Trial and Execution of Ismenias at Thebes

Occupation breeds spectacles of justice. In the months after Phoebidas and his collaborators took the Cadmeia, Ismenias, a prominent Theban opposed to Sparta’s encroachment, was arrested and put on trial. The court’s independence was a fiction; the sentence was preordained. Xenophon notes the proceedings and the execution that followed, a cold administrative killing staged to give the coup a veneer of law [3].

The geography of humiliation traced a short route: from the Cadmeia’s gray stones, where scarlet cloaks watched, down to the agora where citizens whispered, and back up to the place of confinement. The crack of the staff on the floor, the pronouncement of guilt, the silence afterward—these sounds filled a city under guard. Thebes had lost not just its acropolis but its voice.

For Sparta, the removal of Ismenias was neat bookkeeping. A hostile leader gone; a friendlier council installed; a clearer path to managing Boeotia. For Athens, the act broadcast a message: exiles would soon arrive seeking refuge. For the exiles, the execution etched a name into their cause. Pelopidas and others, nursing grief and anger in Athenian porticoes, began to plan revenge with careful precision [3][18].

The narrative’s other actors loom at the edges. Agesilaus had chosen to call the seizure ‘useful’; the trial made the utility explicit. The King’s Peace, inscribed in stone and speaking of ‘autonomy,’ now stood beside a courtroom where autonomy’s meaning had been emptied out. The law’s letters remained black and legible; their spirit went gray.

Across Boeotia, towns calculated their positions. Without the federative shield of the Boeotian League—dissolved under ‘autonomy’ enforcement—they found Thebes occupied and its champions killed. For four years, the occupation held. Then, in 379/8, knives under winter cloaks turned the arithmetic around [12][18].