Exploring Ancient Greek City No One Talks About

If you imagine yourself in ancient Greece, it is probably in one of the two principal cities (or city-states), democratic, fractious, philosophy-loving Athens, or oligarchic, disciplined, anti-tyrannical Sparta. As a woman (if a freeborn citizen), you might be better off in Sparta, where you could own property, get a formal education and compete in athletics. (A good Athenian woman stayed home.) You wouldn’t want to be a slave in either place, but perhaps especially not Sparta, which held an entire population (possibly an ethnic group)—the helots—in a kind of sharecropping serfdom, kept servile, indeed terrorized, by a secret police and arbitrary state-sanctioned murder. In many ways, Athens and Sparta seem like opposite extremes. But what comes to mind at the mention of a third major Greek city, Thebes?