Karian sympoliteiai: Causes and implications of political merger at the periphery of the Greek world

This dissertation explores the causes behind and the implications of sympoliteia—the political merger of formerly indepehdent city-states—in Hellenistic Karia. Traditionally, treatments have explained the phenomenon in terms of interests that are common to the participant state(s) as a whole: expansion of territory, protection of territory, access to agricultural resources, etc. Building on John Ma\u27s application of the peer polity interaction model to the world of the Hellenistic polis (2003), I argue that we need to go beyond these explanations in identifying the interests of elites from small, remote communities who were able through sympoliteia to become citizens of larger cities actively engaged in the inter-polis network of prestige and status identified by Ma. I begin by outlining the historical context of the sympoliteiai, first in relation to the power politics of the large empires on whose periphery Karia was situated, and then from the perspective of the local histories of the city-states involved in a sympoliteia. Next, I engage in a detailed examination of each instance of political union, and conduct prosopographical case studies of Miletos and Pidasa, on the one hand, and Mylasa and Olymos, on the other. The evidence points to a significant movement of leading individuals either to larger towns or to locally important sanctuaries, both important venues for self-advertisment. Finally, I consider the effect of sympoliteia on Karian ethnic identity, critiquing the traditional view that this identity was effaced by an encroaching Greek culture. Stressing the primacy of local, i.e., polis, identity in ancient discourses of ethnicity, especially in the syngeneia inscriptions between Karian communities and Greek poleis, I argue that because different ethnic identities were articulated in different contexts, Greek and Karian identities were able to become mutually inclusive as contact between the two (by no means distinct) groups continued to increase