2005 Summer Reading
The Burial at Thebes
Thebes
by Prof. Michael Arnush, Classics
If Athens was the paradigm for representative democracy with its citizenry committed
to equal rights for all male citizens, Thebes was the polis, or city-state, at the
other end of the political spectrum. In the ages before Athenian democracy emerged
in 510 BCE, Athens, Thebes and many other poleis were ruled by local, small groups
of land-owning aristocrats who legislated for, decided legal disputes within and governed
over their communities. The Greeks referred to these members of the ruling class as
the oligoi – “the few” – and their rule became described as an oligarchia, or “rule
of the few” (an “oligarchy,” of course). Whereas Athens and, later in the 5th century,
other poleis rejected oligarchic rule and embraced the rule of the citizenry – demokratia,
or “power in the hands of the demos (the people)” – city-states like Thebes remained
under the control of oligarchs for much of their history (so was the case with Sparta,
Athens’ erstwhile ally in the Persian wars and, for most of the 5th century BCE, Athens’
bitterest rival).

The Plague of Thebes, Charles Jalabeat
(1819-1901): Antigone leading Oedipus out of Thebes
(Musée des Beaux Arts, Marseilles, courtesy Prof.
L. Kim, Univ. Texas, Austin)
Like Athens and her oversight of the territory of Attica, Thebes controlled the region
of Boeotia (pronounced “Bee-OH-sha”), whose southern borders abutted northern Attica.
Hence, two governments diametrically opposed in their political philosophies were
neighbors, and this proximity only contributed to their on-going antipathy towards
each other. If Athens could look to any specific action by Thebes for a casus belli
– a rationale for war – she needed only to refer to the medizing of Thebes in the
Persian wars of 499-479 BCE. By the time of the last and greatest Persian assault
on the Greek mainland in 481, Thebes had abandoned the Greek cause and sided with
the Persians – which the Greeks referred to as “medizing,” for “the Medes” was interchangeable
with “the Persians.” For any polis to support the barbarian enemy was tantamount to
treason, despite the lack of political unity in Greece, and the Athenians despised
the Thebans for their betrayal. In fact, one Greek polis in Boeotia – the city-state
of Plataea (“Pla-TEE-ah”) – fought alongside the Athenians in a number of the battles
with Persia, and served as a stark reminder of the traitorous action of the Boeotian
Thebans on the other side of the battle line. When in 431 at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian
war – between Athens and her allies (including Plataea), and Sparta and her allies
(including Thebes) – the Thebans exacted vengeance for Plataea’s alliance with Athens
by destroying the city.
Back to 479 BCE. After the Persian wars, the level of animosity between Athens and
Thebes escalated, resulting on a number of occasions in outright war but on battlefields
geographically removed from the two great city-states. By ca. 441, the year of Sophocles’
production of the Antigone, Athens and Thebes were at a stalemate, though it would
not take much to provoke an outbreak of hostilities. They had just concluded a series
of battles not much more than a decade before, and although warfare had ceased their
hostility towards each other had not cooled.
So, when we read a play like the Antigone set in Thebes, we need to remember that
the climate in Athens towards Thebes was antagonistic, hostile and disapproving. The
Athenians had long memories, and for them the polis of Thebes represented everything
politically that they had rejected. Sophocles, drawing upon the mythological traditions
surrounding the house of Creon, creates for us not an oligarchy but a hereditary monarchy;
nonetheless, an audience of Athenians would quickly recognize in Creon an authoritarianism
that smacked of non-democratic decision making. The Athenian audience would be hard-pressed
to feel sympathetic towards the plight of a Theban ruling class, and so Sophocles
could use the political climate to his advantage in advancing the mythological storyline.