Boeotia has significant political importance, owing to…
477 BCE to 466 BCE
Boeotia has significant political importance, owing to its position on the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth, extending westwards between Thessaly and Peloponnesus to the Isthmus of Corinth; the strategic strength of its frontiers; and the ease of communication within its extensive area.
On the other hand, the lack of good harbors have hindered its maritime development.
The Boeotian people, although they include great men like Hesiod, Pindar, and others to come, are proverbially dull.
The leading city of Boeotia is Thebes, whose central position and military strength make it a suitable capital; other major towns are Orchomenus, Plataea, and Thespiae.
It is the constant ambition of the Thebans to absorb the other townships into a single state, just as Athens had annexed the Attic communities, but the outlying cities successfully have resisted this policy, and only allowed the formation of a loose federation which, initially, had been merely religious.
No details of the earlier history of Thebes have been preserved, except that it was governed by a landed aristocracy who safeguarded their integrity by rigid statutes about the ownership of property and its transmission.
The Thebans in 519 BCE had been brought for the first time into hostile contact with the Athenians, who had helped the small village of Plataea to maintain its independence against them, and in 506 BCE had repelled an inroad into Attica.
The aversion to Athens best serves to explain the apparently unpatriotic attitude which Thebes, the largest city of the region of Boeotia and the leader of the Boeotian confederacy, had displayed during the Persian invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE).
Though a contingent of 700 had been sent to Thermopylae and remained there with Leonidas until just before the last stand when they surrendered to the Persians, the governing aristocracy had soon after joined Xerxes with great readiness and fought zealously on his behalf at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE.
The victorious Greeks had subsequently punished Thebes by depriving it, for a time, of the presidency of the Boeotian League.
Pindar, after two years at the court of Hiero, moves in 474 to Thebes, where he composes lyric odes to celebrate triumphs in the Olympic Games and other athletic events.
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