Seven Against Thebes
Hepta epi Thebas
A family curse pursuing Oedipus's sons to mutual fratricide shows that inherited guilt can outlast any individual's own choices, closing off every attempt to escape a doom set in motion by a previous generation.
- fratricide fulfilling a family curse
- inherited guilt across generations
- the finale of a lost connected trilogy
- catalogue structure (paired champions and gates)
- doom as inescapable despite individual choice
Seven Against Thebes, performed in 467 BC as the finale of a lost trilogy on the House of Laius, stages the siege of Thebes by seven champions, one of whom is Polynices, son of Oedipus, attacking the city his brother Eteocles now rules. The play builds toward the brothers' mutual killing of each other at the seventh gate, fulfilling their father's curse and completing the destruction of the cursed line of Laius that Aeschylus's lost earlier plays had traced back to Laius's own defiance of a divine warning. Structured largely as a tense catalogue of paired champions and gates, the play's real subject is the mechanics of inherited doom, showing how a family's guilt compounds across generations until it consumes even the innocent.
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