Boeotia

The Greek region that everyone mocked and that briefly beat everyone. Boeotia lay north-west of Attica around Lake Copais, fertile enough to grow grain when most of Greece could not, and its Athenian neighbours converted that agricultural comfort into a stereotype of dull, gluttonous rustics - Boeotian pig was an ordinary Athenian insult. The region was organised as a federal league of cities dominated by Thebes, an early and genuinely interesting experiment in federal government with proportional representation and rotating officers. Its politics were shaped by Theban attempts to control the smaller cities, especially Plataea, which turned to Athens and was destroyed for it. Boeotia sided with Persia in 480, a choice that was never forgotten. Its extraordinary decade came after 371, when Epaminondas destroyed the Spartan army at Leuctra using an oblique order of battle and a deep left wing, ending Sparta's reputation for invincibility, and then invaded the Peloponnese and freed the Messenian helots - which broke Spartan power permanently by removing its economic base. Theban hegemony died with Epaminondas at Mantinea in 362. Philip of Macedon, who had been a hostage in Thebes and learned there, crushed the league at Chaeronea in 338. Alexander razed Thebes in 335. Hesiod and Pindar were both Boeotians. Thebes was the largest city, with Orchomenos and Plataea its rivals. The Sacred Band, a unit of a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers, was destroyed at Chaeronea and its burial found in the nineteenth century. Lake Copais was drained in the nineteenth century and is now farmland. Mycenaean Thebes has yielded Linear B tablets. Oedipus and Dionysus both belong to Theban myth.

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