Seven Against Thebes

Not to be confused with Aeschylus’ tragedy Seven Against Thebes.

The Seven Against Thebes were seven champions who marched from Argos to restore Polynices to the throne of Thebes after his brother Eteocles refused to give it up. The expedition failed, and almost all the attackers died, but the war left a sequel: ten years later their sons, the Epigoni, returned and destroyed the city.

The Quarrel of the Brothers

After Oedipus was driven out of Thebes, his sons Eteocles and Polynices inherited the kingdom. According to Apollodorus (Library 3.6.1), they agreed to rule in turn, one year each. In the usual version Eteocles took the first year and then refused to give up the throne, and Polynices left for Argos; Apollodorus also knows a version in which Polynices ruled first and handed the kingdom over. In Aeschylus the quarrel fulfils a curse of their father, who prayed that his sons would divide their inheritance with iron in their hands (Seven Against Thebes 785–790).

The Army from Argos

At Argos, king Adrastus welcomed Polynices and gave him his daughter Argia in marriage, promising to restore him by force (Apollodorus 3.6.1). Tydeus was sent ahead to Thebes to demand the throne; on his way back he was ambushed by fifty Thebans and killed all but one (3.6.5). On the march the army stopped at Nemea, where the nurse Hypsipyle showed them a spring and the child in her care, Opheltes, was killed by a snake; the Seven founded the Nemean games in his memory (3.6.4). Adrastus gathered the army under seven leaders. In Apollodorus, they are Adrastus, Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hippomedon, Polynices, Parthenopaeus (Parthenopeus) and Tydeus. Aeschylus’ tragedy names the attackers at the gates differently: Tydeus, Capaneus, Eteoclus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, Amphiaraus and Polynices.

Amphiaraus was a seer who foresaw that all but Adrastus would die and refused to go, until his wife Eriphyle, bribed by Polynices with the necklace of Harmonia, forced him (3.6.2). In Apollodorus (3.6.8), as he fled beside the river Ismenus, Zeus split the earth with a thunderbolt and Amphiaraus vanished beneath it with his chariot and his charioteer Baton, and Zeus made him immortal.

The Seven Gates

Thebes had seven gates, and in Aeschylus Eteocles posts a Theban defender at each one. The attackers and their opponents are:

• Tydeus against Melanippus, a man born of the dragon’s teeth that founded Thebes
• Capaneus against Polyphontes
• Eteoclus against Megareus, the son of Creon
• Hippomedon against Hyperbius
• Parthenopaeus against Actor
• Amphiaraus against Lasthenes
• Polynices against his brother Eteocles, who insists that no one else has so just a claim to meet him

Before the fighting, Tiresias declared that the city could be saved only by the death of Menoeceus, a son of Creon, and Apollodorus (3.6.7) says that he gave his life for Thebes. Capaneus, who boasted that he would burn the city even against the will of Zeus, was climbing a ladder to the wall when Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt (3.6.7).

The Brothers’ Duel

The war was decided at the seventh gate, where the brothers met in single combat. Eteocles and Polynices killed each other, as their father had cursed (Apollodorus 3.6.8; Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes 805–821). The other attackers fell too: Melanippus wounded Tydeus in the belly; Athena was bringing a medicine begged from Zeus to make him immortal, but Amphiaraus, who hated Tydeus for talking the Argives into the war, cut off Melanippus’ head and gave it to him, and Tydeus split it open and gulped down the brains, so that Athena turned away in disgust and withheld the gift; Ismarus killed Hippomedon and Amphidicus killed Parthenopaeus. Adrastus alone escaped, carried off by his horse Arion (Apollodorus 3.6.8). Creon, brother of Jocasta, became ruler of Thebes.

Creon’s Edict and Antigone

Creon ordered that Eteocles be buried with honour and that the Argive dead be left unburied. In the closing scene of Aeschylus’ play, a herald proclaims that Polynices is to be cast out unburied, and Antigone declares that she will bury him herself (1005–1078). Scholars have long suspected that this closing scene was added to the play after Aeschylus. Apollodorus (3.7.1) says that Antigone took the body of Polynices and buried it in secret, was caught by Creon and entombed alive. Sophocles retold the same event as the subject of his tragedy Antigone. Apollodorus adds that Adrastus fled to Athens and sat as a suppliant at the altar of Mercy, and that Theseus marched on Thebes and buried the Argive dead, while Evadne, the wife of Capaneus, threw herself on her husband’s pyre; this is the subject of Euripides’ Suppliant Women.

The Epigoni

Ten years later the sons of the fallen leaders set out to avenge their fathers. The oracle promised them victory if Alcmaeon, the son of Amphiaraus, led them. The Epigoni (“those born afterwards”) defeated the Thebans under Laodamas, son of Eteocles, who killed Aegialeus, the son of Adrastus, and was killed in turn by Alcmaeon. On the advice of Tiresias the Thebans slipped out of the city by night, and the Epigoni entered it and sent a share of the spoils, and the prophet’s daughter Manto, to Apollo at Delphi (Apollodorus 3.7.2–4). The Roman poet Statius later told the whole war of the Seven in his epic Thebaid.

See Also: Oedipus, Eteocles, Polynices, Tydeus, Capaneus, Adrastus, Hippomedon, Amphiaraus, Melanippus, Megareus, Actor, Antigone, Creon, Alcmaeon