rhodes had made a substantial loan to

Argos, interest free, to repair its city walls and revitalize its cavalry contingent, so there is certainly a material side to this specific episode.124 Regarding the others, however, we cannot be certain.

For the Rhodians, though, such a recognition was not something to be received with flippancy.

Argive acknowledgement by all accounts was quite important to them, as roughly a century later

Polybius (21.24) relates that the Rhodian claim of Argive origins was repeated before the Roman senate in a speech by Rhodian ambassadors. The community of states which identified as Argive also interacted among themselves, without recourse to Argos. In later disputes with Rome, the Rhodians gave support to Soloi ostensibly because they were both descended from Argos and thus shared a common bond among themselves (Pol. 21.24.4), and the Solians later emphasized this connection with

Rhodes through inscribed votive offerings at the temple of Athena Lindia (FGrHist. 532.33). Hence an

[— — — — ἱαρο(?)]μνάμονας [— — — — — — —]ς ἐπιμέλεσθαι [— — — — — — —]ς ἀγώνσανς 5 [— — — — — — τῶ]ν Σεριφίων αΙ[—] [ἐὰν δέ τις ἀπο(?)]<λ>ίπῃ Σεριφίων. 123 The decree for Soloi is mentioned and discussed by Stroud 1984, 201 and the ethnic of the people of Soloi appears in line 7 of this inscription. Attestations – numismatic and epigraphic – of the ethnikon of the Solians is discussed by Stroud 1984, n.24. 124 The Rhodian decree is dated to around 325 B.C., and despite the clear economic motive between this decree we must be careful not to automatically dismiss these ties as completely contrived. Rather Stroud 1984, n.19 discusses at length the scholarly debate surrounding the authenticity of this Rhodian-Argive tie and concludes that it was likely historical. 140

Anatolian web of diplomatic relations emerges that sprung from perceived ties of Argive descent. Of course such expressions of solidarity had a political and economic valence and were not simply altruistic claims of ethnic belonging, but that the claim was even expressed is testament to its importance.

The pains taken by the Aspendos decree to cite legal precedent and specifically enumerate details of taxation eligibility and civic participation make it hardly seem like an empty ceremonial gesture. Instead these decrees were practical declarations, that Aspendians or Rhodians could and indeed did settle in Argos and take advantage of the cultic and civic rights to which they were entitled.

That these rights were so specifically granted in the first place is readily indicative of their continued importance both at the local level and in the broader realm of Greek interstate relations. That all of the rights, positions, magistracies, and festivals mentioned as being part and parcel of Argive citizenship all were well established, though some still maturing, by the beginning of the Hellenistic Period is another vector of continuity in the region’s fourth century civic culture. These ‘traditional’ cultic centres were broadening their reach by engaging with new communities, and throughout we see the vitality of peer polity interaction between Argos and its various correspondents. Perhaps most intriguingly, omission speaks as clearly as inclusion: throughout, there is no mention of the king, no tribute or nod made to whatever Macedonian monarch held nominal sway over the region at the time of the inscription’s composition. The king is not included in dating formulae or lists of magistracies. In this instance, at least, the advent of monarchy left no permanent imprint on the civic mechanisms of the Argolid.

Following the Aspendos decree (whose dating is nebulous in and of itself) the third-century fog descends again the Argolid and provides precious little evidence with which to gauge the diachronic evolution of the region’s external politics. But there are some glimmers in the darkness that suggest

141 the trends I have identified above were not evanescent. Mythical, as well as the diplomatic and economic ties we have just seen, could be woven by various Hellenistic communities, some of which had just been formed. At roughly the same period as Argos was recognizing the citizen rights of

Anatolian cities like Rhodes, Soloi, and Aspendos, the attractive power of Argive descent was being felt farther south into northern Syria. New foundations as well as old Greek cities were vying to be seen as part of the venerable Argive tradition, not least of which was the famed Antioch of the Syrian tetrapolis.125

In a clever instance of mythical engineering the Antiochenes, early in the reign of Antiochus I around 280-270 B.C, re-wrote their mythical history to include an episode in which Inachus, father of Io, despatched a group of Argives under Triptolemus to the region of what would become Antioch near

Mt. Silpios in order to search for his lost daughter.126 The Argives, the tradition goes, were so enchanted with the locale that they lost all desire to return home, and thus founded their own settlement on slopes of the mountain.127 Importing this Argive myth suddenly made the otherwise

125 On the foundation of Antioch and its mythology see Ogden 2012, Buraselis 2010, and Downey 1961. Grainger 2000 also mentions certain aspects of colonization and settlement at 122-146. 126 The general mythical tradition of the city’s foundation is in Lib.Or.11.52-55 and Malalas 8.15; the Argive myth only appears in Strabo 16.2.5. 127 Strabo 16.2.5: συνῴκισε δ᾽ ὁ Νικάτωρ ἐνταῦθα καὶ τοὺς ἀπογόνους Τριπτολέμου, περὶ οὗ μικρὸν πρόσθεν ἐμνήσθημεν: διόπερ Ἀντιοχεῖς ὡς ἥρωα τιμῶσι, καὶ ἄγουσιν ἑορτὴν ἐν τῷ Κασίῳ ὄρει τῷ περὶ Σελεύκειαν. φασὶ δ᾽ αὐτὸν ὑπ᾽ Ἀργείων πεμφθέντα ἐπὶ τὴν Ἰοῦς ζήτησιν, ἐν Τύρῳ πρῶτον ἀφανοῦς γενηθείσης, πλανᾶσθαι κατὰ τὴν Κιλικίαν: ἐνταῦθα δὲ τῶν σὺν αὐτῷ τινας Ἀργείων κτίσαι τὴν Ταρσὸν ἀπελθόντας παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ: τοὺς δ᾽ ἄλλους συνακολουθήσαντας εἰς τὴν ἑξῆς παραλίαν, ἀπογνόντας τῆς ζητήσεως ἐν τῇ ποταμίᾳ τοῦ Ὀρόντου καταμεῖναι σὺν αὐτῷ: τὸν μὲν οὖν υἱὸν τοῦ Τριπτολέμου Γόρδυν ἔχοντά τινας τῶν σὺν τῷ πατρὶ λαῶν εἰς τὴν Γορδυαίαν ἀποικῆσαι, τῶν δ᾽ ἄλλων τοὺς ἀπογόνους συνοίκους γενέσθαι τοῖς Ἀντιοχεῦσιν. Nicator also settled here the descendants of Triptolemus, whom I mentioned a little before.42 And it is on this account that the Antiocheians worship him as a hero and celebrate a festival in his honour on Mt. Casius in the neighbourhood of Seleuceia. It is said that he was sent by the Argives in search of Io, who disappeared first in Tyre, and that he wandered through Cilicia; and that there some of his Argive companions left him and founded Tarsus, but the others accompanied him into the next stretch of seaboard, gave up the search in despair, and remained with him in the river-country of the Orontes; and that Gordys, the son of Triptolemus, along with some 142 foreign region of Antioch seem more like an extension of mainland Greece, treaded by the same heroes and deities who had perused the Peloponnese and beyond. An alien landscape was now familiar, an empty region sown with the same traditions that persisted so vibrantly in the Argolid itself.

Again, the effort is telling: that the Antiochenes went to such pains to creatively graft Argive mythology onto Syria is a reciprocal testament to its importance to the Argives as well. That the founding population of Antioch was composed entirely of Macedonians and the former (largely Athenian) residents of Antigoneia – among whose ranks we can identify no ‘true’ Argives – certainly could not get in the way of such mythical engineering.

On the smaller and more immediate level of the Peloponnese, the same territorial concerns and local affairs that we have seen with the Pallantian decree persisted well into the third century. The specifics of each episode have been well discussed by others, but their overall theme bears on our current discussion. Mantineia was called in to arbitrate a dispute of 240 B.C. between the Achaean

League and Argos over an alleged attack by the former on the territory of the latter.128 External arbitration was again required some years later in 229, though in this case the dispute was among the region’s cities themselves. Argos and Cleonai disagreed over some parcel of land, the specifics of which evade us though given the two cities’ antagonistic history it likely revolved around Nemea. The dynamic is still present regardless: territorial rivalry among the region’s communities did not disappear under the hegemony of either the Antigonids or the Achaean League. These squabbles over chunks of territory that had flared since the Archaic Period continued arise with equal conviction into the

Hellenistic Period. That Argos required and sought mediation for both questions of external and

of the peoples who had accompanied his father, emigrated to Gordyaea, whereas the descendants of the rest became fellow-inhabitants with the Antiocheians. 128 Plut.Arat. 25.5 = Ager 1996 document 136. 143 internal relations is further demonstrative of Ma’s Peer-Polity dynamic, and the case of Argos and

Cleonai bears apt witness to the endurance of divisions within the region’s own inhabitants as late as

229 B.C. Again, the monarchy is conspicuously absent from all of these local episodes.

The fog in the Argive evidentiary record – in the realm of external relations as elsewhere – returns only to be burned away by the advent of the Romans. The last attestations of the theōria at

Epidauros in 191 give way some thirty years later to a new kind of external interaction, one now dominated by the hegemonic – and authoritative – power of Rome. At first Rome began to act as a

Hellenistic mediator in its own right, and appears in episodes from 163 and 161 as the arbitrator of perennial disputes between Argos and Sparta.129 Unsurprisingly this episode was fuelled as ever by contested territory – in this case Kynouria and Thyreatis, and hence we hear the same old tune of

Argive local concerns. In this instance, though, the arbitration it is conducted under the authority of senator Gallus and other Roman Legates, not another ‘Greek’ mediator. The issues are the same, the mechanism familiar, and all players save one are traditional – but the replacement of representatives of cities or leagues with the Romans meant that the process would never be the same. As the old adage of Roman involvement in Greece goes, once the Romans were invited they were never inclined to leave.

As we shall discuss in more detail subsequently, I think it no mere coincidence that after the appearance of the Romans on the Peloponnesian diplomatic stage we very quickly begin to see this local activity wither. Such territorial contest in the external arena – pacific or otherwise – is not the only contemporary victim of the Roman hegemony that we identify. The disappearance of the theōria at Epidauros causes us to wonder whether the games survived long thereafter or if they disappeared in

129 Paus. 7.11.1-2 = Ager 1996 document 137. 144 the same manner as the traditional games of the Hecatomboia by the close of the second century..

These were not, however, done away with overnight. Yet these cultic traditions, just as the internal and external relations that I have discussed above, had remained prominent far longer into the

Hellenistic Period than we may have been inclined to suppose. It is to them that we must now turn in order to glimpse another facet of the Argolid’s Hellenistic experience.

Deceptive Antiquity: The Cultic Traditions of the Hellenistic Argolid

The various strands of territory, monarchy, diplomacy, and exchange that I have discussed above all intertwine in the cultic and religious traditions of the Argolid. In the Argolid as elsewhere, the realms of the external and the internal, the local and the panhellenic, the political and the social all overlap in the sphere of religion. This happens particularly in its public expression through festivals and their accompanying games, but also in the stark physicality of temple sites and sanctuaries. In examining the development of each over the course of the first two centuries of the Hellenistic Period we must reconsider the purported abandonment of civic religion and the turn towards individual devotion to new (foreign) deities with which many scholars have characterised the development of

Hellenistic religion in the mainland.130 But as with monarchy and politics the dawn of the Hellenistic does not shed light on processes and patterns that were entirely new; instead we must look back to the Late Classical Period and see the origins of certain trends that are often labelled as Hellenistic. The subject, however, is not an easy one to consider: Amandry (1980, 232-3) laments that our epigraphic dossier for the region’s various games is limited to perhaps three or four inscriptions per century. The

130 See my discussion of the cultic stereotypes of the mainland in the Introduction. 145 cracks that emerge in the chronological record are expansive, and the archaeological record is as episodically fragmentary as the epigraphic.

The scholarly preconception for Argive religion is much the same as it is for politics or monarchy.

The Argolid falls neatly into line with the rest of the mainland whose impoverishment extends into the spiritual as well as the material. Decline permeates discussions of Hellenistic Argive religion, and again the old tropes are difficult to dislodge. Amandry, after listing several local festivals that endure into the first century, then does an about-face by consigning the Argive Heraion and Temple of Zeus among those ‘victimes d’une dèsaffection qui a atteint, certes, beaucoup de lieux saints de la grèce antique’

(Amandry 1980, 250). The changed Hellenistic political landscape ‘condamnaient ces sanctuaires à une mort lente’ (Amandry 1980, 250). Tomlinson is rather less dramatic when he concedes that at the time of Pausanias the old sanctuaries were still functioning, though more humble cultic venues had begun to go defunct (1972, 201). Elsewhere, though, he rather ambiguously falls into line with the syncretic stereotype of Hellenistic religion in general when he writes that contact with other regions ‘may also have led to the introduction of new cults and beliefs’ (200). In this we see the spectre of the more general opinion of Hellenistic religion that I have cited in my introduction: the impotence and domination of the mainland led to widespread disenfranchisement with ‘traditional’ civic cults, inspiring a shift towards more individualized worship of different deities.131

While Argive cultic traditions may have seemed to date to the 8th or 9th century, stripping away various layers reveals that many of the region’s principal sites came to prominence much later. As I

131 The alterantive to the view of religious importation is that old ceremonies were still performed, but bereft of meaning. To quote Walbank 1981, 209: ‘‘old certainties had gone and though ancient rites were still zealously performed in the conviction that what was traditional should be observed, many people were at bottom agnostics or even atheists. The observance of established rituals must have meant little to many worshippers’ (Walbank 1981, 209) 146 have mentioned above, Jonathan Hall (1995) notes the archaizing tendency of the region through the example of the sanctuary of Hera: though the literary tradition would lead us to date its foundation and prominence to the 8th century, the Argives would not have yet spread throughout the Argive plain, much less involved themselves with such an elaborate sanctuary until the mid-5th century (Hall 1995,

595-7). Pindar’s 10th Nemean Ode in 464 is the first secure date that we have for the annual Argive procession to the sanctuary, despite how it seemed to date to time immemorial. Even the moniker

‘Argive Heraion’ becomes somewhat misleading when we bear in mind Aufarth’s study (2006) of the sanctuary, which concludes that it was not even important to Argos itself until after their conquest of the plain. It was only in the mid to late fourth century that the Heraion became a ‘regional’ sanctuary in the sense that it figured prominently in the cultic traditions of the plain’s northern and southern communities alike.

The physical sanctuary of Hera as we know it in its Hellenistic form only dated to around 420-

410; the previous incarnation was destroyed by fire and it was subsequently rebuilt and enlarged over the following decade (Amandry 1980, 235, Hall 1995, Thuc. 4.133). The sanctuary of Aphrodite, another prominent lieu de culte, was only first constructed in 430-420. The Asklepieion at Epidauros first appeared in typically humble Asklepian fashion in the mid-5th century, and our aforementioned theōria inscriptions reveal that the sanctuary was not enlarged and its games were not re-inaugurated until the 360s B.C.

At the same time we must also acknowledge the tessellation of the Argive religious plane: at the time of the League of Corinth’s foundation, the Asklepieion was under the (fiercely) independent control of Epidauros, the games at Nemea were outside of Argive jurisdiction, and even the sanctuary of Hera and its associated games had only been under the control of Argos itself for less than a

147 century.132 These local sanctuaries and their associated festivals had only begun to come to prominence in the first half of the 4th century and thus their effervescence is a late-Classical phenomenon; an interesting observation when we compare this to the perception of the decline of such cults that is more typically associated with the transitional period.

The point of this temporal recapitulation is quite similar to what will be encountered with the chronology of Euboea’s urban foundations. As I have discussed above, scholars of these sanctuaries during the Hellenistic Period posit their decline beginning in the third century. Yet this model of decline comes with the assumption that they must have hit their zenith in the fifth or fourth centuries.

Reviewing this chronology, however, brings out a different frame of reference for the subsequent centuries: if the Asklepieion had only been enlarged and reconstructed in the 360s and 350s, and the

Heraion had only been a regional sanctuary for less than a century, than how can we so firmly conclude that the Hellenistic Period was marked by decline? The notion of the slow death of these sanctuaries glosses over the fact that these cultic centres hit the peak of their popularity and development only in the middle of the third century.

The other side of the coin is that some cults in the region that would typically be labelled as

‘Hellenistic’ are actually late-Classical in their origins. Asklepios to many represents the Hellenistic deity par excellence given the basis of individual petition and devotion, and the associations of health and safety on which his worship is predicated. Yet in the Argolid his worship was a Classical development: the sanctuary at Epidauros had already been extant by the turn of the fourth century, as were other

132 See Piérart 2004 s.v. Epidauros (no.348) for full epigraphic dossiers on Epidauran control of the sanctuary, and also Kleonai (no.351). 148 smaller sanctuaries in Argos itself.133 The stock of his festival and associated games were already well on the rise by the dawn of the Macedonian hegemony, and thus their popularity should not be seen as a by-product of regional disenfranchisement with more traditional institutions. The salient points are thus: while some regional cults that may on the surface appear Hellenistic had in actuality been fairly well-established by the period’s outset and are thus late-classical phenomena. Other ‘traditional’ regional cults imbued with an aura of antiquity only hit the zenith of their popularity, both in terms of their broad appeal and the development of their sanctuaries during the third and second centuries. We shall consider each sanctuary in turn, as much as our evidence allows.

The Asklepieion at Epidauros

We have already discussed the emergence of the Epidaurian theōrodokia in support of the developing sanctuary of Asklepios and need not reiterate the details here, save that the first attestation of the epigraphic lists provides us with a fairly certain terminus post quem of the reorganised games’ regional prominence (Perlman 2000, 67). Although the site had long been associated with Asklepios and there had been some form of temple dedicated to him, the prominent iteration of the sanctuary only dates to roughly 370-365 B.C. It was after the sanctuary’s expansion and renovation that the theōroi were despatched throughout the Greek world to the locales we have mentioned in the

133 The sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros actually has a much longer history than many realise. The initial excavations by Kabbadias published in 1891, and subsequent work by Latte 1931, and more recently Seve 1993, conclude that the sanctuary in some form is attested from the sixth century onwards. The games in honour of Asklepios are likewise fairly old, and foreign competitors from Aegina (Pind.Nem. 5.95-7; Isthm. 8.68) are attested in 530 BC and 479 BC, respectively. That being said, the games had fallen from prominence during the fifth century and it was only in the decades leading up to the Macedonian conquest that the sanctuary began to be revived and its festivals expanded. The events of the 370s and 360s thus mark the expansion and the reorganization of a long extant cult. 149 spring of 370. The timing of the renovation is striking: although the games in honour of Asklepios had been celebrated since the fifth century (see note above), and some form of temple had long been present at the site, suddenly we see a surge in local interest in the cult develop in the early decades of the fourth century.

This stands against the notion that such civic cults were declining, as the expansion of the cult of Asklepios here at Epidaurus was primarily driven by the city itself. Broad efforts to renovate the sanctuary and promote the cult thus began in 370, and we can presume that it and the festival gained increased regional prominence over the following decade. After the region had begun to take part in the festival, the Epidaurians then decided to further expand its reach by despatching the theōria to farther-flung corners of the Greek world. There are three points to be made here. First, the cult of

Asklepios as such is not a Hellenistic phenomenon but rather in this corner of the Peloponnese has

Archaic and Classical roots. Second, although the god’s cult is often considered an individual form of devotion, it was instead originally a prominent civic cult of Epidauros, and thus falls in line with our preconceptions of Classical religion and its ties to the polis. Third, the broad-based promotion of the sanctuary and attempts to boost its panhellenic appeal did not begin in earnest until the closing decades of the Classical Period. From then, the sanctuary grew in popularity and size, rather than declining in prominence.

Epidauros, of course, was not alone in being interested in the sanctuary. Argos maintained a continuous relationship with the cult as well as its games that is further telling of regional dynamics in the Hellenistic Period. The Argives themselves naturally had a vested interest in their Epidaurian neighbours, particularly when the Epidaurian theōria gained the interest of many regions of the Greek world. The involvement of kings, tyrants, and cities alike in the affairs of the newly-invigorated

150 sanctuary imbued it with a prominence that the Argives perhaps envied, given that the sanctuary and its games were controlled by Epidauros and were essentially outside of Argive influence (Tomlinson

1972, 211). This did not, however, prevent them from becoming involved in whatever capacity possible: many Argives worked as architects or craftsmen on the sanctuary’s construction, and a sizeable delegation of citizens visited the sanctuary every year to participate in its festivals. The involvement of Argive craftsmen makes this at least in part a regional venture, but that the we can drawn a distinction between the Epidaurian and Argive participants in the sanctuary’s cultic activities at all brings to light the lines within the region that continued to be visible well into the 3rd century. At the same time, the similarity in theoric itineraries of Argos and Epidauros that I have discussed above leads us to think that the latter were following a trail that was first blazed by the former. Again we see the fragmentary unity of the Argolid: though the two cities were independent and often opposed, and they promoted different sanctuaries, they still collaborated by following similar theoric routes built on regional ties.

By all accounts the theōria and Epidauran efforts to promote the sanctuaries and games of

Apollo and Asklepios were a resounding success, and the wave of their popularity crested during the late fourth and third centuries. Perlman’s study (2000, 67-98) of the Epidauran theōria records some

29 honourary decrees preserved on three stelai, which have been dated to the span 315-223 B.C. This local-come-panhellenic festival thus flourished under the nominal domination of Macedon and the various tyrants appointed to oversee the region, and politics of course were never far separated from religion. Out of the 21 honourary decrees from Epidauros itself that have been published, eleven of them merit note by virtue of their combination of cultic and civic honours. These eleven grant various

151 individuals joint awards of proxenia and theōrodokia according to a recurring formula: πρόξενον εἶμεν

τᾶς πόλιος τᾶς Ἐπιδαυρίων καὶ θεαροδόκον τοῦ Ἀσκλαπιοῦ.134

As with the Argive citizenship decrees above, cultic privileges remained part and parcel of civic privileges; the two remained inseparable for the first two centuries of the Hellenistic Period. That both proxenia and theōrodokia are awarded by and for a city other than Argos reminds us that the Argolid was not simply dominated by its namesake polis in either the political or the cultic arenas. That this epigraphic floruit occurs in what we would otherwise consider to be a period of political stagnation makes the effervescence of the sanctuary all the more remarkable. Here, at least, there was no sharp break with the past that occurred with the advent of Philip. The embassy followed the same route as it had since its inception in the 360s, the same lists were meticulously maintained through to the end of the third century, the same grants of proxeny made according to the same formula, and the sanctuary experienced its heyday at a time when the prevailing logic would rule out any possibility of such local dynamism.

The rush of epigraphic evidence for the fourth and third centuries slows to a trickle at the dawn of the second and then subsequently ceases altogether. Only speculation flows in its place. 191 B.C brings us our last evidence that survives for the theōrodokia in Epidauros with the appointment of

Archias of Pergamon as theōrodokos, whether it continued in the years that followed or ceased abruptly thereafter simply cannot be known.135 Following Perlman, we should perhaps be more

134 IG IV2,1 49, decree from the late fourth or early third century granting these awards to Hegistratos, son of Hecataeus. The same formula appears in IG IV2,1 48, 50, 51, and various others cited in Perlman 2000’s epigraphic catalogue. 135 Perlman 2000, 96 and IG IV2.1,54;58, also 1, 21, 52; 55; 56; 58; Peek 1972 no. 10 for the final decrees. The decree of Archais of Pergamon, ambassador of King Eumenes of Pergamon, is IG IV2,1 60, especially l.4-11: περὶ] τοῦ πρεσβ̣ευτᾶ παρὰ τοῦ̣ [βασιλέος Εὐμένεος ἔδο]- ξε̣ τᾶι πόλει τῶν Ἐπιδα[υρίων· Ἀρχίαν Ἀσκλαπι]- 152 inclined to think that these embassies continued to be despatched for some time, particularly when we bear in mind that there continue to be attested competitors for the games of the Asklepieia until as late as the third century AD (Perlman 2000, 67-80; Ep.Cat.E 17).

The sanctuary’s appeal was thus not a distinctly Hellenistic phenomenon, and neither were

Asklepios and the games associated with him solely of interest to the ill and downtrodden of society: the prominence of kings, tyrants, and other notables from the traditional centres of Classical Greece as well as Cyprus, Epirus, Macedon, and Asia Minor hint at the decidedly panhellenic appeal of this local cult.136 But above all, the cult of Asklpeios at Epidauros in the Hellenistic Period remained what it had been: a local civic cult, with a local sanctuary, that had been extant since the close of the sixth century.

Its rising popularity was a late Classical phenomenon, and the unique climate of the Hellenistic Period created the milieu in which it came to its greatest prominence.

The Heraion

The cult of Hera and her associated sanctuary in the Argolid are highly representative of the broader religious landscape of the Argolid both in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. As I have mentioned earlier, Hall provides an account of the deceptive antiquity of the sanctuary, as well as the

άδου Περγαμηνόν, ἱερ[ατεύοντα Ἀσκλαπιοῦ] Περγαμοῖ, πρ[όξ]ενον ε[ἶμεν τῶν Ἐπιδαυρίων] καὶ θεαροδόκον τοῦ Ἀπ[όλλωνος καὶ τοῦ Ἀσκλαπι]οῦ 136 Shipley 2000, for instance, encapsulates this trend neatly when he includes the cult of Asklepios under the heading of ‘Oriental and Personal religions’ in which he characterizes the period as being ‘in general… a time of religious change.’ 163. He then goes on to make the remarkably inconclusive statement that Asklepios exemplifies another trend identified as ‘the seemingly increased popularity of certain existing cults,’ as if this were a Hellenistic phenomenon and not just religious life as usual. Shipley 2000, 163-164. Devotion to Asklepios is taken to be indicative of the turn towards individualized religion and the personal search for cures or redress of wrongs, physical or otherwise – a sentiment that is echoed by Potter 2005 citing Edelstein 1945. 153 evolution of the temple and its games from the fifth through the third centuries (1995). But here we see the intersection of the panhellenic, the regional, and the local, and the Hellenistic development of the Heraion speaks to the region as a whole. By the time of the Macedonian hegemony the ‘Argive’

Heraion had only been under the control of Argos proper for roughly a century (Hall 1997, 580). The archaic sanctuary had exclusively been the domain of Mycenae since its earliest foundation: Hera herself was traditionally not an important deity in Argos, but rather figured most prominently in the mythology and cultic habits of the Mycenaeans and their surrounding communities (Hall 1997, 610-

612). The original sacred way on which the annual procession to the Heraion took place originally began not in Argos but in Mycenae; this state of affairs would not change until roughly 460 when the

Argives dramatically swept through the plain and established control over many of its cities.

Although the city was sacked and its population resettled, Mycenaean cults remained. After

460 Argos began a different sort of campaign aimed at uniting the as yet disparate communities of the

Argolid under their banner. Accordingly the Argives sought to bring the traditions of the conquered into a new set of regional traditions: the importance of Hera in Argive mythology was greatly augmented (McAuley 2008, Hall 1997, 612-626), and her new prominence reflected physically with a sizeable expansion of the temple itself constructed with a fusion of architectural styles meant to capture the nascent synthetic unity of the region (des Courtils 1992, 249). The processional way was rebuilt, now leading from Argos to the Heraion instead of Mycenae. Such integration of regional traditions into the pantheon of Argos proper was aimed at making the Heraion into what Hall describes as ‘a confederate sanctuary for all of the Argive plain’ (1995, 613).

It was only then that we find the first attestation of the games of the Argive Hera: by all accounts they and the almost indistinguishable games of the Hecatomboia were only established after

154

460 to provide some measure of annual reinforcement of the Argive plain’s new religious – and thus political – communality.137 Between 460 and 420 B.C. some five prize inscriptions have been unearthed honouring the victors of the games, which already had taken a broader pan-Peloponnesian and panhellenic character as early as some decades after their foundation (Amandry 1980, 233-239).138 On a regional level such concerted efforts on the part of the Argives are telling: the renovation of the sanctuary, the revision of mythic tradition to include new communities, the creation and promotion of the games, even the inclusion of Hera on Argive coinage are all part of what Amandry identifies as an

Argive push to provide a symbolic end to the rivalry of Argos and Mycenae (Amandry 1980, 233-239 and Hall 1995, 613). The chronology, again, is of interest to us: by 420 these newly sown efforts at regional cohesion were just beginning to germinate.

This momentum continued unabated into the first half of the fourth century despite the destruction of the sanctuary by fire and it subsequent reconstruction in the following decades. As I have mentioned, although the earliest extant theoric lists that we have found in the region are from

Epidauros, not Argos, Perlman (2000, 103) convincingly argues that there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the latter had been despatching such embassies and making such appointments earlier than the former. It is telling, then, that two rival sanctuaries from the same region would follow the same theoric route - cultic diversity and competition were not necessarily bad things for the region’s local communities. Again, this widened web of Argive external contacts, in this case centred on the

Heraion, is a late-Classical, not a Hellenistic development: the embassies were sent throughout the first

137 On the incorporation of Hera into the Argive pantheon and the mechanisms by which this was accomplished, see Hall 1995, 612; Amandry 1980, 234-239; Hall 1997, 96-99; Kritzas 1992, 236-237. 138 See Amandry 1980, 233n.54 for his catalogue of early victor’s inscriptions at the games. Interestingly, the famous athlete Doreius of Rhodes is attested as having been victorious in both the games of Asklepios and the games of Argive Hera, thus suggesting that perhaps the two competitions formed part of a similar competitive circuit throughout the Greek world. 155 half of the fourth century and continued into the third, and the presence of such ‘Hellenistic’ notables as Cleopatra of Epirus and Nicocreon should thus be viewed as the culmination of a trend rather than its beginning (Perlman 2000, 101-103).

Shortly after these theoric lists come the citizenship decrees of Rhodes and Aspendos that I have discussed in the previous section. What we ought to recall here is the inclusion of the right to participate in the traditional Argive procession to the Heraion and subsequent festivals that is given to the grant’s recipients along with their civic rights. In the same way as the grant of citizenship itself was not an empty gesture, neither was the inclusion of such cultic privileges.

The lists of victors in the athletic competitions of the games of Argive Hera and the

Hecatomboia, though generally impossible to date with any degree of precision, still indicate the breadth of the festival’s appeal. Among the competitors attested during the Hellenistic Period and leading into the Early Empire we find a cross-section of the Greek world as a whole: names like

Menodoros of Athens, Demetrios of Chios, Dranctides of Halicarnassus, and somewhat later Philippos of Pergamon and a Milesian competitor represent the panhellenic renown of Hera’s games.139 It is interesting to note the long-term success of the Argives’ efforts at promoting the sanctuary: what began as a means of fostering some measure of cultic unity in the region ultimately results in the

Heraia ranking among the most popular competitions in the Greek world some centuries later. The political divisions had shifted, but the games remained. The later inclusion of theatrical performances

139 see Amandry 1980, 229-230 for the full list, especially notes 33-38 for the various publications of these victor decrees and their chronology. The persistence of the games under Roman rule is striking: Demetrius of Chios won his victories in either the first or the second century BC, Dracontides of Halicarnassus was in the middle of the first century, Philippos Glaukon of Pergamon was victorious around 25 BC in either this or the games at Nemea (or indeed both), and a Milesian was the first of his city to win a competition at the Heraia in around 20 BC. Other inscriptions refer generically to the games of Hera, especially IG IV.611 and VII.48, both of which likely date to the first century BC as well. See further Amandry 1980 notes 43-47 for other attestations, and his discussion of the games’ subsequent trajectory at 231-239. 156 of Euripides (won by a man from Tegea) and various other artistic competitions put this agon on par with Delphi and Olympia, even though our documentation is so slight.

Aside from these glimpses of insight the evidence is too fragmentary to piece together a detailed picture of the games’ longer-term trajectory and eventual demise. The Hecatomboia disappears from the epigraphic record before the end of the second century, and the Heraia is the only

Argive competition that is attested in subsequent centuries. The political importance of the Heraia, though, continued well into the second and first centuries. Philip V in 209 is listed as the proud agonothetēs of both the Heraia and the Nemean Games. In 186 the games of the Heraia took place in

Argos at the same time as an assembly of the Achaean council – all in the presence of Q. Caecilius

Metellus (Pol.22.10.13). A lacuna of sixty years during the first century AD presents another gap in our evidence, though the intermittent recurrence of victor lists and mentions of the competition suggest that it continued to be held in some form well after the Roman conquest (Amandry 1980, 246-248).

Yet as with the Asklepieia, the trajectory of the Heraia reveals that the Hellenistic Period did not spell cultic decline on the local or regional level, neither did it reduce traditional festivals to mere formalities. Quite the opposite: the Heraia did not come to its full panhellenic renown until the

Hellenistic Period, and had only emerged as a coherent and regular competition in the Late Classical

Period. Its contemporary appeal aptly reflects the effectiveness of Argive efforts to promote their games during the Hellenistic Period. And, in this case, what was borne of a desire to instil some measure of cultic solidarity on an otherwise unsettled region succeeded vastly beyond its borders during the Hellenistic Period – all without compromising the distinctly Argive flavour or function of the cult.

157

The Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea and the Nemean Games

By far the most renowned and venerable of the Argolid’s athletic competitions and cultic festivals, the Nemean games are also the region’s most antique – and perhaps also the most interesting to us given the manner in which they were revived and relocated in response to political developments. Much of what we have already discussed in the context of Epidauros and of the Heraion holds equally true for Nemea, thematically as well as practically: the theōrodokoi for the Heraia and the Nemean Games were identical, an honour from one automatically equated to the other in the

Hellenistic lists that have survived. Hence the same conclusions that we have drawn regarding outside contact and the political valence thereof ring true for Nemea as they had for Argos.

Nemea, though, has a somewhat longer trajectory than its regional contemporaries: Eusebius dates the first Nemead to 573 B.C. and the early temple and sanctuary do indeed seem to be of an equal vintage, so we have little reason to doubt its antiquity in myth as well as settlement (Miller 2001).

By the dawn of the Hellenistic Period the games had been taken away from Nemea itself, and it was only by the intervention of Philip II that they would be returned to their ancestral location. The site itself, of course, would have to be substantially revamped and expanded to host such an important panhellenic festival. The American School’s excavations of the 4th century temple and the Hellenistic stadium date the construction of the entire complex to shortly after the victory at Chaeronea (Miller

2001). The presence of a bronze coin of Philip II found lodged between different building layers of the

Stadium’s wall is an unsubtle hint of both the chronology and sponsor of the stadium’s construction.

The reconstruction of the stadium was not driven by purely altruistic motives. The panhellenic ideology of Philip was reinforced by the League’s practice of hosting a meeting of its synedrion at the

158 panhellenic festival for that year, and the return of the games to Nemea seems to have been the product of this agenda (Miller 2001, 90-94). Substantial deposits of Macedonian coinage throughout the site also testify to the influence – economic and otherwise – of its patrons, and in this we are presented with a case in which the Macedonians did indeed put their political aspirations into practice in the region. The sanctuary and its festival immensely benefitted from this royal patronage; the massive stadium, still impressive to the contemporary visitor, was constructed thanks to their benefaction. A palaestra and a xenon were also added, while the sanctuary itself was aggrandized to make the complex among the most prominent in Greece. All of this occurred within a fairly short span of time after Chaeronea until roughly the close of the fourth century. The proximity of the site to

Corinth, of course, would have been a visible reminder of the benefits of Macedonian patronage. This site as well hit the peak of its physical size and its popularity during the Hellenistic Period. We cannot know the exact condition of the sanctuary or stadium when Cassander presided over the games in 317 and 315 B.C. (Diod. 19.64.1), or indeed shortly thereafter in 311 when Demetrius Poliorcetes appears to have established a league that was to meet regularly at Nemea as well (Geagan 1968, 37).

Regardless, the connection between the sanctuary and the Macedonian kings remains.

The panhellenic programme of the Macedonians is aptly reflected in the architectural style of the renovated Temple of Zeus. Elements and some materials from the old sanctuary were incorporated into the new, but in general the style of the temple is marked by a creative combination of Corinthian,

Ionic, and Doric elements, along with the addition of certain idiosyncratic features.140 The construction of a Hellenistic heroön on the site as well – likely contemporaneous with the wider-scale renovation of the sanctuary, rounded out the cultic environment. In these developments we see the grafting of a

140 For instance the presence of an adyton in a temple of Classical proportions is fairly unusual. 159 new layer – generally panhellenic in character – onto an existing regional sanctuary which changed the flavour of its appearance but not necessarily its content.141 Yet I should be careful to note Miller’s caveat that the Macedonians – Philip or Cassander – were not completely responsible for the sanctuary’s enlargement. Instead, they jump-started a process that continued until the games were relocated to Argos in 271 (Miller 2001, 92-93). Throughout, the construction process is marked by the careful incorporation or recycling of classical elements, and thus continuity seems to be the dominant theme desired by its architects.

Despite Macedonian intervention the sanctuary remained under the control, nominal or otherwise, of Cleonai, not Argos proper, hence we are provided with another instance of the cultic diversity of the plain during the period. The Argives, as with Epidauros, had a vested interest in the affairs of such a prominent sanctuary located in their orbit, though not particularly close by the city.

Amandry’s observation that Cleonai itself would have been economically or practically unable to administer such a sanctuary without some form of Argive assistance ought to be borne in mind when considering the gradual re-appropriation of the games by Argos (Amandry 1980, 252). Attestations of

Argives in the sanctuary of Nemea in epigraphic evidence further reveal the level of Argive involvement in the more mundane details of the festival’s management (Piérart & Thalman 1980). Although the precise date at which the games were transferred to Argos proper remains unclear, Miller’s hypothesis of 271 to me seems the most sound. The rash of campaigning in the Argive countryside during the preceding years by Antigonus Gonatas and later Pyrrhus would have made it clear to the Argives that they would be better served to maintain their control over the festival by shifting it to the city proper instead of keeping it at Nemea. Cleonai, for its part, would have been unable to effectively resist the

141 The full details of the site’s early Hellenistic expansion is explained by Miller et al. 1990, 72-106 which includes architectural and topographical features of the sanctuary itself as well as the Hellenistic heroön. 160

Argives, and by all accounts the site fell into disuse in the years that immediately followed.142

Archaeological indications suggest that the construction of the Hellenistic stadium was never fully completed, and its decay was accelerated by incomplete retaining walls. All of this lends credence to the conclusion that site fell into disuse rather abruptly (Miller 2001, 93-94). Argos, in turn, built a new stadium for the games in Argos proper, while the old site at Cleonai disappeared into relative obscurity.

While this episode of Argive relocation may seem to be as a sharp break in cultic patterns brought on by the political vagaries of the period, in the longue durée of Argive relations with its neighbouring communities this comes as less of a shock. As with the previous example of the games of

Hera, Argos proper had been engaged in drawing neighbouring communities and their respective traditions into a closer web since the mid fifth century. The Argive presence at the games had been constant and was apparently increasing since the close of the fourth century. I am thus inclined to view the Nemean transfer as the culmination of a longer trend rather than an instantaneous Hellenistic phenomenon. Though the Macedonians had repeatedly shown their interest in Nemea by means of benefaction, their general distaste for micro-managing such local affairs makes it more likely that this was accomplished at the behest of the Argives themselves with Macedonian approval – either explicit or tacit.

In spite of their common location at Argos, clear distinctions between the Heraia and the

Nemean games persisted; it is not as if they were fused into a more generic Argive festival (Amandry

1980, 246). The parallel lists of theōrodokoi, the common competitors, and the close timing of the two festivals give a misleading impression of amalgamation, but the Argives themselves were careful to maintain the divide. This does not, however, prevent them from taking advantage of the symbolic

142 Miller 2001, 93 n.213 for the full argument and historiography behind the stadium’s gradual descent into disuse. 161 capital with which both festivals were invested. As a public display of thanks for liberating them from the hands of the pro-Spartan Machanidas, the Argives honoured Philip V of Macedon by making him the agonothetēs of both competitions in 208.143 Though our evidence in the intervening years again becomes sparse, the few episodic mentions of the games being interrupted in times of war indirectly illustrate their continuity (i.e. Livy. 34.41.1). Given the generally panhellenic character of the competitors attested in the region we have no reason to presume any kind of decline in the festival’s importance either within the Argolid or without, and the period of prominence seems to have been inaugurated with Macedonian revival of the games in the aftermath of Chaeronea.

The prevailing image that emerges of the Nemean games in the Hellenistic Period is thus one that is in harmony with the other festivals that we have described above. The narrative is not one of decline but of fluorescence, of architectural elaboration rather than decay, and surging popularity instead of dwindling relevance – altogether one that again gives us cause to reflect on Amandry’s mort lente of these sanctuaries and find it insufficient as an explanatory model. The sanctuary at Nemea was at its grandest opulence under the tutelage of the Macedonians, and remained so for sixty years until being passed over in favour of Argos (Miller 1982). This marked the culmination of a process of Argive consolidation over the plain that had been unfolding for nearly two centuries. The change that we observe in Nemea ought to be construed as gradual rather than instantaneous. Nemea’s symbolic potential as a local and panhellenic beacon was employed by the Argives and the Macedonians alike; blame should not be heaped on the latter as opportunists. It is thus fitting that when Flamininus in 196 ordered the public declaration of the freedom and restitution of the Argolid after the defeat of Nabis,

143 Liv. 27.30-31; Amandry 1980, 246; Tomlinson 1972, 165. 162 he did so through the voice of a herald at the Nemean games. An event more imbued with the enduring regionalism of the Argolid, in all of its uneasy diversity, could hardly be found.144

Changes

I would be myopic if I did not make ample room for new developments in the Argive cultic landscape that emerged over the course of two centuries. The religious picture is dominated by overwhelming continuity, yes, but not without new shades emerging with varying degrees of prominence. The quintessentially Hellenistic deity of Tyche makes her appearance in the Argive agora during the period in a temple constructed next to a sanctuary of Nemean Zeus.145 Though Pausanias

(2.20.3) speaks of the antiquity of the cult we cannot be entirely sure of the precise time at which it was introduced, but the rampant popularity of a cult of civic fortune in nearly every corner of the

Greek world during the period would lead us to surmise that it was introduced during the third century.146 The placement of her temple next to the other prominent traditional sites of the agora is telling, though perhaps unsurprising. (Tomlinson 1972, 215).

144 Liv. 34.40; Plut. Flam.12.5-6; the political dimensions of Greek freedom as declared by Flamininus in the Argolid are discussed by Dmitriev 2011, 204-208. 145 Tyche, of course, has a much longer history in Greek literature than simply the Hellenistic Period, though it is only then that we see her emerge as a prominent civic cult. Hesiod discusses the parentage of Tyche (Theog. 346ff), while Pindar Ol.12 refers to her parentage by Zeus and calls her ‘saving fortune’ (l.1-2: λίσσομαι, παῖ Ζηνὸς Ἐλευθερίου / Ἱμέραν εὐρυσθενέ᾽ ἀμφιπόλει, σώτειρα Τύχα.) Elsewhere, Pindar fr.43 (Paus. 4.30.6) is the first to mention her as a civic deity who supports the city (ᾖσε δὲ καὶ ὕστερον Πίνδαρος ἄλλα τε ἐς τὴν Τύχην καὶ δὴ καὶ Φερέπολιν ἀνεκάλεσεν αὐτήν). It is not until the third century, though, that we see the popular presence of cults of Tyche in various cities. 146 Paus.2.30.3, on the agora: πέραν δὲ τοῦ Νεμείου Διὸς Τύχης ἐστὶν ἐκ παλαιοτάτου ναός, εἰ δὴ Παλαμήδης κύβους εὑρὼν ἀνέθηκεν ἐς τοῦτον τὸν ναόν. Over against the Nemean Zeus is a temple of Fortune, which must be very old if it be the one in which Palamedes dedicated the dice that he had invented. 163

Alongside Tyche, the cult of Aidonis likewise appears in the Argive agora at some point in time, another deity – though of eastern inspiration, in this case – who enjoyed immense renown among the

Greeks after Alexander. The cult was popular among the city’s women, and his rituals observed in a dedicated building. The introduction of these new cults in the heart of the city’s agora is indication enough of the persistently civic character of religious devotion; neither of these cults appeared in more obscure corners of the city as we would expect in cases of individual or small-scale worship. The

‘international’ connections of the Argives do indeed seem to have imported at least one branch of a more organised panhellenic cult: the Dionysian technitai, headquartered in Teos. Argos was the headquarters of the local guild branch of these theatrical craftsmen, and a festival of Dionysos is attested epigraphically during the period (SEG 11.312), and by the construction of the Hellenistic theatre in the city. Yet none of these importations came at the expense of more ancestral regional cults, and neither did their arrival spark any motion towards the syncretism. For this there seemed to have been no cause or need; the new, as in the realm of politics, posed no implicit threat to the old.

The Argives’ evident preference for the latter is revelatory in itself: the relative humility of these exotic religious imports stands in stark contrast to the vast capital – economic or otherwise – expended in the aggrandizement of more traditional deities and festivals. Attachment to the ancestral superseded the appeal of the exotic; here, as elsewhere, stability reigned.

The cult of Athena Saitis, the Greek permutation of the Egyptian goddess Neith, had a regional sanctuary as well that is tempting to identify as a Hellenistic importation (Tomlinson 1972 207-208).

The cult’s dating, however, is far too nebulous to support such an assured conclusion, and to my mind the most likely occasion on which the cult might be said to have arrived in the region – if indeed we are

164 to speculate – would be coincidental with the return of Argive mercenaries recorded as serving in

Egypt during the early 340s (Tomlinson 1972, 151).

Isis, whose worship so conventionally epitomizes the Hellenistic penchant for religious syncretism, would not grace the territory of the Argolid with any prominence until long after the struggles of Aratos, Aristippos, or Antigonus had faded into distant memory.147 A partially preserved terrace excavated by Vollgraff bears an inscription dedicated to Isis and Serapis that was carved by craftsmen in the city that was by then a Roman possession.148 Roman, not Hellenistic, coinage bears the images of these deities who have been taken to be paradigmatic of the latter epoch with such enthusiasm. And it was the Romans, not their predecessors the kings of Macedon or the tyrants of the

Argolid, who would so visibly leave their mark on the region’s sanctuaries with such flamboyance. The eyes of a Hellenistic Argive visiting his region’s Heraion in the Imperial Period would be drawn the sanctuary’s more eccentric recent additions, unknown in his own time. Treading the path leading to the temple, he could not help but notice a statue of what appeared to be Orestes but bore the inscription ‘AVGVSTVS’ on its pediment. Venturing further he would come across an ornately jewelled golden statue of a peacock that was the gift of admiring Hadrian. We can only wonder at his reaction to gazing at the image of the goddess herself clothed by Nero, with perhaps unintentional resonance, in a robe of imperial purple with a crown of Roman gold perched on her brow.149

147 Shipley 2000, 163-168 for the perceived popularity of eastern cults such as Isis and Serapis who were imported to the Greek mainland, both deities along with Asklepios are said to have forged personal connections with their worshippers which thus reinforce the perceived shift away from civic and towards individual religion. 148 See Vollgraff’s articles in BCH 82 and 74 for the original inscription and attempts at dating. 149 From Paus.2.17.6: ἀναθήματα δὲ τὰ ἄξια λόγου βωμὸς ἔχων ἐπειργασμένον τὸν λεγόμενον Ἥβης καὶ Ἡρακλέους γάμον: οὗτος μὲν ἀργύρου, χρυσοῦ δὲ καὶ λίθων λαμπόντων Ἀδριανὸς βασιλεὺς ταὼν ἀνέθηκεν: ἀνέθηκε δέ, ὅτι τὴν ὄρνιθα ἱερὰν τῆς Ἥρας νομίζουσι. κεῖται δὲ καὶ στέφανος χρυσοῦς καὶ πέπλος πορφύρας, Νέρωνος ταῦτα ἀναθήματα. Of the votive offerings the following are noteworthy. There is an altar upon which is wrought in relief the fabled marriage of Hebe and Heracles. This is of silver, but the peacock dedicated by the Emperor Hadrian is of gold 165

Land & Settlement Patterns

Transitioning from the realm of gods to men, perhaps the best milieu in which to gauge the social and cultural climate of the Hellenistic Argolid is on the rather more human plane of settlement patterns, land organization, and population concentrations. In the region, as we shall see in Euboea and Boeotia, attempting to distinguish between the Classical and the Hellenistic is remarkably difficult given the material continuity between the two periods. But it is here, on this basic level of the landscape and countryside, that the majority of Hellenistic Argives would have lived out their daily lives in their ancestral homeland. It is here that we can best determine whether the vacillations of power among the Macedonian kings and their momentary favourites in Argos manifested themselves in any concrete manner among the ‘broader’ populace, or if they were merely the machinations of a court that was detached from the daily lives of the Argives. The evidence, as ever, is constricting and limited to the results of only partially published field survey projects that have most recently been consolidated by Alcock and Shipley;. Yet it is precisely here, on the level of the farm or homestead, in the small rural village, that any sharp disruption with the past, any revolutionary social or economic changes that have been attributed to the period would present themselves with little ambiguity if they did in fact occur. The reality of the on-the-ground impact of the Hellenistic Period’s political and social vagaries is, however, rather humble.

The countryside of the Argolid is, in short, is held to have been trapped in a downward demographic spiral akin to that described in other corners of the mainland. When casually asserted and gleaming stones. He dedicated it because they hold the bird to be sacred to Hera. There lie here a golden crown and a purple robe, offerings of Nero. 166 and without substantial evidentiary support, as Alcock writes, ‘such a gradualist non-explanation sheds no light on actual conditions in Greece’ (1993, 89). Tomlinson’s offhand remark that the population of the Argolid could – emphasis on the conditional – have been reduced by half comes readily to mind.150

The few evidentiary hints, however, suggest quite the opposite: the population of the Argolid was increasing, and rather than rural depopulation there is the sort of territorial competition that can only come from a vibrant population base. One of the few attested changes to the civic organization of

Argos is first attested epigraphically from c.330-300 BC (SEG 30.355), and involves the creation of a new civic subdivision called the pentekostyes that existed alongside the traditional phylai and phratriai, and perhaps had a territorial valence.151 The system, according to Piérart, must represent some form of integrative measure on the part of Argos proper, and likely was implemented in response to the city’s territorial gains thanks to the League of Corinth and Philip II’s favouritism. Such an organizational effort, it seems, is made in response to an increase of territory and population and thus even at the period’s early outset there are indications of growth. But this new system did not supersede traditional forms of social organization, and rather was grafted into an existing structure.

As noted, the city of Argos itself, and in many respects Epidauros as well, did not reach their peaks of either urban population or territory until the Hellenistic Period. Building campaigns and renovations of the region’s cities, the addition of gymnasia, stoa, or stadia to the urban landscape, all occurred during the Hellenistic Period (Shipley 2005). All was certainly not doom and gloom in the countryside, either. The four large survey projects in the Argolid itself and neighbouring regions of the

Peloponnese combine to form a remarkably coherent picture in which the landscape of the late

150 See introduction above. 151 Naturalised citizens had to be inscribed in a phyle, a phratra, and a pentekostys, personal names a sub-ethnic was sometimes added to name and patronymic, first the phyle, then the phratra later or even the pentekostyes SEG30.355, or a combination of the two SEG 33.288; Piérart 2000, 297-301. 167

Classical and early Hellenistic Period appears exceptionally active, characterized by the presence of numerous small sites generally identified as farmsteads (Alcock 1993, 48-49). Such prevalent agricultural activity at fairly small sites of consistent scale throughout the countryside is in keeping with the model of mixed farming and ranching that characterised the Argolid’s economy during the Archaic and Classical Periods. While ‘an impression of chaos and the universal dispossession of small landowners once reigned’ in the Hellenistic countryside , such new survey data lead us to note instead its persistent productivity (Alcock 1993, 73). Agricultural residence patterns do not gradually decline, and the survey evidence as a whole does not unequivocally point towards depopulation – at least certainly not to the extent that many like Tomlinson have presumed (Alcock 1993, 55). The record of destruction and disappearance of poleis is spotty at best – only a few seem to have been outright abandoned and some later re-founded on a new site, but such an urban ebb and flow is not altogether out of place in the Classical Period either.152 The scale, organization, and pace of agriculture in the early

Hellenistic Period continued to be the same as they had been in the Classical Period.

Territorial disputes between cities and regions are equally telling of the dynamism of the rural milieu. The recorded number of border disputes and contestations hits record highs in the Hellenistic

Period and necessitated frequent arbitration over fairly small issues (Alcock 1993, 118-119). It was, it would seem, business as usual for the highly competitive poleis of the region that were lumped, at times unhappily, into the same geographic confines. Elsewhere in the Peloponnese – notably Sparta – various outbreaks of social revolution with demands for redistribution of land are certainly noteworthy as they demonstrate that inter- and intra-regional tensions were not the result of a lack of men, but a lack of land. The sheer number of territorial disputes and small conflicts over ownership within and

152 Shipley 2005, citing Wells 1982. 168 without cities and regions would not have been possible had a substantial portion of the rural population emigrated at the period’s outset as many have supposed. Such occurrences on such a scale rather reveal high and competitive population densities inhabiting a finite amount of land (Alcock 1993,

91).

Greek Conclusions, Roman Epilogue

Adopting a broader chronological perspective reveals that many of the trends typically associated with the Hellenistic mainland were instead the product of Roman administration during the

Early Imperial Period. It is then that we see the social fabric of the Argolid altered both dramatically.

The demands of Roman taxation shackled the cities of the Argolid with an annual burden which forced them to adopt more intensive agricultural practices. Public and private debt led to a concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer large landowners in a pattern that clearly manifests itself in the first century BC (Alcock 1993, 110-118). The major trend towards nucleated settlements and the organisation of land into large estates does not occur until the Early Imperial Period, and this comes at the decline of individual landowners and small homesteads. Traces of rural settlement activity gradually decrease as the Imperial Period progresses, giving the impression of an increasingly empty landscape. The economic break further manifests itself in the conversion of previously arable land into ranching pasture; along with the concentration of elite land holdings this forms a very different economic model than what had prevailed during the late Classical and early Hellenistic Periods. The

Macedonians showed no interest in reorganizing an economic structure that by all accounts was functioning smoothly when they assumed control of the region. It was instead instability in land

169 ownership and uncertain territorial settlements on a large scale at the hands of Roman administrators that provoked a shift away from citizen estates and towards the concentration of territorial wealth in the hands of few – oftentimes non-native – landlords.

Roman imperatores were far more heavy-handed with their Argive subjects than the

Macedonian basileis and their tyrants had been, and again it is not until the region passed into Roman control that we see large-scale territorial realignments and other signs of invasive governance emerge with drastic ramifications for local culture. Pompey, for instance, settled 20,000 Cilician pirates at

Dyme in the north-western Peloponnese (Plut.Pomp.28.4); Caesar and his successors founded cities and colonies, notably Patrai, whose success came at the economic, cultic, and territorial expense of much of the north-western Peloponnese.153 The religious landscape of the broader region was similarly changed with the redistribution of cultic images and the promotion of the imperial cult. Such patterns, equally true of the Peloponnese in general, must have had a parallel effect in the Argolid.154

Yet until then, the religious geography of the Hellenistic Argolid was marked by two things: first, the continued prominence of traditional cults that had long been important to the region’s various communities; and second, the expansion, renovation, and elaboration of these cults’ sanctuaries and associated festivals. While the cults of Hera, Zeus, and Asklepios that we have discussed in detail above all date to at least the Classical Period, they all enjoyed a surge in popularity both from within the region and without that began in the fourth century and hit its zenith in the third.

153 Alcock 1993, 135-140. For instance at Patrai cult objects are taken up and redistributed among other centres, Paus. 7.18.8-9, images like those of Dionysos from Kalydon were taken from their original centres and brought to Patrai, Paus. 7.21.1, and this combined with the city’s economic primacy translated into negative effects on the region’s other cities. 154 The varied impact of the Imperial Cult on the religious (and political) geography of the Imperial Peloponnese is discussed by Alcock 1993 at 180-195; by all accounts Roman imperial religious efforts had a far more drastic effect than Hellenistic ruler cult – which is conspicuously absent for much of the region. 170

The rule of the Macedonian kings or their tyrants created an environment that by all accounts was beneficial to such local cults: many sanctuaries received royal benefaction, their festivals were announced through theoric embassies that circulated throughout the Greek world, and their athletic competitions drew athletes and dignitaries from a similarly broad base. It is striking, here as we shall see elsewhere, that these communities of the Argolid instinctively chose to promote those local cults that had long been dear to them, rather than discarding them in favour of new influences from the enlarged Greek world.

On an economic and territorial level the late-Classical patterns in the Argolid continued unchanged during the Hellenistic Period. The fourth and third centuries showed no profound change in settlement patterns, and this largely continued into the second century as well. For the average Argive in the countryside, life would have remained much the same as it had been before Chaeronea or the campaigns of Alexander. The smallest scale of local life persisted, and it was not until the coming of

Rome that the Argolid would be reshaped on its most fundamental levels. The winds of change blew much later, and they were borne from the West, not the North. While at first they were felt only slightly in the corners of the Argolid, once the storm had arrived it raged over the Peloponnese as a whole as the Argolid was yet again caught up in a conflict on a scale vastly beyond its realm of control.

Interaction with the Romans proved to be a very different beast than the relatively stability and continuity the region had known under the Macedonians.

Argos was, of course, not alone in its fate. It along with Sparta, Corinth, and Achaea was tossed into one administrative district by the Romans and in the process the delicate facets of local culture and tradition that had remained in fragile place during the Hellenistic Period were either scattered or broken. Change was not, as it ever is, instantaneous or without cause. While the seeds of such drastic

171 subsequent developments may be seen in the Hellenistic Period one must acknowledge that Rome cultivated them with typical speed and efficacy towards rapid fruition in the Argolid as in the entire

Peloponnese. In this sense Hera’s words to Zeus in Book IV of the Iliad take on an unsettlingly prophetic tone and may well have also been addressed with equal pertinence to the Romans as she says:

ἤτοι ἐμοὶ τρεῖς μὲν πολὺ φίλταταί εἰσι πόληες

Ἄργός τε Σπάρτη τε καὶ εὐρυάγυια Μυκήνη:

τὰς διαπέρσαι ὅτ᾽ ἄν τοι ἀπέχθωνται περὶ κῆρι:

τάων οὔ τοι ἐγὼ πρόσθ᾽ ἵσταμαι οὐδὲ μεγαίρω.

εἴ περ γὰρ φθονέω τε καὶ οὐκ εἰῶ διαπέρσαι,

οὐκ ἀνύω φθονέουσ᾽ ἐπεὶ ἦ πολὺ φέρτερός ἐσσι.

ἀλλὰ χρὴ καὶ ἐμὸν θέμεναι πόνον οὐκ ἀτέλεστον:

My own three favourite cities… are Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae. Sack them whenever you may

be displeased with them. I shall not defend them and I shall not care. Even if I did, and tried to

stay you, I should take nothing by it, for you are much stronger than I am, but I will not have my

own work wasted

-Homer, Iliad 4.51-57

172

Chapter II

Practically the Middle of Greece: Euboea

ἐρῶ δ᾽ οὖν οἵοις ἀνδράσι καὶ ὅντινα βίον ζῶσι συνέβαλον ἐν μέσῃ σχεδόν τι τῇ Ἑλλάδι

So, then, I shall now describe the character and the manner of life of some people that I met in practically the middle of Greece

-Dio Chrysostom, Oration 7.1

Introduction: Cursed Geography

In December of 1623 the English poet John Donne lay convalescing after an illness that came perilously close to costing him his life. From near death, poetry flowed with remarkable speed as barely three weeks later he had penned and published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a collection of insights gained from peering at the brink. Among them we find his particular turn of phrase ‘no man is an island, entire of itself’; a sentiment that has equal resonance in Hellenistic Greece as it did to Elizabethan England. In the context of the former, no man was an island, independent of his fellows. The sense of commonality and shared destiny that existed among the residents of a given community, and among those communities themselves, made such isolation unthinkable in the Greek mindset. The metaphor holds true at scale as well. No city was an island, no region was an island, and

173 no island was truly an island, entire of itself and isolated from the forces that guided their contemporaries. While the Greek world can be seen as a coherent set of continuous regions, each with their own political and social climate, they all too often bled into one another at the margins in a way that made their histories inseparable. Euboea’s topography at first glance may give it the impression of isolation and insulation, but in practice its links to the mainland were taught and percussive. The

Greeks, unlike Donne, did not only learn this lesson on their deathbed.

The island’s geography was its persistent curse. Critically poised between the Aegean Sea and the western coast of the Hellenic mainland, Euboea was the logical stepping stone from West to East, or East to West, and thus was variously traversed, settled, razed, sacked, and subjugated with equal enthusiasm by Greeks and non-Greeks alike. The waters around Euboea were too narrow and too shallow to afford it any kind of true insulation from external politics. Developments far away from the island itself splashed onto its shores, and its own internal divisions at times spilled outward.

Such external rather than internal exchange among the island’s communities is hardly a surprise given its topography. The contemporary visitor to Euboea quickly notes that passage from the

Attic coast to the Island’s eastern cities by sea is much easier than the shorter but far more difficult land routes which connect its principal cities of Chalkida, Eretria, Carystos, and Histiaia. One example suffices to prove the point: from the Attic port of Raphina to Carystos is barely a 20km voyage by boat that takes roughly an hour, while the three and a half hour long land route is over 75km of winding roads that are taxing even when travelling by car. It comes as little surprise that Eretrian contact with

Attica would be more frequent – for better or worse – than with its isolated southern neighbour of

Carystos. Kyme, the island’s eastern-facing port, is only accessible by a 45km passage through the plains in Euboea’s central valleys, making the trek difficult even from Eretria. As a consequence of the

174 island’s topography, the principal communities of Euboea are inherently outward facing, given the facility of their external links, and the difficulty of domestic transport. It is often easier for one to cross into the island from the outside than it is to move among its constituent communities.

This has always the case in Euboean history, from its archaic colonization by the Homeric

Abantes to the subsequent arrival of the Persians, Athenians, Boeotians, Macedonians, and Romans whose tracks remained on the island’s territory with varying degrees of permanence.155 The frequency with which Euboea played host (willingly or not) to such a diverse group of guests – welcome or otherwise – has led at least one author to characterise the island’s history as ‘un état de sujétion quasi- permanent… tout au long de son histoire’ (Knoepfler 2001a, 427).

To some, this would make the study of regional dynamics all but impossible, but to me, so much the better. If Euboea was, as Knoepfler has put it, gasping under the fardel of subjection for much of its history, then such subjection was at the hands of other Greeks more frequently and more violently than Macedonians, and took place with the most profound effect during the Classical, rather than the Hellenistic Period. What happens, then, when the island found itself relatively free of its ancestral shackles at precisely the same moment when the horizons of the Greek world had expanded far beyond Hellas? With such newfound freedom of movement, did Euboea turn inward, towards itself, or outward, embracing the breadth of the world that had been torn open by the conquests of

Alexander? The answer lies somewhere in the middle. Euboea, as I shall argue, is one of the few regions of Greece which we can hold as being liberated from Classical-era mechanisms of colonial control and economic subjugation by the political geography of the Hellenistic Period. Athenian control

155 The semi-mythical Abantes make their first appearance in the Homeric catalogue of ships (Hom. Il. 2.536-556), and are then described as inhabiting seven cities of the island. For other archaic references to the Island and its inhabitants, see Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004, 644. See also Statius, Thebaid, 7.368-371. 175 of the island made it essentially a tributary of Attica, but such systematic exploitation of Euboea was ended with the demise of Athenian external influence which came with the rise of the Macedonians.

The island thus becomes the reversal of the typical paradigm: it was only after Chaeronea that

Euboea had the relative autonomy necessary to come to terms with its own regional character, and to begin weaving its own web of relations. Only after Philip and Alexander was it able to begin creeping out from the umber of Athens, and in the decades and centuries that followed Euboea’s communities started interacting with far more of their contemporaries than just their immediate neighbour to the west. This was thanks, ultimately, to Macedonian control of the Attic coast which severed the island’s hegemonic dependence on the Athenians, and encouraged Euboea’s communities to turn towards each other, as well as to look outwards.

The massive island – the second largest in the Greek world after Crete – extends 1,200 stades from Cape Kenaion in the Northwest to Geraistos in the south, earning it the well-deserved nickname makris.156 But for all of its geographical expanse, the politics of the island have been considered to be more modest. To ancient and modern eyes alike Euboea has always paled in comparison to Attica, whose well-documented renown has long drawn interest west across the Euboean gulf causes it to be considered in relation to Athens almost exclusively.157 In no small measure, Euboea has been passed over or ignored simply because it is not Athens. It has also fallen off the scholarly radar in part because it does not sit comfortably inside the standards and norms that are expected of the Greek world, which are themselves derived from the exceptional – but archetypal – examples of Sparta and Athens. When

156 Callm.Hymn. 420, Strabo 10.1.2. Steph.Byz. 283.20. Cf. Reber, Hansen, and Ducrey 2004, 644-645. 157 The sheer proliferation of scholarship discussing Euboea only as an illustrative intermediary in understanding the rise of Macedon and decline of Athenian power is striking. Among such studies we can count Teegarden 2013, Parke 1929, Cawkwell 1978, Brunt 1969, Buck 1970, and most recently Landucci and Bertoli’s contributions to the 2014 edited volume on the Island. 176 we envision a region of Greece, particularly in the Classical Period, we expect to find cities, a relatively high degree of urbanization, several poleis, each with its own chōra, interacting in a network composed of similar polities.158 This, after all, was what made Greece unique.

Euboea does not present such comfortable units for analysis; it rather necessitates looking beyond the polis as the fundamental unit of regional study (Vlassopoulos 2007). This is an island in which the polis is not the main or dominant form of nucleated habitation. Ancient testimonia by

Pseudo-Skylax (58) and Demosthenes (23.313) claiming that the island is a tetrapolis are both revelatory and misleading. Revelatory in that by the late Classical Period there were indeed four principal poleis on the island, and misleading in that these are not the only social groupings to be found in Euboea.

It is unsurprising that these two sources would refer to Euboea as a τετράπολις, given their

Athenian provenance, and the usage speaks to the legacy of Athenian imperialism in the region. The

Attic coast immediately opposite Euboea, comprising the cities of Oenoe, Marathon, Probalinthos, and

Tricorythos is traditionally referred to by the Athenians as the τετράπολις, and thus two possibilities present themselves. The first is that the Athenians simply considered Euboea to be the logical extension of the north-eastern Attic coast around the plain of Marathon, and lumped it in with their extant geographical appellations. The second is that the Athenians viewed their own work on the island as being akin to the subjugation of northeast Attica by Theseus, and by labelling it τετράπολις

158 This was a point that was raised explicitly by Josh Ober in a lecture delivered to the Global Antiquities workshop held at McGill University in October, 2014. In his keynote address, Ober stressed that a dense urban network in which democracy feature prominently among constituent cities created an environment conducive to the spread of information and innovation. The success of the Greek world of the late Classical and Hellenistic Period thus become contingent or urbanism and division of power in a meritocratic society. He has indirectly alluded to this overarching theory in his 2008 monograph, as well as his publications which I cite as 2014a and 2014b. For other instances of this prevailing attitude, I refer the reader to the voluminous output of the Copenhagen Polis Centre. 177 they were therefore re-enacting their own foundational myth. In either case, though, ancient use of the terminology is not meant to be purely geographical, and can be somewhat misleading.

The resultant inference to be made, according to Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey, is that ‘there may have been over 100 nucleated settlements, of which only a dozen or so were poleis in the Archaic and

Early Classical Period’ (2004, 644). By the time of Demosthenes, the number of principal poleis had been reduced to four, but this does not mean that these other nucleated settlements had faded into oblivion. Care ought to be taken to avoid equating political organisation of a territory to its cultural absorption, and while various poleis which were once independent – Athena Diades (no. 364) and Dion

(no. 368), for instance – had been incorporated into Histiaia (no. 372) by the mid fourth-century, this does not automatically imply that they had simultaneously surrendered their local attachments. The same could be said of Grynchai (no. 371) and Styra’s (no. 377) demotion to the status of Eretrian demes at roughly the same time.159

Instead, Euboea presents an odd patchwork of diverse settlements ranging from large and prominent poleis to regions that are almost entirely devoid of an urban core well into the Late Classical

Period.160 A glance at contemporary Euboea again reinforces the point: the island’s topography does not naturally lend itself well to large urban settlements, given the often isolating character of the terrain. Today between Eretria and Kyme there is a long string of largely agricultural villages interspersed throughout the plains, and in spite of the small distances separating them, each still remains a distinct community. One can imagine this being even more the case at a time when transport and communication were far more onerous. The geographic diversity of this island, which naturally constrains political unity, must be borne in mind when considering its political trajectory.

159 The above references are in accordance with the system established by Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004. 160 Further references to the diversity of settlement in the region can be found at ibid. 644-648. 178

Those poleis that we may rightly consider regionally dominant beyond their original chōra –

Eretria, Chalcis, Histiaia, and Carystos – only became so in the third century after a long and gradual process of expansion; many of what were later attested as their demes would have been independent settlements throughout the Archaic and Classical Periods.161 In this sense Euboea is vastly different than Boeotia, to which we shall turn next, which is a region with a history of nucleated urban settlement that begins in the Bronze Age and extends through the Archaic and Classical Periods. The same contrast holds true with Attica, which had a different model of hegemonic control over the region by one city and the gradual disappearance of other urban centres. Instead, the trend toward nucleated urbanised settlement in Euboea had only just begin by the rise of the Macedonians, while among its neighbours this had been taking place for centuries.

As with the Argolid many of Euboea’s principal urban players emerged at a much later date than might be expected. Contrary to the impression given by many– Knoepfler, Reber, and others – the

‘Classical traditions’ against which the region’s Hellenistic development have been compared are not as timeless as they may appear – and neither are they as clearly defined. Only thirteen of the more than one hundred attested settlements in the region were identifiable as poleis by the middle of the fourth century.162 Essentially nothing is known of the history of Chalcis before 506, save for the semi- mythical Lelantine wars of the murky archaic past.163 Its demonym is only attested internally in the late sixth/early fifth century, (IG I3 40.5.21), and the organization of its territory into demes does not first grace our epigraphic record until c.315-285 (F.Delphes.III.1.424.1-2). A similar situation is at work with

161See below for more specific instances of poleis and smaller settlements that were incorporated into larger Euboean poleis, again enumerated at Reber, Hansen, and Ducrey 2004, 644-648. Reber 2002 and Knoepfler 1971 both discuss the oddly popular example of Styra by Eretria. 162 Reber, Hasen, & Ducrey 2004, 634-644. 163 Known from Hdt. 5.77 when Chalcis joins an abortive attack on Athens, and discussed in Reber, Hansen, and Ducrey 2004’s entries on Chalcis and Eretria. 179

Eretria: the city and region’s history before 500 is a blank slate marked only by retrojection and extrapolation, and our first internal and external hints at the existence of a coherent urban community date from the late sixth and early fifth centuries.164 The earliest manifestations of Eretria’s much- studied systems of phylai and demes date no later than c.500 and c.450, respectively (IG XII.9.241.37).

It is only at the beginning of the fourth century that there are clear traces of structures commonly associated with a vibrant civic community. This relatively late urban development of Eretria is noteworthy when considering the allegations of its Hellenistic decline: several scholars posit that the city’s politics and structures withered under the Macedonians, but how could this be the case if they had just emerged? Eretria’s complex structure of demes, phylai, and other vectors of social organisation developed and crystallised under the Macedonians, they did not merely endure their control. It was only during their hegemony that complex polis structures emerged.

The early histories of Histiaia/Oreos and Carystos are equally nebulous, though in the case of both we can presume that whatever semblance of a polis community had emerged by 500 was handily swept away first by the Persians, and then again by the Athenians. By the time Philip expanded his dominion through the Greek mainland, then, the cities that comprise the rhetorical Euboean tetrapolis had a coherent communal history that stretched back only a century and a half at best, and only several generations in the latter two cases. It is not as if any of them entered the Hellenistic Period with a set of local traditions and civic attitudes that had hardened over the course of many centuries. I ought also to add the observation that for most of their early civic history, these cities were dominated by the Athenians with varying degrees and frequency of interference, through invasive mechanisms to which we shall shortly turn.

164 Hansen, Reber, & Ducrey 2004, 651-652 for the discussion of early Eretria. The first internal attestation is SEG 41.725B, and the external attestations are Hdt.5.99.1, 5.102.3, also Knoepfler 2001a, no. 1.110-111. 180

To gain a fuller picture of Euboea’s regional history one must look beyond the walls of these regional players – and indeed beyond the walls of poleis in general – and towards the countryside, whence the island derived much of its wealth and importance.165 Simply because Euboea’s poleis are only attested from a fairly late date does not mean that the island was uninhabited: the famous example of Lefkandi attests to the island’s continuous Dark Age history, as do the early settlements near Eretria. The largely non-urban settlement pattern of Euboea was nonetheless agriculturally and demographically productive, and there is great variety among the island’s various communities. These micro-regions were and remained distinct – at times antagonistically so – until Rome brought them all into line under a single yoke.166 The fits and spurts of the Euboean koinon provide the best testament against such a notion, as the attractive force of federalism was recurrently opposed by the repulsive character of the island’s geography and ethnic heterogeneity. As Denis Knoepfler has recently highlighted, Euboea’s diversity of ethnic origins was yet another source of fundamental disunity.167

Despite a shared Ionian dialect and an epic tradition which would lump all Euboeans under the generic heading of ‘Abantes,’ subsequent waves of colonization made the island’s ethnic geography equally diverse as its topography by the early Classical Period.168 The arrival of various Thessalian groups

(Perrhaibes and Ellopes) in Histiaia, and the Dryope population of Carystos (Thuc. 7.57.4), not to mention the liberal sprinkling of Athenian settlers after the Persian wars, all further serve to dilute any potential for homogeneity and extra-political unity.

165 The etymology of the Island’s name – ‘rich in cattle’ – is an unsubtle hint as to the source of its economic productivity, though income of livestock was augmented by rich agricultural fertility. 166 See Knoepfler 2015’s early pages for an enlightening discussion of the limitations of a sense of pan-Euboean solidarity. 167 Knoepfler 2015. 168 Hom.Il, 2.536-545, Nonnos, Dionysiaka 13.158-168, see also Statius Theb. 7.368-371 and Sakellariou 2009, all discussed in Knoepfler (2015). 181

This is not to say that there were no ties that bound the Euboeans; the shared cults and common festivals which drew the island’s various populations together on a regular basis will soon be a subject of my analysis, and the Euboeans’ intermittent attempts at some form of federal unification have long been a topic of hot debate.169 Neither does this make the island’s regional history impenetrable. Euboea rather stands as yet another stark reminder of the necessity of reconsidering our most basic assumptions about a region, its peoples, and its history, even if they have infiltrated the footnotes of a century’s worth of scholarship.

To understand Hellenistic Euboea, then, Athenocentrism must be put aside and one must look instead to the island’s particular chronology and political geography. The region’s history during the period, as I have mentioned, has always been viewed by contrast with a Classical tradition whose coherence has been vastly overestimated by generations of scholars. To peel away these layers of tradition, we must examine the current state of Euboean scholarship – both of the Hellenistic Period and more generally – to reveal precisely how the historiographical lens has been ground. From there we shall turn towards a period which provides the most illustrative contrast and prequel for the island’s Hellenistic experience: its fourth century domination by the Athenians. As Attica’s influence waned and the balance of power shifted towards Macedon, Euboea came into a vastly different phase in its regional history that was marked first by uncertainty during the Wars of the Successors and under the brief Boeotian occupation, and then by Macedonian dominion until the more violent advent of the

Romans.

169 Again cf. the recapitulation of relevant scholarship of the federal character of Euboea in Knoepfler 2015. The scholarly tradition date to Montesquieu, and continues through the 18th and 19th centuries with various dismissive judgements of Euboea. The principal modern studies are Larsen’s chapter on Euboea in 1968, preceded by Wallace 1956, and Swoboda and Hermann 1913, 442-443. Also formative are the treatments of Ziebarth 1915, 172-173, and Geyer 1925, 439-440. 182

To gain a better grasp of Euboea’s trajectory we shall consider its history through our main categories of analysis: internal and external relations, the civic and religious realms, and the region’s economy while under the sway of the Successor Kings in the third century. After considering this throughout the island as a whole, I shall zoom in on one of the most frequently overlooked regions of

Euboea – the Carysteia – and gauge the practical, on-the-ground impact of Hellenistic Period by considering how – and indeed if – it left its mark on patterns of settlement, housing, agriculture, and the other aspects of daily life. To close, we will look forward towards the period of Roman dominance.

Not Athens: Euboea in Contemporary Scholarship

The corpus of Euboean scholarship is at once vast and disparate. The region’s long history of excavation, particularly at Eretria, by first Swiss and later American and Greek archaeologists has produced an abundance of epigraphic material that in some measure counterbalances the island’s rare appearances among ancient authors.170 Our understanding of such epigraphic material is forever indebted to the vast body of work done by Denis Knoepfler, and our archaeological tableau has been painted by the various studies of Karl Reber and Donald Keller.171 Yet in the midst of so many narrowly- focussed, specialist studies we have no synthetic view of such varied types of data considered in context with one another, and no one has yet ventured to provide a systematic overview of the

170 Ducrey 2005’s retrospective of forty years of Swiss excavations at Eretria provides an illuminating summary of the scope and scale of the archaeological work undertaken, along with extensive bibliography. His list of Swiss members of the école française d’Athènes at 555 is also quite helpful for identifying further scholarship. 171 Knoepfler’s faculty page at the Collège de France’s website is exhaustive, as is the bibliography appended to Reber, Ducrey, & Hansen 2004. A helpful bibliography of research relating to the survey of the Carysteia has been compiled by the Canadian Institute in Greece. I owe my sincere thanks to Donald Keller for kindly sharing digital copies of his unpublished PhD dissertation and other articles. 183 region’s narrative history. The pieces of the puzzle have been well-carved and identified, but not yet put together. What emerges is an historiographical situation in which we have a remarkable understanding of the finest details of Euboean life – ephebic traditions, civic formulae, housing patterns, proxenia and other decrees, but no broader context in which to situate them. Epigraphists have often been engaging in a dialogue only with other epigraphists, archaeologists with archaeologists, and narrative historians have only ventured to the island insofar as Athenian history permits them.172

Hints of answers to the ‘bigger questions’ are thus scattered throughout this vast body of work, hidden among the assumptions that guide each scholar, and gird each study.173

Unsurprisingly given the island’s location, interpretations of Euboea’s Classical history have been framed almost exclusively with reference to Athens, in a manner that brings the pro-Athenian bias common to many scholars to the fore. Be it with regards to Ephebic traditions (Chankowski 1993), a nebulous council of 500 (Knoepfler 1985), or laws against tyranny (Teegarden 2013), Euboea has only been considered vis-à-vis its domineering neighbour, and all too frequently found deficient. The

Euboean instance is often treated as illustrative only inasmuch as it provides more insight into a similar dynamic in beloved Attica; to quote Wallace in the case of one city, ‘indeed if future excavation should substantially increase our knowledge of Eretria, as it probably will, the city will be of interest partly because it is, on a smaller scale, in this as in other ways, so similar to Athens’ (1947, 146).

This scholarly preoccupation with Athens has created a situation in which Euboean narrative history essentially concludes with the struggle between Demosthenes and Philip II of Macedon over control of the island – and it is a decidedly unhappy ending. Scholars have been quick to pick favourites

172 See note 3 above. 173 Knoepfler’s work perhaps best exemplifies this trend, as his analysis of the finer details of inscriptions is without equal, but many of the observations he puts forth in specific contexts do not filter up into his overarching analysis of the period and the region. 184 in Euboea’s transition from Athenian to Macedonian hegemony in the closing years of the decade, making it seem like the victory of the latter was a death knell to self-governance and freedom in the

Greek world. Pierre Brunt, for instance, readily condemned Philip’s intervention as ‘gravely misjudged’ and ‘flagrant’ (1969, 261 and 264, respectively), serving only to solidify Greek resistance against him.

Euboea was caught in the middle, and Athens, it seems, should have better conducted itself in order to secure its ideological victory (Parke 1929).

The impact of the invective of Demosthenes against Macedonian intervention is noteworthy in

Euboea’s scholarly tradition, as is the general oversight of the brutal Athenian occupation of the island.

Burke was less subtle when he wrote in 1984 of the 350s and 340s that ‘for a while, at least, Euboea was safe from Philip’ (120), as if Athenian domination is somehow inherently preferable to

Macedonian.174 Marcello Bertoli’s discussion of Euboea in the first half of the fourth century is, to his great credit, among the few to be free of this pro-Athenian stance. He smoothly captures the essence of the period with his summation that ‘questa tensione tra autonomia e dipendenza segno significativamente la storia dell’Eubea’ (2014, 223). The context in which Bertoli’s chapter was published is telling of the broader state of Euboean scholarship for the period: the edited collection, focussing entirely on Euboea, devotes only fifty-six pages of a 284 page volume to the Hellenistic and

Imperial Periods (Bearzot & Landucci, 2014). There is a great deal of interest here, as ever, in the politics of the fourth century and Euboea’s relationship with Athens, but other contributions tend to gloss over the third century as simple maintenance of the status quo by the Macedonians governing

174 Brunt 1969 also discusses this infectious invective of Demosthenes. 185 through a Euboean koinon. Once Athens exits the scene, so too does the majority of scholarly interest in its insular neighbour.175

An American historian, David Teegarden, most explicitly captures this pro-Athenian, pro- democratic bias in a chapter from his recent, subtly-titled monograph Death to Tyrants (2013). Philip is cast as a maniacal tyrant bent on absolutism, described as ‘the most serious threat to democratic governance in the mainland since – at least – Sparta’s victory in the Peloponnesian War’ (Teegarden

2013, 109). Philip’s intervention in the Greek world – contrasted with the ambitions of Athenian foreign policy – enabled him to ‘acquire loyal puppet regimes on the cheap; anti-democrats would be able to dominate their domestic opponents. It thus was with reason the Demosthenes feared for the future of Democracy’ (Teegarden 2013, 109). While this is an extreme example, it is nonetheless revelatory: pro-Athenian sentiments have coloured Euboean history in the shades of pro-democratic, anti-Macedonian bias, and the island’s transfer into Macedonian hands is depicted as a fall from grace.

The terms of crisis and decline that form the period’s vocabulary elsewhere recur here, with the usual undertones. Reber, discussing housing in Hellenistic Eretria, describes the city and island as being struck by the ‘general economic crisis that troubled the Greek world in early Hellenistic times’ (2007,

288) as a causal factor but provides no further elaboration or citation of this ‘general crisis’. Elsewhere he erroneously claims that in this region ‘we are undoubtedly confronted by a general phenomenon in the early Hellenistic Period, a notable reduction in farmsteads in most of the Greek countryside’ (2007,

287), and later describes an ‘almost total lack of Hellenistic habitation sites in the countryside as

175 Landucci 2014 is particularly indicative of this trend, as in her discussion of the relationship between Euboea and Macedon she focusses almost exclusively on Euboea and Macedon qua Athens. Once the Macedonians gain the upper hand, she then essentially writes off the next century of Macedonian occupation as the Antigonids ruling through some form of Euboean koinon (244-248). The lack of sources, to her, makes the high Hellenistic Period impenetrable (230). 186 occurred elsewhere in Hellenistic Greece’ (2007, 288). I shall return to this later, suffice it to say for the moment that Alcock’s aforementioned arguments suggest that this is at least ambiguous given the impossibility of specific dating and the inability to distinguish late Classical sites from early Hellenistic sites with any clarity.176

Knoepfler similarly echoes the sentiment that Euboea is representative of the general impoverishment of the mainland: ‘commune à la plupart des poleis hellénistiques… cette détérioration des finances publiques doit avoir eu à érétrie des causes tant générales que particulières’ (2001a, 300-

301). The consequences of this are devaluation of currency, shifts in market patterns, and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small minority. As ever, material impoverishment both indicates and causes cultural and religious impoverishment on the local level – a connection that resonates through over a century of scholarship with no contention. Nilsson in 1906, describing the

Euboean games of Hermes during the Hellenistic Period, dismisses them as being ‘fast alle inhaltsleer’

(206); Chankowski unflinchingly follows his lead 83 years later by describing late Hellenistic Euboean festivals as ‘généralement dépourvue de rites de type ancien’ without providing any further detail

(1993, 20).

Civic traditions, as with religious traditions, become hollow shells of their former prestige by the third and second centuries. Knoepfler describes the proliferation of Eretrian grants of proxeny as being indicative of the gradual devaluation of such privileges, and of the inflation of the market, as it were, of civic accolades that became rampant as the period progresses.177 He arrives at this conclusion

176 Alcock 1993 discusses Euboea passim at 30-39 and 83-111 but as ever her focus is on the Roman settlement of the mainland. The Hellenistic Period, as we have seen with Argos, is grouped with the Classical Period and thus the advent of the Romans again becomes the point of divergence with regards to material culture. 177 Knoepfler 2001a, 302-304, 426-428. Also 2001b, 1362. See my discussion of proxenia in the preceding chapter on Argos, particularly the works of Mack 2015 and Mitchell 1997. 187 based simply on an observation of the frequency with which various privileges associated with proxeny were granted in our surviving epigraphic corpus. Describing the period after 260, Knoepfler writes of

Eretria that the city ‘sombra dès alors dans une décadence irremediable,’ thus explaining the lack of such awards, or indeed that ‘elle fut temporairement étranglée par la tutelle macédonienne, plus pésante à partir des années 260’ (2001b, 1364). The Hellenistic island is thus made to have stagnated after the advent of Macedon.

Karl Schefold, writing in a relatively obscure article from the 1960s published in the middling journal Archaeology provides a dissenting voice, though he falls back on some unfortunate generalizations. Providing an overview of Euboean architecture in fairly general terms, he observes that the island in general, and Eretria specifically, ‘seems to have enjoyed a long period of peace, first an ally of Athens, and later independent and allied to the Macedonians’ (1968, 281). Noting that some of the richest tombs discovered on the island date to the Early Hellenistic Period, he concludes that

Euboea was able to flourish in its new independence from Athens until it came under the domination of Rome after the mid-second century. Up until then, though, it remained connected to a broader network of Greek cities, and enjoyed a great deal of material prosperity during this rather tranquil period. Despite this, he too falls back on old prejudices against the period: after describing the general boom in Euboea during the Hellenistic Period, he then promptly goes on to say that ‘Eretria’s great period had been the Homeric one of the eighth and seventh centuries’ (281). Poetic legend, it seems, has more allure than demographic prosperity.

A point that I have made above merits repetition: these fatalistic and disparaging generalizations of Hellenistic Euboea are made in response to the perception of a Classical tradition which can neither be fully known for lack of substantial evidence, nor can it be thought to have so

188 strongly crystallized by the beginning of the Hellenistic Period. Euboea has been judged against a

Classical standard which perhaps never existed, and certainly was not as rigid as we may assume. The constituent communities of the isalnd only emerge as visible and independent players in the realms of external diplomacy, religion, and trade in the Hellenistic Period; it is only then that they creep out of their obscurity as Athenian subjects in the preceding centuries.

Yet in this we see how deeply the typical view of the period as one of mainland decline has penetrated various layers of scholarship: for lack of a revised general narrative arguing to the contrary, the broader assumption manifests itself even in such specific contexts as a discussion of a single decree from Eretria. It then leads many commentators, following in the footsteps of Droysen and Gschnitzer, to adopt the same logic that at its origin was little more than subjective dismissal. When we re-align our operating principles and discard the baggage of perceived Hellenistic decline, a vastly different pattern emerges from Hellenistic Euboea as elsewhere. Before we proceed forward, however, we must make a closer examination of the island’s history in the Classical Period to better gauge its starting point as it emerges into the Hellenistic arena.

A Preferable Imperialism: Euboea under the Athenian Yoke

Many different terms have been used by modern scholars to describe Athens’ relationship with

Euboea in the fifth century, some conciliating, some apologetic, and yet others outright evasive.

‘Friendship’ (philia), ‘military obligation’ (symmachia), and similarly amicable words used by the

Athenians themselves had been duly copied by later scholars, but such pacific vocabulary serves only to dress subjugation and imperialism in less frightening clothing (Knoepfler 2015). While some would

189 perhaps be uncomfortable thinking of democratic Athens as an abusive power, the Euboean experience of the fifth century should be described as what it was: the systematic exploitation of the island and its cities in the service of Athenian economic and strategic interests. This came at the expense of local autonomy and regional culture, and was implemented by the Athenians with a directness and severity that left a far more lasting mark on Euboea than anything it would experience afterwards.

It is thanks to recurrent Athenian intervention that we can classify the Euboean poleis I have mentioned above as being either ‘emerging or ‘consolidating’ urban communities by the mid-fourth century, as it was only then that they were recovering from over a century of domination by their neighbours to the West. Other communities in the island – from local farmsteads to ports and trading posts – were more deeply impacted, for better or worse, by Athenians than by Macedonians.

As I have mentioned above, the Island’s geography was its recurrent curse, and this observation holds true with regards to the east and the west equally. I would be remiss if I were to omit some mention of the Persian invasion of Euboea. After quelling the sighs of revolt on the Ionian coast and

Naxos, the Persian punitive expedition sailed across the Aegean and Euboea was among the first targets of the impassioned reprisal against Athens for having singed the Great King’s beard. Eretria and

Athens were conspicuous among those who had fanned the flames of Ionian revolt, and the former was reprimanded on the way to the latter.178 In 490 the Persians laid siege to Eretria and the city was later conquered after its betrayal by two leading citizens (Hdt .6.98.1 – 100.1). According to Herodotus, sanctuaries were burned to the ground, the countryside ravaged, the population enslaved

178 Hdt. 5.99.1, 5.102.3 for Eretrian involvement in the revolt at Sardis. There is no dedicated scholarly treatment of the invasion of Euboea by the Persians, although Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey discuss it passim at 643-645 and in the entries on the specific poleis of Eretria (no. 370), Carysos (373), and Histiaia (372). Also see Keller 1985, 195ff. 190

(andrapodismos), women and children exiled to Sousa.179 Although the destruction was not complete – the Eretrians would still contribute men to the battles at Artemision (Hdt. 8.1.2) and Salamis (Hdt.

8.46.2) – we must assume that the urban and rural landscape was brutally scarred by the traverse of the Persians. Histiaia and what little of which Carystos consisted at the time suffered a similarly disastrous fate (Hdt 8.23.2).

The island’s treatment at the hands of the Persians reiterates the point I have made above: as late as 490-480, we see the substantial destruction of three of the island’s fledgling urban centres, and the razing of numerous other communities that were too humble to merit direct mention. In Carystos, these terms are not emphatic exaggeration: Keller concludes with no lack of certainty that after 490 the population of the Carysteia would have been reduced to farmers and shepherds of the mountain ranges (1985, 95-100). The region, and the island as a whole, had in no small way been reset by the advent of the Persians: urban communities that were only beginning to consolidate were swept away, rural settlements burned, and several among both groups would never recover. It is worth nothing that the destruction of many of these communities often only comes a decade or two after their first attestation.180

It was then that the Athenians seized the moment of opportunity presented by a Euboea that lay smoldering – and they did so with eager vindictiveness. We shall take each major sub-region of the island in turn, in order to gain a better sense of the depth and breadth of the enduring Athenian involvement in Euboean affairs that so often came to the detriment of these communities in the fifth and fourth centuries. T

179 Hdt. 6.106.2, 107.2, 115, 118-119, Plut.Menex. 240A, Reber, Hansen, and & Ducrey 2004, 652. 180 Such is strikingly the case again with Eretria, Histiaia, and Carystos who had only begun to emerge onto the evidentiary record by the close of the sixth century. See the above discussion for their first attestations. 191

After the first invasion of the Persians in 490 left Carystos in scattered ruins, there was no possible or practical hope for effective resistance when they returned in 480 (Hdt. 6.99; Keller 1985,

195-198). With their fledgling urban core destroyed, the region’s rural population had neither the means nor the manpower to stem the flood of Xerxes. The Athenians, though, took this practical acquiescence personally and singled out Carystos along with Andros for particular punishment as unforgiveable medisers. It is revelatory that out of all the Greek communities that had taken Xerxes’ side either actively or for lack of any other realistic choice, the Athenians chose to exact their revenge on the weakest and poorest of their neighbours. The Athenians demanded an indemnity for their treachery, which the Carysteians paid, and yet the Athenians still ravaged the region (Hdt. 8.121; Keller

1985, 200).

What followed over the next century at the hands of the Athenians is aptly characterized by

Keller as ‘a calculated policy of reducing to further impotency those states on which it had imperialistic designs’ (1985, 200). The Athenians did their work well: by 470 there was simply no city left on which the Athenians could lay siege, and there is no archaeological evidence for a Classical city of Carystos between 490 BC and when the city began re-issuing its second attested series of coinage in the mid 4th century (Keller 1985, 200-201). For the fifth century, there was no civic centre, there was no necropolis typical of the Classical Period, graves were peppered on private lands, and the few sanctuaries that remained were distributed among population groupings scattered throughout the countryside (Keller

1985, 200-203). The region was raided and pillaged twice in the fifth century, in 470 the Athenians seized Carystos’ port, Carysteians were required to take part in Athenian campaigns in 425 and 415, and the region was compelled to shelter Athenian livestock and possessions. (Keller 1985, 203-204).

192

‘Karystos’ history,’ to again quote a fitting summary by Keller, ‘throughout the fifth century is that of a weakened and oppressed client state of Athens’ (1985, 204).

Athenian domination was not merely political: a cleruchy of 250 men was placed in the region under the command of Tolmides in 450 BC, and the pattern of rural settlement that emerges is one that is characterised by the presence of quintessentially Attic homesteads presiding over large estates, interspersed with defensive fortifications.181 This is clearly a highly organized system of Athenian settlement that can best be described as colonial, all in order to bolster Athenian agricultural production and relieve population pressure (Keller 1985, 205-208). Alongside – or rather in the shadow of – these typically Attic settlements were much smaller homesteads maintained by the native

Carysteians. Although Athenian control of the region would loosen somewhat during the fourth century, the memory of Athenian repression and the vestiges of their continued presence kept the

Carysteians in check. The relationship between the two gradually transitions to that between allies, but we should not be deceived by the superficial equality of the terminology.182 The Athenians kept their territory at Geraistos, settlers continued to hold private land, and their patterns of settlement had left their mark on the countryside. Bit by bit, though, Carystos was reconsolidated as a centre of nucleated settlement: after a century of systematic Athenian repression, the city gradually began minting its own coinage by the 370s, and by the middle of the century public inscriptions begin to appear again. It was

181 The cleruchy under Tolmides is discussed by Wallace 1972, 172ff, who is supported by Erxleben 1975 and Keller in 1985. In what Keller identifies as Zone I of his survey (his fig.95) we can identify a clearly organized pattern of settlement with farmsteads evenly spaced and fortifications along with religious sanctuaries placed at certain intervals. He hypothesizes – correctly, I believe – that this was the region of Athenian settlement. The native Carysteians, for their part, were scattered on the outskirts of this region with no coherent pattern. See Keller 1985, 204-208. 182 Other attestations of Athenian cleruchy and general involvement in Carystos are given by Diod. 11.8.5, Paus. 1.27.5, and Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey analyze its contributions to the Delian League at 2004, 658. For the nature of Athenian government in the region see Thuc. 1.98.4; 1.114.1-115.1. 193 thus only by the decades preceding the conquest of Philip that Carystos had begun to stand its own civic feet, ever so shakily, though still bearing the scars and bruises of Athenian domination.

The Carysteian instance is worth dwelling upon by virtue of the totality of Athenian imperialism: patterns of settlement, economic production, urban dynamics or the lack thereof, and civic culture were all profoundly affected by the presence of Attic lords. It was not the only region to be affected, and we see elements of a similar plot unfold in the Island’s neighbouring districts. After the Eretrian slate was similarly wiped clean by the Persians, what remained of the city and region were swept under the sway of the Athenians in the decades that followed the Wars. While there is no evidence of a cleruchy as elsewhere in the island, the Athenian reprisal for a failed revolt by the city in concert with

Chalcis is equally telling. The abortive rebellion was harshly quenched under Pericles (Thuc.1.114.1-3) in 446, and a subsequent decree of 442/1 ordered that the son of the city’s aristoi be kept in Athens as hostages.183 Athenian re-assessment of the city’s phoros in 425 must have been markedly vindictive given the city’s subsequent rebellion.184 The next half-century in Eretria would be characterized by the region’s vacillation between oligarchic and democratic regimes who were inclined towards Thebes and

Athens, respectively, and the salient point to be taken from this period is that democracy was neither the norm nor presumed in the fourth century (Knoepfler 1985, 258). Despite recurrent Athenian involvement, the city was not merely a miniature copy of Athens as many have assumed (ibid, 244-253).

It was again only in the mid fourth century that we begin to witness the emergence of coherent

183 Hesych. E5746; Phot. E1908 for the requirement of hostages, as discussed by Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004, 651-652 with extensive references. Thuc. 1.114.3 on the campaign of Perikles: ‘καὶ Ἀθηναῖοι πάλιν ἐς Εὔβοιαν διαβάντες Περικλέους στρατηγοῦντος κατεστρέψαντο πᾶσαν, καὶ τὴν μὲν ἄλλην ὁμολογίᾳ κατεστήσαντο, Ἑστιαιᾶς δὲ ἐξοικίσαντες αὐτοὶ τὴν γῆν ἔσχον.’ Thereupon the Athenians under the command of Pericles again crossed over to Euboea and reduced the whole country; the Hestiaeans they ejected from their homes and appropriated their territory; the rest of the island they settled by agreement. 184 Philoch. Fr.130, Paus. 1.29.2, Knoepfler 1996 194

Eretrian regional traditions and religious festivals – among them the Dionysia and the Artemisia.185 In the generation leading towards Philip’s conquest, Eretria, like its Euboean neighours, was only beginning to expand and solidify its regional influence after escaping from the orbit of Athens.

Athenian imperial designs on Chalcis, on the other hand, pre-date the Persian Wars and suggest that such intervention was not merely a knee-jerk reaction to the post-victory political climate. In 506

Chalcis joined the Peloponnesians and Boeotians in a misguided attack on Attica (Hdt. 5.74.2), prompting the Athenians to invade Euboea and defeat the city. Their subjugation again was not merely political, as Athens had more enduring plans: the Chalcidian hippobotai were exiled, and their lands confiscated by Athens and divided among 4,000 cleruchs.186 4,000 settlers is not an insignificant number when we bear in mind that in the late fourth century Eretria is estimated to have had around

6,000 adult male citizens, so such a settlement in Chalcidia is the equivalent to transplanting almost an entire polis into the region and settling it on confiscated property.187 Athens would have been visible here as elsewhere with an immediate tangibility that Macedon would never subsequently achieve or desire. Though cowed and intimidated, Euboea was neither fully defeated nor assimilated into Athens:

185 The festivals are discussed by Knoepfler 1988, 384-388 and 1971. 186 Hdt. 5.77, along with CEG 179. The text of Herodotus leaves little ambiguity regarding Athenian conduct in the island, to quote 5.77.2-3: τῆς δὲ αὐτῆς ταύτης ἡμέρης οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι διαβάντες ἐς τὴν Εὔβοιαν συμβάλλουσι καὶ τοῖσι Χαλκιδεῦσι, νικήσαντες δὲ καὶ τούτους τετρακισχιλίους κληρούχους ἐπὶ τῶν ἱπποβοτέων τῇ χώρῃ λείπουσι. οἱ δὲ ἱπποβόται ἐκαλέοντο οἱ παχέες τῶν Χαλκιδέων. ὅσους δὲ καὶ τούτων ἐζώγρησαν, ἅμα τοῖσι Βοιωτῶν ἐζωγρημένοισι εἶχον ἐν φυλακῇ ἐς πέδας δήσαντες: χρόνῳ δὲ ἔλυσαν σφέας δίμνεως ἀποτιμησάμενοι. τὰς δὲ πέδας αὐτῶν, ἐν τῇσι ἐδεδέατο, ἀνεκρέμασαν ἐς τὴν ἀκρόπολιν: αἵ περ ἔτι καὶ ἐς ἐμὲ ἦσαν περιεοῦσαι, κρεμάμεναι ἐκ τειχέων περιπεφλευσμένων πυρὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ Μήδου, ἀντίον δὲ τοῦ μεγάρου τοῦ πρὸς ἑσπέρην τετραμμένου On that same day the Athenians crossed to Euboea where they met the Chalcidians too in battle, and after overcoming them as well, they left four thousand tenant farmers1 on the lands of the horse-breeders. Horse- breeders was the name given to the men of substance among the Chalcidians. They fettered as many of these as they took alive and kept them imprisoned with the captive Boeotians. In time, however, they set them free, each for an assessed ransom of two minae. The fetters in which the prisoners had been bound they hung up in the acropolis, where they could still be seen in my time hanging from walls which the Persians' fire had charred, opposite the temple which faces west. 187 Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004, 392 and discussion s.v. ‘Chalcis’. 195

Chalcis, as mentioned above with Euboea, revolted in 446 only to be quelled by Pericles (Thuc.1.114.1-

3), and like their neighbours the Chalcidians were forced to swear loyalty to Athens and surrender hostages. The Chalcidians would continue paying the imposed phoros until as late as 413.188 In the midst of vacillation between pro-Theban and pro-Athenian factions, both outside powers would invade but it was the Athenian army sent under Phokion in 349/8 that would be decisive – at least for the moment (Dem.21.132). It is also worth noting that the broader Euboean rebellion was led by a

Chalcidian. The now-familiar pattern again recurs: until the twilight years preceding the Argead invasion, Chalcis was held in the grip of the Athenians whose rule was far more direct than simple hegemony.

Histiaia is the most straightforward example because of the totality of the region’s reconfiguration by the Athenians, and the events that followed in the wake of the Euboean revolt of

446 speak for themselves. After the invasion of Pericles the Histiaians were expelled from their city and sent to Macedon, while the vestiges of the urban community were re-settled by an imported Athenian population.189 The Athenians tore down the existing governmental structure and replaced it with a constitution of their own making, including a boulē, dikastērion, and archontes.190 Even the name of the city changed to Oreos as a result of this subjugation, if we are to believe Strabo (10.1.3).191 It comes as little surprise, then, that Thucydides goes so far as describe the settlers as apoikoi (7.57.2), and the size of the group – 2,000 – again represents a substantial demographic shift. The Athenian grip

188 This fifth century narrative is largely recapitulated from the detailed account of Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004, 648-650. 189 An even that garnered no lack of attention among the ancients, as discussed by: Thuc. 1.114.1-3; 7.57.2; 8.95.7; Theopomp. Fr.387; Philoch. Fr. 118, Diod. 12.7.1, Plut.Per. 23.4. 190 IG I3 41, Koch 1991, 181-182, and 192-193; Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004, 657. 191 Paus. 7.26.4 also mentions the context of the name change, though the two names overlap for some time until the mid-fourth century in other sources. 196 would be relaxed after the Peloponnesian War, and it is noteworthy that in the absence of Athenian domination Chalcis, like its other Euboean neighbours, tended towards oligarchy rather than democracy. The Athenians would again ravage the countryside roughly a generation later in 377 when the city had leaned towards Spartan loyalty, only to be brought back into the Athenian fold in 375 or soon thereafter.192 Small wonder, then that in the 340s the pro-Macedonian faction, headed by

Euphraios, a pupil of Plato, enjoyed the support of the majority of the dēmos (Dem.9.59-62). Even as late as 342, when Philip II made Philistides the tyrant of the city (Dem. 9.33, 18.71), the Athenians again invaded and silenced the unwelcome dissenting voice.193 The dawn of Macedonian hegemony would have been a welcome sight to tired Histiaian eyes once it finally crested over the horizon. The long night of Athenian domination had at last drawn to a close.

I have dwelled on the Athenians in Euboea at such length because they were the sort of rulers that the Macedonians were not. Athenian control was total: populations exiled, governments restructured, lands confiscated, indemnities and taxes imposed with the intention of keeping the

Island’s communities weak and servile. Rebellions against Athenian rule were met with immediately violent repression followed by more enduring forms of systematic subjection by means of hostages,

192 Diod. 15.30.2, Xen.Hell. 4.57. 193 Demosthenes (18.71) justifies the Athenian response by highlighting the immediacy of the thread post to Attica by Phillip’s supporters in Euboea: οὐδὲ νῦν περὶ τούτων ἐρῶ. ἀλλ᾽ ὁ τὴν Εὔβοιαν ἐκεῖνος σφετεριζόμενος καὶ κατασκευάζων ἐπιτείχισμ᾽ ἐπὶ τὴν Ἀττικήν, καὶ Μεγάροις ἐπιχειρῶν, καὶ καταλαμβάνων Ὠρεόν, καὶ κατασκάπτων Πορθμόν, καὶ καθιστὰς ἐν μὲν Ὠρεῷ Φιλιστίδην τύραννον, ἐν δ᾽ Ἐρετρίᾳ Κλείταρχον, καὶ τὸν Ἑλλήσποντον ὑφ᾽ αὑτῷ ποιούμενος, καὶ Βυζάντιον πολιορκῶν, καὶ πόλεις Ἑλληνίδας τὰς μὲν ἀναιρῶν, εἰς τὰς δὲ τοὺς φυγάδας κατάγων, πότερον ταῦτα ποιῶν ἠδίκει καὶ παρεσπόνδει καὶ ἔλυε τὴν εἰρήνην ἢ οὔ; καὶ πότερον φανῆναί τινα τῶν Ἑλλήνων τὸν ταῦτα κωλύσοντα ποιεῖν αὐτὸν ἐχρῆν, ἢ μή; Even now I will not discuss them. But here was a man annexing Euboea and making it a basis of operations against Attica, attacking Megara, occupying Oreus, demolishing Porthmus, establishing the tyranny of Philistides at Oreus and of Cleitarchus at Eretria, subjugating the Hellespont, besieging Byzantium, destroying some of the Greek cities, reinstating exiled traitors in others: by these acts was he, or was he not, committing injustice, breaking treaty, and violating the terms of peace? Was it, or was it not, right that some man of Grecian race should stand forward to stop those aggressions? 197 taxation, and treaties couched in the deceptive terms of alliance. Once the Island’s communities had been reduced to a state of essential helplessness by the subsequent waves of Persian and then

Athenian reprisals, they were powerless to resist the importation of thousands of Athenian colonists who redrew the map of the landscape and settled it in their particularly Attic manner. The influence of

Athens would have been everywhere: in cities, ports, in the style and architecture of homesteads scattered through the countryside, as well as in the heights of civic government, foreign policy, and trade. By the fifth century, Athens controlled nearly two thirds of the territory in Euboea, no small portion of it held in the hands of private estates.194 As a consequence of this colonial domination, even in the fourth century we hear only the faintest whispers of civic activity among Euboea’s communities: an inscription here, a coin there, but precious little else even as the Classical Period was drawing to a close.

Thus the stage was set at the beginning of the Hellenistic Period, and all of this lends further credence to the idea that there was simply no concrete Classical precedent, no idealized past in

Euboea, which would be eroded later. In the years that followed, the Macedonians did not exert anything approaching such a pervasive influence over nearly all facets of daily life in Euboea, and this is precisely why the Athenian experience is so telling. To many of the island’s communities, the advent of the Macedonians would have marked an optimistic beginning, rather than an ominous end.

Calm amidst the Storm: 340-267 BC

194 Erxleben 1975, Meiggs 1972: 567, and Wallace 1972, 66. 198

The tumult of the long decade of the 340s has been the subject of such scholarly discussion that the specifics need not be repeated here, suffice to say that by the time the dust had settled in 340 the regional game had changed. The rise and fall of factions supporting either power, the installation and overthrow of tyrants and partisans happened with such rapidity in the Island’s communities that none were able to implement any lasting policy or effect any enduring change.195 Athens was by then reduced to a state whose control over Euboea was no longer practical given more pressing concerns elsewhere. The settlement between Athens and the cities of Euboea that emerges by 340 is among the first time in the history of their relationship that one can speak of alliance with any sort of accuracy.

Athenian influence remained, but not with anything approaching the same degree of immediacy or hostility (Chankowski 1993, 30-31).

Macedonian control of the island, exerted by means of mercenaries or monies in support of a sympathetic faction, was too evanescent and episodic to have any measure of enduring impact. The

Argead attention span in the region was simply too short, their interests too pressing, and the scale of their designs too large for them to exercise an influence with the calculated longevity of the Athenians.

This detached attitude is perfectly understandable given the Macedonian perspective: why would the kings who were vying for control over swathes of the Mediterranean bother to micromanage an island whose communities were separated by mountains, shoals, valleys, and difficult paths. In this respect

Athenian imperialism in Euboea is rather more logical, given their explicit interest in the western-facing communities of the island which were separated from the Attic coast by barely 20km. The brutal colonization of the Athenians was inherently local in both character and outlook, the dominion of the

Macedonians was not. While early Hellenistic power vacillated at the highest registers of the political

195 See note 7 above for a list of scholars discussing Athenian involvement in 340s, and the historiographical review supra. 199 score, the situation on the ground in Euboea played a more constant note in a lower octave – and in this deceptively tumultuous context we hear the first murmurs of regional consolidation by the

Euboeans themselves. In what follows my focus will mainly be on Eretria, more out of necessity than preference thanks to its abundant epigraphic resources, but we shall turn to different corners of the island in due course.

The Eretrians wasted little time in organising their own affairs. In the years immediately following Eretria’s ‘liberation’ from Athens we see the first signs that Eretria was both enjoying its newfound autonomy and taking full advantage of it with remarkable speed. An inscription conventionally dated to 340 BC recounts the (re)organisation of the traditional festival of the Artemisia, though this time with more solemnity as a sign of the region’s independence.196 In addition to the religious content of the inscription, its tone and vocabulary are telling. The decree concludes with the lines (44-45) ‘ἐλευθέρων ὄντων Ἐρετριέων καὶ εὖ πρηττό̣ν̣ [τ]ων καὶ αὐτοκρατόρων’ an unsubtle assertion that – implicitly after a longer period when this was not true – the Eretrians were now free and autocratic. The communis opinio has long attributed this newfound sense of liberty to the

Athenian invasion of the island under Phokion to counter the influence of Macedon in 343, and surmised that this inscription must relate to the overthrow of the pro-Macedonian tyrant

Cleitarchus.197

But in the context of similar decrees from Priene and Eretria which use the same vocabulary of freedom and autonomy, I wonder if perhaps this inscription could be dated somewhat later – to one of

196 The text of the inscription is most recently published as Rhodes & Osborne 73. See their commentary for the full publication history of the inscription (IG XII,9 189). 197 Wilhelm first proposed the analysis that forms the basis of the communis opinio regarding the inscription; his conclusions along with the subsequent commentary and revision of the inscription are provided by Chankowski 1993, 30 especially note 45. 200 the numerous liberations of the city and island at the hands of the various monarchs to whom we shall shortly turn. The combination of eleutheria and autonomia (expressed either as αὐτοκρατόρων or

αὐτονόμους) appears to be almost a formulaic expression of a city’s return to (nominal) self- governance and autonomy after liberation by a Hellenistic monarch. Take, for instance, Alexander’s letter to Priene (OGIS 1), which decrees that the inhabitants of Naulochus will be ‘αὐτο-[νό]μους εἶναι

κα̣[ὶ ἐλευθ]έρους, (l.3-4), as well as the Eretrian decree which we shall discuss below (IG XII,9 192) which refers to the preservation of the city’s laws and its freedom in the same sentence (l.4-5).198 Both decrees combine eleutheria with autonomia, in the latter case expressed by the restoration of the city’s τοὺς π]ατ<ρί>ους <νόμ>ους, and both clearly indicated a Hellenistic dynamic of power in which a king is restoring (or decreeing) a city’s status and constitution. This connection between Athenian intervention and ‘liberation,’ is tenuous at best – both from our perspective and that of the Euboeans themselves, thus they might equally have been celebrating a more lasting form of eleutheria gained from one of the Sucessors.199

Regardless of the precise date, the inscription speaks to a newfound sense of self- determination and autonomy and this concluding formula is so emphatic as to make this status seem exceptional in the recent history of the city. The restorative tone ought to be emphasized: this decree does not create a festival outright, but instead mandates the special commemoration of a festival whose celebration in recent years had been hindered (l. 30-31). The festival itself, thanks to Pindar’s

13th Olympic Ode, is first attested in 464 BC and thus it is revelatory that the Eretrians instinctively

198 Alexander’s letter to Priene is also published as Rhodes and Osborne 86B, IPriene 1, SEG 30.1358 and 37.993. 199 Dialectically, the inscription cannot realistically be dated any later than 300 as it is not in strict conformity with the koinē that was thereafter dominant in the island. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of moments between 340-300 at which the Eretrians might have considered themselves to be ‘newly’ liberated from an external influence – be it of Boeotian, Athenian, or Macedonian provenance. 201 used their newfound autonomy to restore an ancestral festival, rather than abandoning neglected traditional practices as so many of their mainland contemporaries are said to have done.

This festival was not of interest to the Eretrians alone. A learned study of the Artemisia’s various appearances throughout Euboean history penned by Knoepfler emphasizes the pan-Euboean character of the tradition, and argues for the regular participation of Carystos and Histiaia in its games

(Knoepfler 1988, 295-297). Common participation, though, does not make this a federal festival: by all accounts the Artemisia was celebrated by the major communities of the island even when they remained politically distinct, and while it was at times associated with whatever semblance of a koinon may have been extent at a given time, it was a not a by-product of federal consolidation. (Knoepfler

1988, 297).

Here is another example of the duality of the island: on the one hand it is a larger region, on the other a network of smaller, independent sub-regions, and it lies on neither extreme of spectrum from local to federal but instead sits comfortably somewhere in between. In a broader sense, it is interesting that in the instance of this celebration of the Artemisia, the ebb-and-flow of early Hellenistic power came to the communities of Euboea not as a disruption, but as an opportunity for restoration. While kings and dynasts won and lost with divergent fortune, their local religious lives went on, and they picked up precisely where they had left off. This moment of upheaval in the political geography of the region was not used as an excuse for innovation or abandonment of tradition, instead it was seized as an opportunity for its reinvigoration. The local preoccupation of the Euboeans here is likewise striking: as the balance of power in the Aegean and beyond was in question by the struggles of the successors, rather than being distracted by such distant concerns they were, as ever, focussed on their own affairs closer to home.

202

At the same time, though, one must acknowledge the looming influence of Athens in these early years of the period. In 330-320 we also see the creation of the Eretrian ephēbeia, which was clearly modelled on its Athenian cousin.200 We shall return later return to the specifics of the ephēbeia, but for the moment we must highlight Chankowski’s conclusion that the Eretrian institution ‘ne fut rien d’autre qu’une réplique de l’institution athénienne’ (1993, 43). The two-year period of military formation was made mandatory for all citizens of the polis, and clearly served a similar function in theory and practice as its Athenian inspiration. It is noteworthy, then, that even though Eretria had achieved political independence from Athens, it had not yet been liberated of its influence. More importantly, though, the institution of the Eretrian ephēbeia indicates a renewal of civic vitality precisely at the time when the city and island were coming under Macedonian hegemony.

This rhetoric of restoration and continuity reappears in a similar decree relating to the procession in honour of Dionysus that is conventionally dated to 308/7. Given the revised dating of the

Artemis decree that I have surmised above, though, the two may well be more contemporary than we had previously thought. Regardless, we see the same pattern at work: the Eretrians described themselves as having been freed of a garrison and the city itself as liberated (ὅ τε δῆμος ἠλευθερώθη, lines 4-5). In order to commemorate and take advantage of this newfound freedom, the Eretrians decree that everyone participating in the procession of Dionysus would wear an ivy wreath provided at civic expense, and choruses of men should also take part in the celebration.201 All of this civic fanfare is meant to mark the return of the city to its patrioi nomoi, to which the text again makes specific reference (l.4-5). Yet even in the midst of such emphatic continuity among the Eretrians there are

200 Chankowski 1993 for the full textual history of the Eretrian ephēbeia and its relationship to the Athenian model – which he proposes was copied essentially outright from the reforms of Lycurgus. 201 Provision of the wreaths is provided at lines 7-10. The inscription itself SIG 323, original text is IG XII, 9.192, on which the Greek text I have used above is based. 203 elements of innovation: these instances of religious restoration are part of an epigraphic habit that is only recently developing, and while the Euboeans may be adhering to tradition they are doing so through new media – and, as we shall discuss shortly, with new language.

Eretria, as with the island of Euboea as whole, teetered among the warring Diadochs who aimed to carve up the Greek world between 320 and 300, and like much of the mainland the island was awkwardly caught in the midst of Ptolemy, Cassander, and the Antigonids as represented by

Demetrius Poliorcetes.202 All the while, of course, Boeotia was leering in the background, eager to establish whatever measure of dominance over the island that they could muster; an endeavour in which they were fairly successful from 308-304 before being swept back across the gulf. The precise vacillations of power have preoccupied historians of broader scope, but need not retain us here. What is of more pressing concern for regional dynamics is not so much how the Euboeans carried themselves in the midst of these ultimately short-lived changes of hegemon, but rather their actions after the dust had settled somewhat. In this we see another parallel to the Argive experience: though various factions traipsed through the region with great fanfare, none exerted a measure of influence that had any longevity.

We ought to note, however, the Euboean enthusiasm for the advent of Demetrius Poliorcetes.

This is not altogether without precedent, as we shall soon see, because the Euboeans generally seem to have been fairly welcoming towards their new Macedonian hegemons.203 Eretrians participated in

202 Diod. 19.78.2, and Billows 1993, 254 for a brief narrative of Euboea among the warring successors. 203 The liberation of Euboea is recounted by Diod. 20.100.6, also Billows 1993, 254 for other inscriptions relating to the Macedonians. The account of Diodorus: σπεύδων δ᾽ ἐλευθερῶσαι τοὺς Ἕλληνας ῾οἱ γὰρ περὶ Κάσανδρον καὶ Πολυπέρχοντα τὸν ἔμπροσθεν χρόνον ἄδειαν ἐσχηκότες ἐπόρθουν τὰ πλεῖστα μέρη τῆς Ἑλλάδοσ᾽ πρῶτον μὲν τὴν Χαλκιδέων πόλιν ἠλευθέρωσε, φρουρουμένην ὑπὸ Βοιωτῶν, καὶ τοὺς κατὰ τὴν Βοιωτίαν καταπληξάμενος ἠνάγκασεν ἀποστῆναι τῆς 204 the naval campaigns of the Besieger along the Ionian coast, and were apparently not opposed to doing so. A decree of 302 honours three brothers of Antigoneia for their care towards and support of

Eretrians who were serving in Demetrius’ navy, and heaps gratitude, honours, and privileges on the new proxenoi for their good conduct towards the city.204 The involvement of the Euboeans alongside their former Athenian overlords in the campaigns of Poliorcetes is apt testament to just how quickly the fate of the latter had changed in the decades following Alexander. Likewise interesting is the triangular interaction between the city of Eretria, Demetrius, and the newly founded city of Antigoneia.

Despite the mention of the king, though, this document remains an instance of communication between two urban communities, and it is striking that the latter city, a new foundation in Anatolia, so quickly adopts the traditional mechanisms of a polis.

It is interesting to note here that the city – the dēmos – is grateful for such benevolence with regard to citizens serving in the army of a Hellenistic king. With this as with other proxeny decrees which we shall subsequently discuss, I fail to see how the conferral of the privileges which must have

Κασάνδρου φιλίας, μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα πρὸς μὲν Αἰτωλοὺς συμμαχίαν ἐποιήσατο, πρὸς δὲ τοὺς περὶ Πολυπέρχοντα καὶ Κάσανδρον διαπολεμεῖν παρεσκευάζετο. Since he was intent on freeing the Greeks (for Cassander and Polyperchon having up to this time enjoyed impunity were engaged in plundering the greater part of Greece), he first freed the city of the Chalcidians, which was garrisoned by Boeotians, and by striking fear into the Boeotians, he forced them to renounce their friendship with Cassander; and after this he made an alliance with the Aetolians and began his preparations for carrying on war against Polyperchon and Cassander 204 IG XII.9.210, SIG 348. Lines 1-10 of the inscription provide the mention of the king, his navy, and the Eretrians who were serving in it: Δαμασίας Φανοκλείου Ἀφαρε- ῦθεν εἶπεν· ἐπειδὴ Γλαύκιππ- ος καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ Ἱππο- δάμας καὶ Ἀπολλώνιος ἄνδρε- ς ἀγαθοὶ διατελοῦσιν ὄντε[ς] περὶ τὸν βασιλέια Δημήτριο[ν] καὶ τὸν δῆμον τὸν Ἐρετριείω- ν καὶ περὶ τοὺς στρατευομέν- ους τῶν πολιτῶν ἐν ταῖς ναυσ- ὶν πολλὴν φιλοτιμίαν ποιο̑ν- ται 205 retained some measure of value – otherwise why grant them? – implicitly speaks of desperation, impotence, and the cheapening of civic government, when Wilhelm has argued so convincingly to the contrary (Wilhelm 1942). These decrees insetad indicate a persistent if not growing civic vibrancy among the Euboeans who hitherto had been oddly silent in the epigraphic record under Athenian domination. Following Lynette Mitchell’s logic again, these decrees only mark the beginning, not the end, of a relationship between two communities, and thus this does not represent instanteous interaction. I do not think it mere coincidence that once the veil of Athens had been lifted, we suddenly see such a surge in epigraphic output from the city.

Elsewhere, to continue pursuing our Eretrian case study, the Macedonians in general and the

Antigonids in particular appear in the epigraphic record to have been received with a great deal of favour by the Eretrians. As early as 319/318 (Knoepfler 2001a, VII) Eretria published a decree in honour of Timotheos, an officer of Polyperchon who was well-received by the Euboeans in preference over

Antipater.205 Even a middle-ranking officer like Timotheos was lauded with praise and accolades for his role in instituting the diagramma of Polyperchon (Diod.18.57.1; 69.3): he was granted citizenship, along with various other megistai tamiai in the civic arena. Among them were freedom from taxation, the choice of one of the houses vacated by political exiles, an equestrian statue, a gold crown, and the conferral of these privileges on his progeny (Knoepfler 2001b, 1378-9). Here again we see civic government functioning smoothly, publicly honouring influential Macedonians without overt suggestions of coercion, and with undertones of genuine appreciation on the part of the Eretrians.

While Knoepfler (2001b, 1389), takes the conferral of these privileges as being exorbitant for a relatively minor figure like Timotheos, does this automatically exclude the possibility that the Eretrians

205 According to the reconstruction of the decree’s context by Knoepfler, though others would date it to the conflict between Cassander and Antigonus somewhat later in 309. See also Knoepfler 2001b, 1388-1389. 206 were grateful for his intervention? I believe that we should allow for some appreciation of the fervour of the moment, and the genuine emotion that certain royal interventions would have generated. The most obvious parallel to this is the enthusiasm of the Athenians for the arrival of Demetrius Poliorcetes

(Plut.Dem. 8-10). While the adulation of the Athenians may have been excessively grovelling to subsequent commentators, the populace can hardly be blamed for being ecstatic at the time of the city’s liberation. Bayliss (2011, 59-60) notes that Demetrius’ reign in Athens signalled the end of the narrow oligarchy that had preceded it under Demetrius of Phaleron, and thus the arrival of the

Antigonids would have marked the return of the franchise to the nearly two-thirds of the citizen body that had been deprived of their voting rights (Diod. 18.18.4; Bayliss 2011, 70-73). The Besieger’s subsequent conduct would have been embarrassing to those who had supported him, but we should not dismiss them as fickle for their initial enthusiasm. The same, I believe, can be said of the Eretrian treatment of certain Macedonians.

This is neither the first nor last decree of Eretria in honour of the Macedonians; the message remains the same whether its recipient be Adeimantos of Lampsacus (IG XII,9.198), Timotheos, the aforementioned brothers from Antigoneia, Apollodorus (Knoepfler 2001a, no. 5) or even the officer

Arrhidaios if we choose to place him in this temporal context (Billows 1993). In Eretria, at least, restoration of tradition and gratitude towards influential Macedonians go hand-in-hand in inscriptions which appear with a frequency that we have never before witnessed during the Athenian occupation.206 By all accounts, the Eretrians benefitted from the usurpation of Athenian dominance by

206 The dynamics of royal interaction in IG XII,9 198 are fascinating, as they reveal that in this case the interests of the kings, the Greeks as a whole, and the city of Eretria are all aligned. The opening lines (1-8) of the inscription read: [ἐπειδὴ Ἀδείμαντος Ἀνδροσθένους]- [Λαμψακηνὸς διατρίβων παρὰ τῶι β]ασιλ- 207 the Macedonians: no more cleruchies, no more hostages, no conscious re-structuring of civic institutions, no large-scale demographic shifts; such concerns were too petty to preoccupy the diadochoi and their lieutenants. Even the intervention of Demetrius should be read as a welcome event, one which rid the Island of a Boeotian garrison and replaced it with rather light royal oversight. For lack of other evidence we can only hypothesize what was the case among the Island’s other communities, but subsequent lists of Chalkidian proxenoi hint that civic activity was blossoming beyond the confines of Eretria alone.207 With the Athenian yoke lifted, the Eretrians – and likely their neighbours as well – had begun to stretch their political legs.

The question of continuity versus discontinuity in late fourth-century Euboea is complex given the legacy of Athenian domination, and gives us cause to pause and reconsider the character of certain dramatic changes that had begun to occur by the close of the fourth century. Chief among them is dialect. As Knoepfler (2001b, 1372) and others have remarked, a profound dialectical shift in which

Ionian and Attic elements are discarded in favour of the emerging koinē had already reached its

[εῖ Δημητρίωι — — — — — — — κ]αὶ τἆλλ- [α πάντα οὐδὲν ἐνλείπων τῆ]ς εὐνοίας τ- [ε καὶ συναγωνιζόμενος τοῖ]ς Ἕλλησιν δια- [τελεῖ καὶ περὶ τὸν δῆ]μον τὸν Ἐρετριέ- [ων εὔνους ὢν καὶ λέγω]ν καὶ πράττων ἀεὶ [— — — — —]ω̣ν̣ τὰ συμφέροντα Ἐρετρ- [ιέων πόλει. [Since Adeimantos of Lampsakos, the son of Androsthenes . . . has (?) accomplished in accordance with the will of] kings [Antigonos and Demetrios] and [does everything] else [in a praiseworthy manner, always displaying] goodwill for the Greeks, and continues to be [well-disposed] to the people of the Eretrians and always speaks and acts [in the name of the king] in the most advantageous way for the Eretrians. The inscription then proceeds to heap honours on him – a bronze statue, the right to participate in civic festivals, exemption from taxes, and even the election of an ambassador who will convey this news to Adeimantos. Again, we should not take this as idle flattery, as there seems to be genuine enthusiasm among the Euboeans for this man’s service. 207 Especially at the outset of the second century, though there are some Chalcidian decrees that can perhaps be dated to the 260s including OGIS 760, Austin 48, and the inclusion of Chalcidians in lists of proxenoi at Delphi further hint that the practice was popular there as well as in Eretria (e.g. F.Delphes.III.1. 424.1-2). 208 culmination by 300. Such speed is remarkable, as from the close of the century onwards typically

Euboean (a melange of Attic and Ionian influences) traits had entirely disappeared from the epigraphic record, hence we are confronted here with a dramatic linguistic shift that took place within the space of a generation or two. Though gradual, the process was complete: the Eretrian rhotacism disappeared between 345 and 335, then Ionian tendencies slip by the wayside in the next two decades, and finally from 310-290 all spellings are brought into conformity with the koinē.208

Considering this in tandem with the efflorescence of Eretrian epigraphy and the active civic culture that it suggests, I believe that we are beginning to witness the re-orientation of Eretrian local consciousness away from preoccupation with Attica and towards the broader world of the Hellenistic

Aegean – including the Macedonians. At the same time, it is by the close of the fourth century that we see the resurrection of the Euboean koinon under the tutelage of the Antigonids, hence the various communities of the island were coming into closer political and civic contact with one another as they were simultaneously strengthening their connections beyond its immediate shores.

When the Athenian yoke had been lifted, the Euboeans become almost immediately active in a manner never before witnessed during the Classical Period. In the process, the mechanisms of civic government appear to have been strengthened, communication among the island’s regions began to increase through the media of politics and religion, and a web of external relations began to be spun by

Eretria, and, presumably, its neighbours. All of this was already well underway by the close of the fourth century, by which time the island had been brought more fully under the umbrella of the

Macedonians.

208 A full discussion of this dialectical shift is provided by Knoepfler 2001b, 1372-1374. 209

Macedonian Sunrise: Euboea in the Third Century

As with so many other corners of the Greek mainland, our record of the third century in Euboea is spotty and nebulous at best. Most literary sources disappear thanks to the loss of book 21 of

Diodorus and the distraction of Polybius, thus other sources of evidence must be sought. When filling in the blanks of Euboea’s history during the Macedonian occupation, historians tend to assume the worst, or the least glamorous, taking what materials do survive to us as voices which narrate preciously brief episodes in a long, sad tale.209 The same evidence, viewed from a different perspective, spins a different story - one in which an abundance of proxeny decrees need not be implicit proof of a cheapened civic culture desperately trying to prove its own continued relevance, but rather as energetic indications of the vitality of a ‘traditional’ civic culture that is communicating with new audiences through new media (Mack 2015). In the same vein, we must not dismiss other cities like

Chalcis or Carystos simply because their inscriptions have not enjoyed the fortunate survival of

Eretria’s.

My account of Euboea under the domination of Macedon will be both shorter and less dramatic than my account of the island under Athenian occupation. The Macedonian experience is more remarkable for what it lacks than what it provides: no cleruchies, no organised and systematic resettlement of Euboean lands, no persistent restructuring of the island’s governments, no harsh indemnities or cruel destruction of cities and territory. Instead there are a group of civic and local

209 See the preceding discussion of the scholarship on Hellenistic Euboea, especially the fatalistic tone which dominates reconstructions of the third century. As will be discussed below, Reber 2007 ascribes to the model of a general economic crisis leading to impoverishment and depopulation, while on the political plane even Chankowski 1993, 20 and Knoepfler 2001a & b trend towards a stifling view of the Macedonian hegemony. This is when, according to Knoepfler 2001b, 1364 Eretria ‘sombra dès alors dans une décadence irrémédiable ou même seulement qu’elle fut temporairement étranglée par la tutelle macédonienne.’ 210 cultures that are finding their place in a very different hierarchy of power, but one that does not automatically spell their demise. In the context of the longer trajectory of Athenian domination that I have described above, the effervescence of third-century Euboea becomes less surprising. Gone were the colonial structures and exactions of the Athenians, and while the vestiges of their influence remained in some of the region’s civic structures, their economic privations had ceased.

I have already much of the character of Euboea during the period stretching from the Lamian

War to the Chremonidean War, and even Knoepfler – who tends to have a rather pessimistic view of the third century – identifies this as a period of relative independence marked by great economic and cultural development (2001a, 107-109). The proof is in the inscriptions, again, ranging from the

Macedonian honours to decrees relating to the Histiaians, the restoration of the Artemisia, or recognition of other Greeks (No. IX). It merits mention that the Eretrians, at least, were the most publically well-disposed towards the Macedonians during the period in which they were free of a garrison or royal oversight.210 The situation would change from 267 onwards as the mainland was reoriented by the Antigonids in the wake of the Chremonidean War. From then until the advent of the

Romans in 196 Euboea was consistently under the dominion of Macedon, and while many terms have been used to brand the island the most fitting that I have yet encountered to characterise its status vis-

à-vis the Antigonids is ‘protectorate’.211 Knoepfler has characterised this period as one in which the

210 Knoepfler 2001a, fig. 101 for the full list of decrees from the period. It merits note, on closer inspection, that only three decrees from Eretria pre-date the period of Macedonian occupation. From 330 to around 300, though, see a rapid proliferation of this civic activity with roughly fifteen proxeny decrees emerging by the end of the century. 211 Jacobsen and Smith 1968 are the first to use this term, which I believe best captures the character of the Macedonian relationship with Euboea. I have here tended to use ‘dominion’ in the sense that Euboea fell within the Antigonid realm of influence, but do not consider it to be nearly as heavy-handed as the outright occupation of the island by the Athenians for which I have argued above. 211

Island suffered ‘une assez lourde domination étrangère’ marked by the presence of garrisons and viceregal officials (2001a, 272-274).

To again take Eretria as an exceptionally well-documented example, the situation then becomes somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the Island is subject to the Antigonids and, ostensibly, chafing at the presence of a garrison, Macedonian officers, and some form of tribute payment, but on the other hand we see a very high level of activity on both the internal and external registers that speaks to a great deal of civic autonomy (Knoepfler 2001a, 265-271). A somewhat offhand observation by Knoepfler in his description of the third century corpus is telling: on an epigraphic level it is extremely difficult to distinguish proxeny decrees granted after the Chremonidean

War from those which predate the Macedonian dominion - they have far more similarities than differences and thus dating becomes rather tricky (2001a, 271).

I do not wish to dwell long on the specific case of Eretria, especially considering how its epigraphic tradition has been so completely discussed by Knoepfler that there is little hope of improving upon his grasp of the details here. I instead limit myself to a few observations of a broader scope before turning out attention to other corners of the island. First, Knoepfler asserts in his conclusion that the domination of Athens from 446 to 411, and the subsequent vestiges of its influences along with an oligarchic regime from 370-341 prevented the Eretrians from conferring proxeny as they would usually (2001a, 427). The inclination of the city when it was free and relatively autonomous was thus towards the wide and frequent conferral of such status; an inclination which was suffocated by Athenian domination. It becomes telling then, to follow his logic, that during the

Macedonian occupation we have such a proliferation of these decrees that picks up pace as the city

212 remains under Macedonian hegemony.212 The simple conclusion is thus that they had the autonomy to behave as they would, even though the city is simultaneously described as being subject to the ‘assez lourde domination étrangère’. It seems as if the civic ambitions of the Eretrians, in the realm of proxeny at least, were only realised in the unique arena offered by the Hellenistic Period.

Elsewhere, the habit and the statistics are telling in equal measure. Hellenistic kings themselves never receive decrees of proxeny, and seldom are they the subject of direct honours – the Eretrians are more inclined to honour local representatives of the king rather than appealing to the monarch himself.

If nothing else, this implies distance, and the sentiment that the king was a removed power who was not even theoretically engaged in the day-to-day governance of the city. Most such decrees are given to other Greek citizens, and Macedonian officers, but it remains a mechanism that functions from the level of a city to an individual.213

The Eretrians, by all accounts, profited from the expansion of the Hellenistic world in the third century. The numbers, as I mentioned, are revelatory: when we map the body of Eretrian proxeny decrees we see a network of roughly 40 cities emerge that stretch from the Italian coast to Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, Macedon, and even Egypt.214Eretria was in more consistent contact with more

212 Again cf. Knoepfler 2001a, fig 101, p.427 of the manuscript. As a methodological caveat, the dates he provides are estimations but regardless of the specific dates the pattern is abundantly clear: the vast majority of the decrees – over 30, if we could from c.310 onwards, were inscribed while the island was under Macedonian hegemony. The epigraphic habit continues undaunted after the city’s conquest by the Antigonids, with easily another 15 decrees appearing between the years c.270-200 BC. 213 The geographic and temporal distribution of the decrees is also telling. Take, for instance, Macedon: subjects of the kingdom appear in at least 8 proxeny decrees (Knoepfler’s catalogue 5, 15, V, VI, VII, XI, XXV and perhaps VIII), which range from the late 300s BC until well into the third century). Conferral of proxeny to Macedonians is thus not an instantaneous measure of appeasement, but rather a longer lasting pattern in Eretrian civic government. 214 For an extremely helpful geographical visualization, consult Knoepfler’s map of the distribution of proxeny decrees in 2001a, fig. 102 (p. 429). The prominence of the Ionian coast demonstrates the strength of Eretria’ pan-Aegean civic connections, and the fact that most of Asia Minor was then still in the hands of the Seleucids – not the Antigonids – shows that such civic ties could cross dynastic boundaries. The geographical and 213 corners of the Greek world from the very earliest years of the period onwards than it ever had been in the Classical Period, it had more deeply entrenched links that were established bilaterally and without the oversight of Athens or Macedon with cities that were hundreds of kilometres away. This is not the behaviour of a city languishing under a series of foreign (Macedonian) occupations, and such a network is not symptomatic of a stagnant milieu of civic interaction. Even more telling is that the disappearance of proxenia as a civic institution occurred not under the Macedonians, but later, under the Romans, whose advent marked the end of this horizontal network of peer relations with such dramatic speed.215

Whether or not they were directly responsible is another matter entirely.

There is one other institution of prime importance that we must consider in the Eretrian context before moving on: the ephēbeia. As I have mentioned above, in his 1993 study of the institution, Chankowski asserts that the ephēbeia as it appears in Eretria is the result of the importation of the Athenian model that was adopted during the fourth or perhaps even fifth century (Chankowski

1993, 18-19 and 2010, 144-158). While the Eretrian ephēbeia was inspired by Athens, it was developed and instituted under the city’s independent auspices following its liberation from Athenian control in the 330s. Regardless of the precise date of its (re)institution, the ephēbeia is clearly active and functioning by the close of the century: an inscription (IG XII,9 240) dated to 308-304 provides a long list of ephebes for the year, and this kind of military catalogue remains present throughout the third

chronological distribution of the decrees identifies no clear correlations, and the Eretrians seem to have cast a fairly wide net throughout the third century. These decrees were not knee-jerk responses to the exigencies of a particular moment in time. The absence of the Athenians from such decrees is conspicuous. 215 Knoepfler 2001b, 1365, and Knoepfler 2001a, 427-428 with fig. 101. It is striking that out of Knoepfler’s corpus of over fifty decrees, only five (Catalogue A, B, C, D, & E) postdate the Roman conquest of Euboea. It was this event, more than anything, that spelled the death of the vibrant civic institution. 214 century (e.g., IG XII,9 243 and 249B, IGXII,9 sup.555).216 The number of names in the first catalogue is noteworthy: thirty men are listed with their patronymics, and given that this text is dated by the year of the polemarchs, we would presume that such a list would be produced annually. This was not,

Chankowski concludes, a momentary Boeotian affectation, but instead is another example of the much longer-term adaptation of the Athenian ephēbeia for Eretrian purposes.

Our evidence for the ephēbeia elsewhere in Hellenistic Euboea is slim, but there is one inscription from Carystos which leads us to believe that the institution may have been replicated in form or another among the island’s other communities. IG XII,9 20, found in Carystos and dated to the second century BC based on its letter forms, is largely fragmentary but lists a number of civic offices – grammateus, agoranomos, stratēgos, among others (l.3-9), and line 10 has been reconstructed by

Ziebarth to read ‘[ἐφηβα]ρχ̣ήσαντα.’ The reconstruction by all accounts seems plausible, as the letter counts seem to match, and the most likely alternative – gymnasiarchēsanta – is too long to sit comfortably in the line (Chankowski 2010, 468 and catalogue 107). The implication is that Carystos at some point in the second century had a functioning ephēbeia, along with a magistrate responsible for the training of the corps. We can say precious little beyond this, save that the presence of another ephēbeia in this southern corner of Euboea leads us to conclude that the institution was not unique to

Eretria, and may well have been present among the island’s other major cities. The presence of such an official, however, does not permit us to conclude whether or not the Carysteian ephēbeia was a carbon copy of its Eretrian equivalent. Regardless, the civic importance of the institution remains the same.

216 See Chankowski 1993, 33-36 and notes for his collection of military catalogues and early attestations of the ephēbeia in Eretria. It merits note here that the Eretrian institution is the first ephēbeia attested outside Athens, and thus this region – by virtue of its longstanding connections to Attica – implements this quintessentially hellenistic institution much earlier than most. Many of his conclusion are reiterated in Chankowski 2010, 144- 158 and an epigraphic catalogue at 468-469. 215

This, perhaps above all other institutions, provides the best litmus test for civic vitality and the engagement of the individual citizen in the collective affairs of the polis. In the Euboean context as in the Boeotian context, I would argue that the epigraphic evidence for the Hellenistic ephēbeia represents the formalization of a practice of civic education for young males that had been present for centuries. The archaic origins of the institution have been well discussed by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1968,

1996), who draws on anthropological models of rites of tribal initiation and sees hints of these practices in the Greek world since the sixth or seventh century. To Vidal-Naquet in particular, the process of taking a young man out of his normal social context and putting him through a trying experience before becoming a full member of society has its parallels in North African initiation rites.

Claude Calame (2003) elaborates on these models of tribal initiation and argues that the same ideology is at work with performance in choruses as with the formalized ephēbeia. Most recently Lynn Kozak

(2013) argues for the Homeric origins of the institution and its guiding ideology of the educated warrior, and then traces the development of ephebic programmes which become ubiquitous from Ukraine to

North Africa. The ephēbeia in general, then, is simply the organization of a process that was likely widespread in the Archaic and Classical Greek worlds, and provides a more rigid form of training for a very traditional process. This long history of the programme should be borne in mind as we consider its

Euboean manifestation.

We shall turn to the Boeotian equivalent in the subsequent chapter, but the presence of such an ephēbeia throughout the third century and into the second in Eretria is telling, as is the suggestion of a Carysteian equivalent. In the former case, the investment of two years of the life of every young male of citizen status is a massive commitment of manpower, and the presence of such an ephēbeia indirectly attests to the persistence of the city’s hoplite class. A community that feels impotent or

216 ambivalent in the face of strangling external control does not regularly mobilise an entire section of its citizen body in a programme of military training and civic service. The engagement of the ephebes in the religious life of the city speaks to the multifaceted character of their education. The persistent presence of the Eretrian ephēbeia amidst the vacillations of power within the city and without is one of the surest signs of its energy; such an institution is not the product of an ambivalent or bankrupt society. While we must acknowledge the Athenian roots of this mechanism of civic education – the first of its kind attested outside Attica – the endurance of the Eretrian ephēbeia after the city’s independence from Athens implies that its survival was purely the result of their own initiative.

Perhaps the same can be said of Carystos and the island’s other poleis, but this is only speculation.

Eretria has garnered the lion’s share of scholarly attention for the simple reason that it offers by far the most robust epigraphic record of any city on the Island, but henceforth we shall instead turn our attention to the other corners of Euboea in order to round out our discussion. Eretria’s evidentiary abundance is a scholarly blessing, to be sure, but it runs the risk becoming a curse similar to

Athenocentrism if we take it as being paradigmatic simply because it happens to be the best attested.

At any rate, it was not alone in extending its lines of communication beyond the Island and Attica.

In the spring of 1963 a farmer in Porto Kastri was preparing to plant olive trees in a plain about

100 metres from the shore when his spade struck a stone on which two decrees were inscribed that were subsequently published by two American archaeologists working at the American School in

Athens.217 As an illustrative example of interstate arbitration in the third century, the inscription seems to have escaped the notice of Euboean scholars as well as those with broader interests. The

217 Jacobsen and Smith 1968 published the new stone which they had discovered during the dig at Porto Kastri, and quickly made the connection between it and the extant inscription IG XII,9 44. Accordingly, the latter inscription is taken as the first part of the decree, and the new stone continues where the fragment had left off. The text has been subsequently commented on by Knoepfler 2001a, 412, and SEG 44.710. 217 stele, when joined with another fragment nearby, contains the text of two inscriptions displayed at the sanctuary of Poseidon near Geraistos in the Carysteia. One of the region’s native sons – Charianthos, son of Aristagoras – had justly settled a number of conflicts that had arisen on the island of Kimolos which, although not terribly far away, is still hardly nearby according to Greek standards (Jacobsen and

Smith 1968, 184-196). The usual rewards for such good judgement were conferred to Charianthos and his descendants, who would henceforth enjoy a place of honoured privilege in a grateful Kimolos.

Testament thereof was erected in Kimolos at the sanctuary of Athena, and in Geraistos at the sanctuary of Poseidon.

The episode is of interest on several levels, not least of all in its procedural mechanics. The letter recounts that Charianthos came to Kimolos ‘in accordance with the letter of King Antigonus’ (l.

20-25), charged with settling many outstanding cases that were causing enduring civic strife. Based on the decree’s letter forms, it must date to the third century and our commentators conclude that the

‘King Antigonus’ mentioned must be Antigonus III Doson.218 The geography of the inscription presumes

Antigonid dominance of the Aegean, and thus this must date to some point after the Chremonidean

War – likely to around 250, the time at which we would expect Antigonid interference in both locales to be at its most heavy-handed. Yet the royal touch is rather light: Kimolos must have written

Antigonus with a request for arbitration in order to restore civic harmony, Antigonus then responded with a letter promising an arbitrator, and Charianthos of Carystos arrived in fulfillment of this charge.

All involved, we must assume, were consenting parties: it does not seem as if Antigonus is forcing a foreign judge on the Kimolians, and neither ought we to think that Charianthos was dragged kicking and screaming to the southern Aegean. The king, as is the case in the Eretrian decrees I have

218 L. 21 discussed at Jacobsen and Smith 1968, 198 of this and Schumacher 2006, 55.. 218 mentioned above, exerts a spectral influence and wields indirect authority through the vehicle of civic officials from elsewhere in his domain.

The gratitude of the Kimolians ought to be taken as genuine, and their aspirations traditional: good repute throughout the Greek world, civic concord, and the praise and reward of the man who was so instrumental in restoring it. This is civic government functioning precisely as it should, and while

Carystos had up to this point been relegated to evidentiary obscurity within Euboea and presumable anonymity without, it is suddenly participating in a broader realm of interstate relations from which it had previously been absent.

We further gain a glimpse of the regional dynamics within the Carysteia: after the devastation of the Classical Period, Carystos had apparently begun to reconsolidate an urban core and accompanying government as the closing lines of the inscription refer to (l.47-48) τάν βουλᾶν καὶ τόν

δᾶμον τῶν κάρυστιων. Such civic resurgence can only have occurred since the collapse of Athenian hegemony. A very traditional regional dynamic is at work. The decree is not to be erected in the city itself, but rather in an inviolable place in the nearby sanctuary of Poseidon at Geraistos – thus an extramural sanctuary of regional importance is the preferred lieu de memoire.

Civic and regional religious traditions were thus well alive and functioning during the Antigonid dominion, especially given our uncertainty about whether or not Geraistos can be counted as a possession of Carystos at the time. Regardless, the sanctuary – traditional, given that it was well known to the Dark Age Greeks (Geyer 1903, 111-113) – was enjoying a newfound prominence during the period as it ‘seems to have become the most important religious centre in the Carysteia, if not in fact in the whole of southern Euboea, by the Hellenistic Period’ (Jacobsen and Smith 1968, 196-197). As was the case in the Argolid, the third century was not marked by the decline of regional cultic centres, quite

219 the opposite: these ‘traditional’ sanctuaries become increasingly prominent features of the Euboean cultic landscape and hit their zenith precisely when the Macedonian hegemony was at its strongest.

The Sanctuary of Poseidon as Geraistos was not alone, as we see the same effervescence of regional religious activity throughout the Island. We have already encountered the festival of Artemis at Amarynthos (vel Artemis Amarynthia) in the inscription adding certain elements of solemnity to its usual celebration during the first years of Macedonian hegemony. The restorative character of this inscription, and its implication that the festival had been celebrated long before the rise of Philip and

Alexander, should be borne in mind. This goddess, well described by Nilsson as ‘die Hauptgöttin von

Euboea’ (quoted in Knoepfler 1988, 390) had long ranked first and foremost in the Euboean pantheon, and certainly continued to do so throughout the Macedonian hegemony and far beyond. The treasury of Artemis acted as the principal holy bank of Eretria, her sanctuary was the site at which various treaties and dedications made by the island’s cities were inscribed and exposed, and by all accounts none of this was diminished during the third century.

Since the outset of the Hellenistic Period the Artemisia was celebrated with more solemnity than ever thanks to the addition of musical competitions, and the festival continued unabated through the third century both in Eretria and throughout the island. As I shall discuss in greater detail in my conclusions, in the last quarter of the century Magnesia on the Meander organised prominent games in honour of Artemis Leukophryene. In order to lend an air of tradition and importance to its new celebrations it sought approval, participation, and recognition of asylia from those cities in the mainland which had the longest (continuous) history of honouring the goddess.219 At the top of their list were Eretria and Chalcis; the former is explicitly said to be renowned for its piety in general

219 Magnesia’s broader quest for asylia and its diplomatic overtures throughout the Greek world are best discussed by Sosin 2009, TAPA 139, 369-410. Our decrees here are mentioned at 380-384. 220 towards the gods and its devotion to Artemis in particular (l.13-14: μάλιστα πρὸς τὴν Ἄρτε̣[μιν]).220 The series of inscriptions involving Eretria and Chalcis date to the around 208-205 BC, and the implication is that the worship in Artemis in both communities – and thus in the island as a whole – was alive and well over a century after the decree restoring her festival.221

The snapshot provided by this episode is fascinating. Here we have two Euboean cities being approached independently by a new Hellenistic foundation in Asia Minor for recognition of its emergent cultic traditions, and participation in its games. For the Magnesians, what better way to ground the festival in deep Hellenic tradition and lend an air of antiquity to their festival than by inviting these two cities and thereby borrowing some of their religious prestige? Neither Chalcis nor

Eretria would have been the recipient of such overtures had their regional cultic traditions – in this case, worship of Artemis – fallen into neglect and irrelevance under Macedonian domination. The enthusiasm of Magnesia is perhaps the best means by which to hold a mirror up to contemporary

Euboean practices and catch some glimpse of their enduring vitality. That Eretria and Chalcis remained connected to this broader network of Greek cities that stretched across the Aegean and traversed dynastic divides is another ready indication of their prominence and energy. The Macedonian kings do appear in the background, though not ominously: Chalcis makes reference to a letter of Philip, though

Eretria does not, though I agree with Sosin when he notes that ‘we see in these neighbors’ responses indications of local sentiment and sensibility rather than of a monarch’s puppet strings’ (2009, 382).222

Genuine religious devotion, which transcended the walls of individual cities on the island, seems to be

220 I.Mag.48, the decree is also collected by McCabe as Magnesia 27. 221 The decree regarding Chalcis is I.Mag. 57, Magnesia 19, and SEG 29.1132, while the decree relating to Eretria is discussed by Knoepfler 1988, 390. 222 Reference to the letter of Philip is at lines 1-2: ἐπειδὴ ὁ β]ασιλεὺς Φίλι[π]πος ἔγρα[ψε]ν τῆι βουλῆι κ[αὶ τῶι] δήμ[ωι] 221 at work here – not simple grovelling at the feet of a domineering monarch that some would assume.

This episode will subsequently prove invaluable in formulating our broader conclusions at the end of this study.

The Artemisia’s enduring regional popularity was not limited to Chalcis and Eretria, and seems to have included Carystos as well.223 A mention of the latter city by Livy (35.38.3) when describing the events of 192 BC states that sacrum anniversarium eo forte tempore Eretriae Amarnythidis Dianae erat, quod non popularium modo sed Carystiorum etiam coetu celebratur.224 The festival itself was celebrated near Eretria, but not limited exclusively to Eretrians – and here is another hint that the festival was of pan-Euboean importance even by the dawn of the Roman conquest of the island. One need not necessarily assume that this festival was simply the recent product of a contemporary trend towards federalism, as Knoepfler succinctly states that its popularity across the island ‘n’implique nullement que la fête ait été fédérale’ (Knoepfler 1972, 272). As seen in the Peloponnese, neither the

Macedonian aegis nor a strong web of extra-regional connections automatically entailed the decay and death of regional religious traditions.

The Macedonian hegemony did not freeze the dynamics of regional interaction, either: it is during this same century of ‘occupation’ and ‘domination’ that there is independent expansion of several of the island’s urban communities and re-organization of their territory. It is only during the

Hellenistic Period – specifically during the third century – that most of Eretria’s 55-60 demes are first attested, and while some may have a history that extends back to the Classical Period there are just as many new regional attestations (Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004, 643). The city was, if not expanding

223 The relationship of Carystos and the Carysteia with the festival of Artemis Amarynthos is described in exhaustive detail by Knoepfler 1972. 224 ‘It happened at that time that it was the annual festival of Artemis Amarynthia at Eretria, which is celebrated by the people of not only that city, by of Carystos as well.’ 222 outright, then still in the process of consolidating and organizing its regional possessions. The same can be said of Histiaia’s contemporary organization into thirty demes, only a few of which are attested previously. Those which can be traced back to the Classical Period – Athenai Diades (no. 364), Dion (no.

368), Orobiai (no. 378), and Posideion (no. 376) – are all attested as poleis that were later incorporated into Histiaia, and thus perhaps this is evidence of a late process of synoecism in the region.225 Many of the island’s demes are attested as settlements, but not poleis, in the Classical Period, therefore the process of nucleation and urban agglomeration was certainly still under way during the Hellenistic

Period.

Adding in the trend towards some form of federalism which Knoepfler has recently argued was emerging under Macedonian dominion, the region if anything can be characterised as ‘developing’ during the third century (Knoepfler 2015). I do not mean development in an idealised subjective sense, but rather as a set of objective criteria: the Euboeans were organising their territory according to their own structures, grouping different communities in to an emerging hierarchy of polis communities, demes, and settlements. These polis communities in turn were negotiating their relationship with each other, balancing common interests with local preoccupations with varying degrees of success by means of federal structures whose precise prerogatives were still coming to be defined (Knoepfler 2015).

Beneath all of this, shared religious traditions and cultic patterns, along with annual celebrations, provided a subtle glue to hold the island’s pieces together.

225 As previously, the catalogue numbers for these poleis and settlements are those listed by Reber, Hansen, & Ducrey 2004. 223

The Economy of Hellenistic Euboea

Whether or not the island was economically prosperous under Macedonian tutelage is unclear; scholarly assertions on the matter are often vague. Knoepfler lauds the span stretching from the close of the fourth century to the Chremonidean War in glowing terms as being ‘à coup sûr des décennies de grand essor économique et culturel’ (2001a, 107). Describing the decree in honour of Proteas (no.15,) during the Macedonian domination, he paints a less clear picture. On the one hand he cites the city’s desperate need to borrow money and their fickle benefaction of civic honours in gratitude thereof, but on the other he mentions the reliability of abundant harvests and general agricultural success of the third century (2001a, 301). Slightly later, he notes that even if several abundant coin hoards dating to the period have been found, we must attribute these instead to a higher concentration of wealth, and remain steadfast in the conviction that ‘les finances érétriennes ne paraissent pas s’être sensiblement améliorées dans la seconde moitié du IIIe siècle’ (2001a, 301). Yet these generalizations, he admits, rest more upon incomplete archaeological data and inference than anything else. Admittedly, the

Euboeans had to pay some form of taxes (phorai/eisphorai) to the Antigonids, but there is no reason to presume that this burden would have been harsher than the more systematic exactions of the

Athenians.

Sylvain Fachard’s 2012 monograph la défense du territoire builds off of the Swiss School’s excavations of the region by studying the Eretrian countryside with an eye to regional defence.

Although his goal is not to complete a traditional survey of the region per se, he still concludes that

Eretria’s peak period of agricultural productivity continued well into the second century – thus the city does not hit its economic apogee until the beginning of the Hellenistic Period (111-123). The fertility and productivity of the countryside then leads the Eretrians to invest in its defence, resulting in a

224 network of fortifications designed to secure and defend the countryside – not simply to repulse outside invasions (263-276). The fortifications which emerge are the product of the city’s own efforts, and serve no broader strategic purpose except for the defence of the city’s chōra, so it is not as if these are another tool in the arsenal of an occupying king. The territory of Eretria presents 35 fortified settlements, of which 30 remained occupied throughout the Hellenistic Period, with no sharp or immediate decline in site numbers. Interestingly, these fortifications were built and occupied when the civilian population of the region peaked, and the land was at its most productive. Such regional defence was a sign of economic vitality, not impoverishment (269-276), and he concludes that they served a fundamentally economic function. In addition to acting as fortresses scattered throughout the countryside, they also functioned as storage facilities to protect the region’s agricultural products from the elements throughout the year (279-287). All of this emerges in the late fourth century, and continues to be developed into the second – precisely when Eretria at its most successful.

Karl Schefold sees indices of prosperity through a slightly different lens in his survey of Eretrian architecture. Rich tombs, artistic activity, and urban development are all symptomatic of a booming economy under Macedonian protection, beginning in around 300 with the expansion of the city’s theatre and continuing until around 198 – after which Eretrian building projects are geared more towards restoration (1968, 281).

In a study of Hellenistic Eretrian houses, Karl Reber brands the city and the island with such terms that bring the endurance of our preconceived notions of Hellenistic decline to the fore. Guided by the decree in honour of Timotheos that we have discussed above, he hypothesizes that a new wealthy class established itself in the city after the tumult of c.320, which then led to the concentration of arable land in the hands of a few new proprietors (2007, 287-288). Noting the presence of olive

225 presses in houses within the city walls that had been expanded and renovated, Reber concludes with no substantial precision that these olive presses were relocated from the countryside out of concerns of safety ‘in relation to a warlike event which was responsible for the installation of processing centres inside the city walls’ (2007, 287).

The picture that he paints is one of urban trepidation towards the perils of the countryside, which had been beset by ‘warlike events’ with such frequency that they were no longer economically viable. The means by which Reber arrives at his conclusions speak of the logic that guides these assumptions, and in the wake of Fachard’s recent findings I am unconvinced by this assertion of insecurity in the Eretrian countryside. As I mentioned above, he refers to ‘a general economic crisis that troubled the Greek world’ (2007, 288) but provides no specifics, and he is comfortable in asserting that ‘we are undoubtedly confronted by a general phenomenon of the early Hellenistic Period, a notable reduction of farmsteads in most of the Greek countryside’ (2007, 287).

He describes the phenomenon as being widespread, and to shed light on the Eretrian experience he borrows data from nearby on the island: ‘for Euboea, as I mentioned before, our data are insufficient… only in southern Euboea do we have evidence pointing to an almost total lack of

Hellenistic habitation sites in the countryside, in contrast to the late Classical Period’ (2007, 287). In support of this conclusion, he cites the survey of the Carysteia conducted by Donald Keller in 1985. But when we follow the trail and examine what Keller has to say about the character of the Hellenistic countryside in the sub-region, a different story emerges – and it is to this that we now turn our attention in order to focus on the experience of one fairly humble corner of the island.

226

The Very Local Level: Carystos and the Carysteia

As I have mentioned above both in the context of Euboea and the Argolid, there is an unfortunate – though certainly understandable – propensity for looking at the most conspicuous city in a region and presuming that it comfortably stands in for the whole. This has been far too often the case with Athens being taken as paradigmatic of a typical Classical polis despite its innumerable idiosyncrasies, and in Euboea we have seen a similar problem at work with the amount of scholarly attention given to Eretria and Chalcis at the expense of the rest of the island.

The quality and quantity of epigraphic evidence naturally account for this, but fortunately for

Hellenistic Euboea there is a thorough archaeological survey of a region that seldom graces the literary record. If we seek to understand how the vagaries of the Hellenistic Period manifested themselves in

Euboea and elsewhere on the most local, immediate level of daily life, then there are few better places to which we ought to turn than the Carysteia. It moreso than many other regions can be held to be representative: at the end of the Classical Period it had a fledgling urban core, but was mostly populated by scattered agricultural settlements of varied size and scope. The region has a coherent religious tradition, but lacks the glamour of more complex urban development of the sort that draws our attention away from the countryside.

We must start by tracing Reber’s assertion of an ‘almost total lack of Hellenistic habitation sites in the countryside’, particularly when compared to the late Classical Period. I am puzzled as to how

Reber arrived at this conclusion, as the pages which he cites of Donald Keller’s survey discuss the discovery of several new Hellenistic habitation sites on the outskirts of the city itself – indicating a developing trend towards nucleation of settlement that had not been identifiable during the Classical

227

Period. (Keller 1985, 217-218). Fachard’s assertions regarding Eretria speak to the contrary elsewhere in the Island, but we shall continue with Carystos.

If we, as Reber, take Carystos as being paradigmatic then the island’s Hellenistic history is marked by at least continuity, and at most expansion. Decline never enters into the equation, especially when bearing in mind the near complete lack of archaeological evidence for urban settlement in Classical Carystos after the Persians and Athenians. The city was sacked, weakened, and scattered, and so it largely remained under Athenian domination (Keller 1985, 207-214).

Tracing a trajectory of rural decline is essentially impossible for a variety of methodological reasons. Carysteian settlements of the Classical Period were scattered in the foothills of Mt. Ochi, and did not leave the same easily identifiable material remains as the distinctly Attic cleruchies of Athenian settlers (Keller 1985, 188-19 and 200-201). Most telling, though, are the terms in which the survey archaeologists themselves discuss the classification of their find sites. A 2010 special edition of an archaeological journal dedicated to Carystos and Styra use ‘Classical-Hellenistic’ as a site category because the sites of both periods are essentially indistinguishable. Classical homesteads look materially the same as Hellenistic homesteads and there is implicit continuity among them.226 Other analyses of fortifications and religious sites similarly use ‘Classical-Hellenistic’ as an analytical category, indicating that the true rupture in material culture did not come until the Roman conquest.227

To compound the issue, early Hellenistic settlements in the Carysteia are likewise indistinguishable from second century settlements – thus even if decline could be said to have happened, we could not point to any one period with enough specificity to cast blame or attribute responsibility. Keller opens his discussion of Hellenistic Carystos with the caveat that ‘it has proved

226 For instance, Keller and Hom 2010, 1-6, and 5 for a specific site analysis. 227 e.g., Chidiroglou 2010 on fortifications, and Tankosic and Chidiroglou 2010 on Kampos. 228 difficult, on the basis of surface remains only, to isolate sites of strictly Hellenistic date… the majority of third century material also continued to be occupied in the early Roman period,’ thus leading him to consider the two epochs as one (1985, 214-215). Continuity in rural settlement is thus the dominant trait of the period, and it is not as if there is a cataclysmic decline in site numbers at its outset – or at all, for that matter. Life in the countryside of rural Carystos went on after the Macedonian conquest as it had previously, and continued to do so well into the Roman Period.

Even without much of a city until the early Hellenistic Period, the Carysteia still bore all the marks of a region: regional sanctuaries remained the most conspicuous finds during the Classical and

Hellenistic Period in Kampos, (Tankosic and Chidiroglou 2010, 15-17), and ‘even in such a small area as the Paximadhi peninsula, various levels of communication existed between different types of sites of human activity’ (Keller and Hom 2010, 8). Rural does not equal underdeveloped, and there is evidence for the persistence of regional network routes into the Hellenistic Period throughout the Carysteia

(Ibid., 5-8).

The advent of the Macedonians and Carystos’ role ‘in the position of a city and province under the control of a succession of foreign rulers’ spelled an economic boom in the region (Keller 1985, 204).

Considering that Carystos only began to show the faintest signs of urban life in the 370s, the pace of its

Hellenistic development is stunning. Despite vacillations in government as Macedonian currents spilled through the city, ‘the region appears to have prospered’ (Keller 1985, 215.) By the mid second-century,

‘the archaeological remains from the city demonstrate the general prosperity of Hellenistic and Roman

Karystos’ (Ibid.) It was only under Macedonian control that the city began to expand thanks to the region’s prosperity.

229

The Hellenistic Period marks the birth, rather than the death, of this particular polis: the fledgling city was enriched by the addition of religious and civic buildings in the period, it continued to expand through the second century, and prominent structures like the temple of Dionysus date from the period (Keller 1985, 215-217). It is only during the Hellenistic Period that we begin to see fairly intense urban settlement and the proliferation of sites on the outskirts of the urban core, it is only then that we can identify a prominent citadel at the city’s centre, and a necropolis to the south of the city itself (Keller 1985, 215-219). These are trends that we more commonly associate with the Late Archaic

Period than the Late Hellenistic, yet they are conspicuous in this corner of Euboea.

Such regional prosperity and urban development were precisely of the sort that the Athenians had methodically tried to prevent during their Classical occupation of the Carysteia. Only the lighter touch of the Macedonians could encourage such invigoration. A brief comparison to the Carysteia’s

Roman sequel further illuminates the character of its Hellenistic experience. It was under their control, not Macedon’s, that the region’s land was reconfigured towards the production of cash crops for export, the implementation of new farming technologies, and a shift in efforts away from terraced slopes and towards alluvial plains (Keller 1985, 221). It is a similar story to that which we have just encountered in the Argolid. Such a retooled agricultural system was both symptomatic of and inclined towards large manor farms that were worked by many workers and slaves. Villas begin to dot the countryside, and Roman economic attention was further drawn towards the modern village of

Marmari and its deposits of Cipollino marble that were so lucrative to the Republic, and later to the

Empire.228 This along with other mineral interests led to the creation of surburbs that further changed

228 The villas, for instance, are at sites 55 and 67 in the countryside near Alamanaika, and other habitation sites distributed along the shore of the bay at sites 12, 118, 136. The former sites are marked by the richness of their architectural elements, as discussed again by Keller 1985, 227. 230 the geography of the region, and all the while the city itself benefited from the marble revenue and its key position on maritime trade routes (Keller 1985, 222-5).

The conclusions to be drawn from Hellenistic Carysteia are thus fairly straightforward. On the level of agriculture and material development of the countryside, the Hellenistic Period is archaeologically indistinguishable from its Classical precedent and is thus marked by the continuity, rather than decline, of traditional patterns of settlement and cultivation. There is no indication of a catastrophic rupture in the region’s economy, or of a trend towards rural depopulation. The urban core, which had only begun to re-emerge in the mid fourth century, enjoyed great material prosperity and physical development under Macedonian domination, only acquiring most of the traits associated with a full-fledged polis during the third and second centuries. Much of the material change typically associated with the Hellenistic Period is rather present during the Roman occupation, under whose tutelage the region’s economy was reorganized towards large-scale cultivation of crops for exportation and marble quarrying. If the experience of the Carysteia is taken paradigmatic as the rest of Euboea, there are few signs of demographic or economic disruption until the advent of Rome.

Conclusions

By means of conclusion we ought to expand on the Carysteia by making a brief glance towards the Roman presence in Euboea. The epilogue, as ever, reveals much of the character of what preceded it. The Macedonians, as we have seen here and elsewhere, had more pressing concerns in their broader struggle against each other for dominance in the Aegean or beyond, and generally could not be bothered by the mundane details of micromanagement in the mainland. The pax macedonica, as it

231 were, of the third century came with a fairly straightforward set of rules: tolerate the presence of a

Macedonian garrison and royal official, pay whatever tribute was expected of each individual city, and life went on largely as it had beforehand. There is almost no evidence of the calculated management of the Athenians resurrected in the Macedonian administration of Euboea.

The Romans, as usual, are a different story. As with the Argolid, Euboea steps out of the evidentiary fog at the beginning of the second century around the outbreak of the Macedonian Wars, with each of the island’s cities treading their own path in response to the approach of the clouds from the West. Each accordingly did so with varied success in a narrative that has recently been recounted by Knoepfler in sufficient detail that it need not be repeated here (2015). Suffice it to say that the legal status of the cities of Euboea had changed dramatically – and often repeatedly – in the midst of successive Roman interventions, beginning with their inclusion in Flamininus’ bold Isthmian declaration of Greek freedom.229

Euboea was clearly becoming entangled in a much larger drama, as in the aftermath of the

Isthmian settlement the Attalids demanded Oreos and Eretria as the price of services rendered – though to no avail.230 The Macedonians were happy to play the role of Greek benefactor provided assurances of Greek loyalty, while the Romans speak to the Euboeans in rather more threatening tones: at Livy’s conventus of Euboean cities in 194 summoned by Flamininus, the proconsul menacingly reminded the Euboeans of the condition in which he found them, and the condition in which he left them.231 Though Flamininus was speaking to the momentary responses of the Euboeans to the advent

229 Pol. 18.47.10-11, Liv. 33.34.10, discussed by Knoepfler 2015. 230 Again I refer the reader to Knoepfler 2015’s discussion of the Euboean response to the arrival of the Romans. 231 Livy 34.51.1-2: ipse Chalcidem profectus, deductis non a Chalcide solum sed etiam ab Oreo atque Eretria praesidiis, conventum ibi Euboicarum habuit civitatium admonitosque, in quo statu rerum accepisset eos et in quo relinqueret, dimisit. 232 of Rome he was perhaps unknowingly perspicacious, and we too would do well to bear in mind this consideration of how Euboea was found, and how it was left behind by the Romans.

Roman commanders of the Middle Republic are not known to be subtle men, and this repute certainly holds true in Euboea. Eretria was sacked at the initial arrival of the Romans in 198 BC, from which the western quarter of the city’s housing would never fully recover (Reber 2007, 288). Under

Flamininus, the Romans then resurrected the Euboean koinon in service of their interests, in the process restructuring regional politics in a manner that perhaps engendered more resistance than compliance. The divisions of the Hellenistic world quite literally came to Euboea’s doorstep with the dramatic arrival of Antiochus III in 190, during his march through central Greece. The Chalcidians, along with the rest of Euboea, seem to have welcomed him with open arms, and his symbolic commitment to them was concretized with his marriage to the aptly-named Euboea, daughter of Cleombrotos of

Chalcis.232 It had now become abundantly clear which side Euboea preferred to take in the conflict. The image of a young girl who bore the island’s name being passed off in marriage as a means of choosing one side over the other is not lacking in symbolism; the Island’s fate would henceforth be wed to that of the Hellenistic kings, for better or worse.

The hopes of Antiochus were quickly proven to be abortive, and in the aftermath of his defeat the Romans again set about institutionalizing their involvement in the island’s politics. The latest version of the koinon that was resurrected, this time centred on the capital of Chalcis, had at its head an official bearing the title of hegēmon which Knoepfler identifies as first being held by none other than Flamininus himself (2015). In a far cry from distant Macedonian oversight, as early as in the first

He himself went to Chalcis, withdrawing the garrisons not from Chalcis alone but from Oreos and Eretria also, called a council there of the Euboean states and let them go after reminding them in what condition he had found them and in what he was leaving them. 232 Pol. 20.8.1-5, App.Syr. 16.2, Livy 36.11.1-2, Athenaeus 439e-f. 233 decades of Roman dominance we see both their engineering of Euboean politics and their transplantation of officials into the helm. The region’s cultic landscape had also changed by the mid- century at the latest, with the institution of the games of the Romaia in Chalcidia at some point after the Aetolo-Syrian debacle. Already, the Romans had (indirectly or directly) effected more change in the religious landscape of Chalcis in less than a generation than the Macedonians had done in a century and a half.233 By 146 we can see that the Euboeans had been thoroughly cowed by Roman might, as an honorary inscription at Amarynthos – previously, as Knoepfler notes, the site of aspirations towards

Euboean unity and common action – now praises L. Mummius as a saviour and a god.234 This, in and of itself, is a vector of continuity between the Hellenistic and the Roman periods: here we see a Roman magistrate being honored with the quintessentially Hellenistic titles of saviour and god. Interestingly, these had not been used to praise the Macedonian kings in Euboea, but they nonetheless appear in reference to their Roman successors.

Rome, rather than Macedon, left its mark on the processes of civic government. After their arrival comes a sudden end to the practice of granting proxeny at Eretria and elsewhere, epigraphic evidence again becomes sparse, and we have no mention of any communal actions taken by the

Euboeans whatsoever from around 167 to 146. Thereafter some form of a Euboean koinon would continue to exist well into the Julio-Claudian period and beyond, though only as a structure lingering in the shadow of Rome. Civic activity within its constituent cities only appears intermittently, after pauses of increasing length as the Roman dominion wore on. As Zecchini has recently put it with poetic simplicity, ‘nel 146 era cominciata un lungo sonno politico, che si prolungo sino alla fine del mondo antico’ (2014, 269).

233 Knoepfler 2015, n.79. Picard 1979, following Robert 1969, 44-49; Knoepfler 1990, 485. 234 Knopfler 1990, 252, 280, based on SEG 28.722. 234

As with the Argolid I must take care, however, not to simply transfer blame that was once borne by the Macedonians onto Roman shoulders. Many aspects of local life, even under the Romans, seem to have carried on as they had previously during the Republican and Imperial periods alike. In

Eretria, the ephēbeia endured into the first half of the first century and thus persisted long into the

Roman period. This institution which, as we have seen, was of Athenian inspiration on the level of organization nonetheless continued to be carried by Eretrian hands through the Macedonian hegemony and well into the Roman period. A contemporary inscription attests to this vector of continuity in the city’s internal life (IG XII 9,234), in which the organs of city government – probouloi and synedroi – recognise the virtue and generosity of the gymnasiarch Elpnikos, son of Nikomachos and commend him for his good will towards the people.235 The gymnasiarch had in no small measure continued to grease the wheels of civic life with his individual benefactions, allowing the gymnasium to continue functioning, training the boys of the ephebate by bringing in a rhetorician and drillmaster, and providing the oil necessary to gymnastic life.236 Elpnikos further provided the prizes of festivals that had been celebrated since the fifth century and continued to be commemorated in his day, the

Artemisia not least among them along with the games of Herakles and Hermes

I shall further discuss the importance of the Hellenistic ephēbeia for our understanding of the mainland’s persistent civic vitality in the following chapter on Boeotia, but the topic ought to be reiterated again with a few words here. As we had seen in the closing decades of the fourth century, still the wheels of civic government continued to turn: the young boys and ephebes of the city were

235 Chankowski 1993, 22-31 and Knoepfler 1988, 385-390 for the decree. The first few lines (1-5), borrowing the text of IG XII,9 234 merit quotation here as apt testament to the continued function of many civic bodies: οἱ πρόβουλοι εἶπαν· ἐπειδὴ Ἐλπίνικος Νικομάχου / αἱρεθεὶς ὑπὸ τοῦ δήμου γυμνασίαρχος ἔν τε τοῖς / λοιποῖς τοῖς κατὰ τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐνδόξως ἀνεστρά- / φη, συνελθόντων διὰ τὴν φιλοτιμίαν αὐτοῦ / πλειόνων παίδων τε καὶ ἐφήβων καὶ τῶν ἄλ- / λων τῶν ὑπὸ τὴν ἀρχὴν πειπτόντων. 236 As in lines 8-9: καὶ παρέσχεν ἐκ τοῦ ἰδίου ῥήτορά τε καὶ ὁπλομάχον. 235 educated and trained in martial and rhetorical arts, and their careful cultivation in preparation for the life of the citizen was prioritized now as it was then. This civic mentality outlasted the more momentary dominions of the Athenians, the Macedonians, and to some extent the Romans as well.

But even here, in this snapshot of what seems to be the civic life so quintessential of the Hellenistic

Period, there are shadows at the edges of the frame: Elpnikos further proved his civic benevolence by inviting both the citizens of the city and the resident Romans alike to a banquet on the fourth day of the festival of Hermes (lines 29-30).237 This aspect of civic life persisted, but with a new audience that seems to have fit awkwardly within the community.

And so it would persist for centuries to come, in some form. The Herakleia celebrated in Chalcis and Eretria continued into the first century, and other inscriptions speak to the persistent importance of the festival of Artemis Amarynthia through the end of the Republic and into the Imperial Period

(Chankowski 1993, 22-31). Strabo (10.1.10) mentions the famous procession in honour of the goddess featuring a large number of hoplites, horsemen, and chariots, and her repute had crossed the gulf into

Attica by the second century AD (Knoepfler 1988, 396.). As late as the third century, Xenophon of

Ephesus mentions that the games continued to be celebrated and thus cultic traditions seem to have persisted where others perished (Ibid.). But much else of daily life changed under the Romans after the first century, and with their rule we see a coordinated shift in the Island’s geography and economy of a scope and scale that rivals the Athenian occupation.

The motif that I have discussed above in the Carysteia holds true elsewhere in Euboea, as patterns of land ownership and agriculture were reconfigured again in response to the exigencies of an imperial export-based economy. The Romans did their work in the same efficient manner as their

237 l.29-30: τούς τε πολίτας καὶ / Ῥωμαίων τοὺς παρεπιδημοῦντας 236

Athenian predecessors. A gradual decline in site numbers during the Roman Period is matched by the presence of larger manors with elaborate villas. The individual subsistence farmer gave way to the wealthy landowner more interested in reliable soil productivity than the traditional methods of exploitation.238 Agriculture, which had so long been the lynchpin of the Euboean economy, gradually paled in importance as the attention of the Romans was drawn towards the lucrative prospect of marble exportation in the south of the island. These communities, as I have mentioned, profited immensely from feeding the voracious Roman appetite for such luxury, but this wealth, it seems, was not distributed as equally as with its older systems of agriculture. The island’s centre of economic gravity shifted to the south, to the Carysteia, which now basked in the benefits of Roman exportation after it had languished so long in the darkness of fifth and fourth century obscurity.

Others were not so fortunate. Eretria, which has for so long been held as the beacon of Euboea, never recovered from the advent of the Romans and bore their yoke only with the greatest difficulty.

The city that had so prospered under the Macedonians, which had maintained such active links with its fellow cities across the Aegean and beyond, and had seen the zenith of its urban development in the third century subsequently slid ever deeper into decline after the first century. It was when the

Macedonians left, not when they arrived, that the rot began to set in. After the Eretrians had decided, perhaps unwisely, to side with Mithridates over the Romans, we witness the beginning of what Brélaz and Schmid identify as the real ‘époque de récession, voire de crise économique’ (Brélaz and Schmid

2004, 257). Inscriptions and archaeological hints at building activity become completely absent well into the Imperial Period. Certain neighbourhoods of the city itself fell into disrepair and were later abandoned, never to be subsequently reoccupied. The temples of Apollo and Artemis, who had

238 This discussion of Euboea’s broader archaeological trajectory is drawn from Alcock 1993, 30-34 and other references to Euboea cited above. 237 enjoyed such shared primacy in the Eretrian pantheon, gradually fell into neglect and later oblivion as their once proud cults were forgotten (Brélaz and Schmid 2004, 257). The environs of the agora, once a place of the vibrant commerce of everyday life in its Hellenistic heyday, came to be used instead as a necropolis. This site of aspirations that had here been realised much later than elsewhere was now inhabited only by the ghosts of what had once been; they too, along with the Eretrians themselves, consigned to the earth.

238

Chapter III

Stability and Innovation: Hellenistic Boeotia

ὄτρυνον νῦν ἑταίρους,

Αἰνέα, πρῶτον μὲν Ἥραν Παρθενίαν κελαδῆσαι,

γνῶναί τ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽, ἀρχαῖον ὄνειδος ἀλαθέσιν

λόγοις εἰ φεύγομεν, Βοιωτίαν ὗν.

Now rouse your companions,

Aeneas, first to shout the praises of Hera Parthenia, and then to know whether we have truly escaped the ancient reproach of men's speech, ‘Boeotian pig’

Pindar, Olympian VI, 87-90

Introduction: The Greek Countryside

From Euboea we turn our gaze westward, towards a region that in some ways is so strikingly similar, and in others profoundly different. Boeotia, like its eastern neighbour, has been the object of antique and modern marginalization as Attica takes centre stage. Neither is Boeotia among the most wealthy or most enticing regions of Greece, nor did it enjoy primacy among its contemporaries save for

239 its brief decades of hegemony in the fourth century. Too little, too late, in the eyes of those more interested in resistance to the Persian invader or the success of Athenian dominion in the century that followed. That Boeotia was caught on the wrong side of both conflicts did little to lighten the burden of ancient disdain.239 The typical ‘Boeotian Swine’ first alluded to by Pindar but perpetuated in the eyes of

Athenians and their eager successors is an antique characterization that is remarkably difficult to unhinge, and one which foments a bias that runs far deeper than we may suspect.240 Yet in Pindar’s appropriation of the moniker we also see the other side of the rhetorical coin: the Boeotian poet became panhellenic in the same manner as Hesiod before him, and the region gained broad appeal by osmosis – as well as by contrast to Athens. Thanks to its most famous sons, Boeotia figures prominently in the ancient literary tradition in a manner that elevates it above being simply a neglected backwater. The seeds of panhellenism had long been sown on the shores of the Kopaïs.

But the stolid reputation of the Boeotians that was encouraged by the Athenians endured longer than such rural appeal. The sixteenth-century adjective ‘boeotian’ is still defined in some dictionaries as ‘dull, ignorant’ bearing all the contempt that is easily heaped on old-fashioned farmers by their more urbane cousins.241 Dismissive judgements of the region’s character led to equally dismissive judgements of its history: in 1895 W. Rhys Roberts summed up his (half-hearted) attempt at

239 Müller 2013, 273-276 for the most up to date recapitulation of the legacy of Boeotian Medism in the literary and historical context. Guillon 1948 provides a complete survey of Athenian prejudice against Boeotians and the ‘swine’ stereotype. Rhys Roberts 1895 likewise recovers much of the evidence for the marginalization of the region and its inhabitants. 240 As Beck 2014 notes, ‘the Athenians tended to use their Boeotian neighbours as a negative foil: Boeotia became virtually an “anti-Athens.” With reference to Arist. Rhet. 1407a4-6 and Plut.Per. 33.4. Zeitlin 1990 and 1993 for the image of Boeotia in Athenian drama. 241 The negative connotations of boeotian are still occasionally extant in English, and particularly pronounced in the French tradition. The 19th century Trésor de la langue française provides several entertaining definitions, among them ‘à l'esprit des Béotiens, tel qu'il a été caractérisé par les Athéniens. Celui qui est lourd d'esprit, grossier, peu cultivé, indifférent à la production littéraire et artistique’ along with the synonyms ‘épais, inculte, lourd, lourdaud’, and the antonyms ‘fin, raffiné, spirituel; athénien.’ The last among them is the most poignant. 240 rehabilitating the Boeotian character by concluding ‘Stolid the Boeotians no doubt were, and self- indulgent. So much should be admitted. The short duration of Boeotian greatness, though other reasons contributed to its brevity, seems to point in the same direction’ (1895, 76).

The region in the Classical Period is, in short, inglorious, and for much of its life in contemporary historiography it has been a dull but nonetheless constant presence in Greek history. A few lines after

Rhys Roberts casually dismisses the Boeotians, however, he goes on to make a level-headed observation that provides the thematic base for our treatment of the region’s Hellenistic experience:

The truth is that the Boeotians, if looked at neither with the contempt of superior neighbours

nor with a misplaced admiration due to a feeling of revulsion against so much undue

depreciation, have many sterling claims upon our regard. There is a stability, between Attica

and Phocis, and reaching to both seas (1895, 77)

It is precisely this stability, introduced by Rhys Roberts and elaborated by Roesch in 1982, that is of most interest to us as we reconsider Boeotia in the centuries leading from Alexander to the Romans and beyond. Viewing the region through the lenses of settlement, politics, and religion reveals instead widespread innovation and cooperation in the interest of stability. The mechanisms themselves may have changed in the Classical to Hellenistic transition, but the overarching goal of preserving the region’s socio-political and territorial integrity remained the same.242

242 The implicit goal of social stability harkens back to the arguments of Samuel 1983 that the Greek economic ideal was the preservation and perpetuation – not growth or expansion – of existing capital. I refer the reader to the introduction for a broader discussion. Post 2012, 31-34 discussed the longer history of this emphasis on preserving territorial integrity, which is best enshrined in the fourth century building programme of the Thebans. 241

In considering each of these aspects we will tread the now-familiar ground of survey archaeology, along with the epigraphic remains of proxenia and commerce, but we shall also delve into the region’s ephebic and agonistic landscapes which lead through the Macedonian hegemony and into the Roman Period. Far from discarding its ancestral adherences and wading into the bland mire of the koinē, Hellenistic Boeotia turned profoundly inwards in defence and preservation of its own regional integrity. At the same time, it was able to enthusiastically establish contacts with the broader

Hellenistic world. Such local energy, I shall argue, was not dissipated as the Romans dissolved the koinon in 172/171. Like the Argolid and Euboea, it allows us to see beyond the exceptions that are

Athens and Sparta, and focus instead on this more rural corner of the mainland.

Yet Boeotia is a rather different beast than the Argolid and Euboea, and to gain a better grasp of its eccentricities we must cast our lines farther back into the Bronze Age and Archaic Period, and track the region’s progress through the political morass of the fifth and fourth centuries. As with the other regions we have considered, the manner in which Boeotia has been characterized in the years preceding the rise of Macedon has coloured our posterior perceptions, and such extant biases must be identified before proceeding forward. The region’s topography provides our first step.

A recent edited volume on Boeotian epigraphy opens by lamenting that it ‘has always been a kind of historical enigma’ (Papazarkadas 2014, 1). The region is puzzling, to be sure, but it is neither incoherent nor disunified. While not truly insular like Euboea, Boeotia’s geography makes it a contiguous and easily defensible region: the high mountain ranges of Kithairon, Patra, and Parnes in the south link to form a rugged border with Attica and Megaris which can only be traversed through

242

Oropos.243 Its western and northern borders are similarly ringed by the hills of Parnassos, Mount

Helikon, and the ranges of Khlomon and Prophitis Elias (Fossey 1988, 4). The northeastern coastline in turn provides access to the Euboean Gulf and thus the Aegean, all the while sheltering inland regions.

The Kephisos River cuts into the centre as it flows to Lake Kopaïs, around which lay fertile plains – all contributing further to Boeotia’s inherently agricultural character.

In and of itself, the 2500km2 area of Boeotia is ringed in by mountains and coastlines which can be traversed only through a few key passages, providing a degree of protection and isolation. Yet the region’s situation in the middle of Greece also makes it an important crossroads, as all land routes from the Peloponnese, Attica, and the west converge in the Boeotian heartland (Fossey 1988, 4). The region today provides apt testament to this: its flat plains lend themselves well to easy transport and the two highways linking Attica and the north follow along what would have been natural passages in antiquity. The E75, the major north-south highway through mainland Greece, runs through Oinophyta and skirts north of Thebes before heading north through Akraiphnio and following the coast towards

Thermopylae. The other route – EO3 – runs south of where Lake Kopaïs had been in antiquity, winding northwest from Thebes to follow an inland track linking the region’s antique centres – Thebes, Thespiai,

Haliartos, Koroneia, and Lebadeia. The trajectory is flat and uneventful but the fertility of the region is evident, as is the looming spectre of mountain ranges to the south.

The modern topography of the region thus reveals the two most important zones of Boeotia to which we shall return in our subsequent political discussion: the inland, largely rural group of settlements stretching along the southern coast of Lake Kopaïs, and its north-eastern coast facing the

Euboean gulf. Contemporary Boeotia is not heavily inhabited, but the strings of villages nestled in the

243 Fossey 1988, 1-13 provides the best overview of the geography of its region and its topographical features. Beck and Ganter 2015 provide a more succinct review, as does Hansen 2004 with ancient references. 243 foothills of the southern mountains or along the coast remain conspicuous. Its decidedly rural character is now, as it was then, obvious, but amidst the crops and flocks there is a steady stream of traffic winding its way through the region. Its geographic integrity should not be equated with cultural isolation. That being said, Boeotia was and remains a world away from the Megaris or Attica, even though the geographical distance separating them is deceptively small.

Though I shall soon turn to more precise details of the region’s history of settlement, a brief recapitulation of its long-term trajectory helps to better situate the Hellenistic Period. Boeotia has long been densely populated as a region, though plagued by Malthusian peaks and valleys over the course of roughly two millennia (Fossey 1988, 408-416). Several Bronze Age palaces and settlements have been identified, notably at Orchomenos and Thebes, but as early as LH I (1550-1500 BC) there is a sharp decline in site numbers followed by only gradual redevelopment over the following centuries

(Fossey 1988, 419-421). The plain, of course, lends itself well to such a Bronze Age network and it is unsurprising to find a similar structure of early settlement as in the Argolid. If there was indeed migration to the region, as ancient traditions purport, it must have been slight, as the Later Helladic

Period (c.1300 onwards) is again marked by a decline in site numbers on a scale that far surpasses anything seen during the Hellenistic or Roman Periods.

From LH IIIB to IIIC (1300—1060 BC) site numbers are halved, and the trend barrels towards near oblivion during the Dark Ages: in the transition from LH IIIB (1300 BC) to the Early (900 BC) and

Middle (850-760 BC) Geometric Periods, Fossey calculates an 87.2% reduction in sites – which by all accounts is a catastrophic decline in rural settlement.244 It is only by the seventh century that we begin

244 Fossey 1988, 426-427, with the chart and list on 428 and 429 respectively. The reduction in sites is strunning: from the LH IIIB peak of 39 sites the number is reduced to 18 by LH IIIC, and further to 9 Protogeometric sites and 5 Early & Middle Geometric sites. The transition between these periods is one of start and remarkably 244 to see signs of repopulation and rehabitation, and by the Classical Period the pattern of site habitation is almost as it was at the end of the Mycenaean Period (Fossey 1988, 431-436). With this broader chronological perspective, Boeotia’s population climax in the fifth and fourth centuries takes on a different appearance. It should perhaps better be seen as a gradual phase of recovery to the bar set by the Mycenaean Period, rather than a completely spontaneous and unprecedented surge in population.

Allegations of decline between the Classical and Hellenistic Periods in turn seem far less catastrophic, and the supposed third century ‘dip’ is only another trough in a regularly fluctuating cycle – a demographic sine curve that is certainly not unique to the region.

Boeotia’s coherence is not limited to such geographic and anthropological criteria. Studies of the early development of Boeotian ‘identity’ have proliferated in recent years; all have followed different paths to similar conclusions. Our ancient references are clear and consistent: the name of the region is of course attested in Hesiod (fr.181), the ethnic boiotos likewise appears in Homer (2.494,

14.476), and 29 Boeotian communities are listed in the Catalogue of Ships (2.494-510), though

Orchomenos is detached and listed among the Minyans (511-516).245 In light of archaeological attestations of depopulation and decline, it is unlikely that all of these communities were continuous with their Bronze Age forerunners. Regardless, Mycenaean ruins at Thebes and Orchomenos were held

constnat decline – 53.8% from LH IIIB to C, 50% from LH IIIC to the Protogeometric, and a further 44.4% from the Protogeometric to the Early Geometric. This, on the aggregate, is far more drastic than the alleged rampant decline of the fourth century. Note also the prolonged time span of such a decline, compared to the allegations of sharp and decisive fourth century reductions which we shall soon discuss. 245 Kühr 2006 provides a magisterial study of the early origins of Boeotian ‘identity’, and while I hesitate to use the term the extent of her material and analysis is without equal. See particularly pp. 53-73 for the Homeric references to Boeotia as a region and its inhabitants, and 15-46 for its early mythical tradition. Hansen 2004, 432 for the discrepancies between the Homeric catalogue and the subsequent Classical geography of the region. The variation is, by all accounts, minor. 245 as proof of the unbroken link between Archaic Period Boeotians and their Mycenaean predecessors in myth if not in fact.

This Boeotian sense of commonality thus dates to the 7th century at least. These are not communities that had only begun to think of themselves as such in the century leading up to the conquest of Alexander. The eponymous hero Boiotos appears as a common ancestor by the sixth century BC, and while this sense of regional adherence was strong it was not overpowering.246 Beck and Ganter note that even in the Archaic and Early Classical Periods, ‘it did not marginalize the established local identities as they were in place Thebes and Orchomenos’ (2015), thus the regional in

Boeotia is never diametrically opposed to the local. The two can coexist happily, and indeed seem to have done so for centuries. Such symbiosis is precisely what we shall observe in the Hellenistic Period.

The emergence of Boeotian polis communities in the seventh and sixth centuries has cast a far stronger spell on contemporary researchers than their subsequent Hellenistic trajectory. Hesiod, naturally, provides the best local account of the emergence of the polis both in his native Askra as in the region more generally (Edwards 2004). No city was an island, even in early Boeotia, and attestations of individual polis communities appear hand-in-hand with consistent evidence of regional interaction among them, both on the small and large scales. Thespiai, as studied by the intense surveys of Bintliff and Snodgrass, provides a fitting example of Boeotian synteleia and the early emergence of a hierarchy among individual poleis in which some exert hegemonic influence over their smaller neighbours, locking them in their territorial orbit.247 Although some cities, like Hyettos (SEG 24.300),

246 On the development of Boiotos in relation to the Boeotian ethnos see Kühr 2006, 262-264 with notes, and 266-267. 247 The work of the Cambridge/Bradford survey project has been published in various increments, namely with Bintliff and Snodgrass 1985 and 1988, Bintliff, Howard, and Snodgrass 1999 and 2007, and for the territorial dynamic of polis and chōra see Bintliff and Howard 2004, also Bintliff 1985. 246

Thebes (SEG 24.300), and Coroneia (SEG 42.381) are attested as poleis as early as the sixth century, other communities like Hysiai, Eleutherai (Paus. 1.38.8) and Skaphai only first appear as dependants of their larger neighbours.248 The cooperation of Boeotian cities like Akraiphia, Hyettos, Coroneia,

Tanagra, and Thebes is attested at an equally early date through numismatic evidence, and a sixth century dedication to Apollo Karykaios in Tanagra by a group of Theban soldiers adds a vector of religious interaction on the regional level.249

As Angela Kühr (2006) and Emily Mackil (2013 & 2014) argue, these religious ties are equally important foundations of Boeotian regional integration. Kühr’s analysis of Boeotian foundation myths reveals that this process was neither unanimous nor consistent, as various communities proposed different threads of heroic and mythic ancestry which were in constant dialogue with one another. To

Mackil, participation in common cults and festivals is the most pivotal forerunner to the more elaborate forms of regional interaction that the various Boeotian koina would come to institutionalize; the latter could not have existed without the foundations of the former. The sixth century is again a formative period for Boeotian communal activity, with elements ranging from the popularity of the eponymous hero Boiotos to the first attestations of the festival at the sanctuary of Athena Itonia.250

A large number of dedications from the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoius near Akraiphia, whose oracle enjoyed widespread repute, similarly date to as early as the sixth century, while the shrine of Poseidon

Onchestos boasts an even more ancient pedigree (Beck and Ganter 2015). Barbara Kowalzig’s 2007 study of how myth was performed in poetry and song reveals how such rituals in the Boeotian context served to bring the mythological past into startling focus in the historical present, further promoting

248 For Hysiai Hdt.5.7.4.2, 6.108.6 for Athens but then in Plataian territory Hdt.9.101.1. More extensive discussion is provided by Hansen 2004. 249 LSAG 94.no.7, Hansen 2004, 431. 250 Alkaios F325 Voigt and Bakchylides F15 Snell. 247 the idea of communality among emergent Boeotian communities. Stephanie Larson in 2007 proposed the notion that before the koinon the Boeotians were only loosely organised as an ethnos, and thus religious and cultural vectors of interaction both predate and outlast systematized political and military collaboration. Hans Beck (2014) provides the most concise recapitulation of these early vectors of integration, likewise arguing that the Boeotians as an ethnos predate the Boeotians as a koinon – this non-Federal character of Boeotian regional ties will become particularly important after the dissolution of the League in 172/171.

I elaborate on this process of regional interaction and cooperation not to provide yet another account of Boeotian ‘ethnogenesis,’ but rather to identify key characteristics of Rhys Robert’s Boeotian

‘stability’ which persist well into the Hellenistic and Roman periods.251 There are two salient points to be drawn from this archaic recapitulation: first, the religious and economic ties of Boeotia predate and indeed provide the subsequent foundations of the koinon, and second, at no time in its history does

Boeotian regionalism flow exclusively from federal institutions. The vitality of the federation, in other words, is not entirely indicative of the vitality of the region – an observation which will become all the more pertinent after the Roman dissolution in the second century. In the same vein, momentary political division such as that which arose in response to the Persian question, and would likewise rear its head on various occasions with the Macedonians and Romans, does not imply regional fracture.

Although I have painted an antique portrait of Boeotia, the fact that it boasted many archaic poleis does not mean that all of its communities were quite so ancient. As we shall see, the fourth century and beyond witness the first attestation of urban centres which had never previously graced

251 The term seems to have become quite trendy in contemporary studies of Boeotia, and appears with equal use in Kühr 2006, Larson 2007, and Mackil 2013. Buckler & Beck 2008, 13 and Beck 2014 likewise resurrect the term, though to me this comes with all of the hesitations that I have elaborated in the introduction. 248 the historical record, though in some cases had been settled since the Bronze Age. The Boeotian cast would be renewed with the addition of Anthedon, Chorsiai, and Thisbe as poleis in their own right, and thus the landscape had not been entirely set in stone by the arrival of the Macedonians. That such

‘new’ communities appeared in the coastal and interior regions of Boeotia indicates that this was not a phenomenon exclusive to one of its geographical corners.

When Philip and Alexander marched south into Boeotia in the middle of the fourth century, they encountered a landscape which bore the surface scars of recent tumult. Thebes had emerged to momentary prominence in the region and beyond, though at great expense to its onetime subjects and long-time neighbours. The collective power of Boeotia had been harnessed into the service of one city, and the redirection had caused no small measure of disturbance in the traditional arrangement of things. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Philip II and the Greeks clashed at Chaeronea, in the process destroying a hegemony that had been all too aberrant in the longer history of the region. But as Philip had manoeuvred through Boeotia in the preceding months he crossed a vast landscape that was more densely populated, agriculturally exploited, but subject to the caprice of only one city for the first and only time in its history.

In the coming pages, I argue that Philip was witnessing an exceptional period in Boeotian history that was equally marked by upheaval as it was by amplification. At the same time, however, the trend was playing itself out throughout the rest of the Greek Main, as we have seen in the cases of

Euboea and Argos, and thus the Boeotians were not alone in encountering such developments – though each region reacted in their own individual manner. Considering the Boeotians in the following centuries shows that they were returning to a path from which Thebes had caused them to err, and in their political, religious, and civic comportment amid the vagaries of Hellenism we see that stability,

249 here as elsewhere, remained an implicit good to be sought, if not always attained. Before doing so, however, we must reconsider some ancient and modern judgements of Hellenistic Boeotia.

Impending Doom: Scholarship on Hellenistic Boeotia

The observation that scholarship on the region is heavily weighted towards the Classical Period rather than the Hellenistic has by now become a familiar refrain. This statement was true throughout many decades of Boeotian scholarship, though the trend has in recent years reversed thanks to surging interest in federalism as an ancient analogue to the European Union, and a new focus on epigraphy.252

Albert Schachter’s various studies of Boeotian religion and cultic life, among countless other topics, still provide the base of many contemporary studies, while at the same time his pioneering work on the region as such has left a great mark on approaches to Greek history in general. Boeotia, however, has some traits which set it apart from its contemporaries: the inner workings of the Boeotian koinon have been of especial interest thanks to the Hellenica Oxyrhyncia. The papyrus along with other accounts led to a frenzy of research into the particularities of the league’s offices, magistracies, and especially its geographical divisions.

The other side of the Boeotian scholarly coin is a wealth of survey archaeology spearheaded by the projects of John Fossey (1988), Bintliff and Snodgrass (see note 245 above), and more recently

252 Papazarkadas 2014 provides the best overview of recent epigraphic finds in Boeotia and their various schools of interpretation; the volume itself testifies to the dynamism of the evidence and field of enquiry. It is in this sense that we must take care when treating the studies of Feyel (1942) and Roesch (1982) as too authoritative given the rapidly changing nature of the game. 250

Emeri Farinetti’s GIS-based survey of the region (2011).253 The Bronze Age and Archaic preoccupations of these surveys are patent, with the result that the Hellenistic Period is often lumped into the broader

Roman chronology. In both federal and archaeological studies, preceding eras are consciously or unconsciously treated as prologue to the Theban hegemony. After the destruction of Thebes, Boeotian history seems to either end or be stuck in neutral; an impression conveyed by Buck’s 1979 History of

Boiotia, and his more narrowly-focussed 1994 monograph Boiotia and the Boiotian League, 432-371

BC.254

The revival of interest in fourth-century Greece has caused the chronological boundary to be pushed somewhat, though not entirely: the treatment of Boeotia in both Beck’s Polis und Koinon (1997,

83-106) and Buckler and Beck’s 2008 Central Greece and the Politics of Power in the Fourth Century BC proceeds in great detail through to 338, only for the closing decades of the century to be treated as epilogue (277-281). Schachter’s survey of Thespiai also exemplifies this trend, as he charts the city’s progress through the Archaic and Classical Periods and then ends promptly with the destruction of

Thebes, without any mention of the city’s later Hellenistic importance (1996, 99-126). Apart from my preceding observations, the entire heft of Boeotian studies need not be regurgitated here, as the work has already been done. We are all indebted to Albert Schachter’s tireless work on the Boeotian bulletin

Teiresias, to which I refer the reader for the full archive of past and ongoing projects.255

253 Post 2012, 13-16 provides a succinct review of the region’s history of survey archaeology, cf. in particular the bibliography of Bintliff 1997. Alcock 1993, 49-63 also recapitulates broad developments quite coherently. 254 Is it striking, particularly in Buck’s study of the Boeotian League, that he discusses the next century of Boeotia’s federal history with only brief summation on pp. 121-125. He asserts that the later League was far looser, and respected the autonomy of local cities at the expense of the sort of federal solidarity witness during the fifth and fourth centuries. His nostalgia for the fall of Thebes is palpable, which he views as being a tragically failed attempt at importing an Athenian style dominion over Attica into the region of Beootia. 255 For current and past editions of Teiresias visit the archive on the McGill University website: http://www.mcgill.ca/classics/research/teiresias 251

There is, again, no monograph providing a synthetic, narrative treatment of Hellenistic Boeotia.

The proliferation of epigraphic evidence along with the paucity of literary sources partially accounts for this, but not entirely. Emily Mackil is the only scholar to my knowledge who has attempted to piece together a narrative of Boeotia, but she does so by considering the region in tandem with its Achaean and Aetolian contemporaries (2013). Nikolaos Papazarkadas (2014) provides a full account of the history of Boeotian epigraphy, and thus I limit myself to more generalizing observations.

As was the case with Euboea, the epigraphical richness of Hellenistic Boeotia is at once a blessing and a curse: French and Canadian studies of Boeotian inscriptions abound, but are hesitant to advancing broader conclusions due to the specificity of the subject matter. Inscriptions are either treated in isolation, or in relation to a small group of similar inscriptions, which in turn causes the material to be isolated from questions of wider scope. The epigraphical genius of Roesch (1982, among others), Fossey (1991, 2004), Knoepfler, and others is invaluable to our understanding of the sequence of archons, naming conventions, or the federal calendar, to cite only a few examples, but such studies generally do not enter into a dialogue with our broader characterizations of the period.

Some measure of fault for this, however, lies in antiquity. The historiography of Hellenistic

Boeotia, in the realms of both survey archaeology and epigraphy, has been deeply shaped by scholarly adherence to Polybius’ comments on the region and its inhabitants in book 20:

ὅτι Βοιωτοὶ ἐκ πολλῶν ἤδη χρόνων καχεκτοῦντες ἦσαν καὶ μεγάλην εἶχον διαφορὰν πρὸς τὴν

γεγενημένην εὐεξίαν καὶ δόξαν αὐτῶν τῆς πολιτείας. οὗτοι γὰρ μεγάλην περιποιησάμενοι καὶ

δόξαν καὶ δύναμιν ἐν τοῖς Λευκτρικοῖς καιροῖς, οὐκ οἶδ᾽ ὅπως κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς ἐν τοῖς ἑξῆς

χρόνοις ἀφῄρουν ἀμφοτέρων αἰεὶ τῶν προειρημένων, ἔχοντες στρατηγὸν Ἀβαιόκριτον. ἀπὸ δὲ

252

τούτων τῶν καιρῶν οὐ μόνον ἀφῄρουν, ἀλλ᾽ ἁπλῶς εἰς τἀναντία τραπέντες καὶ τὴν πρὸ τοῦ

δόξαν ἐφ᾽ ὅσον οἷοί τ᾽ ἦσαν ἠμαύρωσαν.

The Boeotians had long been in a very depressed state, which offered a strong contrast to the

former prosperity and reputation of their country. They had acquired great glory as well as

great material prosperity at the time of the battle of Leuctra; but by some means or another

from that time forward they steadily diminished both the one and the other under the

leadership of Abaeocritus; and subsequently not only diminished them, but underwent a

complete change of character, and did all that was possible to wipe out their previous

reputation. Pol.20.4.1-4.

After describing the cause and acceleration of Boeotian decadence, he then goes on to narrate the institutional failure of the region by the closing decades of the third century:

καὶ τῆς κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν ἐπιδόσεως: τὰ δὲ κοινὰ τῶν Βοιωτῶν εἰς τοσαύτην παραγεγόνει

καχεξίαν ὥστε σχεδὸν εἴκοσι καὶ πέντ᾽ ἐτῶν τὸ δίκαιον μὴ διεξῆχθαι παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς μήτε περὶ τῶν

ἰδιωτικῶν συμβολαίων μήτε περὶ τῶν κοινῶν ἐγκλημάτων, ἀλλ᾽ οἱ μὲν φρουρὰς

παραγγέλλοντες τῶν ἀρχόντων, οἱ δὲ στρατείας κοινάς, ἐξέκοπτον ἀεὶ τὴν δικαιοδοσίαν: ἔνιοι

δὲ τῶν στρατηγῶν καὶ μισθοδοσίας ἐποίουν ἐκ τῶν κοινῶν τοῖς ἀπόροις τῶν ἀνθρώπων. ἐξ ὧν

ἐδιδάχθη τὰ πλήθη τούτοις προσέχειν καὶ τούτοις περιποιεῖν τὰς ἀρχάς, δι᾽ ὧν ἔμελλε τῶν μὲν

ἀδικημάτων καὶ τῶν ὀφειλημάτων οὐχ ὑφέξειν δίκας, προσλήψεσθαι δὲ τῶν κοινῶν αἰεί τι διὰ

τὴν τῶν ἀρχόντων χάριν. πλεῖστα δὲ συνεβάλετο πρὸς τὴν τοιαύτην

253

But Boeotia as a nation had come to such a low pitch, that for nearly twenty-five years the

administration of justice had been suspended in private and public suits alike. Their magistrates

were engaged in despatching bodies of men to guard the country or in proclaiming national

expeditions, and thus continually postponed their attendance at courts of law. Some of the

Strategoi also dispensed allowances to the needy from the public treasury; whereby the

common people learnt to support and invest with office those who would help them to escape

the penalties of their crimes and undischarged liabilities, and to be enriched from time to time

with some portion of the public property obtained by official favour. Pol.20.6.1-4256

The passage has been taken at face value by generations of scholars and it is from the Achaean historian’s pessimistic appraisal that the stereotype of decline in Hellenistic Boeotia has derived its

256 Walbank 1979 ad loc provides a full account of the scholarly history of this passage. It is noteworthy that in his commentary on the passage he does not call into question the veracity of the account, rather he provides details of date and historical context. It seems that Walbank took a different approach to the passage between then and the publication of his article on Polybius and decline in 2002. At any rate, I quote his description of the debate surrounding the identification of Amaeocritus versis Abaeocritus and his preference of the latter in full from Walbank 1979, 67: ‘so Kumanudes for Amaeocriton (P). Abaeocritus of Thebes, son of Abaeodorus, is known as a naopoeus at Delphi in 273 (Syll. 238, col. ii, no. 8), who was granted Delphic proxenia in the archonship of Ameinias (Syll. 446, where the archon is incorrectly given as Amyntas; see Roussel, BCH, 1923, 41- 42; Bourguet, BCH, 1925, 24 n. r; Flaceliere, 449). Flaceliere, loc. cit., dates Ameinias' archonship to 263/2 (?). Plut. Arat. r6. r (following Aratus' 1\femoirs) relates how in his first generalship (245/4; cf. Walbank, Aratos, 168- -9) Aratus arrived too late to help the Boeotians, with the resultthat 'Aboeocritus (sic) the Boeotarch and ro,ooo men' fell fightingthe Aetolians at Chaeronea (d. §§ 4-5).Abaeocritus is called Boeotarch by Plutarch, but general in P. From some date in the third century a federal general commanded Boeotian troops in place of the Boeotarchs, who however still existed (xviii. 43· 3 n.; Livy, xxxiii. 27. 8); cf. 6. 2, xxii. 4· 12 (187/6); Livy, xxxiii. 1. 3, L 7 (r97), xlii. 43· 9 (qr); GDI, r872 (a Delphic manumission-record which mentions a Boeotian strategos, Eureas, in the Delphic archonship of Melission, which Daux, 191, dates to rn/6). Busolt-Swoboda (ii. I4J6n. 2) and Feyel (r98 n. 4) both prefer Plutarch; and Roesch, Thespies, II2-zr, in a not wholly successful analysis of the above- mentioned passages, dismisses GDI, r87z, as an error and concludes that P. and Livy use strategos (praetor) in a general, non-technical sense. Hence, he argues, there is no proof of the existence of a Boeotian federal general in the second century.’ In the circumstnaces of our discussion here, the fineries of date are of less concern than the thematic valence of the passage, and given the prevalence of the Boeotian ephebic programmes until the 170s it would seem likely that there was, indeed, a Boeotian federal general in the second century. 254 longevity. Polybius has, in short, either poisoned or spiked the well. For over a century, contemporary scholars – both archaeologists and epigraphists – have tried to reconcile this passage with their less temporally precise data, and thus Polybius’ allegations have become the chronological and thematic basis of their reconstructions.257 The tendency to view such evidence through the lens of Polybius and date it in relation to this testimony is endemic to scholarship on Hellenistic Boeotia, and the historicity of the passage has only recently been decisively challenged. The damage, however, remains, and we must track Polybius’ legacy before arguing why we should discard his testimony.

Although many have debated the precise chronology of Polybius’ Boeotian indictment, nearly all were quite happy to accept it – particularly when it served the contemporary resonance of their analysis. World War II provided a fertile context for such presentism: in 1941 Michael Rostovtzeff saw the theme of Boeotian decadence as evocative of the social problems that plagued his native Russia at the turn of the century (Müller 2013, 268-269). He then proceeds to deride the Boeotians in a similar manner as Polybius, but in Marxist terms. Writing on the close of the third century, he asserts that ‘the class struggle reaches its culmination in Boeotia at this time. The mob ruled. They were represented by generals whose decisions were determined by their desire to rule the proletariat’ (1941, 611-612).

Such decadence breeds civic and social decline, irreversibly leading Boeotia into the clutches of the

Romans.

Michel Feyel’s 1942 thesis Polybe et l'histoire de la Béotie au IIIe siècle avant notre ère provides a long and elaborate analysis of the specifics of Polybius’ Boeotian assertions, and is the prime example of Boeotian epigraphy being viewed through a Polybian lens. Feyel discards elements of Polybius’

257 Müller 2013 provides a full recapitulation of the last impact of Polybius’ comments on Boeotian epigraphy. The trend is most obviously present in Feyel 1942, whose entire work is based around reconciling epigraphic data with the literary testimonia of Polybius. Feyel’s role as the pioneer in the field have led numerous others – Knoepfler among them – to perhaps inadvertently fall into the same trap. More recently, see Post 2012. 255 chronology while adopting his scornful pessimism without alteration, revising the chronology by asserting that the regional rot only set in after 220, not after 245 as the Achaean alleged.258 Feyel’s politics were certainly not left out of the equation, and Müller concludes that his denunciation of

Boeotian politics had more to do with his criticism of France vis-a-vis Germany in 1942 than any antique concerns. He goes on to cast Philip V as a cruel tyrant who destroyed the social order of his neighbour, just barely falling short of outright equating him to Hitler (Müller 2013, 269-289). According to Feyel, the epigraphic evidence holds that the wheels of Boeotian government ground to a halt as lapsed Boeotian virtue was no longer interested in greasing them. Inscriptions which in and of themselves do not offer such specific dating are conveniently lumped into the period of 220-200, and held as substantiation of Polybius.

Feyel, for better or worse, blazed many of the first trails into the study of Hellensitic Boeotia and it is unsurprising that his moralising conclusions would so long endure among later scholars. André

Aymard in 1946 (313) preferred to cast a wider net for Boeotian decline, observing that ‘le contraste entre les années qui précèdent et celles qui suivent 220 demeure insuffisamment établi. Bien plutôt, les choses ne devaient pas aller très brillamment avant 220 et elles n’ont pas tourné brusquement à la catastrophe’. Accordingly, things were consistently dire in Hellenistic Boeotia, and the decline less sudden. Later scholars softened the verdict somewhat in certain contexts, but the prevailing sentiment

258 Feyel 1942, 13-14, discussed by Migeotte 1985, 103-6, and Müller 2013, 267-268. Feyel is one of the old generation of scholars whose import was not limited to the university. Decorated with the croix de guerre for his valiant efforts in repelling the German invasion of France in 1940, he then became maître de conférences at Strasbourg before he turned 30. His timing and his location were unfortunate, as on 21 June 1944 he was taken hostage by the German army and shifted around a variety of prisons in Brioude and elsewhere. In the face of the allied advance, his captors then loaded him and 100 of his fellow prisoners into a train car with no food and little water. The evacuation train arrived at Stalag X B near Hanover, and Feyel succumbed to malnutrition and disease there some days later. Given his own experience of the war he can perhaps hardly be blamed for the presentism inherent in his work; would that he had survived to temper his conclusions. 256 of decline and decay lingers: Leopold Migeotte in 1985 argued that Feyel had overplayed his hand, but in the end it remains obvious and indisputable that Boeotia like many regions of the Main knew and confronted grave difficulties at the end of the third century (1985, 103). Though he notes that the economic situation in certain Boeotian cities by 200 was more complex than simple bankruptcy, the old truisms are resurrected when he concludes that the inscriptions in question ‘illustrent donc les embarras financiers des cités béotiennes à cette époque et s'accordent avec les nombreux autres témoignages sur les difficultés sociales et économiques des régions voisines' (1985, 106).

Migeotte is only one example of the tone of those who comment on Hellenistic Boeotia, but his concluding remarks encapsulate the tendency to view specific bits of evidence in relation to broad, oftentimes unsubstantiated generalizations. Boeotian inscriptions, in sum, have been taken to indicate decline because they have been taken to indicate decline. We shall later turn to Paul Roesch’s study of

Hellenistic Boeotia in more specific contexts to follow, but for the moment his generally balanced and impartial approach ought to be commended.259 He acknowledges that in spite of the vicissitudes of the

Diadochs and their successors, Boeotia was marked by a remarkable level of institutional and social continuity during the period.260 Erudite as his studies are, they are somewhat compartmentalized and his overarching conclusions are rather too subtle and dispersed to have reversed the trend.

Survey archaeologists have been likewise eager to follow in the footsteps of Polybius. We shall treat the specific conclusions of the Boeotian projects shortly, but a few examples sufficiently prove

259 Roesch 1982 considers the period of 338 to 172 through a variety of individual case studies, and while he does not attempt to consolidate his findings into one overarching conclusion or narrative, his introduction hints at this. 260 The original text merits reproduction here: ‘pendant ces cent soixante-six ans, malgré les vicissitudes de la politique, les invasions, les alliances fates et défaites, malgré les jalousies et les ambitions des successeurs d’Alexandre, la Béotie a connu une rare stabilité due autant à la solidité des institutions qu’à la sagesse de ces citoyens.’ (Roesch 1982, vi). 257 the rule. In 1996, Bintliff recycled the typical view of Hellenistic Greek decline in arguing that ‘the general demographic and economic malaise that is seen in almost all regions of mainland southern

Greece in the late Hellenistic Period finds its correspondence in the Valley of the Muses’ (1996, 198). It is striking that despite having grouped his evidence into a chronological span of six centuries, he is so quick to attribute the decline to such a specific period. Ruben Post, in his study of the Hellenistic

Boeotian military, likewise falls prey to such equations of convenience. After providing a learned review of Boeotian survey expeditions, he then stumbles into the familiar trap by saying that Polybius’ testimony ‘agrees strikingly with the results of surveys carried out in Boiotia and throughout central

Greece... a clear picture emerges of a state which was suffering not only from a political decline, but also a demographic and agricultural collapse’ (2012, 22-23). He subsequently nuances the verdict by writing ‘the Achaian historian therefore astutely observed the demographic decline that still affected

Boiotia in his own day, but wrongly diagnosed the cause of the downturn’ (2012, 26). Decline, at any rate, is still rampant.

Yet the conclusions of these epigraphic and archaeological studies are to me marked by circular logic. Polybius’ testimony of decline is correct because the inscriptions point to decline, and the inscriptions point to decline because of the testimony of Polybius. The prophecy thus becomes self- fulfilling: an inscription indicates social and civic decay at a certain point and must relate to Polybius, and Polybius is substantiated by a chronology that derives its specificity in relation to him.

The validity of Polybius’ account has been called into question by two scholars whose arguments lead me to reject the passage as an embellished literary construct rather than an account of the on-the-ground reality of Hellenistic Boeotia. The first was Frank Walbank: while in his commentaries on the passage he does not raise any questions regarding its integrity, his article ‘The

258 idea of decline in Polybius’ published in 2002 elucidates why passages such as this should not be taken literarlly. Walbank places Polybius in his intellectual context at Rome, where an idea regarding the cyclical nature of history and the inevitable rise and fall of empires had been coming to prominence since the 180s and 170s (Walbank 2002, 195). Aemilius Sura, notably, put forward the idea that there had been four world empires thus far: Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia, with the implication that

Rome would be the next. In response to this, Walbank argues that Polybius structured his narrative to reflect the inevitable rise of Rome, which had to have come as the consequence of the decline of the

Macedonians – and thus their Greek subjects (Walbank 2002, 195-206). Passages such as this in which

Polybius highlights the decline of Greece should thus be viewed as scaffolding which has been added to structure his narrative of the rise of Roman power. Furthermore, there are two ways in which these passages could be read in light of Walbank’s analysis: first, such accounts of Greek decline are the ultimate cause of the rise of Rome, as the Greeks are ridden by confusion and disturbance while fortune has shifted to the side of the Romans. Second – and rather more complicated in Walbank’s reconstruction – is that Polybius was presenting a warning to Rome at the time in which he was writing: he saw the early hints of such confusion and disturbance in the actions of his young Roman contemporaries, and thus this account of Greece becomes a cautionary tale bearing the hint that Rome had already passed the apogee of its power (Walbank 2002, 203-211). In other words, Walbank argues that Polybius was seeing the same undesirable activities among Roman youth as he had among Greek youth several decades earlier. Regardless, either of these two options gives us reason to dismiss these passage as a literary artifice, especially when we consider how awkwardly it sits in its own context. This dismissal is further reinforced by Polybius’ own leanings: to the Achaean historian, the Boeotians’ alliance with the Aetolians and subsequent submission to Macedon would have met with his sharpest

259 disdain. As Walbank neatly summarises, ‘his own prejudcies and his hatred of the Aetolians also come in to colour the picture’ (2002, 199).

Following in the footsteps of Walbank, in 2013 Christel Müller published an article a in which she too argues convincingly that we should take this passage as being a literary construct, not a historical reflection. She does so by considering this passage against a Greek backdrop, which complements Walbank’s Roman approach.. Considering its placement in the longer arc of Polybius’ work, she agrees that it seems that the Boeotian digression was a post facto insertion, an editorial that that was slammed into an existing narrative and sits awkwardly in the text (Müller 2013, 269-270). In the broader context of Greek literature, Polybius is at once perpetuating the stereotype of ‘Boeotian

Swine’ while creating echoes of older tropes: she writes that the “Macedonianism” of the third century... balances the Medism of the fifth century’ (Müller 2013, 274-275). All of the Boeotians, in the literary eyes of Polybius, are tainted, their Medism is the ‘original sin’ that forms part of their historiographical inheritance. The third century becomes an echo of the Persian Wars, rife with all of their moralization they entail (Müller 2013, 277). This additional source of disdain for the Boeotians, as it were, aligns neatly with Walbank’s reasons for the Historian’s contempt, and the two arguments in favour of dismissing the historicity of the Boeotian passages are, to me, quite convincing. When

Polybius is removed from the picture, much of the evidence takes on a very different character.

Fatalism in the study of Hellenistic Boeotia is not limited to the close of the third century, and there is one further historiographical observation that I ought to make. According to the communis opinio, if Boeotia as a region was in a sorry state by the end of the third century, then it was the

Romans who came to put it out of its misery with the dissolution of the koinon in 172/172. To some scholars this seems to mark nothing short of the end of the region: after the federation ceased to exist,

260 the implication has been that Boeotian regional interaction died along with it. For lack of federal structures, so the story goes, the horizon of the Boeotians was limited to their immediate city, their organs of communication and interaction with one another were irreparably excised. Knoepfler (1996,

165) asserts that many festivals die out after the end of the league, and Emily Mackil calls the period of

Roman intervention from 196-167 ‘the dismantling of regional cooperation’ (2013, 128). Federal courts

(Roesch 1985a), proxenia (Fossey 2014, 36-44), and many festivals (Knoepfler 1996) were victims of the

Romans, as was any broader sense of regional interaction as having any kind of political import. Those that remained in the following centuries have been described as hollow shells of their former importance, which ‘survived or were resurrected for largely religious or cultural reasons’ (Fossey 2014,

42). Boeotian regionalism, though, is again not contingent on its federal structures.

I have elaborated on the scholarly tradition of Boeotia at such length because the corpus of studies provides an object lesson in the perils of too eagerly attempting to reconcile epigraphic data with our literary sources. The example of Polybius’ comments in book 20 demonstrate how one passage can cause an entire body of inscriptions and decrees to be viewed in a certain light by only relative chronology, and also indicates the depth to which historiographical presuppositions colour our vision of epigraphy. The same is true of Polybius’ lasting influence on the chronology of survey data for the region, which has been compressed and made overly specific in order to mesh with literary testimony. These epigraphic and literary pitfalls are certainly not unique to Boeotia, and we have seen their counterparts in the scholarly traditions of Euboea and the Argolid.

Informed by this review of the scholarly tradition, two arguments will be proposed below. First, when Polybius’ characterization of Hellenistic Boeotia is discarded the evidence points instead to the persistent health of regional interactions and their institutions. Second, the advent of Rome and

261 dissolution of the koinon marked only the transformation, not the end, of meaningful regional interaction in Boeotia. Neither force was cancerous or fatal. Before turning to this, however, we must consider a power whose presence and authority was far more keenly felt, and with far more dramatic consequences than either of its antagonistic successors: Thebes.

The Best of Times, or the Worst of Times? Boeotia under Thebes

If one is looking for an entity that left widespread institutional realignment, heavy taxation, military and diplomatic coercion, and demographic change for Boeotia in its wake, one need look no farther than Thebes in the fifth and fourth century. As Athens was to Euboea, so Thebes was to Boeotia.

Despite assertions that Boeotia, as the rest of the mainland, was stifled by the dominion of Macedon, I shall argue instead that the power of Thebes was far more directly felt than any of its Macedonian or

Roman successors.

The implication in much of the scholarship that I have described above is that this alleged stagnation in Boeotia was the direct product of Macedonian domination; the other regions of the mainland, lack of any ‘real’ power or authority led to gradual civic disillusionment followed by abandonment according to those who advocate discontinuity. Macedonian kings, for their part, were eager to coerce loyalty – or more importantly, revenue – out of the cities that fell into their spheres of influence.

The sentiment pervades treatments of Hellenistic Boeotia: even Paul Roesch, who otherwise holds the Macedonians in fairly light regard, nevertheless writes that for much of the late fourth and early third centuries ‘la Béotie n’a cessé d’être soumise, sinon occuppée, par les differents chefs d’état

262 hostiles’ (Roesch 1982, 431). In this we see an echo of the kind of ‘état de sujétion quasi-permanente’ alleged by Knoepfler in Euboea (2001a, 427). But in Boeotia, as in Euboea, the ambitions of the Greeks during the Classical Period were far more destructive the Hellenistic dominion of the Macedonians; the former left much more lasting scars on the most basic aspects of daily life.

From 379 onwards, the predominance of Thebes was such that the League cannot be said to have led a life of its own, ‘being virtually a facade of Theban rule’ as Bakhuizen puts it (1994, 308).

Although the citizens of Boeotia’s towns and poleis were theoretically participants in the assembly and the army, their own desires were subordinated to those of Thebes, to which they owed regular military and financial tribute. Imperialism through the mechanisms of a koinon is still imperialism, and their theoretical representation does not lessen the reality of their fourth century burdens of taxation and service. The obligations of small towns were linked to their larger neighbours, and we see a weakening of autonomy especially among these minor communities. The landscape itself was changed in response to Theban strategic interests: a widespread building programme of fortifications in the countryside was part and parcel of Thebes’ ‘policy of unification by force’, as Beck and Ganter coin it (2015). It is a testament to the strength of Boeotian attachments that such communities persisted under the Theban hand (Bakhuizen 1993, 318-319).

Several of Boeotia’s most prominent cities endured a level of violent disruption during the years spanning the Persian Wars to Philip’s victory that far exceeds anything which occurred after. Many were caught between the ambitions of Thebes and its enemies, particularly Sparta and the Athenians, and were accordingly exposed to the brutality of whichever side was momentarily vengeful or simply trying to prove a point. Plataea, perhaps more than any other, was torn asunder by the currents of the

Classical Period: in 480 the Persians occupied the city and put it to the torch (Hdt. 8.50.2). It was only

263 the subsequent arrival of the Greek coalition in 479 to what was left of that city that ensured its later existence (Hansen 2004, 431, Thuc. 2.71.2). Plataea was part of the Boeotian League until it became another target of the Thebans in 431, prompting it to leave the federation (Thuc. 2.2-6). A few years later it was besieged by Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies, which it resisted for nearly two years before being captured at last in 427 (Thuc. 2.71-2, 78; 3.20-24. 52-68). The Spartans then exacted their revenge by killing the city’s male citizens and enslaving its women and children (Dem. 59.103; Thuc.

3.68.2). After 426 precious little remained of the city’s core, though the ashes were gradually settled by some Megarians and Peloponnesian sympathizers (Thuc. 3.68.3); the Plataeans themselves would not be restored to their ancestral home until the King’s Peace of 386.261

Plataea’s suffering, however was not over: unsurprisingly the city refused to enter the second federation under Thebes, prompting the Thebans to attack and again destroy the urban community in the closing years of the 370s (Xen.Hell. 6.3.1, Isoc. 14.1, 5, 7, 19, 35, 46). The exiled Plataeans were warmly welcomed by the Athenians, and thus Thebes had succeeded in driving another uncompliant community out of their growing domain. What remained of the town barely recovered over the next three decades, as Demosthenes describes it as being deserted and unfortified in 343 (Dem. 19.12, 112,

125).

The fortunes of the Plataeans would only turn thanks to the efforts of Philip II, who repatriated them to their ancestral homeland as part of his settlement of 338 (Paus. 4.27.10, 9.1.8). They can perhaps hardly be blamed for joining in Alexander’s sack of Thebes with such enthusiasm in 335

(Arr.Anab. 1.8.8, Diod. 17.13.5). The aftermath of Alexander’s victory for them was an oasis, not a desert: the town was gradually rebuilt in the following years, and gradually re-joined Boeotian cultic

261 Xen.Hell. 5.4.14; Paus. 9.1.4. See Hansen 2004, 449-451 for a brief and concise narrative of Classical Plataea (no.216 in the Inventory). 264 life by providing hieromnēmones in 331 (CID II, 86,13). Plataean memory of the preceding century and a half must have been stark. The city was thrice razed to the ground by first the Persians and then the

Spartans and Thebans in turn, and its population had barely begun to recover after repeated slaughter and exile. The Classical Period here, at least, had been catastrophic.

Thespiai, like Plataea, was battered and nearly broken by various waves of outside invasion and intervention. In 480 the city’s inhabitants fled to the Peloponnese, and their abandoned city was burned to the ground by the invading Persians (Hdt. 8.50.2). Although the city was resettled after the

Battle of Plataea, its citizen ranks had been depleted to the point that more had to be added in the following decade to make up for wartime casualties (Hdt. 8.75.5). The city would suffer similarly severe losses some decades later after the Battle of Delion in 424, and perhaps also at the Battle of Nemea in

394.262 Caught between the Spartans and the Thebans, Thespiai was subjected to a Lacedaemonian garrison in 379, and put under the authority of a Spartan governor. By the mid-370s, Thebes had come to the alleged rescue of nearby cities, but liberation quickly morphed into coercion as the Thespians were compelled to join the koinon and Theban synteleia.263 Their inclusion was all too brief: before the close of the decade, Theban aggression again reared its head as the city was sacked and its population exiled.264 Even in the ancient sources, the destruction of Thespiai by the Thebans seems equal parts wanton and vicious.265 Thespiai is a particularly poignant example which we ought to bear in mind as

262 For the former: former: Thuc.4.96.3, 133.1; recorded on a monument in IG VII 1888; latter is Xen.Hell.4.2.20, SEG 2.186, 47 519. 263 Xen.Hell. 5.4.15, 41; 5.4.63; Isoc. 14.9, SEG 25 553.14 264 Xen.Hell. 6.3.5, 6.4.10, Diod. 15.46.6, Isoc. 6.27; Dem. 16.4, 25, 28. 265 To quote Diod. 15.46.5-6: παραγενόμενοι δὲ πλησίον τῆς τῶν Πλαταιέων πόλεως, ἀπροσδοκήτου τῆς ἐπιθέσεως γενομένης, οἱ πλεῖστοι μὲν τῶν Πλαταιέων ἐπὶ τῆς χώρας καταληφθέντες ὑπὸ τῶν ἱππέων συνηρπάγησαν, οἱ δὲ λοιποὶ καταφυγόντες εἰς τὴν πόλιν, καὶ συμμάχων ὄντες ἔρημοι, συνηναγκάσθησαν ὁμολογίας συνθέσθαι τοῖς πολεμίοις εὐαρέστους: ἔδει γὰρ αὐτοὺς τὰ ἔπιπλα λαβόντας ἀπελθεῖν ἐκ τῆς πόλεως καὶ μηκέτι τῆς Βοιωτίας ἐπιβαίνειν. μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα οἱ μὲν Θηβαῖοι τὰς Πλαταιὰς κατασκάψαντες καὶ Θεσπιὰς ἀλλοτρίως πρὸς αὐτοὺς διακειμένας 265 we head forward to the Hellenistic Period, as against this Classical backdrop the city’s Hellenistic effervescence is all the more remarkable. As with Plataea, their enthusiasm for the arrival of Alexander would hardly have been understated.

Orchomenos perhaps ranks first among the victims of Thebes and its enemies by virtue of the frequency with which the city violently changed hands and was cleansed of whomever was momentarily a dissident. Much to its misfortune, the city opted to remove itself from the federation and side with the Spartans at the outbreak of the Corinthian War in 395 (Xen.Hell. 3.5.6). Like others it endured the presence of a Spartan garrison in the city proper, though in this case for a period of almost two decades as the war against Thebes raged steadily on toward Leuktra.266 In the aftermath of the Theban victory, Orchomenos was brought forcibly back into the federation from which it had defected, though this time it did not enjoy any privilege of representation in the league’s government.267 Resentment towards the Thebans was hardly quelled: a faction within the city colluded with exiled Thebans in the coordination of an attack on Thebes itself in 364. Bitterness alone could not carry the effort to victory, and the coalition was unable to prevail against Theban might. The city, as

ἐξεπόρθησαν, οἱ δὲ Πλαταιεῖς εἰς Ἀθήνας μετὰ τέκνων καὶ γυναικῶν φυγόντες τῆς ἰσοπολιτείας ἔτυχον διὰ τὴν χρηστότητα τοῦ δήμου. καὶ τὰ μὲν κατὰ Βοιωτίαν ἐν τούτοις ἦν. They reached the neighbourhood of Platea when the attack was not expected, so that a large number of the Plateans were arrested in the fields and carried off by the cavalry, while the rest, who had escaped to the city, being helpless without any allies, were forced to make a covenant agreeable to their enemies; they were obliged, namely, to depart from the city with their movable possessions and never again to set foot on Boeotian soil. Thereupon the Thebans, having razed Platea completely, pillaged Thespiai as well, which was at odds with them. The Plateans with their wives and children, having fled to Athens, received equality of civic rights as a mark of favour from the Athenian people. 266 Xen.Hell. 4.3.15, 5.1.29; Diod. 15.37.1. 267 Following Hansen 2004, 447, based on Diod.15.57.1, and the attestation of only seven Boeotarchs in 365 with SEG 34.355. 266 had happened with many of its unruly neighbours, was conquered, razed, and its population either slaughtered or enslaved in yet another instance of fourth century andrapodismos.268

Thebes, however, had more enduring designs on Orchomenos, as rather than simply leaving the city to lay fallow it was instead re-sown with settlers who were loyal to their conquerors (Hansen 2004,

447). The reprieve was brief, even for this new generation of Orchomenians, as by 354 the city was taken and occupied by the Phocians until the summer of 346.269 During this Phocian interlude, the city was perhaps resettled by some of those who had escaped the clutches of the vengeful Thebans a decade previously, but after peace was struck with the Phocians, the city was plunged again into violence. The Thebans, after receiving the city from Philip, seem to have promptly exacted another round of enslavement on the now long-suffering Orchomenians (Dem.19.112, 141, 325). After the destruction of Thebes, the city was re-founded with Macedonian backing and returned to whichever

Orchomenians had survived such varied privations. To them as well the new order would have marked both a welcome reprieve and promising new beginning.

Chaeronea shared a similarly unhappy fate, though somewhat less repeatedly tragic: the city served as a refuge for oligarchs from other Boeotian poleis in the mid fifth century, but in 446 it was conquered by the invading Athenians who promptly exposed the city to andrapodismos.270 It

268 Diod. 15.79.3-6; Dem. 16.4, 16.25. 269 Dem. 19.148, Aesch. 2.141, Diod. 16.58.1. 270 On the treatment of Orchomenos here, following Thuc. 1.113.1-2: καὶ χρόνου ἐγγενομένου μετὰ ταῦτα Ἀθηναῖοι, Βοιωτῶν τῶν φευγόντων ἐχόντων Ὀρχομενὸν καὶ Χαιρώνειαν καὶ ἄλλ᾽ ἄττα χωρία τῆς Βοιωτίας, ἐστράτευσαν ἑαυτῶν μὲν χιλίοις ὁπλίταις, τῶν δὲ ξυμμάχων ὡς ἑκάστοις ἐπὶ τὰ χωρία ταῦτα πολέμια ὄντα, Τολμίδου τοῦ Τολμαίου στρατηγοῦντος. καὶ Χαιρώνειαν ἑλόντες καὶ ἀνδραποδίσαντες ἀπεχώρουν φυλακὴν καταστήσαντες. Some space of time after this, the outlaws of Boeotia being seized of Orchomenus and Chaeronea and certain other places of Boeotia, the Athenians made war upon those places, being their enemies, with a thousand men of arms of their own and as many of their confederates as severally came in, under the conduct of Tolmidas the son of Tolmaeus. And when they had taken Chaeronea, they carried away the inhabitants captives and, leaving a garrison in the city, departed. 267 maintained its oligarchic sympathies, though they were intermittently quelled by the intervention of other Boeotian poleis – notably Thebes (Hansen 2004, 439). Coroneia rounds out our list of fourth- century disruptions, as like Orchomenos it was razed and its population culled after the settlement of

346.271

Other cities endured less drastic means of integration: Erythrai was annexed by Thebes in a synoikism of 431 and its population relocated, and it still lay well within the sphere of Thebes’ territorial interest in the fourth century (Hell.Oxy.30.2, Hansen 2004, 440-441). Eteonos/Skaphai was brought into synoecism with Thebes around 430, and later remains suggest that it was among the small settlements whose population was resettled in its new mother city in the midst of the

Peloponnesian War (Hell.Oxy. 20.3, Hansen 2004, 118). Oropos, after being captured by Eretrian tyrants and menaced by the Athenians, was strong-armed by the Thebans into joining the confederation (Aeschin. 3.85, Dem.18.99). Such inclusion, however, came at the cost of a garrison as well as much of the city’s internal and external autonomy (Xen.Hell. 7.4.1, Diod. 15.76.1). The city would only become independent again after the 320s (Diod. 18.56.6).

The character of the period from 480 to 335 is thus clear. The dominion of Thebes and its clashes with those who would rival its hegemony shook the communities of Boeotia to their foundations. From those towns in the city’s immediate vicinity who were brought into its fold and relocated, to all the Boeotian poleis who owed tax, tribute, and service through the facade of the

League, few corners of the region was left untouched. To some like Chorsiai, admittedly, this may have come to their profit (Bakhuizen 1994, 316), but to far more it was to their detriment. There are numerous instances of bloodshed, enslavement, destruction, and relocation either at the hands of the

See also Theopomp. Fr.407. 271 Dem. 19.112, 5.22, 6.13, Diod. 16.58.1. 268

Thebans themselves or those who vied with it for supremacy. To Plataea, Thespiai, Orchomenos,

Chaeronea, and others, what has been described as the region’s demographic and political pinnacle instead spelled the repeated destruction and enslavement of their communities, while to the rest it brought taxation and the unilateral imposition of foreign and domestic policy. Such, to borrow the words of Diodorus, was the state of affairs in Boeotia.272

In this broader context, the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great in 335 seems less without precedent, and rather becomes the continuation of Boeotian politics by their usual fourth century means; Thebes’ reprisal was exacted by its own mechanisms. As the smoke rose, Thebes had been reduced to the same condition to which either it or its enemies had left so many of them. This period, then, is defined by warfare, dislocation, and disruption at the lowest levels of Boeotian society.

The period we have just considered stands greatly at odds with the region’s character in the Archaic and Early Classical Periods. Thebes had profoundly disrupted Boeotia’s regional equilibrium, but after the scales had tipped in its favour during the fourth century they would inevitably slide back in the centuries to come – not despite, but because of the dominion of Macedon and Rome.

While the fifth and fourth centuries here and elsewhere in the Greek mainland provide the standard against which Hellenistic decline is alleged, in this broader Boeotian context the timeframe takes on a very different character. Politically, militarily, and demographically, the fourth century in

Boeotia was an aberration, a period of extraordinary developments in the most neutral sense of the word. A new political order had risen and fallen, leaving the ashes of cities and populations in the wake of its traverse across the regional stage. Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans would exact such

272 Diod. 15.46.6: καὶ τὰ μὲν κατὰ Βοιωτίαν ἐν τούτοις ἦν 269 cruelty on the Boeotians as the Boeotians had on each other in the fourth and fifth century, though it was only under the pax macedonica that region’s communities were able to catch their balance.

The Beginning of the End? Dispelling the Archaeological Fog

The sack of Thebes by Alexander the Great is often held to mark the beginning of the end for

Boeotia: as its foremost city was dragged into ruin, its other communities gradually followed suit in the coming decades. In recent decades much of this alleged decline has been substantiated with reference to the various survey expeditions in the region that have been conducted since 1979 by predominantly

British and Canadian archaeologists The methodology itself has certainly revolutionised contemporary archaeology and its applications to ancient social, economic, and political history; ‘pride of place’ in the movement, as Susan Alcock puts it, ‘must be given to Boiotia’ (Alcock 1993, 37). The sheer amount of data for Boeotia greatly outweighs any of its neighbouring regions, and thus we should ostensibly be better-informed here than anywhere else in the mainland. Survey archaeology is equal parts fascinating and indispensable, though we must equally acknowledge that it has limitations that become readily apparent in the Boeotian context.273 A closer examination of the region’s various survey projects calls into question the manner in which they have been broadly applied, not the

273 On the history of Survey archaeology in Boeotia see Alcock 1994, 37-39, and Post 2012, 13-15. As mentioned above, a full bibliography of Boeotian surveys undertaken by the Cambridge Bradford Boeotia project are in Bintliff 1997, 89-95. Fossey 1988 is of course the most notable progenitor of the method, and his provides the data of the widest scope. We shall turn shortly to the methodological concerns regarding the specific Boeotian context, but for a concise bibliography see Post 2012, notes 15-17. As we have seen in the case of Euboea, there is a great deal of ambiguity regarding how sites are classified as Classical or Hellenistic, which largely arises out of the difficulty in distinguishing them on a material level. Even the method of counting sites is troubled, as Post himself notes (2012, 15): ‘differing land-use patterns between the Classical and Hellenistic Periods may in fact lead rural sites to be undercounted for the former and overcounted for the latter period.’ 270 integrity of their data – which ought to be considered with reservation and sobriety. Before proceeding to more specific data for Hellenistic Boeotia, I wish to argue two points: first, the findings of Boeotian surveys have been taken out of proportion in service of arguments towards regional decline in the period, and second, when the aforementioned allegations of Polybius are taken out of the evidentiary equation, the data becomes all the more chronologically ambiguous.

As I have mentioned above, the survey data describes a demographic situation in Boeotia in which population figures are steadily rising during the Late Archaic and Classical Periods, only to hit their zenith in the fourth century before taking an abrupt downward turn during the Hellenistic and

Roman Periods.274 The broader chronological context that I have previously reconstructed, however, indicates that this decline is neither the first, nor by any means most catastrophic, trend in the region’s settlement history (Compared to the post LH IIIB Decline after 1320 BC). All of these observations, however, are predicated on site numbers, not direct population – the two have a rather tricky relationship to which we shall soon turn.

Subsequent scholars have seized on these archaeological hints at decline and amplified them greatly in both intensity and duration: indications of site decline over a six century period have been taken instead as revealing an almost cataclysmic abandonment of farmsteads within a relatively short span beginning in the mid fourth century and accelerating in the third. Post is again the most visible recent proponent of such conclusions, as he cites the expeditions of Bintliff and Snodgrass as well as

Fossey in arguing for the disappearance of rural farmsteads in the third century, which in turn indicates

274 Blintliff 1996, 197, Alcock 1993, 38-9, Fossey 1988, 407-8. Post 2012, n.21 for the Archaic and Classical development of the region in modern scholarship with particular regards to agriculture. Notable among the studies he cites are Bintliff and Snodgrass 1989, Bintliff 1997, and Edwards 2004, 32-33. 271 demographic collapse that limited the availability of manpower for the federal army.275 Those farmsteads which remained, accordingly, were concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy landowners, leading to an increase in the number of landless poor (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1985, 134-5, 151, Müller

2010, 231-236). The trend only accelerated in the third century, leading to what he describes as the depopulation of several major population centres, and an abrupt halt in the identification of new settlement sites (Post 2012, 45-46). The correlation between survey data and historical population trends are to him so strong that ‘the conclusions reached … about the population peak of the fourth century and the subsequent decline in the third century may be, if anything, too reserved’ (Post 2012,

15).

It is unsurprising, given our preceding historiographical discussion, that Post and his scholarly influences readily cite Polybius as justification of their remarkably specific chronology of decline.

(Bintliff 1993, 139-140, Bintliff and Snodgrass 1985, 139-145). This, combined with the general allegations of malaise in the Greek mainland, have led many to confine archaeological data that can be periodized only to the broad ‘Hellenistic-Roman’ slot of over 600 years to only its first century or two.

The archaeological argument for widespread demographic decline in Hellenistic Boeotia thus rests on two assumptions: first, that other contemporary sources point to an endemic weakening of the mainland in general, and second, that site numbers are readily representative of regional population figures.

Ancient Historians by and large have been eager to place such specific confidence in data that archaeologists themselves admit is ambiguous; as with constructs of ancient ‘ethnicity,’ some have tended to gloss over the methodological fine print. Returning ad fontes, however, makes the data itself,

275 Most notably at Post 2012, 16-19 and 105-113. 272 and the depopulation it has been used to substantiate, seem much less certain. I do not wish to demean the invaluable work of the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project, but we must acknowledge its limitations.276 Bintliff and Snodgrass’s findings only relate to a specific region in and around the city of

Thespiai; they have consciously cast a very specific net from which we should hesitate to draw overly generalizing conclusions. Their work has shed invaluable light on settlement patterns of Thespiai and synteleia in this particular region, but eccentricities of one site should not be taken as the hard and fast rule of the region. They readily acknowledge the ambiguity of their findings, as should we: Bintliff ascribes ‘general demographic and economic malaise’ to the region of Thespiai over a time span from

200 BC – 400 AD, and there would seem to be no reason why we should assume that all disaster befell the city in the period’s opening decades (1996, 197). His conclusions also point to continuity between the Classical and Early Hellenistic Periods, so perhaps we should look to the Empire for the source of decline (1996, 213-214).

Other projects support such Classical-Hellenistic continuity. Alcock, in her résumé of Boeotian survey findings, observes quite aptly that ‘by far the densest occupation of the landscape dates to the

Classical and Early Hellenistic Period,’ while the decline in site numbers does not occur until what she describes as the ‘Late Hellenistic and Imperial Period’ spanning from 200 BC – AD 300 (1993, 38-39).

The fourth century zenith of Boeotian population thus continues well into the middle of the Hellenistic

276 Methodological discussion of survey archaeology in general and how to identify rural sites in particular has blossomed over the past decade. Pettegrew (2001) cautions against the usual on-site off-site dichotomy, arguing that data from the field should be viewed as refuse from continuous or repeat occupation, not necessarily a discrete site in and of itself. Lin Foxhall (2004) has also described the hazards of putting archaeological data into an overly tight historical context. See also Eberhard Sauer’s overview of the discussion in 2004, as well as his introduction to the volume. The fascinating case studies in Kolb’s 2004 edited volume also bring the intricacy of much of this to light. 273

Period and decline, when it sets in among site numbers, is observed over a five century period under a vastly different political order.

In the context of the current discussion, John Fossey’s findings are of the most interest. While

Bintliff and Snodgrass confined themselves to a fairly intensive survey of a small city, Fossey instead opted for a much larger swathe of Boeotia and thus his findings, though not chronologically precise, nonetheless provide a helpful aperçu. In his data the decline is again more ambiguous: ‘the general picture’, he writes of the Hellenistic and Imperial Periods, treated as one, ‘shows a notable reduction in site numbers’ (Fossey 1988, 440-441). The numbers themselves are admittedly notable, but not catastrophic: from a Classical peak of 74 identifiable sites, the broadly defined ‘Hellenistic’ Period yields 58, while the Imperial Period has only 39. This translates into a 21.6% reduction from the

Classical to the Hellenistic, 32.8% from the Hellenistic to the Imperial, and 47% from the Classical to the

Imperial (Fossey 1988, 440-441). The largest slice of this reduction, he notes, took place between the

Hellenistic and Imperial Periods, not the Classical. On a regional level, the numbers exhibit some variation but the general trend is still the same: between the Classical and Hellenistic Periods there is a marked drop, though much smaller compared to the subsequent Hellenistic to Imperial difference. In eastern Boeotia this is particularly pronounced, with only 13.8% for the former, and 57.9% in the latter

(Fossey 1988, 441-442). While the picture described by Fossey speaks in general to Classical and

Hellenistic continuity, there are regional variations within Boeotia that nuance the trend somewhat.277

277 I must note here that Fossey’s data are split into three sub-regions, and one of them – the basic of Lake Kopaïs – does demonstrate a notable decline during both periods. From the Classical to the Imperial Period there is a 54.5% overall reduction in sites throughout Boeotia, and Eastern Boeotia sees a 63.6% reducation in the Classical to Imperial transition but only 13.6% in Classcial to Hellenistic, 57.9% from Hellenistic to Roman Periods. While Kopaïs certainly shows rapid decline in site numbers during the Hellensitic Period, the flooding mentioned by Strabo in the region ‘alone could explain most of the reduced settlement in the two post-Classical periods’ (Fossey 1988, 443-444). The East of Boeotia also shows a fair deal of variation in site numbers, though 274

This data and its resultant calculations are entirely based on numbers of identifiable sites, and their dropping number have often been taken as indicating regional decline largely because of political factors when it could equally be attributed to so many other causes. Natural disasters such as the flooding of Lake Kopaïs (Strabo 9.407) remained a massive problem to settlement well into the

Imperial Period. Changes in settlement patterns could equally be a cause, particularly given the shift from traditional forms of land organisation by merē under the Theban hegemony to the rise of more numerous poleis and their respective chorai under the third-century koinon (Fossey 1988, 440). The latter to me is particularly enticing, given the appearance of several urban communities in the early decades of the period. Another important observation the has generally gone overlooked is that

Boeotia is generally a non-trading state in both the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, and hence we could safely presume that on a material level most sites of either period would be indistinguishable from one another – something which we have previously seen in Euboea. ‘In short,’ as Fossey aptly concludes, ‘the change from Classical to Hellenistic times, while statistically evident, is of very limited significance’ (1988, 446).

Further complicating our archaeological picture of the region is the ambiguous relationship of site numbers to population. Post and others have taken lower site numbers to be ultimately indicative of a lower regional population, largely through the argument that fewer farmsteads results in less agricultural production, which in turn taxes the region’s demography. The assumption that fewer sites automatically means fewer people, however, is not certain. Fossey himself readily acknowledges this, and even extends its limitations beyond demography as he writes ‘even in the Classical Period it is

generally in the later Hellenistic and Imperial Periods. Fossey describes, ‘this would appear to be the area of boiotia in which population redistribution was most frequent’ (445).

275 difficult to estimate just what the significance is of the pattern of inhabited sites, and the problem is much greater in the succeeding periods’ (Fossey 1988, 440).278 A decline in site numbers, Alcock argues, is also in sore need of contextualization, particularly in this case: Boeotia, for instance, actually maintains a higher density of settlement throughout this time than the well-explored Italian region of the Ager Veientanus close to Rome itself’ (Alcock 1993, 54).

To sum up, then, the archaeological tableau hardly snaps into focus during the fourth and third centuries with such clarity as some have claimed, but leaves the precise timing and causes of Boeotia’s decline in site numbers frustratingly impenetrable. When we discard the testimony of Polybius, we come to realise that many archaeological data have been dated erroneously in relation to his literary construct, as trends and patterns that could be at home anywhere within a span of six centuries have been so confidently confined to only a few decades. The data have been borrowed, but their limitations have often been overlooked. A broader context casts the regional variations of the Boeotian landscape in a different light. Alcock provides the best summation which pertains equally to Boeotia and to the mainland as whole: ‘what must be stressed at this stage of our argument is that our survey evidence does not a priori prove demographic decline, or certainly not the extreme degree that has often been claimed’ (1993, 55).

From Thebes to Macedon: Politics in Hellenistic Boeotia

While throughout this chapter I argue for the general stability of the region during the

Hellenistic Period, nevertheless I must identify instances of rupture when they present themselves. The

278 See also Witcher 2011 on models of Mediterranean survey archaeology, among other methodological discussions in Bowman and Wilson 2011. 276 sack of Thebes is certainly one such event, whose importance and ramifications should not be glossed over. The perhaps misguided Theban revolt provided the young king of Macedon with a sterling opportunity to make an example of the city which its fellow Greeks would not be quick to forget.

Various ancient sources discuss the gory details of the city’s destruction, and have been duly analysed by Brigitte Gullath (1982, 60-85); the aftermath of the event is of principal interest to us here.279 The loss of more than 6,000 of the city’s men (Hansen 2004, 454) represented a staggering demographic loss to the former Boeotian hegemon, and a further 30,000 men, women, and children were exposed to andrapodismos and sold into slavery. In one fell blow, Alexander had wiped Thebes and its hegemony from the face of Boeotia. Given the Theban privations of the preceding decades, we ought to surmise that the other cities of Boeotia would have rejoiced at the fate of their overlord.280

The distribution of Theban territory among its former dependants would equally have been cause for celebration among the neighbouring communities who stood to gain economically as well as politically from the largesse of Alexander. Again, as elsewhere, we must note that for these various cities – indeed much of the population of Boeotia – the advent of the Macedonians, particularly

Alexander, would have been enthusiastically welcomed. The Macedonians, for their part, had begun doing their work in Boeotia even before the revolt of Thebes and Athens: under the settlements of

Philip, the cities of Orchomenos and Plataea were reconstructed and repopulated, while other cities

279 The principal ancient sources for the destruction of Thebes are: Arr.Anab.1.7-9, Diod.17.7-14, Plut.Alex. 11.6- 12. 280 In the years leading up to and following its destruction, Thebes lost control of Orchomenos (Paus. 4.27.10), Thespiai and Oropos (Paus. 1.34.1) and after the city was sacked its territory was divided among neighbouring cities according to Hyp. 6.17, Diod. 18.11.3-4, Paus. 1.25.4, as discussed by Gullath 1982, 77-82. Theban casualties in the process are listed by Diod. 17.14.1. Plut.Alex. 11.12 and Ael.VH. 13.7 who all provide the same figure, as discussed by Post 2012, 81, and Gullath 1982, 65. 277 that had been strangled by the Theban hegemony began to creep out of their former master’s shadow

(Beck and Ganter 2015).

The early reign of the Macedonians, as we shall see, was a period of construction and restoration throughout much of the region. Even Thebes itself later owed its continued existence to the benefaction of Cassander beginning in 316/315, only to eventually regain the status of self- governing city in the federation in 288 – though this time as only a medium-sized city among many other medium-sized cities.281 Though Thebes had been cut down to size by Alexander, it had been restored by the Diadochs; the city’s ideological importance in panhellenic affairs outlived its urban core, and made it an indispensable asset to those who would claim dominion over the mainland.

Boeotia, as much of the Greek world, was buffeted by the shifting alliances of Alexander’s immediate successors as they vied for supremacy at home and abroad, but their momentary control over the region precluded any lasting or meaningful change to its structures. From the death of

Alexander to the Battle of Ipsos various claimants to Alexander’s throne traipsed through or near the region, and while this may have been a decade of momentary inconvenience it is not one that marks the beginning of the sort of systematic control akin to that implemented by the Thebans. Even the

Diadoch’s settlement of 311 in which they divided the Greek world among themselves was of little to no immediate consequence to the Boeotians: as Paul Roesch comments, ‘l’année 311 s’achève sans qu’aucun événement vienne modifier, semble-t-il, la situation en Grèce centrale’ (1982, 428). Emily

Mackil (2013, 91-120) and Brigitte Gullath (1985) provide detailed narratives of the period in their respective studies which need not be recapitulated here, but as the dust settled after Ipsos we note that the situation on the ground had changed very little.

281 Roesch 1982, 423-428 provides the best recapitulation and discussion of Thebes’ history in the years immediately following its destruction. 278

The ill-fated expedition to Chalcis and Eretria had little by way of lasting impact, and the gifts of

Cassander and Demetrius, among others, were reversed with such frequency that a return to the status quo ante was inevitable (Roesch 1982, 428-431). In the wake of Ipsos the garrisons of Cassander and Demetrius were removed from the region and everything quieted down again. While the revolt of

293 was certainly a memorable, if doomed, effort, Demetrius’ reprisal was hardly catastrophic: only a few heads at the top of the conspiracy rolled, and even this was in the specific context of his siege of

Thebes.282 Thebes itself figured more prominently in the campaigns of the vying successors than any other city in the region, thus even these intermittent episodes of violence would have been tightly localised.283 To some communities, such Macedonian competition even came to their immediate financial benefit: as important ideological, if not just military, pieces in the larger game, they were often the objects of royal benefaction aimed at winning their favour (Roesch 1982, 428). After roughly the end of the 280s we can speak of the region as remaining essentially neutral.284 Save for certain episodes which I will highlight below, the third century in Boeotia was marked by prevailing neutrality and general insulation from the tumult of external politics. By and large daily life seems to have gone on as usual in the aftermath of Thebes’ destruction; the storm had come and gone, and the clouds remained over the horizon.

282 Diodorus’ account of Demetrius’ leniency at 21.14.1-2 merits quotation here: ‘King Demetrius laid siege to Thebes when it revolted a second time, demolished the walls with siege engines, and took the city by storm, but put to death only the ten men who were responsible for the revolt. King Demetrius, having gained possession of the other cities also, dealt generously with the Boeotians; for he dismissed the charges against all except the fourteen men who were chiefly responsible for the revolt.’ This is hardly catastrophic, particularly compared with the previous experience of Thebes under Alexander. 283 Roesch 1982, 425-430 and Mackil 2014, 91ff for the particularities of this period in Boeotian in particular, and the mainland in general in each respective study. 284 This neutrality continues essentially until the end of the third century save for a few episodes discussed by Post 2012, 90-96 and notably by Feyel 1942, 83-105. Scholten 2000 however has since raised several poignant criticisms of this prevailing sentiment of neutrality at 270-275. 279

As we shall see from various angles, the reformed koinon that emerged is marked by a clear commitment to equality of political representation. The redesigned league made institutionally sure that no one city would come to dominate federal bodies and magistracies as Thebes had in the fourth century: all magistrates were elected kata poleis from the federal assembly, and lower level federal officials were elected in their own cities (Beck and Ganter, 2015). Each citizen community now played an equal part in federal administration, and the league become adequately representative of common interests after having been a facade for Theban rule. In this there is a return to the kind of regional integrity and community that preceded the rise of Thebes and the Persian Wars, and in this sense, perhaps, Boeotia had returned to normal. Power in the region was transferred from Thebes back to sanctuaries of ancestral prominence, namely the Itoneion near Koroneia and the Poseidonion near

Onchestos – with the latter taking on added administrative importance.285 Proportionality, participation, and representation were the new hallmarks of a reworked league that now pursued interests that can more fully be described as common: common treaties, territorial integrity, military defence, economic interests, and the organisation of Boeotia’s civic and cultic life. Each of these aspects shall be treated in turn.

With Thebes having been reduced to only middling rank first by the destruction of Alexander and then by its only partial reconstruction, communities that had previously languished in its shadow were able to take root and grow. The third century is precisely when we see the emergence of several

Boeotian communities as full-fledged poleis of the koinon for the first time in their history. This does

285 Beck and Ganter 2015 provide the most recent and comprehensive survey of the League in the Hellenistic Period, incorporating references to previous studies including, but not limited to: Busolt and Swoboda 1926, 1432-1442; Larsen 1968, 303-358 (outdated by still influential). The institutional details of the League are treated by Roesch 1965, Larsen 1968, 178-180, Étienne and Knoepfler 1976, 263-250. Funke 2007a & b emphasize the high degree of participation in the Federal league. 280 not, however, imply that these communities emerged out of thin air, but rather that settlements that had been present since the Bronze Age now formally developed themselves and their institutions.

Anthedon is first called a polis in the urban sense by a fourth century mythological treatise

(Hansen 2004, 442), and its mechanisms of civic and federal government are most concretely attested in the third century as its citizens appear among the aphedriateuontes (IG VII 2723.4) and among the victors at panhellenic games.286 The community had only previously been attested as providing a harbour and naval base to Thebes, but after the latter’s downfall the city is attested as a full-fledged member of the koinon by c.280 (IG VII 2723.4), and issued decrees of proxenia in the same century.

This onetime Theban harbour provides a particularly fitting example of the Hellenistic dynamism of

Boeotian communities, because the site itself displays signs of continuous settlement since the

Neolithic Period (Fossey 1988, 255). It was only now, thanks to the political climate provided by the rise of Macedon that Anthedon was afforded the space to develop into a distinct polis community. Again, this comes at a time when the polis is often dismissed as a hollow shell of its former import.

Chorsiai furnishes another example of this third century effervescence, as it is only then firmly attested as a polis in internal and external decrees (SEG 3.342, 22.410). Previous evidence suggests that in the fourth century it had been a dependent community of Thespiai, but again the third century climate allowed it to stretch its own political legs. Hyettos joins their ranks: dominated by the Thebans since the early Classical Period and likely extant as a political community since well beforehand, it is not firmly attested as a polis in its own right until a mid-third century military catalogue (SEG 26.498.3-

4). All attestations of Oropos as a polis likewise date to the Hellenistic Period (Hansen 2004, 443), even though Hansen concludes that it was likely a dependent community of Thespiai during the preceding

286 Steph.Byz. 96.17-18 specifically names a certain Nikon of Anthedon as a victor. 281 centuries. For a latecomer to the Boeotian political stage, Oropos was remarkably active: it is referred to as a polis by Diodorus (14.17.3), as well as in citizenship decrees.287 That the latter all date to around

310 is apt testament to the speed with which these Boeotian communities established themselves in the aftermath of Thebes’ downfall.

This trend towards the emergence and development of new polis communities during the third century stands in stark contrast the rampant demographic decline that some have alleged follows from the archaeological evidence. As I mentioned above, the decline in rural site numbers could have many explanations beyond that these communities simply died off, and this certainly could well be the case here. The consolidation of these long-extant communities into coherent and visible poleis, each replete with their own civic and religious culture, must have entailed the resettlement of at least some of their respective populations into an emerging urban core. This would be a fairly typical example of settlement nucleation that comes with the development of any polis.288 At any rate, in simple quantitative terms the Boeotian political landscape of the third century was more active and engaged than it had been in preceding years.

In spite of the disappearance of a central authority over the region, the Boeotians act with a coherency of purpose in the years following the Macedonian conquest that is striking. The ‘other’

Battle of Thermopylae in 279 provides an example that often slips beneath the scholarly radar. In response to the Galatian invasion of the mainland, the Boeotians organised and sent a force of 10,500 men to counter the threat – the largest army ever fielded by the Boeotian League (Paus. 10.20.3, Post

2012, 75). The Macedonians, for their part, were nowhere to be found, meanwhile the Boeotians project such a unified front precisely at the moment when we would expect them to be at their most

287 I.Oropos 4.7-8, 5.8-9, 6.9-10 and SEG 15.264 288 See Alcock 1993 for the Hellenistic and Rome trend of site nucleation. 282 fragmented. I shall turn later to a more specific discussion of the league’s military structures when we consider the Boeotian ephēbeia, but for the moment it suffices to note that the throughout the third century the league had a clear policy of preserving the territorial integrity of the region, and patrolling the countryside in order to counter any potential threats (Post 2012, 90-96). Such a policy could only have functioned with the dedicated involvement of each of the League’s constituent communities.

That the dispersal of Boeotian federal power among a larger number of communities did not likewise dilute its federal policy is likewise revelatory.

The league rather cleverly navigated the diplomatic storms that occasionally arose in the century following the sack of Thebes in order to further ensure the region’s integrity and territorial stability. From 301 until the Aetolian defeat in 245, the Boeotians made and broke alliances several times in the interest of preserving ‘regional autonomy’, as Beck and Ganter put it (2015). Even in the years after the Achaean debacle the Boeotians successfully maintained a position of essential neutrality from 228 until the close of the century, only being forced to seek external assistance on one occasion in 208 (Pol. 10.41.1). The presence of cavalry patrols, guard dogs in the countryside, and regular military competitions reveals a strategic emphasis on regional security. It is telling that in the midst of the Diadoch’s struggles, the Boeotians chose to adopt a purely defensive strategy. Expansion and growth, save for a few occasional acquisitions, was neither a policy nor a desired ideal.

Instead, consistency and stability reigned in the realm in external relations as it did in internal organisation. Two studies of by Paul Roesch are of particular interest to us with regards to the league’s courts and calendars, respectively. In his treatment of justice in the Hellenistic League, Roesch begins by making the fascinating disclaimer that Boeotia is the only region in the Greek world that does not provide any hint of the use of outside arbitration to settle internal disputes (Roesch 1985, 132). Such

283 an absence speaks volumes: the studies of Ager (1996) and others have heralded the Hellenistic Period as the golden age of interstate arbitration, and yet here we have no whisper of such a judicial mechanism. Territorial disputes, he justifiably concludes, must have been resolved exclusively in the federal courts, and the lack of attestation of external arbitration implies that such a system functioned beautifully until the dissolution of the League in 172 (Roesch 1985, 129-133).

There are eight documents which testify to the presence of outside judges in Boeotia, but all of these date to after the Roman dissolution, and one of them, at Akraiphia, refers to a harmful backlog of pending decisions that required a tribunal from Larisa (Roesch 1985, 130-132). The proliferation of such evidence after 172 retroactively reveals the effectiveness of federal mechanisms for conflict dispute. All of this in turn provides further support to my refutation of Polybius’ allegations of judicial decline. If, as Polybius asserts, the wheels of justice had ground to a halt in the closing decades of the century, then we would expect some, if not abundant, evidence of outside arbitrators being summoned as a substitute for broken federal courts. Yet there is none, and the conclusion follows that the League’s member states remained active in, and faithful to, federal structures of litigation.289 This does not mean that there was utter harmony among the member states, rather that they all agreed to common means of resolving the disputes that inevitably arose.

Another interesting vector of federal fidelity is provided by our abundant evidence for the

Boeotian calendar in the Hellenistic Period. In Roesch’s catalogue (1982, 4-32) of inscriptions relating to both civic and federal calendars, all of the texts combined produce exactly 12 names of months, and

289 A fitting late fourth or early third century example of this is SEG 23.297 = Ager 1996 no. 16, which is a boundary stone produced after a between Choroneia and Lebadeia that was arbitrated and resolved by the koinon. The most recent summary of the inscription is found in Mackil 2014`s dossier, no.14. It merits note that in this instance, the koinon is not credited with delineating the boundaries, but rather ‘the Boeotians.’ To quote lines 1-3: ‘[Ὅρια τας Τροφ]ωνιάδος γας [ἱαρας κὴ Λεβα]δειήωμ ποτὶ [Κορωνειας ὡς] Βοιωτοὶ ὥριτταγ’. 284 not one that is additional or exceptional on either the federal or local level.290 The months of

Chaeronea, for instance – the only city for which we have a full attestation - are identical to the months of the Federal calendar (1982, 47). Even in Oropos, a city which was prone to fluctuations of power and allegiance, the months of the civic calendar are identical to the federal calendar (Roesch

1982, 51).291 Although these texts only give data for the third century organisation of time in the region, and shed no light on preceding mechanisms, the fact that this calendar continued with essentially no modification into the Imperial Period suggests that it was already well-established by the dawn of the

Macedonian hegemony (Roesch 1982, 54).

It is only on the level of how days were counted that we see ‘une certaine originalité se manifester dans les cités,’ (Roesch 1982, 76), but even this is relatively minor. These calendrical observations, while certainly historical minutiae, are nonetheless crucial to the argument in favour of

Boeotian regional stability during the period. While often overlooked in other regions for want of elaborate evidence, in Boeotia such arguments in favour of chronological continuity are secure. The organisation of time is one of the most basic structures in the daily life of any community, and such striking consistency over a great span of time and amidst numerous political upheavals speaks to a level of fidelity to local tradition that endures more evanescent disruptions. Daily life went on, the days

290 Roesch 1982 does so by first establishing the Federal calendar (33-45) and then comparing this with our various pieces of evidence for the municipal calendars. Particularly helpful is his chart on 46, proving a visual synthesis of the range of evidence at our disposal. Note that in addition to the 250 inscriptions which attest the names of months in Boeotia, there are also some scattered literary mentions discussed on 48-49. The overall pattern is abundantly clear, with twelve names of months ‘sans un seul de plus’ 47. 291 The eighty inscriptions from Chaeronea which provide useful dating formulae are listed at Roesch 1982, 13-16, with corresponding IG and publication references. Forty decrees from Oropos, notable among them IG VII 388, 399, 400, 446, and 494 provide the names of nine months of the calendar, discussed by Roesch 1982, 20- 24.Coroneia is nearly as helpful with all but four months solidly attested. 285 and months continued to be counted and recorded as they had been and as they would be for centuries to come.

This federal consistency, however, did not prevent Boeotia’s cities from acting independently in other arenas. Stability does not automatically entail perpetuation of the status quo, but in these aspects we see the Boeotian propensity for innovation – or at least redevelopment – in the service of the designs of both the League and its members. The redesigned Boeotian koinon of the third century afforded its members a measure of autonomy in the international arena that the Theban hegemony had previously stifled. In the consideration of this dynamic we shall again turn to the institution of proxenia, and consider which Boeotian cities were issuing such decrees, to whom, and for what reason.

The conferral of such privileges interestingly functions simultaneously on both the federal and local levels, and each will be considered in term.

The character of Hellenistic federal decrees of proxenia is, as is so often the case in this study, best established by means of contrast with its precedents.292 Such decrees dating from the fourth century are quite in few in number, and are exclusively issued from the koinon, with the implication that individual member cities did not have the privilege of conferring their own privileges to outsiders

(Fossey 2014, 5). The few occasions on which the Theban-dominated League granted proxenia were purely strategic and opportunistic, aimed at securing alliances or promoting its momentary military agenda. The Hellenistic Period, however, produces a considerable quantity of such federal decrees

292 See my preceding discussion of proxenia in the cases of Argos and Euboea, particularly the comment of Mack 2015 and Mitchell 1997 arguing that such decrees indicate the beginning, not end, of interaction between two communities by means of the honorands. Such decrees cam with the expectation of future assistance and services. Also noteworthy is Mack’s observation that these decrees which survive in would only have been a small portion of the total decrees that a city or community would have passed. Only certain ‘highlights’ would have it into the epigraphic record; bearing this in mind makes the proxenic networks yet more intricate that they already appear. 286 which have survived to us in various states of repair, but Fossey’s analysis of the corpus has produced several sound observations. Of the 45 texts that have been preserved, roughly 37 are in adequately discernable shape to afford some insight into the nature of the Hellenistic institution; only a few of the decrees date to the late fourth century, while the vast majority fall in the second half of the third century, specifically from 240-200 BC.293 This in and of itself further speaks against the Polybian opinio communis, which would identify precisely this range as being when the Boeotian government slipped into deep neglect. Aside from the unique case of a certain Eudamos Nikonos of Seleucia in Cilicia who is described as having influence with King Antiochus, almost none of the decrees make any mention of

Hellenistic royalty, their philoi, or their families as we have seen elsewhere.294 The use of proxenia as a federal means of gaining royal favour is a very late invention in Boeotia.

Half of the honorands come from regions that we would expect, particularly Athens and Chalcis, and thus immediate regional utility of federal proxenia is obvious. The other half are rather more diverse, hailing from a sphere of interest that stretches through Northern Greece, Macedon, the

Aegean, and up to the Euxine Sea in the north, and the Levant in the South.295 The Ptolemies and any

293 Fossey 2014 5-6, on which he identifies the following as too fragmentary to contain any useful details: IG VII 1720, , 2859, 2862–2863, 2866–2867; REA 1966: 61–66 no. 3 and 69–72 no, 9; Feyel, 1942: 17. The criteria he uses for establishing such utility is the legibility of the ethnic or name of the honorand; several inscriptions lack a federal archon to establish a specific date for the decree. 294 Eudamos must have been a remarkably influential man given his popularity throughout the Greek mainland at the time. He is honoured by the League in an inscriptions dating to roughly 172 BC, Syll3 644/5 lines 28–33, and elsewhere Fossey 2014 6-7 mentions that he is likewise honoured by Argos, Rhodes, Byzantion, Chalcedon, and Cyzicus. Fossey places this in the context of the heightening tensions leading up to the Third Macedonian War, arguing that these various states were attempting to gain Antiochos’ favour before the upcoming Roman advance. Even though he essentially discards the inscription as being part of the ‘last fling’ (7) of Boeotian diplomacy, he goes on to write that ‘at the same time it does serve to show the potential military-strategic use of the proxenia still being exploited by the federation in the earlier 2nd century BCE.’ (7). 295 Discussion on Fossey 2014, 6-7, with figs.1 & 2 mapping the Federal Proxenoi in the first and second half of the third century, respectively. The predominance of local proxenia in the first half of the cnetury is obvious, as all the decrees relate locally save 5. To quote his list and discussion: ‘The very early ones are in favour of a Pellanian (Roesch, 1982: 271–272), an 287 of their domains save Cyrene are conspicuously absent from the list of the league’s proxenoi, as it seems that in general the league’s external attention was drawn north (Fossey 2014, 7). Yet the sheer extent of territory covered is striking, as is the league’s penchant for establishing lines of communication with regions that had only recently come into the Greek orbit.

Admittedly this took some decades to happen, as it is only in the latter half of the third century that we see such Anatolian links being forged, but the fact that such an avowedly neutral, largely landlocked region as Boeotia would take part in such an emergent network is indicative of the vitality of such communication. The creation of such a wide network reveals that the Boeotian strategy of territorial integrity did not equate to simple isolationism. Here is another example of a region of the mainland participating in the emergent cultural koinē without sacrificing their local priorities. Neither was such outreach driven by simple economic interests, as Fossey concludes that ‘this should reinforce the suggestion that federal proxenia was used... for primarily political purposes rather than commercial ones’ (Fossey 2014, 7). This widespread politicking in the international arena while the region was theoretically under domination by a foreign power speaks to the lack of Macedonian interference in the day-to-day governance of the mainland.

It is in the abundance of civic proxenia decrees in Boeotia that we find our best qualitative and quantitative evidence for the region’s buzz of local activity in the Hellenistic Period. As I have mentioned previously, if we do not qualify our argument for stability then we risk deceiving ourselves: stability in this region did not mean the inane repetition of the Classical status quo with no discernable change, rather it was the goal towards which Boeotia’s cities and their inhabitants strove with often

Adramyttian (IG VII 2860), a Perrhaibian from Phelanna (IG vii 2858) and a Parian (AE 1909: 55–56); the single example from the second quarter of the 3rd century honours an Amphipolitan (SEG 15 282)... a certain continuity of the late Classical interest in North Greece and the Aigaion can perhaps be detected’ 2014, 6. 288 innovative means as a matter of policy. Such Hellenistic innovation, or at the very least departure from

Classical precedent, is aptly captured in not only the number of proxenia decrees, but who was granting them. In the corpus of such inscriptions again assembled by Fossey, Tanagra interestingly is among the top of the Boeotian pack with 28 decrees that have been recovered thus far, equalled only by Thespiai with the same number.296 Following them are Akraiphia with 19 and 10 at Thisbe, while the rest of the region’s cities only produce numbers in the single-digits (catalogue at Fossey 2014, 49-82). It is striking that Classical Period’s most active and influential cities – in particular Thebes – are so humble in the realm of proxenia and the networks it represents. Bearing in mind Mack’s (2015) arguments that these epigraphic decrees would only represent a fraction of the number of proxenic decrees passed by a given city or federation, the network becomes all the more robust.

In the preponderance of certain cities we see how the political landscape of the region had changed, but we also catch a glimpse of its new priorities: Oropos boasts large numbers of proxenoi likely thanks to the international repute of the Amphiaraion, likewise Akraiphia profited from the prestige of its Ptoion and hence is so well-represented. The rest of the leading cities, many of which had been rather obscure players in preceding centuries, lie on or near the region’s coastline and thus the connection between proxenia and the sea ‘is fairly obvious and must surely indicate that the

Hellenistic city proxenoi are to be taken as the results of commercial activity’ (Fossey 2014, 9).

Although Fossey is ready and willing to boil the issuance of these decrees down to simple economic interest, but there is more to be gleaned from examining each city’s circumstances.

296 Fossey 1991, 27-34, and 2014, 8-10. The preponderance of each city is shown graphically with his fig. 3, while the individual decrees are listed at Fossey 2014, 29-82. 289

All of the proxenia decrees issued by Thespiai save perhaps one outlier date from the period

240-172.297 This in and of itself is noteworthy, as the span which has been alleged as Boeotia’s most profound decline instead at Thespiai represents its most fervent activity on the civic level. All are written in the local dialect and none betray influence by the koinē. The geographical span covered by the decrees is likewise impressive: its trading interests naturally lie to the west and we are unsurprised to find southern Italians and Thessalians represented, but the Thespian web extends much farther than its immediate economic zone (Fossey 2014, 10). A man of Seleuceia (IThesp. 24), an Alexandrian, and two Kanopeans also figure among the city’s proxenoi (IThesp. 19 for both). In the context of the federal decrees I have discussed above, it is remarkable that Thespiai’s web of proxenia is different, and indeed larger, than that of the koinon. Even in the midst of such strong signs of federal conformity, and such apparently well-functioning federal structures, its member cities were able to – and certainly did

– weave their own web of external contacts. That Thespiai did this in a manner that presented no challenge to the koinon whatsoever is further testament to the league’s flexibility in the realm of local politics.

Thespiai’s location does not lend itself well to the establishment and maintenance of such far- reaching links: the ancient site is located far inland, roughly 20km from Thebes by way of the modern villages of Vagia and Leontari. A range of hills separates Thespiai from its nearest northern neighbours on the plain, making direct passage from the north or the east difficult at best. To the south and west

297 Fossey 2014, 9-11 is here following Roesch 1982, 311 who clearly concludes that the inscriptions all ‘datent des années 240 à 172 environ,’ except for one inscription – 1982, 307-309 – which we shall soon consider in great detail. This inscription concerning the training of young men in Thespiai is dated by Roesch to 255-245 BC. Fossey and Roesch both conclude that these Thespian decrees must date to before the dissolution of the koinon because they continue to be written in the dialect. The few examples of Boeotian decrees that were written in the koine are IG VII.527, SEG II.184, and IG VII. 3059. The thespian decrees are listed in Fossey 2014, ch. 3 and stem largely from Roesch’s IThesp. 290 the city is ringed in by steep mountain ranges which cut it off from coastal access, and thus unlike its neighbours on the Boeotian coast this city did not naturally facilitate such expansive links with the

Greek world. That such a city was capable of forging and maintaining relations with citizens of

Alexandria and Seleuceia is indicative of the geographical reach that was enabled by the Antigonids.

For it to extend such a reach on its own accord is likewise revelatory. Cities such as Thespiai were now able to interact and exchange freely throughout the Greek world while lying in the shadow of Macedon.

If anything, this seems to have created a sort of free-trade zone in which cities such as Thespiai stood to profit immensely, all without sacrificing their local autonomy.

The proxenoi of Thisbe paint a similar picture. For a city with a small population and a small fleet – more humble certainly than Thespiai – Thisbean proxenia had a remarkably far reach. Its honorands are clustered in maritime straits leading through the Gulf of Corinth, including citizens of

Chalcidia (SEG 3.350), Sikyon (IG VII 2223; SEG 3.346 and 348), Naupaktos (IG VII 2224), as well as an

Aetolian, Pagaian, and Amphissan (SEG 3 343; 344; 349, respectively). While more local than the

Thespian network, Thisbean proxenia is nonetheless impressive for a city of its stature and again reveals the capacity for peer-polity communication and exchange among cities who fell under the

Antigonid umbrella (Fossey 2014, 14). Here a different, more local side of proxenia comes to the fore:

Thisbe is ringed in by mountain ranges in all directions save for a small passage towards Thespiai to the northeast, and the coastline – roughly a kilometre away – to the south which provides access to the

Corinthian Gulf. This network of proxenia which the city establishes thus naturally represents its most common maritime connections with cities along the gulf’s coast, and thus stands in for its regular routes of trade. This would not have been the only time at which Thisbe was interacting with these communities. On an internal level, however, these decrees reveal the smooth functioning of the city’s

291 government and the engagement of its citizens in their common affairs, otherwise the privileges would not be considered worthwhile in the first place. The thriving trade implied by such decrees, if we adhere to Fossey’s economic prioritization, hardly speaks to collapsing local economies or a widespread demographic crisis.

Oropos, with its 185 proxenoi, is likewise impressive in its flurry of activity in the third and early second centuries. 137 of those honoured hail from Greece itself, while the remaining 52 from parts further afield throughout the northeastern Mediterranean and Anatolia. The frequency of Athenians and Euboeans, the region’s closest neighbours and thus most immediate contacts, is quite low at 11 and 7 %, respectively, and only 45% of those honoured come from Boeotia’s neighbours.298 The rest spread through Macedon, the Aegean, and Anatolia, suggesting that at the time Oropos was establishing and cultivating relationships among a wide group of cities with which it had never previously had close contact. The city’s situation again does not lend itself naturally to such a wide web of exchange: while it lies in the flat plain linking Attica to Boeotia by the inland route, it is still roughly six kilometres from the Euboean Gulf and the route winds through hills towards the shore. Such a vast network of contacts again reveals the effort and energy behind such diplomatic interaction. Oropos’ diplomatic and cultic horizons had certainly been broadened, but this interaction does not automatically imply that such inherent traits as dialect or civic structures bled into the mire. Quite the opposite, as the popularity of the Amphiaraion seems to have drawn outsiders towards Oropos rather than a unilateral exchange in the other direction (Fossey 2014, 14-15). That this was forged around a religious, rather than purely economic, nexus suggests that trade was not always the sole motivating factor behind the promulgation of such decrees and the interaction they represent.

298 The above figures are taken from Fossey 2014, 14 with refernec eto his catalogue in ch. 4 and fig. 7. 292

Some Boeotian cities were, however, victims of their own geography, and this vast networking did not always penetrate inland. Akraiphia, for instance, the home of the renowned Ptoion, presents a substantial number of proxenoi but these decrees concern mostly the city’s immediate neighbours rather than far-flung destinations.299 The only notable exception to this inland trend is at Orchomenos, which saw proxenia granted to two Alexandrian Greeks (IG VII 3166-3167). Nonetheless, these cities still maintained their ancestral connections with one another and their neighbours, though they did not tread such new political ground as some of their contemporaries.

There are several salient points to be taken from this review of Boeotian proxenia on the civic level. First, my arguments in favour of Boeotian stability and territorial integrity may lead us to equate such a policy with isolationism, in which Boeotia simply turned inward and insulated itself against exterior upheaval. This was not the case, as the diplomatic, economic, and cultic activity of cities such as Oropos, Thisbe, and Thespiai shows that stability did not come at the expense of either communication or trade. This interaction, conversely, did not lead the Boeotians to discard local tradition or dialect. As we have seen previously thanks to the studies if Wilhelm (1942), Mitchell (1997), and Mack (2015), these decrees should not be dismissed as driven by crass economic concerns, and their privileges should be not be viewed as empty gestures.300

299 Fossey 2014, 16 for his discussion of Akraiphia and its proxenoi. There are roughly 21 texts, though four of them are too mutilated to be helpful to our discussion here, namely: IG VII 2709 and 4129; BCH 1899: 95 nos. IV.2 and IV.4. Fossey then procees to go through the remaining texts which are difficult in some manner. Regarding inland cities in general, however, he concludes that ‘In short there seems good reason to suggest that the inland cities of Boiotia had little in the way of proxenoi because their commercial activity would be limited to other nearby cities; even an inland city with an international religious centre has a largely restricted network of contacts.’ (2014, 17). 300 See again the studies of Knoepfler in the preceding chapter. Fossey 2014 likewise ascribes to this school of though at 17, when he writes ‘The coastal cities on the other hand have networks of proxenoi reflecting maritime and thus commercial contacts, the differences in scale indicating simply extensiveness of trading relations.’ All of this, in short, is this economic. Any connection between politics and proxenia is, to him, inherently exceptional: ‘At the same time we have noted a possibly political purpose behind two city decrees of 293

The fact that relatively small cities were willing and able to interact in the broader Greek sphere indicates the enthusiasm and energy of the former, and the pacific environment of the latter that was guaranteed by Macedonian hegemony. Finally, the observation that the lion’s share of these decrees dates from the period in which Boeotia has been described as being civically stagnant further leads us to discard the disparaging comments of Polybius in favour of a more level-headed appraisal. The end of the third century rather becomes a period of bubbling civic and economic activity – which in turn gives cause to reconsider assumptions about the region’s character when the Romans arrived on its doorstep in the following decades. Proxenia, as we shall see, is not the only indicator of civic and regional vitality in Hellenistic Boeotia.

Good Credit: Boeotia’s Economy

Before moving on to more specific matters of civic involvement, the notion that economic decline accompanied, and perhaps drove, the decline of civic culture must be considered. As seen above, the presumption of third century decline – particularly in its closing years – extends across essentially every realm of Boeotian society, from civic engagement to law courts and demography. The implicit assumption among those who advocate this stance is that Boeotia’s economy must likewise have taken a catastrophic turn for the worse: civic disenfranchisement and a collapse in agricultural productivity must be both exacerbated by and symptomatic of a regional depression. Yet much of the evidence which has been taken as indicative of regional impoverishment is guided by the allegations of

Akraiphiai in the context of Rome’s advance and we may see at Haliartos clearer examples of this sort of phenomenon’ (2014, 17, with my emphasis). 294

Polybius and the overly precise inferences of survey archaeology. When these assumptions are removed, the material becomes much more ambiguous.

Take, for instance, several decrees from Orchomenos and Akraiphia which date to the close of the century (roughly 230-200): Orchomenos, in place of repaying all of the sum it owes to a certain

Eubolos of Elateia instead grants him the right to pasture 1000 sheep or goats and 220 cows or horses on its territory for the lender.301 Whether or not this lending relates to another decree found at Oropos, in which the koinon insisted the city solicit funds to repair its walls, is unclear though possible.302

Regardless of the specific context, the choice of the Orchomenians to repay Eubolos with grazing rights rather than currency, when viewed through a Polybian lens, becomes yet another indication of the region’s irreversible decay: in the midst of a faltering economy, and with a breakdown in the mechanisms of civic government, the city was unable to amass the funds it needed to repay its debt, and rather than defaulting outright it instead chose to barter in a desperate measure to save face.

Removing Polybian invective from the equation, I argue instead that here there are indications of a local Hellenistic economy functioning rather smoothly. First, the fact that this city – or any city, for that matter - was soliciting money from outsiders should not in and of itself be taken as a desperate manoeuvre: to quote Migeotte’s analysis (1985, 106) ‘l’emprunt public ne doit pas toujours être

301 The inscription in question is IG VII 3171, and is dated by the Orchomenian archon Thynarchos who can be placed at some point between 230 and 210. The sums involved in the lending are stunning – there are two receipts of reimbursement mentioned by Migeotte 1985, 104-105: one for 16,093 drachmae, the other for 5,773. Given that the Orchomenians choose to offset part of their debt with grazing right suggests that the initial sum lent might well have been much higher than this. 302 The Federal stipulation requiring the refurbishment of the city walls comes from the decree IG VII 3173, again discussed by Migeotte en passant at 1985, 104-105. The decree mentions federal officials who are traditionally placed between 224 and 210 by Feyel 1942, 249 among others, and by Knoepfler and Étienne 1976, 303 and 350 to the year 221 precisely. While Migeotte views this decree and the Orchomenian transactions as not being related, I do not think it beyond the realm of possibility that a federal measure stipulated that all member cities repair their walls at some point in the mid-220s. Such a vast sum of money in Orchomenos would be concurrent with a building project of such scale. 295 considéré comme un signe de détresse financière, il peut être aussi, du moins au moment où il est conclu, un signe de santé économique’. In short, Migeotte here convincingly argues that such a credit based economy in a region like Boeotia presumes both some degree of economic stability, and the realistic expectation that the city will be able to repay its creditors – otherwise the loan would have never been made in the first place.303 In a stability-based economy like that of the Greek mainland, wealthy benefactors would hardly be willing to bestow these sums of money on communities like

Orchomenos without a reasonable expectation of return on their investment.

Second, 21,866 drachmae is a vast sum of money, not purely in its fiduciary sense but rather as simple currency. It is unlikely that a city like Orchomenos would have kept such a vast reserve available for these expenditures, nor would it necessarily have access to this amount of currency on relatively short notice. As in the case of Anthedon in the second century, civic or even associational revenue and the liquidity thereof was highly variable based on the time of year: taxes were only levied at certain intervals, and would not always be readily available, leading to other forms of financing which helped various institutions stay afloat until the revenue arrived.304 In this light, the benefaction of grazing rights to Eubolos in place of hard currency becomes simply the repayment of the loan by other means,

303 In this discussion I have consciously avoided the intricacies of the Nikareta affair involving Orchomenos. The affair itself is large and convoluted though ends happily for the lender after a great deal of exchange. All has been discussed by Migeotte 1984, 43–69 with deep bibliography. Nikareta, in short, lent 18,822 drachmae to the city, repayment for which was not easily acquired. The principal inscription is IG VII 3172, dated to 225-223 by Étienne and Knoepfler 1976, 301-2. 304 The decree in question is published and extensively commented in Roesch 1982, 91-117. In his discussion of the situation in which a private association at Anthedon honours Kaphisias for having donated generously to the society of Zeus Karaios and Anthas in order to maintain the gymnasium and the society’s broader activities, Roesch makes several key points. The fact that Kaphisias is honoured for his generosity towards the society does not, according to Roesch 1982, 99-105, indicate that it was financially insolvent or bankrupt – though some might think to the contrary. He instead notes that wealth of the society – and thus also of organs of civic government, by analogy – was reliant on revenue from land leases and taxes. This revenue, however, only came at certain times of year, and if some unforeseen expense suddenly arose, the society would have a liquidity problem. Its net assets were not affected, only its available liquid assets, hence the need for a cash loan to tide the society over until the next harvest and associated revenue. 296 not something borne of an endemic economic crisis. The privilege itself is telling: the right to graze such vast herds of livestock on Orchomenian land must have been valuable – extremely valuable, on the level of well over 21,000 drachmae – or it never would have been granted. In place of currency,

Orchomenos instead repaid its creditor with its next most valuable commodity: the use of its fertile land.

A similar pattern of alternative recompense is visible at Akraiphia, in a document also dated to the end of the century. The small port city had borrowed money from a wealthy creditor, Kallon, and in return for a loan of around 1500 drachmae the city granted him the right to graze fifty head of cattle in perpetuity.305 Among the other documents which Migeotte adds to his dossier on third century

Boeotia, the pattern remains clear: instead of repaying certain sums of money which had been lent to these relatively modest communities, the cities instead opt to reimburse the lender via non-monetary means. In the Boeotian context in particular, with its economy that was driven mostly by domestic agriculture rather than foreign trade, this would seem to be business as usual: in such an environment marked by a relatively low index of import and export one would not expect to see the same degree of monetization as elsewhere, hence this is simply the market functioning as it would have for centuries.

Finally, a further examination of the Akraiphian instance indicates that for some Boeotian communities the Hellenistic Period would have been a time of economic growth and relative prosperity – particularly in the third and second centuries. Akraiphia’s stock was rising over the third century thanks to the growing popularity of the sanctuary of Apollo on the slopes of Mount Ptoion, and accordingly the city became rather more ambitious in its territorial – and thus economic – designs. As

Lytle convincingly argues, the territorial expansion of Akraiphia in the northwest was thwarted by

305 The document in question here is SEG 3.356, also see SEG 3.359 for Akraiphian lending at roughly the same period of time. 297

Kopai, but the city would have been more successful in extending control to the east over villages and lands heading towards Anthedon. Hence the third century inscription IG VII 2792 marking the boundary between Akraiphia and Kopai, and the subsequent inscription IG VII 4130 of the second century testifying to another territorial struggle between Akraiphia and a neighbouring state (Lytle

2010, 281). Akraiphia would have been among those communities which benefitted from the destruction of Thebes by receiving some of its territory, and while it may not have retained all of its momentary Theban holdings it nonetheless expanded somewhat at the expense of its former overlord.306 With increased revenue from the Ptoion and its increased land for farming and grazing, the third century would have been a boon for the small community.

Two decrees currently housed in the museum at Thebes shed further light on the economic development of Akraiphia in the late third and early second centuries. The first, discovered in a well in

1935 by M. P. Guillon, contains an alphabetic list of fish names accompanied by corresponding prices in obols and chalks per mina. Feyel then seized on the inscription, dating it to the early second century BC by virtue of its lettering and dialect, and then promptly forced it to fit within his Polybian mould of early second century collapse in the region. Accordingly, Feyel claims (1936, 27-38) that the inscription is a product of the social and economic upheaval which plagued Boeotia in the decades leading up to the Roman takeover, and viewed this decree as further proof of Polybius’ assertion that demagogues were forcing civic officials to pass decrees on the behalf of the poor. The prices listed in the decree

306 The region contains four settlements and five archaeological sites, which are traditionally held to be the territory of Thebes thanks to a mention of Strabo 9.2.22 and 26. Lytle however argues that Strabo is hardly a reliable source for the territorial divisions of Hellenistic Boeotia, and that contemporary scholars have consequently assigned Hellenistic Thebes much more territory than it likely had. (282). Given the Hellenistic boundary disputes between Akraiphia and its neighbours, it would seem that tit was not the only city to be jockeying for territory after the sack of Thebes – and neither was it the only one to benefit on a more lasting timescale. 298 thus become indicative of widespread impoverishment, particularly among the urban poor, and the decree seeks to curb their poverty by mandating maximum prices at which the fishmongers can sell their wares. A second block, discovered nearby in 1965, includes a list of magistrates responsible for the decree, which concerns the produce of the sea and stipulates that fishmongers are to use certain weights and measures (l.15).

In a different analytical context, however, this inscription, like those mentioned above, suggests an economy that is functioning smoothly rather than the desperate attempts of a powerless government to curb price inflation. Lytle argues that ‘a balanced assessment of the evidence... suggests instead that regulations on sale, including occasional attempts to control prices, were a normal feature of the civic economy’ (2010, 293). Such a decree stipulating maximum prices should not be used as evidence that poorer Greeks could not afford fish, he convincingly asserts, but such price fixing would rather have been intended to protect both fishmongers and their customers. By stipulating a maximum price for a popular commodity, the city was stabilising the market so that would not be overly volatile in times of glut or dearth, thereby protecting both parties in the transaction. The fishmongers would be unable to gouge prices during shortages, and neither would they be able to take advantage of visitors who had come to the city and sanctuary for the Ptoia (Lytle 2010, 293-4).

When plugged into the broader economic structure of Hellenistic Boeotia, this decree – and indeed those discussed above – argue for stability, but not lacking in some measure of economic change. Considering the decree in tandem with Aristotle and Polybius, Lytle concludes that the dominant mode of production in Boeotia remained agricultural, but there was a small but noticeable class of individuals who broke out of the traditional mode of self-sufficiency and embraced new forms of generating wealth (Lytle 2010, 295-297). This new economic activity involved market exchange and

299 was largely based on currency rather than agrarian forms of income, and there is a latent tension in the upper registers of society that emerges between these two wealthy groups. This tension, in turn, is reflected in the lending decrees I have mentioned above, and we see the repayment of market-based wealth by agricultural means which continued to be dominant as they had for centuries.307

Stability with vectors of innovation, then, comes to characterise not only the economy of

Hellenistic Boeotia, but its broader political structures on the federal and civic level. As I have argued above, in the aftermath of Thebes’ destruction the political landscape of Boeotia was returned to something that was more familiar to its Archaic past. Boeotia’s ancestral tendency towards regional collaboration and solidarity could weather even the storm of Theban domination, and reappeared with remarkable speed in the years following Alexander’s campaign by manifesting itself in the reorganization of the koinon. Sobered, perhaps, by the lessons taught by the anomalies of the fourth century and the bloodshed and disruption that flowed in its wake, the new Boeotian League aimed at ensuring that recent history would not repeat itself.

In the new League the region’s dedication to territorial integrity, security, and the preservation of each city’s autonomy and right to contribute to Federal politics is obvious. Federal politics, in turn, became regional again in a way that they had not been for over a century, and the league’s constituent communities were quick to capitalise on this. This was not, as I have mentioned, simple isolationism. In the third century we see that the Boeotians as a whole were guaranteeing the stability of their

307 As he himself aptly concludes (2010, 296): ‘Seafood occupied an especially problematic ideological space, in part because its consumption stood largely outside the aristocratic ideals of the self-sufficient oíkoç and the traditional economy of gift-exchange. Its purchase involved competition mediated not by class but by price, and in this competition an aristocrat had no inherent advantage over a resident foreigner or a cook buying on behalf of a dining club. In my view, the cultural tensions arising from the friction between these different economic modes and their associated ideologies lie at the heart of both Polybius’s diatribe against the proliferation of dining clubs in Hellenistic Boiotia and Diphilos's humorous account of the Corinthian measures aimed at restricting access to the fish market’. 300 holdings, but at the same time embracing the newly enlarged Greek world through proxenia, trade, and religious interaction. These trends continued unabated through the third century, picking up pace in its closing decades and yielding one of the richest epigraphic dossiers in antiquity. These inscriptions, in their sheer quantity as well as their content, speak with little ambiguity to vibrant activity both on the level of the region and among its smallest, most insignificant communities. To better understand how such activity on the level of the region and of the individual community intersected and reinforced one another, we must turn to the institution which provides by far our best index for gauging communal involvement: the ephēbeia. jm

From the Cradle: The Ephēbeia in Hellenistic Boeotia

Boeotia’s Hellenistic policy of preserving territorial integrity did not equate to its demilitarization; if anything, quite the opposite. The old assumption went that as Greek poleis of the mainland felt themselves eclipsed by Macedonian military might, they discarded their arms along with their ancestral practices of training for warfare. John Ma handily disproved this dated notion in the context of Ionia and Asia Minor with his 2000 article ‘Fighting Poleis of the Hellenistic World’, and as I shall argue below his conclusions certainly hold true in the case of third-century Boeotia as well. With a decidedly local strategic gaze, the Boeotians set themselves to preserving and protecting their ancestral territory throughout the late fourth and third centuries with a fierce dedication that speaks to the communal effort’s utmost importance.

Here again we see that the horizon of the immediate dominates, even in a political world of far broader scope. As mentioned above, patrols throughout the countryside were regular occurrences,

301 and Post has aptly described the extent of the region’s defensive measures.308 These in and of themselves are impressive, but more noteworthy is the social and institutional mechanism which provided the willing and able manpower necessary for such a large-scale effort. Such dedication does not come from ambivalence, and in the military policy of the Hellenistic koinon we catch some glimpse of the sheer human scale of the region’s communal efforts. It is here, in the defence of each city’s chōra and the League’s collective sovereignty, that we see the intersection of the federal and the local, and the massive investment of time, manpower, and labour in the preservation of each.

What I have already discussed in the context of the Euboean ephēbeia certainly holds true here as well. If anything, the conclusions are amplified: the Boeotian ephēbeia provides us with the best approach to grasping such an investment, as I argue that the institution stands for much more than just a two- or three-year period of mandatory military preparation for nearly-adult citizens. By considering what the Boeotian ephēbeia entailed, and the formation that preceded and followed it, a culture of civic engagement comes to the fore that is nearly comprehensive in the lives of its young citizens as it provides over a decade of military and civic education. While Boeotia is not alone, in the importance it placed on its ephebic training, it stands head and shoulders above the rest in the size, scope, and comprehensiveness of the programme. That the ephēbeia was universally instituted in the cities of the

308 It is interesting how Post 2012, 136 ties this in to the broader context of the pax macedonica and the psychology behind such territorial policing. In this case, I think, he has overplayed his hand: ‘Boiotians living under the autonomous Boiotian League in existence between 338 and 171 fared worse than the inhabitants of regions like Thessaly that were conquered by Makedon and held under direct control. Despite the burden of taxes and tithes and the loss of political freedom, these individuals at least were provided with the protection of a military power willing and able to protect actively territory under its control against enemy incursions and, thus, they enjoyed relative stability. A state powerful enough to maintain its autonomy but too weak to prevent raids and invasions into its territory, on the other hand, left its inhabitants, especially those living in the countryside, living in constant fear.’ 302

Hellenistic League, yet still afforded each enough room for idiosyncrasy and local practice, speaks again to the symbiotic relationship of the regional and the local.

As with Euboea, I do not believe that the Boeotian ephēbeia was a Hellenistic institution created from scratch, but rather represents the formalization of ‘ephebic’ practices that had been present in the region for centuries. Again, Vidal-Naquet’s seminal article from 1968 comes to mind as do the works of Claude Calame, both of which highlight the Archaic origins of rites of initiation that would later be organized into the ephebic programmes of Athens and elsewhere. While ephebic programmes appear throughout the fourth century Greek world, as Lynn Kozak writes ‘these institutions did not appear ex nihilo, but emerged from traditional, community-based forms of civic and military education’ (Kozak 2013, 306). These can be found everywhere from the Spartan agoge and crypteia, which invert many of the norms of Spartan society during the education of young boys in a manner that echoes the tribal rituals described by Vidal-Naquet and Calame. Kozak traces the origins of these ephebic practices to certain episodes in the Iliad and Tyrtaios, and thus the idea of education and military cohesion had long been emphasized in the Greek tradition (Kozak 2013, 306-310). The ideology and practice are then organized in proto-ephebic programmes, such as the Spartan examples above along with the Thucydidean peripoloi (4.672-675). While the fourth-century Athenians may have led the pack in institutionalizing the practice, they were far from the only Greeks who had a tradition of military education before a young man reached adulthood.

Fortunately, the Boeotian ephēbeia is among the region’s best-attested institutions, and one that is intrinsically related to the functioning of the federation and its army (Roesch 1982, 316-318;

Reinmuth 1971, 123-133; Pelekides 1962, 11-12). The Boeotian penchant for physical activity and regular training was nothing new by the third century (Post 2012, 98). Xenophon (Hell .6.5.23)

303 mentions that all Boeotians exercise under arms, and during the campaigns of Alexander the

Macedonians considered the Boeotians to be more fit than even they were thanks to their regular training (Diod. 17.11.4).309 This martial aspect, at least, outlived the Theban Hegemony by nearly a century and a half, and thus this is a militarised culture rather than simply a momentary martial policy.

The Boeotians seem to have picked up on Athenian innovations in organizing their Ephebic programme, though in the decades that followed they excelled well past their inspiration (Chankowski

2010, 164-165; Roesch 1982, 318). The ephēbeia must have been instituted during the fourth century but remained compulsory until the dissolution of the koinon. The image that emerges from our epigraphic evidence in tandem with the longer trajectory of the ephebate that I have outlined above is that the Boeotians formalised and standardized the already extant ephebic programmes of the region’s communities through the vehicle of the koinon. The reconstruction I propose below should thus be seen as the re-organization of these programmes, not their imposition from above. While some would assert that the Boeotian ephēbeia was ‘purely military in nature throughout the Hellenistic Period’

(Post 2012, 100), there are hints that it was broader in scope. An inscription from Haliartos dated to the early second century (IG VII 2849) mentions that the ephebes were active in the gymnasion and

309 Xen.Hell. 6.5.23: ‘καὶ γὰρ οἱ μὲν Βοιωτοὶ ἐγυμνάζοντο πάντες περὶ τὰ ὅπλα, ἀγαλλόμενοι τῇ ἐν Λεύκτροις νίκῃ’ For all the Boeotians were now training themselves in the craft of arms, glorying in their victory at Leuctra. Diod. 17.11.4 on the fitness of the Thebans: ταχὺ δὲ τούτων ἐξαναλωθέντων καὶ πάντων εἰς τὴν ἀπὸ τοῦ ξίφους μάχην συμπεσόντων μέγας ἀγὼν συνίστατο. οἱ μὲν γὰρ Μακεδόνες διὰ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν ἀνδρῶν καὶ τὸ βάρος τῆς φάλαγγος δυσυπόστατον εἶχον τὴν βίαν, οἱ δὲ Θηβαῖοι ταῖς τῶν σωμάτων ῥώμαις ὑπερέχοντες καὶ τοῖς ἐν τοῖς γυμνασίοις συνεχέσιν ἀθλήμασιν, ἔτι δὲ τῷ παραστήματι τῆς ψυχῆς πλεονεκτοῦντες ἐνεκαρτέρουν τοῖς δεινοῖς. These were soon expended and all turned to the use of the sword at close quarters, and a mighty struggle ensued. The Macedonians exerted a force that could hardly be withstood because of the numbers of their men and the weight of the phalanx, but the Thebans were superior in bodily strength and in their constant training in the gymnasium. Still more, in exaltation of spirit they were lifted out of themselves and became indifferent to personal danger. 304 attended lectures that were given by an itinerant philosopher (Chankowski 2010, 160-161). It therefore seems likely that there was some measure of intellectual or moral formation as well.

While the Boeotian ephēbeia certainly existed since the late fourth century, its heyday came during the latter half of the third following the League’s comprehensive reform of its military. From its intervention in the Gallic invasion of 279 until around the mid-250s, the Boeotian military did not see active service and was confined largely to guard duty. In the general peace that reigned, the Boeotians saw no need to modify their military structures or strategy. But by 250 the pressure on Boeotia had alarmingly mounted, culminating in the Aetolian invasion of the region by the middle of the decade.310

The invasion was doubly tragic: Boeotia was caught completely unawares by the Aitolian advance, which had been well timed to take place during the festival of Pamboiotia. This Battle of Chaeronea and the subsequent alliance imposed on the Boeotians by the victors galvanized them towards reform in order to assure that such a humiliation never befell them again. Accordingly, at some point between

250 and 237 the Boeotians completely overhauled their military structure, and in the decades following this reform we find the best attestation of the ephēbeia’s particularities. Much ink has been spilled over the precise date of the reform, and in the context of our discussion the debate is largely inconsequential.311

Regardless of the chronological niceties, at some point following 240 the Boeotian League had trimmed the fat from its military structure and rebuilt it in a manner that mirrored the contemporary

Macedonian-style phalanx (Post 2012, 95). A smaller, more responsive, and better-trained army was

310 Post 2012, 84-85, Pol. 20.4.4-6, Plut.Arat. 16.1 311 Feyel 1942 provides several contradictory dates for the reform, namely between 250 and 250 at one point (Feyel 1942, 197) but then later between 245 and 237 (302). On palaeographic grounds, Roesch 1988, 309 and 341 dates the reform to some point after 245 but provides no further specification. Chankowski 2010 argues that perhaps some of the ephebic inscriptions pre-date the reform, 2011, 163-164. 305 now the ideal, and to produce such soldiers the Boeotians likewise re-organized their ephebic programme with an eye to adaptability and flexibility on the battlefield. A standing force was now mandated, comprised of elite infantry and cavalry, while other forces would have been kept in reserve and mobilised at times of need (Feyel 1942, 81-105). Preparing young citizens for such a role required vast amounts of time and effort in an enterprise that first and foremost required standardization in order to be effective. The prevalence of the resulting institution provides the best gauge of Boeotian civic engagement in the latter half of the third century.

We are furnished with several examples of inscriptions which provide lists of ephebes from aftermath of the military reforms.312 Over forty such military catalogues are posterior to 245, and nearly every city in the region provides at least one instar: Thespiai, Akraiphia, Chaironeia, Thisbe,

Copai. Hyettos, Aigosthenai, Anthedon, Thebes, and Orchomenos (Roesch 1982, 342-345 for the catalogue). The post-reform ephebic programme was thus pervasive, involving large and small communities in Boeotia’s coastal and interior regions alike. The geographical spread of the decrees and their formulaic consistency leads Chankowski to conclude, quite rightly, that ‘il s’agit d’un sysème universellement adopté dans ce koinon’ (2010, 161). Even Megara, which did not join the Boeotian koinon until 224, provides clear evidence for the ephēbeia with two military catalogues of its own (IG

VII 27-28). The institution was therefore implemented even in cities which were not even part of the

League until two decades after the military reform.

This body of epigraphic evidence, taken together, testifies to an institution of civic and military formation that is ubiquitous in Boeotia throughout the closing decades of the third century and well

312 The catalogues dating to before 245 as compiled by Roesch 1982 are: Akraiphia (IG VII 2716); Thisbe (SEG 3.351); Copai (IG VII 2781 and BCH 99, 77 no.1); and four inscriptions from Thespiai including BCH 1946 476-377 no. 2, SEG 3.333, BCH 1946, 476 no.1, IG 7.1747, BCH 1936, 477-478 no. 3 and IG VII 1754. 306 into the second. Every eligible male citizen of every city of the League was thus put through a similar training programme which lasted several years, providing an indispensable vector of common experience which doubled as a subtly unifying factor across the region’s various communities. Yet the chronology of the evidence is perhaps the most critical factor: such catalogues proliferate from 240 until 172/1, which yet again is precisely the period at which Boeotia is presumed to have been in a state of deep decline. This, as so many other indices, speaks unequivocally to the contrary.

Not only was such a fundamental mechanism of civic engagement and education as the ephēbeia alive and well, it was in far better shape here in Boeotia than among its contemporaries.

While in Athens the institution’s popularity had waned by the end of the fourth century, and had been further reduced to essentially a social club by the end of the third, in Boeotia it had retained its military core and the region produced more ephebes than any other in Greece (Roesch 1982, 316-319;

Chankowski 2010, 114-142). Boeotia thus not only matches the rest of the mainland in terms of ephebic participation, it outstrips all of its contemporaries in this index of civic vitality. Much has been made of these military catalogues and whether or not they can reliably be used to extrapolate broader population figures at the time of their composition. Étienne and Knoepfler have resoundingly answered in the affirmative, and used an elaborate series of calculations to claim that the population of Hyettos increased in the final two decades of the century and then declined by 20% in the first quarter of the second (Étienne and Knoepfler 1976, 202-209). Such figures, interesting as they are as an arithmetic exercise, must be taken with a grain of salt and all of my previous reservations about such excessive chronological specificity should be resurrected here.313 But the conclusions, in the

313 Post 2012, 24 captures this necessity for sobriety neatly: ‘Nor are the figures provided by these inscriptions indicative purely of demographics, as in those cities for which we possess conscript numbers immediately 307 present context, are immaterial: even if the catalogues demonstrate some measure of population flux, regardless the sheer number of late-third century ephebes attested in Boeotia is striking.314

The ephēbeia was thus a federal policy that was universally implemented in each of the region’s communities according to a fairly specific paradigm. This uniformity was not overwhelming, as variance in formulary and naming conventions persists among different cities, but the general design of the training was fairly standardized. To see the on-the-ground application of these federal policies, I wish to focus on the famous Thespian inscription honouring Sostratos of Athens. Through this, we witness not only the local reality of the ephebic programme, but also come to appreciate the scope of the endeavour. A stele was found in the spring of 1967 in a field on the site of ancient Thespiai bearing an inscription that was in a remarkably good state of preservation. Roesch edited and published the editio princeps in 1971, and this accordingly forms part of the broad corpus of relatively new epigraphic evidence that continues to fuel interest in the region. The decree that the stone contains beautifully combines many of the strands I have gathered above: proxenia, civic vitality, federal mechanisms, and above all, the character of the Boeotian ephēbeia. It merits quotation in full, following Mackil’s text and translation (2013, dossier no. 27)315

Φαείνω ἄρχοντος, ἔδοξε τοι δάμοι preceding and following the military reform of 245 ... and the dissolution of the League in 171, we find reductions in manpower which seem to be indicative more of institutional than demographic change.’ 314 See in particular the chart on Roesch 1982, 317 for the comparison between the numbers of Ephebes attested in Athens and Thespiai from 267 until 219. Thespiai, a city of far humbler means than Athens, consistently has at least double and often thrice the number of their Attic counterparts. Take, for instance, two catalogues that are essentially contemporary: the Athenian (IG II2 766, from 246/245) lists 23 ephebes, while the Thespian counterpart (BCH 1946, 478 no. 4, from 250-240 BC) lists 86=92 ephebes. Likewise for 235, when a catalogue in Hesperia 1947, 185 no. 92 lists 20-24 Athenian ephebes, while Hesperia 1968, 255s lists around 60 for Thespiai. 315 Roesch 1982: 307–54; SEG 32.496; ITh esp 29). The text as used above is Mackil 2013, dossier no. 27 ‘Thespian Proxeny Decree and Law of the Boeotian Koinon on Military Training’. 308

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[σο]τέλειαν κὴ ἀσφάλιαν κὴ ἀσουλί-

[αν] κὴ πολέμω κὴ ἰράνας ἰώσας κὴ κα-

8 τὰ γαν κὴ κατὰ θάλατταν κὴ τἀλλα

πάντα καθάπερ κὴ τοις ἄλλοις προ-

ξένοις· Ἐπειδεὶ νόμος ἐστὶ ἐν τοι κοι-

νοι Βοιωτων τὰς πόλις παρεχέμεν

12 διδασκάλως οἵτινες διδάξονθι

τώς τε παιδας κὴ τὼς νιανίσκως

τοξευέμεν κὴ ἀκοντιδδέμεν

κὴ τάδδεσθη συντάξις τὰς περὶ

16 τὸν πόλεμον, κὴ Σώστρoτος φιλο-

τίμως ἐπιμεμέλειτη των τε παίδων

κὴ των νεανίσκων, ὑπαρχέμεν Σωσ-

στράτοι τὸ ϝέργον πὰρ τας πόλιος ἅως

20 κα βείλειτη, ἐπιμελομένοι των τε παί-

δων κὴ των νεανίσκων κὴ διδάσκον-

τι καθὰ ὁ νόμος κέλετη· μισθὸν δ᾽ εἰ-

μεν αὐτοι τω ἐνιαυτω πέτταρας

309

24 μνας.

Translation:

When Phaeinos was archon, resolved by the people that Sostratos son of Batrachos

the Athenian should be proxenos of the polis of Thespiai, he and his descendants,

and they should have the right to acquire land and houses, along with i[so]teleia,

asphaleia, and asylia in war and peace, by land and by sea, and all the other rights and

privileges belonging to the other proxenoi. Because there is a law of the koinon of the

Boiotians that the poleis must provide trainers who will teach the boys and the

youths to shoot bows, to hurl javelins and to draw up ranks in battle array for wartime

situations, and because Sostratos zealously took charge of the boys and youths,

it was resolved by the polis for Sostratos to undertake the task, having charge of the

boys and youths and teaching them as the law requires. Let him be paid annually

four mnas.

The amount of attention the inscription has generated comes as little surprise. Roesch (1971 and 1982) takes the inscription as the only clear evidence that we possess which indicates that koinon passed a specific law on military formation that was in turn implemented in each of its member communities.

The most pertinent commentaries for our immediate purposes are Chankowski (2010) and Post (2012), and I discard Cassayre’s (2010, 69-72) unsubstantiated opinion that this inscription somehow testifies to the weakness of the koinon’s member states.

310

The first ten lines of the inscription are a straightforward but nonetheless illustrative decree of proxenia and the conferral of its associated privileges by the city of Thespiai on a certain Sostratos of

Athens, son of Batrachos. The usual rights of acquiring land and houses, isolteleia, asphaleia, and asylia in war and peace, on land and sea, and ‘τἀλλα πάντα καθάπερ κὴ τοις ἄλλοις προξένοις’ are granted, readily indicating the extent to which proxenia had been standardised in this community as elsewhere in Boeotia. Such conventionality, however, does not mean that such privileges should be taken as bereft of any real import. In the case of Sostratos, they instead indicated that he is now fully accepted as part of the community of Thespiai: he has immigrated here from Athens – a fact that is interesting in and of itself – and after serving the city he is rewarded by some measure of integration. The inscription’s reference to the other proxenoi implies that there is a visible group of such honorands who are already resident in the city, or at least spend enough time in Thespiai to be an identifiable civic and perhaps social group as well. Also, the civic and specifically military function of this Thespian decree again weakens Fossey’s assertion that Boeotian proxenia is generally economic in nature. In general, though, here are all of the basic markers of civic vitality on the smallest scale: eponymous magistrates, dating formulae, use of the Boeotian dialect, and the typical ἔδοξε τοι δάμοι formulary that we expect from a sovereign civic community. In this decree, dated roughly to 240, all is functioning smoothly in Thespiai.

But Sostratos’ presence in Thespiai is the result of extra-local influences and policies, as he is fulfilling a role required by federal mandate. After conferring his reward of proxenia, the decree goes on to elaborate why he is being heaped with such honours: Ἐπειδεὶ νόμος ἐστὶ ἐν τοι κοινοι Βοιωτων

τὰς πόλις παρεχέμεν διδασκάλως’ (l.10-12). The legal framework here is clear: there is a law in the koinon of the Boeotians that the poleis must provide teachers for the young boys. The federal mandate

311 is thus enacted on the local level with apparently no resistance or hesitation, to the point that the city is happy to refer to the federal decree and honour one of its teachers in his excellent performance in service to it. The entire inscription is, in no small way, the city’s advertisement of how effectively they are taking part in the regional efforts of the federation, and there is an enthusiasm for both the broader endeavour and Sostratos’ specific diligence.

The didaskalos’ specific duties in turn reveal the depth of engagement in federal policies on the local level, and here we glimpse the scope of the city’s investment of its human capital in service of regional stability: ‘οἵτινες διδάξονθι τώς τε παιδας κὴ τὼς νιανίσκως τοξευέμεν κὴ ἀκοντιδδέμεν κὴ

τάδδεσθη συντάξις τὰς περὶ τὸν πόλεμον’ (l.12-16). The precise skills mentioned here are as diverse as they are surprising, and the Boeotian ephēbeia was not simply a short programme in phalangite warfare.

First, archery and javelin-throwing (τοξευέμεν κὴ ἀκοντιδδέμεν) are interesting, if not somewhat unconventional, skills in traditional Greek warfare. Post (2012, 101-102) notes that both were part and parcel of the Homeric aristocratic warrior ethos, but fell mainly in the realm of traditional leisure activities rather than practical skills for a hoplite. The Macedonian conquest of

Greece, however, had changed the game, and suddenly by the fourth century such skills were highly useful even to a young Thespian trainee – hence the emphasis on instruction in both. The Boeotian transition towards fighting in the Macedonian-style phalanx that was made with the mid-century reforms is evident in the third skill mentioned, ‘manoeuvring in combat formations’ (l.15-16), which

Roesch convincingly takes as referring specifically to the Macedonian formation (Roesch 1972, 66 pace

Chankowski 2010, 164). Any of these skills independently would be difficult to master, but perfecting the triad would take years of laborious effort. In the end, though, such a programme produced young

312 citizens who were able to respond to the changing conditions of Hellenistic Warfare. Post summarises the ensemble and its martial context neatly:

This was training that reflected the new order of things among the Greeks, and in

particular the Boiotians, in the Hellenistic Period: a citizen’s primary concern was

generally no longer to be able to prove himself in fighting shoulder to shoulder with his

comrades in the serried ranks of the phalanx, but was instead simply to see to

maintaining the territorial integrity of his state in an environment filled with predatory

leviathans of many stripes (2012, 102).

While Post has tendency to stress novelty over continuity, his strategic characterization is certainly apt: the emphasis in this decree is no longer on traditional phalanx warfare, but rather we should see this programme of formation as the direct response to a military policy that centred on the maintenance of territorial integrity and stability. All of this, in turn, is defensive in nature – again revealing where the

Boeotians’ true ambitions lay.

The specific skills indicate the content of Boeotian military training, while the different age groups to which the inscriptions refers reveals its duration. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this inscription is that it only describes the training required of Boeotian male citizens before they entered the ephēbeia proper; all that I have described above is prologue to the core of ephebic service from the ages of 18-20. The ephēbeia here, paradoxically, is much larger than the ephēbeia itself but rather extends to include a much longer period of training. Sostratos is honoured for his diligence in instructing two groups, neither of which are referred to as the ephēboi themselves: the paides and the

313 neaniskoi (των τε παίδων κὴ των νεανίσκων). Commentators disagree on the precise age group comprised by the neaniskoi. Roesch (1982, 322-346) provides an elaborate and learned explanation of the divergent possibilities, highlighting the imprecision inherent in the term which could equally refer to young adolescents, the ephebes themselves, or men in their early twenties who have already graduated from the ephēbeia in become young citizens in their own right. In the end, he concludes that the latter must be the case, and thus oi neaniskoi are the men of the city who are aged 20-22 and have recently completed their ephebic training.

Chankowski (2010, 162-164) disagrees, arguing that Roesch’s hypothesis is unsubstantiated by any other contemporary reference and that it would be odd to see this sole attestation of neaniskoi referring to men older than the ephebes in the post-reform context of the Boeotian military in the 240s.

Chankowski puts forward two potential hypotheses based on parallel evidence from elsewhere. First, in the context of the gymnasion, he argues, the term neaniskos refers to a young man who is near the age of majority but not yet an ephēbos, providing a middle ground between a young boy (pais) and an ephebe. Second, in the Athenian context he notes that neaniskos is a non-technical term used synonymously to refer to ephebes themselves – though to me this latter possibility seems less likely, given the Thespian tendency to simply call them the ephebes explicitly.316

While Roesch’s arguments that the neaniskoi are young men aged 20-22 are enticing when arguing for the long span of citizen involvement in military training, to me it is, unfortunately, unlikely.

The simplest observation which argues in favour of Chankowski’s first assertion that the neaniskoi are the ‘in-between’ group of teenagers is to me the fact that the inscription refers to the paides and neaniskoi in apposition. It follows logically that they would be two sequential age groups, and that one

316 For instance, IG VII 1755; 1750; 1748; 1749; or before 245 they were called simply oi neteroi in SEG III ,333, IG VII 1747. 314 didaskalos would be responsible for the instruction of two groups which are distinct yet still close to one another in age and experience. The simple analogy of a school teacher would seem to suffice: it is hardly unusual to have one teacher instructing a group of students in grades 5 and 6, but having the same teacher instruct grade 3 and grade 10 would be rather untoward. It would be odd, perhaps, to have Sostratos instruct young teenagers in military tactics while simultaneously being charged with highly-trained post-ephebic men in their twenties. The comparison is inelegant, but the point, I believe, holds. Post thus recapitulates the most sensible compromise, in which the paides are between the ages of 12 and 14, while the neaniskoi are between 15 and 17 (Post 2012, 101).

Even this compressed duration of training is still remarkably long and thorough. The picture that emerges of Boeotian military formation, as dictated by federal law, is one in which all eligible male citizens are educated in a variety of intensive military skills from the ages of 12 until their completion of the ephēbeia at age 20. These eight years of preparation far excels the typical Athenian two-year programme, which itself had largely fallen into military ambivalence by the end of the third century.

There is no reason to think that the Thespian programme is exceptional, particularly not given the abundance of ephebic material throughout Boeotia and the Sostratos inscription’s specific reference to a federal decree.

A decree such as this, so quintessentially Hellenistic in mechanism with its privileges of proxenia, is to me marked by a deep traditionalism. At its core, the Thespian instance reflects a civic culture that we had all too eagerly presumed to have been battered into irrelevance by the advent of Alexander and the subsequent reign of Macedon. Here we catch a glimpse of a Hellenistic city that is profoundly

Classical, in a way, as it mandates the formation of its young men in the martial arts not for the sake of some hollow exercise of civic solidarity, but to prepare them for the practical defence of their city,

315 chōra, and region. To reward the man who ably formed them for such a mission reveals the city’s adherence to an ideal that we had presumed dead, here individual Hellenistic technē is honoured for its contribution to Classical civic aretē. In doing so, however, we must bear in mind that Thespiai was not alone, and neither should this snapshot of Boeotian citizen formation in 240 be presumed to have been instantaneous. It was rather only one cog in a much larger regional mechanism which was contingent on the active participation of each of its members in order to give its policy of territorial stability any realistic hope of success. The abundance of ephebic catalogues over the next eighty years speaks to the broader success of the endeavour, but fostering a culture of civic martial prowess was only one side of the coin. To grasp the other, we must look to the gods.

The Religious Landscape of Hellenistic Boeotia

Neither the civic engagement that came with the Boeotian ephēbeia nor its practical military training ended when a young man of the region legion left its ranks. The comprehensive regimen on the local level that was just described was regularly complemented by regional competitions that took place on an annual basis at the sanctuary of Athena Itonia: the aptly named festival of the Pamboiotia.

Held during the tenth month of the Boeotian year – the correspondingly named ‘Pamboiotios’, roughly

September-October – at the Koroneian sanctuary, the Pamboiotia’s religious importance was rivalled by the spectacle of its various games. Although an annual festival had been held in the confines of the sanctuary since well into the Classical and Archaic Periods, the celebration took on greater regional importance in the third century as it became the venue in which the region’s various cities could

316 compete with one another for pre-eminence in a variety of military skills.317 Unlike many of its contemporary agonistic competitions, the Pamboiotia was unique in that it was reserved exclusively for Boiotian competitors, and hence we see that this is a regional festival and a regional competition in the purest sense (Schachter 1978, 88-89). That these games took place at one of the federation’s most hallowed sanctuaries served to underscore their importance. During the middle of the third century, the Boeotians began to seek broad outside recognition of their festival and sanctuary: by the 260s a

Delphic decree had declared the sanctuary inviolable, and around the 220s the festival was protected by a truce preventing any conflict during the time at which it was held.318

The events of the festival were intended to display and assess the military prowess of contingents from each member city, and thus in turn served to gauge the health of the federal army as a whole. In addition to the regular foot and equestrian competitions, from the third century onwards we have clear attestation of a number of competitions that are purely martial in character (Schachter

1978, 81-91; Roesch 1982, 39-41;Post 2012, 105-106). It follows logically that the agonistic side of the festival was overhauled during the second half of the third century, and this antique regional celebration was recast in a new martial light. Collectivity, on various levels, is the unifying theme of the festival and its competitions: each city of the league despatched a contingent of foot soldiers, as well as cavalry if possible, and it merits note that these contingents competed as units rather than as

317 Schachter 1978 for the epigraphic history of the festival, while Ducat 1973 analyses its development in the context of Theban expansion in the Archaic Period. Mackil 2013 recapitulates the archaic history of the festival at 158-163, concluding that by the mid-fifth century the cult of Athena Itonia had broad regional appear and import. 318 Mackil 2013, 224 especially n.286, reproduced here: ‘Amphiktyonic decree recognizing asylia of the Itonion: Bousquet 1958, 74–77 with photo, fig. 10 (SEG 18.240; FDelph III.4.358) ll. 11–14. Pouilloux (FDelph ad loc.) rightly emphasizes the fact that the reference to Koroneia in line 14 is entirely restored and suggests that the decree could refer to the Thessalian Itonion. That is indeed possible, but literary references (Polyb. 4.3.5, 25.2; 9.34.11) suggest that in the latter part of the third century the Itonion at Koroneia had both asylia and a sacred truce for the Pamboiotia, both of which could of course be broken. Cf. F. W. Walbank 1957-79: I.452, 471; Schachter 1981–94:I.123.’ 317 individuals (Schachter 1978, 82). Victory inscriptions from successful cities shed further light on the precise character of the events themselves: there were cavalry competitions of various sorts, as well as the eupolia which judged the presentation and appearance of various contingents of troops with different armaments.319 In addition, the type of skills which we have just discussed as being part of a young man’s training regimen were likewise evaluated here, specifically with the competition of syntaktia – during which the various contingents were made to manoeuvre in formation (Post 2012,

106).

The festival thus served a variety of practical and communal functions. On the most straightforward plane it provided an invaluable opportunity for federal officials to review and inspect contingents of troops provided by the League’s constituent communities. Doing so on an annual basis ensured regularity and consistency of training and competition, preventing the league from being caught so off guard as it had in the middle of the century. The rhythm of the games likewise ensured that each member city would continue training its men on a regular basis, as each would naturally want to send its best, and best-prepared, men to compete in front of their peers. It was similarly beneficial in fostering lines of communication and face-to-face exchange among otherwise disparate communities scattered throughout the region by ensuring their annual interaction in a religious context that lent itself naturally to communal solidarity. But such military competition also played an indispensable role in defusing latent tension among Boeotian communities: simply because they were included in the same federation does not mean that all hostility was left at door of the koinon. Games such as the Pamboiotia allowed cities to vent their discontent through competition in a relatively harmless agonistic environment. A spirit of fierce rivalry among Boeotian cities, then, only stood to

319 Mackil 2013, 224; IG VII 3087, SEG 26.551-552 for victory inscriptions. 318 benefit the League and its military – thus in this festival, at least, in a sense everyone won. The timing of the festival’s reorganization and subsequent popularity as we march towards the close of the century is, as ever, revelatory.

The Pamboiotia was only one part of a much broader flurry of religious activity in Hellenistic

Boeotia which must be considered before turning to the arrival of Rome. Thanks again to abundant epigraphic evidence, Boeotian cultic patterns have been the subject of extensive contemporary interest, and in this regard, we are remarkably well informed on this region’s development from the fourth century until well into the Imperial Period. The chronology of this development can be much more specific: as Knoepfler remarks in a study of the Mouseia, the decade of 230-220 ‘se caractérise, en Béotie même, par une réactivation très remarquable des cultes civiques’ (1996, 166). As we shall see, this ‘réactivation’ is not limited to one corner of the region and rather manifests itself throughout, and while there is a discernible peak in activity in the decade he highlights, the trend developed gradually over the course of entire century. This was hardly, then, an instantaneous or localised phenomenon; instead, it is a development marked by the Hellenistic reorganization of local cults and festivals that date to the Archaic Period or even the Bronze Age. Such activity could only take place within the framework of a koinon that guaranteed local autonomy in religious affairs while still providing financial support from the federal level, and none of this limits the outreach of individual cities in publicising their cultic activities. That these activities and these networks of communication outlast the koinon and continue well into the Roman hegemony and the Imperial Period speaks to the endurance of these local attachments.

The Mouseia and their associated sanctuary provide a fitting case study of this long-term process. In the Valley of the Muses, roughly six kilometres west of Thespiai, lay the famous Sanctuary

319 of the Muses – only a few kilometres from the likely location of Hesiod’s native Askra (Schachter 1981-

1994, 2.150). Although the majority of the site’s archaeological remains date to the third century, there are numerous indications that the sanctuary enjoyed vibrant popularity from the sixth century onwards (Ibid. 152-153). At the end of the Classical Period the site came under Thespian control, and from then onwards the most prominent activity which took place in the sanctuary were the games of the Mouseia (Paus. 9.29.6, 9.27.5, Schachter 1981-1994, 2.153). Schachter nevertheless concludes based on indirect testimony that the cult site was active throughout the fourth century, as it was buoyed by growing interest in Hesiod and his specific geography (Schachter 1981-1994, 2.158-159).

The Helikonian Muses’ appeal was quickly borne to new corners of the Greek world after the campaigns of Alexander, as the Attalid patriarch Philetairos made a dedication to the sanctuary at some point in the first half of the third century.320 The budding Pergamene dynast bought and dedicated a parcel of land near the Sanctuary to the Muses, and established an association that was to govern the holdings in perpetuity (IG VII 1788-1789, 1790, Schachter 1984-1991, 2.159). He would not be the only Attalid to lavish the shrine, as at some point later in the century another Philetairos would make a similar benefaction.

Such royal largesse is the product of local cultic vitality rather than desperation. The Attalids, at such an early date in the period, stood to gain as much from the patronage of the sanctuary as the inverse, and their generosity did not discourage the Muses’ other suitors. We see two very different sides of the Hellenistic political spectrum collide here in the Valley of the Muses at roughly the same

320 Roesch 1982, 126 for the text and date. The inscription, first published in 1885, is IG VII 1790 and has generally been dated to around 270-260. 320 time when the Boeotian koinon also made a dedication to the Helikonian Muses.321 Towards the end of the century, even the Ptolemies – with whom the Attalids had at times strained relations – appear in this somewhat humble corner of Boeotia with a dedication of their own. Ptolemy IV and his sister-wife

Arsinoë III, as the Attalids before them, bought a parcel of land whose revenue was dedicated to the cult of the Muses.322 The shrine, and the inhabitants of Thespiai, had no moral or religious qualms about enjoying the benefaction of their fellow Boeotians along with far-flung monarchs from

Pergamon and Alexandria.

My point with the above discussion is to better situate the re-organisation of the games of the

Mouseia in its third-century context. As interest in the sanctuary did not appear out of nowhere in the late third century, neither did the games which it hosted. Although direct evidence is scarce until the third century, Schachter still concludes that ‘an agon of some sort may have been celebrated in honour of the Muses of Helikon as early as the fifth century BC’.323 Until their reorganization in the century’s closing decades, the Mouseia featured predominantly dithyrambic, tragic, and comic competitions.324

These extant competitions were greatly enlarged in both scope and popularity at some point between

217 and 205 thanks to a combination of federal and external funding. Whether or not one accepts every detail of Feyel’s elaborate reconstruction in which Thespiai solicited prizes from the Ptolemies and the outreach of the koinon is of less import than the emergent character of the competition.

321 IG VII 1795, Roesch 1965, 138, Schachter 1984-1991, 2.160, also catalogued in Mackil 2013, no. 22. The text itself provides a beautiful illustration of the interaction between the region’s cults, as in this case we have a tripod that is dedicated to the Muses of Helikon in response to an oracle of Apollo Ptoios. One cult thus reinforces the other in yet another instance of federal and regional religious interaction. The inscription opens with: ‘[Βοιωτοὶ τὸν] τρίποδ[α ἀνέθεικαν] τ̣ης / [Μώσης της Ἑ]λικ[ωνιά]δεσσι κὰτ τ̣[ὰν μαντειίαν τω] Ἀπόλλω-/ [νος τω Πτοιίω, ἄρχοντος] Ξ̣ένωνος / Διοδ̣[ω]ρίω Θειβήω’ lines 1-3 of the inscription. 322 SEG 15.321, Knoepfler 1996, 145-146 with a later dating. 323 Quotation from Schachter 1984-1991, 2.163. See also 2.156 n.4, 157,-8. 324 Schachter 1984-1991, 2.164, and note 2 after Feyel 1942, 115. 321

First, as ever, the timing: here is another instance of cultic – and political – activity on the level of the polis, the sanctuary, and the federation precisely in those decades in which Polybius alleges that none of the above were functioning.325 The content of and motive behind the reforms similarly reinforce the point: regardless of the precise chronology, as Schachter summarises the reforms were aimed at increasing the renown of the Mouseia and attracting new competitors by offering enticing prizes for a wider swathe of competitions. Further musical and poetic categories were added, including epic poetry, auletai, aulodēs, and kitharistai (Schachter 1984-1991, 2.164). The success of these reforms is handily attested by the prevalence of victor’s lists in the decades that follow, as the popularity of the games well outlives the Boeotian koinon and advent of Roman hegemony – a trend to which we shall shortly turn.

The experience of the Sanctuary of the Muses and its associated competition is revelatory on a number of levels. As with many of its contemporaries, the sanctuary itself boasted a pedigree that extended to the Archaic Period and perhaps beyond, and continued to enjoy Classical prominence in the centuries that followed. As was the case with several Argive sanctuaries, the Helikonian Muses reached the peak of their popularity only from the mid-third century onwards. There was something in the unique mix of localism and panhellenism that emerged in the third century context which benefitted the sanctuary immensely, as the wave of its Classical popularity crested with benefactions from the Attalids, Ptolemies, and the koinon itself. The reach and renown of the Mouseia’s competitions were cleverly and systematically enlarged in the closing decades the century, further testifying the period’s vitality and growth – both of which proved to be hardly instantaneous. This reorganization should not be taken as innovation: the Helikonian muses, like their sanctuary and its

325 The original reconstruction is summarised in Feyel 1942 258-261, critiqued by Knoepfler 1996, 160-165. 322 celebrations, were steeped in local antiquity, and their Hellenistic narrative is best understood the end of a process of expansion which ran through the course of centuries.

The Muses are not the only such example, as the same story plays out in many of the region’s other sanctuaries. In these locations as well there is an identifiable flurry of activity towards the end of the third century, but this is not instantaneous. The sanctuary of Apollo Ptoios near Akraiphia dates to the eighth century BC, and provides abundant votive material dating from the 620s onwards

(Schachter 1981-1994, 1.54-56). The god’s prominence in the Boeotian pantheon likewise accrued over time, hitting its peak in the aftermath of the Theban hegemony as the sanctuary’s oracle became the semi-official oracle of the koinon. From the earliest years of the period until the middle of the third century the league and its members dedicated a number of tripod bases, and while the Ptoion lavished in this federal attention it was ultimately the agency of Akraiphia that would drive the expansion and reorganization of the cult and its associated festival.326 Although the early history of the Ptoia remains nebulous (Müller 2014, 130), it is clear from epigraphic evidence that between 226 and 224 the

Akraiphians sought and received recognition of the sanctuary’s asylia from the Delphic amphiktyony and neighbouring Boeotion communities (relevant decrees in Roesch 1982, 229). The festival and its associated competitions would be re-organised again roughly a century later, in another indication of persistent regional vitality under the Romans. Regardless, the pattern again emerges: a long-

326 Notable among these dedications are the Federal dedications of tripods to Apollo Ptoios, made after 287 and throughout the middle of the century. Among them we find IG VII 2724a = Mackil 2013 no. 18; IG VII 2724b = Mackil 2013 no. 19; and IG VII 2724c = Mackil 2013 no. 20. The middle inscription, given its excellent state of preservation, provides a fitting exemplar of the mechanism and the regional reach of the sanctuary. Dedicated around 280-270, it reads: Βοιωτοὶ Ἀπόλλωνι Πτωΐ[οι], ἄρχοντος Ἠσχρώνδαο Θιομνάστ[ω] / Θειβήω, ἀφεδριατευόντων Κρισάδαο Ἀγχιαρίω Ἁριαρτίω,/ Θηράρχω Στρωσιήω Θεισπιειος, Ἡροδώρω Εὐκώμω Πλαταειος,/ Ἀπολλοδώρω Βροχχίω Θειβήω, Νίωνος Ἀριστωνυμίω / Ταναγρήω, Θοίνωνος / Τιμογιτονίω Ἐρχομενίω, Περιπόλ̣[ω] / Μικουλίω Χαλκιδειος, Πύρρακος Ἰθουδαμίω Θισβειος, / μαντευ[ο]μένω Ὀνυμάστω Νικολαΐω Θεισπιειος. We this find that the aphedriates hailed from Haliartos, Thespiai, Plataea, Thebes, Tanagra, Orchomenos, Thisbe, and also one representative from Chalcis. 323 established regional cult is elaborated and expanded in the third century, gaining further domestic and panhellenic appeal.

The cult of Zeus Basileus at Lebadeia provides our final example of this third century process.

Driven by various political and geographic concerns the Thebans opted to hold the festival of the

Basileia at the sanctuary of Zeus Basileus on the hill now called Prophitis Elias near the town of

Lebadeia. The site is a logical choice for such a festival, given its location: located roughly 50km to the northwest of Thebes, Lebadeia is situated at the natural convergence of land routes heading to the north, towards Lamia beyond, and the western route through the mountains to (and thus from) Delphi and the Corinthian Gulf. The Basileia equally appealed to a Boeotian audience as well as neighbouring regions that could easily make the trek to Lebadeia.

The agonistic aspect of the festival is attested epigraphically during the fourth century thanks to two inscriptions.327 While the festival was likely, as Schachter surmises, celebrated with Theban sponsorship, both the cult and its associated competitions outlived the Theban hegemony, enduring throughout the life of the Hellenistic League and well beyond (Schachter 1981-1994, 3.116-117). The competition was either revived or reinvigorated under the auspices of the koinon in the third century, and abundant epigraphic evidence testifies to the vitality and popularity of the competition.328 The competitions themselves became quite well known, and attracted a wide variety of competitors from throughout the Greek world. While Diodorus (15.53.4) would hold that the competition had been panhellenic since the early fourth century, it is far more likely that it did not enjoy such a status until its

327 IG VII 552 from Tanagra, and IG VII 2532 from Thebes. 328 IG II2.3779; 4.428; 5.2.142; 7.530; 2487; 3091; 4247; SEG 3.368; 11.338; 24.362. 324 third century expansion.329 As with its counterpart at Akraiphia, this competition would also be reinvigorated under Roman dominion.

Through these various agonistic examples, the religious trend in third century Boeotia is clear.

Far from the abandonment and disillusion with traditional forms of religious which has been posited for the Hellenistic mainland, instead we see quite the opposite.330 In the expansion of these regional cults and the elaboration of their festivals there are aspects of innovation, to be sure, but innovation in the promotion of traditional religious attachments. Here as elsewhere the conservatism of the communities of Boeotia comes to the fore: instead of discarding the old in favour of the new, they embraced the former with all the more enthusiasm and found creative ways to foster its development.

Participation in such cults in turn united the various strata of the Hellenistic mainland: other Boeotian communities, the koinon which represented them, as well as cities, dignitaries, and even monarchs from far beyond its confines were regularly brought together by the rhythm of the religious calendar.

Such a vector of commonality transcended more fleeting divides of allegiance or strategy, and provided a reassurance of regularity and predictability in the religious sphere which spilled into other corners of society.

329 Knoepfler 2008 and 1992. Diodorus describes the origin of the games’ broad appeal as dating to Epaminondas at 15.53.4: ἄλλον δὲ κατέστησεν ὡς ἀπὸ Τροφωνίου προσφάτως ἀναβεβηκότα καὶ λέγοντα, διότι προστέταχεν ὁ θεὸς αὐτοῖς, ὅταν ἐν Λεύκτροις νικήσωσιν, ἀγῶνα τιθέναι Διὶ βασιλεῖ στεφανίτην: ἀφ᾽ οὗ δὴ Βοιωτοὶ ταύτην ποιοῦσι τὴν πανήγυριν ἐν Λεβαδείᾳ. He placed before them another man as one who had recently ascended from the cave of Trophonius, who said that the god had directed them, when they won at Leuctra, to institute a contest with crowns for prizes in honour of Zeus the king. This indeed is the origin of this festival which the Boeotians now celebrate at Lebadeia. 330 See the arguments toward either syncretism or preference of new religious traditions over old in, for instance, Shipley 2000, 153-156. Of particular note is his quotation of Walbank 1981, 153: ‘Old certainties had gone and though ancient rites were still zealously performed in the conviction that what was traditional should be preserved, many people were at bottom agnostics or even atheists. The observance of established rituals must have meant little to many worshippers.’ Our above comments here, I should, argue forcibly to the contrary – particularly when we consider that these rituals were in constant development throughout the third century. 325

Considering what is conspicuously absent, however, is perhaps the best way to gauge the religious conservatism for which I argue among the Hellenistic Boeotians. In the midst of the purported decline in civic religion, the cults which are typically held to have thrived in its place are either scarce or nowhere to be found in the region.331 Asklepios has a regional presence that is slight at best, and much of the archaeological evidence for cult activity is uncertain. A cult at Lebadeia is mentioned by

Pausanias (9.39.3) but his account gives little insight into date or popularity. A sanctuary at

Orchomenos has been described as perhaps having been taken over in the third century by a cult of

Asklepios, but such conjecture has yet to be grounded in solid evidence (Schachter 1984-1991, 1.104-

109). Elsewhere the deity is mentioned almost exclusively in the context of manumission decrees, with an abundant dossier coming from Thespiai and Chaeronea in the third or second century. The decrees themselves remain puzzling, as do the date and mechanism of their manumission; at any rate, the phenomenon is highly localised on both the geographic and social planes.332

It is in this context that we also find our only evidence for Serapis in Hellenistic Boeotia, overwhelmingly at Chaeronea which has produced 86 instances of manumission by consecration to the deity.333 Again, though, this cultic activity is strictly limited to the servile context and did not infiltrate higher echelons of Boeotian society for centuries. Thespiai is something of a notable exception: an inscription from c.90-80 BC gives a list of victors at the mysterious games of the Serapeia (IG VII 540).

Interestingly, the games were financed entirely by one man – Charilaos – who paid for the competition

331 For the opinio communis see again Shipley 200, 163-172 who argues that oriental and personal religions gradually displaced civic traditions, marking a turn from collective to individual religiosity in the period. Although he concedes that this happens ‘alongside the possible increased popularity of pre-existing cults’ (165), the focus of the period is clearly shifted to new gods that were imported from the corners of Alexander’s empire. 332 IG VII 1824, 1780, 1779, Grenet 2014 with appendix at 426 to 430. 333 The complete list is: IG VII 3301–3307, 3309–3346, 3348–3374, 3376–3377, 3381–3383, 3387–3390, 3397– 3399,. 326 as well as its associated sanctuary (Schachter 1984-1991, 1.203-205). Charilaos ought to be taken as a singular example of extraordinary individual piety, and while we may never know the specific character of his devotion it is abundantly clear that he was exceptional. We see no such worship of ‘foreign’ deities on a civic or regional level until the second century AD when Thespiai erected a statue of Isis and Serapis.

With these notable and limited exceptions aside, the continuity in Boeotian religious sensibilities throughout the Hellenistic Period is striking. Cults which were grounded in Archaic tradition were reinvigorated as they became the object of a new wave of devotion from within the region and beyond. Cults throughout Boeotia – of Apollo , of Athena, of the Muses, and others – which had endured the privations of the fifth and fourth centuries reached the zenith of their popularity in the centuries following Alexander. Festivals were organised or reorganised, advertised throughout the

Greek community that now encompassed shores far beyond the mainland, and then were celebrated with a lavishness that they had never before known.. The vitality of Boeotian religious life in the fourth and third centuries speaks to the vitality of the region’s cities, communities, and the koinon into which they organised themselves.

Conclusion and Epilogue: Sub Imperium Populi Romani Dicionemque

My aim in re-examining the character of Boeotia under the pax macedonica in such a redemptory manner is not simply to exonerate the successors of Alexander by shifting the blame to the

Romans. Even among those who have argued for the enduring vitality of Boeotia during the third century are quick to conclude that what signs of life remained were quickly stamped out by the advent

327 of the Romans, and they are not entirely unjustified in doing so.334 Regionalism in Boeotia is held to have died on the same day as the Boeotian koinon, as the fall of both has been dated to the winter of

172/171 BC. While Perseus lurked in the background as the man who potentially would be able to break the encroaching hegemony of the Romans – though countered by the sobering spectres of

Antiochus III and Philip V – the Boeotians remained divided in their uncertainty regarding with which side they ought to throw in their lot. According to the testimony of Livy (42.43-44) and Polybius (27.1-

2), the league was unable to arrive at a common resolution. With federal opinion divided to the point of irreconcilability, the Roman legates, ever pragmatic, instead chose to negotiate peace with each member city of the league independently. Thebes and Chaeronea were the first to fall, and the rest of the dominos tumbled in turn. The koinon, as we knew it at least, was unable to survive such circumvention and was effectively dissolved by the vitriol of how to respond to the Romans. From then, the league and the region could not, and would never, be the same.

Much has been made of the winter of 172/171 BC, and again the responsibility lies largely with

Polybius. As had occurred with his description of the preceding half-century, contemporary commentators have been all too happy to borrow the Achaean’s disparagement wholesale. As ever, the Historian was unsubtle in his indictment of the Boeotians: in negotiating individual settlements with the Romans city by city, he writes

τὸ δὲ τῶν Βοιωτῶν ἔθνος ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον συντετηρηκὸς τὴν κοινὴν συμπολιτείαν καὶ

πολλοὺς καὶ ποικίλους καιροὺς διαπεφευγὸς παραδόξως τότε προπετῶς καὶ ἀλογίστως

334 See the review of scholarship on Hellenistic Boeotia above. 328

ἑλόμενον τὰ παρὰ Περσέως, εἰκῇ καὶ παιδαριωδῶς πτοηθὲν κατελύθη καὶ διεσκορπίσθη κατὰ

πόλεις

Thus the Boeotian people after remaining for many years faithful to their League and after

many marvellous escapes from various perils, now by rashly and inconsiderately espousing the

cause of Perseus, and giving way to insensate and childish excitement were broken up and

dispersed among their several cities (Pol. 27.2.10)

The devil, here, is in the adverbs – with which addenda Polybius adds delectable embellishment to an already charged account: παραδόξως (incredibly, inconceivably), προπετῶς (hastily, recklessly),

ἀλογίστως (irrationally), and most scathingly, παιδαριωδῶς (childishly). The entire sentence, in the narrative sequence of this part of Book 27, smacks of a later insertion. The preceding and following sections recount pre-war diplomatic manoeuvres in great detail and with little comment; the prevailing tone is one of neutral reportage. Suddenly and inexplicably between his close narrative of sections 9 and 11 the Historian adds this indicting judgement which fits neither syntactically nor narratively, and then his close and detailed account continues without any other such reflections for some time. Taking such an awkwardly inserted passage at evidentiary face value is hardly sound, as we have seen above – especially when we consider that Polybius conveniently forgot to mention that this was neither the first nor the last time that Boeotia was divided between Macedon and Rome. This, to Polybius, would be another warning to the Romans of the individualism and discord that comes from a society’s slide into decadence, elaborating the Boeotian-Roman parallel introduced by Walbank (2002).

329

Despite this Polybian insertion, the date of 172/171 is generally acknowledged as the dissolution of the koinon and thus the end of the political, social, and economic ties that bound the region’s communities (Beck and Ganter 2015). Fossey sums up the trend neatly when he concludes that ‘there are other indications [beside proxenia] in Boiotia and the surrounding parts of central

Greece that institutions which previously were part of the functioning of independent cities or states survived or were resurrected for largely religious or cultural purposes’.335 When politics or economy are removed from the equation, the region is neutered. As I have demonstrated above, however, the regional vitality of Boeotia did not proceed directly from its federal vitality. In order to cast this period of Roman hegemony in a different light two broad topics must be considered in turn: first, the political circumstances which preceded and followed the events of 172/171, and second, the endurance of various forms of regional interaction and collaboration in the longue durée. The argument is simple: while the intervention of Rome in Boeotian regional politics was certainly not without its practical or ideological consequences, it does not mark the death of the region or many of its mechanisms of communality. Such a Roman epilogue, in and of itself, provides a fitting conparandum for the

Macedonian hegemony which it inherited.

Considering the ‘dissolution’ of the koinon in 172/171 as the point of no return for Boeotian regionalism is something of a red herring. The preceding two and half decades were equally fraught with division over whether to side with Rome or the Greek kings: in 197 T. Quinctius Flamininus provided the League with his ultimatum that the Boeotians ought to become allies of the Romans, sparking the debate over the koinon’s loyalty. The koinon then decided to reject the Roman alliance, but to little consequence from the victors. Despite the fact that some 1,000 Boeotians fought in the

335 Fossey 1999, 108-109 quoted on 2014, 42. 330 ranks of Philip V against Rome, Flamininus exacted no practical revenge on the troops themselves or the communities that sent them (Livy 33.14.5, 27.6-7). The debate continued to rage in the years that followed, however, and the Boeotians even at this point were not unanimous.

Another meeting in 192-191 at Thebes eventually led the Boeotians to side tacitly with

Antiochus III in his war against the Romans (Pol.20.7, Livy.36.6, Roesch 1982, 278-279); the concilium gentis mentioned by Livy voted in favour of the king rather than the Romans, supporting Antiochus

‘sinon de fait, au moins de coeur’ as Roesch aptly phrases it (1982, 278-279). Even with such debate raging – at times violently – the mechanisms of the koinon continued to function, and at least some measure of regional consensus was met in these most perilous of decades. Roesch notes that even in the year 173 the mechanisms of federal government continued to function relatively smoothly as the

Boeotarchs and federal archontes were elected by the usual means, though with perhaps greater friction (Roesch 1982, 280). The point of this political résumé is that the koinon, though divided, continued to function until the moment when the Roman legates decided to negotiate peace with each individual member city. The dissolution of the koinon is thus not inherently the fault of the Boeotians or their rashness, as Polybius would have us believe. The system continued to function even in the face of such domestic division over foreign policy.

The strategy of the Romans was clever, if not entirely effective. If its aim, as Müller has recently asserted, ‘was to reduce the Boeotians to a political life based on cities,’ then the Romans enjoyed only moderate success at best (Müller 2014, 119).336 First, the koinon and the region had in some measure

336 She goes on to elaborate on the Roman policy aims here: The Roman objective was fundamentally political and the policy that the Romans pursued corresponds to a dismemberment, a spatial disarticulation of the federal skeleton that entailed much more than the destruction of its central organs. In principle, this also affected the confederacy’s territorial subdivisions or districts, the tele... Accordingly, from 172/1 onward there were no federal archons in Boeotia, no 331 always had a political life based on cities, particularly in the relatively even playing field of the

Hellenistic federation. The dissolution of the koinon was remarkably short lived: the league was resurrected under the Roman aegis by as early as 167 and endured as a coherent body until 146. Even in the absence or impotence of certain federal bodies to decide foreign policy – the Boeotarchs, the synedrion, etc... – the Boeotians still have a general coherence of diplomacy. 197 and 172 would not be the last times that the region wavered between loyalty to Roman magistrates or Greek kings, as in 146 several Boeotian cities flocked to the sides of the Achaeans, and during the Mithridatic wars they were likewise torn over their response to Sulla (Müller 2014, 119-125).

The Romans themselves were unsure as to exactly when Boeotia had come under their control.

Cicero, in his second Verrine, holds that Boeotia was only brought into the dominion of Rome after 146 thanks to Mummius who ‘urbisque Achaiae Boeotiaeque multas sub imperium populi Romani dicionemque subiunxit’ (Cic.Ver 2.1.55). Even after the Romans dissolved the koinon again in 146 it was brought back to life shortly thereafter, albeit in altered form, and endured up until 27 BC with traces that lasted into the third century (Beck and Ganter 2015). Although the appearance and structure of the league had changed, we must not equate this with ideological bankruptcy. Beck and Ganter’s

(2015) caveat about post Roman League ought to be borne in mind, as they write that its tumultuous trajectory ‘did not root it any less in the lives of the Boiotians, nor did it drive the koinon into obsolescence’.

The winter of 172/171, then, was not the end of the koinon, nor was it the end of Boeotian political activity on a regional scale. The encroachment of Rome on Boeotian politics was too slow, too intermittent, and too episodic to permanently cut the links that the region’s communities had forged federal magistrates such as Boeotarchs, no synedrion, no federal assembly, no federal judicial institutions.’ (2014, 119). 332 among one another. Debates over the response to Rome had begun in earnest nearly three decades previously and continued in the decades the followed, and 172/171 is only one step along many on the path the led Boeotia into the imperium populi romani.

As Boeotia had not been suffocated under the shadow of Macedon, neither was it suffocated under the shadow of Rome. There is an underlying strength to Boeotian regional attachment which both endures and links the various forms taken by the koina, and this regionalism was able to survive under Thebes, Macedon, and Rome alike. For those who ascribe to the trajectory of Polybius, according to whom Boeotia died a slow and self-inflicted death between the 245 and 172, the period after the dissolution of the koinon is something a black hole. If Boeotia in the third century is under- discussed, Boeotia in the second and first centuries is nearly neglected outright.

Simply because the koinon was restructured and deprived of some of its judicial authority did not mean that Boeotia’s cities suddenly ceased to disagree with each other. In the slate of arbitration cases studied by Roesch in 1979 we find indications of continued regional vitality in the persistence of routine disagreements among cities. Rivalry, of course, is always a sign of a healthy Greek political culture; the total absence thereof is disconcerting in any period. Even under Rome old trials still had to be resolved, and new ones considered – hence for lack of federal bodies of arbitration Boeotian cities instead had recourse to external arbitration as a means of legal settlement (Roesch 1979, 130-131).

Territorial disputes naturally emerge now as they always had. In Akraiphia, there was a backlog of trials that needed settlement and thus the city requested judges from Larisa, which is hailed as being the mother city of all the Boeotians. The former city had ongoing disagreements with Thebes, Anthedon, and Kopai, and instead of common resolution through the federation such suits were now handled on a bilateral level (Roesch 1979, 131). The late date of these inscriptions – all of which are after the

333

‘dissolution’ of the koinon, speaks in two directions: on the one hand, it indicates that federal judicial bodies were functioning smoothly until 172/171, and, on the other, that regional justice went on by other means in the decades that followed.

So too did religion, but on a broader time scale. The elaboration of traditional Boeotian cults that I have described during the third century was hardly cowed by the political presence of Rome, as they continued to be celebrated and expanded well into the Roman Period. The partial dismantling of the koinon in 172/1 does not seem to have severed Boeotia’s ties with the broader Greek world in the decades or centuries that followed. Fossey neatly summarises this in his discussion of the agonistic landscape: ‘in short the principal orbit of Boeotian contacts with the outside world may have gone through minor upsets (as after the Third Macedonian War) but it presents us, with the most part, with a continuous picture’ (Fossey 2014, 116). Our assumptions, in this respect, regarding the Macedonians are often transferred to the Romans: the dominion of a broad and generally disinterested hegemon like the Antigonids or the Romans does not automatically blanket a city or region’s network of interstate relations.

The festival of the Basileia at Lebedeia discussed above continued to be celebrated throughout the second and first centuries. The second century has produced two victor lists which furnish a variety of names and ethnics (SEG 3.368, Nouveau Choix 22A). The usual neighbours are present as expected, including representatives from Thebes, Thespiai, Chaeronea and Coroneia. Beyond these, however, the geographic expanse of the festivals’ competitors is striking: from beyond the mainland hail victors from

Epirus, Smyrna, Tyre, Nicaea in Bithynia, Rome, and perhaps most strikingly, Ptolemy Philopator himself (Fossey 2014, 109). The trend continues after a lacuna that is filled after the Mithridatic Wars

334 with another set of two inscriptions.337 These lists, dating to after 65 BC, provide a similar swathe of domestic and ‘international’ competitors. Among the latter, notably, we find two ‘Romans’ (one of whom won five events), and competitors from Tyre and Nicaea again, and even Seleucia on the Tigris

(Fossey 2014, 109). The patently Hellenistic character of these agonistic catalogues are fascinating: it is not until the period’s twilight, as the dawn of the Imperial Period was cresting on the horizon, that we see such a list of locales that so capture the geographic diversity of the period – and that we find such a list here in this corner of Boeotia.

The Mouseia likewise continued apace under Roman hegemony. The third century reorganisation that I have highlighted above certainly seems to have served its purpose, as two mutilated victory lists from the second quarter of the second century reveal that the festival and its competitions continued to be held after 172/171 (Fossey 2014, 111 referring to IThesp 165-166).

Unfortunately the names and provenance of the victors themselves have not survived, but we are better informed for the decades before and after the Mithridatic War. An inscription (IG VII.1760 =

IThesp 172) is of particular interest as it dates to shortly after the war’s conclusion and names victors who hail from Athens, Thessaly, Phocis, Cyzicus, Sidon, and Lydia (Fossey 2014, 112 and fig.8). This festival in particular managed to survive and indeed thrive into the imperial Period, as inscriptions from the mid-second century AD list a similarly Hellenistic band of competitors from all corners of the realm that Alexander’s successors had conquered. The reach of the Mouseia thus continued to grow steadily in the four centuries following its reorganisation.

The list can and indeed does go on, and I refer the reader to Fossey’s recent study of such later epigraphic evidence for Boeotia’s ongoing agonistic and cultic activity (2014, 105-116). Notable

337 SEG 3.367 and ADelt. 1971: 34-35. 335 exampla of festivals with persistent and indeed growing popularity throughout the Republican and

Imperial Periods include the Ptoia, the Erotideia, the Agrionia, and perhaps most interestingly, the

Amphiaireia. Without dallying here on the experience of each, the trend at any rate holds true. These festivals continued to be organised, advertised, and – perhaps most importantly – funded by collaboration among the cities of Boeotia and their respective delegates (Müller 2014, 136). Although outside financial support was solicited and received from figures ranging from the Ptolemies to Sulla, the management and oversight of these festivals remained an inherently local endeavour. The cultic landscape of Boeotia and the regional collaboration it both facilitated and necessitated were, by all accounts, thriving under the Roman standard.

And even now, removed from the Archaic Period by centuries and tried by the tumult with which they were filled, the old gods still reigned. The consistency of religious sensibility among the

Boeotians over the span of eight centuries is striking: cults and sanctuaries which had their roots in the sixth or fifth centuries – or earlier – continued to be prominent regional fixtures in the second century after Christ. Precious few additions were made of any lasting consequence. The Serapeia, as I have mentioned, was a one-off affair, and there is only one attestation of the Romaia in Boeotia which involved almost entirely Theban participants.338 Old cults were celebrated in new ways, their deities were honoured by new competitions involving participants from all corners of the Hellenistic world, but the gods were the same; Mount Helikon was still sacred to its Muses.

The dominion of Rome, however, was not always benevolent, and I would do the region’s history an injustice if I were to gloss over the deprivations of the Roman magistrates and legionaries

338 Fossey 2014, 107. The single text from Thebes is SEG 54.516, which provides victors dating to 120 BC. Only one man from Delphi is attested as being victorious in the competition, all the rest are Thebans. Knoepfler 2004, 1262-1264 discusses the seemingly isolated festival in further detail. 336 who barrelled through it on so many occasions. Haliartos suffered a punishment that Boeotia had not seen exacted since the bloody days of the Theban Hegemony. Rome was all too happy to make an example of the city for having sided with Perseus, and thus in 171 it was besieged, captured, razed to the ground, and 2,500 of its citizens were reduced to slavery. Thebes, likely alongside Thespiai and

Tanagra, was punished in 146 for having sided with the Achaeans, and all three were dismantled, disarmed, and placed under the direct control of Rome – in theory, at least (Müller 2014, 120). The war against Perseus, the Achaean War, the Mithridatic Wars, and the Roman Civil Wars all brought levies, taxation, and privation to the communities of Boeotia (Alcock 1993, 149-150). Over time, and only gradually, it seems, did these take their agricultural and demographic toll. It is again noteworthy that after the spectacular destruction of Thebes by Alexander, no city of the region would suffer such a fate until Haliartos in 146. As was the case with Euboea, the bloodshed and brutality of the fifth and fourth centuries were generally nowhere to be found during the Macedonian hegemony, only to rear their heads again with the advent of Rome.

The hegemony of Thebes, the strong-armed domination of Boeotia’s communities by one of their fellows was a curious period in the longer history of a region that is better marked by enduring vectors of communication, collaboration, and commonality than the short-lived oppression of a single city. There is something particular to this otherwise rural corner of Greece that outlived any of those who intervened, pacifically or violently, in its politics. The communities, the cities, the cults, the sensibilities of Boeotia withstood the momentary dominance of Thebes, as they did the Macedonians and the Romans as well. There was, throughout, ‘a stability, between Attica and Phocis, and reaching to both seas’ to resurrect the words of Rhys Roberts with which this chapter began (1895, 77). This stability endured the peaks and troughs of the region’s trajectory through the Classical Period, and

337 came to manifest itself most prominently in the Hellenistic. It was only then, with Theban dominance shattered by the fist of the Argeads that it was able to emerge from its fourth century slumber. Old poleis reappeared as prominent characters in the Boeotian cast, old communities were given the autonomy necessary to organise themselves into cities in their own right. The ancestral ties among both were strengthened and reinforced, while new connections were forged in the corners of a world that had only recently been opened to Boeotia. This network, in turn, was exposed to the region’s unique religious traditions and invited to take part in new manifestations of very old cultic sensibilities.

Generations of young men from all corners of Boeotia were trained for much of their youth in how to defend and preserve the ancestral stability to which they had a common obligation. At times the koinon sparked or accelerated the process, at others, its task was simply oversight. Much changed with the arrival of Macedon and Rome, but in this region of Greece, as the others we have seen, far more remained the same. Yet this can only be glimpsed when we shed antique prejudice and modern preference, and it is only then, like Pindar’s Aeneas, that we can ‘know whether we have truly escaped the ancient reproach of men's speech, “Boeotian pig”’.

338

Conclusion

The Horizon of the Immediate

εἰ γάρ τις προθείη πᾶσι ἀνθρώποισι ἐκλέξασθαι κελεύων νόμους τοὺς καλλίστους ἐκ τῶν πάντων

νόμων, διασκεψάμενοι ἂν ἑλοίατο ἕκαστοι τοὺς ἑωυτῶν: οὕτω νομίζουσι πολλόν τι καλλίστους τοὺς

ἑωυτῶν νόμους ἕκαστοι εἶναι. οὔκων οἰκός ἐστι ἄλλον γε ἢ μαινόμενον ἄνδρα γέλωτα τὰ τοιαῦτα

τίθεσθαι

For if it were proposed to all nations to choose which seemed best of all customs, each, after examination, would place its own first; so well is each convinced that its own are by far the best. It is not therefore to be supposed that anyone, except a madman, would turn such things to ridicule.

-Herodotus, 3.38.1-2.

The Opinio Communis

In order to conclude this examination of the Hellenistic mainland we must return to the old assumptions with which we began. As we have seen it manifested in the historiography of the regions that we have covered, the scholarly communis opinio of the Hellenistic mainland is remarkably consistent across studies of large and small scope. Droysen’s (1833, 1.1) pioneering assertion that the

339 reign of Alexander marked the beginning of a fundamentally different period in world history than what had preceded it left an indelible imprint on subsequent interpretations of the Hellenistic Age.

Every beginning must equally mark an end, thus Glotz in 1928 was led to lament that the Chaeronea marked ‘la fin de la cité grècque’, and the complex civic culture that been held in such high regard by so many of his contemporaries (448). Death was not instantaneous, rather the mainland was left a shadow of its former self, weakened and feeble in the eyes of a world that had passed it by, languishing, as T.E. Lawrence put it, in ‘the correct banal Hellenism of the exhausted homeland’

(13.9.17).

The scholarly voices who have spoken against this discontinuity of the period – Wilhelm, Robert,

Gauthier, Habicht, and Oliver – have gained traction over the past few decades, but old generalizations still persist. The impression that Chaeronea marks an irreversible rupture with the Classical Past and the introduction of an era whose structures of power were irreconcilable with old civic sensibilities remains prominent even in the third millennium. Graham Shipley, writing of the relationship between

Hellenistic kings and cities, echoes Glotz as he writes ‘the political changes of the period 338-376 entailed serious consequences for the old city-states of Greece. Kingship was anathema to the archaic and classical poleis, according to their mythology they had repudiated it very early’ (2000, 59). My regional case studies above, I hope, have shown that these regions of Greece regularly interacted with

Macedonian monarchs with few fundamental qualms.

The Classical World, it follows logically, is somehow incompatible with the Hellenistic Period; its structures and mechanisms of power cannot survive in a world dominated by monarchs ruling over far- flung empires. As they came under Macedonian dominion, the argument in favour of discontinuity goes, the complex culture of the polis and the ancient regional attachments of the Greeks who were

340 left behind no longer had any meaning or relevance. I again quote Giovannini’s opinion in full to summarise the consensus of what happened to the mainland in the centuries that followed: