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164 In fact the Spartans proved but lukewarm friends to Thebes. Hearty support from Sparta might have averted the bitter humiliation of Œnophyta; but that support was withheld, and the Thebans found too late that they had leaned upon a broken reed.

The mythical glories of Thebes were out of all proportion to the importance of the city in later history. They carry us back into times before the Dorians had established themselves in Sparta, when Athens was not yet a city. Thebes and Argos were then the foremost powers in Greece; and the struggles between these two cities occupy in the earlier period of Greek mythology the same prominence which in the later period belongs to the Trojan war. The opening verses of the Sixth Isthmian contain a long list of the heroic memories of ancient Thebes, the birth-place of Heracles the greatest of all Greek heroes, of Dionysus the god of wine, of Tiresias the father of Grecian seership, of Iolaus—a favourite hero of Pindar's—the nephew and comrade of Heracles. There too we find mention of the "Sparti," the warrior-race who sprang from the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus, first founder of the city, and from whom sundry Theban families in Pindar's own day claimed descent. The closing scene of the Argive war, the repulse of Adrastus from before the walls of Thebes, is not forgotten: and the list closes with the legend of Pindar's own ancestors, the Ægids, who helped to found the Dorian sovereignty in Sparta.

References to this series of legends abound in our poet, but they are by no means confined to the Odes addressed to Theban conquerors. Indeed, in these latter