Common Peace and League of Corinth, 338/7

Two non-joining fragments of a stele., found in Athens (a on the Acropolis, find-spot of b unknown), now in the Epigraphical Museum. Phot. Kern, Inscriptiones Graecae, Taf. 30; Heisserer, Alexander, 1011 pis. 23. Attic-Ionic, retaining the old o for ov in a. 12; astoichedon 33 with irregularities in 11. 1921; b stoichedon. A. Wilhelm, Sb. Wien CLXV. vi 1910 = Akademieschriftten, i. 371425; IG n^ 236; SIG* 260; U. Wilcken, Sb. Berlin1929, 291318, esp. 31618; Schwahn, HeeresmatrikelundLandfriedePhilipps II. vonMakedonien] Raue, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des korinthischen Bundes] Tod 177; Svt. 403*. I; Heisserer, Alexander, 812. Trans. Heisserer, Alexander, 812; Harding 99. A. See also Larsen, Representative Government, 4765; Ryder, Koine Eirene, 10215, 15062; [Hammond&] Griffith, 60446; Hammond [&Walbank], 5719; J. Buckler, /CSxix 1994, 99122.

then used the title 'king' (but he rightly rejected the suggestion [Dittenberger on IG vn 4250 (sicj\ that 'of Macedon' inscribed over an erasure in A was a replacement for 'king': 17 n. 26). Errington objected that Aristomedes was already in Persian service by 340 (Didyrn. In Dem. ix. 4352 = Thp. FGrHn^F 222), and that tez/amn the Lebadea inscription is likely to have been an informal description rather than a title claimed by Amyntas; but he accepted Ellis's late date for our inscriptions and suggested that the two Amyntases were sent to Oropus by Philip with news of his settlement. Griffith accepted Errington's interpretation of 'king', but wanted a slightly earlier date for all the inscriptions; Hammond dates IG vn 3055 to the early 3505 when he believes Amyntas was king. For the use of the title 'king' cf. on 76. If Knoepfler is right, Oropus could have awarded proxenies between 338 and 335 but not between 366 and 338, and the Amyntases are likely to have visited it in connection with its liberation from Thebes. That seems to us the best context for our inscriptions; if Alexander saw these Amyntases as a threat, their being honoured by Oropus might help to explain his decision not to leave Oropus independent but to return it to Athens. However, the dedication of Aristomedes must be earlier; and Amyntas' consultation of the oracle of Trophonius need not be linked with the other inscriptions. As for the language, oiViijs is Euboean, and eiv and ru^ei are distinctively Eretrian, but some Eretrian features (e.g. the use of rho in place of sigma) are absent. A. Morpurgo Davies remarks (in Grespo et al., Dialectologies, Graeca, 261-79 at 273-8) that the earliest Oropian inscriptions are linguistically Euboean; these two are transitional; subsequent inscriptions are Attic, even at times when Oropus formed part of the Boeotian federation.

Oath. I swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, Poseidon,Athena, Ares, all the gods and goddesses: I shallabide by the peace (?); and I shall neither breakthe agreement with Philip (?) nor take up arms forharm against any of those who abide by the oaths(?), neither by land nor by sea; nor shall I take anycity or guard-post nor harbour, for war, of any ofthose participating in the peace, by any craft orcontrivance; nor shall I overthrow the kingdomof Philip or his descendants, nor the constitutionsexisting in each state when they swore the oathsconcerning the peace; nor shall I myself do anythingcontrary to these agreements, nor shall Iallow any one else as far as possible.17 If any one does commit any breach of treatyconcerning the agreements, I shall go in supportas called on by those who are wronged (?), and Ishall make war against the one who transgressesthe common peace (?) as decided by the commoncouncil (synedrion) and called on by the hegemon; andI shall not abandon

After his defeat of Athens, Thebes, and their allies at Ghaeronea in 338, Philip'ssupremacy was accepted by all the states of mainland Greece except Sparta (Just,ix. 5. m, cf. Arr. Anab. i. 16. vn, Plut. Alex. 16. xviu; D.S. xvn. 3. ivv has Arcadia forSparta). He first made individual treaties with a number of separate states (discussedby G. Roebuck, CPxliii 1948, 73-92 = S. Perlman (ed.), Philip and Athens, 2oga-2i8):this involved a number of territorial adjustments, and also the final dissolution of theSecond Athenian League (explicitly stated Paus. i. 25. iii). This was followed by onor more meetings at Corinth (in general, D.S. xvi. 89, Just. ix. 5), in which Philipunited the Greeks in a common peace treaty ([Dem.] xvii. Treaty with Alexander2, etc.),created an organization, known to modern scholars as the League of Corinth, whichhad a synedrwn ('council': [Dem.] xvii. 15) and in which he held the position ofhegemon('leader': cf. Dem. xviii. Crown 201, Polyb. ix. 33. vii, Plut. Inst. Lac. 240 A), and gainedapproval for a campaign against the Persians, which he was to command (cf. Aeschin. Ctes. 132, P. Oxy. i 12 = FGrHz^, iii. 913). This is the stage to which our inscriptionbelongs.In 336 he sent out the first forces of this campaign (D.S. xvi. 91. ii-iv, xvii. 7), butin the same year he was assassinated (D.S. xvi. 91. iv - 94). Alexander the Great succeededfirst to the throne of Macedon, then to the archonship ofThessaly (cf. on 44),and finally to the leadership of the League of Corinth and the command of the campaignagainst the Persians (D.S. xvn. 34, Arr. Anab. i. i. iiii, etc.). Belonging to theperiod of Alexander's leadership we have another inscription (discussed below) anda speech preserved with the Demosthenic corpus ([Dem.] xvii. Treaty with Alexander.dated to the beginning of Alexander's reign by a scholiast [p. 196 1. 18 Dilts]; but 333by W. Will, RM2 cxxv 1982, 202-13, Athen undAlexander, 67-70 cf. 62-3; 331 by G. L.Cawkwell, Phoen. xv 1961, 74-8; 330 by [Hammond &] Griffith, 627, without discussion)which accuses Alexander of breaking the promises made to the Greeks. In 319Polyperchon in the name of'the kings and the leaders' proclaimed a renewal of thedispensation of Philip and Alexander, which had effectively lapsed in the Lamian Warof the Greeks against Antipater in 323322 (D.S. xvin. 556); and in 303/2 a revivedleague was founded by Antigonus Monophthalmus and Demetrius Poliorcetes (D.S.xx. 102. i, Plut. Demetr. 25. iii, cf. D.S. xx. 46. v (307)), from which we have substantiafragments of a long inscription (cited below).Wilhelm established that our two fragments are from the Athenian copy of a documentwhich was probably published in many or all of the participating states: fr. acontains part of the oath sworn by the participants, fr. b part of a list of participantswith numerals against them. The general sense of fr. a is clear; in its language thistreaty generally echoes earlier treaties, though at some points the vocabulary in whichit is expressed is not certain: in accepting restorations ofemne ('peace') in 11. 3,10, an(koine eirene: 'common peace') 20, and ofsynthekai ('agreement') in 11.16 and 18, we havebeen guided by the fact that the words eirene and synthekai are preserved on the stone,in 11.14 and 4 respectively, and are used repeatedly in [Dem.] xvii, whereas symmachia/symmachos ('alliance'/'ally') are not. In the list on fr. b we have avoided adventurousrestorations.The arrangements of 338/7 have been much discussed, often in excessively legalis-Itic terms. It is clear from [Dem.] xvn that the Greeks swore oaths which made themparticipants in a common peace treaty (2, 6), and that the treaty stipulated that theGreeks were to be free and autonomous (8), with their stability guaranteed in variousrespects (io, 15, 16). They were represented in a synedrwn (15), and they werein a relationship with the king of Macedon, such that interference by him in Greekstates could be considered a breach of the agreement (4, etc.), but the king was nota member of the organization on equal terms with the Greek states: Philip will havebeen the hegemon, working with the synedrwn (our inscription, a. 202), and 01 etrl rrjKOLvr] (j)vXaKrj rera-y^iivoi ('those put in charge of the common protection', 15: cf.the Committee of Public Safety [Gomite de Salut Public] established in France in1793) will have been a board of agents appointed by Alexander to act for him whilehe was away on campaign (Ryder, 1567, [Hammond &] Griffith, ii. 63946; againstWilcken, Sb. Wien 1932, 13940, Gawkwell, Philip of Macedon, 1712). The words symmachia/symmachos are not attested (cf. above); but the provision for common actionagainst any one who broke the peace (a. 18 sqq.; [Dem.] xvn. 6,10), as in at least someof the earlier common peace treaties (cf. below), means that the participants were infact bound together by a defensive alliance, whether that language was used or not (onthe avoidance of the term 'alliance' in conjunction with a common peace cf. Ryder,723), and by committing themselves to the campaign against the Persians they werein fact committing themselves to an offensive alliance (Arr. Anab. in. 24. v; the Greekstaking part in that campaign are frequently referred to as 'allies', e.g. Arr. Anab. i. 24.iii). The decision to campaign against Persia probably belongs to a later occasion thanthe original establishment of the League (esp. D.S. xvi. 89, Plut. Phoc. 16. v-vi): Hammond[& Walbank] believes that an alliance was made at that stage, but Ryder and[Hammond &] Griffith do not.The gods named as those by whom the oath was sworn are plausibly restored asthose named in 53 (cf. Svt. 446, cited below). The early part of the undertaking is astandard formulation for a peace treaty (cf. e.g. the Peace of Nicias in 421: Thuc. v.18. iv), and is alluded to in [Dem.] xvn. 16. More striking is that the participants wereguaranteed not only freedom and autonomy ([Dem.] xvii. 8: not in our inscription)but also the preservation of the constitution which they had when they swore to thepeace (11.1214). ([Dem.] xvn gives the impression of reproducing the actual clauses ofthe treaty, though it may sometimes be enlarging on them for the author's polemicalpurposes, and we need to remember, for instance, that 'tyrant' in the fourth centurymay be no more than a pejorative term for a party leader to whom the user of the termis opposed: 15 spells out a ban on illegal execution and exile, confiscation of property,redistribution of land, cancellation of debts or liberation of slaves 'for revolution'; 4,7, exempts tyranny from the preservation of constitutions. For a fear of tyranny inAthens at this time cf. 79.) The participants in turn swore allegiance to the kingdom ofPhilip and his descendants (as Athens had made the Peace of Philocrates with Philipand his descendants in 346: Dem. xix. Embassy 48). (There has been argument as towhether Philip used the title 'king'. Whatever may have been the case in Macedonearlier [cf. on 75], the word basileia ['kingdom'] is preserved on the stone in a. n, butthis is not enough to prove that Philip used the title: see Borza, Before Alexander, 12-15.)The obligation to support participants who were wronged was included in at any ratethe later of the previous common peace treaties (Ryder, 72-3); but the previous commonpeace treaties had not provided a mechanism to give effect to that obligation,whereas this treaty, with a synedrwn and a hegemon, does.Attempts to reconstruct the list of members on fr. b are too speculative to be worthpursuing. The numerals presumably indicate the number of units assigned to a stateor group of states, and their representation in the council and their military obligationswere probably in proportion to these. What survives comes from the end of thelist: those named are largely from the north, but are not given in a logical geographicalorder: [Samothrace and] Thasos, islands of the northern Aegean, follow the Thessalians (or some of them), but precede the Ambraciots, from the west, some communityor communities from Thrace, in the east, then peoples of northern Greeceincluding those on the borders of Thessaly, and the list ends with islands off the westcoast of Greece. None of the voting units here is a single city, if editors are right tocombine Samothrace with Thasos (proposed by Wilhelm on the grounds that theyare adjacent islands and would appropriately account for two units), but we cannotbe sure that that would be true of the complete list. Schwahn guessed that there mayhave been about a hundred synedroi altogether.What Philip has done in this treaty is combine several strands in recent Greek diplomacy,to dress up his control of mainland Greece in clothes which would be acceptableto the Greeks. A common peace treaty settles outstanding disputes and tries toguarantee the stability of the present state of affairs; the apparatus of a hegemon and asynedrwn, as in such leagues as the Second Athenian League, provides a mechanism forenforcing the peace, which previous common peace treaties had lacked; proportional,rather than equal, representation was used in the Boeotian federation of the late fifthand early fourth centuries. But behind this facade lies Philip's supremacy: the Greeksswore to uphold not only the constitutions of the member states but also the kingdomof Philip and his descendants; however much the synedrwn might be independent ofPhilip in theory (cf. below), he as hegemon would in practice be responsible for identifyingbreaches of the peace and ordering action in response to them; and, whether theLeague was reinforced by a full alliance or not, in undertaking the war against Persiait became an instrument of Philip's policy.When the Peace of Philocrates had been made in 346, Athens prompted by thesynedrwn of the Second League had wanted a common peace open to all the Greeks,but Philip had rejected that and had insisted on a bilateral peace and alliance (Aesch.in. Ctes. 6872); later, when he offered to renegotiate the Peace of Philocrates, Philipwas prepared to accept a common peace ([Dem.] vii. Halon. 30-2). This peace, andits league of participants, at first included all the mainland Greeks except Sparta; itwas extended, probably in 336, to the Greeks of the Aegean islands (78, 84); in 334 theGreeks of the Asiatic mainland were liberated and made allies of Alexander but wereprobably not incorporated in this league (86).The fragment of a treaty with Alexander (from Athens: IG n2 329 = Tod 183 = Svt.403. II = Heisserer, 326 ~ Harding 102) refers to the sending of troops and theirprovisioning: this may refer to the contribution which Athens was required to make tothe campaign (Heisserer, Alexander, 203); cf. the syntaxis of 86. It appears to end witinstructions for publication at Pydna by 'those put in charge of the common protection'(11. 1214: title largely restored). Alexander used the league to condemn Thebefor its revolt in 335 (Arr. Anab. i. 9. ix); the rising of 331330 led by Sparta was referredby Antipater, Alexander's commander in Europe, to the league and by the league toAlexander (D.S. xvn. 73. vvi). Alexander's order in 324 that the Greek states were totake back their exiles (cf. on 101; otherwise D.S. xvn. 109. i, xvin. 8. iivii; Curt. x. ii.4-7; Just. xin. 5. ii-v) was a breach of the league's guarantee of constitutional stability,but probably by then he had long since ceased to care about the rules of the league.Fragments survive of a detailed inscription concerning the revival of the leaguein 303/2 (best text Svt. 446; trans. Harding 138, Austin 42 [both iii only]; cf. Plut.Demetr. 25. iv). How many of the details are new and how many have been repeatedfrom the original league we cannot tell, but among points worth noting are: the oathis probably sworn by the same deities (139-40 = v. 23-4); what is sworn to can berestored as an alliance with Antigonus and Demetrius and their descendants (140-2 =v. 24-6: sym preserved), with an undertaking not to make war on participants or tooverthrow the kingdom of Antigonus, Demetrius, and their descendants (1427 = v.2631); the synednon is to be presided over by five proedroi, to be appointed by lot whenthe war [is over] (7683 = iii. 218) but until then appointed by the kings (91 = iii. 36);its meetings are to be summoned by 'iheproedm and the king or the general designatedby the kings' (sic) until the war is over, and thereafter at the major festivals (703 =iii. 1518; in an earlier formulation of this, 6670 = iii. 1115, the general is describedas 'the general left by the kings in charge of the common protection'); decisions areto be binding, there is to be a quorum of over 50%, and synedroi cannot be called toaccount in their own cities for the decisions of the synednon (736 = iii. 1821); citiesare to be fined if they fail to send synedroi, except when the synedroi are absent throughillness (914 = iii. 369); the .synednon is to have judicial powers (e.g. 66, 813 = iii. n,26-8).