L'ethnos acarnano dal 454 al 424 a.C.: dinamiche locali e relazioni internazionali

The earliest contacts known to us between Akarnania and the world of the Greek poleis are an unsuccessful attempt at conquering Oiniadai made by an Athenian expedition led by Perikles in 454, as part of a strategy aiming at ‘encircling’ Corinth in the first Peloponnesian war, and another, undated one by the Messenians from Naupaktos. After a gap in our evidence, the alliance concluded in or about 435 between Athens and that part of Akarnanian ethnos which centred on Stratos, the biggest and most important among the inland Akarnanian cities, was a response to the aggressive policy of the Corinthian colony of Ambrakia. Before and during the Archidamian War till 424, when the crushing defeat suffered by Ambrakia in 426/5 stopped warfare in this region, the Akarnanian ethnos allied with Athens, consisting of a few poleis and some small ethnic subgroups and with an army made up of local contingents led by a board of generals, acted as a unitary entity on the military and diplomatic plane that behaved loyally to Athens and at the same time went on pursuing its own interests. The Thucydidean evidence, though focused on military events rather than on institutional aspects, allows us to go beyond the widespread representation of the Akarnanians as a mere summachia strengthened by the ethnic solidarity and to grasp some real ‘federal’ hints in its political organization. This is shown, for example, by the different ways the ethnos gradually came to annex, apparently through a purposeful plan, all the Akarnanian communities that still in 431 were under the Corinthian control or shared a pro-Corinthian stance (Astakos, Sollion, Anactorion, Oeniadae). Moreover, a closer reading of Thuc. 3, 105, 1 shows that the koinon dikasterion at Olpai in Amphilochia here mentioned was likely to be a «common court» of the Akarnanians (not of the Akarnanians and the Amphilochians), an institution that anticipates a similar one reported in a decree of the Akarnanian League of 263. At the same time, Thucydides himself in his narrative partly disproves the oversimplified picture given in the archaiologia of the Akarnanian (and Lokrian and Aetolian) primitive way of life as a consequence of lack of security in human settlements and relations. On the whole, the subject here investigated is an interesting test-case of the interplay between the international relations, which brought about a deeper implication of north-western Greece in the expansionist politics of Greek superpowers, and the development of a Greek ethnos towards more complex political and institutional forms peculiar to federal States.