Thebes

Thebes was the principal city of Boeotia and, for nine years, the strongest power in Greece. It sat on good farmland, dominated a federal league of Boeotian cities, and was permanently at odds with Athens across the border. Its reputation elsewhere in Greece was poor: it sided with Persia in 480 and the other Greeks never forgot it. After Sparta beat Athens in 404 Thebes turned against its own ally, and in 371 it did what nobody had managed. At Leuctra, Epaminondas massed his left wing fifty ranks deep against the Spartan right, refused his own weaker wing, and destroyed the Spartan army with its king. He then invaded the Peloponnese, freed Messenia after three centuries of helotage, and founded Megalopolis to hold Sparta in. Sparta never recovered, which is the largest single consequence of any Greek battle. The Sacred Band, three hundred paired lovers, was the elite of the Theban army. Epaminondas was killed at Mantinea in 362 and the hegemony died with him. Philip of Macedon had been a hostage in Thebes as a youth and learned its tactics there. He used them against it at Chaeronea in 338, where the Sacred Band died in place. Alexander destroyed the city entirely in 335 after a revolt, killing or enslaving the population and sparing only the temples and the house of the poet Pindar. Boeotians were mocked elsewhere in Greece as slow and rustic. The Sacred Band's grave was excavated in the nineteenth century and held two hundred and fifty-four skeletons. Pindar had been dead for a century and a half when Alexander spared his house. Thebes was refounded twenty years later by one of Alexander's own successors.

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