Acarnania never sat still. Its coastline fronted the sea-road to Italy, which meant that every Mediterranean power with ambitions eventually pointed its warships at this shoreline. Corinth planted colonies at Anactorium and Leucas in the 7th century BC, pushing the original inhabitants — the Taphii, the Leleges, the Curetes — deeper into the interior. Athens allied with the Acarnanians against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans under King Agesilaus ravaged the countryside in 391 BC but achieved nothing lasting. Philip II of Macedon drew their opposition. Rome finally subdued them after capturing Leucas and defeating Philip at Cynoscephalae — and even then the Acarnanians had to be beaten twice more before they accepted Roman supremacy. The pattern was consistent across eight centuries: invaders arrived, won battles, and found that winning battles was not the same as winning Acarnania.

What held this fractious territory together was the Acarnanian League — a confederation loose enough to accommodate mountain villages that barely spoke to one another but strong enough to field armies and negotiate treaties. Aristotle wrote a constitution of the League, now lost, suggesting that Athenian intellectuals took it seriously. Thucydides records its judicial hill at Olpae, near Argos Amphilochicum, where disputes were settled. The League's religious heart was the sanctuary of Apollo at Actium, on the promontory guarding the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, and the chief priest of that temple was important enough to give his name to official dates — the Acarnanian equivalent of an Athenian archon. This was not a barbarous backwater. It was a functioning polity, rough at the edges and fierce when threatened, operating exactly as its geography demanded.

The landscape of Acarnania has three layers. First comes a rocky Ionian coastline, punctuated by promontories — Actium to the north, Crithote to the south — and studded with offshore islands including the Echinades at the mouth of the Achelous. Behind the coast rise mountains of no exceptional height but real wildness, forested and cut by narrow valleys. Then the interior opens onto the plain of the Paracheloitis, the broad flood corridor of the Achelous, one of Greece's major rivers. The Achelous has shifted its channel repeatedly over the centuries, and by the 19th century the plain's lower reaches had become marshland. Pliny mentions iron mines in the hills and a pearl fishery off Actium — modest wealth, but real. The chief riches, though, were always the herds that grazed the river meadows. Several inland lakes break the mountain terrain, the largest being Lake Trichonida, called Melite by the ancients.

The final blow to ancient Acarnania came not from conquest but from depopulation. After his victory at Actium in 31 BC, Octavian — soon to be Augustus — founded the city of Nicopolis on the Epirus coast opposite, as a monument to his triumph. To populate it, he relocated the inhabitants of several Acarnanian towns. Strabo, writing under Augustus, described the region as 'utterly worn out and exhausted.' It passed through the Eastern Roman Empire, the Despotate of Epirus, Serbian conquest in 1348, and Ottoman rule from 1480. Since 1832 it has been part of the Greek state, now forming the western portion of the regional unit of Aetolia-Acarnania. The landscape remains rugged and sparsely populated — not because history forgot it, but because history passed through it too many times.

The region produced an unlikely roster of advisers to the powerful. Lysimachus of Acarnania tutored Alexander the Great. Philip of Acarnania served as Alexander's personal physician — trusted enough that when Alexander fell dangerously ill on campaign, he drank Philip's medicine despite a letter warning him the doctor had been bribed to poison him. Megistias, the seer who fought at Thermopylae, was Acarnanian. Carnus, whose prophecies established the cult of Apollo Carneus among the Dorians, came from here. A land that supplied Greece's greatest conqueror with his teacher and his doctor, and gave Sparta its most important religious cult, was never quite as peripheral as Homer's silence implied.