Boeotia occupies the broad plain north of Attica and east of the Gulf of Corinth, hemmed in by mountain ranges on most sides: the Cithaeron massif to the south, Helicon to the west, Parnassus and the Phocian hills to the northwest, the hills of Locris to the north, and the channel of the Euboean Gulf to the northeast. The Cephissus river drains the western plain; the Asopus drains the eastern lowlands toward the sea. In the center, until it was drained in the nineteenth century, lay Lake Copais — a vast shallow lake that shaped Boeotian geography, agriculture, and settlement for thousands of years.

The land is fertile by Greek standards, which are exacting. Boeotia was always an agricultural region, producing grain, olives, and livestock in quantities that made it strategically valuable. Its capital in antiquity was Thebes, whose position at the center of the plain, with good communication in all directions but poor harbor access to the sea, defined both Boeotia's military strength and its maritime weakness. In modern times, Livadeia is the regional capital; Thebes remains the largest city.

The myths that came out of Boeotia are not minor ones. Cadmus, who the Greeks credited with bringing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece and founding Thebes, was a Boeotian figure. Dionysus was born here, son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele. Heracles was born in Thebes. Oedipus ruled Thebes. The Sphinx stood outside its gates. Narcissus was a Boeotian. The Muses lived on Mount Helicon, which rises in western Boeotia to about 1,750 meters — Hesiod, who herded sheep on its slopes, said they taught him to sing. Eros was worshipped in a fertility cult at Thespiae. Orion was born somewhere in the Boeotian plain.

The older myths, the scholars note, took their final form during the Mycenaean age, between roughly 1600 and 1200 BC, when Boeotia was one of the wealthier parts of the Greek world. The Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus — a tholos tomb of the Mycenaean period — is one of the most impressive Bronze Age structures in Greece. The Argonauts were sometimes called Minyans, after the early people of Orchomenus. The wealth the myths encoded was real; archaeology confirms it.

Boeotia's political history is largely the history of its relationship with its neighbors. During the Persian invasion of 480 BC, Thebes — unlike most of the rest of Boeotia — sided with Persia, a fact that Athenians never let anyone forget. After the war, the Spartan alliance reinstated Theban dominance over the Boeotian League in 457 BC as a counterweight to Athens. Athens then attacked, defeated the Spartans at Tanagra, and at the Battle of Oenophyta took control of the entire country. For ten years, Boeotia was Athenian territory, its traditional confederate structure replaced with installed democracies.

The Boeotians did not accept this permanently. In 447 BC, exiled Boeotians returned, retook towns, and when the Athenian general Tolmides marched to restore Athenian control, the Boeotians defeated him at the Battle of Coronea. Boeotia regained its independence, reassembled the Boeotian League, and placed Thebes back at its head. The restored confederation under Theban leadership eventually reached its peak in the 370s and 360s BC, when the generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas made Thebes briefly the dominant power in Greece — until Epaminondas was killed at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC and Theban supremacy died with him.

The irony of the Athenian insults is that they have largely vanished while Boeotia persists. Athens produced the philosophical and literary tradition that the Athenians thought defined civilization; Boeotia produced the poets who gave that tradition some of its earliest and most durable work. Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days are among the oldest texts in the Western canon. Pindar's odes for athletic victors at Olympia and the other Panhellenic games are the earliest extended Greek lyric poetry to survive substantially intact. Plutarch's Parallel Lives, written in the first and second centuries AD from his home at Chaeronea in western Boeotia, became one of the most widely read books in European history.

Boeotia today is a regional unit of the Greek state, its capital at Livadeia and its largest city at Thebes. The ancient plain is still farmland, its fields flat and productive as they were when Epaminondas drilled his troops. The lake that once defined the center of the plain is gone, drained beginning in the 1880s. What remains is the land itself — broad, fertile, and indifferent to the jokes made about it.