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The Spartan Occupation of Thebes

  • Writer: sulla80
    sulla80
  • May 3
  • 8 min read

In the winter of 379 BC, a small group of Theban exiles returned from Athens to a city held under Spartan occupation. Some entered Thebes under the guise of hunters; later that night, conspirators in women’s clothing entered a banquet and killed the pro-Spartan polemarchs. The coup ended the Spartan occupation of the Kadmeia and opened the way to Thebes’ brief but extraordinary ascendancy in Greece.


This stater may belong to that world. The standard catalogue tradition dates the ARKA issue to c. 368-364 BC, but Schachter’s revised chronology would move it back into the years of Spartan control, c. 382-379 BC. The clue is not only the magistrate’s name but a single letter: the local Boeotian R-shaped rho in ARKA, preserved on a coin struck at a moment when Thebes was negotiating political domination and the survival of its older civic forms.

If Schachter's chronology holds, this coin was issued 382–379 BC when Sparta had seized the Theban citadel and left Thebes under the control of a pro-Spartan faction, protected by a Spartan garrison in the Kadmeia (citadel). BCD Boiotia 536 (same rev. die), Hepworth 13 (same rev. die); SNG Copenhagen 318 (same rev. die); British Museum -.
If Schachter's chronology holds, this coin was issued 382–379 BC when Sparta had seized the Theban citadel and left Thebes under the control of a pro-Spartan faction, protected by a Spartan garrison in the Kadmeia (citadel). BCD Boiotia 536 (same rev. die), Hepworth 13 (same rev. die); SNG Copenhagen 318 (same rev. die); British Museum -.
1975 Glendining listing for this coin Lot 64
1975 Glendining listing for this coin Lot 64

The Greek Alphabet Before Standardization

The Phoenician alphabet dates to around 1050-1000 BC, and the Phoenician script itself descended from even earlier Semitic writing traditions going back to around 1800-1700 BC. By the eight century BC, and perhaps earlier, Greeks had adapted the Phoenician alphabet. Each Greek city-state used its own local version of the alphabet.

Figure 28 from Jeffery, 1990, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece The top row gives the standard classical Greek alphabet as a reference header (alpha through rho at the end). The rows numbered 1-5 below show the actual attested Boeotian letterforms, organized chronologically with row 1 being the earliest and row 5 the latest.
Figure 28 from Jeffery, 1990, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece The top row gives the standard classical Greek alphabet as a reference header (alpha through rho at the end). The rows numbered 1-5 below show the actual attested Boeotian letterforms, organized chronologically with row 1 being the earliest and row 5 the latest.

This table shows Boeotia's epichoric alphabet - an English word with Greek roots ἐπιχώριος (epikhōrios) - "of the land" or "native to the place" from ἐπί (epi, upon/in) + χώρα (khōra, land, region) - the English meaning "local" or "regional".


Where the Boeotian Alphabet Came From

Boeotian letter forms belong broadly to the western, Euboean-Chalcidian family of local Greek alphabets. Boeotian script was an independent local tradition, not a provincial or degraded version of the alphabet we think of as "classical Greek." Boeotia did not get its alphabet from the Ionic Greeks of the Aegean coast - the tradition that eventually became the standard classical Greek alphabet. Instead, it received its script from the neighboring city of Chalkis on the island of Euboea.


Reforms in Athens

In 403 BC Athens had just survived the Thirty Tyrants - a brutal period after losing the Peloponnesian War. The alphabet reform was part of a sweeping democratic renewal. The old Attic alphabet had real practical problems, most notably using the same letter for two different sounds, and the Ionic alphabet from the Greek cities of the Aegean coast already resolved these ambiguities cleanly and was increasingly used by Athenian traders and educated classes anyway. Other city-states adopted the standard gradually through the 4th century simply because Athens was the cultural and commercial center of gravity.


The R-Shaped Rho

In Boeotia, the earlier Boeotian rho looked like a P, and the R-shaped form only developed from around 520-480 BC onward. It was invented to solve a practical visual problem - Boeotia's letter for D was also rounded and D-shaped, so the P-form rho was easy to confuse with it. Adding the diagonal leg to create the R-shape resolved the ambiguity. The Ionic tradition solved the same problem differently, by sharpening the D into a triangle (Δ).


Boeotian silver begins in the sixth century, with Theban and federal shield types already established before 500 BC. Boeotia was slow to abandon their local letterforms, which appear on coins as late as the 390s BC. The R-shaped rho is not a simple fifth-century date marker; it also shows the persistence of local Boeotian letter forms into the early fourth century - it rules out the very earliest issues, which would show a P-shaped rho instead.


The Provenance

Beyond its historical significance, this particular coin has a documented recent history spanning three continents which is a positive support for authenticity. It is always fun to find lost provenance for a coin - especially when that provenance covers more than 50 years of the coins travels from Sydney Australia to London to the US. I am grateful to @Boneless a collector of Boeotian coins from Numisforums.com who shared this information with me a week ago.


This stater is from an Australian collection sold in 1975 by Glendining in London - the auction description reads:

"THE collection now offered for sale was begun over fifteen years ago. The owners, both retired educationalists, have been inspired in its formation 1n recent years by their son, W. James Noble, a well known collector in Australia. It contains specimens from various sources including older Australian and New Zealand collections and though many of the coins have not been on the market for many years, most of them probably emanated from London at some time or other. It is gratifying that these particular coins should be offered to the public once again from London."
-11-12 December 1975 - Glendining & Co. Auction Catalog

Here is the coin in the plate photo from 1975 (note that the obverse is 180 rotated from my photo). https://archive.org/details/catalogueofimpor00glen_70/page/20/mode/2up


Two tools are used by numismatists to sequence undated coins:

1) die-linking, which identifies coins struck from the same physical die, and

2) hoard evidence, which establishes which coins were circulating together when a hoard was buried.


Hepworth used both to place ARKA in the sequence, noting: ARKA is "die-isolated" and he placed it tentatively between Klion (ΚΛΙΩ/ΚΛΙΩΝ) and Kabirichos (KABI) in his relative chronology.

“Like ΚΛΙΩ(Ν) the ARKA issue is not die-linked to any other magistrate. Termini post and ante quem are established by the absence of APKA from the Myron hoard and its presence in the Thessaly 1978 hoard whose linked magistrate sequence ends seven issues after those of Myron. It seems logical to place both the unlinked issues together and ARKA is therefore tentatively positioned between the ΚΛΙΩ(Ν) and KABI issues.”
-Hepworth 1998 p.66

Dating the Coin

The traditional numismatic date for this coin is  c. 368-364 BC; Schachter’s analysis pulls the issue back into the occupation c.3820379 BC. The KABI issue that follows ARKA in Hepworth’s sequence may refer to Kabirichos/Cabirichus, the magistrate killed during the liberation of Thebes. In Plutarch’s De Genio Socratis, Cabirichus is a lot-appointed magistrate with sacral associations, but he is also treated by the conspirators as compromised by collaboration with the pro-Spartan regime. Schachter’s identification of the coin magistrate with this historical figure is the hinge of the revised chronology: if KABI belongs to 379 BC, then ARKA may belong immediately before it, during the Spartan occupation.


The two varieties (ARKA, with the R-form rho) and Attic-Ionic (APKA, with the P-form of rho) could provide evidence of two different die engravers: one trained in the old local alphabet, one already using the new standard. This is what you might expect in the early 380s, when the Attic-Ionic alphabet had been official in Athens for two decades but had not yet fully displaced the local tradition in Boeotia.


One possible explanation - unprovable but attractive - could explain why the ARKA issue specifically might have drawn on a different pool of craftsmen. If Schachter's 382-379 BC dating is correct, the mint was operating under the disruption of the Spartan occupation, when normal institutional continuity was broken. The regular die-cutters may have fled with the pro-Athenian faction - around three hundred Thebans escaped to Athens after the coup - leaving the mint to work with whoever remained or could be recruited, which could easily have included an older craftsman still writing in the traditional letters.


Schachter’s chronology is respected and yet auction houses and catalogs are slow to reacognize and still rely on the older Hepworth dating. Schachter’s revised chronology has already proven useful: Papazarkadas uses it to identify the coin magistrate Wastias with both the inscribed Wastias of the Theban lion and the Spartan leaning politician Astias/Wastias of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. For ARKA specifically, the remaining uncertainty is the relative placement of a die-isolated issue before KABI.


Sparta and Thebes

In 404 BC Sparta defeated Athens and was at the height of its dominance over Greece. The King's Peace of 386 BC, was brokered with Persia and declared all Greek city-states autonomous. Sparta used the autonomy clause of the King’s Peace to dismantle the Boeotian Confederacy. Anti-Spartan factions remained politically active in Thebes and the city remained a potential rallying point for Greek resistance.


In 382 BC a Spartan general named Phoibidas was urged by Leontiades, the leader of the pro-Spartan faction in Thebes, to seize the Kadmeia, the citadel of Thebes. Phoibidas marched his troops into the city during the festival of the Thesmophoria. The festival displaced normal civic use of the Kadmeia and created a moment of vulnerability.


Ismenias, an anti-Spartan leader in Thebes, was arrested, charged with collaborating with Persia and executed. Androkleidas and ally of Ismenias fled to Athens with around three hundred members of the anti-Spartan faction. The occupation lasted just under three years, ending in the winter of 379 BC with a dramatic coup.


A small group of Theban exiles slipped back into Thebes. Some came in as hunters; later, the assassins entered the banquet disguised as women, assassinated the pro-Spartan polemarchs at a dinner party, and seized the city.


The KABI (Kabirichos) issue that immediately follows ARKA in the sequence is named for the eponymous archon of 379 BC who was killed during the liberation. Kabirichos, the legitimate chief magistrate of Thebes, not a Spartan appointee, appears in Plutarch's De Genio Socratis (On the Sign of Socrates), a philosophical dialogue written in the early second century AD, roughly five centuries after the events it describes, in which the liberation of Thebes is narrated by a participant.

"But Theopompos, standing at his right (Kabirichos' right), struck him with his sword and said: "Lie there with those whom you flattered. May you never be crowned in a free Thebes, and may you sacrifice no more to the gods, before whom you many times called down many curses upon your homeland, praying on behalf of its enemies." 
-Plutarch De_Genio_Socratis 31 (machine translated from the Greek text)

By Schachter's reading, this coin was struck in the last years or months before that moment of violent political reversal.


References

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