A door to the Lycian League assembly hall.
Patara was the capital of the Lycian League, a federation of city states in Roman times. James Madison mentioned the Lycian League as model for a federal state during the Constitutional Convention in 1787. (The convention that would write what we call our Constitution -- a replacement for the first, failed constitution, the Articles of Confederation.) The Lycian League is also mentioned in three of the Federalist Papers. The framers noted three things about the League that are also present in our Constitution: 1) unequal voting weight of the constituent states; 2) representative, as opposed to democratic government; and 3) the power of the federal government to make laws that directly applied to individuals in the constituent states, rather than only to the states as states.