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Abstract: In this paper the author demonstrates that the earlier and later sources for the Hellenic League understood that alliance quite differently. The later authorities depict a cohesive and durable organization managed by a powerful common council, while Herodotus and Thucydides present a more tenuous and temporary alliance that was largely dependent on Sparta. These versions are often combined in historical reconstructions, but the significant difference between the two suggests that they are not compatible. The letter version is likely an invention of the fourth century and as such sheds considerable light on the tradition of the League, but not the historical League itself.
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Introduction
In 479 B. C. the grand Persian invasion of Greece was defeated by the so-called Hellenic League.1 The strength, cohesion, and duration of this league are debatable.2 Recent work on Persian-War memory and a renewed interest in the history of interstate cooperation in Greece have raised the stakes of that debate still further.3 Given the importance of the Hellenic League to these burgeoning fields of inquiry, it seems fitting to revisit the evidence for this early alliance. Scholarly consensus has recently emerged in favor of a strong and cohesive Hellenic League that continued to be a powerful force in Greece at least down to 462/1.4 Only Adrian Tronson has recently argued for a weak and ephem- eral League, but his conclusions have been largely ignored, in no small part because of his insistence that the Hellenic League was nothing more than a temporary expansion of the Peloponnesian League.5 While the Hellenic League was certainly a separate organization,6 Tronson's broader point about the overall weakness of the League warrants more attention than it has received. Arguments in favor of a stronger League draw heav- ily on later accounts adduced to supplement our fifth-century sources. LTnderlying this practice is the assumption that our earlier and later accounts, when properly evaluated on the basis of their "intrinsic plausibility," can be combined to reconstruct a more precise picture of the League as it was.7 By contrast, I argue that this practice has obscured a significant difference in how our sources thought the Hellenic League operated. For our later authorities the League was indeed a cohesive, independent,...