Creating a Common Polity by Mackil Emily;

Author:Mackil, Emily;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

The Evanescent Polis: Regional Responses to Localized Stress

It should be clear by now that by the Hellenistic period the koina of mainland Greece took their role as managers of regional economies quite seriously. They took measures to gain and protect regional economic resources, including coinage, to address debt crises, and to end disputes between member poleis that frequently arose over access to a variety of resources, principally but not only land and harbors. In all these ways, the koinon can be seen as an institution that dramatically increased the capacity of its member states to cope with stress, whether induced by ecological or by social factors, and in so doing it decreased their vulnerability.299 There is one additional strategy, stemming still from the basic principle of regional mobility, by which some koina mitigated the vulnerability of their small member states. Settlement mobility, perhaps best understood as the extreme form of economic mobility, became an option to communities under severe stress that could rely either on close social relations with other communities (above all, those that were expressed in the form of kinship, however fictive) or on formal, institutional ties such as those provided by membership in a koinon.300 Ancient sources suggest that under strain, some poleis evanesced, being abandoned by their inhabitants for more salubrious places or for communities within the koinon in which survival, if not prosperity, would be easier.

When the Helikeans refused the requests of the Ionians’ sacred ambassadors in 373 and subsequently disturbed their sacrifice at the altar of Poseidon Helikonios, they probably did not realize that they were perched on a spot of land that was highly vulnerable to catastrophe (map 3).301 A coastal delta fed by the alluvial silting of three rivers, resting directly above the highly active Helike Fault, and shadowed by the Achaian mountains, which reach nearly 1,800 meters, Helike was vulnerable not only to earthquakes but also to two of their more insidious and deadly counterparts: soil liquefaction and tsunami.302 Ancient literary sources report that an earthquake followed by a massive sea wave destroyed the city in a single night.303 Strabo, citing the fourth-century philosopher Herakleides Pontikos, reports that “two thousand men were sent by the Achaians to collect the bodies of the dead, but they were unable to do so. They divided up the territory among the neighbors.”304 Ongoing archaeological investigations appear to confirm the claim that Helike was not inhabited during the early Hellenistic period, as does its complete absence from the literary and numismatic record after the 370s.305 “The Achaians” in Herakleides’ report can only be the Achaian koinon. That their rescue and retrieval effort was unsuccessful is less important than the fact that they made it in the first place. We must likewise see the koinon’s hand in the distribution of that portion of Helike’s territory that was still above water: a land grab by Aigion or Boura or Aigai would surely have been contested by the other Achaian poleis, and the koinon would likely have become involved in arbitration to resolve the issue.

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