A New Approach to the Development of Political Confederacies in Ancient Greece

FAIN: FT-53323-05

Emily Maureen Mackil
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT 06459-3208)

The form of political organization that we know as federalism has its origins in Classical Greece, but we have no satisfactory understanding of why such states, marked by the participation of multiple communities with partial sovereignty, evolved in the Classical world where city-states fought bitterly to retain their full autonomy. I propose to answer that question by rethinking radically the nature of these confederacies. I suggest that they were not artificial governmental constructs created from the top down but rather regional power structures that evolved gradually to maintain and protect relationships of economic and military interdependence and cultic participation among small communities.