Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece

Description

An incisive, inspiring and vitally illuminating account of a city which changed the ancient world and which deserves to be remembered by the modern. A masterful book written by a master historian. Bettany Hughes, bestselling author of Istanbul and Helen of Troy

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 dragons 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 Hercules birthplace and the home of the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus solved, winning the Theban crown and the kings widow in marriage, little knowing that the widow was his mother, Jocasta.

The citys 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 like Thebes an oligarchy to defeat Pericles 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 Greeks achievements whether politically or culturally and thus to our own culture and civilization.

Author Information

Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the Faculty of Classics, where he taught from 1979 to 2014. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of well over a score of books, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece; The Spartans: An Epic History; Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past; Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World; and Democracy: A Life. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and an Honorary Citizen of Sparta, Greece, and holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic.