Thebe () — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Thebe — Hypoplakian Thebe, holy city of Eetion — first of Troy's allies to fall, and the hidden spark of Achilles' wrath.

The Cilician city of Eetion under Mount Plakos, a Trojan ally sacked by Achilles in the tenth-year raids. Its plunder yielded Chryseis to Agamemnon — kindling the quarrel that opens the Iliad — and its royal daughter Andromache, Hektor's wife, now lives as the war-slave of Achilles' own son.

Leader at Troy: Thebe.

Role in the Trojan War: A Cilician city allied to Troy, fielding no ships in the muster because it fell first: Achilles stormed it in the early raids, slew King Eetion and Andromache's seven brothers, and carried off the spoil — Chryseis and the horse Pedasos — that would ignite his quarrel with Agamemnon.

The homecoming: Sacked and never rebuilt — its last princess a slave-bride in her destroyer's house.

Under the wooded shoulder of Mount Plakos, where the land of the Kilikes runs down toward the Troad, stood high-gated Thebe — the holy city of Eetion, ally and neighbour of Troy. It is not a realm of the Catalogue of Ships, for it never lived to be mustered against: Thebe fell in the tenth-year's opening raids, when Achilles and the Myrmingdons harried the towns about Ilios. Its whole story is a sack and its long aftermath, and at the present hour of the returns it is a silent name under the mountain, its house scattered as spoil across the Achaian world. Eetion was its king — "chiefest once of all the world in lineage, wealth, in many and goodly sons," as the widowed remember him. He was father-in-law to Hektor of Troy: his daughter, white-armed Andromache, golden Aphrodite's own bride-gift bright upon her, Hektor had "led forth of the house of Eetion, having given bride-gifts untold." So Thebe was bound to Ilios by marriage, and its fall was the first cutting of that cord. When Achilles took the city he slew Eetion and, in the same day's work, the seven brothers of Andromache in their father's halls — a house emptied at a stroke. The sack of Thebe is the hidden spring of the whole war-song. From its plundered wealth "the sons of the Achaians divided among them all aright; and for Atreides they set apart Chryseis of the fair cheeks" — and it was that captive, torn from Thebe and given to Agamemnon of golden Mycenae (MYC), whose ransoming Agamemnon refused, so that Apollo sent the plague and the quarrel over her forced surrender kindled the menis of Achilles with which the Iliad opens. Achilles took, too, the goodly trace-horse Pedasos from Eetion's stalls, a mortal steed that ran beside the immortal pair. Thus the ruin of one small Trojan ally set the great host at its own throat. Thebe's true kinship is with sister-city Lyrnessos (LYR), stormed in the very same raids — there Achilles slew Mynes and bore off Briseis, as here he bore off Chryseis; two Trojan towns emptied in a season by the son of Peleus and his Myrmidons (MYR). Both were satellites of Troy (TRO), and both purchased the fall of Ilios in advance with their own. There is no nostos for Thebe — no leader came home, for its king was burned in his own armour and its walls were never raised again. Its return, if it has one, is Andromache's, and it is the cruelest in the poems. Widowed when Achilles' son struck down Hektor's line — the babe Astyanax hurled from the tower — she was haled "midst the captive thralls," and in the division of Troy's spoil "to Achilles' son Andromache had" fallen as prize. So the last princess of Thebe now dwells overseas as the war-bride of Neoptolemus of Skyros (SKY) — the son of the very man who razed her father's city and killed her seven brothers. She "on those three fearful deaths... of husband, child, and father" broods far from woody Plakos, and Thebe endures only in her mourning.

“We had fared to Thebe, the holy city of Eetion, and laid it waste and carried hither all the spoils.” — Iliad 1.366