Thebes

Paul Cartledge has done it again - he has shone a light on a crucial epicentre of ancient Greek affairs that so often gets overshadowed by the might of Athens. He does it with assured scholarship, a clear and engaging style, and more than a hint of humour. Thebes is lucky to have Cartledge as its champion! -- Michael Scott
'The Forgotten City', as Cambridge professor Paul Cartledge calls it in his engaging new history, nonetheless was of enormous political and cultural importance . . . One of the many strengths of Cartledge’s book is the way it illustrates how hearsay, history and myth combined to form the basis of Theban culture . . . Cartledge’s great achievement is to solve the riddle of why Thebes disappeared and put the ancient city back on the map. -- Daisy Dunn * Literary Review *
Cartledge, matching his unrivalled command of the complex, fragmentary and often contradictory sources to his talents as a storyteller, traces the arc of the Theban story as well as anyone is likely to do. -- Tom Holland * Spectator *
Will delight anyone that is interested in ancient Greece and the Classical world more generally. An outstanding work by a scholar of justifiable world renown. -- Mark Merrony * Antiquus *
Paul Cartledge’s gripping new book reconstructs an ancient city that was once the near equal of Athens and Sparta, but left behind no Thucydides to tell its story . . . Cartledge’s Thebes has let me see a familiar subject, ancient Greece, in a fundamentally new way. -- Rana Mitter * History Today *
Excellent . . . rich and detailed * London Review of Books *
An incisive, inspiring and vitally illuminating account of a city which changed the ancient world and which deserves to be remembered by the modern. A masterful book written by a master historian. -- Bettany Hughes, bestselling author of Istanbul and Helen of Troy.
The great value of this book is that is enables us to see the Thebans not through the eyes of their enemies, but as they themselves would have wished to me seen. -- Tom Holland * BBC History 'Books of the year' *
Cartledge deserves full credit for his spirited and readable attempt to put Thebes back on the map. -- Peter Thonemann * TLS *
Thebes has all but slipped from cultural consciousness. Or so it had. In this new book, Paul Cartledge, the former AG Leventis professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge, with his usual charm and erudition, fights to 'rescue it, permanently, from oblivion'. -- Catherine Nixey * BBC History Magazine *