Coinage of Boeotia

Sale: Triton XIII, Lot: 125. Estimate $750.  Closing Date: Monday, 4 January 2010.  Sold For $2000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

BOEOTIA, Federal Coinage. Circa 395-387 BC. AR Stater (12.24 g). Boeotian shield / Amphora; BO-IΩ across field, bow above; all within incuse concave circle. BCD Boiotia 7-8; Head, Boeotia p. 77; BMC p. 37, 48; Traité III 369. Near EF. Exceptional fluted amphora.

The region of Boeotia in central Greece, bounded by Phokis and Lokris to the north, and Attica to the south, derived its present name (Gk. Bοιοτια, “Ox Land”) from the fact that it was one of the few areas on the ancient Greek mainland where cattle could be pastured. The oldest settlement of the area was Graia (Gk. Γραια, “old”) later renamed Tanagra, a city which Aristotle claimed had an antedeluvial foundation. Another city figuring prominently in the mythology of Boeotia was Thebes, a city founded by Kadmos, and the home of both Oedipus and Pentheus. Boeotia was also the homeland of several important ancient Greek authors, among them the biographer Plutarch (from Chaironeia) and Pindar, Greece’s greatest lyric poet (Kynoskephalai, a village in Thebes). The eighth century BC poet Hesiod, himself from Ascra near Thespiai, in his Works and Days, reveals that Boeotia had become an agricultural society of small, independent farmers, though several of the larger towns (Plataiai, Tanagra, and Thebes among them) exercised control over their smaller neighbors, and began to form the well-defined political units that became the later Boeotian League. As early as the last quarter of the sixth century BC, this league was under the hegemony of Thebes, by then clearly the region’s most powerful city.

The Boeotian League consisted of eleven sovereign cities with their associated towns. Each city elected one boeotarch, or minister of war and foreign affairs, contributed sixty delegates to the league council located at Thebes, and supplied a contingent of about a thousand hoplites and a hundred cavalry to the league army. To protect against undue encroachment by the central government, all-important questions of policy had to be submitted for ratification to the councils of the individual cities. These local councils were composed of the local propertied classes and were subdivided into four sections, resembling the Athenian prytaneis, which took it in turns to vote on all new measures.

The Persian invasion had serious repercussions for Boeotia and its League. Some of its members, originally favoring the Greeks, soon turned to the Persian side; after Thermopylai, only Plataiai remained loyal to the Greek cause. In 479 BC at Plataiai, the Plataians along with their Athenian and Lakedaimonian allies finally ended Persian dreams of incorporating Greece into their empire. Boeotia, however, was devastated and only a truncated form of its league survived. Because Thebes had supported the Persians, that city lost its presidency of the league. The rising tensions between Athens and Sparta, however, prompted the latter in 457 BC, after the First Battle of Tanagra, to reinstate Thebes to create a northern bulwark against Athenian advances. After their subsequent victory at the Battle of Oinophyta, however, Athens took control of the whole of Boeotia, except for Thebes, for the next decade. A Boiotian victory at the First Battle of Koroneia in 447 BC renewed Boeotian independence from Athens and a rebuilding of the Boeotian League.

The Boeotian League initially supported Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, but with peace in 404 BC, relations between the two cooled significantly. In 395 BC the League severed its ties with Sparta, joining Athens, Corinth, and Argos against its former ally. With the Spartans’ victory over the allies at the Second Battle of Koroneia in 394 BC, the terms of the Peace of Antialkidas in 387 BC, and a Spartan attack on Thebes in 382 BC, the Boeotian League again lay weakened, and under Spartan control. It was not until 378 BC, when Thebes revolted, that the League was re-established. At Leuktra in 371 BC, the League, under the command of its most famous and capable commander, Epaminondas, and fielding the Sacred Band, a new elite fighting unit from Thebes, defeated the Spartans and firmly established the League as a viable force. Fostering the anti-Spartan democratic movement in Arkadia, Epaminondas dealt a lasting blow to the Spartans by liberating the Messenian helots and rebuilding their capital, Messene, arising in Arkadia in the central Peloponnesos. Also, under his auspices, the city of Megalopolis was built as the capital of the short-lived Arkadian League and, like Messene, a fortified buffer against Spartan power in the Peloponnesos. Epaminondas’ death in 362 BC from wounds received at Mantineia removed the driving force of the Boeotian League, bringing about its eventual disintegration.

Thebes’ hope to acquire Phokis led to the Third Sacred War (356-345 BC), an all-out conflict among the Greeks, in which only Philip II of Macedon was the clear winner. In 353 BC, the weakened Thebans agreed to his offer of fighting on their behalf. Always uneasy about this alliance, they joined the Athenians against Philip at Chaironeia in 338 BC. The Sacred Band distinguished itself, but their complete annihilation there brought an end to Theban hopes of reassuming its former position in Greece. Although Philip II remained content to deprive Thebes of her dominion over Boiotia, an unsuccessful revolt in 335 BC against Alexander III resulted in the destruction of the city, except, according to tradition, the house of the poet Pindar.

Afterward, the Boeotians never again pursued an independent policy, but looked toward the protection of greater powers: Macedon, and subsequently, Rome. Though they briefly joined the Aitolian League (circa 245 BC), Boeotia was generally loyal to Macedonia, supporting its later kings against Rome. Eventually, Rome dissolved this league, merging its adherents with the other central Greek federations in the new Roman province of Achaea.