Seven Against Thebes1 was produced at the City Dionysia of 467 BC as the third part of a four-play production – that is, the last play in a tragic trilogy; it was preceded by Laius and Oedipus, and followed by the satyr drama The Sphinx. The production won first prize. Both the rival dramatists on this occasion were sons of famous tragic poets of the previous generation: Aristias son of Pratinas, and Polyphrasmon son of Phrynichus. Sophocles, who had been victorious the previous year, was not competing.
The story of Laius, Oedipus and the wars for possession of Thebes among members of the latter’s family after his death had long been familiar throughout the Greek world, and was the subject of three early epics, the Oedipodeia, the Thebaid (about the curse of Oedipus, the quarrel between his sons, and the expedition of the Seven) and the Epigoni (about the attack on, and destruction of, Thebes by the sons of the Seven). Sophocles’ treatment of it in Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus (to name his three plays in the order of their composition) became canonical for later times, but we are not entitled to take it for granted that the stories were used by, or even necessarily known to, Aeschylus in the form in which Sophocles presented them, except where there is positive evidence that this was so. The evidence that we do possess about the content of Laius, Oedipus and The Sphinx – much of which is derived from Seven Against Thebes itself – is discussed later in this volume (see pp. 102–6); briefly, the main event of Laius will have been the death of Laius at the hands (as all will have assumed) of an unknown assailant (in fact, of course, it was his son Oedipus, subsequently to come to Thebes, defeat the Sphinx, be given the vacant throne and marry Laius’ widow), while Oedipus will have included what Sophocles (Antigone 51) called Oedipus’ ‘self-detection’ of his crimes, followed by his self-blinding (cf. Seven 778-84).
The climax of Oedipus is likely to have been the curse of Oedipus on his sons, which seems to have run roughly thus: ‘You will quarrel, and come to a bitter resolution, dividing my inheritance sword in hand’ (cf. Seven 766–7, 785–90). Little if anything of the following phases of the story can have been included in the action of Oedipus, and it appears that the audience were left to infer them from backward references in Seven Against Thebes and from their prior knowledge of the myth. It is not difficult for us to do likewise.
After the death of Oedipus, his sons Eteocles and Polyneices quarrelled over their father’s property and over the kingship of Thebes. The virtuous prophet Amphiaraus thinks that Polyneices had a considerable degree of right on his side (Seven 584), and there is reason to believe that Aeschylus represented him as the elder of the two brothers;2 but by whatever means, Eteocles was able to gain full control of the city, and Polyneices went into exile. Coming to Argos, he met another exile, Tydeus; the two won the favour of King Adrastus and the hands of his two daughters, and Adrastus, strongly encouraged by Tydeus (cf. Seven 571-5), decided to mount an expedition against Thebes, with seven great warriors (among them Polyneices, Tydeus and Amphiaraus) as its leading figures. Polyneices’ objective was of course to gain for himself the Theban throne, the property of Oedipus and revenge on his brother, but with the exception of Amphiaraus, a most reluctant participant in the expedition,3 all his colleagues seem to be set on the destruction of the city.4
When the surviving play begins, Thebes has been under siege for some time, and the prophet Teiresias5 has declared that the day now commencing will see a major enemy assault on the city. The audience, knowing the story well and knowing that this is the final play of the tragic trilogy, will be certain that this will be the day when Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other. Eteocles too can guess that the time has come for the ‘bitter resolution’ of which his father’s curse had spoken, but not what form this will take (cf. 70–72); if the words of the curse were approximately as suggested above, he has no reason to suppose that he will fight his brother one-to-one. Indeed it is likely that at this stage he has no intention of personally taking part in the battle at all, and that (unlike the citizenry whom he harangues in the opening scene) he is not in armour.6 He is the helmsman of the city (2–3, 62), whereas the champions at the gates are described as oarsmen (283, 595) – and one man cannot do both these jobs.
What changes Eteocles’ mind is the panic of the young women (who form the Chorus), which brings him back in a hurry (at 182) from his task of organizing the defences (cf. 62–5). He calms them down (with difficulty, and not very effectively – as their songs, full of fear and alarm, make evident throughout the next phase of the play) and, apparently to reassure them further, undertakes (282–4) that he will post seven champions including himself to guard the city’s seven gates: there had been no previous mention of any such plan. We begin to see where this is leading. It is likely that Polyneices and Tydeus, as Adrastus’ sons-in-law, were always assumed to have been prominent figures in the attacking army, and most lists of the Seven include both of them; so we expect Polyneices to be attacking one of the gates, and expect too that Eteocles will post himself to defend that same gate. But will he do so by design or in ignorance?
To that question, it will prove, the best answer is ‘both’, as eventually emerges from the extraordinary scene (375–676) commonly known as ‘the shield scene’ or ‘the seven Redepaare [pairs of speeches]’. Eteocles, having gone off apparently to make his postings, has returned to hear the Scout report who is attacking each gate. Six times, working sequentially round the walls in a clockwise direction, the Scout names the man attacking a gate – every one of them, except for Amphiaraus, a physical monstrosity, or a moral one, or both – describes the device on his shield (again always boastful and arrogant, except for Amphiaraus, who has none at all) and asks who can oppose him; six times Eteocles names a man who will defend the gate, and is always able to find something about the attacker, or the defender, or both, which can be taken as a good omen for a successful defence. It has long been disputed whether Eteocles is actually making the postings during this scene, or whether he has made some or all of them already (during his absence between 286 and 369); but the non-random sequence of the verbal tenses referring to the postings strongly points to the conclusion, with which nothing in the text is inconsistent, that he has made three, probably four, of the seven postings already, and that only those at the sixth, seventh and first gates, which are fairly close together (cf. 570–89), remain to be made.7 The audience, of course, cannot know this at the outset, and will have no idea how fateful is Eteocles’ decision not to take on himself the defence of the first gate against Tydeus.8
After that, four times in succession, the defender turns out to have been posted already, and by now most spectators will have guessed that Polyneices will be attacking the last gate. Eteocles thus now has only one chance to avoid disaster, and that proves to be no chance at all, for the sixth attacker is Amphiaraus, and Eteocles knows that according to an oracle Amphiaraus will be swallowed by the earth before he can attack the city (615–19; cf. 587–8) and therefore that the task of opposing him is a purely nominal one to which he cannot honourably assign himself. And then we hear what we were expecting, and Eteocles hears what he never expected: the seventh attacker, assigned by lot (55) to the seventh gate, is Polyneices, and this is the gate which Eteocles has reserved himself to defend. The curse of Oedipus has come true in the worst possible way.
Or has it? The Scout, in his last words before his final exit (650–52), takes it for granted that Eteocles will send someone else to fight Polyneices and reminds him, and us, that his proper role is to be ‘captain’ of the city; and the Chorus (677–82) cannot understand why he does not nominate a substitute and insist that this would not be dishonourable (698–9). But to Eteocles’ mind it is futile to resist the storm-force winds and currents of divine hostility (689–91; cf. 705–9). And there is also another factor, which finds ghastly expression in the epigram (four Greek words) which he puts in the mouth of the Curse (697): ‘The gain comes before the death that comes after’. To Eteocles it is a gain, a benefit, to have the opportunity of personally killing his brother, even at the cost of his own life; he wants to fight him and thinks it right to do so (673). Whether this is the Curse taking possession of his mind, or whether it is the bursting out of a deep hatred long suppressed, we cannot tell; perhaps we are meant to suppose it is both.
At any rate it is effectively the end of the trilogy. Eteocles, fully armed, leaves the scene for the last time; the Chorus reflect (720–91) on the disastrous history of the royal house; a messenger reports that the city is saved, but the two princes are dead; presently the two bodies are brought back, mourned over (with virtually no distinction being made between the brother who fought to defend the city and the one who fought alongside those who aimed to destroy it) and finally taken off for burial. The disturbance that began when Laius defied an oracular warning to beget no heir (742–51) has reached its end in the annihilation of his heirs.
Towards the end of Seven there are several passages of highly suspect authenticity. The final scene, in which a Herald forbids the burial of Polyneices, Antigone defies him, and the Chorus divide in two, half escorting the body of one brother and half that of the other, ruins an ending which till then had stressed, over and over again, the equality of the brothers in death, and leaves the action of the play, and therefore of the trilogy, lacking any closure; at one point, moreover (1039 and note), the text can hardly be understood without prior acquaintance with Sophocles’ Antigone. It is overwhelmingly probable, therefore, that this scene was added for a restaging of Seven, at a time when Sophocles’ play had made it impossible to think of the mutual slaughter of Eteocles and Polyneices without also thinking of the tragic heroism of their sister.
If that is the case, it becomes unlikely that Antigone and her sister Ismene (862) originally figured at all in a play whose later scenes otherwise emphasize the complete destruction of the house of Laius,9 and this is confirmed by the very clumsy way in which they are introduced in 861–74, with the Chorus saying that the sisters have evidently come to sing a lament and immediately adding, without any reason given, that they themselves, the Chorus, ought to sing one first. Clearly the interpolator wanted to have the sisters sing the antiphonal lament 961–1004 (which Aeschylus doubtless wrote for sections, or section leaders, of the Chorus10) but did not want to bring them on immediately before it and so break up the continuous sequence of lyric lament. The removal of 861–74 allows the Chorus’ lament over the bodies of the two brothers to begin immediately they have been brought on stage (a movement covered by 848–60).
The short anapaestic passage 822–31 may well also be an interpolation; it contributes nothing to the reshaping of the ending consequent on the introduction into the play of Antigone and Ismene, and need not (though it may) have been composed at the same time as the other additions.
As a result of these changes to the ending of Seven, we seem to have lost a few lines from the very conclusion of the play – though probably no more than that: already in the last surviving genuine lines the question has been raised (1002) of where the brothers shall be buried, and it has been pointed out (1004) that it would be cruel to lay them near the father who had cursed them; once an alternative suggestion has been made and accepted, the Chorus – all of it, not two halves separately as in the altered ending – can escort the two corpses to their final home, the only share of their father’s possessions that has in the end been allotted to them (731–3).
1. This title, though already current in the late fifth century (Aristophanes, Frogs 1021), is unlikely to have been given to the play by Aeschylus, since nowhere in it are Thebes or the Thebans referred to under those names; they are always called the city and people of Cadmus. Probably the component parts of closely connected trilogies like this one originally had no separate titles of their own.
2. An Etruscan hand-mirror of the fourth century shows two warriors labelled Eutucle and Phulnice about to stab each other in the left breast (cf. Seven 888–90); Polyneices has a beard, Eteocles does not. In Seven too Polyneices is said to be bearded (666), and though we are not told in the text that Eteocles is beardless, it is significant that a Chorus of very young women can address him as ‘child’ (686) and that he, unlike Polyneices, is unmarried (clearly implied by 187–8).
3. See note on Seven 612.
4. Cf. Seven 42–8 (the oath of the Seven – we cannot at that stage be sure that Polyneices is among them), 427 and 434 (Capaneus), 467 (Eteoclus), 531 (Parthenopaeus). The uncomfortable position of Polyneices, attacking his own city in such company, may have reminded many spectators of that of the ex-tyrant Hippias and his family accompanying the Persian expeditions against Athens in 490 and 480 respectively (Herodotus 6.102, 107, 109.3; 8.52.2).
5. See note on Seven 24. It is, of course, possible that Teiresias had been seen on stage in one or both of the preceding plays.
6. I have argued this more fully in Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari 1996), pp. 107–9.
7. See further Aeschylean Tragedy, pp. 103–7.
8. 8. As H. D. F. Kitto pointed out (Greek Tragedy, third edn (London 1961), pp. 48–9), for more than ten lines (397–407a) – over half of Eteocles’ speech – Aeschylus makes it seem as though he is going to post himself at this gate!
9. Cf. 691, 720, 813, 877, 881–2, 951–5.
10. Except for 996–7 (see note on 995); these two lines, which suit only the sisters, were probably inserted by the interpolator.