Lukiya Alliance

The Lycian League is invoked in the Federalist essays as evidence that a confederacy can preserve its constituent communities while exercising meaningful authority over their internal affairs. Its twenty-three cities or republics had unequal representation in a common council, which appointed local judges and magistrates; Montesquieu’s praise of the arrangement as an excellent confederate republic makes it a pointed rebuttal to narrow definitions of federal government.

Structure and shared authority

The account describes the League as an association of twenty-three cities or republics. Representation in its common council was weighted by the size of the members: the largest received three votes, those of the middle class two, and the smallest one. The arrangement therefore joined a common institution with differentiated voting strength rather than granting every member an identical share.

The council’s authority reached into the members’ local administration. It appointed all judges and magistrates of the respective cities—a particularly consequential form of shared power, since choosing local officers might otherwise seem the exclusive business of local jurisdictions. The example shows that a confederacy could preserve its member communities without reserving every internal function to them alone.

Montesquieu’s endorsement

The essay sets this institutional practice against the assumption that federal authority and local autonomy must be sharply separated. Montesquieu, cited as a leading authority on political arrangements, praised the Lycian association as a model of an excellent confederate republic, despite the council’s power to appoint local officials. His approval makes the League more than a historical curiosity: it is evidence that substantial common authority can coexist with a confederate form.

That contrast is directed at what the essay calls novel refinements of an erroneous theory: distinctions imposed on confederacies that, in the author’s reading, were not part of Montesquieu’s own understanding. The League’s institutional design supplies a practical counterexample to the claim that local jurisdictions must be insulated from all common appointment powers for a union to remain federal.

Place in the Federalist argument

The Lycian example appears within a broader defense of a confederate republic as an association of states whose separate organization remains in existence for local purposes, even when subordinate to general authority. The proposed Constitution, the essay argues, does not abolish state governments: states remain constituent parts of national sovereignty through direct representation in the Senate and retain important exclusive powers. The League provides a classical comparison for this combination of member institutions and common government.

Elsewhere, the essays compare ancient and European confederacies with the American arrangement to test what a union can accomplish and where its design may fail. The Lycian case is used affirmatively: unlike an example of a union disabled by the sovereignty of its members, it shows that a common council can exercise consequential authority without making the confederacy cease to be a confederacy. Its force lies in that specific institutional point, not in any claim that the Lycian system and the proposed American Constitution were identical.