Greek Mythology, page 13
With six other generals, Polyneices led an army against Thebes. The city was on the point of being captured when Teiresias announced that the gods would save it if one of the royal household willingly laid down his life. When Creon’s son, Menoeceus, sacrificed himself, Thebes’ fortunes immediately changed. As one of the attackers, Capaneus, scaled the walls, Zeus destroyed him with a thunderbolt, and at last, with many dead on both sides, Polyneices and Eteocles challenged each other to single combat. In the vicious duel, each struck a mortal blow and with both brothers dead the invaders turned and ran. Thebes was saved, but all was still not well.
Assuming command, Creon ratified his nephew Eteocles’ earlier wish that no fallen enemy should be buried – a clear defiance of the gods’ unwritten laws. Opposed even by her sister, Ismene, Antigone disobeyed the edict, either dragging her brother Polyneices’ body to Eteocles’ already burning pyre, cremating it on a pyre of its own or scattering sufficient earth on it to free his spirit. In Sophocles’ version, Creon then ordered Antigone to be walled up in a cave and left to die. However, his son Haemon (Antigone’s fiancé) refused to condone such barbarity and ran to free her. Shortly afterwards, Creon, too – shown the error of his ways by Teiresias – rushed to the cave. But already Antigone had hanged herself and, seeing Creon, Haemon lunged at him unsuccessfully with a sword, which he then turned on himself. When Creon leaned that his wife Eurydice had also hanged herself, he must have hoped Thebes’ sorrows were complete. They were not.
Shortly afterwards, Theseus, outraged at Creon’s impiety, arrived from Athens at the head of such a threatening army that the Thebans were forced to allow the fallen attackers to be buried. Worse was to come. A generation later, the sons of the seven original invading generals launched their own attack on Thebes. Teiresias knew that these so-called ‘Epigoni’ were destined for success and advised the Thebans to leave city under the cover of night. The next morning the invaders broke in, ransacked its buildings and razed Thebes to the ground.
Today Antigone’s story is familiar to theatregoers, but much of Sophocles’ plot may be his own creation. In an older version of the story, when Antigone buries Polyneices, Creon tests Haemon’s loyalty by ordering him to kill her. Haemon pretends to carry out the sentence, but in fact gives Antigone to shepherds for safe-keeping. In time their son returns to Thebes to take part in games. Creon recognizes him thanks to a genetic birthmark and, despite pleas from Heracles, vows to punish Haemon; but instead Haemon kills both himself and Antigone. Creon then gives his daughter Megara to Heracles in marriage.
The Birth & Madness of Heracles
Heracles, too, was Theban-born. His mother, Alcmene, a Mycenaean princess, fled to the city with Amphitryon, her husband, when he accidentally killed her father. Soon after they arrived in Thebes, Zeus took advantage of Amphitryon’s absence on campaign to visit Alcmene by night – and no normal night at that. To prolong his pleasure, and disguised as Amphitryon, he persuaded the sun-god Helios not to rise until three days had passed and Selene, the moon-goddess, to dawdle on her journey across the sky. Only when the real Amphitryon returned did Alcmene discover Zeus’ trickery.
As always, Hera was none too pleased by Zeus’ infidelity, especially since, with Alcmene already in labour, Zeus announced that a son born that day to the royal line of Mycenae was destined to rule her special land, the Argolid. His boast came too soon. Not to be outwitted, Hera hurried first to Tiryns, where she eased the premature birth of Sthenelus’ son, Eurystheus, then to Thebes, where she prolonged Alcmene’s labour until after dark. At last Alcmene was delivered of twins. One, Iphicles, was Amphitryon’s son, the other the son of Zeus, named either ironically or in an attempt to assuage the goddess’ anger, Heracles (‘Hera’s Fame’).
As his family look on and his wife, Megara, watches helplessly from the door, the maddened Heracles prepares to dash one of his sons to the ground. (Mid-fourth-century BC South Italian wine bowl.)
Zeus’ plans were thwarted, but he still managed to outwit his wife. When Hera was passing Thebes, he caused Alcmene to leave the baby Heracles outside alone. Not knowing who he was and thinking he had been abandoned, the maternal Hera was drawn to his crying. Picking the baby up, she began to suckle him. But Heracles sucked too violently. Hera tore him off her breast, and her milk splashed high into the heavens to form the Milky Way. And then she recognized Heracles. Too late. Her milk had already rendered him immortal.
Still Hera hounded Heracles. While he was a baby, she sent two serpents into the boys’ nursery. Roused by Iphicles’ screams of terror, their parents ran in – only to find Heracles calmly strangling the snakes in his small but powerful hands. Grown to manhood, Heracles fought valiantly against neighbouring Orchomenos, earning the Theban king Creon’s gratitude and his daughter Megara’s hand in marriage. Soon they were proud parents of a dynasty of sons.
But Hera, her fury undiminished, drove Heracles temporarily mad. Mistaking his sons – and those of his brother Iphicles – for the sons of his enemy, Eurystheus of Tiryns, he began butchering them. Euripides’ The Madness of Heracles (which places the episode later in Heracles’ life) tells how:
He chased one child, circling a column in terrifying pursuit until his view was unimpeded and he shot him through the heart. The boy fell backwards, spraying the stone pillar as he spattered out his life.… Then Heracles aimed at another of his children, who was hiding, crouched behind an altar. The arrow drawn, the poor boy threw himself before him in an act of supplication, pleading, ‘My dearest father, please! Don’t kill me! I am not Eurystheus’ son, but yours!’ But Heracles scowled as grimly as the Gorgon … and slammed his club down on the boy’s fair head, crushing his skull, as a blacksmith hammers molten metal. Then he turned to his third son. Before he reached him, Megara snatched the boy and ran outside, slamming the doors behind them. Now Heracles believed that he was standing by the walls [of Tiryns that] the Cyclopes built. He battered down the twisted doors, breaking down the jambs and lintel, and with one arrow shot dead both wife and child.
At last, Heracles came to his senses. Although granted ritual purification from his guilt, he still needed to atone for his family’s murder, and in punishment he was sent to Tiryns to serve Eurystheus and undertake twelve labours.
Narcissus
Hera was involved in another tale of destructive love located near Thebes. Learning that Zeus was consorting with nymphs on Mount Cithaeron, she set out to expose him, but each time she approached the mountain she was waylaid by the garrulous young Echo. At last, irritated by Echo’s talkativeness, Hera cursed the poor nymph. No longer able to initiate a conversation of her own, all she could do was repeat the last words of others.
One day, Echo fell in love with Narcissus, a cruel but beautiful young huntsman, lost on the mountainside. Seeking his homeward path, he asked her for directions. Tongue-tied, Echo could not give them. Instead, with growing frustration on both sides, she simply reiterated everything Narcissus said, until the angry youth chased her off and collapsed in self-pity by a pool. But as he gazed into its glassy waters he saw a face gaze back at him, a beautiful, cruel face, the most beautiful he had ever seen. Whenever he tried to touch it, though, the face appeared to shatter, before slowly forming once again. Mesmerized, Narcissus could not tear his eyes from his reflection and in time he died. A flower grew where his body lay, called the narcissus to this day. As for Echo, she wasted away until now only her voice remains.
On a Roman mosaic in Paphos, Cyprus, Narcissus gazes longingly at his reflection in a pool of water.
Alternatively, Pan so lusted after Echo and envied her sweet musicality that, when she refused his advances, he tore her limb from limb. Although her body was scattered, it could still sing, repeating every sound it heard. When Pan hears Echo’s voice today, he rushes headlong in his desire to find her.
Pausanias dismisses the story of Narcissus out of hand. Instead, describing a pool near Thebes named after the dead hero, he explains that Narcissus had a twin sister. They were so devoted to each other that they wore the same clothes, sported the same haircuts and were in every way indistinguishable. When his sister died, Narcissus became obsessed with his reflection because it reminded him so much of her. After all, as Pausanias exclaims, at one stroke debunking the illogicality of myth: ‘it is ridiculous – a young man old enough to fall in love, who cannot tell a human being from a reflection!’
Thebes in History & Today
Because of the circumstances of history, a detailed archaeological record of Thebes is difficult to achieve. Not only does most of ancient Thebes lie under the modern town, rendering it inaccessible, but the city was famously razed to the ground more than once, both in mythology and in history. Much of our knowledge comes from literature and the odd lucky find.
During the Bronze Age, Thebes was one of the most powerful cities of mainland Greece and traces of palaces survive on the Cadmeian Hill in its southwest quadrant. Archaeology has revealed trading and social links both with local towns, such as nearby Orchomenos (itself a wealthy centre), and with Crete, Egypt and Miletus on the western shore of Asia Minor. Like other Mycenaean sites, Thebes was deliberately destroyed around the turn of the twelfth century BC.
By the sixth century BC, thanks to its agricultural wealth, Thebes’ position as the strongest city in Boeotia led to the first of many conflicts with neighbouring Attica over the border-city of Plataea. Accepting the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, Thebes sided with the Persians against Athens during the Persian Wars, earning opprobrium from the victorious Greeks. Later in the fifth century BC, it again allied itself with Athens’ enemies, this time the Spartans, in the Peloponnesian War, one of the first acts of which was Thebes’ siege of Plataea. Nonetheless in 403 BC, Thebes graciously helped Athens overthrow the Thirty Tyrants imposed on it at the end of the war by Sparta.
The city’s heyday came in the fourth century BC, when – after a hostile Spartan occupation in 382 BC – the politician Pelopidas and general Epaminondas built Thebes into a formidable player on the Greek stage. In 371 BC Epaminondas’ defeat of Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra altered the balance of power in the Peloponnese and wider Greece, and earned him the title of ‘Greece’s Liberator’. However, Epaminondas’ death at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC marked the end of Thebes’ brief Golden Age.
In 338 BC, along with its allies (now including Athens), Thebes’ army was defeated by the Macedonians at the Battle of Chaeronea. Its celebrated Sacred Band, a regiment formed exclusively from pairs of homosexual lovers, was cut down to a man. They were buried in a common grave – the monumental lion erected over it still guards the road into Chaeronea. Two years later the Thebans, wrongly believing Alexander the Great was dead, revolted from Macedonian rule. Alexander’s response was extreme. He razed the city to the ground, sparing only its temples and the house of the fifth-century BC poet Pindar, its most famous literary son.
In 316 BC, Alexander’s successor-general Cassander rebuilt Thebes, and some decades later the traveller Heracleides described it as ‘lush and well-watered, with more gardens than any other city in Greece’. However, it had a reputation for lawlessness – its men were quick to pick a fight and murders were committed for the slightest motive. As for its women:
They are the tallest, the most beautiful and the most elegant of any in the whole of Greece. They veil their faces so that only their eyes can be seen, and every one of them wears a white dress with purple shoes, laced to show off their feet. They tie their blond hair in a topknot and have bewitching voices – unlike the men, whose voices are rasping and deep.
After Rome annexed Greece in 146 BC, Thebes allied itself with Mithridates of Pontus, earning severe punishment from the Roman general Sulla. In 86 BC he sacked the city and redistributed its land. It never really recovered. When Pausanias visited, Thebes was little more than a village. It enjoyed a brief flowering in the twelfth century thanks to its silk factories, but, when the centre of production moved to Sicily, Thebes sank once more into decline. Despite its lack of loveliness, the modern town of Thivai represents a welcome return to relative good fortune.
Thebes
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
c. 1300 BC
Thebes flourishes.
c. 1200 BC
Thebes destroyed by fire.
480 BC
Thebans fight reluctantly against Persians at Thermopylae.
479 BC
Thebans fight alongside the Persians at Plataea.
457 BC
Thebes allies with Sparta.
431 BC
Thebes’ siege of Plataea stokes Peloponnesian War.
403 BC
Thebes helps Athenians to overthrow the Thirty Tyrants and reintroduce democracy.
371 BC
Epaminondas defeats Spartans at Leuctra.
362 BC
Epaminondas killed at Mantinea.
338 BC
Theban Sacred Band annihilated at Chaeronea.
336 BC
Alexander the Great razes Thebes to the ground.
316 BC
Cassander rebuilds Thebes.
86 BC
Sulla sacks Thebes, which has sided with Mithridates.
C2nd AD
Pausanias finds Thebes to be little more than a village.
AD 1146
Thebes sacked by the Normans.
C12th AD
Thebes flourishes as a centre of silk production.
Such buildings as survived Thebes’ many sacks lie under the modern town, though tantalizing fragments can be seen. Among these are sparse foundations of the Cadmeia, Thebes’ Bronze Age palace, near the modern market place, from which a trove of Linear B tablets has been unearthed; the remains of the agora and theatre on Kastelli Hill; the site of the Temple of Apollo Ismenus on Ismenus Hill; and some desultory remnants of the Electra Gate on Odos Amphionos.
The museum (closed indefinitely at time of writing) boasts a fine selection of Bronze Age cylinder seals, inscriptions, armour and worked ivory as well as an impressive thirteenth-century BC larnax (coffin) with a painting of five women tearing their hair in grief.
In the early nineteenth century AD, the Theban plain was rich in antiquities. Sadly, thanks to enthusiastic looters and developers, this is no longer the case. Close by Thebes are Chaeronea (with its lion-memorial to the Theban Sacred Band and rock-cut theatre), Orchomenos (another fine theatre and the tholos called ‘The Treasury of Minyas’), the Mycenaean fortress of Gla to the north, and the haunting sites of Plataea and the battlefield of Leuctra to the south.
11
Tiryns & the Labours of Heracles
Heracles himself roused ancient Tiryns to arms. The city was not without brave men nor unworthy of her great son’s fame, but fallen on harsh times, without the strength that wealth can bring. Few live in her empty fields, but they still point out the citadel, built from the sweat of the Cyclopes’ brow. Yet still Tiryns can raise a force of three hundred gallant men. Untrained for war they may be, and lacking javelin-thongs or gleaming swords, but on their heads and shoulders they drape lion skins, as befits their ancestry; and in their hands they wield a pine staff, while their quivers bristle with innumerable arrows. They sing the battle hymn of Heracles, who purged the world of monsters; and far away on wooded Oeta, the god listens to their words.
Statius, Thebaid, 4.145f.
Beside the straight and busy road from Argos east to Nafplio, the fortress walls of Tiryns hunker squat and grey. At first glance, the site is far from prepossessing. Contained behind a metal fence in flatland strewn with cans and plastic bags, it is flanked to the south by the local prison and, across the road, by a string of modern homes. It can all seem rather unlovely, and the roar of traffic simply compounds the disappointment.
But enter the site; walk down along the walls, the massive masonry rough and warm; climb up the ancient ramp, and through the ruined remnants of the gate; stand on the Upper Citadel; look out beyond the citrus orchards to the mountains ranging east to Nafplio, its fortress proud above the pretty town; look back to Argos with its castle perched atop Larissa Hill; look to the sea, and to the mountains of Arcadia, pale contours in the bluing haze. Half close your eyes and see the coastline closer; see Bronze Age ships at anchor jostling by the quay; half hear the creak of timber and the slap of water on the hulls, the shouts of stevedores, the quick commands, the snatch of a sea shanty learned in far-off Syrian or Cretan ports; think of the legends clinging to this place and think of Heracles. Then Tiryns comes alive. For this once-proud citadel was not only one of the most important hubs of Mycenaean trading, it was the epicentre of some of the most exuberant of all Greek myths.
Tiryns & the Coming of Heracles
Acrisius, king of Argos, had a twin brother, Proetus, with whom he quarrelled even in the womb. As adults, the two were meant to rule in alternate years, but Acrisius refused to relinquish the throne. So Proetus, aggrieved, fled east to Lycia, where he married the king’s daughter, Anteia (also called Stheneboea).
With the backing of his powerful father-in-law, the Lycian army and seven Cyclopes, Proetus returned to Argos, where he fought Acrisius for the throne. There was no clear victor, so the brothers split the kingdom. Acrisius kept Argos, while Proetus took the north and east, including the port of Tiryns. Here he put the Cyclopes to work, hewing stone and heaving it into position to form impregnable defences. Today their handiwork can still be admired: with stones weighing up to nearly 14 tons, walls over 750 m (800 yd) in circumference and in places 8 m (25 ft) thick still rise to nearly 10 m (32 ft), half their original height.
