Onmainland Greece in the early third century there were political developments
that indicate the limits of Macedonian power and interference. Two new political
groupings formed in a kind of incipient federalism. The Aetolian League in northern
Greece, comprising a number of smaller communities, had an assembly made up of
men of military age meeting twice a year. There was a council and a chief magistrate
who was also general, elected on an annual basis. The league had a notable military
success for their part in repelling an invasion of Greece by the Gauls in 278, who had
come as far south as Delphi. The Achaean League comprised a number of states in
the northern Peloponnese. There were four meetings per year, a council and an
assembly in both of which voting was by city. There were two generals at first, then
a single general in the second half of the third century. These Leagues had come
together in the previous century but acquired their greater constitutional forms and
prominence in the wake of Macedonian power. According to Polybius writing of the
Achaean League in the second century, ‘They have the same laws, weights, measures
and coinage, as well as the same magistrates, council-members and judges’ (2, 37,
10). Individual states continued to have their own political institutions alongside their
federal membership. These two Leagues were more formally constituted than the old
Spartan league and they were a looser federal union than the Athenian empire in
which the subject states had little or no say in the government. In 243 the Achaean
League actually freed Corinth from Macedonian control and most of the states south
of the isthmus joined the league with the notable exception of Sparta. However, these
impulses towards union were too little and too late at a time when the Greek states
found themselves faced with more formidable powers, first the Macedonian
monarchy and then the Romans.
Egypt of the Ptolemies
The Ptolemies ruled Egypt and part of Asia Minor with their capital at Alexandria,
which had been founded by Alexander on the Nile delta in 331. In the immediate
aftermath of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy had diverted his body, which was bound for
Macedonia, and had taken it to Alexandria and kept it on permanent display. He had
also used the money he found in Egyptian treasuries to equip himself with a
mercenary force. In due course he proclaimed himself Pharoah in 305. But in many
of its features, its architecture and its civic organization, the new city was instituted
on Greek lines. It had its own exclusive hereditary citizenship, recruited from various
parts of the Greek world and exempt from royal taxation, its own laws and its own
coinage, which was eventually used throughout Egypt. Its great harbour facilitated
trade and the colossal lighthouse built by Ptolemy II on the island of Pharos that
enclosed it was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, a beacon to sailors,
and symbol of the city’s pre-eminence. Its strategic position soon made it a great
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