Picador Press (2020) h/b 304pp £25 (ISBN 139781509873166)
This book is long overdue as an account of one of the most important places in ancient history. Many people grow up thinking that ‘Greek’ means ‘Athenian’; and the Athenian contempt for men they called ‘Boeotian pigs’ has no doubt rubbed off on many of their readers. Athens—the very noisy neighbour of Thebes—got the last word in most areas, and Sparta always had the mystique of a constitution which ensured that it never lacked for critics and admirers. Thebes, by contrast, has been largely ignored or only mentioned in passing as a site of legends which the Athenians (of course) adopted to write plays which would not have been put on in Thebes itself. Not any more.
C. sets the scene in a lively introduction, lightly addressing issues of myth, history and archaeology which will be fully fleshed out in the rest of the book. He reminds us of the key stories which we all know—Cadmus, Oedipus, Antigone, the Seven against Thebes, Heracles and so on—as well as pointing us towards the early history of the city as shown in the writers (Homer and Hesiod primarily) and also the artists. The bulk of the book (pp. 47-239) then follows a chronological format, taking us from Archaic Thebes (taking 800 BC as a starting point) up to its near-total destruction at the hands of Alexander the Great in 335 BC. The story is a good one and is well told: but C. obviously has to widen his focus considerably. Thebes (like everywhere else) was a piece of the ever-shifting jigsaw which was Greek history, as different states jostled with each other and within themselves militarily, constitutionally and politically. In telling the tale of Thebes, C. has to tell the larger tale of the Greeks as a whole and inevitably there are stretches of narrative where Thebes is not mentioned at all—but C. always homes in on those parts of the story where the Thebans mattered most and sees things from a resolutely unpartisan and objective standpoint.
The Athenians (and later on the Macedonians) neither forgot nor forgave the Theban ‘medising’ in the Persian Wars, and C. is excellent in his account of this, giving us the Theban account of their actions and assessing the extent to which the criticism is (or is not) fair. Athenians also hated Thebes for helping to persuade the Spartans to flatten their ally Plataea (who had been hugely beneficial in the Persian conflict) and the one speech by Thebans in Thucydides (3.61-68) ends up being ‘a litany of moralizing rhetoric, displaying envy, malevolence, hatefulness, hypocrisy and sophistry’ (p. 144) as they try to wriggle out of their blame for medism and also to justify crushing the Plataeans.
Where C. rightly lays great emphasis is in his discussion of the Theban politeia. Thebes (and Boeotia of which it was part) showcased a form of moderate oligarchy in close working with a Boeotian federal government: where Thebes led, other states were to follow, and yet this pioneering political side of Thebes has not received the credit it deserves until now.
There were other Theban firsts: their creation of the ‘Sacred Band’ of 150 pairs of male lovers—a band which performed exceptionally well at Leuctra—was part of the traditional ‘pederasty’ which was culturally ingrained in Thebes (p. 27) and which C. sensitively analyses (pp. 190-192) in contrast to the more familiar Spartan agôgê. There were also Theban individuals in different fields who were by any criterion world-class and who fully deserve the attention C. gives them: the lyric poet Pindar, the piper Pronomos and the general Epaminondas. C. tells us enough about all three to let us see their exceptional quality, but he also lets us infer that such talent does not grown in a cultural desert and the ‘Boeotian Pigs’ were in fact very civilised animals. Epaminondas in particular would be beaming with smugness in his sarcophagus were he able to read the glowing account of his life and achievements contained here.
The final chapter (‘Mything revivals: the ‘pigs’ bite back’) makes no claims to be exhaustive in its impressionistic sketching of the Nachleben of Thebes, but it does remind us that this ‘forgotten city’ is still delivering the goods. C. darts from the visual arts to drama to psychology—and ends neatly with some lines from Brecht requiring us to look at the nameless men who built the seven-gated Thebes. This quotation delivers on several levels: we always assume that it is the ‘big names’ who make history, but the anonymous people were no less important, and Thebes itself falls into that category—and the fact that Brecht in 1935 thought to begin his ‘Questions of a book-reading worker’ with this city (before moving on to Babylon and ancient Rome) shows the continuing resonance of the place as a byword for ancient greatness.
This is not an academic book for an academic audience: there are no footnotes and few detailed references. For more detail the reader is referred (p. 278) to other titles such as Rockwell’s (2017) Thebes: a History. C. largely avoids jargon and writes in a straightforward style, but seems at times to be assuming that his readers are very slow learners—bronze is defined twice in six pages (35, 41), medism defined three times in five pages (pp. 90-94)—although he also assumes that the reader of p.105 will remember the definition of an amphictyony from p.77 and he never tells us or shows us what a cist grave was (p. 35) nor exactly why the generals were executed after Arginusae (p. 165). Some of the explanations—such as that of the trireme on p. 100—are excellent and anyone reading this book will learn a huge amount, but the book shows some signs of haste and lack of revision: there are errors (the reference to ‘figure 8’ on p. 53 should read ‘figure 5’); and the caption on fig. 13 claims to show ‘the stone victory monument marking the Thebans’ famous victory over the Athenians at Leuctra’ when it was the Spartans who were defeated, as pp. 196-9 narrates in vivid detail). Some of the paragraphs are long-winded (e.g. pp. 38-9, 120) and could have done with more effective punctuation. C. repeats himself—sometimes almost verbatim—on things like satyr plays (pp.114, 129), the helots in 464 BC (pp. 105, 139) and the Oedipus legend (pp. 25-27 does a better job of this than p. 125, and cross-reference between these pages would have helped).
The judgements on the history are always reliable and well-informed, but C.’s reading of the plays can be oddly myopic: on p. 126 he reads the Oedipus at Colonus as showing Athens in ‘reconciliatory’ mood towards the Thebans, ignoring the pantomime-villain part played by the Theban tyrant Creon who spends a lot of the play trying to hunt the noble old man down for selfish reasons and ends up being outmanoeuvred and then roundly ticked off by the good Athenian Theseus in a mood of jeering righteousness. Hardly ‘reconciliation’, is it?
The book has a good index and plenty of suggestions for further reading, and there are four (essential) maps and 22 illustrations of varying quality (the reproduction in figure 11 shows little or none of the detail which C. describes on pp.150-152). Cassander of Macedon described Thebes in 316 BC as ‘a city widely known for its achievements and for the myths handed down about it’ and this timely and fascinating book does a lot to bring the ‘forgotten city’ out of oblivion and back into the light.
John Godwin