Thebes, City-State of
State | Defunct
1450 BCE to 86 BCE
Ancient Thebes is a Boeotian city-state (polis), situated to the north of the Cithaeron range, which divides Boeotia from Attica, and on the southern edge of the Boeotian plain.
It plays an important role in the fabric of Greek myth, as the site of the stories of Cadmus, Oedipus, Dionysus and others.It is the largest city of the region of Boeotia and is the leader of the Boeotian confederacy.
It is a major rival of Athens, and sides with the Persians during the 480 BCE invasion of Xerxes.
Theban forces under the command of Epaminondas end the power of Sparta at the battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE.
The Sacred Band of Thebes (an elite military unit) famously falls at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE against Philip II and Alexander the Great.The central position and military security of the city naturally tends to raise it to a commanding position among the Boeotians, and from early days its inhabitants endeavor to establish a complete supremacy over their kinsmen in the outlying towns.
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Thebes, apparently one of the first Greek communities to be drawn together within a fortified city, owes its importance in prehistoric days—as later—to its military strength.
Deger-Jalkotzy claims that the statue base from Kom el-Hetan in Amenhotep III's kingdom (LHIIIA:1) mentions a name similar to Thebes and considers it to be one of four (Danaan?) kingdoms worthy of note (alongside Knossos and Mycenae).
Thebes has lost contact with Egypt in LHIIIB but has gained contacts with "Milatos" (Hittite Milawata) and "Cyprus" (Hittite Alasiya), growing to rival Argolís as a center of Mycenaean power until its palace and walls are destroyed shortly before the Trojan War.
The myth of the "outlandish" and "savage" Seven who threatened the city in Seven Against Thebes, an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BCE, has traditionally seemed to be based on Bronze Age history in the generation before the Trojan War, when in the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships only the remnant Hypothebai subsists on the ruins. (According to tradition, the sons of the Seven destroyed the city.)
Thebes in the late LHIIIB is able to pull resources from Lamos near Mount Helicon, and from Karystos and Amarynthos on the Greek side of the isle of Euboea, according to Palaima ("Sacrificial Feasting", Hesperia 73, 2004).
The neglect of Thebes in the Homeric poems is a perplexing feature of Theban history.
As a fortified community, it attracts attention from the invading Dorians, and the fact of their eventual conquest of Thebes lie behind the stories of the successive legendary attacks on that city.
The central position and military security of the city naturally tends to raise it to a commanding position among the Boeotians, and from early days, its inhabitants have endeavored to establish a complete supremacy over their kinsmen in the outlying towns.
This centralizing policy is as much the cardinal fact of Theban history as the counteracting effort of the smaller towns to resist absorption forms the main chapter of the story of Boeotia.
Thebes is governed by a landholding aristocracy who safeguard their integrity by rigid statutes about the ownership of property and its transmission.
Of the earlier history of the city, no details have been preserved.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the seventh or eighth centuries BCE.
With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerge various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Southern Italy ("Magna Graecia") and Asia Minor.
These states and their colonies reach great levels of prosperity that result in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy.
Most of the Greek city-state governments begin to be run by archons, state magistrates of the highest order.
Athens, initially, has three archons: one each to exercise civil, military, and religious authority.
The tenure of the three Athenian archons, typically ten years in the eighth century BCE is reduced to one year by 683.
The six junior archons (thesmotetai), or magistrates, are said by Aristotle to have been instituted in Athens after 683 BCE to record the laws.
Trade begins to flourish beginning in the eighth century BCE between the developing city-states of Greece and Italy, many of which, like Athens, are building states that include wider sectors of society in their political activity than had any previous society, laying the basis of democracy.
Athens becomes the largest polis, combining several regions of the peninsula of Attica; its huge size and favorable configuration makes it unusual by any standards among Greek poleis.
Its territory is far larger than that of Corinth or Megara; while Boeotia, though in control of a comparable area, resorts to the federal principle as a way of imposing unity.
Like Corinth but unlike Thebes (the greatest city of Classical Boeotia), Athens has a splendid acropolis (citadel) that has its own water supply, a natural advantage making for early political centralization.
Athens is, moreover, protected by four mountain systems offering a first line of defense.
Second, Attica has a very long coastline jutting into the Aegean, a feature that invites it to become a maritime power (one may contrast it with Sparta, whose port of Gythion is far away to the south).
This in turn is to compel Athens to import quantities of the shipbuilding timber it lacks, a major factor in Athenian imperial thinking.
Third, although Attica is rich in certain natural resources, such as precious metal for coinage—the silver of the Laurium mines in the east of Attica—and marble for building, its soil, suitable though it is for olive growing, is thin by comparison with that of Thessaly or Boeotia.
Athens, whose territory became more densely populated after the post-Mycenaean depopulation, which had affected all Greece, had had to look for sources of grain outside Attica: to secure those sources, it had to act imperialistically.
Animal representations, floral motifs, and, by the eighth century BCE, human figures in stylized silhouettes, have intruded gradually into the traditional abstract geometric decorations of Greek pottery, particularly abundant in Attica.
The contemporary “Dipylon Krater”, a large vase originally used as a grave monument, depicts dancers, processions of horsemen and chariots, battle scenes, and men and women lamenting the dead.
Knowledge of succeeding centuries in Thebes is sparse following the destruction of the Mycenaean period city at the beginning of the Iron Age.
Immigration has produced a Boeotian mixed stock, including the Aegeids, a Dorian clan, and an oligarchy of large estates is regulated by laws passed about 725.
Sparta and Athens are, in different ways, among those Greek polities that are in the process of building states that includes wider sectors of society in their political activity than had any previous society, and the basis of democracy is laid.
Athens becomes the largest polis, combining several regions of the peninsula of Attica, whose huge size and favorable configuration makes it unusual by any standards among Greek poleis.
Its territory is far larger than that of Corinth or Megara; while Boeotia, though in control of a comparable area, resorts to the federal principle as a way of imposing unity.
Like Corinth but unlike Thebes (the greatest city of Classical Boeotia), Athens has a splendid acropolis (citadel) that had its own water supply, a natural advantage making for early political centralization.
Moreover, Athens is protected by four mountain systems offering a first line of defense.
Second, Attica has a very long coastline jutting into the Aegean, a feature that invites it to become a maritime power (one may contrast it with Sparta, whose port of Gythion is far away to the south).
This in turn is to compel Athens to import quantities of the shipbuilding timber it lacks, a major factor in Athenian imperial thinking.
Third, although Attica is rich in certain natural resources, such as precious metal for coinage—the silver of the Laurium mines in the east of Attica—and marble for building, its soil, suitable though it is for olive growing, is thin by comparison with that of Thessaly or Boeotia.
This means that when Athens' territory became more densely populated after the post-Mycenaean depopulation, which had affected all Greece, it had to look for outside sources of grain, and, to secure those sources, it had to act imperialistically.
By 500 BCE, the Persian Empire controls the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia.
Attempts by some of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule fail, and Persia invades the states of mainland Greece in 492 BCE, but is forced to withdraw after a defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE.
A second invasion by the Persians follows in 480 BCE.
Following decisive Greek victories in 480 and 479 BCE at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, the Persians are forced to withdraw for a second time, marking their eventual withdrawal from all of their European territories.
Led by Athens and Sparta, the Greek victories in the Greco-Persian Wars are considered a pivotal moment in world history, as the fifty years of peace that follow are known as the Golden Age of Athens, the seminal period of ancient Greek development that lays many of the foundations of Western civilization.
The league gains control of the coveted shrine, and Phocis falls, for the first time, under the influence of Thessalian city-states, especially Thebes.
Delphi becomes one of the meeting places of the Amphictyonic League (“dwellers around” Thermopylae, and now Delphi).
Cleisthenes' stock rises, and he builds a new Sicyonian treasury at Delphi.