Thebes, Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  Thebes stands in the plain of Boeotia, about 50 kilometers northwest of Athens, at an elevation of 215 meters above sea level. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and for a stretch of the 4th century BC it was the most powerful city-state in all of Greece. How did a city so dominant fall so fast? And what kept it alive through destruction, plague, occupation, and centuries of foreign rule? The answers reach back before written history, to clay tablets scratched in a script called Linear B, and forward to a medieval silk trade that made Thebes the richest producer of luxury textiles in the Byzantine world. Along the way, Thebes gave the Greeks some of their most enduring myths, produced a military unit unlike any other in the ancient world, and was rebuilt from rubble not once but several times. What follows is the story of that city.

• 2. Bronze Age Origins

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  Archaeological excavations around Thebes have uncovered cist graves from Mycenaean times containing weapons, ivory, and clay tablets inscribed in Linear B, the earliest known form of Greek writing. Among the tablet references is te-qa-i, read by scholars as an ancient form of the city's name, meaning roughly "at Thebes." That points to a settlement already significant enough to be recorded in a palace bureaucracy.

  A statue base from Kom el-Hetan, associated with the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, contains a name that scholar Deger-Jalkotzy identified as likely referring to Thebes, listing it alongside Knossos and Mycenae as one of four kingdoms worthy of note. That places the Bronze Age city in elite company on an international register.

  By a later phase of the Mycenaean era, Thebes had trading contacts with Miletus and Cyprus, and the ability to draw resources from communities near Mount Helicon, and from Karystos and Amarynthos on the island of Euboea. Then the central citadel, known as the Cadmea, shows clear signs of destruction toward the end of the Mycenaean period, and much of the site was abandoned. Scholar Richard Hope Simpson linked this reduced settlement to the place Homer called Hypothebai, or "sub-Thebes," mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad. That diminished remnant may have been the seed from which the Archaic and Classical city eventually grew.

• 3. Myths and Founding Stories

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  Homer's Iliad already calls Thebes "Seven-Gated Thebes" to distinguish it from the Egyptian city of the same name, which Homer calls "Hundred-Gated." That ancient nickname stuck for centuries, and it points to how early the city had accumulated enough prestige to need distinguishing from a rival namesake across the Mediterranean.

  The Greeks preserved the memory of Thebes's earliest days in a dense body of legend that scholars have sorted into five main cycles. One centers on Cadmus, a Phoenician prince from Tyre, the site of modern Lebanon, and the brother of the princess Europa. Cadmus was credited with introducing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece and with building the acropolis of Thebes, which was named the Cadmea in his honor. A second cycle tells of Semele and the god Dionysus. A third concerns Amphion, who supposedly built the seven-gated wall, and the connected figures of Zethus, Antiope, and Dirce.

  The fourth and perhaps most far-reaching cycle follows the house of Laius, the tragedy of his son Oedipus, the war of the Seven Against Thebes, and the later campaign of the Epigoni. A fifth cycle belongs to Heracles, who was associated with the city from birth. One obscure founding variant named Agenor rather than Cadmus as the city's originator, producing a term for Thebans, "Agenorids," that later fell mostly out of use. These myths, the source notes, rival the stories of Troy in their wide influence on classical Greek literature.

• 4. Rise to Power

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  In 457 BC, Sparta reversed its earlier hostility toward Thebes and reinstated the city as the dominant power in Boeotia, calculating that a strong Thebes would serve as a counterweight against Athens in central Greece. The great citadel of the Cadmea proved its worth almost immediately, holding out as a base of resistance while Athenians overran and occupied the surrounding region from 457 to 447 BC.

  At the Battle of Delium in 424 BC, Theban forces at the head of the Boeotian levy inflicted a severe defeat on an invading Athenian army. The source singles that battle out as the first time Thebes displayed the kind of disciplined military organization that would eventually carry it to supremacy in Greece.

  By 382 BC, however, a Spartan force had seized the Cadmea in what the source calls a treacherous coup de main. Three years later the garrison was expelled and a democratic constitution replaced the traditional oligarchy. What followed was a military transformation. The Theban army, trained and led by the generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas, became formidable. Years of fighting ended in 371 BC at Leuctra, where Theban forces crushed the Spartans in what was hailed across Greece as a victory for the oppressed. The Thebans then carried the war into the Peloponnese, permanently crippling Spartan power in part by freeing many helot slaves, the foundation of the Spartan economy. Expeditions also went north to regulate affairs in Thessaly and Macedon.

• 5. The Sacred Band

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  Epaminondas and Pelopidas are the named commanders who shaped Thebes's military peak, but the force most celebrated as decisive at Leuctra was the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite unit composed entirely of male lovers. Ancient sources treated the bond between paired fighters as a source of extraordinary courage; each man would refuse to disgrace himself before the person he loved most.

  Pelopidas himself, born around 420 BC and died in 365 BC, commanded the Sacred Band at Leuctra and led the rebellion that expelled the Spartan garrison from the Cadmea. Epaminondas, born around 418 BC, commanded the broader Theban forces at both Leuctra in 371 BC and at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC. His death at Mantinea proved catastrophic. With Epaminondas gone, Thebes sank back to the position of a secondary power, and none of the states it had protected were willing to remain permanently under its control.

  Philip II of Macedon had himself been raised in Thebes, albeit as a hostage, and the source records that he learned much of the art of war from Pelopidas. Philip honored that connection throughout his career, always seeking alliances with the Boeotians even in the run-up to the battle that destroyed their last bid for supremacy.

• 6. Destruction and Restoration

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  In 338 BC, the orator Demosthenes persuaded Thebes to join Athens in a final effort to halt Philip II's advance. The combined force lost decisively at the Battle of Chaeronea. Philip chose not to destroy Thebes but stripped it of its dominion over Boeotia.

  The finishing blow came in 335 BC, when an unsuccessful revolt against Philip's son Alexander the Great, launched while Alexander was campaigning in the north, brought his army to the city's walls. Alexander and his Greek allies destroyed Thebes almost completely. Tradition held that only the house of the poet Pindar and the temples were spared. The surviving Thebans were sold into slavery. Alexander spared only priests, leaders of the pro-Macedonian party, and descendants of Pindar. The fall of Thebes cowed Athens into submission, and a special Athenian embassy led by Phocion managed to persuade Alexander not to demand the exile of the anti-Macedonian leaders, including Demosthenes.

  Plutarch records that Alexander later grieved his excess and, during his conquests in Asia, attempted to make amends to every individual former Theban he encountered. Thebes was, as the source notes, revered as the most ancient of Greek cities, with more than a thousand years of history behind it at the moment of its destruction.

  Following Alexander's death in 323 BC, the city was re-established in 315 BC by Cassander, one of the diadochi ruling in Greece. Cassander called on Greek city-states to contribute skilled labor and materials; the Athenians rebuilt much of the city wall, and major contributions came from Megalopolis, Messene, Sicily, and Italy. Despite the effort, Thebes never recovered its former standing. After Cassander's death in 297 BC, the city was besieged by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 293 BC and again after a revolt in 292 BC. Demetrius was wounded in that second siege but eventually broke through the walls. Thebes recovered its autonomy in 287 BC and allied with Lysimachus, the king of Thrace, and the Aetolian League.

• 7. Silk Capital of Byzantium

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  After the dissolution of the Boeotian League following the Achaean War of 146 BC, Thebes came under Roman rule. In 27 BC it was absorbed into the newly established Province of Achaia. When the Roman Empire divided in 395, Thebes passed to the Eastern Roman Empire. In the late 7th century, Justinian II created the Theme of Hellas with Thebes as its capital.

  From the 11th century onward, Thebes built a new kind of power: silk. Its workshops were boosted by imports of soaps and dyes from Athens, and the trade grew so rapidly that by the middle of the 12th century Thebes had become the single largest producer of silks in the entire Byzantine Empire, surpassing even Constantinople. The women of Thebes were particularly famed for their weaving skill, and Theban silk was prized for both quality and reputation.

  That prosperity drew enemies. In 1147, the Normans of Sicily attacked Boeotia, plundered Thebes, and captured skilled craftsmen whom they relocated to Palermo to seed a Sicilian silk industry. The city rebounded. Venetian merchants arrived soon after and negotiated favorable privileges with the imperial government to purchase local silk.

  The traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited Thebes around 1161 or 1162 and found a city that was a regional administrative center, a major market, and a significant producer of textiles. He reported a Jewish population of 2,000, the largest Jewish community in any Byzantine city of the 12th century except for Constantinople. Estimates from that period suggest the total population of Thebes ran between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. In 1205, the city was conquered by the Latins of the Fourth Crusade, and the Frankish dynasty de la Roche chose it as their capital before eventually moving the seat to Athens.

• 8. From Ottoman Rule to Today

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  Latin hegemony in Thebes lasted until 1458, when the Ottomans captured the city and renamed it Istefe. Ottoman control ran until the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821 and nominally concluded in 1832, with one interruption: a Venetian interlude between 1687 and 1699.

  In the modern Greek state, Thebes served as the capital of the prefecture of Boeotia until the late 19th century, when Livadeia took over that role. In 2011, the Kallikratis administrative reform merged Thebes with the communities of Plataies, Thisvi, and Vagia into a larger municipality that kept the Thebes name.

  The city today is a market town. Its agricultural and industrial base flourished through the 1980s, but during the late 1980s and 1990s most industry migrated south toward Athens. Tourism focuses on sites connected to antiquity, including the battlefield of Plataea, though the source notes that the proximity of more famous destinations like Athens and Chalkis, and the undeveloped state of many archaeological sites, has kept visitor numbers low.

  The modern city holds an archaeological museum and the remains of the Cadmea, the citadel that has anchored Theban life from the Bronze Age through to the present. The Holy Church of Luke the Evangelist, built around the 10th century, contains the tomb and relics of Luke, who died in 84 AD. Among the city's notable modern figures is Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens, born in 1938, and the singer Haris Alexiou, born in 1950, both from Thebes. The climate records its own extremes: a low of -7.9 degrees Celsius on the 10th of January 2017, and a high of 44.5 degrees Celsius on the 3rd of August 2021.