Ancient Greece Had Elite Unit of Loyal Lovers

The city of Thebes, in central Greece, has often been marginalized if not forgotten, both in antiquity and in modern times. Though it produced at least one wonderful poet (Pindar) and one stellar musician (Pronomus), it never bred a historian to match, say, Thucydides of Athens. Its mythical tradition was appropriated by the dramatists, above all the tragedians, of Athens, and the tradition itself is riddled with filicide, patricide, incest, civil war and other such abominations. But it was in 480 B.C. that Thebes blotted its escutcheon comprehensively: So far from joining forces with Sparta and Athens to resist a mighty Persian amphibious invasion, it actively took the Persian side and, to use a word derived from the Greek for such an act, “medized.” For that error, Alexander of Macedon made the city pay horribly, annihilating almost all of it in 335 B.C.