The name 'Hypoplakia' means 'below the plateau' or 'at the foot of Mount Placus' — and it is this geographic qualifier that distinguishes this Thebe from the far more famous Thebes in Boeotia, Greece. Ancient geographers placed the city in the Theban plain, near the Gulf of Adramyttium (modern Gulf of Edremit). Strabo, writing in the first century BCE, put it at 60 stadia from Adramyttium. Pomponius Mela positioned it between Adramyttium and Cisthene. Modern scholars have been unable to agree on the precise site. Archaeologist Josef Stauber has proposed two different locations across different publications — Paşa Dağ (2 kilometers northeast of Edremit) in one, and Küçuk Çal Tepe in another. The editors of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World settle on a site approximately 1 mile north-northeast of Edremit. The plain itself — long described as extraordinarily fertile, praised by Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, and Livy — is not in doubt. The city within it remains elusive.

At the time of the Trojan War, Thebe Hypoplakia was ruled not by Trojans but by a people the sources call the Cilicians — a different group from the Cilicians of southeastern Anatolia. Their king was Eetion, and his daughter Andromache had been married to Hector, heir of Troy. Homer describes Thebe as a walled city with a lofty citadel. Its wealth was real: the plain around it was among the most productive in the region. Achilles raided the area during the Trojan War, as recorded in the Bibliotheca attributed to Pseudo-Apollodorus — rustling the cattle of Aeneas on the slopes of Mount Ida before descending to Thebe, where he killed King Eetion and his sons. The city also lost Chryseis, a local woman who was taken as a captive and given to Agamemnon. It is Chryseis's father, the priest Chryses, who opens Homer's Iliad with his failed attempt to ransom her — and Agamemnon's refusal that triggers the quarrel with Achilles. Thebe Hypoplakia, in other words, is where the Iliad's plot begins.

Of all the connections between Thebe Hypoplakia and the Iliad, none is more affecting than Andromache's. In Book Six of the poem, she tells Hector that he is now her only family — her father Eetion is dead, her seven brothers are dead, her mother was enslaved (though later ransomed). She describes Achilles killing her father: he stripped Eetion's armor but did not despoil the body, burning it with full military honors and raising a burial mound over him. The daughters of the mountain nymphs planted elm trees around the mound. Even Homer's Achilles, in his most devastating phase, had limits. Thebe was also, according to some accounts, the origin of Pedasus — one of the three horses that pulled Achilles' chariot, captured during the sack of the city. One of Achilles' own instruments of war came from the city he destroyed.

One tradition attributes the founding of Thebe Hypoplakia to Heracles, who named the city after his birthplace in Boeotia following an earlier sack of Troy during the reign of King Laomedon — a generation before the Trojan War proper. Strabo records that the Theban plain was fought over repeatedly in antiquity, disputed between the Mysians and the Lydians, then settled by Greeks from Aeolis and from Lesbos. By Strabo's own time — the second century BCE — the plain was controlled by the people of nearby Adramyttium (modern Edremit). Herodotus mentions Thebe in his account of Xerxes' march through the region in 480 BCE. The plain, it seems, was always worth having. What was once a Cilician kingdom with a royal family connected by marriage to Troy became Greek colonial farmland, then a possession of Adramyttium. The city disappeared. The plain is still there, just northeast of Edremit, still fertile, still quietly remarkable — as it was when it caught the attention of every ancient writer who passed through.