Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/447

Rh CHAP. Thus the story told by Diomedes of his father Tydeus when sent to Thebes to demand the restoration of Polyneikes reproduces in part the story of Bellerophon.^ Victorious in the strife of boxing or Tes- thng to which he had challenged the Kadmeians, he is assailed on his way back to the Argive host by an ambuscade of fifty Thebans, all of whom he slays except Maion, who is saved by the special interven- tion of the gods. So too the prophecy of Teiresias that the Thebans should be conquerors m the war if Ares received the youthful Menoi- keus as a victim, must be compared with those utterances of Kalchas which sealed the doom of Iphigeneia and Polyxena ; and finally when the Argives are routed and Periklymenos is about to slay Amphiaraos, we see in his rescue by the earth which receives him with his chariot and horses another form of the plunge of Endymion into the sea or of the leap of Kcphalos from the Leukadian cape. It is the vanishing from mortal sight of the sun which can never die, and so the story went that Zeus thus took away Amphiaraos that he might make him immortal.

This first assault of the Argives against Thebes answers to the -phe war ot ineffectual attempts of the Herakleidai to recover their paternal ^^^ ^P'- . gonoi. inheritance. It was therefore followed by a second attack in the struggle known as the war of the Epigonoi, or the children of the discomfited chiefs of the former expedition. But it must be noted that as the Herakleids find a refuge in Athens after the slaughter of Hyllos by Echemos, so Adrastos, who alone had been saved from the carnage by the speed of his horse Areion, betakes himself to the Attic Eleusis, whence Theseus marches against the Thebans to insist on the surrender and the burial of the dead, — an incident in which the historical Athenians took pride as an actual event in their annals. The doom of Thebes was now come, and the Epigonoi approach like the Herakleidai when their period of inforced idleness is at an end. The Thebans are utterly routed by the Argives under Alkmaion, the son of Amphiaraos ; and Teiresias declares that there is no longer any hope, as the gods have abandoned them. The city is therefore surrendered, and Thersandros, the son of Polyneikes, is seated on the throne of Kadmos.

Of the remaining incidents connected with these two great struggles Anti?on6 the most remarkable is the doom of Antigone, who is condemned by mon. Kreon to be buried alive because she had performed the funeral rites over the body of Polyneikes, which had been cast forth to the birds and dogs. Of the sentiments which Sophokles puts into her mouth as explaining her motives and justifying her actions, all that we need to

iv. 384, e/ seq.