The following offers a new perspective to explain the disintegration of the Peloponnesian League and the Boeotian Federation in the early half of the fourth century B.C. Members of both these alliances had legal and conventional expectations regarding what they had to give and what they could receive from their associations. Tensions and conflicts arose within an alliance once an individual polis did not fulfill its duties and obligations. There were two factors that persuaded a member not to meet their expected responsibilities: one was the role of a polis ' factions and the other was the intervention in the association's affairs by a third party. It was primarily the failure of an alliance's members to meet each others expectations that inevitably led to the dissolution of these interstate organizations.

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