so-called Corinthian War and formed the nucleus of the league against Sparta. At the battles of Haliartus (395) and Coroneia (364) they again proved their rising military capacity by standing their ground against the Spartans. The result of the war was especially disastrous to Thebes, as the general settlement of 387 stipulated the complete autonomy of all Greek towns and so withdrew the other Boeotians from its political control. Its power was further curtailed in 382, when a Spartan force occupied the citadel by a treacherous coup-de-main. Three years later the Spartan garrison was expelled, and a democratic constitution definitely set up in place of the traditional oligarchy. In the consequent wars with Sparta the Theban army, trained and led by Epaminondas and Pelopidas (q.v.), proved itself the best in Greece. Some years of desultory fighting, in which Thebes established its control over all Boeotia, culminated in 371 in a remarkable victory over the pick of the Spartans at Leuctra (q.v.). The winners were hailed throughout Greece as champions of the oppressed. They carried their arms into Peloponnesus and at the head of a large coalition permanently crippled the power of Sparta. Similar expeditions were sent to Thessaly and Macedonia to regulate the affairs of those countries. But the predominance of Thebes was short-lived. The states which she protected were indisposed to commit themselves permanently to her tutelage, and the renewed rivalry of Athens, which had been linked with Thebes since 395 in a common fear of Sparta, but since 371 had endeavoured to maintain the balance of power against her ally, prevented the formation of a Theban empire. With the death of Epaminondas in 362 the city sank again to the position of a secondary power. In a war with the neighbouring state of Phocis (356–346) it could not even maintain its predominance in central Greece, and by inviting Philip II. of Macedon to crush the Phocians it extended that monarch’s power within dangerous proximity to its frontiers. A revulsion of feeling was completed in 338 by the orator Demosthenes, who persuaded Thebes to join Athens in a final attempt to bar Philip’s advance upon Attica. The Theban contingent fought bravely on behalf of Grecian liberty in the decisive battle of Chaeroneia, and bore the brunt of the slaughter. Philip was content to deprive Thebes of her dominion over Boeotia; but an unsuccessful revolt in 335 against his son Alexander was punished by the complete destruction of the city, except, according to tradition, the house of the poet Pindar. Though restored in 315 by Cassander, Thebes never again played a prominent part in history. It suffered from the establishment of Chalcis as the chief fortress of central Greece, and was severely handled by the Roman conquerors Mummius and Sulla. Strabo describes it as a mere village, and in Pausanias’s time (A.D. 170) its citadel alone was inhabited. During the Byzantine period it served as a place of refuge against foreign invaders, and from the 10th century became a centre of the new silk trade. Though severely plundered by the Normans in 1146 it recovered its prosperity and was selected by the Frankish dynasty de la Roche as its capital. In 1311 it was destroyed by the Catalans and passed out of history.
The most famous monument of ancient Thebes was the outer wall with its seven gates, which even as late as the 6th century B.C. was probably the largest of artificial Greek fortresses. The names of the gates vary, but four are constant—the Proetides, Electrae, Neistae or Neitae, and Homoloides; Pausanias gives the others as Ogygiae, Hypsistae, Crenaeae. There is evidence that the gate Electrae was on the south, and near it was the tomb of the Thebans who fell at the capture by Alexander. The gates shown to Pausanias as Neistae and Proetides led respectively north-west and north-east. Two of the springs have been identified with some probability—that of St Theodore with the Oedipodea, in which Oedipus is said to have purged himself from the pollution of homicide, and the Paraporti with the dragon-guarded fountain of Ares (see Cadmus). Dicaearchus, referring to the town of Cassander, gives two measurements for the circuit, equal to about 9 m. and 512 m.; the smaller fairly corresponds to the 412 m. over which the extant remains have been traced; it consisted of sundried brick on a stone foundation. Beyond this the topography is wholly uncertain. From the interest of the site in history and still more in literature, as the scene of so many dramas, the temptation to fix details has been specially strong. Conjectural plans or descriptions, differing widely, are given by Leake, Forchhammer, Ulrichs, Bursian, Fabricius and others (references below). There are two main difficulties to contend with. The description of Pausanias was written at a time when the lower city was deserted, and only the temples and the gates left; and the references to Thebes in the Attic dramatists are, like those to Mycenae and Argos, of little or no topographical value. The literary glory of Thebes is centred in the poet Pindar. It had a flourishing school of painting in the 4th century, of which the most famous representation was Aristides, who excelled in pathetic subjects.
Authorities.—Herodotus, bks. v.–ix.; Thucydides and Xenophon (Hellenica), passim; Diodorus xvii., xix.; Pausanias ix. 5–17; M. Müller, Geschichte Thebens (Leipzig, 1879); E. v. Stern, Geschichte der spartanischen und thebanischen Hegemonie (Dorpat. 1884), pp. 44–246; E. Fabricius, Theben (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1890); E. Funk, De Thebanorum actis, 378–362 (Berlin, 1890); B. V. Head, Historia Numorum (Oxford, 1887), pp. 295–299. See also Boeotia throughout. (E. Gr.)
THEBES, ROMANCE OF. The French Roman de Thèbes is a
poem of some 10,000 lines which appears to be based, not on
the Thebaid of Statius, but on an abridgment of that work.
This view is supported by the omission of incidents and details
which, in spite of the altered conditions under which the poem
was composed, would naturally have been preserved in any
imitation of the Thebaid, while again certain modifications of
the Statian version can hardly be due to the author’s invention
but point to an ancient origin. As in other poems of the same
kind, the marvellous disappears; the Greeks adopt the French
methods of warfare and the French code of chivalric love.
The Roman dates from the 12th century (c. 1150–55), and is
written, not in the tirades of the chansons de geste, but in octosyllabic
rhymed couplets. It was once attributed to Benoit de
Sainte-More; but all that can be said is that the Thèbes is
prior to the Roman de Troie, of which Benoit was undoubtedly
the author. The Thèbes is preserved also in several French prose
redactions, the first of which, printed in the 16th century under
the name of Edipus, belongs to the early years of the 13th
century, and originally formed part of a compilation of ancient
history, Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The first volume of
Les histoires de Paul Crose traduites en français contains a free
and amplified version of the Thèbes. The Romance of Thebes,
written about 1420 by John Lydgate as a supplementary
Canterbury Tale, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde about
1500. From the Roman de Thèbes also were possibly derived
the Ipomedon and its sequel Prothesilaus, two romans d’aventures
written about the end of the 12th century by Hue de Rotelande,
an Anglo-Norman trouvère who lived in Credenhill, near Hereford.
The author asserts that he translated from a Latin book
lent him by Gilbert Fitz-Baderon, 4th lord of Monmouth, but
in reality he has written romances of chivalry on the usual
lines, the names of the characters alone being derived from
antiquity.
See L. Constans, La Légende d’Oedipe étudiée dans l’antiquité au moyen âge et dans les temps modernes (Paris, 1881), and in the section “L’Épopée antique” in De Julleville’s Hist. de la langue et de la litt. français; Le Roman de Thèbes, ed. L. Constans (Soc. des anciens textes français (Paris, 1890); G. Ellis, Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, iii. (1805).
THECLA, ST, one of the most celebrated saints in the Greek Church (where she is commemorated on the 24th of September) and in the Latin Church (where her festival is the 23rd of September). She is honoured with the title of “protomartyr.” The centre of her cult was Seleucia, in Isauria. Her basilica, south of Seleucia, on the mountain, was long a very popular place of pilgrimage, and is mentioned in the two books of St Basil of Seleucia. The great popularity of the saint is due more particularly to her Acta, which in all their forms derive from the apocryphal work known as the Acta Pauli et Theclae. According to her Acta, Thecla was born of illustrious parentage at Iconium, and came under the personal teaching of the apostle Paul. In her eighteenth year, having broken her engagement with Thamyris, to whom she had been betrothed, she was accused by her relations of being a Christian. Armed with the sign of the cross, she threw herself on the pyre, but the Hames were extinguished by a sudden rain. She then went to
