Continuously inhabited for five millennia, and at one point the most powerful city in Ancient Greece, Thebes has been overshadowed by its better-known rivals, Athens and Sparta.
According to myth, the city was founded when Kadmos sowed dragonās teeth into the ground and warriors sprang forth, ready not only to build the fledgling city but to defend it from all-comers. It was Herculesā birthplace and the home of the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus solved, winning the Theban crown and the kingās widow in marriage, little knowing that the widow was his mother, Jocasta.
The cityās history is every bit as rich as its mythic origins, from siding with the Persian invaders when their emperor, Xerxes, set out to conquer Aegean Greece, to siding with Sparta ā like Thebes an oligarchy ā to defeat Periclesā democratic Athens, to being utterly destroyed on the orders of Alexander the Great.
In Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, the acclaimed classical historian Paul Cartledge brings the city vividly to life, and argues that it is central to our understanding of the ancient Greeksā achievements ā whether politically or culturally ā and thus to our own culture and civilization.
