Mr. Cartledge’s command of the historical material is effortless and exhaustive, and his appreciation of Thebes is persuasive. Between the radical but self-destructive democracy of Athens and Sparta’s totalitarian oligarchy (both imperialist), Thebes and Boeotia stand in the middle as an early model of democratic federalism ... It was Thebes that dealt a critical blow to Spartan domination, and a Theban leader who freed a long-enslaved people. Alexander the Great himself adopted military tactics from Epaminondas. If Thebes’s period of hegemony was brief—barely a decade—it also changed the course of the ancient world.

Cartledge, matching his unrivaled command of the complex, fragmentary and often contradictory sources to his talents as a storyteller, traces the arc of the Theban story as well as anyone is likely to trace it ... The great value of Cartledge’s book is that it enables us to see Thebes at long last, not as Athens saw her, but as the Thebans themselves did.

Thebes, a survey of a thousand years of Theban myth and history, marks a new phase in Paul Cartledge’s career. ... in the last decade Cartledge has turned his attention to the topic of democracy as practised both in ancient Greece and in the modern West. His previous book, Democracy: A Life, made a brief case for seeing the rise of Thebes as evidence of democracy’s vitality. In this book, he expands on that thesis, seeing the heyday of Theban power as part of a ‘great age of democracy in the Greek world as a whole’ ... Throughout his career, one of Cartledge’s strengths as a Hellenist has been his awareness of the way sexual love between older and younger males influenced Greek political and military power structures. This topic is too often ignored or, occasionally, over-stressed by scholars for subjective reasons. Having already dealt with the subject deftly in his biography of Agesilaos and elsewhere, Cartledge again shows admirable insight into the historical importance of Greek male homosexuality.

After a slightly pedestrian introduction—it read better a second time as a summing-up after finishing the book—and the lack of a Theban Thucydides to put meat on the bones of their decades on the naughty step, Cartledge’s narrative comes to life as the city of Thebes flourishes. The story of their rise and fall in the second half of the book is told as vividly as he relates their myths in the enjoyable second chapter. Alas, for Thebes, glory was all too fleeting.

This is unashamedly a work of advocacy. Cartledge wants to convince us that Thebes should in fact be 'central to our understanding of the ancient Greeks’ multiple achievements—whether viewed politically or culturally—and thus to the wider politico-cultural traditions of western Europe, the Americas, and indeed the world.' That is over-egging it a bit: Thebes is never going to warrant more than a footnote in the history of Western civilization. But Cartledge does make an impressive case that the Thebans were not (just) the violent lunkheads of ancient Greek stereotype. As he rightly underlines, most of our evidence for Classical Thebes comes from Athenian writers (Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes), and the Athenians had a particular loathing for their northern neighbours: imagine a history of Ireland based only on things the English have said about the Irish. The strongest plank in Cartledge’s argument is constitutional ... Cartledge...whips through the entire history of Thebes in the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern periods in a cursory five pages ... The underlying assumptions here about what constitutes 'significance' do worry me a bit: historians of Classical Greece have a bad habit of assuming that Greek cities stop being of interest the moment they stop butchering or bullying their neighbours. Still, Cartledge deserves full credit for his spirited and readable attempt to put Thebes back on the map, though I doubt many readers will be inspired to put Thebes at the top of their list for a post-lockdown holiday.

Eminent classicist Cartledge examines the history, mythical and proven, of an ancient Greek city that is often overlooked in standard texts ... A welcome addition to any philhellenic library by a reliable, readable interpreter of the ancient past.

Diving deep into centuries’ worth of scholarship, Cartledge manages to make the ancient world accessible to modern readers. This deeply informed and richly detailed chronicle restores Thebes to its rightful place in history.