Ethnos and Koinon 271of the history of a population group. Jakob Larsen (1968) likewise postulated the exis-
tence of primordial tribal groups that morphed, by mysterious and largely uncharted
processes, into states with institutions that we would recognize as essentially federal. He
took the view, for example, that the Boeotians were in fact a single population group
that occupied their territory in central Greece at the time of the Dorian migration, and
that this same group formed what he called the “Boeotian League” in the sixth century
(Larsen 1968: 26–8). Exactly how their “tribal unity” related to the formation of a state
around the boundaries of the ethnic group is not clear in the ancient sources, and Larsen
never attempted to address this crucial problem. This primordialist view persisted into
the 1990s (e.g., Daverio Rocchi 1993; Grainger 1999).
However, in the intervening years, anthropologists and sociologists showed that eth-
nic identity was a highly dynamic and labile social construct, effected by negotiation
rather than genetics, and frequently deployed to achieve particular ends (e.g., Barth
1969; Smith 1986). If the primordialist view of ethnicity has been largely replaced by
the instrumentalist, and ancient historians have charted the degree to which such identi-
ties in ancient Greece were constructed and adapted to meet contemporary needs (e.g.,
Hall 1997; Morgan 2003), they have only begun to analyze the implications of this
conceptual shift for the particular case of thekoinon. In his work on Phocis, Jeremy
McInerney observes that mythology, as a means of articulating an ethnic identity, “pro-
vided the necessary fiction out of which some form of political federation and statehood
could evolve” (McInerney 1999: 148). This view is echoed by Hans Beck’s remark, in an
article surveying new developments in the study of ancient federalism, that theethnoswas
“the fiction which made the creation of a political organism possible” (Beck 2003: 181).
Both essentially see ethnic identity as necessary for the construction of federal political
institutions. Angela Kühr has suggested that, in the case of Boeotia, the formation of the
koinonstrengthened a pre-existent but weak sense of Boeotian identity, articulated above
all through myth (Kühr 2006: 301–6; cf. Ganter, Chapter 15 in this volume).
In what follows, I shall propose a slight adjustment to these views: however fictive it
may have been, ethnic identity was an argument used to generate support for a politics
of cooperation. The argument was made above all by assertions of a group identity artic-
ulated through myths of consanguinity and the possession of a common territory, which
Hall (1997) isolates as the only two criteria of ethnic identity in the Greek world. The
ethnic argument was particularly important when thekoinonwas still a real innovation in
Classical mainland Greece. By the Hellenistic period, however, it had become possible to
envisionkoinawithout ethnic origins, such as theKoinonof the Islanders, an instrument
for Antigonid and later Ptolemaic control of the Aegean (Buraselis 1982: 60–87). Even
in Classical mainland Greece, I will suggest, the efficacy of the ethnic argument was always
limited, and it was only one argument among many. Thekoinonwas something radically
different from theethnos, a complex, regional state with a careful and deliberate distri-
bution of power among several interdependent scales (polis, district, andkoinon), rather
than a group of communities with loose and informal structures for cooperation (Mor-
gan 2003). The former initially grew out of the latter, but is to be sharply distinguished
from it. The politics of cooperation had in fact a great deal to offer its participants, and
these advantages presented compelling arguments of a different kind, which may help us
to understand whykoinaso quickly and so frequently overstepped their putative ethnic
boundaries. I shall first address several cases (chosen for their richness, complexity, and