# Thebes: The forgotten City of Ancient Greece by author # Paul Cartledge is a wonderful history. Thebes overshadowed by rivals, at one point was the most powerful city in Ancient Greece. And this novel gives the city long lost credit.🌟🐾
Thank you,
#Netgalley, # Paul Cartledge, and # Abrams Press for the advanced copy
* Good gift for those in School along with history lovers with the holidays approaching.🎁

A detailed and, informative study of a often forgotten polis. Worth a careful read by people interested in Ancient Greek history.

Thebes will always be relegated to standing in the shadows behind the more well-known Spartans and Athenians. But, Cartledge makes a valiant effort to dredge Thebes up from relative obscurity; polish her up and tell the world about all about her. Cartledge once again succeeds in threading the needle between scholarly and popular history, making a readable little book in the process. He weaves together disparate elements of Theban culture to write a book about Ancient Greece that is not focused on the Athenians or the Spartans. Thebans deserve to shine a little more and this book does an admirable job.

Thebes is often overlooked by books on Ancient Greece, in favor of Athens and Sparta so I was thrilled to see a book dedicated to this often ignored area.

This is a fantastic book with a lot of information, starting with pre-history, to Thebes as we know it and moving through it's downfall with lots of great detail of everything in between. The middle of the book includes a lot of information on wars in the region which I highly enjoyed, as a fan of military history. Mr. Cartledge also injects his own personality and snark though out which is great, especially if you need a bit of a break from the often heavy subject matter. Though it's a bit short coming in at 320 pages, I feel like we could have adding a few hundred more with even more detail and information (but I like my books big!).

I was a bit disappointed with sections of the book where Thebes is not only no longer the focus, but after is completely relegated to the background and not even given a passing glance, though I understand that often times that's necessary. The book does seem to jump around a bit, and I wish Mr. Cartledge would have finished out lines of thought/narrative instead of shelving them for later, I have a bad memory and it's tough to recall the beginnings of these sometimes. However I still really enjoyed the book and will definitely recommend it to friends and family. I've read most of Cartledge's work and I've loved every single one.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Cartledge recasts the "traditional" way of narrating Greek history from a Athens-Sparta binary to a Athens-Sparta-Thebes triangle. Any book that attempts to decenter Greek history away from Athens is already starting well in my books. The trouble for Cartledge comes when he gets bogged down in the non-Theban aspects of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, especially the wars. There were many times that I could have been reading any textbook about Classical Greece. Pages go by with nary a mention of Thebes. Most problematic for me is that Cartledge spends so much of his time narrating "history" with only vaguely more emphasis on Thebes than usual (certainly not from a "Theban" perspective). I never quite understood what was actually very different about his narrative of the Persian War, Peloponnesian War, Corinthian War, and Battle of Chaeronea (Chapters 6, 8, 9, 10) from what I learned in history class (which indeed included quite a bit of discussion about Thebes, as I think most ancient Greek history classes taught in the last ten years do). Plus, I felt those chapters were particularly inaccessible to a general audience, because they assumed a significant amount of knowledge about the wars. At some points in the book, he introduces Thucydides as if the reader had never heard of him, and at other points in the book, he assumes the reader has read, analyzed, and internalized all of Thucydides.

Cartledge is at his best when he gets out of the historical narrative and weaves together the diverse sources. I very much enjoyed when his discussions incorporated material culture, literature, and myth. His analyses of vases and plays add an important dimension and enormous value to his discussion. In my mind, this is real history, not picking out the Theban bits from Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus. At times, his discussion of material culture and cultural history were so engaging that I felt I was sitting in a particularly good lecture, and it didn't feel like I was reading at all.

I enjoyed the way Cartledge employed his narrative voice -- he's at time dryly funny and snarky and somewhat informal, which added levity to the 150+ pages of incessant war in the middle. I also thought his Chapter 1 was really excellent. I would certainly assign it to students. I think it hits the exact right level for undergraduate students and curious, non-specialists. However, there were enough times that I (an ancient historian and classicist by profession) had to look up information, because it wasn't adequately explained or contextualized. There were also numerous instances where I understood a joke or a reference but ABSOLUTELY know that my students and basically anyone who is not an ancient historian would be lost.

I was also let down by his discussion of the Boeotian federal state. It's such an important political concept, and I felt that the discussion was lost in the narrative of Chapter 9. I would have liked to have seen it as its own chapter, like Chapter 5. While Cartledge briefly mentions that it is a forerunner to the American federal state system, it deserves a much fuller and accessible discussion that aims at uncovering the structure and legacy of this political system.

I was very excited by the timeline at the beginning of the book, because it seemed like we were going to get a fuller discussion about post-335 Thebes. Unfortunately, this was little more than a timeline itself. Chapter 13 (Mythic Revivals) felt very out of place. Also the tone of the writing changed completely. It goes from a rather a somewhat funny, jokey author to a rather stuffy and pretentious professional theater and literature reviewer. Both are fine, but it felt like an entirely new author in the last chapter. I actually think I would have preferred a discussion of Thebes' "afterlife" in the beginning of the book to set the scene and to provide more self-awareness to the book. My main criticism is actually the lack of self-awareness both in the who the audience is and what the aim of the book is. Cartledge notes frequently that something is important, but doesn't mention why. Sometimes he says that there is something important in say the Peloponnesian War generally but doesn't actually say WHAT was important. Sure, a well-informed reader can get there but that is asking the reader to do the job of the author. I would have liked to see more signposting of arguments and a clearer (and more self-aware) structure, possibly with sections and subsections in the very long middle chapters.

I don't know who the audience for this book is, and I'm not sure Cartledge does either, which I think is where the majority of the problems of the book arise. I think that Paul Cartledge is a clear, interesting, and (usually) engaging writer and an excellent historian. I do, however. think that this book would be inaccessible for most readers.

If you are anything like me, your last lectures on Ancient Greece occurred many years ago, focused on Athens and Sparta, and have dissolved into a bit of a fog. My knowledge of the city of Thebes was limited to references in Disney’s Hercules. But I’m always on the lookout for new information, so this book covering the rise and fall of historical Thebes, as well as Thebes of myth, sounded promising. I was expecting a work along the lines of Mary Beard’s SPQR: decidedly grounded in academic fact, but approachable by the armchair historian who knows very little. Thebes is not that book. Cartledge is obviously an expert on his subject, but he assumes a relatively high level of familiarity with Ancient Greece and Grecians. The ARC I received as an ebook did not have the maps, illustrations, or pictures, and therefore I can’t comment on how those might help readers who don’t already know quite a bit about the geography and history of the region. The overall tone and style are highly academic, including a stereotypical lack of clarity and confusing cross-references within the text.

I can’t recommend this to general readers, but I can see it as a candidate for individuals who have read deeply and broadly about Ancient Greece, or for use in an academic setting.

I received a copy of this work from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

Very interesting and detailed book. Enjoy the fruits of labor from Cartledge’s deep dive into Ancient Greece, which produced this informative and historically rich account of Thebes.

Thebes By Paul Cartledge gets three stars because it will go on to a deep detailed explanation great right? Then it will say we will put this on pause and come back to this another time. It jumps around a lot back and forth alot which can get quite confusing to the reader at least me. I'm a huge fan of greek and roman history and myths and comparatives so that's why it gets still a good rating. ( actually it would be 3.5) Since I don't mind the academic feeling of books. This arc was given to me by net galley in exchange for an honest review.