Aeschylus: ‘Seven Against Thebes’

 There is nothing like a chorus of hysterical women to throw you off the track.

In Aeschylus’ play, the women of Thebes are mad with fear. The Argives have surrounded the city with plans to sack and pillage. The women are making such a scene that King Eteocles tries to reassure them. Their panic is a public danger, undermining the city’s ability to defend itself.

The women are so distraught that Eteocles casually mentions that he himself will defend one of the city’s gates. And with that line, dropped so casually it seems like an afterthought, that we learn that the play is not about the fate of Thebes but about the fate of Eteocles.

The Argives have seven champions, each leading soldiers against one of the city’s seven gates.

Eteocles coolly weighs what kind of man each Argive is and selects just the right person, by temperament and character, to lead the defense. Every choice is careful, considered, just.

Unsaid is that Polyneices, Eteocles’ brother, is leading the Argives. They are both sons of Oedipus, once king of Thebes, and both have been cursed by their father. Polyneices hates his brother so much that he’s willing to sack the city rather than let his brother have it. But Aeschylus doesn’t mention Polyneices by name until late in the play.

Instead, we know that Eteocles will defend one of the gates and that, one by one, he’s eliminating choices about which gate he’ll defend.

Somewhere along the way, we folks in the audience begin to suspect that Polyneices is at the seventh gate.

H.D.F. Kitto, whose reading of the play is being followed here, points out that any modern dramatist would have done it differently. Sophocles, Aeschylus’ younger contemporary would have done it differently.

Other playwrights would have loved the conflict between brothers. As Kitto puts it, Aeschylus had a different view of what tragedy was.

 

His mind and dramatic imagination were absorbed in the questions of Man’s relation to God, fate, and the Universe, not in his relation to Man.

 

Kitto says “Seven Against Thebes” is the most complete example of for Old Tragedy, just as Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” is the perfection of Middle Tragedy. After such a feat, playwrights have to try something new or tragedy, as an art form, decays.
• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on “Seven Against Thebes” is on pages 46-57. The quotation is on p. 48.

“Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 88-130.