Seven Against Thebes

The overlap of Human Agency Versus Divine Forces becomes a reality in the final part of the play. The Theban army has been victorious in battle, which means, at least in the world of the play, that the gods have granted them victory. Thus, it is “great Zeus and spirits that guard / the city” (823-24) that the Chorus invokes after learning of the Theban victory, and Eteocles’s efforts in the war must be deemed secondary to the role played by “the Blessed Ones and the strength of Zeus” (1074) in saving the city from destruction.

However, although the gods have saved Thebes, they have at the same time destroyed the house of Oedipus, reflecting The Hereditary Nature of Family Misfortune. The Messenger thus assigns responsibility for the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices to the god Apollo and to the “guiding spirit” that “has surely destroyed this hapless family” (814-15). The curse that Oedipus placed on his sons acts in conjunction with these destructive divine forces. It must be admitted, then, that the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices are somewhat overdetermined even on this divine level: In the play, the deaths of the two brothers are attributed both to the multigenerational misfortunes of the Labdacids (seemingly rooted in the hatred of the god Apollo) as well as to the “Fury of Oedipus” (887), charged with fulfilling the father’s curse upon his sons.

Though the city’s escape from The Horrors of War—namely, the fate suffered by a conquered city—provides some relaxation of the Chorus’s anxieties from the first part of the play, the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices inevitably produce an extended lament. The Chorus does not know whether to celebrate or to mourn:

shall I rejoice, shall I cry aloud

for our city’s safety?

Or for those wretched ones, luckless and childless,

our generals, shall I lament? (825-28).

What makes the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices even more terrible is the fact that they were both “childless” (at least in Aeschylus’s version), meaning that their dying represents the annihilation of the male line of the Labdacids. The only survivors are Antigone and Ismene, Oedipus’s daughters, who do not count, according to the ancient Greek mindset, because they are women. The city may have been spared the horrors of conquest, but this has come at the expense of the city’s royal line.

Most scholars agree that the end of the play, beginning with the entrance of Antigone and Ismene at Line 861, was not part of Aeschylus’s original. In this scene, Antigone and Ismene enter to mourn their brothers with the Chorus, a Herald announces the edict prohibiting the burial of Polynices, and Antigone declares that she will bury him anyway. Spanning just over 200 lines, this highly condensed scene bears a suspicious resemblance to the basic plot of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone, which premiered in 441 BCE (over a decade after Aeschylus’s death). Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the reasons for adding this scene to the end of Aeschylus’s original was to bring his play in line with Sophocles’s Antigone.

Another reason the ending may have been modified has to do with the conventional two-actor versus three-actor rule in Greek tragedy. Earlier Greek tragedies, including most of Aeschylus’s tragedies, employed only two speaking actors. Since these two actors had to share all spoken roles between them, no scene can employ more than two speaking parts. It was only later that a third speaking actor became conventional, an innovation usually attributed to Sophocles. Until Line 861, Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes can be performed with only two actors (one playing Eteocles, the other playing the Messenger). However, the final dirge and exodos, the final scene or departure, seem to have been imagined with three actors in mind: one playing Antigone, one playing the Herald, and one playing Ismene. The manuscripts have Antigone and Ismene singing the antiphonal dirge at Lines 875-1004, even though most modern editors assign this section to the Chorus.

This distribution of parts seems to correspond to tragic conventions after Aeschylus’s time, and the entire scene may have been interpolated to satisfy the “third actor” (known as the Tritagonist) of professional actor troupes in the later fifth century BCE. As Seven Against Thebes appears to have been one of Aeschylus’s best-known plays in antiquity, it would make sense for its ending to have been modified for reperformance. It is also possible, though, that much of the antiphonal dirge at Lines 875-1004 was originally written by Aeschylus to be performed by the Chorus, and that the play simply ended after this dirge without the scene with the Herald, Antigone, and Ismene.