Editing Seven Against Thebes (play) (section)

==Mythic content==
The [[mytheme]] of the "outlandish" and "savage" Seven who threatened the city has traditionally seemed to be based on Bronze Age history in the generation before the [[Trojan War]],<ref>"There is no reason to suppose that the tale was not based on historical fact" ''Cambridge Ancient History'' II (1978:168), noted by Burkert 1992:107n.</ref> when in the ''[[Iliad]]''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s [[Catalogue of Ships]] only the remnant ''Hypothebai'' ("Lower Town") subsists on the ruins of Thebes. Yet archaeologists have been hard put to locate seven gates in "seven-gated Thebes":<ref>Burkert 1993:107-08 briefly surveys the attempts, with bibliography.</ref> In 1891 [[Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff]] declared that the seven gates existed only for symmetry with the seven assailants, whose very names vary: some have their own identity, like [[Amphiaraus]] the seer, "who had his [[Amphiareion of Oropos|sanctuary]] and his cult afterwards... Others appear as stock figures to fill out the list," Burkert remarks. "To call one of them Eteoklos, vis-à-vis [[Eteokles]] the brother of Polyneikes, appears to be the almost desperate invention of a faltering poet"<ref>Burkert 1993:108.</ref> Burkert follows a suggestion made by Ernest Howald in 1939 that the Seven are pure myth led by Adrastos (the "inescapable") on his magic horse, seven demons of the [[Greek underworld|Underworld]]; Burkert draws parallels in an Akkadian epic text, the story of [[Erra (god)|Erra]] the plague god, and the Seven (''Sibitti''), called upon to destroy mankind, but who withdraw from Babylon at the last moment. The city is saved when the brothers simultaneously run each other through. Burkert adduces a ninth-century relief from [[Tell Halaf]] which would exactly illustrate a text from II Samuel 2: "But each seized his opponent by the forelock and thrust his sword into his side so that all fell together."

The mythic theme passed into [[Etruscan culture]]: a fifth-century [[Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum|bronze mirrorback]]<ref>Illustrated in [[Larissa Bonfante]] and [[Judith Swaddling]], ''Etruscan Myths'' (Series The Legendary Past, University of Texas/ British Museum) 2006, fig. 9 p. 22.</ref> is inscribed with Fulnice (Polynices) and Evtucle (Eteocles) running at one another with drawn swords. A particularly gruesome detail from the battle, in which Tydeus gnawed on the living brain of Melanippos in the course of the siege, also appears, in a sculpted terracotta relief from a temple at [[Pyrgi]], ca. 470–460 BC.<ref>Relief in the Museo Etrusco, [[Villa Giulia]], Rome, illustrated in Bonfante and Swaddling, fig. 10 p. 23, and p. 58.</ref>

[[File:Eteocles and Polynices - Project Gutenberg eText 14994.png|thumbnail|right|300px|[[Eteocles]] and [[Polynices]] being carried away, dead, after the Battle of Thebes, by [[Alfred John Church]]]]

The [[Epigoni]], the sons of the [[Seven against Thebes]], were the mythic theme of the second war of Thebes, which occurred ten years after their fathers had fought in the first war of Thebes.