Seven Against Thebes

Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes was the war play of ancient Greece: In the late fifth century BCE, the comic playwright Aristophanes described the play as “full of Ares” (Frogs, 1021), Ares being the Greek god of war. The tragedy explores both the heroics of war and the cruelty and destruction war brings in its wake.

The crisis in which Thebes finds itself is clear from the very opening lines of the play, where Eteocles addresses the citizens and tells each of them to do their part to protect the city. Eteocles himself never wavers in his courage and his commitment to fight for Thebes, and his heroic attitude is mirrored in the series of single combats between the champions of Thebes and the “Seven Against Thebes” stationed at the seven gates of the city. The famous “Shield Scene,” in which the Messenger reports the shield devices of the attackers and Eteocles responds by selecting the most suitable champion to fight against each of them, embodies the heroic ideal of the Homeric epics, where wars were decided by hand-picked elite warriors while the rest of the army remained largely irrelevant.

Balancing and undercutting these idealized heroic elements, however, is an emphasis on the horrors of war that runs throughout the play. The oath of the seven heroes to fight to the death against Thebes, as recounted by the Messenger, is chilling:

There were seven men, fierce regiment commanders;

they cut bulls’ throats into an iron-rimmed

shield, and with hands touched the bulls’ blood,

taking their oaths by Ares and Enyo,

and by the bloodthirsty god of Terror,

either to smash and lay your city level

with the ground, sacked, or by their death to make

a bloody paste of this same soil of yours (43-48).

In the Shield Scene, the Messenger again paints a terrifying picture of the attackers. Tydeus is almost an animal, “enraged and thirsting for the fight / […] like serpents’ hiss at noonday” (380-81) and raging “like the horse that chafes / against the bit” (392-93). The blasphemous Capaneus “menaces with terrors” (426) the towers of Thebes. Hippomedon’s “vast frame and giant form” (488) are enough to make the Messenger shudder. Parthenopaeus has “a Gorgon look” (537), and Polynices casts fearful curses on the city.

It is the Chorus who is most vocal about the horrors of the war facing Thebes. The invaders become a force of nature, a “a forward-rushing river, the great tide of horsemen” (80) and a roaring “resistless mountain waterfall” (86). They cannot stop themselves from imagining what would happen if they were defeated in battle and the enemy succeeded in capturing their city:

There is tumult through the town.

All around it hangs a towering net:

man stands against man with the spear and is killed.

Screams, bloody and wild, echo around,

from babies new-nourished at the breast (345-50).

War is here presented as the destruction and disruption of peaceful life cycles, with the “bloody and wild” screams “from babies new-nourished at the breast” speaking of the potential massacre that awaits Theban citizens—even the most innocent and helpless—if the seven heroes prevail against the city.

Furthermore, as young virgins, the members of the Chorus are especially afraid of the fate that befalls women taken captive in war, who were often enslaved and forced to become the concubines of their conquerors:

Woeful is it for maidens new-reared and unripe,

before the marriage rites, to tread

this bitter journey from their homes.

I would say that even the dead

are better off than this (333-37).

For all the Chorus’s foreboding, Thebes is spared. The gods come through to save the city, though Eteocles (and Polynices) are killed. The death of the brothers, in some ways, becomes the most terrible of all the horrors of the war, for it marks the destruction of Oedipus’s line.