In Our Time - Thebes

Episode Date: November 23, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the myths and history of the ancient Greek city of Thebes and its depiction in Athenian drama. In myths it was said to be home to Heracles, Dionysus, Oedipus and Cadmus among others and, in history, was infamous for supporting Xerxes in the Persian War. Its prominence led to a struggle with the rising force of Macedon in which the Thebans were defeated at Chaironea in 338 BC, one of the most important battles in ancient history. The position of Thebes in Greek culture was enormously powerful. The strength of its myths and its proximity to Athens made it a source of stories for the Athenian theatre, and is the setting for more of the surviving plays than any other location. The image, above, is of Oedipus answering questions of the sphinx in Thebes (cup 5th century BC).With Edith Hall Professor of Classics at King's College LondonSamuel Gartland Lecturer in Ancient History at Corpus Christi College, University of OxfordandPaul Cartledge Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, the myths of the ancient Greek city of Thebes were among the most famous and notorious in the Greek world, as was its history.

Athenian dramatists, separated from Thebes by only 30 miles and a mountain, treated the myths as a cautionary tale. They wrote of the royal house of Thieves with its king Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, and their daughter Antigone, and of the demigods, Heracles or Hercules, and Dionysus, both claimed by thieves. And Thieves played a key part in battle after battle, fighting with Persians against Greeks, breaking the Spartans for good and offering the last stand against Alexander the Great, for which he destroyed their city. With me to discuss the Greek city of Thieves are Edith Hall,

Professor of Classics at King's College London, Samuel Gartland, lecturer in ancient history at Corpus Christi College University of Oxford and Paul Cartlidge, Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and A.G. Lamantis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College University of Cambridge. Julius Hall, what were the main foundations of Thebes?

Thebes was believed by the ancient Greeks to be its most ancient city state. It was founded by a hero called Cadmus, who was one of the very first generation of monster slayers. Now, Cadmus actually came from Phoenicia. He was from the Lebanon. He came from the city of Tyre. He originally left Tyre because his sister Europa had been abducted by Zeus,

and he was sent off by his parents to go and try and find her. That, in fact, when he went to the Delphic Oracle, to say, where, oh, where is poor Europa, they said, don't worry about that. Go and found Thebes. Follow this heifer, which has a shape of a crissue. present moon on her rear until you get to where she lies down and there found a great city. So he did that. You don't disobey the Delphic Oracle. Thebans who do so get into big trouble. And he went and founded this extraordinary city just north of the Cathiron Mountains.

He married Harmonia, who was the daughter. She was extraordinarily beautiful. Her name means beautifully put together, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. And at their wedding, the first mortal wedding ever, or the gods came to feast. And most of all, he slayed the dragon, and Athena or the dragon gave him the teeth, he put them in the ground, and a military force sprung up fully armed. Beautiful.

And the dragon was a dragon of Ares. It was a particularly important fountain. And he was given a stone which he had to hurl into the fighting-sown men, and the fighting-soned men all got killed off except for four or five, depending on which version you believe. And they became the ancestors. of the ruling aristocratic families of thieves. Well, after that perfectly plausible,

realistic account of the founding of thieves, let's move on to... Why did it become the source of so many myths, Edith? Well, it was regarded as the most ancient one, and it probably was. In the early 20th century, a very important Greek archaeologist called Antonios Caramopoulos

dug it up. And this was an extraordinary moment because we'd all known from myth that there was this extraordinary citadel from the Bronze Age with high level of civilisation and writing and so on and he dug it up and it was one of those amazing moments where archaeology proved the stories right after all of this time. It was 3,000 BC, it was a very ancient city

was it was believed to be the most... And the first myths about siege and conquering cities and violence and warfare seemed to have clustered around Thebes long before the story of Troy. And so it had that resonance all the time? Absolutely. It was the siege city. In all of ancient myth, and that even translated to the Romans,

it is the site where you explore civil war. It's where brothers fight each other out. It's where you think about the effects of siege on women and the effect of the threat of slavery and rape. It was supposed to have seven gates. We haven't found seven yet. one at least, but not seven. And all the myths involve extraordinary scaling of high walls

by various heroes from the Peloponnese who come to attack it. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they don't. And these stories were almost certainly far more ancient than the Trojan cycle. And one thing before we move on, they did have a massive wall, which was complicatedly built realistically by two people who probably didn't exist. But let's leave it as a massive fortification, which was never breached, and it was a terrifying deterrent. the myth and it's been found in reality.

And it's been found in reality. The people who built it were mythical, but the wall is there. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you very. Sam, you've got to get this right, because it's going to be quite tricky with myth and history. Sam Gartland. Let's talk about Oedipus, a dominant figure from Thebes.

Sure. Well, Oedipus links very naturally into the Cadmian foundation, Cadmus' foundation of the city. He's several generations down, perhaps a great-great-grandson of one of these sewn men, the spartoy that emerge from these dragon teeth that are that are sewn into the ground. His myth is established very early. Homer has a very simple version recorded in the Odyssey. He is the son of Lyos, the ruler of Thebes, who has some sort of premonition that his son is likely to kill him.

He is left out on the mountains, perhaps, south of Thebes, Mount Kithyrh-on. and some point later on he encounters his father on a road and maybe the... He has to grow up yet, so who is he found by and who grows him up so he goes back to things? In the earliest versions of the myth, this isn't clear at all and it only becomes... That's why you missed it after you.

Well, yes, quite. But the important thing, I mean, is we have what occurs next is the earliest occurrence of road rage. And he bumps the... into his father, doesn't know it's his father, kills him on the road, continues into Thebes, and at Thebes, there is, there is the problem of the king has just been killed, and there is also perhaps a plague or some sort of miasma over the city, and the way in which Oedipus overcomes this is to go

and see the Sphinx, north of the city, a mountain north of Thebes, and he either kills the sphinx or answers a riddle, depending on the story that you believe. And you better tell the list of the riddle because it's quite a good one. Well, there are multiple riddles as well. No, just the ordinary. The most famous riddle is to do with the, it's an old riddle. But in the form that we get it in the classical period, it's something along the lines of what is the creature,

which begins on four feet, spends most of its life on two feet, ends with three feet, speaks only with one voice. And there are variants of all. of that, but the answer is, of course, man, who begins by crawling, spends most of it's like walking and ends with a cane. Edipus solves this riddle, lifts the miasma over the city, and as a reward, he gets to marry the queen, the widowed queen, Eukasta, or Epicaster, in the older versions, who is his mother. Neither of them know this. They have their children,

and this is the central part of the epic cycle, which revolves around Thebes, which is largely lost. It would be useful if you could answer this briefly, but it's a terrific question. Is there any basis in history for this? No. Thank you. Another figure, but myth can be stronger and it's obviously more important, and in some ways it's certainly more important in terms of culture. Now, we're talking about Heracles, or Herak, anyway, he's called Heracles to most people,

that's the Roman version of the name, and Dionysus. What was their connection with Thebes? Both, the Thibans would both claim that they were born in, in Thebes. Heracles, certainly, the tradition is accepted everywhere that Heracles' birth and early life is situated in Thebes. He is a great pan-Hellenic figure. He is a global figure for most of his life in the Peloponnese and beyond most of his labours and great deeds, but his early life is very definitely situated in Thebes. How did you claim Heracles or Hercules, Wilciccah. How do you just say we want him to have been born here?

Again, it's mysterious because he does look like a Peloponnesian figure. But from a very earlier source from Hesiod in Homer, he is there as Theban born. His father, Amphitrion, is a figure rooted in the Argolyd, in Argos and the surrounding areas. He seems to have left some sort of family disagreement ending in a murder, and Heracles is brought up, and for services to Thebes, he is allowed to marry Megara, a member of Yorcasters family, so it's all part of the Cadmian stories as well. But he is really important to Thebes, because he's really important to Thebes,

He is their hero, and he links them in with the rest of the world. Dionysus is a slightly more tricky figure, but he is the grandson of Cadmus. He is Semini's son. Again, lots of different traditions around him, but he is, in some respects, Stephen Bourne. Paul, Paul Cartlidge. How much of the story of Thebes, the myths of Thieves, have come to us directly from Thebes, and how much through Athens? It's near neighbour, as I said at the beginning of the throne, about 30 miles.

away. We know a lot about Athens. I never stopped writing stuff, thank goodness, although they lost a lot, which is a pity, never mind. What do we know? Well, I mean, you've put it very well. In fact, most of our evidence for ancient Greece, period. It's not just Theban history or myth comes via Athenian cultural

sources because they were the dominant cultural force in the classical period, which then was passed on through the Hellenistic, through the Alexandria Library to the Romans. So that's why we think of Athens, as it were, ancient Greece. Some people think ancient Greece was Athens and vice versa,

but Thebes produced historians. Their names, a little fragments survive. Yeah, but we have a lot from Athens, and Athens actually took on Thieves as a quarry for its place particularly. Can you tell us what they thought? How we know of Thieves through Athenians? Well, that's a slightly different question. In other words, what for Athenians did the image

or the various mythological constructions of Thieves? What did they mean for ordinary things? things, and this is typically a matter of theatre, but there is one source who is sort of Theban, and that's Pindar, and he's before the surviving tragedies and contemporary with the surviving tragedies. So we do have a sort of a beotian, I should put it, rather than Theban. He came from somewhere near Thebes, and he focused himself on Thebes, and he's thought of as Theban. But I think we're probably going to come back to Pindar later on. No, let's stay where we are, because I'm still not where I want to be. If I've been asked the wrong

questions, please ask the right questions yourself, because it's much better. Edipus, they write about Thebes, the Athenians, and that's what we know a lot about about Thieves, right? Can you just say something about that? Well, we don't know a great deal, and as Sam and both Edith and Sam have said, there are contradictory versions of just about every aspect of the myth history of Thebes. So if we're talking now about what Thebes really was like in the, let's say, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th centuries. Then we're talking about not just Athenian,

but other sources, for example, Herodotus. But, again, Herodotus is focused through Athens, and so that's how we learned about... But I can't leave you... Because you know everything. But we have to talk about Sophocles, we have to talk about Euripides,

the plays about Theban characters, which the Athenians wrote and put on. Well, they all wrote about Theban stories, and of course, Ischalus is seven against Thieves. The very title is rather revealing. And as Edith said, it focuses on civil war. And then Sophocles, the Oedipus plays.

Two of them survive. They're not joined in originals. They're separately produced, written at very different times. But they link sequentially. And then Euripides, though very little of his actually survives, in terms of the Oedipus myth. But he wrote stuff about Thieves, as indeed... It just was the point of reference.

If you're an Athenian and you're interested in major issues, you prefer not to dwell on your own myth history. You like to project your troubles outwards, and you actually represent, for example, Euripides in the Suppliant Women, has a herald come from Thebes. Well, he's rubbished, and he's representing a king, which is terrible for Athenians think monarchy is dreadful. They're Democrats, and so Thesius, their king.

gives a hymn to democracy. I mean, it's nonsense in terms of history, but it plays to the Athenians' imaginary, as we call it. Is there one way you could characterize the relationship between Athens and Thebes? One is going towards liberal democracy, the other is very autocratic and virulently anti-democratic. Well, it isn't. You see, it's sequentially.

Thebes is actually very interesting politically in that it develops a form of both federalism and a form of moderate oligarchy, not extreme oligarchy, while Athens is developing an extreme democracy. But then in the fourth century BC, they actually come together. Both of them have relatively moderate democracies, and they're actually allied, whereas in the fifth century, this is the time of the plays, they're enemies throughout the fifth century.

Thank you very much. Edith, why was Thieves, then, to take on from what Paul's been saying, why was it so very attractive to the Athenians to write about it or to get their subjects from? I think there's three main reasons. One is simply the richness of the mythical cycle. So we have all these stories of incest and murder and civil war and leadership crises, which Sophocles in particular was very, very interested in. And both his Theven plays, the Oedipus, Tyrannus and the Antigone,

are all about leaders not coping with crises. So I think Sophocles found that very natural. The second is undoubtedly that the Athenians did not like to portray really bad problems in their own city-state or theatre. They liked to export that. That's a bit like a lot of Shakespeare's plays about really bad politics are deliberately set in Italian republics or elsewhere. It's using the elsewhere so you can be safe and you've got to get it past the arcone. That's the magistrate who chooses the plays to go on. He chooses plays that are suitable ideologically for the Athenian audience.

So Thieves, because it was a deadly enemy of Athens, all throughout the period of the production of the dramas, that is from just after the Persian Wars in the 470s, through to the Baccai, which is set in Thebes of 405, all that period, the Athenians really hated the Thebans, so it was a very safe place to commit murder and incest in the imagination. I think the other reason, though, is that Thieves was quite a secretive society. The way I think it genuinely was, it was run by a few,

aristocratic families. I actually think the incest theme reflects something, if not real historically, but about a rather closed-in-bred society where a few families are fighting it out between themselves. That actually the sort of incest and tyranny motif sort of fit with that. So we've actually got six plays set there and they are some of the most violent and some of the most famous in the repertoire. most people who know anything about theatre have heard of Oedipus Antigone and the Backeye, even if they haven't heard of Heracles and Phoinisai, which are the two others.

So I think those are the main reasons. And Thebes was also so cultured, and I hope we can go back to Pindar. Although it didn't do theatre, Indigenous theatre, it was the most famous city for poetry, for pipe music. It even produced philosophers like Crates the Stoic. It was highly intellectual

and highly civilised. And I think the Athenians rather envied some aspects of that. And they felt that... And wealthy. And extremely wealthy. And it had got connections with aristocratic families like the Aigidae of Thebes all over the Greek world in Sparta,

in Libya, in North Africa. They were quite envious of them. Just quick counter to Thebes as a city of high culture. The Athenians, of course, thought their culture was much superior. And there was a phrase, beocean pigs, which the Athenians were very fond of, and Pindar is aware that the Athenians think of them as rural rustics.

And he refers to this Snidly, fair enough. Sam, Sam, Gartland, how the Persians come in, in mighty force, and the Thebans let down their Greek allies, sneak away in the night and support the Persians or let the Persians through. Why did they do that and what effect did it have on their reputation? The Thebans were in a difficult position in Greece. They're right in the centre of Greece and they are on the allied side, if you like, on the Spartan and Athenian side to begin with.

They go up to Thermopylae for the famous battle centre, a force of 400, most other... Greek cities, and they fight until the very last moment against the Persians at Thermopylae. The Thebans do. The Thibians do. They're there with the Thespians, their neighbours, and the Spartans. And only at the very last moment do they say, look, guys, this is not worth continuing. This is suicide, which it was.

Let's go home. And they do go home. Do you mind if I'm being a bit peculiar? They fought for two days, three days. They took 400 men. The Spartans took 300 men. The others took 700 men. There's not a lot of people, but it's a small pass.

anyway. When did they leave? Had they lost 100 men? Can you just give us a bit more? Numbers, yeah, they don't seem to have lost very many. It seems they were fighting, they were fighting in a very narrow pass to almost a standstill with the Persians, but they weren't losing very many men. There is a suggestion

later on that some of the leaders had scars from the battles that were later prominent in Thebes and this was a mark of the king in some way on them. But really it seems as that they got out fairly unscathed from the Battle of Thermopylai, and they returned home. But it's nice because Tha Mthopalais matter so much, doesn't it really?

Did they just run away, or did they make a deal with the Persians to let them run away? What happened? Yes, they made, well, they had friends. They had the Macedonians and the Thessalians who were there interceded and said, look, the Thibans are okay. We can trust them. If you let them go, they're really important allies to have. They hold the keys to the centre of Greece.

In the middle of a battle, that's quite a tricky maneuver, isn't it? It's a very tricky maneuver. Herodotus is our main account for this, and Herodotus comes in for a lot of stick for his treatment of the Thievans in antiquity. So, as it were, they'd run away. What effect did it have on their later reputation with people like the Athenians and the Spartans?

It is used by the Athenians in particular against the Thiebans for the rest of the classical period, at least and indeed beyond, as the great meadising city. But it's not Thermopylae that does that. It's the subsequent behaviour, which I think is brilliant. Thebes is the great cooperator with the Persians.

They're great cooperators with everybody. This is why Pindar is such a great pan-Hellenic figure because he can get on with anybody. He can tell the stories that people need to hear. So what did they do that really put the backs up of Athens as Sparta? Well, they fought with the Persians. They fought as their closest allies. Indeed, we have this wonderful scene in Herodotus

of a vast public feast held between the elite families of Thebes and the Persian nobles out in the open, on the Cadmere, celebrating their unity, and in the battles they fight together. They fight alongside each other. They're both great cavalry peoples, and they fight next door to each other, hammering the Athenians,

as the Thebans would want to do anyway. And all that the Persians do really is amplify the local warfare that the Thebans are involved in anyway, and they end up fighting the Megarians and the Athenians on the battlefield, as they would do any other year. Do you want to shake that up, Paul? Yes. I'd like to register a little bit of a complaint,

because the Thebes seem to be, they seem to be being presented rather positively. They did indeed fight at Flatir, which was the decisive battle in the Greek-A-Persian wars. And so worried were ordinary Thebans, not just the elite, about that, that later on when quizzed on why had you, why did you fight on the Persian side at this decisive battle, the consequences of defeat would have been and so on and so on. They said, well, you know, in those days, we were governed by a very narrow elite. Now, people have said around the table that that was normal. Well, the Thebans actually progressed after that.

The consequences of the Persian wars were very positive, and they developed a very interesting form of federal government, both regionally and within their own city. They had a kind of moderate sort of oligarchy, not the extreme oligarch. Now, you could say that was just an excuse that really the Theban and all of them were actually quite happy because they assumed, as many Greeks did, that the Persians would win.

Argos, very big city in the Peloponnese, tried to stay neutral because it thought, well, probably the Persians will win. That means our enemies, the Spartans are going to get hammered. So great, we'll leap up to be number one in the Peloponnese. I mean, there's an awful lot of intra-Greek struggle going on. And we haven't yet talked about the Beotian federal state very much, but they were the number one.

But they had a big enemy in Orcomanos. They didn't like the Thespians. They didn't like the Pleitians. And they actually were very nasty to other beotians. So that's another side of the picture. Just to come in, after the Battle of Plataea, so the Thiebans and the Persians lose, the rest of the Greeks assemble themselves around the city of Thebes.

It's the great focal point of the Medisers, those that fought with Persia. But because of these monumental walls on the Cadmea, these famous walls from myth and from epic, nobody can get in. And they stay there for three weeks, and nobody can get in. And so all that ends up,

they get handed a few leaders, and that's the end of the business. And Thebes actually comes out of the Persian walls, probably in a stronger position than any other major city. You've talked about, you've talked about Thibs from the Athenian point of view. Can you talk about what Athens,

what it reveals about Athens, that they took these players in such a way and did them with such people? power. What does it say about Athens itself? You touched on it, but if you could develop it, I'd be good. I think the Athenians were very frightened of the Thebans in many

ways. They were brilliant warriors. They were very, very rich. There was a lot of contested territory also in Beosha, which is the general district around the thieves. Cities like Pletia that were sometimes allied with Athens. There was an awful lot of contested territory around there.

They were exactly one long day's walk away. as well, they were too close for comfort. From Athens. If you walk up through it, you can do it. Certain quite famous ancient historians have actually done this. You can do, it's about 28 miles, but you can get over the Catharron Mountains there. So there's quite a lot of paranoia about people might come and spy on us or whatever. They were just too close for comfort.

So I think that this particular mythical cycle, especially because it was so rich, as I said, allowed the Athenians to think very, very hard about it. And they did really dread them. And of course, the Thebans were, when Athens finally fell at the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Thebans were the ones who wanted the harshest punishments exacted. They were very, very, very anti-Athenian, I think it was a bitter, bitter hatred. I mean, I always think it would be like as if Birmingham had sold out to Hitler.

You know, London, Birmingham, you know, that it said it's just too difficult for us. we're going to go lightly and we'll get the privileges and then the way London would therefore have thought about Birmingham. Do you see what I mean? I do see what you mean, yes. I'm trying to imagine it and I can't. At some point though I would love it if we could,

we have got just one incredibly loud voice from Thebes and I would really love it if we could get him on top of the Athenians. We are going to come into Pindana. It's all will be well. All will be well, it all will be well. It all will be well. Now, if I may continue a little bit, okay. Sam, we have Spartans, Thebans and Athenians.

That came to some sort of head in 371 BC. How? The period after the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans are the leading power in Greece. And the other states, Corinth, Athens, Thebes, all gather together and try and resist Spartan power. The Spartans are fairly successful in managing the situation in the mainland. Indeed, they are the first historical force ever to occupy the Cadmea, the centre of Thebes.

In 382 BC, they managed to get a force into Thebes in order to control the city. How did they do that? We've all been talking about it being impregnable for so long. How did the Spartans get in? They were let in. They were let in by a pro-Spartan group. Otherwise, yes, they wouldn't have been able to get in. For three years, they run the city from within, as well as much of the rest of the region. and it's a group of exiles who've been living in Athens come back, seven of them, if you believe Xenophon, which is significant in a Theban sense and they come back and they dress as women

and they assassinate all of the Spartan leaders on the Cadmere. And from that point on, Thebes is pushing back against Sparta. From 379 onwards, they are pushing back against Sparta. In 375 BC we have the famous Battle of Tagira, which is the first time that Thebans defeat Spartans' mandates. to man in a battle. And that's extremely significant in terms of the transition of power that we're seeing.

And later historians would see that as the moment before the great battle of Luxtra. And Luptra is where the Spartan power is broken by the Thebans. And Luctra brings us to this extraordinary man, epaimondas. Now he's a favourite of yours, Paul. He is. Not only of me.

I'm not... And I'm just saying it's a nice introduction. He's favorite of mine too. You sell him. Just tell us a bit about him and what happened at his battle. Well, first of all, let me give you Walter Raleigh, writing in the Tower of London, the worthiest man that ever was bred in that nation of Greece, and hardly to be matched in any age or country,

for he equaled all others in the several virtues when each of them were singular. The point is that for Raleigh, he was both a man of action and a man of thought, so he was both a philosopher and a practical, actually, general. But for me, what is it active is not only was he skilled. He was actually the principal general at that battle that Sam's just talked about. But he also was a man who had a vision, shall we say. And on his epitaph, he never married. And he once said, you know, why have you got no children?

Yes, I have one daughter. That's the Battle of Lutra. But on his epitaph, he says that he sheared the hair of the Spartans. And Spartans had very long hair, which is a rather good metaphor. But what he meant was that he'd destroyed their power, and he'd founded two cities. One of them was a city called Messini, which is the ex-Helots, the ex-survile population of the Spartans,

who'd kept these helots down for hundreds of years, liberation and a new city. And secondly, Megalopolis, the word is actually used, which gathered together lots of communities in Arcadia, which had previously rather a backward area, rather diffuse, and had made it a federal state like the Beotian state from which he came. And the future of governance in Greece before the Roman conquest was with federalism. But he did at this battle, what he was...

Right, right. I'll give you a little bit more detail. Just can we just be specific about 371, the battle where he led the Thebans to unlikelyly eliminate... So, first point, whereas normally the right wings of a heavy-armed infantry Greek army were the crack elements, he transferred his crack Theban forces to his left wing, meaning that they confronted directly the Spartans. He lined them up, not eight ranks deep, normal, not 25 ranks deep, which they had used before, but 50 ranks deep. He then advanced against the spans, not head-on, but obliquely.

All these things are either innovations or putting them altogether. They are extremely apt for the circumstance, which resulted in the head-to-head, Sparta versus Thebes, Thebes win. And within the Theban force, the elite, was a band called, later, the sacred band. Three hundred. Now, elite forces were not new. What was interesting about this one was that. that it played to a particular feature

of ancient theme and culture society, namely pederasty, to use the technical term, an adult male with an adolescent boy, a homosexual relationship, not necessarily sexual, but very often sexual, but what was unusual was to put together

two adult men who were in a sexual relationship. And they won resounding. Now then Edith, unleash Pindar. Right. This doesn't mean we have to go back No, no, it doesn't move through anything except talk about Pivot. First three decades of the 5th century, when he is actually our main source for all the myths.

Our first Athenian tragedy is 472. The first three decades of the 5th century BC, the most extraordinary voice comes out of Thieves, which is Pindar, the lyric poet, who wrote extraordinary poems paid for by patrons all over the Greek world, rich aristocratic patrons when they had won events in any of the four great games, at Olympia, Delphi, the Isthmus and the Amir. He also wrote all kinds of other songs that we haven't got for weddings and different kinds of processions and honours. Pindar's poetry is almost as important as homers

in the field of lyric poetry. Just because he's not a household name now does not mean that he wasn't in antiquity and indeed in the 18th century. His poetry is exquisite lyrics. They vary between two or three stanzas long. He wrote in triads and one poem, which is 400 lines long.

you bought it by the yard. The richer you were, the more stanzas you could book. We've got amazing poems for tyrants from all the way from Cyrene in Libya to almost every city in Greece. What does it tell us about the Thebes and the Thebans? It tells us an enormous amount of the Ames. All right. So he uses Theban myths and gives us those earlier versions

before the Athenians did very, very often. In particular, he wrote four Odes, four Thebans who had one. and in 478 that is only just after the Persian Wars just to show how life was going on normally he wrote two beautiful odes one was for somebody who had run the race in full armour

at the Pythian Games of Delphi who was Telessiccrates of Sireini but that song was actually sung in Thieves because Telesiccrates was marrying a Theban woman and we have a song that has written there and the same year a little boy from thieves called Thrasidias won the boys sprint

at Delphi, and we have got the most exquisite song where he summons all the women of Thebes to sing a chorus in the great temple which we've dug up of Apollo Ismenios, and he summons them. Can I just read one short stanza as introduction? Daughters of Cadmus, Semily, Yulu who lived next door to the Olympians, Eno Lucothea, chambermate of the Nereids, come now with Hercules, Heracles, high-born mother to the presence of the Theban nymph. Come to the inmost shrine with its treasury of the Neerids.

of golden tripods, which Apollo honored and gave it, his name is Menian, a shrine of truthful prophecies. Children of harmonia come now in the early evening the whole sisterhood of the soil to sing for Thrasidias. Thank you very much. We're now turning to... It was a good run, that. Excellent. We all enjoyed that. Sam. Thebans came to be at war with the Macedonians under Philip and later Alexander, and the war with Alexander, approved. Faitle for them, can you go through that, please? Sure. After the Battle of Luctra in 371, Thebes is in charge

of much of the Greek world and they become involved in all different areas of Greece, including up into the very far and further most parts of the northern mainland, including Macedon. They take as prisoner in the 360s the young Prince Philip of Macedon and he lives probably on the Cadmere for several years in the middle of the 360s

and in the early 350s he ascends to the throne of Macedon and he brings in very rapidly a whole host of innovations which transforms the Macedonian state from a slightly disconnected liminal part of the Greek world to being right at the front and centre. Thebes is still interfering with all kinds of other areas and this comes to a head over a war of Delphi, a sacred war between three feet,

56 and 345, when the Macedonians get involved in order to help the Thebans overcome the Fokians in which region Delphi sits. And they're cooperating, Philip II of Macedon and the Thebans are fighting quite happily alongside one another. But at the conclusion of this war, in the mid-340s BC, there is a realization that Philip II Macedon's reaches extending deep into Greece. And this worries the Athenians. It worries the Thevens. And it takes a few years to come about, but there is this rapprochement between them, and it comes to a head at the Battle of Chirona, where the Athenians

and the Thebans mount a last stand, really, against the oncoming power of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, in the north-western part of Beosha, and they are defeated, heavily defeated, by the Macedonians. Then, Paul

Cartledge, Alexander gets into Thebes and destroys it. How did they get in? But more importantly, why did he destroyed. Well, immediately after the Battle of Caraneer, there's the power, of course, of Macedon now extends and he actually

plunks various garrisons around the central part of Greece. And Thebes is a democracy, I believe, and Athens is a democracy, and they both dislike the kind of autocracy that Philip represented. But Philip was

assassinated in 336. He had been planning to go off to Asia to take on the Persians, and He was assassinated for local reasons, probably. Alexander takes over, very quickly establishes his mark, and he is elected by an alliance of Greeks as the new commander-in-chief for the Persian expedition. But before he goes off to Persia, he's got to make sure that Greece behind him is not going to rise up. Well, he's way up in the north, and the Thebans hear a rumor that he's been killed.

Fantastic. They've got a garrison, a Macedonian one. They are a democracy. They rise up. And it's as punishment for that that Alexander, he doesn't merely punish the leaders. He has the whole city destroyed. Except for Pindar's house, which he insisted was allowed to remain. And religious shrines, which are very important.

They just said, one little thing that the listeners might not have got a... The report of his death was premature. He was a lot. In 12 days. So he came back like a pad out of hell, really, and got into the city. Well, outside, but... Well, how did he destroy it? from the outside? Well obviously he had

remember the garrison and so there's all sorts of support there but yeah I can see your point but it's problematic for Alexander because the Macedonian royal house trace their their Greekness any Greekness that they have comes through Heracles and Hercules

being Theban born is it's problematic for a Macedonian king to go on and Philip had lived there all those years I think they were very strong personal ties but but Thieves themselves had destroyed a number of cities before so I mean this is not this is a kind of payback so other Greeks might think,

ah right, they were traitors in 48470. They destroyed Ocommonos in 364. So this is payback time. No, I'm just saying this is how you would see it if you were a loyalist Greek and you didn't like the Theemans particularly. It's still quite interesting to know. Alexander got in.

Now, we know what he became, but he was a young man then. How did he so utterly destroy them? What about these sacred ban? What about these sacred band of thieves? Well, where are they? Yeah, we go back to Carineer for that, and they were still the leading Theban force at Carineer,

and there is a very interesting excavation. It dug up something like 250 graves, and it's thought that it's their graves, whether the others survived, or whether they just weren't recognisable to be buried. But anyway, that's the end of the sacred band. It had a 40-year life, 378, probably, when it was formed 338,

when it was finally wiped out by Macedon. They even had an ancestor in the myths. Chrysippus was one of the first in the line of the Royal House of thieves, founded by Cadmus, and he is said to have done the first ever rape of a young man, as opposed to a young woman. And it was a very famous legend, but that pederasty, technical pederast... Edipus is dad as well. Trace back to Chrysippus and Sophocles' road to play about that as well. Right. Let's go back to the place, then.

Edith. What do you think has given them such resonance? Well, they're incredibly good. They're incredibly violent, incredibly dramatic. There's some of the very few plays, The Seven Against Sebes by Eeschylus, is one of the very few plays where absolutely everybody comes from the same city.

They're all Theban. And that's sort of incestuous in the broad metaphorical sense of the myths around Thebes really comes over that. But it's actually set on the walls. And Etyocles, who's the man in the... brother inside, who's defending it from Polyneses, is coming with the army from the outside. It's given speeches like Henry V. I mean, constant, militaristic. It's an extraordinary piece of rhetoric. You know, it's a very, very, very strong play. What's your time? That we've all got to

hold hard and think of your land and think of your ancestral heroes and thieves will be free and so on. It was very, very famous in Aristophanes Frogs. The play is still famous for being full of Ares, full of martial valour. It's the play you go to train your soldiers in how to be a good, good, good, strong valiant fighters. I mean, it really was the Henry V of the ancient Greeks. And the set, we've actually got a beautiful vase with a set which shows how they portrayed Thebes in the theatre

and a huge castle made of wood with ladders going up. They played out the actual siege in very, very dramatic and theatrical ways. Was there any sense, and Paul's given us a lot of perspective on this, but it's any sense that Thieves could be thought of as anti-Athens and gain something from that? No, I think it's deeply unhelpful in many respects.

It's used by lots of different places and lots of different peoples as a way of seeing themselves. It's not anti-anything. Delphi uses it. Troy is used as a sort of mirror of this. Lots of places use Thebes. What's interesting is because of the destruction in 335 BC, the city doesn't exist for two decades. It's refounded later on

But all of these myths then actually become part of the fabric of the city Because otherwise it doesn't exist for anybody And it's all rebuilt with these myths as an integral part of it And they have to inhabit this strange world Between narrative and history and reality and imagination And that's really the very interesting continuation of this story Is this city that sort of exists and doesn't exist And it's everybody's and nobody's

Well I'm afraid and very sorry We've come to the end of it Thank you very much Sam Gatland Paul Cardledge and Edith Hall. Next week we'll be discussing someone who may have been in the greatest mathematician of all time, Carl Friedrich Gaus. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. You're sorry that we didn't... I'm sorry we didn't in the afterlife. Of course, putting on the Antigone, which I believe Edith is the most performed. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, is a way of receiving ancient thieves, but via Athens, whereas I think it would be at least interesting to have talked a bit about the whole of a psychoanalytic,

psychodynamic theory of human personality. I think you're absolutely right. We can talk about it now. What's the problem? It's simply that Thebes is, people don't realize. No, I wasn't saying the problem of the discussion, I was saying, why not talk about it now? Because we're on air, and this is going to let's say,

but we'll talk about Freud now. It is very interesting that Sigmund Freud actually wrote the interpretation of dreams or got the theory from it after seeing a famous actor, Ghan Mune Sully, who was the most famous French, a classical actor of the late 19th century, perform Edipus. So Sigmund Freud sat in a theatre

thinking he was in Thebes for two hours while he's looking at this incest motif and brings it up. That was exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. And I also had in mind. I've just read Natalie Haynes' The Children of Jakasta. And she has a very interesting take on what the marriage of,

Giacasta and Laos, this is Oedipus, his father was like, that he was predominantly gay. He hired another man to inseminate Jocaster, so Oedipus isn't actually Leos's son. It's absolutely brilliant sort of spin. Is there any proof for this? Well, no, this is all fiction. It's a good novel called the children of Jakarta by 19-Hast. When Edith started off, my hackles as a historian, were rising, because myth to me is one thing in history.

There is myth-history, which is in other words a way of tracetka. trying to tell yourself about your past, which is purely fictional. I don't like the linkage of a physical site, yes, excavated by Keremopoulos, and therefore the myth in some sense is true. No, myth is, no, no, no, but this is purely my... I've just written a little piece on the Trojan War, you see. I'm one who very radically distinguishes the site of Hiselic from the Trojan War cycle. But on this, Thebes is a really interesting example

because it does actually, it builds its myths into the fabric of the city. That's very interesting. Reverse process. There's stories that are told they start to build things that reflect the antiquity. All right, but the other thing we haven't talked about, which I wanted to, was about literacy. And the Cadmus is actually a civilisation hero. And Cadmus is, there's a Greek sense that they learnt

many of their most important technologies and arts from the East. And that is expressed in the myth of Cadmus, who means man from the east. That's what his name means, coming, and he was supposed to have brought writing. Now, the dates don't work for the Phoenician alphabet, but one scholar has suggested, and I think it's very, very plausible,

that what he actually brought in was the Linear B script, that sort of earlier script for writing the Greek alphabet. And that is why when only in the 60s, 250 amazing bits of Linear B were found. the idea that Thebes is this highly civilised city state to absolutely to rival Mycenae or Knossos, which is where the other Linneabee finds have been, or Pylos, it's absolutely there.

And their extraordinary text, one of them even shows the range of the empire of the Mycenaean age thieves, extended all the way across Ubea, Evia, and the port of Aulis. Others have got indications of extraordinary feasting going on, which is backed up in both mythical and historical sources. So I would have liked to, I think the whole connection

and also with metallurgy, he's often connected with Hephaistus and very fine metal work. And we know they had magnificent chariots and arms and so on. It simply complements the mythical. I think just beyond Freud. I'm worried about Freud. Thebes and the surrounding area is the great crucible. of the Western Mind.

So many of the great figures come from a very small area around Thebes that you could talk about any number of these figures. Nature and the Dionysiac. I mean, Dionys is the great myth of epiphany. I mean, Heracles is his figure.

Yes. Hello, I'm Neil McGregor and I'd like to invite you to listen to my new 30-part series about faith and society. For the whole of human history, believing and belonging have gone together.

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