Thebes

Official website of the Archaeological Museum of Thebes: https://www.mthv.gr/en/

Transcript:

So today we are talking about an ancient Greek city that I think it's fair to say hasn't really had a spotlight put on it quite as much as some of the others, but we're going to rectify that today with a very special guest. Would you like to introduce yourself, please? 

Yeah, sure. I'm Michael Ferman. I'm at Florida State University. I'm a Greek historian. I wrote my thesis on Thebes in the fourth century. I actually worked in Thebes on an archaeological excavation for quite a while as well, so I have some experience physically in the city of Thebes. And yeah, I'm now the Associate Director of the University Honors Program at Florida State University, where I teach courses in the reception of the ancient Greek world.

Let's start off just by going over what most people might know about Thebes already. They might know that there was a king there who murdered his dad and married his mom. They might know about gay soldiers and they might recognize the city as being the setting of Disney's Hercules. I think given that those are quite a wide variety of ideas, let's start off with the city itself. How did it begin? 

Historically, the city begins somewhere in the Bronze Age, but most people will know about the mythology of the city, as you just mentioned. It's a very important city mythologically, starting with its foundation. It actually has kind of a weird foundation that represents the different groups that might have been in the region at the time, so it's a case where mythology might map onto a historical setting. Starting with the foundation of the city by Cadmus. Cadmus is actually not Greek. Cadmus is Phoenician, he's part of this trading culture from the Levant, so from the Far Eastern Mediterranean. He's a Phoenician prince. His sister, Europa, disappears with Zeus. Then Cadmus and all of his brothers are tasked with searching the known world to find Europa. Unbeknownst to them, Zeus had turned into a bull, Europa hops on his back, and then he swims all the way to Crete from the Near East, basically. But Cadmus doesn't know that. So Cadmus then goes to Greece. It goes to the Delphic Oracle, asks the Delphic Oracle what he should do, and the Delphic Oracle tells him, you'll see a cow with a sign on it, with a unique marking on it, follow the cow, and then find the city where the cow stops. Not super helpful for finding his sister, but Cadmus just kind of goes with it in the end. So he finds this cow. Cow leads him into the region of Boeotia, which is near Delphi, but it's the region that Thebes is in, and I'll talk more about the regional relationship in a little bit. Cow sits down. Cadmus says, okay, here's where I have to found this new city. So he and his men are very thirsty after their long walk from Delphi, and so they find a spring. It's a spring that's sacred to Ares on the Asmeneon hill in Thebes, which is still a hill that you can visit today. And the spring is guarded by a serpent or a dragon, however you want to interpret the Greek narrative there. And the dragon kills all of the men of Cadmus. And Cadmus, of course, being a hero, goes and kills the dragon. So we have a dragon slayer founding the city of Thebes, but it's a little bit hard to found a city when you're the only person there. He needs a population to help build up the city, and so he gets a vision or a message from the gods that says, take the teeth of the dragon and bury them in the ground. So he does this. And then out of the ground, emerges this group of warriors called the Spartoi. And the Spartoi are standing there for a second, and they're very fierce looking. And so he decides, okay, I need to do something about this. So he throws a rock in the middle of them. They all think one of the other ones threw the rock, so they start fighting, and they start killing each other. And then eventually there's only five left. And those five Spartoi help Cadmus build the first walls of Thebes, which encompass, it's not necessarily the Acropolis of Thebes, but it's the fortified part of Thebes. To this day, it's called the Cadmea, named after Cadmus, the king that founds the city. 

And obviously the gods, particularly Ares, aren't happy with him killing the guardian of his spring. So he's indebted his service to Ares for eight years. And then at the end of the eight years, Ares gives him his daughter, Harmonia, who is the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, as a wife. And so then they start the lineage of kings of Thebes, and Thebes emerges out of that in the Bronze Age. There's also another foundation myth of Thebes. So Dan Berman, who's a scholar on Boeotia, has written a really good article about the double foundation of Thebes. The other foundation are by these twin brothers called Amphion and Zethus. They're twin sons of Zeus. Their mother is Antiochus, who flees from Thebes after she gets impregnated, gives birth to the twins, exposes them on Mount Kithairon, which is this really famous mountain in Boeotia. Abandoning your children on Mount Kithairon is a theme that we see in mythology. It's also where Hercules gets abandoned and where Dionysus gets abandoned and Oedipus. So anyway, abandons the children. Obviously the children don't die. They get taken in and raised as shepherds. Antiochus gets enslaved essentially to the wife of the king of Thebes. The king is named Lycus and the wife is named Dirce. Eventually Antiochus escapes, finds her boys, proves that she is their mother, and they say, okay, well now we've got to get revenge for what's happened to our family. So they show up in Thebes. They kill Dirce. They remove Lycus from power, and they become the joint rulers of Thebes. But then they also build walls of Thebes. And so there's reconciliation of tradition that has to happen. And one way to think about it is Cadmus builds in mythology the walls of the Citadel of Thebes. And then Amphion and Zethus build these outer walls of Thebes. 

And they do it in kind of a magical way. Zethus has to physically lift the stones to build the walls. But Amphion has been given a lyre, which is like a little harp that the Greeks would play, by Hermes. And the harp is magical and it moves stones. So as he plays, the stones levitate and move into place to build the walls of seven gated Thebes, which is what it's known as after that. And then tragedy befalls their family, and Amphion and Zethus both die. And this results in an exiled member of the family, Laius, coming back and taking power. And Laius is, who most of you would probably know, most of your listeners would probably know, the father of Oedipus. And if anyone knows anything about Thebes, even tangentially, it's the Oedipus myth, right? The guy that married his own mother. 

The Oedipus myth comes to us in several different forms. The most famous is the plays of Sophocles. They're known today as the Theban trilogy. Sophocles is an Athenian playwright and decides to set his story in Thebes. And it's important to know that even though when you buy a book of Sophocles today, the three Theban plays are together. They actually were not designed to be performed together. They were written decades apart. So they actually get pushed together by later editors. So it makes more sense actually reading it when you think, oh, there's a disconnect between Oedipus the Kalanas and Antigone and Oedipus Taranus or Oedipus the King. It's because Sophocles had to remember what he wrote a decade before as he's writing these other plays. And they're not performed together in ancient festivals. 

Ah, that's really interesting. We assume that because the three plays follow a continuous narrative that they must have been written to be performed as a trilogy together as playwrights admitted three tragedies per festival. But that's not the case with these ones. The three plays are written over four decades, I think, and not even in chronological order as part of other trilogies of unrelated stories. Four decades, a huge time of political upheaval in the city, which would naturally influence what Sophocles was trying to convey in each one. So the Theban trilogy is a modern invention that might not actually make a load of sense without ditching a load of context. But I'm digressing. That's a whole other episode. For now, for those unfamiliar, and we will treat it as a trilogy because it does tell a continuing story when put as we do now. So for those unfamiliar, what's the main thrust of Sophocles' Theban trilogy? 

So it basically tells the story of the house of Oedipus. There's this prophecy that Laius receives saying that he is going to get killed by his son. Coincidentally, that arrives right as he has a son. So he needs to find a way to get rid of the son. Oedipus's feet are bound together and he's abandoned. He eventually ends up in Corinth being raised by foster parents, who happen to be the king and queen of Corinth. And then Oedipus one day finds out that he is actually not the biological son of Polybis and Merope, the parents that had raised him. And like anybody in the ancient Greek world, when you need answers, you go to Delphi. He goes to Delphi and the Delphic oracle tells him the truth that he is one day going to kill his parents. He thinks, oh, this is bad. But on the way, he happened to have killed this guy in a chariot. They got into an argument, maybe the first recorded instance of road rage in the history of Oedipus is coming along and Laius is in a chariot. And they argue over who has the right of way on the road. They get in a fight. Oedipus kills Laius. So without knowing it has already fulfilled the prophecy of killing his father. And then he ends up going to Thebes because that's the next closest big town. And on the way he encounters the Sphinx. And the Sphinx is associated with Thebes pretty heavily. It shows up in a lot of mythology. It also shows up on some pottery in Thebes as well. The Sphinx is fairly prominent. I mean, the Sphinx has a riddle for Oedipus and the riddle is what walks on four legs in the morning, two during the day and three at night. And Oedipus is the only person to answer it correctly. Oedipus answers man or humans because they crawl on all fours as their babies. They walk on two legs as adults and then their third leg is a cane or walking stick as old age as they kind of near night in their life. Then he's allowed to pass and get to Thebes. And the current ruler of Thebes, who is the brother of the queen Jocasta, who's Oedipus' mother. Again, he doesn't know this. Negurushi has already declared that anybody who solves the riddle of the Sphinx and rids Thebes of the Sphinx gets to be king. And so Oedipus just kind of walks into Thebes and becomes king. And then marries Jocasta, who is the wife of Laius, who he just killed. And seemingly nobody puts it together. Oedipus walks in and says, hey, you know what? Like, I just got rid of the Sphinx. They say, oh great, our king just died. So now we need a new king. And he never puts two and two together of just like, maybe that guy that I just killed on the chariot could be the king that's missing. So he becomes the king as children and then plagues straights Thebes. And so then he has to figure out what do we do? So again, consults the oracle at Delphi. And they find out through a series of events that everyone is kind of starting to realize what has happened here. And that Oedipus is in fact, the son of Jocasta and Laius, who has been taken away to foster parents and then returned and fulfilled the prophecy. And that's part of the tragedy of Sophocles' play. If the audience knows this story, and everybody knows what happens in mythology. And even everybody in the play knows. And the last person to figure it out is Oedipus himself, which is kind of the tragedy of it. So then he blinds himself and sends himself into exile. And then that starts this new reign of his two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices in Thebes. And the two siblings decide, okay, our father is gone. We're going to switch rule. So we're going to do one year on, one year off. So one of us will rule for a year, then the other one will rule for a year. That lasts one year. As anyone might be surprised to know, one year that that arrangement lasts. Eteocles decides that, you know what, I'm not going to give up the throne. Polyneices then raises an army, attacks Thebes, the two brothers kill each other in combat. The body of Polyneices is decreed as like being unable to be buried. That's a big deal in the ancient Greek world. If you're not buried properly, you can't go into the afterlife. And so Polyneices' body is just laying out there in the dust. And so then Antigone, his sister, and this is the theme of the third or the subject of the third of Sophocles' plays, Antigone attempts to bury her brother, gets caught, gets condemned to death. 

Then Creon, who is now the king of Thebes, the brother of Jocasta from before, receives a message from the gods that says, you know what, you probably shouldn't do this. But by the time he goes to release Antigone, she's already killed herself. So that's the tragedy of the Antigone. So that's the Oedipus cycle of all of those families. 

Then you end up getting a major connection to a god that pretty much everybody would recognize, Dionysus. Not everybody knows that Dionysus is from Thebes. He is probably one of the most famous Theban deities. His Semele gets impregnated by Zeus. She gets tricked by Hera into getting Zeus to reveal his true form to her. And the idea is that no mortal can actually see the gods as they really are. That's why the gods are always disguised when you see them in mythology. So Zeus says okay and reveals his true form to Semele. Semele gets incinerated on the spot, but because Dionysus is divine, fetal Dionysus survives this. So Zeus picks him up and sows him into his thigh to continue his gestation basically. The Greeks don't have a great conception of how this works obviously for birthing. Dionysus is born out of Zeus's thigh and he's not quite done with Thebes when he gets born either. Dionysus is famously the god of wine and madness. He has these attendants and the people that follow Dionysus are called Euripides Bacchae. Euripides is another Athenian playwright. 

This is much later than the Sophocles plays. Bacchae premieres in 405 BC as compared to like mid fifth century for the other ones. Bacchae tells the story of Dionysus coming back to Thebes and finding that his cousin Pentheus, who is the grandson of Creon, has decided that Dionysus is not a big deal and no one is allowed to worship Dionysus because Pentheus doesn't think that Dionysus is a real god. So Dionysus shows up disguised and through his powers drives all of the women of Thebes insane. So they run out of the city and they run up into the woods and there are hunters that come with reports to King Pentheus of these women in the forest that they watched them hunt with their bare hands. So they were ripping apart animals and catching them with their bare hands. So Pentheus thinks like, okay, I got to figure out what's going on here. So Pentheus gets Dionysus to help him, even though he doesn't know it's Dionysus at this point. Pentheus gets Dionysus to put him up in a tree so that he can look out over everything that's going on. And then at this point, while Pentheus is up in the tree, Dionysus directs all of the women of Thebes, including Pentheus' own mother, to knock the tree over, pull Pentheus down and rip him apart. And there's a scene at the end, toward the end of the play, where Pentheus' mother actually has like his head and is walking around Thebes with it thinking it's the head of a wild animal that she has killed. And it kind of serves as the downfall of this house of Cadmus here. And Cadmus and Harmonia, at the end of this, are turned into snakes, actually. So Dionysus is very much about transforming people into animals and himself into animals. There's a story about him and pirates where he turns into like a bear and a lion on a boat and destroys a bunch of pirates. Cadmus and Harmonia end up getting turned into snakes and so that's the end of their house.

 If I had a penny for every Greek royal family with a multi-generational curse on them.

 Yeah, absolutely. 

Oedipus is a story so many people are at least vaguely familiar with, but the full saga is so much more than a bit of accidental murder and incest. Thank you for explaining that. But as an elder millennial who can still sing every line of the Disney soundtrack by heart, can we please talk about Hercules? 

Thank you for mentioning Disney's Hercules. That's the one piece of media in the modern world that shows Thebes in Greek mythology. It's the big olive, right? According to Philoctetes, Thebes is the big olive. That's where they're going to go to make Herc into a hero. Heracles is born in Thebes to his mother, Alcmene. And then he marries Megara, who is the daughter of King Creon from the Oedipus myth. His time in Thebes is fairly short-lived though. He ends up being driven mad by Hera and then he kills Megara and his children and that initiates his penance in the labours of Hercules. So it's an early part to the Hercules story, but the Thebans very much associate themselves with Hercules. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Disney never made Hercules 2, because it all goes downhill from there. I really love that that movie tied Hercules so closely to Thebes though, because it sounds like there's a historical precedent for that in the city itself. Do we see Thebans building anything in their city to boast about this Hercules connection, the fact that he spent some pretty significant time there? 

There's an archaic or it might even be geometric shrine to Heracles in Thebes that's very old. And it's one of the oldest shrines of Heracles anywhere in the Greek world. And it's been partially excavated. The Thebans also use as their sigil on their shield... By the time we get to the fourth century, their sigil is the club of Heracles. I could talk a little bit in a bit when we get to the historical period about how Hercules continually gets invoked in the historical period. But yeah, that's kind of the mythology of Thebes that people might be familiar with. There's a lot of tie-ins to really famous figures. Dionysus, Heracles, all from this double foundation myth that gets interwoven. And the idea is that all these connections get made because there's a migration into Boeotia at some point before the historical period of foreign peoples. And so Cadmus represents that group. And then Amphion and Zethus represent the native population of Boeotia. And this is the argument that Berman makes about the double foundation myth. So in getting this double foundation myth, it's actually the result of the merging of these two peoples and their traditions. Which when you start to look at Greek mythology, most of what we know about Greek mythology is emerging of varying traditions like why Poseidon is somehow also the god of horses, right? That makes sense from the perspective of Greeks that would have known him as the god of the sea. It's all about merging traditions as we get deeper into Greek history. 

Right. So it sounds then that Thebes was like a mythological big hitter. Does this reflect the fact that it had quite a lot of prestige in the period before the famous fifth century of Greece? 

Yeah. So even in the Mycenaean period, so in the Bronze Age, there have been excavations in Thebes on the Cadmea that find Bronze Age levels. And there are also a lot of linear B tablets, the written language of the Mycenaeans that had been found in Thebes, including at a place called the Arsenal. There was a massive kind of trove of linear B tablets found in Thebes. Interestingly, Thebes doesn't get mentioned in the catalog of ships in Homer's There's Hypo Thebe, which gets mentioned at some point, but Thebes is a little bit left out in that. And you have Orchomenos, which is another city in Boeotia that's also a Bronze Age site that ends up being mentioned. But yeah, Thebes as its own thing gets left out of Homer. But we know that from excavation, there's a massive Bronze Age presence in Thebes. 

I'd love to know why. You know, as you say, we know from archaeology that Bronze Age Thebes is a big deal. So I'd love to know why they get skipped in the Iliad. It's like they're prestigious, but no one wants you to know it. I think it's going to be a bit of a recurring theme in this episode, Thebes getting the short end of the stick. As we move past the Mycenaean period, does Thebes get more attention in the sources going into the Iron Age? 

Thebes kind of gets through the Greek Dark Ages into the Iron Age. We don't hear a ton about Thebes in literature in the 6th century. So it's really only the 5th century that we get more descriptions of Thebes. And they pop up in the Persian Wars. And one of the reasons that Thebes, I think, historically gets a little bit lambasted is that most of our sources are Athenian that are contemporary to that period. And so, you know, Herodotus isn't Athenian, but Thucydides and Xenophon are. And so we end up getting this perspective of anyone who doesn't help the Athenians fight the Persians is bad. And Thebes is definitely on that list. Thebes did not help the Athenians fight the Persians. But from the Theban perspective, you might say that the Athenians might have abandoned Thebes first, because initially, everybody knows about the Battle of Thermopylae, thanks to Exciter and 300. Initially, that stand against the Persians was meant to be much farther north at Tempe in the far north of Greece. And then the Southern Greeks basically say, you know what, we're not feeling this. We're going to go back to Southern Greece and start to fortify things. So you see the Spartans fortifying the Isthmus of Corinth, whereas they're leaving all of basically central Greece to the Persians. 

So the Thessalians, who were their major group north of the Thebans, they immediately medize or go to the Persians. Medizing is the term that gets used for siding with the Persians in the Persian wars. And it's a label that you get for basically like the Athenians never let the Thebans forget that they sided with the Persians in the Persian war. There are Thebans at Thermopylae, oddly enough. It's not surprisingly, it's not just those 300 Spartan dudes that are there. There's a lot of other Greeks that are there as well. The Thebans have kind of a weird position at Thermopylae though, because it seems like based on the historical sources that we have, they were there more as hostages than anything else. That the Greeks had a feeling that the Thebans were probably going to go to the Persian side at some point. And that is in fact exactly what happens. As soon as the Spartans are left at Thermopylae when the rest of the Greeks retreat, the Thebans surrender to the Persians. And the Thebans get branded actually by the Persians with the mark of their king for fighting against the Persians. So they're shamed forever in the Greek mind, right, of allowing a foreign non-Greek to mark them in that way and then take over their territory. So yeah, so the Thebans are involved at Thermopylae. There's 400 of them there, so it's not like it's a huge group of Thebans. But there are 400 Thebans at Thermopylae, and then they immediately side with the Persians afterward. They immediately medize after Thermopylae. 

Okay. I'm familiar with my geography. I know where Thebes is. I know where Thermopylae is. And I'm trying to put myself in Theban shoes and imagine the largest army the Greeks have ever seen inching closer and closer to me, knowing that every other Greek city has retreated further south. They're regrouping for their next battles, which becomes pretty clear very quickly is going to be too late for me in Thebes. Central Greece has pretty much been left to fend for itself. And all of my backup has either been killed at Thermopylae or evaporated into thin air. Ancient historians make such a big deal about the sacrifice at Thermopylae that slowed down the Persian advance, long enough to evacuate Athens and allow southern Greek cities to prepare themselves. And later they all pat themselves on the back for saving Greeks from Persia. But if I'm in Thebes on our own, the Persians are at our gate. We're outnumbered with a whole load of civilians inside the city. Can you set the record straight for us? Do Thebans defect to the Persians because they're traitorous chickens? Or do they surrender to the Persians to avoid every man being massacred, women being sexually assaulted, being sold into slavery? 

Logistically, they would have no choice, right? If the rest of the southern Greeks are leaving to go back to Attica and the Peloponnese, Thermopylae is the gateway to Boeotia. So the next stop for the Persian army is going to be Boeotia. So it might have been a pragmatic concern for the Thebans rather than get wiped out just to side with the Persians at this point. And then the land battle of Plataea at the end of the Persian Wars, the Persians have to retreat and they retreat all the way back to Persia over a land route. But the only reason they had any army left at that point is because the Theban cavalry actually covers their retreat at the Battle of Plataea. So at Plataea, you have Greeks fighting other Greeks. And it's not this big Persian versus Greek, a united Greece idea that we get in contemporary culture. There were Greeks fighting other Greeks at that battle on the side and trying to help the Persians escape to fight again because the Thebans knew that they would basically get kind of blacklisted from the rest of Greece for siding with the Persians. A couple decades later, the Athenians invade Thebes and occupy the entire region of Boeotia for 10 years. 

What's their justification for that? 

Part of it is their own security at this point. At that point, the Athenians are building the Athenian Empire. They call it the Persians coming back to Greece. But you would have to pay tribute to get into the Delian League. And you can either send ships to help defend against another Persian invasion, or you could send money and the Athenians would build the ships for you. And then they would crew them with Athenians. And so you were basically building the Athenian fleet. If you were a member of this league, you also couldn't leave. So it's not really like the freedom of the Greeks league. It's not defending the freedom of all Greeks. The Athenians multiple times put down member states that attempt to leave. Then this leads into the Peloponnesian Wars. 

Okay, so most people know that the main rivals in the Peloponnesian War are the Athenians and the Spartans. But we might not know how a city like Thebes would get dragged into that. Is there a tension there with other Greeks because Thebes surrendered to the Persians and the other Greeks just really couldn't forgive them for it? 

There'd always been animosity between the Athenians and the Boeotians, partially over their border. And you see that play out at a place called Plataea, which is another city in Boeotia. The Thebans had an animosity with Plataea. The Athenians always supported Plataean independence from Thebes. They actually end up kickstarting the Peloponnesian War with a failed Theban attempt to take over Plataea. The Thebans try and enter the city at night with a supporting army outside that was meant to show up the next day. So the idea is that the Plataeans would wake up, and this is happening in the 430s, like right at the start of the Peloponnesian War. So the idea is that the Plataeans would wake up, the Thebans would be basically in their citadel, and then they would also have an army outside. So hopefully the Plataeans would just give up while the army that was meant to be outside gets delayed in its march from Thebes. So the Plataeans wake up and they just find a handful of Thebans in the middle of their city and decide, okay, well, we can kick these people out. And so there is basically like running battle through the streets of Plataea as the Thebans try and escape, and the Plataeans are locking them in the city. And then the Theban army eventually arrives and lays siege to Plataea. And the siege of Plataea then involves the Spartans because the Spartans are Thebes' allies, so they show up. 

And that kind of kicks off the Peloponnesian War, which is the entirety of Thucydides' work. And this massive war between Greeks. And then the Thebans and Spartans side with each other during the Peloponnesian War. So even though it's mostly, you get taught it's Athens versus Sparta, Thebes plays a big role in that. And Thebes also with its allies in Boeotia defeats the Athenians several times, most notably in the early part of the war, because then it shifts to kind of a naval war later on. But early part of the war, the Thebans are kicking some Athenian ass in the end. They're kicking ass, particularly at this battle called Delium in 424 BC. The Athenians get defeated. There's some names involved in fighting in this battle, apparently Socrates and Alcibiades, who are big names in Athens. Yeah, they're both there, apparently. The Athenians lose. And so it basically kicks the Athenians out of Boeotia. And there's a weird mention in the course of the battle that apparently the Thebans used some kind of flamethrower. Translation is kind of weird for you could describe it as like a fire breathing device. And people have attempted to reconstruct it as well what it would be. It's basically like you hang a burning cauldron on the end of this pipe, and then you can shoot some kind of or you can squeeze some kind of flammable liquid out of it in order to ignite it, and then it becomes a flamethrower. And it's like a throwaway line in the description of the battle, which makes people think like, well, did they have this the whole time? Like is this something that we should? Are we reimagining a Greek battle in the wrong way? Should we think of it as flames are spouting all over the place or what's going on here? But I think the reality is that it'd be pretty unreliable. It'd be pretty easy to mess up the construction of that and end up just incinerating yourself in the end of that. But yeah, it's a weird throwaway line in the description of the battle of Delium that the Boeotians have some kind of flamethrowing device that they're meant to use. 

Yeah, isn't that just typical? It's always the weirdest, coolest stuff that gets a mere throwaway line in the sources before they spend about five chapters on something far less exciting. 

Personally, I don't really need to hear more from Pericles! You want to hear more about the flamethrower? Absolutely. 

I am so glad they hinted about the flamethrower in one of the Assassin's Creed Odyssey DLCs. So I'm going to have to go back and check that they credit Thebes for it, because I distinctly remember they make sure in that game to have the Spartan protagonist slag off Thebes for meadizing. So it's only fair to get all of the facts right. But yeah, thank you for making that clear that, as you say, the Peloponnesian War was not two rival cities going at it. It was pretty much the entire Greek world getting caught up in this huge conflict, and Thebes was no exception. But what were the consequences of this war for Thebes specifically? I can't imagine any cities coming out of it completely unscathed, but is Thebes destroyed? Were they on the side of the winners or the losers by the time this war finally wrapped up? 

Thebes is in a pretty good position at the end of the Peloponnesian War. A spoiler alert for everybody, Athens does lose the Peloponnesian War, and I don't know if anybody is waiting on the conclusion of that narrative, but Athens loses to Thebes and Sparta and all the other allies of Sparta. So Thebes looks pretty good at this point. At this point, they've also formed a federal state with the region of Boeotia. The Thebans themselves are part of this wider ethnic group that Greeks would term it an ethne. We generally think of Greek city-states being organized as a polis. This is kind of like an alternative organization of the Greeks culturally, and it's called an ethne and the ethne of the Boeotians. So they speak in different dialects than the Athenians. They have some shared traditions. They have all these different polis within this wider ethne. So they might identify themselves as a Theban, but they're also part of this wider Boeotian cultural group or ethnic group. So at some point by the mid-fifth century, the Thebans managed to wrangle all the other cities of Boeotia into this koinon, into this federal state. And it's actually really complex, and one of the lucky things about archaeology and about our understanding of Boeotia is that we know they had a federal state because Thucydides mentions it at a couple points, but doesn't really go into the details of it. There's a work that was found based on papyri in the Egyptian desert. It's called the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, and it's based off of the Oxyrhynchus papyri that were found in Egypt at the turn of the 20th century, which is this massive horde of papyri that have been preserved because of the environmental conditions of Egypt, because it's a low oxygen arid environment so bacteria can't eat away at the papyri. So it's a fragmentary history, but the fragments that have been put back together describe the Boeotian federal state. 

So we're super lucky from that perspective of this happenstance of if we only have 1% of Greek literature, this somehow is a thing that we found. Yeah. It's really lucky. And so the state is actually really complex. 

And when I talk to my students about it, I'm teaching a course right now on the influences of the ancient world in modern political and social movements. And when we talk about the way that modern governments are structured, we're much more in common with this federal state of the Boeotians than we do with Athenian democracy. I had my students play out how hard it would be to implement Athenian-style democracy in the United States today. And the best we came up with is like there's an app on your phone that like pings every time you have to vote on something because the Athenians had direct democracy where you vote on everything. It just doesn't work logistically. But the Boeotians have this federal state and they've got everything divided into districts. Districts are roughly geographic. There's a couple of weird ones that we're still trying to figure out the connection, how one city connects to the other. Could be just population balancing between districts, but Thebes has an overweight proportion, so we're not entirely sure. But there is this federal structure. There are districts. Every district has responsibilities to this wider federal state. So you can do kind of whatever you want in your own city culturally. So religious calendars, things like that, all good. Do whatever you want. Local offices, all fine, not regulated particularly by this federal decree. Where it really applies is foreign policy and the military. And so the Boeotian federal state then gets representatives from all of these districts. There are 11 districts at the height of the Boeotian Confederacy. Everybody sends 60 representatives to this central body that's housed in Thebes. 

So Thebes is the center of this because they're the largest city in Boeotia and they have the greatest population. They initially end up starting with two districts just to themselves and then they take on the districts of Plataea after the sack of Plataea in the Peloponnesian War. So Thebes has four districts that represent out of 11. So they have a pretty big size in there. It's a cool map to look at as well. So you have that. So you get representation, vote on foreign issues. You get to send one executive. It's called the Boeotarchos. So the leader of the Boeotians. Every district gets one of those. So there are 11 that all get to come together and they kind of make split decisions. They're the leaders of the military. They also help set like the agenda for assembly meetings. So they're the chief executives of the Boeotian federal states. In terms of the army, obviously when you get a bunch of states together, there's a big advantage in that militarily because you can combine the forces from all of these much smaller states that wouldn't be super significant on their own. But now you have this big army. So everybody is required to send a thousand hoplites. So a thousand heavy infantry and a hundred cavalry anytime the army gets called up. So you have a minimum fighting force for the Boeotian confederation of 11,000 hoplites and 1,100 cavalry, which is substantial, right? Like especially if you're viewing that minimum. That's a big deal on the Greek stage. So the Thebans are basically ruling Boeotia at this point by the end of the Peloponnesian War and things are going very well. Their land is prosperous. One of the reasons you don't see Thebes and other Boeotian cities sending out colonies is likely because the carrying load of their land doesn't get met very often. So the ability to produce foodstuffs in their own region is sufficient for pretty much all of the classical period. So we don't see them doing big colonization movements overseas. Then everything kind of changes with the outbreak of the Corinthian War at the start of the 4th century. And this is also where things like really drop off. This is linking Thebes to events that you might have heard about. The next part when we get into the 4th century is linking Thebes to things that nobody has heard about. But they're very cool in a fun way. And the 4th century is my specialty within Theban history just because I think it's so interesting. 

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that most of the people reading about Greek history as a hobby will have mostly read about the 5th century. And that goes for students too to be honest. And I'd love to help bridge the chasm between the Peloponnesian War and Alexander the Great on this show. Because if you look on a lot of bookshelves and stores it's like nothing interesting happened in the first half of the 4th century at all. It's like Greeks just sat around waiting for Alexander to show up. But that's not what happened. It sounds like Thebes starts the 4th century in a better position than they did the 5th. Do they capitalize on that at all? What are they doing at this point? 

The main thing that serves as a fulcrum or main event that serves as a fulcrum for the rest of the 4th century history up until you get the Macedonian involvement in the mid-4th century is the Corinthian War. And the Corinthian War is an effort by the Spartans to basically become the primary state of Greece. So they want to be hegemon or like chief polis among all the others in Greece. And so they wage war against all of these other Greek states including Thebes. And they eventually get the Persians involved in this as well. So the Persians come back and then at the end of the Corinthian War because it's basically this series of battles that it results in a standstill. No one has a super clear advantage at this point. But the Spartans then get the Persians to weigh in on this and the Persians issue the King's Peace in 386 which basically says the Spartans are the primary dictator of what happens in Greece. Anyone who disagrees with that we will send our army back to Greece to put them in their place. And so they're forcing Greece under kind of the thumb of the Spartans. How did the rest of Greece react? Because Sparta are placing themselves as the protector of Greeks from Persians before the Peloponnesian War. And Thebes is getting lambasted because they surrendered to the Persians in the 5th century. All these years later we've got a complete flip. 

How are people reacting to the fact that Sparta are now running to Persia to back them up? 

It doesn't even take that long for Greek states to start going back to Persia. Like even during the Peloponnesian War one of the critical parts of winning the Peloponnesian War is Persia entering with their navy and helping defeat the Athenians. Because if Athens relies on its navy to bring in foodstuffs and the navy gets destroyed then that's obviously the end of Athens. And so Persia weighing in on the Peloponnesian War is actually what secures it at the end of this. And it's a pretty minimal investment from the Persian side. But basically the Persians end up deciding both the Peloponnesian and the Corinthian War and everybody just kind of ignores it. Like everybody just kind of ignores the fact that oh these people were trying to invade us like a hundred years ago or in the case of the Peloponnesian War like within our living memory. And we're just cool with asking them for help now. Which I think goes a little bit to the idea of political ideology in ancient Greece and how it's all based on power. Right of like you just want you just want to be in power and you're going to support whatever system or whatever entity puts you back in power. So it's tough at times to talk about ideologues and fifth century views from a political perspective. Because you have governments being overthrown constantly and it's just a matter of who's in power. States are perfectly willing to institute an oligarchy if that means that that new oligarchic regime sides with them in foreign relations. So there's a little bit of inconsistency there. But yeah by the time of the fourth century everybody is totally fine with the Persians helping to weigh in on Greek affairs. 

So Sparta is on the ascendancy but it sounds like Thebes are kind of building up quite the military force there. Are they ever going to use it against the Spartans? 

That is a worry of the Spartans. And so in the terms of the peace that ends the Corinthian war it says there is a right of Greek polis to be independent from one another. And so the Spartans use that to basically dismantle the Boeotian League. They say the federal state is actually infringing on the rights of these individual polis. You can't have that federal state anymore and everybody else is exhausted at this point of fighting both from the Peloponnesian war and the Corinthian war. And they kind of go along with it and they basically say yeah Thebes you're out of luck. You have to just ban the Boeotian League. And there are multiple scenes like throughout the fourth century where the Spartans make this argument and then somebody from Thebes says well hold on a second like how about the Peloponnesian League that you're the leader of and the Spartans say well that's different. That's something that yeah that doesn't matter. So again goes back to this idea of power politics. We are in power so we can dictate the interpretation of these rules for everybody else. There's still worry among the Spartans even after the King's Peace. 

So in 382 they do something totally wild and actually capture Thebes. There are some ways to look at it that view it as kind of like an accident where there's a Spartan force marching past Thebes on their way up north to fight a battle. And one of the factions in Thebes approaches the Spartans and says you know we're celebrating a festival right now so there's no one in the Cadmea. You can just literally walk in and take it with your army if you wanted and the and so Thebes gets occupied by the Spartans in 382 and all of the moderate factions of the oligarchy that tend to be anti-Spartan led by these two guys named Ismenias and Androcleides. They get exiled so Ismenias gets brought back to Sparta put on trial and executed and then Androcleides flees to Athens with the rest of his faction. Now a pro-Spartan government gets put in Thebes and it remains that way for three years until this massive event called the liberation of the Cadmea in late 379 where it's winter. The Athenians had been kind of secretly helping the Theban exiles and so the Theban exiles craft a plan to get back into power in Thebes because they basically view the government in Thebes right now as like a puppet government of Sparta which it definitely was. Like there's a Spartan there's a Spartan garrison in Thebes and there's a Spartan military commander there as well. And so the Athenians kind of actually owe the Thebans a little bit because the Thebans had given some of the Athenian Democrats exile or a home in their exile at the end of the Peloponnesian war that then resulted in the democracy being restored to Athens when they came back from Thebes. So this is kind of like pinning it back basically. 

At this point. So they craft a plan they sneak into Boeotia it's a very small group it's led by Pelopidas who is kind of this new leader of the Theban faction because Androcleides was murdered by Spartan assassins in Athens while they were in exile. So Pelopidas takes on the reins. He dresses everybody up in shepherd's clothing basically and sneaks them into Thebes and then they meet at a friend's house who had remained in Thebes at this point. And they decide like okay now we're going to divide up and we're going to go around Thebes and we're going to kill all the ring leaders of this government. So they show up. 

One group is basically like a classic insurgency. We're going to kick in the door and come take care of business in here. But the other one has to sneak into a party and so they dress up like women, as the entertainers for the party, and they have their armor on underneath all of the garments or whatever that they have. And I guess again if you think too much about the logistics of it it doesn't make a ton of sense. But like it must have been it's been cold enough that you would need to have some over clothes on so you could cover up your armor basically. 

So they get into this party and the Spartan commander had weirdly been warned by a spy in Athens beforehand that he got sent a letter that said like hey the Thebans are coming back or the exiles are coming back tonight and they're coming to get you. And he was already drunk at the party and basically told his servant to like no put that on my pillow I'll read it later. Right as that is happening the Thebans walk in take off their disguises and murder everybody in that room. They free all the prisoners that were in prison in Thebes that were political prisoners. They break into the arsenal rearm everybody. 

So basically the Theban military gets reconstituted and they trap the Spartans in the Cadmea. So in this Acropolis that was mythically founded by Cadmea the Spartans are now trapped. And eventually they negotiate a surrender and the Spartans leave and now Thebes is back and it's back with a vengeance. 

An early example of drag queens saving the day! So once the Spartans are evicted from Thebes what does the newly freed city start doing first? 

So they start rebuilding the Boeotian League to get that military force back to take on the Spartans. And you see the Thebans picking off cities that have been occupied or influenced by the Spartans one by one and forcing them back into this league by changing governments. By doing the thing that I talked about earlier, right? By taking a more moderate oligarchic faction and reinstituting their government under that faction versus the pro-Spartan faction in a lot of these places. And so now we're back in full scale war between Thebes and Sparta. And Athens is kind of hanging out on the sidelines waiting to see what's going to happen at the end of this because they're trying to rebuild their naval league at this point. Athens is trying to quietly rebuild their navy. And so this main conflict is now called the Boeotian War in some sources. It doesn't really matter what you call it. It's a war between Thebes and Sparta. And Thebes has kind of their narrative driven historically at this point by two main generals. 

One is Epaminondas who is kind of portrayed as this philosopher general. He's viewed as a military genius pretty broadly throughout the rest of the ancient world. Even in the Roman period Epaminondas is taken as this genius. And then Pelopidas who led the insurgents back into Thebes to retake it from Spartan control. So these two are basically the driving force and they spend the first close to a decade up until 371 trying to defend their holdings in Boeotia from Spartan invasion. Sparta weirdly has two kings at a time and it's a very weird constitution. But one king Cleombrotus invades Boeotia several times. And then we also get a couple of really important battles that are significant to shattering our conceptions of Sparta. Maybe that's why it doesn't get talked about that much. 

But there's a battle called Tegyra in 375. Tegyra is in Boeotia. It's really, really small, almost like a hamlet. But it's a place where a much larger Spartan force meets Pelopidas and his smaller Theban force in battle. And the Thebans win. And they mark it out as like what the first time in recorded history that the Spartans were numerically superior and lost. So Tegyra is this image shattering view of event in Greek history. This gets followed up later in 371 with the Battle of Leuctra where it's a major set battle between the Boeotians and the Spartans. In the midst of all of this, one of the reasons that Pelopidas was able to beat a numerically superior Spartan army is that he had this group called the Sacred Band. Pelopidas and this other guy named Gorgias form the Sacred Band right after the recapture of the Cadmea. It's an elite unit of 300 funded by the state. So all they do is train. So they don't have to work. They get weapons and armor provided and training provided by the state. They get their ribbon board provided by the state and they are an elite military unit. 

Was Thebes unique in having this crack squad of highly trained professional soldiers? Because the majority of Greek armies were citizen soldiers made up of farmers and tradesmen, right? So is this unusual and is it their entire military force or just part of a bigger army? 

Not uncommon to have this in the ancient Greek world at all. There are states in Arcadia that have a unit like this as well. Numbers vary from 300 to 1,000 but it's some kind of smaller unit of your entire army that is practiced soldiers because everybody else is just a farmer that has armor and fights during campaign season between planting and harvest. You wouldn't have this exact professionalism that you would expect. What's unique about The Sacred Band and you mentioned this at the opening too is that it's made of 150 pairs of male lovers and the rationale behind it according to ancient sources is that you'll fight harder for somebody that you are in love with than you will for your fellow citizen. Not the most irrational idea that you would think of and we get a little bit more information about them. We know that they take their oaths at the tomb of Aelaus in Thebes which is who's meant to be kind of the partner of Heracles as well so they swear oaths to each other and it's something that seems to be imbued in Boeotian or at least Theban religious practices as well. So you have this elite unit of 150 pairs of lovers that end up just wiping out the Spartans at Tegera and then play a pivotal role at Leuctra in 371 which is like the battle where Sparta loses its hold on central Greece. 

There's a lot of things that lead into that including some myths about Heracles so the Boeotian army arrives. There's a sixth Boeotarchoi at this point the generals because they're rebuilding the league they don't have 11 they never get back to 11 they only get to seven different districts. They have six Boeotarchoi there they're trying to decide on how to proceed in battle and the votes split because you have an even number and then the seventh one shows up and then they convince him that we should engage the Spartans. But part of that convincing and part of rallying the troops is Pelopidas sharing that he had a dream about victory which is big right like dreams are meant to portend things in the ancient world and then somebody comes up from Thebes and says the armor in the tomb of Heracles or in the Heracleion in Thebes is gone. And so the generals very cleverly spin this into all right so we have to engage in battle now because Heracles has come back and taken up his armor and he's here with us fighting on the battlefield today so we have to live up to the heroism of Heracles and so it's a little propaganda piece as well that this mythic tradition that most people know actually plays a historical role as well in justifying some of the actions and enforcing what the Thebans want to do. 

Okay that sounds to modern ears at least crazy because Heracles is a myth even if he did become a god in the myths it's still just a story but just to be clear for the Greeks myths were synonymous with history, right? So Heracles coming down from Olympus to join him with a battle was actually plausible to them? 

They would absolutely think that this is something that that could happen in a society that relies on omens and oracles you could absolutely believe that this is a sign that Heracles is here wanting to fight on your side and then there's a bad omen that happens later in Theban history that I'll get to in a second but yeah they're big on omens and prophecies. 

So we've got to a point where Thebes has been castigated for siding with the Persians; they've emerged from the Peloponnesian War quite strong and now in the fourth century they are the ones to defeat Spartan armies repeatedly. That's a big deal right? 

Yeah it's a huge deal. So they win at Leuctra they not only win at Leuctra they kill King Cleombrotus. Cleombrotus dies in the battle of Leuctra, so they kill a Spartan king in the course of this battle as well. The Thebans are about to like completely wipe out the Spartan army when one of their allies from the north Jason of Pherae shows up and is basically the mediator for the two sides and he convinces them to not actually wipe each other out, and goes back north to Thessaly because he wants to buy more time to consolidate the north against his own interests. So they win at Leuctra and then they launch invasions of the Peloponnese like they take the fight to Sparta after this under Epaminondas and Pelopidas but it's mostly Epaminondas' thing. You can see a little bit of a division particularly as we get into the 360s of Epaminondas takes the south Pelopidas takes the north and they basically jet out of Boeotia with armies in two directions. They're not into territorial expansion which kind of baffles the other ancient Greeks of why are they not taking over places right and expand their own territory. You can attribute all kinds of things and people have attributed all kinds of motivations to Epaminondas and Pelopidas but it could just be that they're pragmatic and realize that you can't maintain territory like that because they saw the Spartans fail to do it in their own country or in their own homeland. But yeah, they invade Sparta. Epaminondas comes really close to actually invading Sparta itself as a city. He crosses the Eurotas River which is the border of Laconia and Sparta and is ready to take Sparta and only a series of kind of like miraculous defenses of Sparta rallied by the new Spartan king at the time saves them including like a naked guy wielding axes in the middle of the street. It's a big deal that they take the fight to Sparta and they start to gain allies around Sparta as well to hem Sparta in. 

Is that really significant because they're the first Greeks to get that far to get that close to Sparta? 

Yeah, they really are. I mean the Persians don't get there. They don't get that close and then later on when Philip of Macedon is trying to basically force everybody into the League of Corinth which is his way to control Greece. When Philip is trying to get the Spartans he basically sends him a letter that says if I come down there bad things are going to happen. I will destroy Sparta if I cross the Eurotas and come into Spartan territory and the Spartan response is one word and it's 'if.' It's part of the laconic wit that gets attributed to Sparta but yeah, no huge deal. In doing all of this Thebes is now basically the primary state in Greece. They are the ones that dictate what goes on in Greece but it's very short-lived so it doesn't get a ton of attention in historical sources. 

It does seem too good to be true this reversal of fortune. 

Yeah, obviously it takes a lot of manpower to do all this. Greece is fairly exhausted from almost a century of conflict at this point as well and then Pelopidas and Epaminondas both die in battle. Pelopidas dies at a battle called Cynoscephalae in 364 in Thessaly fighting against a very bad guy named Alexander of Pherae who's a tyrant in Thessaly. I said I would mention like the bad omen so as they divide their armies and raising armies to go north and south Pelopidas basically takes the north out of like a variety of reasons. One is that he seemed to have a personal relationship with the Thessalians in some way. He also has some animosity for getting captured as an ambassador in Thessaly when he goes there so when he gets back to Thebes he's like, all right, now I'm taking an army and I'm going to mess these people up. So he goes north. He's building this army in Thebes to go north and then there's a solar eclipse. As he's like getting ready to march out of the city there's an eclipse and it blots out the sun and all the Greeks in Thebes are like, hey, that's probably a bad idea because they're big on omens so I think there's a sign we should not do this. 

Pelopidas kind of has this like Thanos in the gauntlet moment of like, fine, I'll do it myself and goes to Thessaly by himself with this small group of cavalry and hoplites around him and then recruits all the soldiers from the Thessalian cities into this army. He leads them at the battle of Cynoscephale and he sees his opponent, Alexander, the guy that had imprisoned him on the battlefield and he basically has this mental break where he says, I'm going to kill this guy right now and so he runs out from behind his line runs into Alexander's bodyguards and starts fighting them and attempts to kill Alexander himself but he gets killed by bodyguards because it's very tough to fight as a hoplite on your own against everybody else around you. So he dies in 364 and then Epaminondas dies in 362 at the battle of Mantinea fighting against the Spartans. And so, it's a big loss in two years to have their leading figures gone after that. 

So you say leading figures and if Thebes has non-mythological heroes it sounds like these two men are in the running for the title. So are these the two greatest Thebans in history because they do sound pretty significant? 

I think, you know, this is my take as a scholar of the fourth century Boeotia: I think the role of Epaminondas and Pelopidas in general is overblown. There tends to be this idea that the Boeotians just have no ambition whatsoever and are kind of this sloppy people that just hang out all day and eat eels. Like eel eater is actually an epithet that gets put on the Boeotians in the ancient world. Boeotian swine is another one. Boeotian pigs, another one that pops up in Athenian literature. So there's this conception of the Boeotians as lazy or just not interested in conquest which is backed up by they don't send any colonies they're not really interested in territorial expansion and so there's a little bit of historical mapping there as well. Then Epaminondas and Pelopidas are viewed as these kind of two singular geniuses that I was reading and working on this thing on early textbooks about Greek history now. There's an early one from the early 19th century about how Pelopidas and Epaminondas basically single-handedly pull the Boeotians out of their sorry state and force them into the glory of running Greece. But if you look at what Boeotia is doing they're consistently interested in maintaining their sphere of influence in central Greece. They just do it in a way that tries to minimize the impact on them. Yeah, they'll send forces to destabilize tyrants and have them recalled. They'll go litigate dynastic succession in Macedon which is how Philip II, Alexander the Great's father actually ends up being a hostage in Thebes during this time period because he gets given as collateral for his family being given the throne of Macedon. 

Oh, wow. 

Yeah, so he ends up being in Thebes at this point and learning from all of these Theban generals. So it's something that once you look at the patterns of Boeotian behavior it stands for beyond Pelopidas and Epaminondas because they do it consistently even before the time period of Pelopidas. They are a big deal, definitely a big deal but they're not the deal, right? Like they're not the sole reason that Thebes becomes a power. T

he fact that these two generals are idealized… is that because the Greeks have an obsession with individual great men or because historians ever since have had an obsession with great men? 

It's a little bit of both. So the Boeotians actually try to put Pelopidas and Epaminondas in check. They put them on trial after their invasion of the Peloponnese because they hold their army too long. They maintain their office of Boeotaric for too long over the extended time period because you have like the start of the year where you're meant to give up your office and then there's a new election and the new Boeotarchai are installed. They extend that in order to take the fight to Sparta and they get put on trial when they come back. And Epaminondas is on trial and he's trying to take all the blame on himself and he says, okay, if you're going to put me to death then go out there and make sure on my tombstone you put all the things I've done for this city and he's listing off all these victories that he's won like Leuctra refounded the city of Messene in the Peloponnese and then they acquit him in the end. There is a way that there is a sense that they are trying to rein them in and that the two of them don't dictate everything that Thebes does because Thebes is very interested in maintaining the structure of power within their federal states. Plutarch is the other issue. So Plutarch writes the Lives, the Parallel Lives. Some of them are lost. We know he wrote a life of Epaminondas that is lost. He wrote a life of Pelopidas as well. And that we have. And so I think a lot of scholarship on Thebes in the fourth century that focuses on Peloponnese is because of this use of Plutarch as a source that is more unbiased than he is. Or I think they don't quite understand the motives of Plutarch. Or like Plutarch is a biographer, he's going to try and put his subject in as many important things as possible. Nobody's going to write a biography about somebody that is there for one thing, and then everything else just kind of happens. Of course, when he writes a life of Pelopidas, he's going to portray Pelopidas as the ringleader of all of these different movements or the proponent of all of these different policies. And that just continues on because Plutarch is a late source. I mean, Plutarch is writing hundreds of years after this. And even though Plutarch himself is Boeotian, he's got some home field. He's got an advantage in that he has access to Boeotia itself. But he's also got some home field bias. And of course, he would want to make one of the Europeans out to be the best. And then you've got modern scholars that use Plutarch as their primary source. So of course, they're going to put an outsized role in Peloponnese and Epaminondas. 

Yeah. Do you think that there would be even more emphasis on these two guys if we had both biographies from Plutarch? 

Plutarch references Epaminondas at several points in work that we have. So it seems like we'd have a fuller picture of Epaminondas stays in Thebes while everybody else is in exile. So we might get that perspective of what Theban life was like under occupation by the Spartans. It's tough to tell. It's a big what if, right? And I mean, one of the funnest things you can do is usually ask a historian what lost work would you like back, probably. But who knows? Because we don't know necessarily what would be in it. 

Okay. So it sounds like for the time at least where we've got to, Sparta's on the back foot, Thebes is on the up and up a little bit. How long does this ascendancy last? Because it sounds too good to be true? 

Lasts about 10 years. Yeah, lasts about a decade. So the pivotal event once we get to the middle of the 4th century is this event called the Third Sacred War. Focus is the region directly north of Boeotia. Within Focus is Delphi, which is the home of the Delphic oracle. And Delphi has land allotted to it that belongs to nobody. And it's meant to support the site and the people that live there, the priests, things like that. Part of that is this plain that is below Delphi called Chora. And the Phocaeans, who are the people that live all around this, decide, you know what? We need more food. We're going to take Chora for ourselves. And so they take Chora, they harvest food steps out of there. And that's viewed as like an affront to the god, to the god Apollo. Because that's all land sacred to Apollo. So then there's this other league, this religious league that's been around for a long time called the Amphictyonic League that Thebes and the other Boeotian cities are a part of. Athens is a part of it too. It's pretty widespread. And it's meant to be kind of this quasi-religious political organization around Delphi. It's a bunch of people who are responsible for Delphi. 

And so the Amphictyons say, okay, we're going to levy a fine against the Phocaeans, who are also members of this league. The Phocaeans say, I don't think so. And break out of the league, they actually plunder the site of Delphi because of all the dedications that have been left there. There's a lot of like precious metals and things like that, that were just in Delphi. So the Phocaeans plunder the site, they melt everything down into coins, and they melt bronze down into armor. And they use that to buy mercenaries. And so this third sacred war is between the Amphictyons led by the Boeotians and the Phocaeans. And the Phocaeans just continue to hire mercenaries. So they have a pretty steady flow of men and arms into the region. And they're just exhausting each other, right? Because the Boeotians had crushed the Phocaeans multiple times. In the Corinthian War, during the rise of Thebes again after the recapture of the Cadmea, there'd always been an animosity. Thebes always had the upper hand. So now we're exhausting all of our forces. Because again, we're getting close to a century of conflict within Greece. 

And this is where we then end up getting the Macedonians. Because Philip also comes in and they invite Philip to come help them in the war against the Phocaeans. Philip says yes. Philip gradually takes over territory. He gets named the ruler of Thessaly so that he gets even more land out of that. And then we get to the point where no one can actually really resist Philip anymore. 

So he creates the League of Corinth that is meant to be a diplomatic league, but it's really his way to control all of the Greek states. Honestly, Thebes has very important figures. They have a great military. Even into the 350s, Pamanese is the Theban general that is in charge of their effort in the sacred war and does very well. But you only have a limited number of people and supplies. So we get to this point now where Thebes is exhausted, everybody in southern Greece is exhausted, and central Greece. Philip comes in, basically takes over. You get this final stand of the Greeks against Philip at Chaeroneia in 338. The sacred band, that elite unit, gets annihilated at the Battle of Chaeroneia. They get killed to the last man. There's a kind of apocryphal story about Philip actually touring the battlefield after the battle and looking at where all of the members of the sacred band had fallen and crying because he thinks like that's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen of these people dying for each other and their country. And he erects a monument, a lion monument there, that if you go to Chaeroneia today, the lion monument is there. And that is the monument. It's meant to be at the spot where the sacred band fell. So there's this respect in there, these little images or little physical markers of the Theban pass. And then Philip gets assassinated. 

Alexander takes over. The Thebans decide one more time, let's try and break free of Macedon. Let's use this kind of tumultuous period where Alexander is eliminating his rivals to the throne to break free. Doesn't work. Alexander comes down, defeats the Thebans, burns the entire city to the ground, with the exception of a Pindar's house. Pindar is a Theban poet, and  Pindar's house remains apparently, and Alexander doesn't want to destroy that. But he destroys the rest of Thebes. And that's kind of the end of Thebes for a little bit before it gets refounded later on. 

So Alexander the Great, at that point he wasn't the great yet. Is that the first city that we hear about him destroying?

 There's got to be some cities in the north that he had destroyed before Thebes. Yeah, in terms of like the Greece that we would think about, yeah, it's a big deal. This is before he has gone to Asia. Because once he goes to Asia, he never comes back. Which I think people forget about Alexander. It's like once he leaves, he never goes back to Macedon or to Greece as a whole. But yeah, it's a shocking event for everybody. And it's meant to serve as an example to the rest of the Greeks as to what happens when you try and defy the new order. And the Romans do something similar with the sack of Corinth. When they take over Greece, it's meant to be an example to the rest of the Greeks. 

Yeah, don't mess with us because we will literally tear your city to pieces. As a piece of messaging, I mean, at least it's succinct. 

Yeah, yeah, it's very clear. Like, I don't know if you can interpret that in any other way. So how long does it take for Thebes to start getting rebuilt? It kind of falls into obscurity. We know it gets refounded by Cassander, who's one of the successors to Alexander after Alexander dies in 323. We know it gets refounded by Cassander. It doesn't seem to play a hugely important role. We have some descriptions from the Hellenistic period, but it's one of the last times we hear about Thebes as a major power that can influence policy and influence other states beyond its own borders. It becomes really important in like the Byzantine and Medieval period when you get crusaders coming and taking over parts of Greece. There's a Frankish tower in Thebes like on the Cadmea. Actually, it's part of the Thebes Museum. So yeah, it becomes a pretty big deal. Yeah, it's a big place later on. In terms of the ancient world, after Alexander destroys Thebes, we don't get a whole lot from them for the rest of what we know. 

So it sounds like after the heroic age of mythology, they had quite a patchy history. Doesn't sound like there was any consistency. 

Yeah, it's definitely up and down. They get like a pretty solid half century in between the Peloponnesian War and the deaths of Epaminondas and Pelopidas. Part of the issue is we also get the end of Xenophon's Hellenica is actually the death of Epaminondas. So going back to what you were asking earlier about why these viewer are viewed as outsize influences, Xenophon is basically like, well, Epaminondas is dead, so I'm just going to end my history here. Okay. And he says like at this point, all of Greece is in confusion and then it just kind of ends. But yeah, the last thing that Xenophon writes about is the Battle of Mantinea and the death of Epaminondas. 

Right. So he is seen as significant in his lifetime. Significant enough for Xenophon to say, 'that's it, hanging up the pen.' 

Yeah, and culturally there's a big importance, like there are oracular sites in Thebes throughout the archaic and classical period. The Shrine of as Many on Apollo in Thebes is an ancient oracle that was famous, Pausanias writes about it. We also get mentions of it in Herodotus. So culturally Thebes is actually pretty important as well as politically and as well as the mythology that I talked about at the start. 

So we've talked about this city that has this dramatic mythological heritage. It's got a really dramatic rise and fall, rise and fall history. And I'm obviously a history nut and I've traveled to many places in Greece because I've been drawn to them. But never to Thebes. But I'm hardly alone in that, right? It's not a city that's ever going to make the cover page of a Greece travel guide. But is that fair? Because we talked about Thebes not getting the historical credit and attention it deserves. Should it be a destination for more travelers? 

When I was excavating in Thebes, you couldn't find a postcard of Thebes. It's definitely not on the tourist trail. They do have, so it's been several years ago now, but they do have a beautiful new museum in Thebes. That if you've ever been to the Acropolis Museum in Athens, they have the glass floor that shows you the excavation below it. The Thebes Museum has the same thing in their museum. It's a really beautiful museum and it's well worth a stop. They have a lot of great stuff from really all periods, all the way from the Mycenaean period, all the way into kind of the Crusader period, the Byzantine period. It's really, really well done as a museum. And are there any sites in the city, monuments still above ground that we can visit, or is it a city where it's really difficult to see the ancient city in the modern? One of the difficulties of excavating Thebes is that the modern city lies directly on top of the ancient city. So it is hard to see at times, and Thebes wasn't given the excavation attention that Athens was. So like when you go to Athens today, you see like a lot of excavated things or a lot of exposed things. You don't really get that in Thebes. You can see the Cadmea. You can see the foundations of the Cadmea. You can see some of the walls of classical Thebes. You can see the foundation of the temple of Apollo's Medias, which is what the excavation that I worked on was investigating. There is a big statue of Pelopidas in Thebes, but it's modern. There's also a modern statue of Pindar. It's definitely, compared to other cities, you definitely would not see as much ancient ruins just by walking through the city that you would. In other Greek cities. 

But the museum makes it worth a detour? 

Oh, absolutely. The museum is great. And you can stop there on your way to Delphi. So like between Athens and Delphi, you can stop at Thebes and see the museum before you go on to Delphi. Yeah, it's well worth it. 

I'm going to be doing that. The next time I go, I'm stopping at Thebes. I've decided. So just to wrap it up then, what are some misconceptions about Thebes that you maybe want to dispel or some facts that you think should be better known about Thebes? 

I think really just the influence of Thebes needs to be talked about more, about how it shaped a lot of Greek history. And it proves, it demonstrates that Greek history is more nuanced than a lot of people think. Like I mentioned, the Persian Wars, everybody views it as East versus West, Greece versus Persia. Thebes dispels that immediately because they side with the Persians in the Persian War. It also shows a variety of government. Thebes has an oligarchy for pretty much all of its history. It's a moderate oligarchy. Thucydides describes it as oligarchia isonomos, which in their view is one of the best types of government. And you get several ancient authors that point out that moderate democracy and moderate oligarchy aren't that different in practice in the ancient Greek world. But again, seeing this federal state as a different way to organize the ancient Greek world and ancient Greek politics, it just puts a lot of nuance and depth to the ancient Greek world that I think it's missed if we just focus on Athens. 

And the focus on Athens is something that's almost endemic at this point to our study of the ancient world. 

Exactly. 

Thank you so much for helping us unravel the inconsistent, but also really interesting history of this city that does get overlooked. Thank you so much for shining some much needed light on it. And it sounds like there is a lot to read to get even more into it. 

Is there anything that you'd recommend that listeners go out and find to get more information about Thebes? 

Yeah, sure. So there are quite a few works on Thebes. It's not super widespread. If you want to learn more about the government and the politics of Thebes, I would recommend Hans Beck's work on federalism. He has several edited volumes on federal Greek states that work really well from the perspective of Greek religion and cultural identity. Stephanie Larson's book from the mid-2000s is very good on the formation of Boeotian identity in the archaic and early classical periods. I would try and stay away from more popular works that have been published recently. There are several works that I can think of that have been published as scholars musing on Thebes that aren't actual Theban scholars or Boeotian scholars that won't really point you to good sources. It's more about, again, falling into the trap of this Pelopidas and Epaminondas trap. But the foundational work on Thebes and what really brought it back into the scholarly mind is John Buckler's work from 1980 called The Theban Hegemony. So if you're interested in kind of the basics of Thebes in that period of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, I would read that as a starting point, even though it's older. I mean, just because it's older, doesn't mean it's not good. Yeah. And Dan Berman's work is great as well. Thinking about mythology and the topography of Thebes of how myth incorporates itself or how the Thebans incorporate their myth into the physical layout of their city. That work is excellent. 

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. It's been really, really interesting and I hope everyone has enjoyed listening to this rip-roaring history of Thebes. Thank you so much. 

Yeah, as you can tell, once you get me going, it doesn't take a lot to get me thinking about Thebes. Thank you for having me.