Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus

1/ This was tough to read. The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s masterpiece, was first performed in 458 BC. Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467 BC, as the third part and the only one that survives of a four-part sequence, preceded by Laius and Oedipus (forming a tragic trilogy) and followed by a satyr play, The Sphinx. Seven Against Thebes is about the fight between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices, which was not covered by Sophocles’s Theban plays. 

When Sophocles wrote about the same family, Antigone was from around 442–440 BBC, its prequel King Oedipus was around 429–427 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus (ca 407 BC) was written shortly before his death ca 406 BC. 

As my main frame of reference is Shakespeare, when I first got into Greek tragedy, I had to adjust to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides as they’re different, but in the plays before the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s concept of drama is even further away from ours that I don’t quite understand it. The play is static. Part of the play, when the chorus is wailing and lamenting, feels like an opera. Part of the play, when the messenger tells Eteocles about the enemies at the seven gates and paints a picture of each one, feels like an epic poem being performed to the audience. It is very odd. 

2/ I’m just going to poke at the play. 

“CHORUS […] The army has been let loose, it has left its camp! 

This great host of horses is pouring forward at the gallop! 

The dust I see in the air shows me it is so, 

a voiceless messenger but true and certain! 

The soil <of my land>, 

struck by hooves, sends the noise right to my ears! 

It’s flying, it’s roaring like an irresistible 

mountain torrent!”

(translated by Alan Sommerstein) 

If only I could read ancient Greek! 

“CHORUS […] I hear the rattle of chariots round the city! 

O Lady Hera! 

The sockets of their heavy-laden axles are squealing! 

Beloved Artemis! 

The air is going mad with the brandishing of spears!” 

The most interesting images are probably when the messenger describes the enemies. 

“SCOUT […] Tydeus is already growling near the Proetid […]. Teydeus, lusting madly for battle, is screaming like a snake hissing at midday…” 

He describes, he paints a picture of each enemy. What do the audience see? Do they see anything? 

“SCOUT […] I shuddered, I won’t deny it, to see [Hippomedon] brandish his great round threshing-floor of a shield. And it can’t have been a cheap artist who gave him that device on the shield, Typhon emitting dark smoke, the many-coloured sister of flame, from his fire-breathing lips; the round circle of the hollow-bellied shield is floored with coiling snakes. The man himself raised a great war cry; he is possessed by Ares, and he rages for a fight like a maenad, with a fearsome look in his eye…” 

I like the imagery, but all this stuff feels like an epic poem—there’s no drama as we know it, no conflict and tension—till Eteocles hears that his brother Polyneices is at the seventh gate and decides to fight him himself, and the chorus tells him not to do so. 

Aeschylus does raise something interesting, however. When Eteocles hears that Polyneices is at the seventh gate, he says: 

“Ah me, my father’s curse is now truly fulfilled!” 

The curse, presumably about the brothers killing each other for their cruel treatment of their father, would have been in Oedipus, which didn’t survive. But Eteocles’s remark is obviously nonsense—it’s nothing like the preordained fate from which Oedipus couldn’t escape—Eteocles is told that his brother is at the seventh gate—he makes the choice.   

“CHORUS […] And when they die in kindred slaughter, 

killed by one another, and the dust of earth

drinks up their dark red, clotted blood, 

who can provide purification, 

who can release them? O 

new troubles for the house 

mingling with its old woes!” 

4/ The play ends oddly, almost going in a new direction with the herald announcing that Polyneices is not to be buried, and Antigone defying him (which is more or less the plot of Sophocles’s play). However, Kenneth McLeish writes in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“Scholars say that Aeschylus wrote only the first four fifths of Seven Against Thebes as we have it. His contribution ends not with the resolution and catharsis, but with a brief report of the princes’ deaths, a reminder that ‘God’s knife is whetted still,’ and a chorus of desolation balancing the chorus of distress at the beginning. Later hands added the Antigone/ Ismene material we now possess – and they unfocused the meaning of the action, introducing a completely new strand (Antigone’s defiance of the council), without integrating it, and –because the quality of the verse is poor—reducing the impact of Aeschylus’ chorus […] How Aeschylus resolved the issues raised by the play and its predecessors in the sequence is now unguessable.”