The GreekKoinon

Abstract

This chapter examines the history of the koinon, a form of regional state in ancient Greece comprised of multiple poleis and in some instances other forms of community, and characterized by the division of sovereignty among the regional government and its constituent communities. It explains that the koinon was a remarkably widespread phenomenon and that almost of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese became part of a koinon. The chapter suggests that the koinon arose amidst a world of poleis against a background of strong group identities and that its nature was profoundly altered in the process of the Roman conquest of Greece in the second century.

Globalization, Transnationalism, and the Local in Ancient Greece

“…Jakob Larsen's Greek Federal States, published in 1968, follows a historiographical tradition going back to the nineteenth century and remains the most comprehensive reference on the topic. Yet a vast range of studies has flourished in the last thirty years about different regions (e.g., Achaia, Boeotia), exploring for a large part global problems: the link between koinon and ethnos through the question of identity (Morgan 2003), religious issues concerning the origins of confederations and the common activities of their members (Mackil 2013), and the recognition (or not) of archaic ethnē as formal political organizations (Hall 1997(Hall , 2002. But the interactions among poleis members inside a koinon have not yet attracted the same attention, and I therefore concentrate on this aspect.…”