Play: Seven Against Thebes

Overview
Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE) is a tense, city-at-war drama that compresses a legendary siege into a single day of decisions, omens, and oaths. It completes a tragic arc begun with Laius and Oedipus, tracing the curse of the Labdacids to its fatal end: the mutual slaughter of Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles and Polyneices. The play’s power lies in the collision of civic duty and blood destiny, the clang of heraldic boasts against prayerful dread, and a stark finality that leaves victory hollow.

Setting and Background
Thebes is under assault by an Argive coalition led by seven champions, each posted at one of the city’s seven gates. The expedition springs from a broken pact: Eteocles and Polyneices once agreed to alternate the Theban throne, but Eteocles retained power, driving Polyneices into exile. He returns at the head of foreign forces to claim his share by arms. The siege is framed by the inherited malediction of Oedipus, whose curse decreed that his sons would divide his wealth with iron and perish by each other’s hands.

Plot
At dawn, Eteocles exhorts Theban defenders, invoking Zeus and Ares while chiding the Chorus of Theban women for panic-stricken prayers that he fears sap morale. A scout reports the attackers’ array and the fearsome blazons on their shields: Capaneus vows to scale the walls and defy Zeus’ thunder; Tydeus, Eteoclus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, the seer Amphiaraus, and finally Polyneices each stake out a gate and proclaim victory through their emblems. The shield imagery becomes a battlefield of symbols, boasting menaced by counter-emblems and measured replies.

Eteocles answers tactically, assigning a Theban champion to each gate and answering each boast with piety and resolve. The report of Amphiaraus stands apart: a prophet who condemns the expedition’s hubris, he predicts disaster for its leaders and longs for an honorable death rather than plunder. The moral weight of his dissent deepens the play’s fatal atmosphere, suggesting that righteousness cannot save men trapped in cursed designs.

When the scout names Polyneices at the seventh gate, Eteocles suspends strategy for blood obligation. Despite the Chorus’ pleas, he chooses to face his brother himself, submitting to the curse rather than permitting a substitute to incur it. He prays not for victory alone but for justice and for Thebes to be spared, even at personal cost. Offstage, the duels at the gates are fought; the city holds at six, but at the seventh, the brothers fall by mutual blows. The siege is broken as much by fate as by arms.

Themes and Imagery
Fate versus choice governs the play: Eteocles acts decisively as leader, yet each choice seems to ratify Oedipus’ malediction. Civic duty collides with familial loyalty when defending the polis requires a brother’s blood. The shields’ emblems dramatize hubris and counter-hubris, as speech and symbol are met by measured, religiously grounded responses. The Chorus embodies communal fear and piety, their keening offset by Eteocles’ harsh insistence on discipline, revealing the gendered divide of war’s rhetoric: male pragmatism versus feminine supplication, both necessary, neither sufficient.

Ending and Legacy
The bodies are brought in, and the Chorus leads an antiphonal lament that weighs victory against irreparable loss. A herald announces public honors for Eteocles and dishonor for Polyneices as a traitor. In the surviving text, an edict forbids Polyneices’ burial, prompting Antigone to vow defiance, a bridge to later Theban tragedies; many scholars suspect this coda is a later addition. Regardless, the play closes on the cost of salvation: a city rescued but a house extinguished, its curse fulfilled through the very mechanisms of defense.