The chief city of Boeotia—rich in myth as the home of Oedipus and the Seven against Thebes, birthplace of the great lyric poet Pindar, and, for one brief generation, the dominant military power of all Greece.
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Thebes through the eras
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Classical Age
Long overshadowed and tainted by its medizing alliance with Persia in 480 BCE, Thebes rose to sudden supremacy when its general Epaminondas shattered Spartan invincibility at Leuctra in 371 BCE, inaugurating a brief Theban hegemony over Greece. This was the city of Pindar, the supreme composer of victory odes, whose house Alexander the Great spared in 335 BCE when he razed Thebes to the ground to crush a revolt—a destruction long remembered as one of the great tragedies of the Greek world.
Hellenistic Age
Refounded by Alexander's successor Cassander in 316 BCE, a diminished Thebes produced the Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes (c. 365–285 BCE), who famously gave away his considerable fortune to live in voluntary poverty. He became the teacher of Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, and with his wife Hipparchia—a philosopher in her own right—embodied the Cynic ideal of a life stripped to nature's bare necessities.