Stones, Names, Stories, and Bodies: Pausanias before the Walls of Seven-Gated Thebes

Abstract

This chapter discusses four different facets of the famous walls of that most literary of cities, Boeotian Thebes, encountered in different ways. My title sets out heuristic categories: the stones used to construct the walls, the names given to their gates, the stories intricately intertwined with them, and the bodies of the heroes who died attacking and defending them. These are deliberately flexible, porous labels. They illustrate an interlocking corpus of knowledge. Each element both depends on and inflects the others, and never tidily. In their various configurations, together they constitute the walls of Thebes.