Thebes

Thebes is a city in the region of Boeotia in Greece and the setting of some of the best-known stories in Greek myth. Cadmus founded it, Amphion and Zethus walled it, Dionysus and Heracles were born there, and the family of Laius, Oedipus and his children suffered there the disasters that the tragedians later made famous. Its wars gave rise to the Seven Against Thebes and the Epigoni.

Cadmus and the Founding of Thebes

Cadmus, a Phoenician prince searching for his sister Europa, was the mythical founder of the city. According to Apollodorus (3.4.1), the oracle at Delphi told him to give up the search, to follow a cow and to found a city where it fell down exhausted. When it did, on the site of Thebes, he wished to sacrifice it to Athena and sent men to fetch water from a spring that belonged to Ares and was guarded by a dragon. The dragon killed most of his companions, and Cadmus killed it. On Athena’s advice he sowed the dragon’s teeth, and armed men, the Spartoi, grew from the ground. They fought and killed one another until five were left: Echion, Udaeus, Chthonius, Hyperenor and Pelorus. Apollodorus adds that according to Pherecydes it was Cadmus who set them fighting, by throwing stones among them so that each thought he was being pelted by another (3.4.1); Ovid tells the same version (Metamorphoses 3.115–126). The five survivors helped Cadmus found the city, which was first called Cadmeia.

To atone for killing the dragon, Cadmus served Ares for eight years, which counted as a single great year. After that, Athena gave him the kingdom and Zeus gave him Harmonia as his wife. They had four daughters, Autonoe, Ino, Semele and Agave, and a son, Polydorus (Apollodorus 3.4.2; Hesiod, Theogony 975–978).

Semele and Dionysus

Semele, a daughter of Cadmus, was loved by Zeus. She had been persuaded by Hera to ask Zeus to come to her as he came to Hera, and since Zeus had promised to give her whatever she wished, he came with thunder and lightning. Semele died of fear, and Zeus took the unborn child from the fire and sewed it into his thigh until it was ready to be born (Apollodorus 3.4.3). The child was Dionysus. Hesiod (Theogony 940–942) says that a mortal woman bore an immortal son, and that now both are gods.

Hermes took the infant to Ino, Semele’s sister, and her husband Athamas to be raised, until Hera drove them mad and the child was sent elsewhere (Apollodorus 3.4.3). Dionysus returned to Thebes after his wanderings. Apollodorus (3.5.2) says that he drove the women of the city into Bacchic frenzy on Mount Cithaeron, and that Pentheus, the son of Agave who had succeeded Cadmus as king, tried to stop the rites. Pentheus spied on the women, and in her madness his own mother, thinking him a wild beast, tore him limb from limb. This is the story Euripides dramatised in the Bacchae.

Amphion and Zethus

The walls of Thebes were the work of the twins Amphion and Zethus. Their mother Antiope, a daughter of Nycteus, was loved by Zeus and fled to Sicyon; her uncle Lycus, who ruled Thebes while Laius was a child, marched against Sicyon, killed Epopeus and brought her back; and she gave birth to the twins on the way and exposed them. Lycus and his wife Dirce kept Antiope a prisoner and ill-treated her for years, until she escaped to her sons, now grown up as herdsmen. The brothers killed Lycus, tied Dirce to a bull and threw her body into the spring that bears her name, and took the city. They fortified it with a wall, and the stones followed the music of the lyre that Hermes had given Amphion. Zethus married Thebe, from whom the city took its name, and Amphion married Niobe, whose children were killed by Apollo and Artemis (Apollodorus 3.5.5–6). Homer already knew the twins as the first founders of seven-gated Thebes, who fenced it with walls (Odyssey 11.260–265).

The House of Laius

Laius, the great-grandson of Cadmus, was a child when Lycus held power, and he was driven out when Amphion and Zethus took the city. He found refuge with Pelops in the Peloponnese, but fell in love with his host’s son Chrysippus and carried him off; after the deaths of Amphion and Zethus he returned to the throne of Thebes (Apollodorus 3.5.5). The most famous cycle of stories set in Thebes begins with Laius and his wife Jocasta. An oracle warned Laius that he must not have a son, because that son would kill him. Yet one night, when he was drunk, he lay with his wife, and she bore a son (Apollodorus 3.5.7). The child, Oedipus, was exposed, but was rescued by Corinthian shepherds. When he learned at Delphi that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he left Corinth, and on a narrow road he met Laius and killed him in a quarrel, without knowing who he was.

At Thebes the Sphinx was killing the people who could not answer her riddle: what has one voice and becomes four-footed, two-footed and three-footed? Oedipus answered that it was man, and was rewarded with the kingdom and with the widow of Laius, Jocasta, who was his mother. They had two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. When the truth came out, Jocasta hanged herself and Oedipus blinded himself (Apollodorus 3.5.8).

The Seven Against Thebes

After their father’s fall, Polynices and Eteocles agreed to rule in turns, a year each. Eteocles refused to give up the throne when his turn was over, and Polynices went to Argos and gained the help of King Adrastus (Apollodorus 3.6.1). Seven leaders marched against the city: Adrastus, Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hippomedon, Polynices, Tydeus and Parthenopaeus (3.6.3). At Nemea the infant Opheltes was killed by a serpent while his nurse showed them a spring, and they held funeral games for him (3.6.4).

The attackers fought at the city’s seven gates. Capaneus, boasting that not even the fire of Zeus would stop him, was struck by the thunderbolt as he climbed his scaling-ladder (Euripides, Phoenician Women 1172–1186; Hyginus, Fabulae 68, who adds that Teiresias said the city would be saved if one of the dragon-born race died, and that Creon’s son Menoeceus threw himself from the wall). Statius makes Capaneus’ assault on the walls, tearing down towers and hurling the stones into the city, the climax of the tenth book of his Thebaid (10.827–939). The two brothers fought one another in single combat and each killed the other. Amphiaraus fled beside the river Ismenus, and Zeus split the earth with a thunderbolt so that he vanished with his chariot. Adrastus alone escaped, on his horse Arion (Apollodorus 3.6.8).

The Epigoni

Ten years later the sons of the seven, the Epigoni, marched against Thebes under the leadership of Alcmaeon, the son of Amphiaraus, and this time the Argives won; on the advice of Teiresias the Thebans sent a herald to treat with the enemy and fled from the city by night (Apollodorus 3.7.2–3). Afterwards Alcmaeon killed his own mother Eriphyle, who had been bribed with the necklace of Harmonia to send both his father and himself to the war; he was pursued by her Fury until Achelous purified him and gave him his daughter Callirrhoe (3.7.5). The rest of his story, his death at the hands of the sons of Phegeus, belongs on his own page.