Thebes (in ancient Greek / Thễbai, plural) is the main city of Boeotia in Greece. It is second only to Athens and Sparta in importance in Greek history. Its mythical and legendary reputation remains unmatched; Sophocles describes it as “the only city where mortals give birth to gods[1]”.
The modern city (in modern Greek / Thíva) today has 23,820 inhabitants (2001).
Captions
According to legend, the city was founded by Cadmos, son of Agenor, king of the Phoenician city of Sidon, at the head of a group of Phoenician settlers. This one, gone in search of his sister Europe, kidnapped by Zeus in the form of a bull, crosses many unknown lands and ends up arriving in Delphi. The pythia tells him to follow the heifer he finds in an isolated meadow and to found a city where she will stop. Following the advice of the oracle, Cadmus and his companions follow the cow, and when it stops, Cadmus orders the others to fetch spring water to make a sacrifice to Apollo. Not seeing them return, he worries and goes looking for them. He discovers that a dragon had killed them all. Taking an oath of revenge, he kills the dragon after a fierce fight. The goddess Athena appears to him and tells him to sink the dragon's teeth into the ground. Armed warriors, the Spartans, then come out of the ground and kill each other before his eyes. The five survivors of this battle founded the city of Thebes with Cadmus, who became its king.
The city is then associated with the twins Amphion and Zethos, who reign successively:Zethos marries Thebe (who leaves his name to the city) while Amphion marries Niobe, daughter of Tantalus; the latter sees her children (twelve or fourteen according to tradition) massacred by Apollo and Artemis, whose mother, Leto, she had offended.
Thebes would also have had as king the famous Oedipus, who would have delivered the city from the oppression of the Sphinx, after having accidentally killed the previous king, Laios, who was his father without his knowing it. He obtained as a reward the hand of Queen Jocasta, his mother. Because of this double crime, incest and parricide, the city would have been cursed, struck by a terrible epidemic of plague, which would not have disappeared until after the departure of Oedipus.
The Iliad reports a first expedition against Thebes, as part of a war of succession between the descendants of Oedipus, led by Polynices against his brother Eteocles, in which Mycenae and Argos would have participated, the “war of the seven leaders”; apart from the double bloody exploit of Tydeus (IV, 377-397), it was a failure, caused by the impiety of the seven leaders. During a second expedition, the city would have been destroyed by the Epigones, shortly before the Trojan War (IV, 406-409), which would explain why it does not appear in the list of cities having fought against Troy ( see the Catalog of Vessels, canto II of the Iliad). In the Homeric work the city is said to have “the seven gates”.
History
Thebes was one of the palatial centers of Mycenaean Greece and probably the capital of an important kingdom. After a phase of decline during the dark centuries, the city re-emerged in the 6th century BC. J.-C. to take the head of a rather loose confederation of Boeotian cities, but it was never strong enough to unite them in a single state of which it would have been the dominant city.
It would have been founded by Ogygos
Thebes was governed by an oligarchy which, during the Second Persian War, chose an alliance with the Persians out of hatred of Athens and offered refuge to the satrap Mardonios before the battle of Plataea. The support granted to the Persians in 480-479 caused Thebes to lose its preponderance within the Boeotian confederation until 446. In 431, Thebes seized Plataea, its irreducible enemy since 519 and ally of Athens, thus precipitating the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; in 424, the Theban victory of Délion prohibited the Athenians from regaining a foothold in Boeotia. When Athens fell in 404, Thebes was among the cities pushing for the destruction of the city.
The Peloponnesian War was followed by a period of rivalry between Thebes and Sparta for supremacy in Greece; Thebes acquired hegemony, for a short time, thanks to Pelopidas and Epaminondas. The Thebans indeed succeeded in defeating the Spartans at Leuctra in 371 and in lowering their power in the years that followed, but also in extending their authority towards the north by subjugating part of Thessaly and by exercising a preponderant influence at the Macedonian court. .
It was at this time (c. 368) that Philip, younger son of the Macedonian king Amyntas I, was sent as a hostage to Thebes and educated under the direction of Epaminondas. The death of the latter in the battle of Mantinea in 362 put an end to the Theban hegemony. Thebes served the designs of Philip in Greece by inviting him to intervene in the sacred war which opposed the amphictyonia of Delphi to the Phocidians; but when Philip directly threatened Athens in 338, the Thebans, fearing the consequences of a defeat of their neighbors, allied themselves with the Athenians and suffered with them the defeat of Chaeronea, despite the presence of the sacred battalion. Philip then proceeded to dissolve the Boeotian confederacy and installed a Macedonian garrison in the Cadmea, the citadel of Thebes.
The Thebans revolted shortly after the accession of Alexander the Great (335) but the young king, who was waging war in Illyria, fell on them in five days and seized the city. Thebes was then razed, at the request of the league of Corinth over which Alexander presided. This merciless punishment, even though it struck a once hated city, had a profound impact in Greece; when Cassander undertook to raise it in 317, many cities contributed.
New Thebes continued to exist throughout Roman times.