INTRODUCTION

It may seem perverse – or even just plain wrong – to claim that hegemony is a neglected topic in the study of Greek interstate politics. The idea that one Greek state could, and did, exercise leadership over a group of other states recurs throughout the classical period, from the Persian Wars down to the campaigns of Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon. Also widespread is evidence that this leadership could, and did, extend beyond the military sphere (the narrow meaning of the Greek word hêgemonia), to encompass a more wide-ranging set of interstate obligations, established and, where necessary, enforced by a dominant power, but relying primarily on voluntary compliance rather than coerced obedience. It is ‘hegemony’ in this wider (modern) sense which has tended to be rather marginalised in modern discussions of classical Greek interstate politics, and which will be the focus of this chapter.

My central contention is that it is both appropriate and helpful to analyse hegemonic power in this period as a mode of interstate behaviour in its own right, rather than to see it, as ancient historians often tend to, merely as a failed or concealed version of imperialism. To support that claim, I will address two themes in particular. My first goal is to add some substance to the basic definition (sketched out above) of hegemony as a form of leadership characterised by willing compliance rather than coerced control, and to show that this form of leadership was (or could be) seen by the Greeks as a viable, even desirable, form of interstate structure. My second – longer, and more difficult – task is to explore whether there is any consistency in Greek views of how that willing compliance could be secured: what, that is, would constitute a ‘legitimate’ mode of hegemonic control and how could it be sustained?

My aim, then, is to show that there is in this period a distinct form of interstate behaviour, which can reasonably be labelled ‘hegemonic’. Ancient commentators on and agents of interstate politics might not have had a single label for this type of behaviour, but they did, fairly consistently, associate certain types of actions with it, and expect certain (largely, but not exclusively, positive) outcomes to result from it.