The institutions of the Phocian League

Abstract For several decades, attention has been concentrating on the earliest history of the ›Phocians‹ between the Bronze Age and the Archaic period. It is time that we investigated the Phocian ethnos over the full extent of its history, since there has been no synthesis on the institutions of the league since Georg Busolt and Heinrich Swoboda (1926). The present study successively examines the following issues: the identity and number of cities making up the league, not including Delphi and perhaps also Abae; the question of the centre or ›capital‹ of the league; the federal issues of coinage; the signs of institutional unity: calendar, law and citizenship in the league; the name and composition of the deliberative body; and the magistrates, from the lower offices to the magistrates at the head of the league: college of strategoi, archontes, college of phokarchai, single strategos, single phokarches.

Keywords Phocian League, federal institutions, Phocian ethnos, identity