Mummius and the Greek Leagues
Nothing in Pausanias's description of the results of the Achaean War has generated so much controversy as his statement regarding the dissolution and the subsequent restoration of the Greek leagues.[75] Since this assertion immediately follows a list of actions taken by Mummius and the commissioners, scholars have always assumed that this sentence forms part of that list. It then becomes necessary to explain why Rome would have formally disbanded the leagues in 146-145 only to reform them "not many years later" (Paus. 7.16.10). Those who sense an a priori difficulty with a formal abolition of the leagues or interpret other evidence in such a way as to contradict Pausanias's assertion dismiss it as another example of Pausanian historical confusion.[76]
It is possible, however, that Pausanias has here been misread. The crucial verb is in the pluperfect tense and passive voice (
): Pausanias has mentioned the major features of Mummius's arrangements in the aorist or imperfect tenses, then adds in the pluperfect that the leagues
had been dissolved.[77] Strictly speaking, Pausanias simply does not say that Mummius dissolved the leagues. It seems that Pausanias here has stepped back in time and is referring to an event that occurred not as part of, but before, the settlement.
If we are to seek some time before the formal settlement of the war in which to place the dissolution of these leagues, there can be none better than the concluding stage of the war itself. As far as one can reconstruct the story from Pausanias and Zonaras, our fullest sources, after the disastrous battle at the Isthmus the Achaean League simply collapsed: soldiers and commanders fled to their home cities, and the federal strategos Diaeus committed suicide.[78] Under such circumstances it is very difficult to imagine that the League was able to cohere sufficiently to surrender en bloc,[79] assuming Mummius was even inclined to accept anything but individual deditiones ; and it will have been in the interest of many member cities to attempt to distance themselves from the actions of the League. The Boeotian League, assuming that it existed in 146,[80] and the Phocian League, if at least part of it had joined the Boeotians, will have suffered the same fate as Metellus marched through the country.[81] It was by military action, and by accepting the surrender of individual cities, not by a formal ban, that Metellus and Mummius caused the collapse of the leagues.
A close historical and linguistic parallel without actual fighting, is provided by the "dissolution" of the Boeotian League in 172/271 as a direct result of the individual deditiones of the Boeotian cities to Q. Marcius
Philippus (Polyb. 27.2.6-7) rather than a formal ban. Using precisely the word Pausanias applies to the Greek leagues in 146, Polybius writes that "The league of the Boeotians was dissolved [
] and scattered into its individual cities."[82] Pausanias need not be speaking of a formal enactment abolishing the leagues any more than is Polybius.[83] He inserted the reference to the collapse of the leagues here presumably to supply the necessary background to what immediately follows—their restoration with Roman sanction "a few years later"; mention of the leagues was perhaps also suggested by the reference to the abolition of enktesis (foreign landownership) immediately preceding because, in fact, enktesis in member states was a characteristic feature of the federal states (and indeed Pausanias does link the two here twice in immediate succession). Whether or not enktesis was specifically forbidden or merely followed from the collapse of the leagues, the effect certainly will have been to fragment the former constituent cities of the leagues into quite separate economic and political units where previously a very high degree of integration had been achieved, some idea of which can be gained from the large proportion of non-Epidaurian Achaeans in the Epidaurian list of the dead of the battle of the Isthmus.[84]
The significant point in all of this for us is that Pausanias 7.16.9 is not good evidence for the formal abolition of the leagues by Mummius. If my interpretation is correct, he and the senatorial commission did not ban the leagues but did nothing to reconstitute them. The Achaean, Boeotian, and Phocian leagues were casualties of the war, not of the settlement; they were not the marked victims of a new senatorial hostility.
T. Schwertfeger has gone farther, rejecting Pausanias altogether and arguing not only that Mummius and the senatorial commission did not dissolve the leagues, but that they reconstituted at least the Achaean League already in 146-145. In his view, the future of the leagues was the crucial question of 146-145, so Mummius and the commission must have done something about it; and their solution can only have been to recon-
stitute the Achaean League, in view of the fact that its existence is attested later.[85]
Obviously, I hold no brief for Pausanias, but it must be said that the evidence for this view is disappointingly weak: both the inscription from Dyme and Polybius refer to a politeia "given" or "restored" by the Romans to the Achaeans, dearly already in 146-145 rather than a few years later; and an honorary inscription for Damon of Patrae, if dated to 122, used
as an ethnic designation for a number of men from various Achaean communities.[86] But the inscription for Damon cannot bear any weight. Its date is in fact quite uncertain: the years 162 and 96 cannot safely be excluded from consideration;[87] nor in any case need evidence for the existence of the Achaean League in 122 clash with Pausanias, who says that the leagues were restored "not many years later" than 146. But regardless of the matter of date, the inscription does not necessarily attest to the existence of a league. There is no mention of a : the dedicants are merely "Achaeans who went on the expedition" under Damon.[88] They had a (line 9)—Damon—but auxiliary troops will often have had their own commanders, which certainly does not imply the existence of a league.[89] What then of the politeia in Polybius and in the inscription from Dyme, which is dearly part of the Mummian settlement? The issue here is whether politeia refers to a pattern for a league or to the constitutional form of the cities of the former Achaean League.[90] The law that Polybius himself drafted on interstate jurisdiction (39-5.5) may imply the absence of a federal citizenship, while Pausanias explicitly, in a passage separate from his description of the Achaean War and its settlement, gives Polybius
credit for establishing politeiai (in the plural).[91] Q. Fabius Maximus in the Dymaean inscription had good reason to exaggerate the subversiveness of the troublemakers who, he alleges, had tried to overthrow the politeia restored to the Achaeans (not just Dyme). The earliest certain testimony to the existence of the Achaean League after Mummius appears not before early in the first century B.C .[92] The evidence is therefore very unclear, but none of it conflicts with Pausanias's view that the leagues did not function for a few years after 146.
The evidence for the Boeotian League after the settlement of the Achaean War is equally unhelpful for assessing Pausanias. Indeed, it is controversial whether the Boeotian League as such was reconstituted after the Third Macedonian War and thus even existed in 146 as Pausanias appears to believe, but let us suppose that it did.[93] The first dear attestation of its existence after 146 comes in an inscription dated before 120 by one epigraphist but more usually toward the turn of the second century.[94] Only the evidence for the Phocian League provides some support for Pausanias's notion of a lapse for a short period after 146. The disappearance of the name of the Phocian federal strategos from Phocian manumissions at Delphi between ca. 146 and 128, where previously this official had been cited in the dating formula without exception, is suggestive.[95] Although this falls short of proof for the nonexistence of the Phocian League between those years (for even after 128 the strategos is no longer regularly cited in the dating formulae), it does suggest an interruption of some kind.[96]
Other documents mentioning the Phocian League or its officials are too loosely dated to offer any help.[97]
In sum, Pausanias's statement about the Greek leagues after the Achaean War cannot be decisively confirmed. On the other hand, it receives some small corroboration from the Phocian manumission lists at Delphi, and it is (in contrast to other points discussed above) not likely to be the result of some misapprehension of the status of Greece in 146 or polemical distortion by his source. It may therefore be provisionally accepted. The "restoration" of the leagues will probably have taken the form of a favorable senatorial response to an embassy sent to Rome for the purpose. At the same time, the right to own land abroad was restored—a fundamental element of league structure—and the fines imposed by Mummius were remitted (Paus. 7.16.10). The date of this act is irrecoverable, although it should precede 128 if the Phocian evidence has been read correctly.[98] It is tempting to associate the restoration of the leagues and the other signs of Roman "pity" mentioned by Pausanias with Polybius's visit to the Senate sometime after the Mummian settlement had taken root (Polyb. 39.8.1-2). The leagues, when reconstituted, may have been smaller or weaker or both, but this need not be attributed to Roman dictation.[99]
The central point, for our purposes, is that Pausanias, if accepted on the fate of the Greek leagues, does not imply that Mummius and the senatorial
commission formally abolished them. The prevalent view that the future of Greek leagues was a burning problem which Mummius and the Senate could not avoid confronting in 146,[100] and that consequently he set about abolishing some or reconstituting others because they were allegedly a useful means of controlling Greece,[101] blows the issue out of all proportion. The Greek federal states were hardly a source of worry to the Romans, given their proven inability to challenge Roman power—least of all now, when the strongest among them, the Achaean League, had been crushed, and the Boeotian and Phocian leagues had pathetically folded. Their fate could safely be left to the chastened Greeks themselves. Indeed, after "not many years" in abeyance, they reappeared: "Hellenic institutions, once the Romans retired, had a way of slipping back into place."[102]