The United States of Greece

The Ancient Greeks recognised that they were kin who shared a culture, yet their history is often one of internecine wars. Why did they not allow their acknowledged kinship to dictate a more peaceful form of co-existence? At the same time, there is an undeniable trend over the course of Greek history towards unity, especially in the form of federalism. Was this deliberate, in the sense that unity was seen as a desirable goal by the Greeks themselves, or was it a historical accident?

The underlying issue is that there was no national state called Greece in the ancient world. Most Greeks would have found such an idea alien. They considered themselves to be first and foremost citizens of their particular states. That was where they placed their loyalty, while the notion of a shared ‘Greekness’ or Hellenicity hovered somewhere in the background. When writers and politicians spoke of ‘Greece’, they sometimes meant the Balkan peninsula that we call by the same name. But they often used the term as an abstraction: the sum total of all Greeks wherever they were living, similar to the medieval concept of Christendom.

There were almost as many Greeks beyond the Balkan peninsula as on it, living in separate city states (polis) or federations (koinon) around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. After the massive emigration eastwards that took place in the late fourth and early third centuries BC, following Alexander the Great’s takeover of the Persian Empire, the number of Greeks outside the peninsula surpassed by far the population of ‘Old Greece’.

There were hundreds of Greek city states, whose separation was the cause of internecine warfare. Plato agreed: ‘Every state’, he said, ‘is inevitably engaged in undeclared warfare with every other state.’ Each possessed a certain amount of territory, but there was never quite enough to go around. Although states proclaimed self-sufficiency as an ideal, they could never realise it and every state competed with its neighbours for resources. The border wars of the Archaic period (750-480 BC), which took place as states formed and flexed their muscles, gave way in the Classical period (480-323 BC) to conflicts on a larger scale born of the desire to curb the most powerful states, who sought hegemony – which is to say that one state was supreme and imposed its interests on its allies – over the rest. Athens, therefore, became the target during the Peloponnesian War (431-404) and Sparta in the Corinthian War (395-386). The Boeotian War (378-371) was meant to decide which of Sparta or Thebes would be ascendant.

There were a few intellectuals in the early fourth century BC who found such disunity deplorable. The orators Gorgias, Lysias and Isocrates called for Greek unity, choosing the Olympic Games as the place to deliver their speeches in order to address a large audience from all over the Greek world. Even the comic poet Aristophanes, in his drama Lysistrata (411 BC), lamented the fact that Greeks recognised their kinship and yet constantly fought one another. In past decades, scholars have tended to claim that the Greeks – or, more usually, the ‘best elements’ among the Greeks – saw that disunity was not serving Greek interests and strove for unification: for a United States of Greece.

Baser motives

Yet none of these calls for unity was disinterested and idealistic; there was little recognition of the value of unity in itself. Aristophanes, Gorgias and Isocrates wanted the Greeks to unite against the Persians; Lysias was no different – except that for him, as a Syracusan by birth, the enemy was not the Persian king, but Dionysius II, the tyrant of Syracuse. All these intellectuals were using a grandiose theme to disguise baser motives.

It is not clear that by ‘unity’ they meant a desire for all Greeks everywhere to unite politically and permanently in some form of national state. It is more likely that they had in mind the kind of alliance formed in 480 to repel the Persians, which was limited both in time (it was never formally annulled, but became a dead letter after the Persian retreat) and in numbers, since only 31 Greek states made up the alliance that resisted the Persians. Many more Greeks fought on the Persian side (albeit sometimes unwillingly) than fought against them. Lysias and the others were undoubtedly imagining some such alliance. That was the only realistic option. In future decades, the Greeks would scarcely unite in the face of the Macedonian or Roman threat.

These appeals for unity in the early fourth century BC had little effect. The time was not yet right for them to fall on fertile ground, as we can see from a couple of failed initiatives dating from earlier, in the fifth century.

The Persian Wars formed a watershed in the way the Greeks saw themselves. They had long recognised their kinship, but now they sharpened the idea by defining themselves as the opposites of ‘barbarians’, especially Persians. Greeks were tough and independent, so the theory went, while Persians were soft and servile, ruled by an autocratic master. Inspired by this greater sense of Greek kinship and unity, after the Persian Wars the practice of dedicating trophies at Panhellenic sites such as Olympia and Delphi to commemorate victories over fellow Greeks died down, possibly by official edict. Moreover, in 476 an international tribunal was established at Olympia, with the job of arbitrating disputes and reconciling states before they began fighting. We know of the existence of this tribunal only because inscriptions have been unearthed that record two of its decisions. For a while, the experiment worked but, before long, warring Greek states refused to recognise the authority of the panel and stopped submitting their disputes to it.

At the same time, we can outline a tendency towards greater unification. Greeks had always formed military alliances, but none had proved stable. Some of them were based on shared leadership (the Athenians, Corinthians and Boeotians formed an alliance to defeat the Spartans in the Corinthian War), but particular interests always threatened to undermine these temporary unions. The Peloponnesian War was fought between two such alliances: the Peloponnesian League, dominated by Sparta, and the Delian League, which differed little from an Athenian empire.

The trend towards greater unification led to the formation of more permanent leagues. The pattern was set by the ‘common peaces’ of the early- to mid-fourth century: multilateral peace treaties designed to encompass as many of the Greek states as possible and make it harder for them to go to war with one another. In 386 the Persians used the Spartans as their agents to bring the Corinthian War to an end and impose peace on the Greeks. The King’s Peace (also known as the Peace of Antalcidas, after the chief Spartan negotiator) required all Greek states to respect one another’s autonomy and territorial integrity and to retaliate jointly against any state that breached the treaty – conflicts were to be resolved by arbitration rather than military action. This set the pattern for later arrangements. When the Macedonians became the masters of the Greeks in 338, Philip II formed all the Greek states into what we now call the League of Corinth; tellingly, the Greeks themselves called it the League of the Greeks. It lasted for 16 years, with a brief revival at the end of the fourth century.

The leagues saw the Greeks as a distinct people. Never mind that it was outsiders – Persians, Macedonians and, later, Romans – who were treating them in this way. All individuals have a tiered sense of identity. In Greek terms, a person might think of himself as an Argive (a native of the city of Argos) and as a Dorian (sharing a dialect and other cultural features with others who claimed Dorian descent, as opposed to Ionians and Aeolians) and as a Greek. At any given moment, external events, moral persuasion (by a speech, a tract or politically engaged theatrical production) or his own motivations might prompt a person to accept one tier over the others.

Towards unity

The events of history happen when enough people share the same framework in a sufficiently coherent form and choose the same set of loyalties. Then they begin to act as Greeks, or as Dorians, or as Argives, or as a political faction. Coherent, long-term identification with Greekness was required before any kind of unification was possible or even conceivable. The leagues of the fourth century made that easier. But unification cannot be imposed by outsiders and is not the outcome of intellectual appeals. It comes from the bottom up: from the collective, subliminal impulse of the people as a whole. Therefore, when we come to the third century, we find apparently greater efforts being made towards unity.

There are two such manifestations. The first was the development of instruments for peaceful cooperation. Arbitration, mediation, sharing rights to intermarriage between states or even shared citizenship; these all helped and became more common in the Hellenistic period of Greek history (323-30 BC). Kinship diplomacy was another major phenomenon. Dozens of inscriptions survive in which cities base a claim of kinship on a shared genealogy in the mythical past. It became common for one state to claim kinship with another, even when such a claim was rather far-fetched and involved tweaking the mythical past.

For instance, when the town of Cytenium in Doris, the original homeland of the Dorians, needed financial assistance to repair earthquake damage, it did not just turn to Dorian states, but constructed complex genealogies and journeys of both gods and heroes to demonstrate its kinship not just with the city of Xanthus in south-west Asia Minor (where the surviving inscription comes from), but with the Seleucids and Ptolemies. It was to these courts in Antioch and Alexandria that Cytenian envoys were headed when they stopped in Xanthus. The mythology they came up with could have linked them to almost any other state in the Greek world.

The second manifestation of an impulse towards greater unity was the phenomenon of confederation. A number of federal states arose, but the two greatest and most important were the Achaean and Aetolian Confederacies, based respectively in the south and north of the Corinthian Gulf. Aetolia and Achaea were mountainous places, which had remained poor and removed from the mainstream of Greek history. By uniting, they gained the strength to stand up to the greatest of the city states and even to the Macedonians and Romans. It was the war between Rome and the Achaeans that led to the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC and began the process that led to Greece becoming ‘Achaia’, a province of the Roman Empire.

Both confederacies began as ethnic organisations – the original members were exclusively Achaeans or Aetolians – but both burst their ethnic bounds to incorporate ‘foreign’ communities. Numbers were never constant, but the Achaean Confederacy at one point encompassed most of the towns of the Peloponnese (and came close to gaining Athens, too). The Aetolians were even able to incorporate overseas Greek communities.

Both confederation and the development of peaceful instruments of interaction were deliberate acts, but we should not leap to the conclusion that the Greeks now recognised the desirability of national unity and were consciously working towards it. The Achaeans actively wanted and pursued the unification of the Peloponnese, but it is not clear that they ever wanted to unify all Greeks into a federal state, nor conceived of that as a possibility. For a while, both the great confederacies were allies (though they were more usually enemies) and, with historical hindsight, we might wonder if the notion did not arise of turning all mainland Greece into a federal state, seeing that, as allies, these two confederacies already incorporated many of the Greek communities. But there is no sign that they ever thought along those lines and the alliance fell apart before long.

The process of unification was more subtle. Given the scattered and belligerent nature of the Greeks, political unification would never have happened if the potential had not been there. As soon as the Greeks emerged in the Mediterranean, they became aware of themselves as cultural cousins. In the words of Herodotus, writing in the 420s BC, Greekness (to Hellēnikon, ‘the Greek thing’) consisted of shared culture, language and lineage. The Greeks were always aware of a shared substrate underlying their regional and other differences and the idea of a Panhellenic community was supported by cults at sites such as Delphi and Olympia, by shared values, by warfare against barbarians and by a shared past, as constructed by poems such as Homer’s Iliad and the genealogies of The Catalogue of Women.

This sense of cultural unity, of an imagined community, only increased in the Hellenistic period, as a result of the diaspora in the wake of Alexander’s conquests and of expatriate clinging to tradition. There was a genuine sense that Greeks all around the world shared values, ideas and institutions and formed a worldwide community. Someone transported from Athens to Alexandria or Antioch would not have felt far from home.

The Greeks, then, had long imagined themselves as forming a community by virtue of their shared culture and, like any powerful act of imagination, the idea exerted pressure and edged closer to realisation. One of the important triggers, or reminders, was the flourishing of confederacies, because their constitutions gave the Greeks a blueprint for the idea of a federal state voluntarily entered into. Another was sustained contact with quasi-Greeks, such as Macedonians, which entailed the adoption of a larger idea of what it was to be Greek. But responsibility lay chiefly with Alexander the Great, who gave an enormous boost to the idea of Greek unity by reaffirming his father’s League of Corinth and by undertaking an expressly Panhellenic war against the ‘barbarian’, a continuation of the Trojan War. His vast empire opened up new horizons that made it possible for Greeks to transcend the parochialism of the city-state culture of Old Greece.

Over time, then, more people than just a few intellectuals began to take seriously the idea that the Greeks were one in blood as well as in culture and to take steps to consolidate the Greek world on that basis. The Roman creation of the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia and the patchwork of Greek provinces in Asia Minor was the culmination of that trend. But – in a phenomenon with which the modern world is all too familiar – these Roman provinces created borders, which were not necessarily salient to the Greeks themselves.

Religious purpose

In the first and second centuries ad, super-confederacies were formed out of the confederacies of both Greece and Anatolia. These could not be political unions, since politically the Greek confederacies were members of the Roman provinces, so they were given a religious purpose. They were founded on the worship of the emperor: Caligula for the first-century league and Hadrian for the second. The delegates called themselves ‘Panhellenes’ and met, in the second century, in a temple called the Panhellenion, built in Hadrianopolis, a new suburb of Athens constructed by Hadrian. Neither of these leagues lasted more than a few decades, but they show that the Greeks’ awareness of themselves as a potential nation survived the imposition of Roman provinces.

There was always one thing missing. The Greeks could stress their shared language, their kinship, their similar forms of worship, of dress, of warfare. Despite the fact that so much of their history involved Greeks fighting one another, they could create a sense of a shared history by stressing Panhellenic moments, such as the Trojan War, the Persian Wars and the long resistance to Macedon. Yet they could never point to a Greek homeland. They shared the sea, but they had no land.

In the fourth century, however, some politicians began to speak of Greece as ‘the common fatherland’. Isocrates, for example, projected back onto earlier Greeks the idea that ‘while they regarded their native cities as their several places of abode, yet they considered Greece to be their common fatherland’. He supposed that earlier Greeks were capable of transcending an identification with one’s birthplace and recognising a higher level of shared Greekness. But at the time the idea of a shared Greek homeland was a fantasy, no more than a rhetorical appeal for unity.

The road to political unification would never reach an end until there was a Greek homeland; until then, it would always be partial, cultural more than political. For many centuries, as members of the Eastern Roman Empire and then of the Ottoman, the Greeks remembered that they were one and held in their imaginations a sense of community. Finally, in 1832, as a result of the War of Independence, Greece became a true nation state, with its own territory, government, history, religion, language and culture.

Robin Waterfield is the author of Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2018).