Seven against Thebes

• 1. Introduction

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  Seven against Thebes: the name alone carries the weight of a doomed expedition. Seven champions, chosen by Adrastus the king of Argos, marched on a walled city they could not take, and all but one of them died trying. Their war was not a footnote in Greek mythology. According to Hesiod's Works and Days, it ranked alongside the Trojan War as one of the two defining catastrophes of the age of heroes.

  At the heart of the story is a brothers' quarrel over a throne. Polynices, the exiled son of Oedipus, wanted back what he believed was his. His brother Eteocles refused to give it. And so Polynices traveled to Argos, found an ally in Adrastus, and returned at the head of an army. The seven commanders assigned to the seven gates of Thebes became one of the most retold groupings in all of ancient literature, appearing in Homer's Iliad, in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in a Roman epic written by Statius centuries later.

  What made this story grip the ancient imagination for so long? Why did a seer named Amphiaraus march toward a death he had already foreseen? How did a brief stop in Nemea produce one of the great athletic festivals of the ancient world? And what happened to the bodies of the fallen after Thebes refused to give them back?

• 2. The Brothers' Quarrel

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  Polynices and Eteocles inherited more than a throne from their father Oedipus. They inherited a curse. Oedipus, the former king of Thebes, had cursed his sons to battle over their patrimony, and that curse moved through every version of the story like an undertow.

  In the version that became most familiar, first laid out in Euripides' Phoenician Women, the brothers agreed to split the kingship by ruling in alternate years. Polynices, as the younger brother in that account, left Thebes first while Eteocles ruled the first year. When the year ended, Eteocles refused to step down. Polynices went into exile with nothing.

  Earlier sources offered different details but the same outcome. In an account attributed to the historian Hellanicus, Eteocles gave Polynices a genuine choice: take the throne of Thebes, or take the robe and necklace of Harmonia and leave. Polynices took the treasure and left. In the version recorded by Pherecydes, there was no choice at all. Eteocles simply drove Polynices out by force.

  The lyric poet Stesichorus, writing around the sixth century BC, had the seer Tiresias prophesy the brothers' deaths before any army was assembled. Seeking to avoid the prophecy, the brothers agreed that kingship would be decided by lot. The result was the same: Eteocles on the throne, Polynices gone from Thebes. The curse, as Bacchylides would later write, could not be outrun. It was hope, not good sense, that drove the expedition forward.

• 3. Forging the Alliance

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  Polynices arrived in Argos at night, seeking shelter at the palace of Adrastus, the king. He found a spot to sleep, but so did Tydeus, the exiled son of the Calydonian king Oeneus, who arrived the same night. The two strangers began fighting over the same patch of ground.

  Adrastus came upon them brawling like wild beasts. In the version of the story that Euripides told in The Suppliants, the king remembered an oracle from Apollo instructing him to marry his daughters to a lion and a boar. When he saw Polynices wearing a lion's hide and Tydeus wearing a boar's hide, or in later accounts bearing those animals on their shields, the oracle seemed to resolve itself. Adrastus gave his daughters to the two exiled princes and promised to restore them both to their kingdoms, starting with Polynices.

  Assembling the army required one more difficult recruitment. The seer Amphiaraus had foreseen that the expedition was doomed and that all of the champions except Adrastus would die. He refused to go. The way around his refusal was his wife Eriphyle, who was also Adrastus' sister. The two men had previously agreed that she would settle any future disputes between them. Polynices offered Eriphyle the golden necklace of Harmonia, and she ruled that the expedition should proceed and that Amphiaraus must join it. Bound by his oath, Amphiaraus had no choice.

  According to the Iliad, Polynices and Tydeus also traveled to Mycenae to recruit additional allies. The Mycenaeans at first agreed to join, and began assembling troops. Then Zeus sent ill omens, and they changed their minds.

• 4. A Child and a Festival

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  Before the army reached Thebes, it passed through Nemea, and what happened there left a mark on Greek religious life that outlasted the war itself.

  The Seven encountered Hypsipyle, the nursemaid of an infant named Opheltes. Euripides' partially surviving play Hypsipyle, probably written around 411-407 BC, is the earliest source to make Hypsipyle central to the episode. In his telling she was once the queen of Lemnos and the lover of Jason, now reduced to a slave and a nursemaid. The Seven needed water. Amphiaraus told her they needed it for a sacrifice, and she led them toward a spring. In a moment of inattention, she set Opheltes down, and a serpent killed the child.

  The Seven killed the serpent. They also interceded when Hypsipyle was threatened with death for her negligence, convincing Eurydice, the child's mother, to spare her. Then Amphiaraus renamed the dead infant Archemorus, a name meaning the beginning of doom, reading the child's death as an omen of what awaited the seven champions at Thebes. In the poem by Bacchylides, the infant's death is called a sign of the slaughter to come.

  The funeral games the Seven held in the child's honor became, in mythological memory, the origin of the Nemean Games, one of the four great Panhellenic athletic festivals. Apollodorus recorded the result of each event: Adrastus won the horse race, Eteoclus the footrace, Tydeus the boxing match, Amphiaraus the leaping and quoit-throwing, Laodocus the javelin, Polynices the wrestling, and Parthenopaeus the archery.

• 5. Tydeus at the Gates

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  Before the army attacked, Adrastus sent Tydeus ahead alone into Thebes to try to settle the succession dispute without bloodshed. The mission appears as early as Homer's Iliad, where it is told in some detail.

  Tydeus found the Theban leaders feasting at the house of Eteocles. Rather than deliver his message quietly, he challenged every man present to athletic contests, and with Athena's help, he won every single one. The Thebans sent fifty soldiers to ambush him on his way back to the Argive army. Their leaders were Maeon, the son of Haemon, and Polyphontes, the son of Autophonus. Tydeus killed all fifty except Maeon, whom he sent home alive, in obedience to the gods.

  The god-given skill that Tydeus displayed in Thebes prefigures the divine interest in him that surfaces later at the walls. Athena, described in the Iliad as having been present and helpful during every contest, had plans for Tydeus that went beyond the battlefield. That plan would ultimately unravel because of a decision Tydeus made himself, but at the embassy stage he was still the goddess's chosen man.

• 6. The Battle and Its Deaths

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  Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, produced in 467 BC, is the first surviving source to fix the number of champions at seven and assign each one to a specific gate of Thebes. Aeschylus has each champion say a last farewell to Adrastus and hand over mementos for their families before taking their positions.

  Capaneus was assigned the Electran Gate. On his shield he carried an image of a man holding a torch, with the inscription reading that he would burn the city. He boasted that not even the weapons of Zeus could stop him. While scaling the city walls, Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt.

  Tydeus was mortally wounded by Melanippus, the son of Astacus. Athena, who had marked Tydeus as her favorite, arrived intending to make him immortal. But Amphiaraus, who despised Tydeus for having pushed the war forward, cut off Melanippus' head and threw it to the dying Tydeus. Tydeus ate the brains. Athena, appalled, withdrew the immortality she had intended to grant him and let him die.

  Amphiaraus himself was chased from the battlefield by Periclymenus, who had already killed Parthenopaeus. Just as Periclymenus was about to drive a spear into Amphiaraus' back, Zeus intervened. The earth opened and swallowed Amphiaraus, his chariot, and his charioteer. According to Apollodorus, Zeus then made Amphiaraus immortal underground. Adrastus, in a poem by Pindar, would later mourn him as the eye of the army, good both as a seer and as a spear-fighter.

  At the seventh gate, Polynices and his brother Eteocles met in single combat, in Aeschylus' account in fulfillment of their father's curse, and killed each other. Adrastus alone escaped, carried from the field by his divine horse Arion.

• 7. The Unburied Dead

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  Creon, who became ruler of Thebes with the death of Eteocles, forbade the burial of the Argive dead. In Sophocles' Antigone, produced around 441 BC, Polynices' sister Antigone defied that prohibition, attempted to bury her brother, was arrested, sentenced to death by Creon, and hanged herself. Creon's son Haemon also died as a consequence.

  The conflict over burial animated an entire strand of Athenian tradition centered on Theseus. In Euripides' Suppliants, produced around 420 BC, Adrastus comes to Eleusis with the mothers and sons of the fallen, seeking Athenian help. Theseus leads an army to Thebes and recovers the bodies by defeating the Thebans in battle. Five of the Seven are returned to Eleusis; Amphiaraus, having been swallowed alive by the earth, cannot be retrieved, and Polynices is presumably buried at Thebes. The rest of the army is buried at Eleutherae, a small village on the Attic side of Mount Cithaeron.

  Aeschylus' earlier and now lost play Eleusinians, dated to around 500-475 BC, offered a different resolution. According to Plutarch, in that version Theseus recovered the bodies through negotiation rather than battle. The Thebans apparently preferred that version. According to the geographer Pausanias, ancient unmarked tombs existed along a small road in Eleusis called Epta Epi Thebais, the Seven Against Thebes, running parallel to the main road leaving the town.

  In Statius' Latin epic Thebaid, written around 92 AD, the resolution is more violent still: Theseus arrives threatening war, kills Creon himself in single combat, enters Thebes as a conqueror, and oversees the burning and burial of the fallen warriors.

• 8. Counting the Champions

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  The number seven was not always fixed. Before the fifth century BC, according to Pausanias, the number of champions in the tradition was greater than seven. Even the names were uncertain. Only six are known from early sources, with no source yet setting the total.

  Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes in 467 BC is the first surviving work to insist on exactly seven names and list them explicitly. His list excludes Adrastus, who was present at the battle but whom Aeschylus does not count among the Seven, and adds two names not found in earlier sources: Eteoclus and Hippomedon. Euripides used the same list in The Suppliants and Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus.

  In The Phoenician Women, however, Euripides swapped Adrastus back in and dropped Eteoclus, producing a different seven. That list was then followed by Diodorus Siculus, by the mythographers Apollodorus and Hyginus, and by Statius. Hyginus offered a practical explanation: Adrastus chose seven generals because Thebes had seven gates.

  Apolodorus added one more wrinkle, noting that some ancient sources did not count Tydeus and Polynices among the Seven at all, substituting instead Eteoclus, son of Iphis, and Mecisteus, a son of Talaus. Such a list, if Parthenopaeus were also read as an Argive, would make all seven champions Argives with no foreigners among them. Whether that reflected an older, purely local version of the story, or a later Argive desire to claim the legend entirely, Apollodorus left open. Pindar mentions seven funeral pyres burning at Thebes, possibly drawing from the Cyclic Thebaid, but even that detail does not settle whether seven was always the canonical count.