April 25, 2025 - Greece
Thebes

This morning, Dave and I walked through the Plaka to the car rental place, near the Arch of Hadrian.  Then I nervously drove through Athens back to our AirBnB to pick up the girls and luggage.  It wasn't too bad.  We loaded up the car and drove northwest out of town.  Our first stop would be at Thebes.

For navigation, I used my iPhone.  I had previously downloaded the map covering Athens to Thebes.  I drove and Lynnette navigated, looking at the iPhone map and giving me directions.  This technique worked really well throughout the entire trip.  Navigating by road signs was a non-starter; they were Greek to me.

Thebes was not in the Rick Steves Greece book.  But I had seen somewhere that Thebes had a good archeological museum.

Plus I wanted to stop there because I had read about Thebes in the Victor Davis Hanson book "The End of Everything".   "In 335 BC, the Thebans not only revolted against the Macedonian occupation of Greece, but defiantly dared Alexander the Great to take the legendary city.   He did just that, after a brief but savage one-day battle.  He then razed the city, killed off most of the adult males, and sold the surviving women and children into slavery, and allowed neighbors to appropriate Theban territory.  The creative polis civilization of the golden age, not just of Thebes but of Athens and the rest of Greece as well, vanished after Alexander.   ....  the old mentalities and the delusions that doomed the Thebans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, and the Aztecs are also still very much with us, especially the last thoughts of the slaughtered:  "It cannot happen here."  ... Victor Davis Hanson

Thebes has nothing left to see after Alexander the Great got through with it;  modern archaeologists have found few material traces of the Theban cataclysum of 335 BC.  But  there is the Museum, and afterwards we had a nice lunch in town center.

Here we are outside of the Archaeological Museum of Thebes.

Thebes was the largest city of the ancient region of Boeotia and was the leader of the Boeotian confederacy. It was a major rival of ancient Athens, and sided with the Persians during the 480 BC invasion under Xerxes I.

"Athens and Sparta are by far the two best known ancient Greek city states – Athens for its philosophers and Sparta for its warriors. Less famous is Thebes – the third city of Greece -- in the region known as Boeotia. Yet it was this same uncelebrated Thebes that won a decisive victory against the Spartans, despite being heavily outnumbered, crushing the Spartan army and breaking its power. In 371 BC, Thebes and Sparta found themselves at war (the minutia of Boetian and Peloponnese politics being fairly uninteresting here), and the Spartans managed to take the Thebans by surprise with a quick advance into the environs of Central Greece, offering the Theban army battle near the village of Leuctra.

The Theban commanders were at first divided over whether to even chance a pitched battle with the Spartans in such conditions. The Spartans outnumbered them, probably something like 10,000 to 7,000, and they were after all Spartans. A Theban general named Epaminondas argued vociferously to take the battle, and in the end got his wish.  Epaminondas’ tactics at Leuctra marked one of the earliest documented examples of coordinated and planned battlefield maneuver.

Leuctra was a titanic victory with massive geopolitical implications. The loss of an army to an outnumbered and underestimated foe rocked both Sparta’s material strength and its perception as the leading military power in Greece, and set in motion a strategic defeat that permanently relegated it to a second rate power within Greece.

The Battle of Leuctra also marked the beginning of the end of classical Greek hoplite warfare, with its focus on uniform, tactically simplified heavy infantry formations.

The Thebans had, in a word, discovered the power of schwerpunkt. Thebes would itself soon be overwhelmed by another Greek power fielding similarly flexible, but even more powerful phalanx formations: Macedonia.

... Big Serge

Epaminondas died in the battle of Mantinea battle on 4 July 362 BC (age about 53).  Macedonia would rise in power at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, bringing decisive victory to Philip II over an alliance of Thebes and Athens.   A mere twenty-seven years after Epaminondas's death, a recalcitrant Thebes was obliterated by Alexander the Great.

For a time 371BC to 362 BC, Thebes was number one.  Unfortunately for them, the Macedonians under Alexander the Great were just getting warmed up.

Here is a map of Greece during the height of Theban power in 362 BC, showing Theban, Spartan and Athenian power blocks

The art of mosaic floors, already popular from ancient times, was widely diffused through the Byzantine Empire.

Numerous mosaic floors, often of exceptional quality and with rare iconography, have been discovered in Boeotia, Thebes and other sites.  Chronologically, they span the mid-5th century to the mid-6th century, a period of economic prosperity and intensive building activity in the region.  They belong to churches or secular buildings such as bathhouses and private villas.

An old medieval tower stands next to the Archaeological Museum of Thebes.  The museum was first founded in 1905.  The current museum building was built in 2007.