Thick as Thebans
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, IN ROMANTIC heat, declared that “we” were/are all Greeks. Young Byron dreamed that Greece might yet be free; later, when in Missolonghi, he had some practical experience of just how fractious flesh-and-blood Hellenes could be, even when allegedly united against the vengeful Turk. “The Greeks, it seems, have run away from Xerxes” summarised one such episode.
John Stuart Mill rated the Athenian triumph at Marathon as more important in English history than the battle of Hastings. Did he mention the almost immediate humiliation, by the Athenians, of their victorious general Miltiades? After his brilliant victory at Salamis, ten years later, Themistocles was banished from Athens and ended serving the Persians whose fleet he had destroyed. A tough house to play, old Hellas. The Athenians did the chat; the Spartans the silences. And Thebes? Supplied settings and plots, mostly in the form of awful warnings
Paul Cartledge makes the case for a central historical role for Oedipus’s home town. As scholarly as he is is neither freckled with footnotes nor fancy with Gibbonian phrases. The Thebans’ exceptional capacity for disastrous decisions begins in mythology with the rejection by king Pentheus of the androgynous divinity Dionysus, dramatised in Euripides’s .
