Athens is presented as both a leading member and a destabilizing force within the Greek confederacies. In the Federalist argument, its history shows how formally equal states can become unequal in practice, how rivalry among powerful members can undo common security, and how internal discord can open the way to foreign domination.

Athens in the Amphictyonic Confederacy

The Amphictyonic council joined Greek republics whose members retained their sovereign status and equal votes. On paper, the council could deliberate on the common welfare, wage war, settle disputes, fine aggressors, and use the confederacy’s force against disobedient members. Yet the arrangement was administered by deputies appointed by the cities and exercised over those cities in their political capacities. The essay treats this structure as a source of weakness: the confederacy’s formal powers did not prevent its strongest members from dominating the rest.

Athens held a pre-eminent position in this system. The account states that it was the arbiter of Greece for seventy-three years, before the Lacedaemonians governed for twenty-nine years and Thebes later gained its turn after the Battle of Leuctra. This succession of dominant powers illustrates not stable common rule but the transfer of ascendancy among the strongest cities. Deputies from powerful cities could awe or corrupt those from weaker ones, and judgments could favor the more powerful party.

Resistance and Unequal Membership

After the war with Xerxes, the Lacedaemonians proposed expelling cities accused of having acted unfaithfully. Athens opposed the proposal because the Lacedaemonians would lose fewer allies and, Athens calculated, would thereby gain control of public deliberations. Its vigorous opposition defeated the measure. The episode makes Athens’s influence visible in a particular decision: rather than treating the proposed sanction simply as a common response to disloyalty, Athens acted against a change that threatened to shift the balance of power toward its rival.

The incident also exposes the gulf between equal standing in theory and dependence in practice. Smaller members were nominally entitled to share the confederacy’s dignity, but the essay describes them as having become satellites of the major powers. Athens’s ability to block the expulsion proposal demonstrates that the council’s collective authority was vulnerable to the strategic calculations of its leading cities.

Rivalry with Sparta and the Greek Rupture

The account of the post-Persian War period turns from institutional maneuver to a wider failure of political judgment. Rather than use the peace after the Greeks’ success against Persia to establish a closer union, Athens and Sparta, enlarged by victory and glory, became rivals and then enemies. Their mutual jealousies, fears, hatreds, and injuries culminated in the Peloponnesian War. The war, in the essay’s compressed account, ended in the ruin and enslavement of the Athenians who had begun it.

Athens therefore appears in two connected roles: it resists a rival’s attempt to reshape the confederacy, and it joins that rival in a conflict that destroys the prospects of cooperation. The contrast gives the example its force. Military success against an external enemy did not secure lasting unity; without institutions strong enough to contain rivalry, triumph fed competition, and competition produced a war more damaging to the Greek powers than the Persian threat they had survived.

A Cautionary Example in the Federalist Argument

The essays use the Greek confederacies to examine a political principle, not to offer a full history of Athens. Their comparison emphasizes the danger of confederacies whose common decisions depend on sovereign members and whose enforcement remains vulnerable to local ambition. Athens’s long ascendancy, its resistance to a measure that could strengthen Sparta, and its later rivalry with Sparta supply distinct examples of that danger.

The broader argument is that a confederacy’s nominal powers and equality cannot by themselves secure common action. The Federalist essays contrast the repeated weakness of confederations with a proposed Constitution described as neither wholly national nor wholly federal: federal in its foundation, partly federal and partly national in the sources of ordinary powers, national in their operation, federal in their extent, and mixed in its amendment process. Against that institutional analysis, Athens’s history contributes a pointed warning: shared external dangers and a record of victory do not prevent leading members from turning their competition inward, with consequences for the union as a whole.