Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 179-204.

This essay gives a close reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in light of Schelling's discussion of theodicy as teleology. The article raises the question of the connection between ethics and time, and it argues that ethical categories are really temporal ones, so much so that it would make little sense to posit a choice between good and evil as if there were two simultaneous options. Instead, the story of Oedipus shows us how Thebes is always to precede if one (...) is to reach Colonus, that evil precedes and enables the good. (shrink)

Epaminondas the soldier has been much admired. His two great battles rank as masterpieces of the military art. Epaminondas himself perhaps regarded them as his greatest achievements, to judge by his last words as reported by Diodorus . He had been carried from the battlefield of Mantinea with a spear stuck in his chest. The doctors declared that when the spear was removed he would die. After hearing that his own shield was safe and that the Boeotians had won, he (...) ordered that the spear be removed. One of his friends said to him ‘But you die without a son.’ He answered ‘I do, by God, but I leave two daughters, my victory of Leuctra and my victory of Mantinea’, and then he died. Nor were his ‘daughters’ unadmired. By remarkable chance the future Philip II of Macedon was hostage at Thebes at the very time of Epaminondas' pre-eminence and did not fail to learn, as Chaeronea was to show. (shrink)

In Plutarch's two narratives of the recapture of the Cadmea by the Thebans, 379/8 B.C. , he speaks of three harmosts as in command of the Spartan garrison. This is the only instance in Spartan history where more than one harmost is mentioned as exercising authority in the same city, and it suggests the question: Was Thebes for some reason receiving different treatment from the other cities where we hear of harmosts in residence ?

It is customary to consider late Imperial historiography as a barren waste of meagre and inaccurate chronicles and incompetent rhetorical epitomes, all overshadowed by the giant figure of Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest literary genius, as E. Stein has called him , between Tacitus and Dante. In fact, however, the fifth century A.D. produced at least one writer who was, in the words of Niebuhr, ‘second to no historian even of the best ages in talent, good faith and wisdom; elegant and (...) very pure in style, he justly acquired praise and glory both among contemporaries and succeeding ages’. Niebuhr was referring to Priscus of Panium in Thrace, but Priscus was a member of a school of historical writing which had been founded earlier in the fifth century by Olympiodorus, an historian of scarcely less merit than Priscus and author of what J. B. Bury called ‘a highly important work’. Since even Schmid-Stahlin are not able to refer to a single essay or mono-graph on Olympiodorus, it may not be amiss to assemble the facts which are known about him and to try to discover, so far as the scanty materials permit, what sort of man he was and what sort of work he produced. (shrink)

Un petit bloc de calcaire a été apporté au musée de Thèbes en juillet 1990, sans que son origine ait été annoncée, relevée ou consignée. Il s'agit d'une base de statue portant une inscription qui se terminait par la signature de Lysippe de Sicyone. La signature était précédée d'une épigramme de quatre vers. Le poème fait allusion à la « patrie » du personnage honoré, en précisant que c'est cette patrie même qui a choisi pour chef à la guerre l'homme (...) dont la statue se dressait sur la base. Le poème ajoute qu'il a « fait grandir la gloire de Thèbes, l'intrépide ». On peut donc admettre que la « patrie » de l'officier n'est autre que Thèbes et par conséquent que l'origine de l'inscription est thébaine. Enfin, l'inscription donne les noms du dédicant, Hippias fils d'Érotion, et du dieu auquel la statue était dédiée, Zeus Saôtas. La base et son inscription sont publiées ici pour la première fois dans leur intégralité. (shrink)

A study of the last drama of Aeschylus' trilogy concerned with the fortunes of the house of Laius that ends with the story of Oedipus' sons, the enemy brothers, who self-destruct in mutual fratricide but thereby save the besieged city of Thebes. The book's findings, however, far exceed these limits to explore the relationships between language and kinship, as between family and city, self and society, and Greek ideas about the nature of human development and identity.

The ninth Pythian is one of Pindar's masterpieces. It contains the romantic story of the love of Apollo for the heroic nymph Cyrene, which is the foundation-legend of the great city, and he attaches to the end of the ode another graceful love-tale which was a family tradition of the athlete's ancestors. The style of the ode is suitable to the subject, and the rhythm is partly Dorian, partly Lydian. Therefore the grand style which is maintained throughout, the style in (...) which Pindar always excels, is richly mellowed and tempered with a certain lusciousness, a rarer quality of his work, but appropriate here to the romantic theme. And Pindar combines here the energy which is his birthright with a certain dignified ease and clearness, and his besetting faults of harshness, bitterness, or overpungency and overstrain are absent altogether. ‘Out of the strong hath come forth sweetness.’. (shrink)

The ninth Pythian is one of Pindar's masterpieces. It contains the romantic story of the love of Apollo for the heroic nymph Cyrene, which is the foundation-legend of the great city, and he attaches to the end of the ode another graceful love-tale which was a family tradition of the athlete's ancestors. The style of the ode is suitable to the subject, and the rhythm is partly Dorian, partly Lydian. Therefore the grand style which is maintained throughout, the style in (...) which Pindar always excels, is richly mellowed and tempered with a certain lusciousness, a rarer quality of his work, but appropriate here to the romantic theme. And Pindar combines here the energy which is his birthright with a certain dignified ease and clearness, and his besetting faults of harshness, bitterness, or overpungency and overstrain are absent altogether. ‘Out of the strong hath come forth sweetness.’. (shrink)

In the initial verses of Seven against Thebes, Eteocles recognizes the need of pronounce the right words as one of his duties as leader and defender of the city of Thebes. The concerns of Eteocles for what ought, or ought not, be said towards an imminent attack comes from a perception of language as a divine form of the world which base itself on the belief among the Greeks that words have a numen in itself and leads, thus, (...) to a prophetic fulfillment. The aim of this paper is, therefore, reveal the contribution of the word to the defense of the city in Seven against Thebes, by Aeschylus. (shrink)

Jean Anouilh , Antigone, La Table ronde, ISBN - 9782710300250Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes: a version of Sophocles' Antigone, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN - 9780374117214.

In March 2005 a rescue excavation uncovered a spectacular new epigraphic find from Thebes. Now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Thebes, a column drum 0.41 m in height has inscribed on it two identical epigrams, one (the older one) written vertically in Boeotian script and a second (later) Ionian copy written horizontally on the other side. Nikolaos Papazarkadas published theeditio princepsof the epigram in 2014, using both inscriptions to create a composite text. As Papazarkadas realized, the (...) column drum, which has a chi-shaped orifice at one end meant to hold a stationary object, at one point displayed a ‘shining shield’ (φαεννὰν | [ἀσπ]ίδα, lines 3–4) that Herodotus had seen in the temple of Apollo Ismenius in Thebes. Moreover, this shield was interpreted by Herodotus (relying on the language of the inscription and likely on the commentary of temple staff) as having been dedicated by the Lydian king Croesus to the hero Amphiaraus, when he was ‘testing’ the various oracles in Greece in order to decide on a course of action against his rival Cyrus of Persia. (shrink)

A forceful study of Sophocles' great drama. With ingenious argument and scholarly documentation Mr. Knox argues that the tragedy of Œdipus is not a tragedy of fate, nor a tragedy of an Aristotelian hero with a "moral flaw," but rather the tragedy of a great man who tries to escape and deny the fact of divine omniscience. The author considers Œdipus as an individual hero, as a political animal who is a symbolic representation of Periclean Athens and as a paradigm (...) of all mankind. The book is written with great vitality and is worth while for "Greekless reader" and classical scholar alike.--M.S.S. (shrink)

So many scholars nowadays believe that the final scenes of the Seven against Thebes as we have them have been considerably distorted and interpolated that some may not be aware that such an opinion was first expressed little more than ioo years ago. The first scholar to do so was A. Scholl, who afterwards recanted.

Caesar in the City of Amun: Egyptian Temple Construction and Theology in Roman Thebes. By David Klotz. Monographies Reine Élisabeth, vol. 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Pp. xvi + 476, illus. €95.

La route antique de Mégare à Thèbes par le défilé du Kandili, dont on a contesté à tort l'existence, correspond à un chemin encore très utilisé au xixe siècle, le Koulouriotiko monopati. Description des restes antiques de cette route et des sites antiques situés tout le long. Les témoignages des historiens antiques sur son utilisation.

In Classical Quarterly N.S. ix , 80 ff. Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones published an article on the closing scenes of Seven Against Thebes. In it he directed an assault on the orthodox belief that these scenes are, in whole or in part, not authentic. The movement in favour of authenticity seemed all the stronger when independently, and in the same year, Walter Potscher put forward arguments in Eranos in defence of some parts of the disputed passages.

What do we mean when affirming ‘the powerful return of the state’? Do we have in mind the jus ad bellum employed by aggressive states, or are we thinking of the duties that a state has towards its citizens? Starting from these questions, this article aims to reconceptualize the issue of the political legitimacy of a state by reconsidering the relationship between power and violence. Among other forms of emergencies and violence, then, a legitimate state needs to be capable of (...) responding to gender-based (sexual and domestic) violence. To reinforce my suggestion, I will reinterpret some Greek and Roman myths related to the founding of cities (Thebes, Athens and Rome). Through these myths, we will be able to illustrate, in particular, the necessity for a state to be capable of combating both public and private violence, reframing the notion of nemesis (as a fate that can be changed by descendants) and fear (as a status that can be stopped in the present). (shrink)

Les inscriptions en linéaire Β des nodules de Thèbes (1982) : la fouille, les documents, les possibilités d'interprétation. P. 103-184 Les inscriptions en linéaire Β portées par les 56 nodules en argile — lesquels présentent également une empreinte de sceau — qui ont été trouvés en 1982 à Thèbes avaient déjà été glosées ici ou là mais jamais véritablement éditées. On trouvera ici photographie, dessin et transcription des faces portant les groupes de signes, le tout accompagné d'un apparat critique et (...) d'index. L'édition est précédée d'une introduction archéologique et suivie de commentaires épigraphiques, paléographiques et philologiques. Enfin, l'on s'interrogera sur l'interprétation qu'il convient de donner de ce groupe homogène de documents, lesquels avaient été réunis dans un but bien précis : la solution est sans doute fournie par une tablette en linéaire Β de Pylos qui présente des similitudes chiffrées étonnantes avec notre ensemble de nodules inscrits. (shrink)

Une nouvelle dépendance du palais mycénien de Thèbes, mise au jour en 1980, présentait des traces évidentes de destruction par incendie comme les autres annexes du palais déjà découvertes dans ce secteur. L'abondance des objets en ivoire et des autres trouvailles montre qu'il s'agit d'un atelier d'ivoirier en usage vers le milieu du XIIIe s. La présence d'un squelette féminin dans la couche de destruction, fait jusqu'à présent unique dans la Thèbes mycénienne, prouve la soudaineté de la catastrophe que l'on (...) attribuera avec vraisemblance à un violent séisme. (shrink)