The sons of Oedipus, now of an age to rule, could not decide which of them should be king of Thebes; they agreed that each should rule in alternate years, while the other went into exile. Eteocles ruled for the first year, while Polynices went to Argos, taking with him the necklace and robe of Harmonia. At Argos Polynices and another exile, Tydeus of Arcadia, were given the daughters of the king, Adrastus, in marriage; Adrastus, moreover, promised to restore them to their lands (for it was by now clear that Eteocles would not abdicate at the end of his year as king), and decided to attack Thebes first. This war and its consequences are the subject of the saga of the Seven against Thebes, which is the title of one of the tragedies of Aeschylus. Several other dramas deal with the saga, including two with the title Phoenician Women, one by Euripides and the other by the Roman author Seneca. The consequences of the war are the subject of The Suppliant Women by Euripides and of Antigone by Sophocles. The saga is most fully narrated by the Roman poet Statius, whose epic, Thebaid, was written in about 90 A.D. and was widely read in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Argive army had seven leaders: besides Adrastus, Polynices, and Tydeus, there were Capaneus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, and Amphiaraus. Amphiaraus had the gift of prophecy, and he knew that all seven, except for Adrastus, would be

killed, and therefore he opposed the expedition. But Polynices bribed Amphiaraus ' wife, Eriphyle, with the necklace of Hamonia, to persuade her husband to change his mind. As he set out he ordered his sons to avenge his death on their mother, and themselves to make an expedition against Thebes when that of the Seven had failed. Before the army reached Thebes two episodes intervened. At Nemea (not far from the Isthmus of Corinth) they were led to a spring of water by Hypsipyle, nurse of Opheltes, the infant son of the local king. She left the baby lying on the ground while she showed the way, and he was killed by a serpent. The Seven killed the serpent and celebrated, in honor of the dead child, the athletic contests that became the Nemean Games; his name was changed by Amphiaraus from Opheltes (Snake man) to Archemorus (Beginner of Death), as an omen of what was yet to come. The second preliminary episode concerned Tydeus. When the army reached the borders of Boeotia, Tydeus was sent to Thebes as an ambassador to demand the abdication of Eteocles in accordance with the agreement with Polynices. While at Thebes, he took part in an athletic contest and beat all comers; the Thebans attempted to avenge their humiliation by setting an ambush for Tydeus as he returned to the army. He killed all fifty of his ambushers, except for one man, who brought the news to Thebes. Thus the army came to Thebes; each leader attacked one of the city's seven gates, and they all failed. The defenders were in any case assured of success, since the Theban prophet, Tiresias, had prophesied that, if one of the Spartoi sacrificed himself, the city would have atoned fully for the blood-guilt incurred by the killing of Ares' sacred serpent, and so be saved from its attackers. Here is part of the prophecy of Tiresias, as given by Euripides (Phoenissae 931-41): This man [i.e., Menoeceus] must be killed at the lair of the earth-born serpent, the guardian of Dirce's fountain, and he must pay the earth with his blood for the water drawn by Cadmus. This is the result of the ancient anger of Ares, who will avenge the death of the earth-born serpent.

If you [i.e., Creon and the Thebans] do this, you will have Ares as your ally. If the earth takes your fruit for hers, and for her blood the blood of mortals, you will have her favor-she who once put forth the gold-helmeted crop of Sown Men [Spartoi]. Of their descendants one must die, one who is descended from the serpent. This passage shows how the myth of the origin of Thebes determined the development of the city's saga and gave it an inexorable unity. Menoeceus, son of Creon and one of the descendants of the Spartoi, willingly died for the city: "Dying for the city," says the messenger in Euripides' play (Phoenissae 1090-92), "he plunged the black-bound sword through his throat to save this land, upon the top of the city-walls," and so he fell into the serpent's lair. In the ensuing fight only Capaneus succeeded in scaling the wall. As he reached the top, he boasted that not even Zeus could keep him out, and for his blasphemy "Zeus," says Sophocles (Antigone 131-37), "hurled him with brandished fire as he stood upon the parapet eager to raise the victory cry. Down he fell to the hard earth, hurled through the air, as he breathed out rage and madness in his frenzied assault." Eteocles and Polynices killed each other in single combat; Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, and Tydeus fell in battle. (Tydeus, indeed, could have been made immortal by Athena, whose favorite he was, but she revoked her gift when she saw him eating the brains of the man who had fatally wounded him.) Only Amphiaraus and Adrastus escaped; Adrastus was saved by the speed of his divine horse, Arion, and returned to Argos; Amphiaraus was swallowed up in the earth, with his chariot and driver, as he fled along the banks of the River Ismenus.

The scene is vividly described by Statius (Thebaid 7. 816-20): The earth parted with a deep, steep-sided chasm, and the stars above and the dead below were both struck with fear. The huge abyss swallowed Amphiaraus and enveloped the horses as they began to cross. He did not relax his hold on his arms or the reins: just as he was, he drove the chariot straight into Tartarus. Amphiaraus became the object of a hero cult at the spot, in this resembling Oedipus, who had similarly been "translated" from life. Creon once more was ruler of Thebes, and he gave orders that the Argive dead were not to be buried, including Polynices. Such treatment of the dead offended Greek religious ideas, and Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, could not allow her brother to be left in this way. She therefore gave him a symbolic burial (by throwing three handfuls of dust over his corpse), and was for this condemned by Creon to be buried alive. Again, such an order defied the law of the gods, and Creon was soon punished; his son, Haemon, attempted to save Antigone (to whom he was engaged to be married) and, finding she had hanged herself in her tomb, ran himself through with his sword; Creon's wife, Eurydice, killed herself when she heard the news. Creon himself, warned by Tiresias, relented too late. According to Euripides, however, Adrastus went to Eleusis (in Attica) as a suppliant and persuaded Theseus to attack Thebes and obtain an honorable burial for the dead Argives; as the corpse of Capaneus was burning on its pyre, his widow, Evadne, threw herself into the flames. It will be remembered that Amphiaraus had ordered his sons to attack Thebes and to punish their mother.

Alcmaeon, one of the sons, carried out these commands ten years later; he and the sons of the other six chieftains (they are known as the Epigoni, i.e., later generation) made an expedition against Thebes and this time were successful. The Thebans abandoned their city on the advice of Tiresias, and it was destroyed. At this point saga touches on history, for the war of the Epigoni took place, it was said, not long before the Trojan War; in the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, which is certainly historical, only Hypothebae (Lower Thebes) is mentioned, implying that the ancient town and its citadel had been abandoned. As for the other part of Amphiaraus' order, Alcmaeon, encouraged by an oracle of Apollo, avenged his father for his mother's treachery by killing Eriphyle. As a matricide he was pursued by the Furies and found temporary shelter in Arcadia, where he married the daughter of King Phegeus, giving her the necklace of Harmonia. But the land was afflicted with famine and, since he was responsible as a murderer and was therefore a pollution, he had to leave; he was advised by an oracle to go to a land on which the sun had not shone when he killed his mother. He went to western Greece, and found such a land at the mouth of the river Achelous, recently formed by the river's silt. Here he settled and was purified of his guilt by the river-god, whose daughter, Callirhoe, he married. But he did not live on for long; he got the necklace of Harmonia from Phegeus by deceit, so as to give it to Callirhoe, and for this was killed by Phegeus' sons. The necklace eventually was dedicated by the sons of Callirhoe and Alcmaeon at Delphi; it was said to have been stolen from there during the fourth century and, true to its traditional character, to have brought only bad luck to the thief. Alcmaeon's sons became the founders of Acarnania, which is in western Greece.

TIRESIAS

A recurring figure in the Theban saga is the blind prophet Tiresias. He was descended from one of the Spartoi and was the son of a nymph, Chariclo, who was a follower of Athena. He lived for seven generations, says Hesiod, and after his death continued to have the gift of prophecy, for in the Underworld, where the souls of the dead are insubstantial and futile, he alone retained his full mental faculties. Accordingly Homer makes him Odysseus' informant when he consults with the dead, and he foretells the end of Odysseus' wanderings and manner of his death. There are different stories about his blindness, an affliction shared by many prophets and poets in Greek literature. Ovid tells the story in full (Metamorphoses 3. 318-38): They say that Jupiter once had driven away his serious worries with nectar and was joking with Juno, saying, "You women have more pleasure than men, I am sure." She disagreed, and they decided to ask the experienced Tiresias for his opinion, since he had known the act of love both as man and as woman. For once he had struck with his staff the bodies of two large serpents copulating in the green forest, and he miraculously passed seven autumn seasons turned from man into woman. In the eighth he saw the same serpents and said, "If striking you has the power to change the striker to the other sex, then I will strike you again now." He struck the serpents, and his former body returned with his native physique. So, being made the judge of the light-hearted quarrel, he agreed with Jupiter. Juno, they say, was more angry than was just, and condemned the arbiter [i.e., Tiresias] to eternal blindness. But the all-powerful father [i.e., Jupiter] . . . granted him in return for the loss of his sight knowledge of the future. In another version, something like the story of Actaeon, he saw Athena naked and was blinded by her. His mother was unable to prevent this punishment, but she made it possible for him, since he had lost his sight, to understand the speech of birds. At any rate, he was the honored prophet at Thebes. In the story of Oedipus he revealed the truth before Oedipus or the Thebans were ready to understand it; in the story of Antigone he warned Creon of the disastrous mistakes he was making; in the attack by the Seven it was he who advised Menoeceus' self-sacrifice to save the city. Finally, it was on his advice that the Thebans abandoned the city before the attack of the Epigoni and migrated to found the city of Hestiaea. Tiresias never reached the new city; on the way he drank from a spring called Tilphussa and died on the spot.