274 Emily Mackil
3.61.2). The Plataeans, by refusing to rejoin thekoinonin 431, implicitly rejected the
Theban claim that ethnic identity ought to determine political allegiance. They did not,
however, entirely disavow their Boeotian identity. The third-century travel-writer Her-
acleides Criticus reports that the Plataeans called themselves Athenian Boeotians (BNJ
369A Fragment 1.11). In doing so, they expressed their view that ethnic identity and
political choices are not—or need not be—mutually determinative. Surprisingly enough,
when Heracleides wrote hisPeriegesisin the 270s or 260s (Arenz 2006), the Plataeans
were probably already members of the Hellenistic Boeotiankoinon(e.g.,IGVII.2723
line 3). By the early third century, they claimed a complex identity that was now separated
from politics.
The dynamic may have been slightly different in Phocis, which lay just to the west of
Boeotia. Archaeological evidence suggests that, in the Iron Age and early Archaic peri-
ods, the region known in the Classical period as Phocis was comprised of two distinct
zones: the Cephisus Valley in the north and the region to the south of Mt. Parnassus,
which divided the two. Each zone appears to have centered around a regional sanctuary,
Kalapodi to the north and Delphi to the south (Morgan 2003: 24–5, 113–34). When
Delphi came under the control of an amphictyony in the early sixth century, following
the conflict known as the First Sacred War (Davies 1994; McInerney 1997: 165–72),
the sanctuary at Kalapodi, probably belonging to Apollo and known in antiquity as Abai
(Arch. Rep. 53 [2006–7] 41; 54 [2007–8] 47), received heavy investment, including
a mid-sixth-century temple that has recently been excavated. Following the First Sacred
War, Phocis was largely controlled by the Thessalians, and it was in opposition to this
foreign rule that the Phocians began vigorously to formulate a single ethnic identity.
Epichoric myths reflect claims to an unusual variety of origins by the various Phocian
communities, who became connected to one another by the assertion of a common
eponymous ancestor, Phokos (McInerney 1999: 127–49). If a single Phocian identity
was forged in the crucible of Thessalian occupation, it lent support to a politics of coop-
eration only after the foreign rulers were expelled in the late sixth or early fifth century
(Herodotus 8.27.2). They commemorated their victory with the dedication of Thessalian
shields to Apollo at Abai/Kalapodi and at Delphi. In this period, the Phocians cooperated
to produce a coinage emblazoned with the abbreviated collective ethnic and the head of
a bull, perhaps the bull sacrificed to the hero Phokos himself (Head 1911: 338). They
also appear to have built some kind of a structure to house political meetings, known in
later sources as thePhokikon(McInerney 1997). However, we know nothing about how
the Phocian communities were persuaded to participate in thekoinon, or about the insti-
tutions by which they did so in this period. What is clear is that the exogenous pressure of
foreign occupation encouraged the articulation of a shared identity, which then became
the framework within which a politics of cooperation was situated after the liberation of
the region from the Thessalians.
Elsewhere, the articulation of an ethnic identity seems to have facilitated the creation
of akoinon, but was not oppositional in the same way. The Achaeans are an illuminat-
ing example. Archaeological evidence suggests that, before the fifth century, the territory
known as Achaea, along the northern coast of the Peloponnese, was home to four distinct
material zones. The material culture of the region becomes more homogeneous only in
the fifth century, precisely the period in which a distinct Achaean identity began to be
promulgated (Morgan and Hall 1996). The fifth-century Achaeans claimed to be the