Thais of Athens (Russian: Таис Афинская) is a historical novel by Ivan Efremov written in 1972.

It tells the story of the famous hetaera Thaïs, who was one of Alexander the Great's contemporaries and companions on his conquest of the oikoumene or the known world.

The earliest roots of the novel can be found in his 1946 tale Callirhoe (Russian: Каллироя), where the meeting between Callirhoe and Antenor is reworked into the meeting between Thaïs and Ptolemy.Plans for writing a novel based on the life of Thaïs were found in Yefremov's notes as early as 1951.

In the novel, the very young (only 17 years old) and already famous Athenian hetaera Tais meets the exiled heir to the Macedonian throne and his childhood friends Hephaestion, Nearchus and Ptolemy.

She then travels to Sparta and Crete with the Macedonians, visits Egypt and Mesopotamia, where she becomes an initiate in the temple of Ashtoreth (Astarte) and eventually follows Alexander to Persepolis, which she requests be set on fire.