“O Thebè blest, wherein delighteth most thy heart? in which of all the noble deeds wrought in thy land in days gone by? Gone by, I say, for now the Grace of olden time is fallen upon sleep.”

Of Bœotia more than of any other province of Greece is our involuntary judgment likely to be at fault, for the ancient distinction between the quick-witted Athenians and the stupid Bœotians has passed into our own proverbial language. But our inherited contempt for the Bœotian “clowns” is rather a tribute to the persistent intellectual domination of the Athenians than an accurate reflection of the truth. Indeed, if we examine the sources of the tradition, we find that the original verdict was popular and unreasoned, receiving its literary support in comedy which deliberately appealed to vulgar prejudices. “If you have good sense, you will avoid Bœotia,” was the mocking advice of Pherecrates, the distinguished forerunner of Aristophanes, and to the comic poets of the following centuries Bœotian gluttony and Bœotian clumsiness were an unfailing resource to pleasure the fickle humours of the crowd.

In the serious literature of the great periods Bœotia is treated with respect. Plutarch complains that Herodotus misrepresented Thebes in the Persian Wars, and warns his readers that as there are venomous insects at the heart of roses so beneath the historian’s delightful and persuasive style lurk defamation and vituperation of “the noblest and greatest cities and men of Greece.” But if Herodotus has diverged from the truth, in this instance a questionable supposition, he has at least looked upon Thebes as an enemy and not overlooked her as a boorish community. In the history of Thucydides also, and even of the bigot Xenophon, Bœotian cities make a dignified, if not always virtuous, appearance among the actors on the national stage.

In poetry Bœotia receives her full rights as a contributor to the imaginative life of Greece. In Homer not only is the Bœotian harbour of Aulis the meeting place of the Greek fleet before it sets sail for Ilium, but also Bœotian landscapes beautify heroic episodes with their rivers flowing between green banks, their open meadows and bright groves, their flocks of tame doves and grassy ways. In the Homeric Hymns Bœotian vineyards and furrows bloom under the swift feet of golden-haired Apollo and mischievous Hermes. Above all, in the Attic dramatists Bœotian Thebes is the scene of the epiphany of gods and of the sorrows of humanity. The legendary past of this city was crowded with personages whose glories and whose dooms were on so grand a scale that they became to the tragic poets of Athens, and still are to us, symbols of the unceasing conflict between will and destiny. The Theban legends more than any others, save those of Argos, appealed to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as fitted for their dramatic purpose of arousing “pity and terror.” In using this material they displayed a familiarity with the Thebes of their own day which is a striking proof that men of sense and feeling could delight in Bœotia. Æschylus perceived the fertility of the land and the fairness of Dirce, goodliest of streams. Sophocles seems to have heard and never forgotten the soft murmur of the river Ismenus. And Euripides knew intimately the wild ivy growing over the city towers and the berries and flowers of the city gardens, the golden wheat-fields and cooling springs of the surrounding country, the “deep pine greenery” and “fallen oak leaves” within the forests of Mount Cithæron, the mountain torrents cleaving the narrow, crag-topped glens, the gleaming snow forever resting on the mountain’s heights.

Furthermore, Bœotia had its own traditions of culture. Although creative artistic power was exemplified only in Hesiod, the originator of a new literary movement, and in Pindar, the most eminent lyric poet of Greece, there was revealed in the architecture, sculpture, and painting which enriched cities and sanctuaries, and in the poetry and music which were conspicuous at festivals, a critical taste as trustworthy as any outside of Attica. Educational ideals also tended toward a genuine if not always vigorous cultivation. Plutarch’s ripe refinement is a late but not a solitary example.

Thus accoutred against prejudice we may hope more fairly to appraise the good and the evil in Bœotian life.

Bœotia has one of the most fortunate situations in Greece, for its frontiers are either protected by high mountains or border on two arms of the sea—the Gulf of Corinth and the Gulf of Eubœa—which in antiquity connected her with the extended maritime life of Greece and put her into easy communication with Attica and the Peloponnesus.

Within the mountain barriers the Bœotian country consists of two plains separated by hills. The flatness of the northern plain is unrelieved, and the rivers that flow into it, like the Cephisus, find no outlets except by katavothras or channels which they force for themselves under Mount Ptoön in the north. The frequent stoppage of these channels turned a large part of the plain into the famous Copaic Lake, the drainage of which moved prehistoric engineers to wonderful feats, tempted to comparative failure the less expert engineers of successive historic periods, and has finally been accomplished by modern skill. Within a few years a British company has reclaimed for the growing energies of modern Greece thousands of acres of land that will yield two crops a year.

The southern basin of Bœotia is smaller and also less homogeneous and monotonous than the northern. Thebes occupies a small plateau of its own on the northern side of a low range of hills that divides it from the larger part of the plain, given over to the beautiful valley of the Asopus.

The fertility and charm of Bœotia may still be appreciated. In antiquity cities and towns, busied with the industries of the soil and of the sea, gave evidence also of the practical resources supplied by Nature. And yet it must be admitted that the historical importance of Bœotia falls somewhat short of its obvious advantages. Only after Athens and Sparta had risen successively to the hegemony of Greece and again lost their power did Thebes play a leading rôle in national politics. And at no time did Bœotians vie either in energy or genius with the people of barren Attica. An explanation often given is that the unhealthful climate and heavy atmosphere of the country modified natural impulses to enterprise. The Athenians, as we have seen, laid great stress on the brilliant freshness of their own air as promoting intelligence. But another explanation takes into account the mystery of racial characteristics. Before Bœotia was conquered, sometime in the centuries, preceding Homer, by the northern race from Epirus and Thessaly which gave the country its name and began the “historic period,” there existed both in the north and in the south older peoples of evident wealth and power. For centuries Orchomenus was the leading city, not only of the northern plain but of the whole country. Its mighty kings and golden splendour were still a bright memory to Homer, and excavations have brought to life for us indications of the richness of its civilization. Exceptionally impressive and interesting ruins of a fortress now known as Goulas (or Gha or Gla) have been discovered on what used to be the eastern bank of the Copaic Lake. And at Thebes also we shall find traces of a people as advanced as any in prehistoric Greece. In the early ages the air of Bœotia does not seem to have prevented conspicuous progress in political power or in the arts. The northern invaders, then, would seem to have been responsible for the defects of later history, failing to construct a civilization equal to the one they had been able to destroy. In the case of the arts especially, it is significant that Pindar, the only Bœotian poet of the first order, was not of unmixed Bœotian blood, but belonged to a branch of the Ægidæ, who traced their pedigree back to the pre-Bœotian rulers of Thebes. Of this descent, distinguished in the eyes of all Greeks, Pindar was justly proud. And yet he was a loyal son of Thebes and assumed his share in the “ancient reproach” of “Bœotian swine.” We are at liberty, therefore, to emphasize his country before his blood.

Modern Thebes is huddled on the site of the ancient acropolis, its poverty serving as a reminder of the desolation which as early as Strabo’s time had fallen upon one of the great cities of Greece. Pausanias found the lower city deserted, save for the sanctuaries, the population being restricted to the acropolis, and Dio Chrysostom had seen a solitary image standing among the ruins of the old market-place. In the middle ages Fortune returned to Thebes from time to time, but under the Turks deserted her in apparent despair. Doubtless the town will revive as the modern nation gathers its forces. In the mean time it serves to indicate the area of the stronghold or acropolis built by the prehistoric settlers. Before the middle of the fifth century the city had grown westward to the stream of Dirce, and eastward to the river Ismenus. After that time, as is evident from remains of city walls, the area was even more extended.

The mythological past of Thebes was greater than any of its historic periods. Her early citizens shone brilliantly among those—

The story of Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes, is one of the best examples of the legends by which the Greeks reconstructed their early history. As if by “shadows of dreams” they were haunted by the memory of ancient adventures and enterprises, by movements of whole peoples and bright deeds of early heroes. And in spite of their arrogant aloofness in historic times from all “barbarians,” they admitted, in the stories into which their racial imagination shaped the formless facts of prehistoric life, a close connection with foreign peoples. So Cadmus was said to be a Phœnician going forth from his own land and settling in Bœotia before it was known by that name. Whatever the Phœnician connection was, whether direct or by way of Crete, whether by colonization or merely by trading stations, it is certain that a pre-Bœotian people occupied Thebes and were displaced by northern invaders, who in their turn, at one time or another, seem to have been forced on by the pressure of Illyrians from Epirus. These facts the Greek people made into a story of individual adventure, and this story Greek poets made dramatic and universal. Cadmus was son of a Phœnician king and brother of the ravished Europa. Sent by his father to find his sister, and not daring to return without her, he asked advice of the Delphic oracle. He was told to follow a cow until she should lie down. This strange behest led him through Phocis to Thebes. Here, like most heroes, including Apollo, who wished to take possession of strange earth, he was obliged to slay a dragon. Athena, his special guardian, bade him sow the dragon’s teeth, and from these sprang up an armed brood of warriors, known thereafter as the “Spartoi” or Sown Men. Cadmus watched them fight with each other until only five were left, with which doughty remnant he built up the Cadmeia, or original Acropolis of Thebes. Like Apollo again, he was forced to atone for the murder of the dragon by serving Ares for a term of years. At the end Ares gave him to wife Harmonia, his daughter by Aphrodite, and Cadmus began a glorious reign. But his patient bondage to Ares had won only a temporary pacification, and to his children and grandchildren passed the relentless curse. Œdipus was his direct descendant. Even in Cadmus’s lifetime two daughters and two grandsons met with violent deaths, and he and his queen Harmonia went far away to Illyria and became rulers of the Enchelians. There they were changed into serpents, “bright and aged snakes,” and were compelled by fate to lead their barbarian people in an invasion of Greece. Matthew Arnold follows Ovid in making them “among the green Illyrian hills,”—

But Euripides represents the old king as filled with evil presentiment:—

Pindar in his radiant vision of the future life beyond the foam of Acheron places Cadmus with Peleus in the company of the mighty dead who dwell at peace forever within the islands of the Blest. The earthly life of both heroes he uses to illustrate to Hieron, lord of Syracuse and Fortune’s favourite, the adage inherited from the men of old: “For every boon to men the gods deal double bane.”

Pindar’s song of praise “flitting like a bee from tale to tale” paused often upon the legends of his “mother Thebes.” Among others he tells the story of Heracles’s birth at Thebes and of his speedy slaying, while yet in swaddling clothes, of monstrous snakes that approached his cradle. The most tragic episode of Heracles’s life, his madness and his murder of his children, also occurred at Thebes, according to the version of the legend used by Euripides in his drama of “The Mad Heracles.” But this play is of little poetic importance in comparison with the plays that deal with the curse-haunted house of Cadmus. Neither Euripides nor Sophocles, in their single extant experiments with the tragedy of Heracles, display the sympathetic genius which has given permanent value to the stories of Pentheus and Œdipus. The two plays, however, which rest upon these legends are famous for antipodal reasons. The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles was selected by Aristotle as the most perfect specimen, in technical construction, of the Greek drama, and is treasured now as the model of what is most restrained, most profound yet clear, most “Hellenic” in Greek literature. The “Bacchæ” of Euripides, on the other hand, is more “un-Hellenic” than any play or poem that has come down to us, more resplendent in fancy, more wild in theme, more incomprehensible in purpose.

Pentheus was the son of Agave and the grandson and successor of Cadmus. But his fame was born of his futile conflict with another daughter’s greater son. Semele, loved by Zeus and at her own request visited by him in the full panoply of his splendour, had been consumed in the lightning’s fire, and her child Dionysus had been snatched from her womb by its divine father and hidden within his own thigh to issue in time as the strangest of all the gods. Popularly known as the “god of wine,” he was in reality a Lord of Many Voices, a Spirit of Guiding Fire, a Mountain Bull, a Snake of a Hundred Heads, a Master of the Voices of the Night, a Lover of Peace, a Giver of Good Gifts, a God, a Beast, a Mystery. His worship, originating among the gloomy Thracians and the mystical yet sensuous Orientals, was late in winning its place in cultivated Athens. Only with very great difficulty can we discover the threads of belief which made out of the newcomer a gracious lord of the vintage, a dispeller of care and teacher of mirth, a prophet, a guide in all the arts of civilization and, more mysteriously still, a suffering god, both redeemer and redeemed, a companion at Eleusis of Demeter and Persephone. Because, however, of the persistent clarity of the Greek imagination, the god now and again emerges from amid the chaos of functions and attributes in a concrete form of beauty. In the Homeric Hymn written in his praise he is a youth with dark hair and dark and smiling eyes standing on a headland that juts above the unharvested sea, while the ocean winds blow about his shoulders a purple robe. To Euripides he is—

The distinguishing feature of all Dionysiac worship was the frenzied raving of its votaries. Women especially were mastered by the strange desire to join in the revels, and, since the intellectualized life of Athens was hostile to insane manifestations of religious fervor, Athenian women made frequent pilgrimages to places where the wildness of nature welcomed the wildness in the heart of man. We have already seen them travelling to the uplands of Parnassus. Mount Cithæron was another favourite gathering place. The women in Aristophanes’s “Thesmophoriazusæ” cry aloud:—

Perhaps the most adventurous would sometimes make their way to the bleak hills near Pella, the capital of Macedonia, where queen and peasant met in Bacchic excesses. Euripides spent the last years of his life at Pella, and it has been thought that there he conceived the idea of writing a play to portray Dionysus’s triumphal entrance into Thebes against the will of Pentheus. Be this as it may, certainly Thebes and Cithæron are more than a perfunctory mise-en-scène for the “Bacchæ.” In no other Greek play is the reader so conscious of the presence of landscape.

Dionysus comes from the East to defend his mother’s memory and to establish his worship in her city. Pentheus opposes him in spite of the wisdom of Cadmus and the warnings of the soothsayer Tiresias. The god constrains the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’s mother and her sisters, who long ago had tempted the young Semele to her destruction, to follow him to Mount Cithæron. Pentheus is then led to spy upon their revels. They take him for a wild beast and his own mother tears him to pieces. At the end, restored to an agonized reason, she becomes an exile from her home. Cadmus goes to his fate among the Illyrians. Dionysus is rapt from mortal sight in a cloud. It is a disputed question whether Euripides was moved to this portrayal of a cruel godhead by the subtlest impiety, or by a belated desire to be considered orthodox, or by a realization of the savage power that lies at the heart of life and cannot be gainsaid. At any rate he has woven into the plot the pathos of which he is master, in the reiterated suggestions of the tie between parent and child: the young god stirred to triumphant action by the memory of his dead mother; the living mother wildly bringing her son’s head in from the mountain, and calling upon him to come and glory in her lion-hunting; the old father deciding to lead his daughter back from the shadows of madness, even if the path of truth ends in grief and pain. And the whole nexus of religion, pathos, and inherited curse is spread before us in colours of flame.

The play is pervaded by the dances and the songs of the Mænads who have followed Dionysus—

and who irresistibly draw to their ranks the matrons and maidens of Thebes:—

The picture of the women as they finally have taken possession of Cithæron is painted for Pentheus by a shepherd. Upon this passage and a few others in the play rests Mr. Symonds’s discriminating statement that “the ‘Bacchæ,’ like the ‘Birds,’ proves what otherwise we might have hardly known, that there lacked not Greeks for whom the ‘Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have been intelligible.” And for this magic not only Euripides’s brilliant fancy but also Mount Cithæron itself is responsible.

The lowing kine awake them and they gird on their dappled fawn-skins:—

The curse laid upon Cadmus destroyed all his daughters, and among his grandchildren not only Pentheus but also Actæon who, because he saw Artemis at her bath in one of Cithæron’s still pools, was torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. Cadmus’s only son, Polydorus, and his son’s son, Labdacus, were strangely spared. Then once more Nemesis rose to the pursuit. The son of Labdacus was Laius, who was unwittingly murdered by his son, Œdipus, and the doom of Œdipus is the subject of the “Œdipus Tyrannus.”

Cithæron still towers on the horizon; in its “winding glens” the infant Œdipus had been exposed and rescued by a vagrant hireling in charge of mountain flocks. But the play takes us back to the city, with its royal palace and temples and market-place. As usual, it is the Thebes of Sophocles’s day that is used for scenery. The drama opens when the fruitful country has been laid waste by a pestilence and her citizens are praying to Artemis, whose temple stands in the Agora, to Apollo at his oracular seat by the river Ismenus, and to all the gods by the altar in front of the royal palace. But in these few hints all localized interest is exhausted. The austere and disciplined beauty of the dramatic structure throws into high relief the pitifulness and the terror of a father’s sin at work in the third and fourth generation, and of the human struggle against destiny. The universal truth of the tragedy as apprehended by Sophocles was as independent of the walls of Thebes as of the confines of the theatre in Athens. And yet in modern Thebes, itself the shadow of a greater past, we may realize afresh the catastrophe that befell the ancient king. He had saved the city by guessing the riddle of the Sphinx and thus destroying her. He had been acclaimed as king in place of Laius, slain by an unknown hand, and had married Iocasta, Laius’s queen. Now he promises to save his people from the pestilence by obeying the Delphic command that the slayer of Laius shall be found and exiled. He discovers that he is the murderer, and, in a crescendo of horror, that he is the son both of the man he murdered and of his own wife. In spite of their effort to kill him in his infancy, he has reappeared, the innocent agent of their destruction, as the irrefutable god of prophecy had foretold. Iocasta hangs herself. Œdipus’s children face a world that will remember against them the sin of their father. He puts out his eyes, and goes into voluntary exile, defeated by fate, a broken-hearted fugitive, not yet conscious that in the surrender of his will to God he may atone and be at peace. Borne from afar upon the quiet air of to-day we may hear ghostly echoes of the songs of the people that watched him. He was an example of the emptiness of life:—

And he also exemplified the truth of Solon’s aphorism that no one should be congratulated before the end:—

In spite of the repentance of Œdipus, the ancient curse fell upon his children, and their dooms also became the subjects of dramas. Æschylus, in the “Seven against Thebes,” deals with the story of Eteocles and Polyneices, whose own folly was the immediate cause of their ruin. They had agreed to rule Thebes alternately, but Eteocles once in possession refused to abdicate. Polyneices raises in Argos an army led by Adrastus, with which he advances against his country. Civil war follows, and the brothers kill each other. This story gave Æschylus two dramatic opportunities peculiarly suited to his genius. One was the handling of the theme of Nemesis, not with grave calm like Sophocles, but with gigantic vigour, with rough-hewn figures of triple-crested waves of evil, harvests of blood, chilling frosts of fear, with a penetrating insistence upon the “black and full-grown curse” which shadows city and citizens. Within its gloom Eteocles fights only with the ardour of despair:—

To relieve this gloom Æschylus uses his other dramatic opportunity, that of describing with Homeric eloquence the seven Argive warriors stationed at the seven gates and the Theban defenders sent to meet them. In the full-mouthed trimeters of the messenger who has seen the enemy, and of Eteocles who is undaunted by his report, echo stirringly the epic clash of arms, neighing of steeds, and war-cries of men. Shields of many devices and crested helmets bedeck the heroes. Courage adorns them all, from Amphiaraus, who foresees disaster, to Parthenopæus, the Arcadian metic, repaying to Argos the cost of his nurture:—

Euripides used the same story in his “Tyrian Women,” but openly scorned the Homeric note of Æschylus. With the enemy at the gates there is no time to describe the warriors, and the emphasis is shifted from the horror of the curse to the burden on Iocasta’s heart. Still living, she seeks to reconcile her sons, and at last kills herself on their dead bodies. Polyneices is not only his country’s enemy but a homesick man whose eyes grow wet when he sees the familiar altars and Dirce and the old gymnasium, and who begs his mother just before he dies to bury him in Thebes. Antigone is brave enough to support her mother, comfort her father, and promise to bury her brother, but so tenderly young that an old servant helps her up a cedarn stairway to the palace roof that she may see the Argive army in the plain. Another vision of brave youth is given in the character of Menœceus, last virgin descendant of the Sown Men. Informed by Tiresias that by a voluntary death he can save Thebes, he evades his father and makes one of the patriotic speeches that never failed to thrill an Athenian audience in the Dionysiac theatre:—

The fame of Antigone was secured by Sophocles. Thebes seems to have been always noted for the beauty of its women, from Semele, the bride of Zeus, to the tall yellow-haired ladies admired by Dicæarchus, and Æschylus suggests the loveliness of Antigone as Euripides suggests her youthfulness. But through Sophocles we know her unadorned as the embodiment of loyalty and courage. On the sunny morning that followed the defeat of the Argives, when the eye of golden day had at last arisen over Dirce’s stream, she buried her brother and defied Creon’s edict, which forbade burial to an enemy of the country, in a noble speech of justification:—

The Athenian reverence for Law made natural an even more magnificent reiteration of this idea in the “Œdipus Tyrannus:”—

Beneath a neighbouring hill Antigone was walled up in one of the rock-cut caverns that abound in Greece. Her lover Hæmon, Creon’s son, kills himself within the door. His mother takes her life, and Creon is left to a late and impotent knowledge of the truth. Before the end the chorus of Theban girls think of Antigone’s betrothal and in a famous hymn to Love flash brief fire upon the lonely moral heights of the play. But suddenly the song dissolves into a lamentation which still haunts the ear in Thebes:—

In historic Thebes heroism had lost its lustre. When Greece was tested, the result in this city is revealed in the laconic words of Herodotus, that among the Greeks who sent earth and water to Xerxes were the Thebans and the other Bœotians, except the Platæans and the Thespians. “The grace of the olden time is fallen upon sleep,” Pindar complained after recounting the “noble deeds” of the heroic age. His own sympathy with the national cause is clearly seen in another ode written after the expulsion of the Persians: “Some god has turned aside the stone of Tantalus from overhead, a load that Hellas might not brook.”

Later, when it was regarded as a political asset to have opposed the Persians, the Thebans defended their failure on the ground that they had had neither constitutional government nor popular freedom. A cabal of selfish nobles had forced them into an action abhorrent to themselves. Certainly it is true that Thebes was always aristocratic rather than democratic. And it is worth noting that Pindar in his art was the true son of such a city. The great festivals of Greece were the immediate inspiration of his extant odes, while his life in Athens and his journeys to Sicily and to the eastern islands furnished him with much poetic material. But as far as the “soaring eagle” is to be identified with a birthplace, we may ascribe to his aristocratic origin and early environment his persistent selection of the things that were distinguished and splendid.

At the time of the Peloponnesian War Thebes appears as the bitter opponent of Athens. But later the shifting politics of the time brought about an alliance between these two ancient enemies and set Thebes against Sparta. Her position, however, was one of difficulty and humiliation, buffeted about as she was between the greater powers. Finally, in the first quarter of the fourth century, under the influence of one man, Thebes entered upon a period of power and distinction. Brief as it was, it served to awaken the sleeping glory of the old days and to make men once more mindful of Thebes of the golden shield. Epaminondas inspired a young Bœotian party, roused the Theban people, opposed Sparta and defeated her by new strategic skill at Leuctra in 371 B. C., renewed the ancient confederacy of Bœotian towns, won the support of neighbouring states and the sympathy of Delphi, and finally marched into the Peloponnesus to oppose the unrighteous designs of Sparta. At the battle of Mantinea in Arcadia he lost his life, before his work for Thebes and Hellas was finished. It is greatly to be regretted that a career so admirable and a personality so original should not have been interpreted by some adequate historian or poet. He lived too late for the enthusiasm of Herodotus or the justice of Thucydides. That Xenophon, through his hatred of Thebes, failed to talk much of the Theban general is no great loss to our imaginative understanding of a great man. Pausanias in his sincere admiration contributes something: “Of the famous captains of Greece Epaminondas may well rank as the first or at least as second to none. For whereas the Lacedæmonian and Athenian generals were seconded by the ancient glories of their countries as well as by soldiers of a temper to match, Epaminondas found his country disheartened and submissive to foreign dictation, yet he soon raised them to the highest place.” Plutarch’s “Life of Epaminondas” has not been preserved, but this loss is partially repaired by his “Life of Pelopidas,” the companion in arms and the passionate imitator of the hero, and by his return now and again in other writings to a contemplation of the character of Epaminondas. Out of slight sketches like these and out of the second-rate histories we must fashion our portrait.

Epaminondas was a great soldier and a leader of men. These facts need not be obscured by the other fact that he did not, probably could not, establish a national unity strong enough to live on after him. With him died the hopes of Thebes. His fear of this must have been his heaviest burden. Patriotism with him not only excluded satisfaction in his own power, but included patience under attack. To us, familiarized with magnanimous patriotism in many nations, this seems more admirable than strange. But against the background of Greek history the statesmen are conspicuous who could have entirely understood the obedient spirit in which Socrates accepted condemnation from the city he had tried to serve. In Epaminondas also appear some of those qualities which his contemporary Plato thought essential to a wise king. He loved philosophy more than power, and his early training had been intellectual and moral rather than martial. Like Pindar, he belonged to the oldest nobility of Thebes, tracing his pedigree to Cadmus, but his family had long lived modestly, dissociated from the more vulgar aristocracy, and devoted to the intellectual life. Philosophers exiled from Southern Italy came to Thebes as well as Athens, and among them Lysis of Tarentum exercised a great influence upon the young Epaminondas. The boy’s gentle nature and hardy will furnished an ideal soil for the seeds of the Pythagorean doctrine, which, before the days of St. Francis of Assisi, taught the beauty of poverty, of temperance, and of humility, and insisted upon a moral earnestness and devotion to duty. Epaminondas, the conqueror and liberator, was at all times a “practical” follower of the religion in which he had been nurtured. And with something of his own fervour he inflamed the Sacred Band, that company of “friends” like Epaminondas and Pelopidas, who inspired each other to valour and to virtue and were united in the cause of patriotism. In this appeal to the chivalric gallantry of youth Epaminondas was thoroughly Greek. In the unmarred consistency of his own life he was unapproached even by his closest followers. As Pindar in his generation was “heavy at heart” over Thebes, so the martial leader must often have brooded in lonely impotence over the same city. To travellers he may appear, as dusk comes on, in the guise in which men found him on an ancient holiday, walking aloof, ungarlanded and thoughtful. “I am keeping guard,” he said, “that all of you may be drunk and revel securely.”

The visible remains of ancient Thebes are at present very few, and although archæological research may reveal sites and fragments of great interest, we shall never see here ruins still clothed upon with beauty. Nor is the situation of the town impressive enough to attract travellers who are indifferent to memories of the past. The chief charm of the place is its view of an horizon broken by Cithæron, Helicon, and distant Parnassus; by Mount Ptoön, where men listened to Apollo, and the Mountain of the Sphinx.

Fragments of walls are all that remain of the city’s fortifications. Of the gates no traces have been found. Pausanias speaks of seeing all seven gates, but he describes only three of them, and some scholars have argued that the other four were invented by the lost epic writers who first gave literary form to the Theban legends. Certainly the poets themselves, Æschylus, Euripides, and the later Alexandrians, differ in their lists. The only important ruins of a building are those recently reported to have been discovered by the Greek archæologists near the Agora. They represent a palace of the “Mycenæan” period which met its destruction by fire and which has been identified, under the name of “The House of Cadmus,” with the ruins of “the bridal chambers of Harmonia and Semele” seen by Pausanias. From the historic period nothing remains, although with the help of broken pieces of marble and stone we may try to imagine the Temple of Ismenian Apollo, second only to Delphi as the seat of this oracular god, in the place of the present church of St. Luke on the hill that rises by the river St. John.

Dismantled as Thebes was in the time of Pausanias, his guides showed him many places which were associated with Pindar or with the legends embodied in the Attic drama. There was the Observatory of Tiresias, where the blind prophet had listened intently to the sharp cries and whirring wings of the prescient birds. As if ageless in sorrow, he pervades each drama on the curse of Cadmus with his futile vision of the truth,—