CHAPTER 18
Ethnos and Koinon
Emily Mackil
Primordial versus Instrumental Identity
It is often said that the Greek world was a world ofpoleis. Yet, in some areas, widespread
urbanization was slower to develop, and communities formed around clusters of settle-
ments known asethn ̄e. If the urbanpolisand the less urbanizedethnosare often taken
to be dichotomous, they nevertheless share an important characteristic: both became
members of larger states calledkoina(singular:koinon), which are frequently dubbed
“federal states.” This phenomenon is widespread: by the late fourth century, nearly half
of thepoleisof mainland Greece and the Peloponnese had become members of one or
another of 11koina. While the non-autonomous or dependentpolishas recently become
a recognizable phenomenon (Hansen 1997; Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 87–94), the par-
ticipation of apolisin akoinonraises a different specter, insofar as membership typically
entailed a carefully delineated set of privileges and obligations that are not necessarily
present in the relationship between a dependentpolisand its autonomous master. This
raises the question of motivation, for participation was rarely coerced (Mackil 2013):
why werepoleisandethn ̄ewilling to enter into such arrangements? One of the standard
answers has been shared ethnicity.
Scholars have taken two different views of the relationship betweenethnosandkoinon,
between ethnic identity and the formation of what are usually called federal states in
the Greek world, which map closely onto the two basic views of ethnicity, the primor-
dial and the instrumental (see Siapkas, Chapter 5, in this volume). The primordialists
explained the development of Greek federal states as a natural outgrowth of communi-
ties bound together by a shared identity. For Fritz Gschnitzer (1955), these communities
were defined by the population group (Stamm, tribe) rather than a particular place, a dis-
tinction that made it possible to take ancient migration myths as largely accurate reports
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.