Seven Against Thebes: the War Between the Sons of Oedipus

Seven Against Thebes is the name for the expedition of seven Argive champions against the city of Thebes, launched to win back the throne for Polynices, son of Oedipus, after his brother Eteocles refused to give it up. Each of the seven attacked one of the city’s seven gates. The assault ended in disaster: Capaneus was struck by Zeus’s lightning, Amphiaraus was swallowed by the earth, Tydeus died gnawing his enemy’s skull, and the two brothers killed each other in single combat. Only Adrastus, king of Argos, got away. It is the great war of the Theban cycle, a generation before Troy, and the backdrop to tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, including Antigone.

Oedipus’s curse

The war begins with a father’s curse. After his parricide and his marriage to Jocasta come to light, Oedipus curses his two sons: they will divide their inheritance with the sword.

The sources disagree on why. Fragments of the lost epic Thebaid mention two insults. Polynices served his father wine from the golden cup and at the silver table of Cadmus, which Oedipus had forbidden, and later the sons sent him the haunch of a sacrifice instead of the shoulder, the portion of honor. In Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus) the offense is worse: the sons let their blind father be driven into exile without lifting a finger.

A shared throne, then a broken deal

To escape the curse, the brothers agree to rule for a year each in turn. Usually Eteocles reigns first and refuses to step down when his year is up; Apollodorus (3.6.1) also records a version in which Polynices ruled first. In Euripides (Phoenician Women 499-525), Eteocles owns his choice openly: if one must do wrong, it is best to do it for the sake of power.

Polynices goes into exile at Argos. According to Apollodorus, he takes with him the necklace and robe of Harmonia, Cadmus’s wedding gifts, which bring ruin to everyone who owns them.

Argos: Adrastus, Tydeus and Amphiaraus

At Argos, Polynices reaches King Adrastus’s palace at night and comes to blows in the porch with another exile, Tydeus of Calydon, banished for a killing. Adrastus separates them and remembers an oracle telling him to marry his daughters to a boar and a lion: the two exiles bear those emblems, on their shields according to Apollodorus, or as the animal skins they wear in other versions. He gives Argeia to Polynices and Deipyle to Tydeus, and promises to restore both to their homelands, starting with Thebes.

That leaves the seer Amphiaraus, who knows the expedition will fail and that every leader but Adrastus will die. He refuses to go. But an old agreement gives his wife Eriphyle the final word in any dispute between him and Adrastus. Polynices bribes her with the necklace of Harmonia, and she orders her husband to march. Amphiaraus obeys, but makes his son Alcmaeon swear to avenge him on his mother.

Nemea, the first omen

On the way, the army stops at Nemea to look for water. Hypsipyle, once queen of Lemnos and now a slave, shows them a spring and sets down the infant Opheltes, the king’s son in her care. A serpent kills him. The leaders kill the serpent, bury the child and found the Nemean Games in his honor. Amphiaraus names him Archemorus, “beginning of doom”: the child’s death foreshadows their own (Apollodorus 3.6.4).

Before the assault, Tydeus goes to Thebes as an envoy. The Iliad (4.382-398) tells how he found the Cadmeans feasting in Eteocles’ palace, challenged them to every contest and beat them all with Athena’s help. On his way back the Thebans set an ambush of fifty men: he killed them all except Maeon, whom he spared at a sign from the gods.

The seven champions at the seven gates

The heart of Aeschylus’s tragedy (467 BC) is a long scene in which a scout describes each attacker to Eteocles, gate by gate, along with the shield he carries. Eteocles answers each one by naming a Theban defender (375-676).

Gate	Attacker	Shield device	Defender
Proetid	Tydeus	The night sky and the full moon	Melanippus
Electran	Capaneus	A naked man with a torch: “I will burn the city”	Polyphontes
Neistan	Eteoclus	A soldier climbing a ladder: “Not even Ares will throw me from the towers”	Megareus
Athena Onka	Hippomedon	Typhon breathing fire	Hyperbius
Borrhaean (north)	Parthenopaeus	The Sphinx holding a Theban in her claws	Actor
Homoloid	Amphiaraus	None: “he wishes not to seem the best, but to be it”	Lasthenes
Seventh gate	Polynices	Dike, Justice, leading a warrior home: “I will bring this man back”	Eteocles

The scene sets the attackers’ boastful shields, signs of arrogance that Eteocles turns against them, against the blank shield of Amphiaraus, the only wise man in the army. When the scout names Polynices at the seventh gate, Eteocles sees his father’s curse coming true and resolves to face his brother himself, despite the chorus’s pleas.

Menoeceus, the sacrifice that saves Thebes

During the siege Creon consults the seer Tiresias. The answer is terrible: Thebes will be saved only if Menoeceus, Creon’s son, is sacrificed to Ares in atonement for the dragon Cadmus once killed. Creon tries to send his son away; the young man refuses and kills himself before the gates (Euripides, Phoenician Women 834-1018; Apollodorus 3.6.7). His willing sacrifice answers, on the Theban side, the arrogance of the attackers.

How the champions died

The final assault is a sequence of telling deaths, reported mostly by Apollodorus (3.6.7-8) and Euripides.

• Capaneus, who boasted that not even the thunderbolt of Zeus would stop him, climbs the wall on a ladder, and Zeus strikes him down mid-climb.
• Hippomedon, Eteoclus and Parthenopaeus fall to Theban defenders. Apollodorus names Amphidicus as Parthenopaeus’s killer; in Euripides, Periclymenus crushes the young man with a stone.
• Tydeus is wounded in the belly by Melanippus. Amphiaraus kills Melanippus and brings Tydeus the head, which he splits open to devour the brain. Athena, who was on her way with a drug to make her favorite immortal, turns away in disgust and lets him die.
• Amphiaraus flees along the Ismenus with Periclymenus at his heels. Before the spear can strike his back, Zeus splits the earth with a thunderbolt and the seer vanishes with his chariot and his charioteer Baton (Pindar, Nemean 9). He becomes an oracular hero, consulted at the Amphiareion of Oropos.
• Eteocles and Polynices meet in single combat and kill each other, fulfilling their father’s curse.

Only Adrastus escapes, carried off by Arion, his divine horse, already famous in the Iliad (23.346-347). Pindar (Olympian 6.12-17) gives him a line over his comrades’ pyres: he mourns “the eye of my army,” Amphiaraus, “good both as a seer and with the spear.”

After the war: burial and the Epigoni

The deaths do not end the story. Creon, now king of Thebes, forbids the burial of Polynices and the attackers. That is the subject of Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Antigone defies the decree to bury her brother, despite the fears of Ismene. In Euripides’ Suppliants, Adrastus and the mothers of the dead persuade Theseus to have Athens recover the bodies by force; according to Plutarch (Theseus 29), Aeschylus preferred a negotiated return.

Ten years later the sons of the Seven, the Epigoni, came back. Led by Alcmaeon, they included Diomedes, son of Tydeus, Sthenelus, son of Capaneus, and Thersander, son of Polynices. This time Thebes fell. In the Iliad (4.404-410), Sthenelus boasts of it: they took seven-gated Thebes with fewer men, against a stronger wall, because they trusted the gods’ omens, while their fathers perished through their own recklessness.

How the ancient sources differ

• The Thebaid, a lost epic of the Cycle, told the whole expedition; only fragments survive, including Oedipus’s curse.
• Homer does not tell the war, but the Iliad looks back on it through Tydeus and the Epigoni as a glorious past.
• Aeschylus makes the siege a drama seen from inside Thebes, centered on Eteocles and the shield scene. The play’s ending, where Antigone announces she will bury Polynices, is widely regarded by scholars as a later addition inspired by Sophocles.
• Euripides (Phoenician Women) keeps Jocasta alive, has her try to reconcile her sons and kill herself over their bodies, and gives Menoeceus a major role.
• Apollodorus gives the fullest account and records the variant lists of champions.
• Statius, a Latin poet of the first century AD, devotes the twelve books of his Thebaid to the war, the version the Middle Ages would know best.

Why the myth matters

Seven Against Thebes is the defining war of the heroic generation before Troy: several sons of the Seven, Diomedes and Sthenelus above all, later fight at Troy. The myth also closes the tragedy of the house of Laius begun by Laius and Oedipus, and opens Antigone’s. Above all it shows, with rare clarity, arrogance punished by the gods: Capaneus defies Zeus, Tydeus loses immortality through one savage act, while Amphiaraus, the only one who saw clearly, is spared death.

Further reading

Both brothers have their own pages: Eteocles, defender of the seventh gate, and Polynices, the exile who marched on his own city. The Oedipus page explains where the curse came from, and Antigone tells what came after. The seer Tiresias appears in every generation of the Theban cycle, and Cadmus, founder of Thebes, is where the necklace of Harmonia began. For the other great war of the heroes, read the Trojan War.