Thebes sided with Persia, then briefly ruled Greece after beating Sparta
Few Greek cities switched sides as often as Thebes. It joined the Persian king Xerxes in 480 BC, backed Sparta against Athens, then turned on Sparta and, under Epaminondas, crushed it at Leuctra in 371 BC. Its dominance proved short: Alexander the Great destroyed the city in 335 BC.
Thebes, in Boeotia, ranks among the world's oldest cities with unbroken habitation and is the region's largest town today. Excavations have revealed a Mycenaean settlement, graves with weapons and ivory, and clay tablets in Linear B that record the name in forms meaning at Thebes and to Thebes. It was among the first Greek communities gathered inside a fortified city, and a statue base from the reign of Egypt's Amenhotep III may mention it. Homer called it Seven-Gated Thebes, to tell it apart from Hundred-Gated Thebes in Egypt.
Myth crowded its streets: Cadmus, Oedipus, Dionysus and Heracles all have Theban stories. Its citadel, the Cadmea, shows destruction late in the Mycenaean era, after which much of the site lay abandoned until the city revived.
Rivalry with Athens began in the late 6th century BC, when Athens helped tiny Plataea stay independent. That grudge helps explain why, after sending 400 men to Thermopylae, the Theban aristocracy fought for Xerxes at Plataea in 479 BC and afterwards lost the presidency of the Boeotian League as punishment. In the Peloponnesian War it allied with Sparta, destroyed Plataea in 427 BC and beat an Athenian army at Delium in 424 BC. Then it turned on Sparta, quietly aiding the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 BC.
The peace of 387 BC stripped it of control over Boeotia, and a Spartan force seized the Cadmea by treachery in 382 BC. Leuctra reversed its fortunes, but Macedon defeated Thebes and Athens together at Chaeronea in 338 BC. The city recovered enough to be famous for silks in Byzantine times, and it houses a church holding the tomb of Luke the Evangelist. In 2011 it absorbed Plataies, Thisvi and Vagia into a larger municipality.
Source: Thebes, Greece
