Many factors played into the annihilation of the ancient Greek city of Thebes. Arrogance was one of them. Despite its fabled history, Thebes hardly intimidated Alexander the Great, who razed it to the ground.
By Patrick Garner
What happened? First, the city’s leaders overestimated the force of its army, underestimated the young Alexander, believed its legendary seven-gated walls were invincible, and relied on help from fickle allies. Those mistakes, combined with a fatal reliance on gods and heroes, ultimately doomed the city.
When Alexander struck, he might as well have dropped a nuclear bomb onto its center.
The Ancient Thebes of Gods and Heroes
In the 5th century BC, Thebes was one of the greatest cities in Greece. It was frequented by deities and heroes. Apollo’s oracle at nearby Delphi had recommended the site to its founder Cadmus, and Athene gave him dragon’s teeth to sow a race of men. Zeus frequented the city at least twice to woo local women who would bear his sons, the god Dionysus and the hero Heracles.
Yet at its most vulnerable moment in the year 335 BC, Thebes was utterly abandoned by its luminaires. Overconfidence and pride are synonymous with hubris, a Greek word. Hubris, as we will see, obscured the judgment of the city’s leaders as they stumbled down the path toward complete ruination.
In December of 335, the hallowed city — with a history known to every ancient Greek — was leveled by Alexander. Its surviving citizens, over 30,000 men, women and children, were sold into slavery.
Foreshadowing the city’s end, all of the events that had made it famous stank of death and crime, betrayal and treachery. For instance, native son Heracles was thrust into madness by Zeus’ wife, the vengeful Hera. She was reacting to her husband’s infidelity by inducing Heracles to kill his family. Hera would not be placated, despite the bone Zeus threw her by changing his son’s birth name from Alcides to Heracles.
Thebes was also where Oedipus played out his grievous life. There he famously solved the riddle of the Sphinx. That made him a hero, because the Sphinx had been blocking the city’s entry until the riddle was solved. Little did he know that the wheels of Apollo’s tragic prophecy — that he would kill his father and marry his mother — were already in motion.
Oedipus had tried to escape the prophecy by fleeing what he thought was his homeland, not realizing that he had been adopted. Ironically, he fled to Thebes, which was his actual birthplace. At a crossroads outside the city, he unknowingly killed his father, the king of Thebes.
Then he encountered the Sphinx and solved the riddle. The city was saved. He was made king and married the widowed queen. Years later he discovered to his horror that she was his mother. She committed suicide, and Oedipus blinded himself and fled the city.
The city’s grim history also included the tale of the Theban King Pentheus and the wine-god Dionysus. Pentheus had tried to ban him from the city as a bad influence. This proved to be the king’s undoing.
Dionysus was born in Thebes — the result of the union between Zeus and Semele which enraged Zeus’s wife Hera. Semele was tricked by Hera into self-destruction. Baby Dionysus was whisked from the city and raised as a girl in an attempt to hide him. Later he returned to Thebes, where he lured the city’s women to the countryside for Bacchic celebrations, spurning their husbands for drink, song and ecstatic dancing.
King Pentheus vowed to eliminate this “foreign” blight — and was himself eliminated by his own mother, who was under Dionysus’ spell.
The Thebes of Alexander
By 335, Greece was largely under the control of the Macedonians. Over a period of two decades, Alexander’s father, Philip II, had welded together 1,500 once-independent city-states into a single entity. By “welded together” I mean that Philip’s army occupied them with brutal force.
Upon Philip’s assassination, his 21-year-old son Alexander became king. As the new commanding general of the Macedonian army, he could wield the power of Philip’s superb military phalanx and prove himself able to step into his father’s shoes.
Thebes’ miscalculation was that some of its leaders talked themselves into rebelling against the Macedonian occupation of their city. They dismissed Alexander as a mere dilettante. As Victor Davis Hanson writes in The End of Everything, “One recurrent theme of the wartime
extinction of civilizations is precisely the frequent naivete of the targeted — a gullibility innate to humans in extremis, and especially unchecked by reality during the passions and hysteria released by war.”
What Hanson concludes is that the Thebans did not seriously consider the possible repercussions of their rebellion against the young king. Logically, Alexander could not afford to allow a single city under Macedonian control to become independent. Such an event would imply weakness. In addition, Thebes was proving to be a distraction as Alexander’s unannounced plans were to use his troops to invade Persia.
The Thebans ignored the obvious. They believed themselves to be an exception. They were convinced that Alexander would allow their rebellion. When they heard rumors that Alexander had been killed in a distant battle, they foolishly captured the Macedonian garrison stationed in the city’s center.
Unfounded Rumors
The rumors proved false, but it was too late. Encamped three days away, Alexander learned of the rebellion. Crushing it was imperative and he acted swiftly. Rumors had already spread that several of the best Peloponnesian armies were likely to join the insurrection.
What Thebes had not anticipated was that, one-by-one, nearby cities concluded that the Macedonian army was greater than each of them individually or in sum. Consequently, the allies faded away, and none joined the increasingly isolated rebels. Contributing to the ambivalence of the cities was the still raw memory that, 150 years earlier, Thebes had joined with the Persian invaders.
The memory of this betrayal remained a stain on the city, and was constantly trumpeted by its enemies. When Alexander drove his Macedonian army into the Boeotian plains to Thebes, many of the surrounding cities simply watched. In fact, cities that had been mistreated by Thebes actually aided Alexander with supplies, soldiers and inside information. Suddenly, Thebes faced an immense army that was determined to make the city’s disobedience an example.
Taunts Instead of Defenses in ancient Thebes
Alexander’s army was a professional force that outnumbered the Theban military by 3 to 1. Furthering the imbalance, the Theban army was largely composed of farmers, slaves and common citizens.
The city had no outstanding generals, no new tactics, no new equipment, no new soldiers — and when it had confronted and enemy three years earlier, it decisively lost. Yet it blustered and swaggered about it prowess.
Within hours, Thebes and its famous seven-gated walls were entirely surrounded by Macedonians. As the enemy forces prepared their siege, the Thebans reassured themselves that Heracles had their back. After all, his weapon of choice was a club, and its image was emblazoned on their shields.
Admittedly, Heracles had deserted the city at times, but his absence occurred only rarely. The leaders of the rebellion declared that would not happen this time. They reminded themselves that they were about to face off with Macedonians. And what were Macedonians? Hardly their equal.
Ancient Greeks considered Macedonians to be, at best, semi-Greek, wannabe Greeks, illegitimate claimants of the glory of being Greek. Alexander ignored these slurs. After all, his father had recruited Aristotle himself to be Alexander’s teacher. Besides, Aristotle was far from the only Greek to tutor the boy. Alexander considered himself as much a Greek as any Theban. How dare they now mutter publicly that he was a mere barbarian!
Hubris and Traitors
The weather that December was cool. It was, in many ways, ideal fighting weather. Thirty thousand Macedonians waited restlessly outside the famous walls of Thebes. Campfires burned and vast fields of Macedonian tents were erected in long rows as far as the eye could see.
The army waited three days without acting. Alexander hoped, according to Hanson, that the “sheer spectacle of his forces would … force a submission.” He sent envoys to broker a negotiated, not humiliating, surrender. He offered moderate terms, simply demanding that the rebellion’s ringleaders be tuned over.
Yet the Thebans refused. They remained confident in their defenses. They knew too that turning over the city’s mutineers would mean certain death. Brushing off the possibility of defeat, even as they scanned Alexander’s vast forces arrayed around the city walls, they sent Alexander’s envoys away. As an old proverb states, “Pride goethbefore the fall.”
Alexander’s envoys raced to his tent with the news. Theban soldiers began to march onto the field beneath the city’s walls.
Alexander reacted quickly. Hanson describes the strategy: “Alexander’s chief force was to hit the main Theban phalanx; a second would storm the outer palisade and drive through the Thebans beneath the acropolis; and a third was held in reserve … Almost immediately the two armies were deadlocked.”
The battle raged for hours, the Macedonians at times gaining ground, the Thebans falling back then charging forward. But Alexander was able to constantly pour in fresh troops. The Thebans were slowly ground down, their spear shafts shattered and their order in disarray. The palisades were now easily knocked over and crossed.
Suddenly a detachment of Macedonians spotted a key gate that allowed access to the city itself. Hundreds of Alexander’s men poured through and as they did so, other city gates were thrown open. Whether gates opened through treachery or incompetence remains unknown. Regardless, it was the turning point in what had been in reality, a shockingly brief engagement.
The Final Blow
Thebes was the fourth largest city in Greece. Estimates place the size of the population at as much as 50,000 residents. These numbers help to put the ensuing carnage into context.
The Greek historian and philosopher Plutarch wrote matter-of-factly that the trapped were surrounded and killed where they stood. He noted that the city was, in the end, “captured plundered and razed.” Plutarch observed that, ultimately, only a few residents escaped execution or slavery. In comparison, Alexander lost 500 troops.
There’s an interesting twist to this saga. The Thebans, when they were calculating their odds, partly counted on intercession by Heracles and Dionysus. What they did not take into account was that Alexander honored the same saviors.
As the English historian Paul Cartledge notes in Thebes, the Forgotten History of Ancient Greece, “Alexander was always desperately keen to keep his own gods and heroes firmly on his side through prayers, vows, animal blood-sacrifices, the interpretation of omens and portents — in short, the whole panoply and paraphernalia of Greek worship.”
Further, Alexander was known to wait patiently for favorable omens and divine signals before going into battle. If and when he struck, he did so only when he was sure that his attack was sanctioned by the gods.
Witnesses to the destruction of Thebes would later say that the deities had clearly shifted from protecting the city to guarding the future conqueror of the world.
The End of Thebes
It took less than a day for Thebes to fall, a remarkable timeline since some ancient battles lasted years. The once mighty city was reduced to stones and ash. There is a Greek phrase describing its end, kataskapsai es edaphos. which means “razed to the ground.”
Hanson writes, “The Macedonian army and its Boeotian henchmen constituted a huge labor force of destruction. No doubt the 30,000 enslaved Theban survivors were pressed into the humiliating work of leveling their own homes and city.” He concludes by saying, “On the first day of the siege the city of Thebes was as it had always been for the prior 350 years. Within days, there was neither Thebans nor a Thebes at all.”
In hindsight the city was on an unwavering path toward its own destruction. And in the end the gods and heroes, wise or rash, turned their back on the arrogant Thebes.
Patrick Garner is an author and podcaster. In addition to The Naxos Quartet, his four novels about the Greek gods in the contemporary world, his podcast, Garner’s Greek Mythology, has listeners in 188 countries. For more information, see patrickgarnerbooks.com