Thebes City Of Myths

Sparta is famous for its warrior tradition, Athens for its intellectual and artistic achievement. But what of Thebes? As ancient historian Paul Cartledge explains, Thebes too had a most distinctive image.

- Paul Cartledge

‘Ancient Greece’ conjures up many different things to many different readers. Typically – and to put it rather crudely – Sparta does war, Athens does art (very broadly interpreted), and Alexander the Great of Macedon does empire.

Of course, it is a lot more complex than that. Athens does much more than (visual, theatrical, rhetorical) art: for example, democracy, philosophy, and indeed high culture generally made Athens the key city for the Romans wishing to inherit and claim descent from ‘Hellenic’ culture, via Alexandria’s Museum and Library. Sparta’s legacy too has been far from purely or solely a military one – as a reading of Elizabeth Rawson’s The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969) amply demonstrates – though that is the predominant element in its reception today for sure, as it was in 19th-century Prussia and 20th-century Nazi Germany. And Alexander the Great’s undoubted imperialism embraced as its legacy, among much else, the aforementioned Museum and Library located in the eponymous Egyptian city he founded.

But what that triangulation so signally fails to include and omits to convey is the fourth term: the ancient Greek city that does mythology, like no other. From the point of view of the perception and reception of myth in the wider Greek world, and perhaps in later expressions in Western art (broadly interpreted to include theatre, music, and poetry), ‘ancient Greece’ should also instantly conjure up Thebes. There are a number of reasons, some good, why it typically does not. There are many more reasons, all good, why it should. I begin with the former, then shall spend most of my time on the latter.