In the last few years a number of books have dealt with Boiotia in antiquity so, the reader may ask, why one more? Most of the other books have dealt with the history of Boiotia without a real look at the physical setting in which that history took place whereas my own work has always started from the landscape of that country, a natural process for the son of two geographers. The only exception to this rule – and it is a distinguished one – is the work of my friend and colleague John Bintliff and his team. I can only claim to have spent even longer in the land of Boiotia than John and his cohorts have done for, while my own work has run for more than 50 years, theirs has a decade less of activity. After so many years and given the physical difficulties I now encounter it seemed worth drawing a final line to my work with this volume pulling together so much remaining material generated during half a century of exploring the Boiotian countryside. The pleasures of roaming the plains and climbing the hills and mountains of that area are now things of my past so it has been a sort of pilgrimage to go through the memory of them once more during the writing of this book, my Boiotian swansong.
My first acquaintance with Boiotia came in brief visits to Thívai in the summers of 1963 and 1964 as the result of a suggestion by Richard Hope Simpson that I might think of studying Boiotia for my graduate research. He made this suggestion knowing that I was interested in doing regional survey and he was aware of the richness of the Boiotian landscape as a result of his own explorations in company with his friend and colleague John Lazenby in preparation for their study of the Homeric Catalogue of Ships.
My real Boiotian life began in February 1965 when, as a graduate student of Birmingham University, I took up residence in Thívai and stayed there for the best part of the next two years, two of the most enjoyable years of my life. I explored Boiotia from end to end, large sections of it on foot. Returning in the spring of 1967 I had the use of a Landrover that allowed me to cover more ground than my previous reliance on feet and legs; the following two springs also allowed me to take advantage of vehicular transport before I emigrated from Britain to Canada to take up a teaching position at McGill University that was to be my base of operations until my retirement in 2000, after which, while being an Emeritus Professor of that institution, I became Curator of Archaeology at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, subsequently to end my professional career as its Emeritus Curator of Mediterranean Archaeology. During most of my years at McGill I continued my field researches in Boiotia and the neighbouring areas of Eastern Phokis and Opountian Lokris, as well as the Perakhóra peninsula across the Gulf of Korinthos to the immediate South of Boiotia. Indeed even after my move to the museum I still was able in Autumn 2004 to spend a last short season of travel based on the village of Kaskavéli a few kilometres to the West of Thíva (as it was then known in the demotic form unlike the katharevousa version of Thívai I had earlier known). My stay in Kaskavéli was much helped by the loan of his house in his native village by my old friend Níkos Kóllias; I am much in his debt. Even if my peregrinations in its landscape were to cease after 2004 Boiotia always occupied my thoughts and caused me to revisit notes and ideas I had set down from 1965 onwards.
The results of the various stages of my work in Boiotia were first published in several articles leading to Topography and Population of Ancient Boiotia (1988) that grew out of my doctoral thesis defended in January 1976; a volume Papers in Boiotian Topography and History (1990) in supplement to that monograph reprinted some of those articles. A year later Epigraphica Boeotica I: Studies in Boiotian Inscriptions (1991) published those of my previous articles on the inscriptions of the area together with a number of new studies; this was followed rather many years later by Epigraphica Boeotica II: Further Studies on Boiotian Inscriptions that brought to an end my investigations of the texts on stone (and pottery) from Boiotia, an area of study to which I had been introduced by the two mentors of my doctoral thesis at Université de Lyon II, the late Professors Jean Pouilloux and Paul Roesch.
In writing this book as a kind of swansong to my Boiotian researches I thought it perhaps useful to summarise their background. In fact it is inevitable that I shall continue to think about Boiotia since, with members of my team, we are continuing with the publication of our excavations of 1980 and 1983 at Khóstia in the South West corner of Boiotia but the present book will probably be the last study of the territory in general. I have, therefore, tried to include all the material remaining from my fieldwork in that area. Particularly is this the case with consideration of military activities represented by fortifications and what I have felt to be defence networks in the same way that I had explored similar situations in Eastern Phokis and Opountian Lokris; this sprang from ideas concerning the Spartan activities in Boiotia in the early 4th century BCE formulated after my work with Richard Tomlinson at Mavrovoúni, as also did some considerations of cults and temples.
During the many years of my fieldwork I had the help of several people and in finishing this apologia pro vita mea in Boeotia I recall, in no particularly chronological order, those whose company and help I most frequently enjoyed: my late wife Eléni Zoïtopoúlou, my late father Hubert Fossey, Roger Green, Nick Baykov, Ginette Gauvin, Jacques Morin, Mike Attas. During the preparation of my previous and present accounts I always received much help from the draughtsmanship of Ginette Gauvin and for the illustrations – both plates and figure – of this volume, in addition to using the base maps prepared by Ginette I have had a great deal of help from my friend George Kellaris who manages to do remarkable things with photoshop; my son-in-law, Scott Bédard with his expertise in computer-assisted design has managed to make sense out of some of the site plans which had been drawn in the field long ago; Renée Bouchard helped with finalising the appearance of several site plans herein. I also received much help in gaining access to certain publications in Greek from two friends, Christina Avronidaki and Yanis Kaliontzis. To all these friends and helpers I can only express my deepest thanks.
Very real thanks go also to my friends and colleagues at the publishing house of Brill. First must come Mirjam Elbers, senior collections editor for Classical Studies, and her assistant Giulia Moriconi; an especial debt at Brill is to Gera van Bedaf with whom I have worked frequently for over more than a decade on the production of volumes of the two series of which I serve Brill as Editor-in-Chief, Monumenta Graeca et Romana and McGill University Monographs in Classical Archaeology and History as well as on my previous book Epigraphica Boeotica II. A by-product of my working with Brill has been the frequent visits to its head offices in Leiden (Netherlands), a city I always enjoy and where I have acquired many other friends over these last years in addition to those at Brill; two of them in particular are Hanneke Kik and her husband Maarten Duinden, the hospitality of whose house and table has been generously and affectionately offered so often. Frequently, over the last period, it has been my assistant at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Alexis Lemonde-Vachon who has coordinated electronic transfers between Montreal and Leiden of text and illustrations as well as information and up-dates. Alexis has also helped very much in getting hold of necessary bibliographic reference material. I also owe a big debt of thanks to my fellow Boiotologist Prof. Stepahnie Larson (Bucknell University) for her many suggestions.
This book sets out to see certain developments in the history of Boiotia in a geographic context and it is only appropriate that I recall the influence in my earlier years of my parents, both of them geographers. The geographic dimension of this work will immediately become very clear from the number of maps it includes. I hope that in some ways I have been able to see historical events in terms of the symbiotic relationship that exists between human societies and their physical environment. Human societies adopt a landscape, they adapt to it and they adapt it to their needs. Most of all can this be seen in furtherance of their strategies, economic and military. It is particularly military strategy that concerns several parts of this book – the way in which the inhabitants of ancient Boiotia made use of their mountains to place protective networks that take advantage of naturally strong positions to set their fortifications and to exploit natural lines of sight for control and communications
I am well aware that there will be readers who will disagree with various of my conclusions or suggested interpretations but there will be few of them who can claim the same close acquaintance with the Boiotian landscape that I have acquired over the last half century. Close behind me, as already mentioned, has come John Bintliff and his team who have been fortunate enough to be able to make use of techniques and a sizable team; obviously GPS was not available to me, especially in the 60’s and 70’s when so much of my fieldwork was carried out and I never had a real team of people with me – most of my field work was “a one-man show”.
Of the 15 chapters in this book nos. 1, 6 and 7 are reworked versions of earlier articles and 11 is a partial extract from another, again extensively reworked; much earlier versions of 3 and 9 were delivered orally at conferences but not published up to now and 13 is the continuation and expansion of a chapter in my last previous book. All the other chapters are completely fresh accounts of observations and interpretations not previously aired. Chapter 15 is, of course, the work of its author my friend Stephanie Stringer, an examination of the Leuktra epigram which she undertook at my request; I am very grateful to her for her collaboration and hope that this will be but the first of many academic works published by her.
It was a real pleasure to examine the ramifications of the three “modern” folk stories included herein that I heard during my Boiotian peregrinations and which always struck me as potentially having useful things to tell us with reference to a past more distant than their own apparent context. There are probably many other such stories to be recorded but it is hoped that this threesome may whet the reader’s appetite for more; may it then encourage colleagues to be alert to possible ancient meaning in folk stories that appear superficially to be of recent genesis. In fact recording of such stories should be taken quite seriously; the account of the daughters of Skedasos reminds us that the key to its understanding was the word tata in Arvanitic; since that language is fast dying out so too can really be lost stories of this sort.
I have already thanked the various friends and colleagues who participated in the fieldwork and in the preparation of this volume but all that would have been as of little worth were it not for the influence and encouragement from my immediate family. As already mentioned, my late wife, Eléni Zoïtopoúlou, accompanied me on many of the later stages of my fieldwork and, as a fellow archaeologist, could always follow my reasoning. After her death in 2007 it was our daughter, Pavlína, who took up the torch constantly encouraging me to get back to my own work and being happy when things did work out and pages did get written. She and her husband Scott also added to my joy in these last years by giving me my two youngest grandchildren.
JMF
Montréal, December 2018