John Stuart Mill rated the Athenian triumph at Marathon as more important in English history than the battle of Hastings. Did he mention the almost immediate humiliation, by the Athenians, of their victorious general Miltiades? After his brilliant victory at Salamis, ten years later, Themistocles was banished from Athens and ended serving the Persians whose fleet he had destroyed. A tough house to play, old Hellas. The Athenians did the chat; the Spartans the silences. And Thebes? Supplied settings and plots, mostly in the form of awful warnings.
Paul Cartledge makes the case for a central historical role for Oedipus’s home town. As scholarly as he is revisionist, his handsomely garnished Thebes is neither freckled with footnotes nor fancy with Gibbonian phrases. The Thebans’ exceptional capacity for disastrous decisions begins in mythology with the rejection by king Pentheus of the androgynous divinity Dionysus, dramatised in Euripides’s Bacchae.
There followed the king’s death at the hands of his own raving, Bacchanalian mother and the seismic ruin of the city. Homosexuality has no place in Cartledge’s index, but Oedipus’s father Laius, mythical king of Thebes, is the first man said to have swung both ways. The Sacred Band, in classical times, was a select Theban formation of pairs of male lovers, all full citizens.
However gay ancient Hellenes were (not all that, some say, certainly not all), the Sacred Band’s reputation suggests that a zest of scandal accompanied its bravura. Sexual aberration was integral to their city’s fame. Oedipus’s inadvertent marriage with his own mother, Jocasta, led to the mutual slaughter of their sons, as well as to the refusal of his daughter Antigone to marry Haemon, the prince chosen for her by King Creon. Creon then walled her up, the original ochi (NO!) girl. It needed the Athenian Sophocles to make a play out of it. Modern Greeks celebrate ochi day every 28 October, anniversary of the date in 1941 when their dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, refused to surrender to Mussolini and so refurbished himself as a national hero.
Thebes and the confederation of Boeotian states it headed figured on no honours board during the fifth century BC, presumed, until recently, to be the Golden Age of ancient Hellas. When Xerxes marched into Greece in 480 BC, the Theban oligarchs took advice from the Delphic oracle — they may well have leaned on it first — and so had a divine excuse for not offering any obstacle to the barbarian invaders.
Half a century later, the Thebans’ levelling of plucky little Plataea, the Athenians’ sole ally at Marathon, was a lowlight of the Peloponnesian war. It was matched only by their vindictiveness after defeating an Athenian army (including infantryman Socrates and the subaltern Alcibiades) at Delium. They left the enemy dead to rot rather than hand over the bodies.
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Mythical Thebans figure again and again in the work of the great Athenian dramatists, almost always as bad examples. The city and its neighbours may have originated political federation, but it produced no remarkable artist, no Demosthenic orator, no great dramatist. As far as the arts are concerned, Cartledge cites only Pronomus, the pied piper whose mastery of the aulos (not so much flute as “double-oboe”) won wide renown. Nostalgic seniors may recall Danny Kaye’s line, “The oboe, it is clearly understood / Is an ill-wind that nobody blows good.”
Thebes specialised in wrong turnings. During its two decades of ascendancy in the fourth century BC, it sought to keep Macedon in its place by holding the young Philip II hostage. Having learnt the military skills of his captors, the unforgiving outsider returned to chasten them. His son Alexander finished the job by literally flattening the city, save for the house of its greatest poet, Pindar, and the temples of gods whose favours he hoped to enjoy when he set off to purge and pillage the Persians. No second Pindar hymned his conquests; the Greeks never took him for one of their own. His death in his early thirties prompted an immediate rebellion against Macedonian dominion.
Frederic Raphael, “Thick as Thebans”, The Critic, 2021-03-25.
