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Updated: June 12, 2025
On New Year's, 1584, John Lyly, the author of Euphues, presented in the first Blackfriars Theater his prose comedy, entitled Campaspe. This play relates the love story of Alexander the Great's fair Theban captive, Campaspe. The twenty-eight characters necessary to produce this play were obtained from the boys of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul's Cathedral.
It was a saying of Epaminondas the Theban that nothing was so useful and necessary for a commander as to be able to see through the intentions and designs of his adversary. And because it is hard to come at this knowledge directly, the more credit is due to him who reaches it by conjecture.
At the truth flashing in upon me through these fantastic lies, I had passed into that mood when the grotesque wickedness of Fate's awards can draw from the victim no loud lamentations when there are no frantic blows aimed at the sufferer's own poor eyeballs till the beard like the self-mutilated Theban king's is bedewed with a dark hail-shower of blood.
I don't know that Kenelm Chillingly would have beaten the Theban Hercules either in fighting or in eating; but, when he wanted to fight or when he wanted to eat, Hercules would have had to put forth all his strength not to be beaten. After ten minutes' absence, the boy came back radiant.
Thus arrayed, the army of Thebes marched to meet its foe, in the valley between the two declivities on which the hostile camps were placed. The cavalry met first, and the Theban horsemen soon put the Spartan troop to flight. Then the footmen came together with a terrible shock.
In Africa was the early reign of Saturn, under the appellation of Ouranus, or Heaven; there the impious Titans warred with the sky; there Jupiter was born and nursed; there was the celebrated shrine of Ammon, dedicated to Theban Jove, which the Greeks reverenced more highly than the Delphic Oracle; there was the birth-place and oracle of Minerva; and there, Atlas supported both the heavens and the earth upon his shoulders.
Priests, scribes, even common men discussed this report of insanity. "Who told thee such a lie?" inquired Pentuer of an engineer. "It is no lie," replied the engineer, "it is sad reality. In the Theban palaces they saw the pharaoh running naked through the gardens. One night he climbed a tree under the window of his mother's chamber, and spoke to her."
Many donkeys and a few carriages awaited us: the whole equipment previously engaged for to-morrow! and in opaline sunshine which stained with pale rose the Theban hills and piled the shadows full of dark, dulled rubies, we started across an emerald plain, kept ever verdant by Nile water.
The original name of the small town on the lower Rhine now called Xanten, was "Ad Santos," "peace for the saints." It was thus named on account of the pious warriors of the Theban legion who in the fourth century had boldly died there for their creed under their leader, Victor. At the time to which our story refers, a mighty stronghold formed the centre of the little town Xanten.
Gereon is said to contain the bones of the hundreds of martyrs of the Theban Legion who were slain by order of the Emperor Diocletian in the year 286. The Church of St. Peter's, where Rubens was baptized, contains his famous picture entitled the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," painted a short time before the artist's death.
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