Civ: Thebans

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

The Theban Greeks

Theban Citizens (left) / Theban Slaves (right)

 

 

Above: Pagondas, son of Aeolidas (left), General Gorgidas (right)

 

Above: Pelopidas the Beoetarch (left), Epaminandas of Thebes (right)

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[rossenburg]

  On 02/08/2023 at 6:07 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The Theban Greeks

 

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This is absolutely incredible, and let's not even start talking about the portraits—it's simply mind-blowing!

[Atrik]

  On 03/08/2023 at 9:43 AM, rossenburg said:

and let's not even start talking about the portraits—it's simply mind-blowing!

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Definitively! But I wonder what the process to generate them looks like. Are you spending your 401k on generative AIs @wowgetoffyourcellphone?

[Vantha]

If I had to guess I would say they're Midjourney images. Am I right?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

www.imagine.art 

 

It takes several (and I mean several) attempts to get good images for each character. I have a library of hundreds of images now where I had to choose the best ones. Current AI generators have a difficult time creating historically accurate images and characters, so there is a lot of trial and error to trick the algorithm to give you what you want. You see how none of them wear helmets and I crop out their armor and that's because the algorithm errs on the side of fantasy almost 100% of the time. If you want to create fantasy Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones characters and armors, AI is great for that. Someone needs to train an AI specifically to be more historically accurate without having to jump through so many hoops.

Edited August 5, 2023 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Genava55]

Thebes and the Boeotian League, from Britannica:

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Boeotian League, league that first developed as an alliance of sovereign states in Boeotia, a district in east-central Greece, about 550 bc, under the leadership of Thebes. After the defeat of the Greeks at Thermopylae, Thebes and most of Boeotia sided with the Persians during the Persian invasions of 480 and 479. Subsequently, the victorious Greeks dissolved the Boeotian League as punishment. The Boeotians remained weak until 446, when they revolted against Athenian domination and reconstituted the league in alliance with Sparta. The league later opposed Sparta in the Corinthian War (395–387) and was defeated and again dissolved, Sparta having had Persian help.

Before the Corinthian War the league had grown into a close-knit confederacy, organized in 11 districts by 431. Each district, comprising one or more cities, sent a general (boeotarch), several judges, and 60 counselors to a federal government; the federal council of 660 was probably divided into four panels, each in turn convening for one year. The vote was given only to the propertied classes. Thebes, where the council met, dominated the league since it controlled four districts and supplied the best contingent to the federal army.

In 379 Thebes joined Athens in a successful effort to overturn Spartan supremacy in Greece. The league was then reconstituted on an initially successful democratic basis: all Boeotians, whatever their property, were members of an assembly convened at Thebes; their vote decided all matters of policy. The seven-man executive (one from each of the then seven districts, of which Thebes controlled three) was directly responsible to the Assembly. Other districts under federal systems joined Boeotia: Euboea, Acarnania, Phocis, Thessaly, Arcadia, and Achaea. But this great block of military power was soon split by imperialist ambitions, and the Boeotian League itself destroyed Orchomenus (364) and intervened in the Achaean League (366) and Arcadian League (362).

Decline set in rapidly when Phocis hired mercenaries and ravaged Boeotia in the Sacred War (355–346), which Philip II of Macedon ended as an ally of Thebes. Thebes suffered defeat, however, along with Athens, when Philip quelled their efforts to maintain Greek independence in 338 at the Battle of Chaeronea. The Boeotian League was again dissolved, and after an abortive revolt (335) against Alexander the Great of Macedon, Thebes and the rest of Boeotia fell permanently under external domination.

Boeotia and Boeotian Confederacy, free article on the Oxford Classical Dictionary:

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Boeotia was a region in central Greece, bounded in the north by Phocis and Opuntian Locris. The east faces the Euboean Gulf, and Mts. Parnes and Cithaeron form the southern boundary with Attica. On the west Mt. Helicon and some lower heights separate a narrow coastline from the interior. Lake Copais divided the region into a smaller northern part, the major city of which was Orchomenus (1), and a larger southern part dominated by Thebes (1). Geography and the fertility of the soil encouraged the growth of many prosperous and populous cities and villages. Although now there is indication of palaeolithic and mesolithic habitation, numerous findings prove a dense neolithic population. Thucydides (1. 12) states that the region was originally named Cadmeis, but that the Boiotoi gave it its present name 60 years after the Trojan War. Yet the Catalogue of Ships (Homer, Il. 2) knows of Boeotians already living in Boeotia before the war. Archaeology also proves both continuity of culture before the putative Trojan War and the decline of population during LH III, probably owing to mass migrations to the east. This late Helladic period was none the less prosperous enough to sustain Mycenaean palaces at Thebes, Orchomenus, and Gla.

Boeotia enters history only with Hesiod of Ascra, whose Works and Days indicates an agricultural society of smallholdings. In his time several basileis in Thespiae possessed the judicial power to settle inheritances. Evidence also indicates that other large cities exercised power over their smaller neighbours, Plataea, Tanagra, and Thebes among them. The result was the development of well-defined political units that formed the basis of an early federal government. The union of these cities in a broader political system was aided by their common culture, ethnicity, language, and religion. By the last quarter of the 6th cent. bce some of these cities formed the Boeotian Confederacy, doubtless under the hegemony of Thebes (see federal states). The Boeotians, as a people, not as a confederacy, were early members of the Delphic amphictiony.

From the outset of the Persian Wars until the Pax Romana, Boeotia was the ‘dancing-floor of war’ in Greece. Boeotian reaction to the Persian invasion was mixed. Plataea, Thespiae, and some elements in Thebes originally favoured the Greeks, but after the battle of Thermopylae only Plataea remained loyal to the Greek cause. The Persian defeat entailed the devastation of Boeotia. A truncated confederacy may have survived, but the region was politically unimportant. In 457 bce Boeotia allied itself with Sparta, which resulted in the battles of Tanagra and Oenophyta, the latter a major Boeotian defeat. Afterwards, Athens held control of Boeotia until the battle of Coronea in 447 bce. Thereafter, Boeotia rebuilt its confederacy, and remodelled its federal government along the lines described by the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (see oxyrhynchus, the historian from).

Boeotia supported Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, with Thebes helping to inflame it by its siege of Plataea. Boeotia defeated Athens at the battle of Delion in 424 bce, and contributed substantially to its eventual defeat. After the peace treaty of 404 bce relations between Boeotia and Sparta cooled to the point where they broke in 395 bce, when Boeotia joined Athens, Corinth, and Argos (1) to oppose Sparta in the Corinthian War. Sparta's victory and the King's Peace resulted in the political fragmentation of the region. A Spartan attack on Thebes in 382 bce further weakened Boeotia, until 378 bce, when Thebes revolted and re-established the Boeotian Confederacy, which ultimately led to confrontation at the battle of Leuctra. There the Boeotian army under Epaminondas defeated Sparta and created a period of Theban ascendancy that lasted until the Third Sacred War. Weakened by the devastation of that war, Boeotia allied itself with Philip (1) II. The alliance, always uneasy, ended with its decision to join Athens to oppose him at Chaeronea in 338 bce. During the Hellenistic period the region was often the battleground of monarchs and leagues alike. Only with Sulla's victory at Chaeronea in 86 bce did Boeotia enjoy peace under Rome. Forming part of Achaia from 27 bce, Roman Boeotia is evoked, with much convincing detail (F. Millar, JRS1981, 63 ff.), in Apuleius' Golden Ass (mid-2nd cent. ce). Although Thebes had declined, Lebadea (see trophonius) and Thespiae hosted Panhellenic cults and festivals; and the family and circle of Plutarch reveal men of culture among Boeotia's landowners. Archaeological survey shows a strong recovery from earlier depopulation in the 4th-6th cents. ce, when Thebes re-emerged as Boeotia's natural centre.

Other sources on their history:

• Boeotia, on Livius: https://www.livius.org/articles/place/boeotia/
• Thebes and Boeotia in the Fourth Century B.C. by S. C. Bakhuizen, on JSTOR : https://www.jstor.org/stable/1192571
• Subdivisions of the Boeotian Confederacy after 379 BC by J. Rzepka, on academia: https://www.academia.edu/download/61549003/Rzepka_Subdivisions_of_Boeotian_Confederacy.pdf
• The military policy of the Hellenistic Boiotian League by Ruben Post, on McGill University: https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/z316q5029
• Thebes, the Boeotian League, and central Greece: political and military development and interaction in the fourth century BC by M.S. Furman, on St Andrews university: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/12254
• A history of Boeotia by R.J. Buck, a 220 pages book.

 

The flamethrower of the Boeotians (5th c. B.C.)

It was the first flamethrower in history and was first used by the Boeotians in the Peloponnesian War for the burning of the Dilion/Delium walls. It consisted of a scooped out iron-bound beam (ripped at length and reconnected) that had a bellow at the user’s end and a cauldron hung from chains at the other end. A bent pipe from the airtight orifice of the beam went down into the cauldron which contained lit coal, sulphur and pitch (tar). With the operation of the bellow, enormous flames were created that burned the wooden walls and removed their defenders. Later it was used for the offence of stone fortifications causing cracks in the stones because of the high temperature and the parallel infusion of vinegar, urine or other erosive substances in them.

Thucydides, 4, 100: [1] The Boeotians presently sent for darters and slingers from [the towns on] the Melian gulf; and with these, and with two thousand men of arms of Corinth, and with the Peloponnesian garrison that was put out of Nisaea, and with the Megareans, all which arrived after the battle, they marched forthwith to Delium and assaulted the wall. And when they had attempted the same many other ways, at length they brought to it an engine, wherewith they also took it, made in this manner: [2] Having slit in two a great mast, they made hollow both the sides, and curiously set them together again in the form of a pipe. At the end of it in chains they hung a cauldron; and into the cauldron from the end of the mast they conveyed a snout of iron, having with iron also armed a great part of the rest of the wood. [3] They carried it to the wall, being far off, in carts, to that part where it was most made up with the matter of the vineyard and with wood. [4] And when it was to, they applied a pair of great bellows to the end next themselves, and blew. The blast, passing narrowly through into the cauldron, in which were coals of fire, brimstone, and pitch, raised an exceeding great flame, and set the wall on fire, so that no man being able to stand any longer on it, but abandoning the same and betaking themselves to flight, the wall was by that means taken. [5] Of the defendants, some were slain and two hundred taken prisoners; the rest of the number recovered their galleys and got home.

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delium

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boeotian_flame_thrower,_5th_century_BC,_Greece_(model).jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boeotian_Flamethrower.png

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The Boeotian League is also known to have implemented military reform during the Hellenistic period. One of the source supporting this is the Great Stele of Thespiai, from which there are mentions of peltophorai (phalangites), an Agema (elite troops unit inspired from the Macedonian army), epilektoi (elite troops, either hoplite like or peltast like), pharetritai (archers), sphendonatai (slingers). In addition we need to add thyreaphoroi/thureophoroi and traditional hoplitai who are mentioned in other sources.

It is also very important to highlight how the Boeotian League and Thebes implemented a lot of training for their troops, from their confrontation with Sparta which also inspired them and their imitation of Athens which developed the Ephebeia. The institutions of Ephebeia and Gymnastikós (gymnastics) were promoted, amplified and strengthened. Xenophon tells us that “all Boiotians exercised under arms” and Plutarch that the Boiotians became famous for “the attention they paid to exercise”. Diodorus also said, when Alexander the Great’s Makedonian troops attacked the Thebans during their revolt in 335, they were still “superior in bodily strength on account of their constant training in the gymnasium”. Boiotians seem to have been more successful than Athens in making the Ephebeia mandatory. Not only do epheboi and neaniskoi train to fight in formation with a shield, they also train with a bow and javelin and in skirmishing techniques. The young men were assessed during a festival called Pamboiotia, which enabled the troops to demonstrate their individual and collective skills.

Edited February 16 by Genava55
added resources and references