Thebes (ancient world)

Thebai (Thivai)

The principal city of Boeotia (central Greece), on the southern edge of its fertile eastern plain. The acropolis (Cadmeia) stood on an elongated plateau, half-a-mile long and a quarter-mile wide, flanked by the rocky gullies of the rivers Dirce and Ismenus and overlooking a lower city to the north and east.

The mythology of Thebes was exceptionally rich, inspiring an epic poem, the Thebais, sometimes inaccurately attributed to Homer. After occupation by a people known as Ectenians, whose king was Ogyges, the town was said to have been founded either by Zeus' son Amphion, who could charm stones into movement with his lyre, or by Cadmus who came from Tyre (Es-Sur) to establish a Phoenician enclave before the end of the Bronze Age (or, according to another theory, he originated from Minoan Cretan legend), and sowed dragon's teeth producing a harvest of armed warriors: five of these were said to have become the ancestors of the Theban aristocracy (who were known as Spartoi, `sown men’). Heracles, although elsewhere ascribed to Argos or Tiryns, was also stated, according to an alternative version, to have been born, and to have undertaken his early enterprises, at Thebes. It was also the scene of the sagas of the House of Oedipus and of the Seven Against Thebes immortalized by Sophocles and Aeschylus respectively.

During the Bronze (Minoan, Mycenaean) Age and earlier, Thebes was a princely palace stronghold, rivalling Mycenae for the supremacy of Greece; it owed its strength to the productivity of its soil, and to its position on routes between Attica and central Greece and leading down to the Corinthian gulf. This Bronze Age center, however, as archaeological evidence indicates, was sacked, burned and abandoned during the thirteenth century BC. The epic tradition attributes the destruction to the Epigoni, the sons of the Seven. The Catalog of Ships in Homer's Iliad only mentions Hypothebae, `the place below Thebes.’

After the Boeotians, as Thucydides reports, had arrived from Thessaly, some of them before and some after the Trojan War, Thebes outstripped its rival Orchomenus, and from the seventh century grouped a dozen towns of the region in the Boeotian League under its leadership. The coinage of this confederation, displaying a Boeotian shield, began early in the sixth century. The hostility of Thebes to the Athenians dates from about 519, when Plataea, by now the only Boeotian town south of Lake Copais to have evaded its domination, appealed for and received the protection of Athens in face of a Theban threat. The Thebans sided against their Greek compatriots in the Persian War (480–479)—a policy accepted by the Boeotian poet Pindar, though without enthusiasm—and in consequence lost their leadership of the Boeotian League. In 457 a war with Athenians began with an indecisive engagement at Tanagra and ended with a decisive Boeotian defeat at Oenophyta, which led to the replacement of oligarchic government by a democracy, at Thebes as well as other Boeotian cities. In 447, however, victory at Coronea restored the ascendancy and oligarchy of the Thebans, who sided with Sparta against Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404), absorbing Plataea (after a long siege, 429–427) and Thespiae (423).

Discontented with the peace at the end of hostilities, Thebes joined Athens and Argos in the Corinthian War against Sparta (395) but was defeated at Coronea in the following year. The King's Peace (Peace of Antalcidas) of 387 enabled Sparta to isolate Thebes from the other Boeotian towns, which garrisoned its citadel; but it reasserted itself in 382. The famous Sacred Band of one hundred and fifty couples, the elite Theban frontline infantry corps, was formed by Gorgidas in 378. In 371 a proposed treaty collapsed because the Thebans tried, in vain, to insist on signing for all the Boeotian cities. War broke out again, and at Leuctra a Theban army defeated the Spartans and drove them out of central Greece, thereafter enjoying a unique nine years of power and glory, under the brilliant leadership of Epaminondas and Pelopidas. But the former's death in his last victorious battle of Mantinea (362) marked the beginning of decline.

Thebes was occupied by Philip II of Macedonia in 338, after victory at Chaeronea, and razed to the ground after its citizens revolted from his son Alexander the Great two or three years later. Reconstructed by Cassander (316), the city was captured in 290 by Demetrius I the Besieger (Poliorcetes) and then by the Macedonian King Antigonus II Gonatas, but from c 280 it resumed an independent but modest place in the revived Boeotian League, forming successive links with the Aetolians, Macedonians, Romans (197) and Seleucids, and then with the Romans (who captured the place in 173) and Macedonians (171–168) once again. In 146 Thebes' participation in the Achaean revolt earned it destruction from Lucius Mummius, who annexed the country, and in 86 it was again sacked and dismembered, this time by Sulla, because it had welcomed Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus. Strabo described the surviving buildings as a village hardly worth mentioning, but it retained city status, although habitation was restricted to the Cadmea; coinage was occasionally revived, notably under Galba (AD 68–69). In AD 248 and again in 396 Thebes was taken by the Goths, but spared from devastation (by Alaric) on the latter occasion. During the late imperial and Byzantine periods it resumed its position as the most important town of central Greece.

After its Bronze Age preeminence—confirmed by excavations of the Mycenaean palace—the site of classical Thebes, in view of its repeated destructions, does not have a great deal to show. Thus only traces of its two ramparts can be seen. The temple of Apollo Ismenius, however, has been uncovered; a wood and brick shrine of c 800 BC was replaced in the sixth century by a stone building, where Herodotus saw tripods inscribed with `Cadmean’ (Mycenaean?) writing. The colonnaded agora, Fountain of Oedipus, and sanctuaries—including a shrine that allegedly contained the funeral pyres of the Seven—lay to the east of the Cadmea, and an eminence to its north displayed the tombs of Amphion and his brother Zethus, roofed by a stepped pyramid. South of the agora was a precinct of Heracles, in whose honor Thebans celebrated the Herakleia, a festival including gymnastic contests. In the cemetery chapel of St. Luke are fragments of a sarcophagus locally venerated as the Evangelist's, although its inscriptions refer to the family of a Roman official named Cosimus.

Within a few miles of the city was another temple of Heracles (Hippodetes), as well as another in honor of the oracular Amphiaraus, who during the attack by the Seven was swallowed up in a cleft made by Zeus' thunderbolt (this shrine is distinct from the more famous Amphiaraon on the north coast of Attica). There were also sanctuaries dedicated to Demeter Cabiraia and Persephone (Kore)—no traces of this survives—and to the Cabiri, underworld deities of non-Hellenic origin, whose precinct, which has been carefully investigated, was evidently the scene of ritual dining and drinking. Its successive strata display a history of many centuries, reaching a climax in the first century BC.