The Haliartia — the territory of Haliartus — was among the most productive agricultural land in Boeotia. The plain was watered by streams the ancient geographers named with care: the Ocalea, the Lophis, the Hoplites, the Permessus, the Olmeius. These rivers flowed from Mount Helicon to the east and from the foothills to the west, crossing the plain before emptying into the Copaic marsh, which the ancient sources called the Haliartian marsh in this stretch. The town itself sat on a hill barely fifty feet above the lake — low enough to be vulnerable, high enough to see the approach of any army. Homer's epithet, given in the Catalogue of Ships, captured the landscape exactly: this was a place of water and grass, of rich grazing and abundant harvest.

In 395 BC, Lysander of Sparta marched on Haliartus as part of a campaign to reassert Spartan power across Greece. He was one of the most successful commanders of his generation — the architect of Sparta's victory in the Peloponnesian War, the man who had brought Athens to its knees. At Haliartus, a Theban force met him beneath the city walls, near the stream the later sources call the Hoplites. Lysander was killed in the fighting. The stream where he fell was remembered by Plutarch. A tumulus near the site may mark the graves of those who died with him. For Sparta, losing Lysander in a minor engagement at a small Boeotian city was a shock — and within a year, the broader confrontation between Sparta and the Theban-led coalition had escalated into open war.

Haliartus had already been destroyed once, by the Persians in 480 BC during Xerxes's invasion. The citizens rebuilt it. In the Peloponnesian War it stood as one of the chief cities of Boeotia. But the second destruction proved permanent. In 171 BC, with the Third Macedonian War underway, Haliartus sided with Perseus of Macedon against Rome. The Roman praetor Gaius Lucretius Gallus took the city by storm. What followed was systematic: he sold the people of Haliartus into slavery, stripped the city of its statues, paintings, and works of art, and razed the buildings to the ground. The territory was given to Athens — not as a gift exactly, but as compensation and redistribution. Haliartus never recovered. By Strabo's time, the city no longer existed. Pausanias, visiting later still, found only a tomb of Lysander and the ruins of temples the Persians had burned three centuries earlier — purposely left unrestored, as a memorial of what had been done.

The traveler William Martin Leake visited the site in the nineteenth century and left the most detailed modern account of what could still be seen. He found the hill terminating in rocky cliffs toward the lake, with polygonal masonry walls on the summit and several sepulchral crypts cut into the cliff face below. A spring issued from the north side of the hill. Two small rivers defined the city's eastern and western boundaries — Leake identified them as the Permessus-Olmeius to the east and the Hoplites-Lophis to the west. Fragments of architecture and inscribed stones, collected from the ruins over the centuries, lay near the ruins of a later village that had itself been long abandoned. The site lies near modern Aliartos — a town that took its name from the ancient city — about a mile from the village of Mazi, on the road between Thebes and Livadeia.

What Rome did at Haliartus in 171 BC was not unprecedented — the ancient world had seen many cities enslaved and razed — but it was complete. The people of Haliartus ceased to exist as a community. Their art and statues were taken to Rome. Their land was redistributed. Their temples stood as burned shells. What Pausanias saw, walking through the silence of the site centuries later, was the deliberate preservation of ruin: the Haliartians had left the Persian-burned temples in their broken state, and their successors — or rather, the absence of successors — had left everything else in the same condition. A grassy, watered place, emptied of the people the grass had fed.