[The following is in regards to the fall of Thebes, conquered and razed to the ground by Alexander the Great in his pacification of Greece, following the death of his father and his ascent to the throne of Macedon.]
The word ‘tyrant’ stung Alexander – no one likes hearing unwelcome home truths about himself, least of all a general whose men are within earshot – and he flew into one of his famous rages. From now on, he swore, he would ‘pursue the Thebans with the extremity of punishment’. He was as good as his word. The siege-engines were brought up, and the palisades breached. The Theban army fought a magnificent action outside the walls, and came within an ace of putting Alexander’s troops to flight, even when the king threw in his reserves. But at the crucial moment, Alexander saw that one postern-gate had been deserted by its guards. He at once sent a brigade under Perdiccas to get inside the city and make contact with the beleaguered garrison. This task Perdiccas successfully accomplished, though he himself sustained a severe wound during the action.
The moment the Thebans learnt that their city-walls had been penetrated, they lost heart. Alexander counterattacked; they wavered, broke, and fled in a wild stampede. The Electra Gate was jammed with the retreating troops, all desperate to get through. The cavalry followed. Dozens of men were trampled underfoot; the great archway rang with screams and curses and the thudding of hooves.
Before the ground could be cleared, or the gates shut and barred, Alexander’s veterans were pouring into Thebes. There followed a period of savage street-fighting, which finally degenerated into wholesale butchery. Some of the Theban cavalry broke back and escaped across the plain; but for the most part Thebes’ defenders fought and died where they stood, using broken spear-hafts or their bare hands, asking no quarter and certainly getting none. Women and old men were dragged from sanctuary and ‘subjected to outrage without limit’. Every house was ransacked, every temple plundered. The dead lay thick along the winding allays. Each corner had its piles of loot, its piteously wailing children.
This bloodbath was by no means the unaided work of Alexander’s Macedonians. Many others whom Thebes in the past had subjected to her own imperious rule – Thespians, Plataeans, the men of Orchomenus: Boeotians all themselves – now took their fearful revenge on the conquered city. By nightfall over 6,000 Thebans had been slaughtered, and something like 30,000 taken prisoner, for the loss of 500 Macedonian and allied troops. Much of the surrounding countryside was also looted and burnt.
[…]
A dignified and cogent appeal by the one Theban prisoner permitted, for form’s sake, to address the council was dismissed out of hand. Then the final voting took place. The delegates’ decision was ‘to raze the city, to sell the captives, to outlaw the Theban exiles from all Greece, and to allow no Greek to offer shelter to a Theban’. The Cadmea was to retain its garrison, while Thebes’ domains were parceled out among those same Boeotian cities that had encompassed her downfall.
The seven-gated city of history and legend, where Oedipus had ruled and Teiresias prophesied, was now, on the authority of a puppet commission, to be blotted from the face of the earth. The sentence was carried out immediately (September 335).
Author’s Note:
Arrian, following Ptolemy, suggests that Perdiccas ‘jumped the gun’ and started the attack without orders. This is extremely unlikely. Ptolemy, it is clear, wanted to minimize Alexander’s responsibility in the matter: he further suggests that all atrocities were committed by allied [Greek] troops, none by the Macedonians. Besides, Perdiccas was never a friend of his. For once Diodorus’ account is fuller, more coherent, and intrinsically more plausible than Arrian’s, and I have no hesitation in following it. cf. now Milns, pp. 40-41. For the figures of the dead and captured see also Aelian, VH 13.7; for the burning of the Thebaid, Paus. 9.25.10.
Source:
Green, Peter. “The Keys of the Kingdom.” Alexander of Macedon: 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography. Univ. of California Press, 2005. 146-48. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Diod. 17.11-13 passim; 17.14.1-4.
Arrian 1.8.1-7; 1.9.6-10.
Plut. Alex. 11.5-6.
Justin 11.3.8-11.4.8.
Further Reading:
Alexander III of Macedon / Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας (Alexander the Great)
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