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Hello, the myths of the ancient Greek city of Thebes were among the most famous and notorious in the Greek world, as was its history.

Athenian dramatists separated from Thebes by only 30 miles in a mountain, treated the myths as a cautionary tale.

They wrote of the royal house of Thebes with its king, Edipus, who killed his father and married his mother, and their daughter Antigone, and of the demigods Hercules or Hercules and Dionysus, both claimed by Thebes.

And Thebes played a key part in battle after battle, fighting with Persians against Greeks, breaking the Spartans for good and offering the last stand against Alexander the Great, for which he destroyed their city.

We've made it to the Greek city of Thebes, our Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College London, Samuel Gartland, Lecturer in Ancient History, Corpus Christi College University of Oxford, and Paul Cartledge, Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and Agile Manta, Senior Research Fellow at Claire College University of Cambridge.

What were the main foundations of Thebes?

Thebes was believed by the ancient Greeks to be its most ancient city state. It was founded by a hero called Cadmus, who was one of the very first generation of monster slayers.

Now, Cadmus actually came from Phoenicia, he was a lebanon. He came from the city of Tyre. He originally left Tyre because his sister Europa had been abducted by Zeus, and he was sent off by his parents to go and try and find her.

In fact, when he went to the Delphiq oracle to say where, where, is Paul Europa? They said, don't worry about that. Go and found Thebes.

Follow this heifer, which has a shape of a crescent moon on her rear until you get to where she lies down, and there found a great city.

So he did that, you don't disobey the Delphiq oracle, theepens who do so get into big trouble. And he went and founded this extraordinary city just north of the Cathiron Mountains.

He married Harmonia, who was the daughter, she was extraordinarily beautiful, her name means beautifully put together, daughter of Erie's and Aphrodite, and at their wedding, the first mortal wedding ever, or the gods came to feast.

And most of all, he slayed the dragon, and Athena or the dragon gave him the tea to put them in the ground and a military force sprung up fully armed.

Beautiful. And the dragon was a dragon of Erie's, it was a particularly important fountain, and he was given a stone which he had to hurl into the fighting stone men, and the fighting stone men all got killed off except for four or five depending on which version you believe.

And he became the ancestors of the ruling aristocratic families of thieves.

Well, after that perfectly plausible realistic, I can't do the pounding of thieves. Let's move on to why would we need to become the source of so many myths, either?

Well, it was regarded as the most ancient one, and it probably was. In the early 20th century, a very important Greek archaeologist called Antónios Caramopoulos dug it up.

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