THEBES AND BŒOTIA
“O Thebè blest, wherein delighteth most thy heart? in which of
all the noble deeds wrought in thy land in days gone by? Gone
by, I say, for now the Grace of olden time is fallen upon
sleep.”
PINDAR.
Of Bœotia more than of any other province of Greece is our involuntary
judgment likely to be at fault, for the ancient distinction between the
quick-witted Athenians and the stupid Bœotians has passed into our own
proverbial language. But our inherited contempt for the Bœotian “clowns”
is rather a tribute to the persistent intellectual domination of the
Athenians than an accurate reflection of the truth. Indeed, if we
examine the sources of the tradition, we find that the original verdict
was popular and unreasoned, receiving its literary support in comedy
which deliberately appealed to vulgar prejudices. “If you have good
sense, you will avoid Bœotia,” was the mocking advice of Pherecrates,
the distinguished forerunner of Aristophanes, and to the comic poets of
the following centuries Bœotian gluttony and Bœotian clumsiness were an
unfailing resource to pleasure the fickle humours of the crowd.
[Illustration: BOEOTIA]
In the serious literature of the great periods Bœotia is treated with
respect. Plutarch complains that Herodotus misrepresented Thebes in the
Persian Wars, and warns his readers that as there are venomous insects
at the heart of roses so beneath the historian’s delightful and
persuasive style lurk defamation and vituperation of “the noblest and
greatest cities and men of Greece.” But if Herodotus has diverged from
the truth, in this instance a questionable supposition, he has at least
looked upon Thebes as an enemy and not overlooked her as a boorish
community. In the history of Thucydides also, and even of the bigot
Xenophon, Bœotian cities make a dignified, if not always virtuous,
appearance among the actors on the national stage.
In poetry Bœotia receives her full rights as a contributor to the
imaginative life of Greece. In Homer not only is the Bœotian harbour of
Aulis the meeting place of the Greek fleet before it sets sail for
Ilium, but also Bœotian landscapes beautify heroic episodes with their
rivers flowing between green banks, their open meadows and bright
groves, their flocks of tame doves and grassy ways. In the Homeric Hymns
Bœotian vineyards and furrows bloom under the swift feet of
golden-haired Apollo and mischievous Hermes. Above all, in the Attic
dramatists Bœotian Thebes is the scene of the epiphany of gods and of
the sorrows of humanity. The legendary past of this city was crowded
with personages whose glories and whose dooms were on so grand a scale
that they became to the tragic poets of Athens, and still are to us,
symbols of the unceasing conflict between will and destiny. The Theban
legends more than any others, save those of Argos, appealed to Æschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides as fitted for their dramatic purpose of
arousing “pity and terror.” In using this material they displayed a
familiarity with the Thebes of their own day which is a striking proof
that men of sense and feeling could delight in Bœotia. Æschylus
perceived the fertility of the land and the fairness of Dirce, goodliest
of streams. Sophocles seems to have heard and never forgotten the soft
murmur of the river Ismenus. And Euripides knew intimately the wild ivy
growing over the city towers and the berries and flowers of the city
gardens, the golden wheat-fields and cooling springs of the surrounding
country, the “deep pine greenery” and “fallen oak leaves” within the
forests of Mount Cithæron, the mountain torrents cleaving the narrow,
crag-topped glens, the gleaming snow forever resting on the mountain’s
heights.
Furthermore, Bœotia had its own traditions of culture. Although creative
artistic power was exemplified only in Hesiod, the originator of a new
literary movement, and in Pindar, the most eminent lyric poet of Greece,
there was revealed in the architecture, sculpture, and painting which
enriched cities and sanctuaries, and in the poetry and music which were
conspicuous at festivals, a critical taste as trustworthy as any outside
of Attica. Educational ideals also tended toward a genuine if not always
vigorous cultivation. Plutarch’s ripe refinement is a late but not a
solitary example.
Thus accoutred against prejudice we may hope more fairly to appraise the
good and the evil in Bœotian life.
Bœotia has one of the most fortunate situations in Greece, for its
frontiers are either protected by high mountains or border on two arms
of the sea—the Gulf of Corinth and the Gulf of Eubœa—which in antiquity
connected her with the extended maritime life of Greece and put her into
easy communication with Attica and the Peloponnesus.
Within the mountain barriers the Bœotian country consists of two plains
separated by hills. The flatness of the northern plain is unrelieved,
and the rivers that flow into it, like the Cephisus, find no outlets
except by katavothras or channels which they force for themselves under
Mount Ptoön in the north. The frequent stoppage of these channels turned
a large part of the plain into the famous Copaic Lake, the drainage of
which moved prehistoric engineers to wonderful feats, tempted to
comparative failure the less expert engineers of successive historic
periods, and has finally been accomplished by modern skill. Within a few
years a British company has reclaimed for the growing energies of modern
Greece thousands of acres of land that will yield two crops a year.
The southern basin of Bœotia is smaller and also less homogeneous and
monotonous than the northern. Thebes occupies a small plateau of its own
on the northern side of a low range of hills that divides it from the
larger part of the plain, given over to the beautiful valley of the
Asopus.
The fertility and charm of Bœotia may still be appreciated. In antiquity
cities and towns, busied with the industries of the soil and of the sea,
gave evidence also of the practical resources supplied by Nature. And
yet it must be admitted that the historical importance of Bœotia falls
somewhat short of its obvious advantages. Only after Athens and Sparta
had risen successively to the hegemony of Greece and again lost their
power did Thebes play a leading rôle in national politics. And at no
time did Bœotians vie either in energy or genius with the people of
barren Attica. An explanation often given is that the unhealthful
climate and heavy atmosphere of the country modified natural impulses to
enterprise. The Athenians, as we have seen, laid great stress on the
brilliant freshness of their own air as promoting intelligence. But
another explanation takes into account the mystery of racial
characteristics. Before Bœotia was conquered, sometime in the centuries,
preceding Homer, by the northern race from Epirus and Thessaly which
gave the country its name and began the “historic period,” there existed
both in the north and in the south older peoples of evident wealth and
power. For centuries Orchomenus was the leading city, not only of the
northern plain but of the whole country. Its mighty kings and golden
splendour were still a bright memory to Homer, and excavations have
brought to life for us indications of the richness of its civilization.
Exceptionally impressive and interesting ruins of a fortress now known
as Goulas (or Gha or Gla) have been discovered on what used to be the
eastern bank of the Copaic Lake. And at Thebes also we shall find traces
of a people as advanced as any in prehistoric Greece. In the early ages
the air of Bœotia does not seem to have prevented conspicuous progress
in political power or in the arts. The northern invaders, then, would
seem to have been responsible for the defects of later history, failing
to construct a civilization equal to the one they had been able to
destroy. In the case of the arts especially, it is significant that
Pindar, the only Bœotian poet of the first order, was not of unmixed
Bœotian blood, but belonged to a branch of the Ægidæ, who traced their
pedigree back to the pre-Bœotian rulers of Thebes. Of this descent,
distinguished in the eyes of all Greeks, Pindar was justly proud. And
yet he was a loyal son of Thebes and assumed his share in the “ancient
reproach” of “Bœotian swine.” We are at liberty, therefore, to emphasize
his country before his blood.
Modern Thebes is huddled on the site of the ancient acropolis, its
poverty serving as a reminder of the desolation which as early as
Strabo’s time had fallen upon one of the great cities of Greece.
Pausanias found the lower city deserted, save for the sanctuaries, the
population being restricted to the acropolis, and Dio Chrysostom had
seen a solitary image standing among the ruins of the old market-place.
In the middle ages Fortune returned to Thebes from time to time, but
under the Turks deserted her in apparent despair. Doubtless the town
will revive as the modern nation gathers its forces. In the mean time it
serves to indicate the area of the stronghold or acropolis built by the
prehistoric settlers. Before the middle of the fifth century the city
had grown westward to the stream of Dirce, and eastward to the river
Ismenus. After that time, as is evident from remains of city walls, the
area was even more extended.
The mythological past of Thebes was greater than any of its historic
periods. Her early citizens shone brilliantly among those—
“Lights of the age that rose before our own
As demigods o’er Earth’s wide region known,
Yet these dread battle hurried to their end;
Some, where the sevenfold gates of Thebes ascend,
Strave for the flocks of Œdipus in fight,
Some war in navies led to Troy’s far shore.”[30]
Footnote 30:
Hesiod, _Works and Days_, 160. Translated by Elton.
The story of Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes, is one of the best
examples of the legends by which the Greeks reconstructed their early
history. As if by “shadows of dreams” they were haunted by the memory of
ancient adventures and enterprises, by movements of whole peoples and
bright deeds of early heroes. And in spite of their arrogant aloofness
in historic times from all “barbarians,” they admitted, in the stories
into which their racial imagination shaped the formless facts of
prehistoric life, a close connection with foreign peoples. So Cadmus was
said to be a Phœnician going forth from his own land and settling in
Bœotia before it was known by that name. Whatever the Phœnician
connection was, whether direct or by way of Crete, whether by
colonization or merely by trading stations, it is certain that a
pre-Bœotian people occupied Thebes and were displaced by northern
invaders, who in their turn, at one time or another, seem to have been
forced on by the pressure of Illyrians from Epirus. These facts the
Greek people made into a story of individual adventure, and this story
Greek poets made dramatic and universal. Cadmus was son of a Phœnician
king and brother of the ravished Europa. Sent by his father to find his
sister, and not daring to return without her, he asked advice of the
Delphic oracle. He was told to follow a cow until she should lie down.
This strange behest led him through Phocis to Thebes. Here, like most
heroes, including Apollo, who wished to take possession of strange
earth, he was obliged to slay a dragon. Athena, his special guardian,
bade him sow the dragon’s teeth, and from these sprang up an armed brood
of warriors, known thereafter as the “Spartoi” or Sown Men. Cadmus
watched them fight with each other until only five were left, with which
doughty remnant he built up the Cadmeia, or original Acropolis of
Thebes. Like Apollo again, he was forced to atone for the murder of the
dragon by serving Ares for a term of years. At the end Ares gave him to
wife Harmonia, his daughter by Aphrodite, and Cadmus began a glorious
reign. But his patient bondage to Ares had won only a temporary
pacification, and to his children and grandchildren passed the
relentless curse. Œdipus was his direct descendant. Even in Cadmus’s
lifetime two daughters and two grandsons met with violent deaths, and he
and his queen Harmonia went far away to Illyria and became rulers of the
Enchelians. There they were changed into serpents, “bright and aged
snakes,” and were compelled by fate to lead their barbarian people in an
invasion of Greece. Matthew Arnold follows Ovid in making them “among
the green Illyrian hills,”—
“Wholly forget their first sad life and home,
And all that Theban woe, and stray
Forever through the glens, placid and dumb.”
But Euripides represents the old king as filled with evil presentiment:—
“Far off to barbarous men,
A grey-haired wanderer, I must take my road.
And then the oracle, the doom of God,
That I must lead a raging horde far-flown
To prey on Hellas; lead my spouse, mine own
Harmonia, Ares’ child, discorporate
And haunting forms, dragon and dragon mate,
Against the tomb and altar stones of Greece,
Lance upon lance behind us; and not cease
From toils like other men—nor dream, nor past
The foam of Acheron find my peace at last.”[31]
Pindar in his radiant vision of the future life beyond the foam of
Acheron places Cadmus with Peleus in the company of the mighty dead who
dwell at peace forever within the islands of the Blest. The earthly life
of both heroes he uses to illustrate to Hieron, lord of Syracuse and
Fortune’s favourite, the adage inherited from the men of old: “For every
boon to men the gods deal double bane.”
Footnote 31:
_Bacchæ_, 1354. This and the following quotations from this play are
taken from the translation by Gilbert Murray.
“Blest with life secure was neither Peleus, son of Æacus, nor Cadmus,
match of gods. And yet, ’tis said, of mortals all ’t was they who
gained the highest bliss. For they could hear the golden-snooded
Muses’ song, or on the mountain-side, or midst the seven gates of
Thebes, when Cadmus took to wife large-eyed Harmonia and when the
other wed the glorious Thetis, maiden child of Nereus. Gods shared
with both their banquet, and they both beheld the sons of Cronos
seated, kings on thrones of gold, and from them wedding gifts
received, and Zeus’s grace requited them for former toil, uplifting
high their hearts. Yet in the after-time sharp anguish of his
daughters three robbed Cadmus of his share of joy. So too from him,
whom as her only son immortal Thetis bare in Phthia unto Peleus, fled
his life, by arrow sped in war.”
Pindar’s song of praise “flitting like a bee from tale to tale” paused
often upon the legends of his “mother Thebes.” Among others he tells the
story of Heracles’s birth at Thebes and of his speedy slaying, while yet
in swaddling clothes, of monstrous snakes that approached his cradle.
The most tragic episode of Heracles’s life, his madness and his murder
of his children, also occurred at Thebes, according to the version of
the legend used by Euripides in his drama of “The Mad Heracles.” But
this play is of little poetic importance in comparison with the plays
that deal with the curse-haunted house of Cadmus. Neither Euripides nor
Sophocles, in their single extant experiments with the tragedy of
Heracles, display the sympathetic genius which has given permanent value
to the stories of Pentheus and Œdipus. The two plays, however, which
rest upon these legends are famous for antipodal reasons. The “Œdipus
Tyrannus” of Sophocles was selected by Aristotle as the most perfect
specimen, in technical construction, of the Greek drama, and is
treasured now as the model of what is most restrained, most profound yet
clear, most “Hellenic” in Greek literature. The “Bacchæ” of Euripides,
on the other hand, is more “un-Hellenic” than any play or poem that has
come down to us, more resplendent in fancy, more wild in theme, more
incomprehensible in purpose.
Pentheus was the son of Agave and the grandson and successor of Cadmus.
But his fame was born of his futile conflict with another daughter’s
greater son. Semele, loved by Zeus and at her own request visited by him
in the full panoply of his splendour, had been consumed in the
lightning’s fire, and her child Dionysus had been snatched from her womb
by its divine father and hidden within his own thigh to issue in time as
the strangest of all the gods. Popularly known as the “god of wine,” he
was in reality a Lord of Many Voices, a Spirit of Guiding Fire, a
Mountain Bull, a Snake of a Hundred Heads, a Master of the Voices of the
Night, a Lover of Peace, a Giver of Good Gifts, a God, a Beast, a
Mystery. His worship, originating among the gloomy Thracians and the
mystical yet sensuous Orientals, was late in winning its place in
cultivated Athens. Only with very great difficulty can we discover the
threads of belief which made out of the newcomer a gracious lord of the
vintage, a dispeller of care and teacher of mirth, a prophet, a guide in
all the arts of civilization and, more mysteriously still, a suffering
god, both redeemer and redeemed, a companion at Eleusis of Demeter and
Persephone. Because, however, of the persistent clarity of the Greek
imagination, the god now and again emerges from amid the chaos of
functions and attributes in a concrete form of beauty. In the Homeric
Hymn written in his praise he is a youth with dark hair and dark and
smiling eyes standing on a headland that juts above the unharvested sea,
while the ocean winds blow about his shoulders a purple robe. To
Euripides he is—
“A man of charm and spell, from Lydian seas,
A head all gold and cloudy fragrancies,
A wine-red cheek, and eyes that hold the light
Of the very Cyprian.”
The distinguishing feature of all Dionysiac worship was the frenzied
raving of its votaries. Women especially were mastered by the strange
desire to join in the revels, and, since the intellectualized life of
Athens was hostile to insane manifestations of religious fervor,
Athenian women made frequent pilgrimages to places where the wildness
of nature welcomed the wildness in the heart of man. We have already
seen them travelling to the uplands of Parnassus. Mount Cithæron was
another favourite gathering place. The women in Aristophanes’s
“Thesmophoriazusæ” cry aloud:—
“Sing, evoë! and sing again,
Shout for Bacchus the glad refrain.
Cithæron echoes around thee, hark!
And the mountain coverts green and dark,
And a roaring comes floating adown, between,
Through bosky gorge and rocky ravine.”
Perhaps the most adventurous would sometimes make their way to the bleak
hills near Pella, the capital of Macedonia, where queen and peasant met
in Bacchic excesses. Euripides spent the last years of his life at
Pella, and it has been thought that there he conceived the idea of
writing a play to portray Dionysus’s triumphal entrance into Thebes
against the will of Pentheus. Be this as it may, certainly Thebes and
Cithæron are more than a perfunctory _mise-en-scène_ for the “Bacchæ.”
In no other Greek play is the reader so conscious of the presence of
landscape.
Dionysus comes from the East to defend his mother’s memory and to
establish his worship in her city. Pentheus opposes him in spite of the
wisdom of Cadmus and the warnings of the soothsayer Tiresias. The god
constrains the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’s mother and her
sisters, who long ago had tempted the young Semele to her destruction,
to follow him to Mount Cithæron. Pentheus is then led to spy upon their
revels. They take him for a wild beast and his own mother tears him to
pieces. At the end, restored to an agonized reason, she becomes an exile
from her home. Cadmus goes to his fate among the Illyrians. Dionysus is
rapt from mortal sight in a cloud. It is a disputed question whether
Euripides was moved to this portrayal of a cruel godhead by the subtlest
impiety, or by a belated desire to be considered orthodox, or by a
realization of the savage power that lies at the heart of life and
cannot be gainsaid. At any rate he has woven into the plot the pathos of
which he is master, in the reiterated suggestions of the tie between
parent and child: the young god stirred to triumphant action by the
memory of his dead mother; the living mother wildly bringing her son’s
head in from the mountain, and calling upon him to come and glory in her
lion-hunting; the old father deciding to lead his daughter back from the
shadows of madness, even if the path of truth ends in grief and pain.
And the whole nexus of religion, pathos, and inherited curse is spread
before us in colours of flame.
The play is pervaded by the dances and the songs of the Mænads who have
followed Dionysus—
“From Asia, from the dayspring that uprises,”
and who irresistibly draw to their ranks the matrons and maidens of
Thebes:—
“All hail, O Thebes, thou nurse of Semele!
With Semele’s wild ivy crown thy tresses,
Oh, burst in bloom of wreathing bryony,
Berries and leaves and flowers;
Uplift the dark divine wand,
The oak-wand and the pine-wand,
And don thy fawn-skin, fringed in purity
With fleecy white, like ours.
“Oh, cleanse thee in the wands’ waving pride!
Yea, all men shall dance with us and pray,
When Bromios his companions shall guide
Hillward, ever hillward, where they stay,
The flock of the Believing,
The maids from loom and weaving
By the magic of his breath borne away.”
The picture of the women as they finally have taken possession of
Cithæron is painted for Pentheus by a shepherd. Upon this passage and a
few others in the play rests Mr. Symonds’s discriminating statement that
“the ‘Bacchæ,’ like the ‘Birds,’ proves what otherwise we might have
hardly known, that there lacked not Greeks for whom the ‘Tempest’ and ‘A
Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have been intelligible.” And for this
magic not only Euripides’s brilliant fancy but also Mount Cithæron
itself is responsible.
“Our herded kine were moving in the dawn
Up to the peaks, the grayest, coldest time,
When the first rays steal earthward, and the rime
Yields, when I saw three bands of them. The one
Autonoë led, one Ino, one thine own
Mother, Agave. There beneath the trees
Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease
In the forest; one half sinking on a bed
Of deep pine greenery; one with careless head
Amid the fallen oak leaves; all most cold
In purity—not as thy tale was told
Of wine-cups and wild music and the chase
For love amid the forest’s loneliness.”
The lowing kine awake them and they gird on their dappled fawn-skins:—
“Then they pressed
Wreathed ivy round their brows, and oaken sprays
And flowering bryony. And one would raise
Her wand and smite the rock, and straight a jet
Of quick bright water came. Another set
Her thyrsus in the bosomed earth, and there
Was red wine that the god sent up to her,
A darkling fountain. And if any lips
Sought whiter draughts, with dipping finger-tips
They pressed the sod, and gushing from the ground
Came springs of milk. And reed-wands ivy-crowned
Ran with sweet honey, drop by drop.”
The curse laid upon Cadmus destroyed all his daughters, and among his
grandchildren not only Pentheus but also Actæon who, because he saw
Artemis at her bath in one of Cithæron’s still pools, was torn to pieces
by his own hunting dogs. Cadmus’s only son, Polydorus, and his son’s
son, Labdacus, were strangely spared. Then once more Nemesis rose to the
pursuit. The son of Labdacus was Laius, who was unwittingly murdered by
his son, Œdipus, and the doom of Œdipus is the subject of the “Œdipus
Tyrannus.”
Cithæron still towers on the horizon; in its “winding glens” the infant
Œdipus had been exposed and rescued by a vagrant hireling in charge of
mountain flocks. But the play takes us back to the city, with its royal
palace and temples and market-place. As usual, it is the Thebes of
Sophocles’s day that is used for scenery. The drama opens when the
fruitful country has been laid waste by a pestilence and her citizens
are praying to Artemis, whose temple stands in the Agora, to Apollo at
his oracular seat by the river Ismenus, and to all the gods by the altar
in front of the royal palace. But in these few hints all localized
interest is exhausted. The austere and disciplined beauty of the
dramatic structure throws into high relief the pitifulness and the
terror of a father’s sin at work in the third and fourth generation, and
of the human struggle against destiny. The universal truth of the
tragedy as apprehended by Sophocles was as independent of the walls of
Thebes as of the confines of the theatre in Athens. And yet in modern
Thebes, itself the shadow of a greater past, we may realize afresh the
catastrophe that befell the ancient king. He had saved the city by
guessing the riddle of the Sphinx and thus destroying her. He had been
acclaimed as king in place of Laius, slain by an unknown hand, and had
married Iocasta, Laius’s queen. Now he promises to save his people from
the pestilence by obeying the Delphic command that the slayer of Laius
shall be found and exiled. He discovers that he is the murderer, and, in
a crescendo of horror, that he is the son both of the man he murdered
and of his own wife. In spite of their effort to kill him in his
infancy, he has reappeared, the innocent agent of their destruction, as
the irrefutable god of prophecy had foretold. Iocasta hangs herself.
Œdipus’s children face a world that will remember against them the sin
of their father. He puts out his eyes, and goes into voluntary exile,
defeated by fate, a broken-hearted fugitive, not yet conscious that in
the surrender of his will to God he may atone and be at peace. Borne
from afar upon the quiet air of to-day we may hear ghostly echoes of the
songs of the people that watched him. He was an example of the emptiness
of life:—
“O generations of mankind,
How all your life I ever find
With Naught and Nothingness aligned!
For who, what man the wide world o’er,
Of happiness e’er gaineth more
Than only this—to have his own
He dreams, and as he dreams ’tis gone.
Thy fate, thine, Œdipus, beholding,
O luckless one, thy wretched fate,
And from it my opinion moulding
Naught mortal I congratulate.”
And he also exemplified the truth of Solon’s aphorism that no one should
be congratulated before the end:—
“Ye who dwell in Thebes our city, look, behold this Œdipus,
He who solved the fam’d enigma, and did prove himself the best.
Now he’s come to what an ocean of calamity and dread!
Well it were then, being mortal, to that last and awful day
That we onward turn our vision and count no one fortunate
Till the race course he has finished and has reached life’s goal
unscathed.”
In spite of the repentance of Œdipus, the ancient curse fell upon his
children, and their dooms also became the subjects of dramas. Æschylus,
in the “Seven against Thebes,” deals with the story of Eteocles and
Polyneices, whose own folly was the immediate cause of their ruin. They
had agreed to rule Thebes alternately, but Eteocles once in possession
refused to abdicate. Polyneices raises in Argos an army led by Adrastus,
with which he advances against his country. Civil war follows, and the
brothers kill each other. This story gave Æschylus two dramatic
opportunities peculiarly suited to his genius. One was the handling of
the theme of Nemesis, not with grave calm like Sophocles, but with
gigantic vigour, with rough-hewn figures of triple-crested waves of
evil, harvests of blood, chilling frosts of fear, with a penetrating
insistence upon the “black and full-grown curse” which shadows city and
citizens. Within its gloom Eteocles fights only with the ardour of
despair:—
“Since eagerly God urgeth this affair, draw lot,
Cocytus draw and, wind astern, sail down his wave!
Apollo hateth all the race of Labdacus.”
To relieve this gloom Æschylus uses his other dramatic opportunity, that
of describing with Homeric eloquence the seven Argive warriors stationed
at the seven gates and the Theban defenders sent to meet them. In the
full-mouthed trimeters of the messenger who has seen the enemy, and of
Eteocles who is undaunted by his report, echo stirringly the epic clash
of arms, neighing of steeds, and war-cries of men. Shields of many
devices and crested helmets bedeck the heroes. Courage adorns them all,
from Amphiaraus, who foresees disaster, to Parthenopæus, the Arcadian
metic, repaying to Argos the cost of his nurture:—
“Now by his spear he swears—which he is confident
To reverence above the god or his own eyes—
The town of the Cadmeans he will surely sack
In spite of Zeus. Thus cries aloud this fair-faced shoot
Of mother mountain-bred, a man though boy in years.
His downy beard is just appearing on his cheeks,
As youth’s prime makes it grow, the thick hair cropping out,
But he with spirit fierce, no maiden’s namesake this,
And terrible bright eye, comes up to take his post.
Nor yet without a vaunt stands he beside the gate,
For on his bronze-wrought shield, his body’s circled screen,
Our city’s shame he wields, the raw flesh rav’ning Sphinx,
Fast riveted with bolts, her body burnish’d-bright
Repoussé work, and under in her grasp she bears
A man Cadmean, that upon this warrior
Most thickly fly the bolts. ’Tis likely, now he’s come,
He’ll not be retail-dealer in the trade of war,
Nor will he bring discredit on his long road’s track.”
Euripides used the same story in his “Tyrian Women,” but openly scorned
the Homeric note of Æschylus. With the enemy at the gates there is no
time to describe the warriors, and the emphasis is shifted from the
horror of the curse to the burden on Iocasta’s heart. Still living, she
seeks to reconcile her sons, and at last kills herself on their dead
bodies. Polyneices is not only his country’s enemy but a homesick man
whose eyes grow wet when he sees the familiar altars and Dirce and the
old gymnasium, and who begs his mother just before he dies to bury him
in Thebes. Antigone is brave enough to support her mother, comfort her
father, and promise to bury her brother, but so tenderly young that an
old servant helps her up a cedarn stairway to the palace roof that she
may see the Argive army in the plain. Another vision of brave youth is
given in the character of Menœceus, last virgin descendant of the Sown
Men. Informed by Tiresias that by a voluntary death he can save Thebes,
he evades his father and makes one of the patriotic speeches that never
failed to thrill an Athenian audience in the Dionysiac theatre:—
“Now I will go and, standing on the rampart’s heights
Over the deep dark dragon-pen, the very spot
The seer described minutely, I myself will slay
And liberate my country.”
The fame of Antigone was secured by Sophocles. Thebes seems to have been
always noted for the beauty of its women, from Semele, the bride of
Zeus, to the tall yellow-haired ladies admired by Dicæarchus, and
Æschylus suggests the loveliness of Antigone as Euripides suggests her
youthfulness. But through Sophocles we know her unadorned as the
embodiment of loyalty and courage. On the sunny morning that followed
the defeat of the Argives, when the eye of golden day had at last arisen
over Dirce’s stream, she buried her brother and defied Creon’s edict,
which forbade burial to an enemy of the country, in a noble speech of
justification:—
“Not Zeus hath published this decree, not Zeus for me,
Neither hath Justice, house-mate with the gods below,
Laws like to this defined for men. Nor did I think
Within these edicts, these of thine, such strength inhered
That, being a mere mortal, thou could’st override
Th’ unwritten and unfailing statutes of the gods.
For not of yesterday nor of to-day their life,
But ever from all time. None knows their origin.”
The Athenian reverence for Law made natural an even more magnificent
reiteration of this idea in the “Œdipus Tyrannus:”—
“Be mine the lot to win pure reverence in every word and work for
which the Laws are set on high, in Heaven’s ether born as children of
Olympus, him alone; no mortal nature among men gave birth to them nor
ever shall oblivion lull them to slumber. Great is God within them and
he grows not old.”
Beneath a neighbouring hill Antigone was walled up in one of the
rock-cut caverns that abound in Greece. Her lover Hæmon, Creon’s son,
kills himself within the door. His mother takes her life, and Creon is
left to a late and impotent knowledge of the truth. Before the end the
chorus of Theban girls think of Antigone’s betrothal and in a famous
hymn to Love flash brief fire upon the lonely moral heights of the play.
But suddenly the song dissolves into a lamentation which still haunts
the ear in Thebes:—
“But already I too past all bounds of the law
Am swept onward myself as I look on this sight,
And the fount of my tears I no longer can check,
When Antigone here I behold as she fares
To that chamber where all shall be resting.”
In historic Thebes heroism had lost its lustre. When Greece was tested,
the result in this city is revealed in the laconic words of Herodotus,
that among the Greeks who sent earth and water to Xerxes were the
Thebans and the other Bœotians, except the Platæans and the Thespians.
“The grace of the olden time is fallen upon sleep,” Pindar complained
after recounting the “noble deeds” of the heroic age. His own sympathy
with the national cause is clearly seen in another ode written after the
expulsion of the Persians: “Some god has turned aside the stone of
Tantalus from overhead, a load that Hellas might not brook.”
Later, when it was regarded as a political asset to have opposed the
Persians, the Thebans defended their failure on the ground that they had
had neither constitutional government nor popular freedom. A cabal of
selfish nobles had forced them into an action abhorrent to themselves.
Certainly it is true that Thebes was always aristocratic rather than
democratic. And it is worth noting that Pindar in his art was the true
son of such a city. The great festivals of Greece were the immediate
inspiration of his extant odes, while his life in Athens and his
journeys to Sicily and to the eastern islands furnished him with much
poetic material. But as far as the “soaring eagle” is to be identified
with a birthplace, we may ascribe to his aristocratic origin and early
environment his persistent selection of the things that were
distinguished and splendid.
At the time of the Peloponnesian War Thebes appears as the bitter
opponent of Athens. But later the shifting politics of the time brought
about an alliance between these two ancient enemies and set Thebes
against Sparta. Her position, however, was one of difficulty and
humiliation, buffeted about as she was between the greater powers.
Finally, in the first quarter of the fourth century, under the influence
of one man, Thebes entered upon a period of power and distinction. Brief
as it was, it served to awaken the sleeping glory of the old days and to
make men once more mindful of Thebes of the golden shield. Epaminondas
inspired a young Bœotian party, roused the Theban people, opposed Sparta
and defeated her by new strategic skill at Leuctra in 371 B. C., renewed
the ancient confederacy of Bœotian towns, won the support of
neighbouring states and the sympathy of Delphi, and finally marched into
the Peloponnesus to oppose the unrighteous designs of Sparta. At the
battle of Mantinea in Arcadia he lost his life, before his work for
Thebes and Hellas was finished. It is greatly to be regretted that a
career so admirable and a personality so original should not have been
interpreted by some adequate historian or poet. He lived too late for
the enthusiasm of Herodotus or the justice of Thucydides. That Xenophon,
through his hatred of Thebes, failed to talk much of the Theban general
is no great loss to our imaginative understanding of a great man.
Pausanias in his sincere admiration contributes something: “Of the
famous captains of Greece Epaminondas may well rank as the first or at
least as second to none. For whereas the Lacedæmonian and Athenian
generals were seconded by the ancient glories of their countries as well
as by soldiers of a temper to match, Epaminondas found his country
disheartened and submissive to foreign dictation, yet he soon raised
them to the highest place.” Plutarch’s “Life of Epaminondas” has not
been preserved, but this loss is partially repaired by his “Life of
Pelopidas,” the companion in arms and the passionate imitator of the
hero, and by his return now and again in other writings to a
contemplation of the character of Epaminondas. Out of slight sketches
like these and out of the second-rate histories we must fashion our
portrait.
Epaminondas was a great soldier and a leader of men. These facts need
not be obscured by the other fact that he did not, probably could not,
establish a national unity strong enough to live on after him. With him
died the hopes of Thebes. His fear of this must have been his heaviest
burden. Patriotism with him not only excluded satisfaction in his own
power, but included patience under attack. To us, familiarized with
magnanimous patriotism in many nations, this seems more admirable than
strange. But against the background of Greek history the statesmen are
conspicuous who could have entirely understood the obedient spirit in
which Socrates accepted condemnation from the city he had tried to
serve. In Epaminondas also appear some of those qualities which his
contemporary Plato thought essential to a wise king. He loved philosophy
more than power, and his early training had been intellectual and moral
rather than martial. Like Pindar, he belonged to the oldest nobility of
Thebes, tracing his pedigree to Cadmus, but his family had long lived
modestly, dissociated from the more vulgar aristocracy, and devoted to
the intellectual life. Philosophers exiled from Southern Italy came to
Thebes as well as Athens, and among them Lysis of Tarentum exercised a
great influence upon the young Epaminondas. The boy’s gentle nature and
hardy will furnished an ideal soil for the seeds of the Pythagorean
doctrine, which, before the days of St. Francis of Assisi, taught the
beauty of poverty, of temperance, and of humility, and insisted upon a
moral earnestness and devotion to duty. Epaminondas, the conqueror and
liberator, was at all times a “practical” follower of the religion in
which he had been nurtured. And with something of his own fervour he
inflamed the Sacred Band, that company of “friends” like Epaminondas and
Pelopidas, who inspired each other to valour and to virtue and were
united in the cause of patriotism. In this appeal to the chivalric
gallantry of youth Epaminondas was thoroughly Greek. In the unmarred
consistency of his own life he was unapproached even by his closest
followers. As Pindar in his generation was “heavy at heart” over Thebes,
so the martial leader must often have brooded in lonely impotence over
the same city. To travellers he may appear, as dusk comes on, in the
guise in which men found him on an ancient holiday, walking aloof,
ungarlanded and thoughtful. “I am keeping guard,” he said, “that all of
you may be drunk and revel securely.”
The visible remains of ancient Thebes are at present very few, and
although archæological research may reveal sites and fragments of great
interest, we shall never see here ruins still clothed upon with beauty.
Nor is the situation of the town impressive enough to attract travellers
who are indifferent to memories of the past. The chief charm of the
place is its view of an horizon broken by Cithæron, Helicon, and distant
Parnassus; by Mount Ptoön, where men listened to Apollo, and the
Mountain of the Sphinx.
Fragments of walls are all that remain of the city’s fortifications. Of
the gates no traces have been found. Pausanias speaks of seeing all
seven gates, but he describes only three of them, and some scholars have
argued that the other four were invented by the lost epic writers who
first gave literary form to the Theban legends. Certainly the poets
themselves, Æschylus, Euripides, and the later Alexandrians, differ in
their lists. The only important ruins of a building are those recently
reported to have been discovered by the Greek archæologists near the
Agora. They represent a palace of the “Mycenæan” period which met its
destruction by fire and which has been identified, under the name of
“The House of Cadmus,” with the ruins of “the bridal chambers of
Harmonia and Semele” seen by Pausanias. From the historic period nothing
remains, although with the help of broken pieces of marble and stone we
may try to imagine the Temple of Ismenian Apollo, second only to Delphi
as the seat of this oracular god, in the place of the present church of
St. Luke on the hill that rises by the river St. John.
Dismantled as Thebes was in the time of Pausanias, his guides showed him
many places which were associated with Pindar or with the legends
embodied in the Attic drama. There was the Observatory of Tiresias,
where the blind prophet had listened intently to the sharp cries and
whirring wings of the prescient birds. As if ageless in sorrow, he
pervades each drama on the curse of Cadmus with his futile vision of the
truth,—
“His robe drawn over
His old, sightless head,
Revolving inly
The doom of Thebes.”
There was also the tomb of Menœceus, and near by a pillar marking the
scene of the duel between Eteocles and Polyneices. The immediate
neighbourhood was still called the “Dragging of Antigone,” because over
it Antigone had to drag her brother’s heavy body.
In addition to the great Temple of Apollo, with its statues by Phidias
and Scopas, Pausanias saw the Temple of Artemis, with a statue by
Scopas; the Temple of Heracles, the Champion, the gables of which held
the representations by Praxiteles of the demi-god’s twelve labours; the
Temple of Dionysus; and the Temple of Cybele and Pan erected by Pindar
so near to his own house that he often heard the music of the vesper
services. Pindar’s house is as unknown now as if it had not been twice
saved when Thebes was sacked, once by the Athenians, who remembered his
praises of their city, and once by Alexander, who reverenced his genius.
While these things are irretrievably lost or await the spade, streams of
living water seem to link the present to the past. The little river of
Hagios Johannis has but changed its ancient name of Ismenus, and the
Plakiotissa, made by several streams which rise south of Thebes, is
easily transformed into the “Dircæan streams.” Some old masonry and
tablets bearing inscriptions mark the tanks which irrigate the
neighbouring gardens. Thebes still boasts in trees and flowers a
reminiscence of its ancient fame for bloom and brightness.
Dirce was the queen of Thebes who cruelly treated her husband’s niece,
Antiope. Antiope’s sons, Amphion and Zethus, ordered to execute their
mother’s sentence, bound Dirce instead to the violent bull. Only a brief
fragment of the play by Euripides, called “Antiope,” has been preserved,
but the sculptured group known as the Farnese Bull has made the story
tritely familiar. Amphion also raised the walls of Thebes by the music
of his lyre, a story seized upon by the poets from Homer to Tennyson.
A lively stream now called Paraporti flows into the Plakiotissa on the
southwest, and Theban women use it for their washing, unconcerned with
its ancient name of “Spring of Ares.” The cave near it was the Dragon’s
Lair, and from the part of the acropolis that rose above it Menœceus
plunged to his death. To the northeast, in the tiny suburb of Hagii
Theodori, bubbles the spring of St. Theodore, anciently called the
Spring of Œdipus because in it the king washed his guilty hands.
The events of the heroic age, if they are baldly catalogued in prose,
lose for us their charm and their significance. Their ineffaceable
reality to the historic Greeks may be illustrated by a story current in
antiquity. At a conference in Arcadia an Athenian envoy taunted the
Thebans and the Argives with having begotten the patricide Œdipus and
the matricide Orestes. “Yes,” answered Epaminondas, “but Thebes and
Argos exiled them and Athens received them.” And yet he would have
rejoiced could he have known that the genius of Athens, in receiving the
wandering Theban legends, had given them an immortal life.