Curse and Dream in Aeschylus' "Septem" Burnett, Anne Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Winter 1973; 14, 4; ProQuest pg. 343

Curse and Dream in Aeschylus' Septem 
Anne Burnett 

FOR A DECADE now all those who have studied Aeschylus' Septem 
have worked, in larger or smaller degree, under the influence of 
Kurt von Fritz. In a chapter of his Antike und mod erne Tragodie,l 

he reviewed the literature of the play, praising Patzer's announce­
ment that it was a tragedy of blindness,2 dismissing Wolff's early 
The ban ga te assignments as "eine typische Philologeninterpretation,"3 
and presumably destroying forever the old notion that Eteocles' 
death was a form of sacrifice. According to von Fritz, Eteocles had no 
expectation of saving his city, and his action in going to meet his 
brother was a flawed one, chosen by the poet as an example of a fated 
crime that was dictated to the principal by the workings of his own 
character. The uncomprehended Curse was taken over from Patzer,4 
and Solmsen's earlier emphasis upon the force of the Fury was wel­
comed,5 but von Fritz himself was chiefly interested in the necessities 
that he found to be at work within the ethos of Eteocles. 

There seems to be a general agreement now that Septem is, just as 
Kitto long ago said it was,6 the first tragedy of character, and recent 
critics have for the most part concerned themselves with the hamartia 
of the king. Eteocles has been accused of discourtesy and impiety, of 
cynicism and self-seeking ambition, and lately slurs have even been 
cast upon his military ability.7 The second episode is no longer said to 

1 Antike und moderne Tragodie (Berlin 1962) 193-226. 
2 H. Patzer, "Die dramatische Handlung der Sieben," HSCP 63 (1958) 97ff. 
3 Von Fritz, op.cit. (supra n.1) 205, in reference to E. Wolff, "Die Entscheidung des 

Eteokles in den Sieben," HSCP 63 (1958) 89ff. 
4 Patzer, op.cit. (supra n.2) 213. 
I> F. Solmsen, "The Erinys in Aischylos Septem," TAPA 68 (1937) 197ff. 
6 H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (London 1939) 44: "tragedy of character and of a single 

character"; cf 52: "our first tragedy of character" ... Eteocles "the first Man of the Euro­
pean stage." 

7 L. Golden, "The Character of Eteocles and the Meaning of the Septem," CP 59 (1964) 
79ff, reports a cynical and impious man who is power-mad and driven by an inner blood 
lust; much in the same vein is A. J. Podlecki, "The Character of EteocIes in Aeschylus' 
Septem," TAPA 95 (1964) 283ff, who finds "petulance and acidity" in the king's treatment of 
the chorus. H. D. Cameron, Studies in the Seven Against Thebes (The Hague 1971), asserts 
that Eteocles is at fault for abandoning his proper post on the acropolis for a position at one 

343 



344 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

show a man acquiescing in his fate, or even building the machine of 
his own destruction, but rather it is described as displaying the fated 
choice of an abominable crime. Yet in spite of an almost universal 
determination to view the playas a tragedy of divine punishment 
levelled against a hero whose character has brought him to destruc­
tion, there is still no effective agreement as to just what sort of char­
acter Aeschylus has given his hero, or exactly how he has described 
that hero's central action, his resolved departure towards his brother's 
gate. What Eteocles knows and what he intends, at this crucial 
moment, is still a subject of dispute among readers of the play.s 

Dissension in the ranks must not, however, be allowed to jeopardize 
the ground that has been gained. It was the great achievement of von 
Fritz that he rescued Septem from the negative criticism that had so 
largely prevailed. Wilamowitz's learned remarks about the double 
substance of the play, and his unsympathetic judgements upon the 
irreconcilability of the HZweistoffen," had threatened to become 
dogma, so that it was a commonplace to say that the tragedy fell into 
two pieces and showed inconsistency throughout.9 Von Fritz insisted 
against this view that Eteocles was presented as a single, compre­
hensible creature, the same in the beginning as in the end, and he 
insisted likewise that the chorus was everywhere equal to itself and 
to the situation-that the play was in fact a success and not an un­
gainly failure, as so many had so easily claimed. 

of the gates (35), and he thinks that the king is "excitable in a crisis and tends to forget 
himself" (33). 

8 Paul Mazon, for example, assumed that Eteocles knew from the start of the tragedy 
that he had to commit a crime and to die on this day (Eschy/e I [paris 1920] 107), whereas 
Patzer argued that he knew neither of these things when he left the stage at the end of the 
second episode (op.cit. [supra n.2] 110-11), though he hoped to kill his brother. Max Pohlenz, 
Die griechische Tragodie (Leipzig and Berlin 1930) 88, reported an Eteocles who knew he 
could not survive a conflict with his brother, whereas E. Howald, Die griechische Tragodie 
(Munich 1930), wrote: "Eteokles hofft den Bruder zu besiegen" (71). O. Regenbogen, 
"Bemerkungen zu den Sieben des Aischylos," Hermes 68 (1933) 63ff, would have Eteocles 
move towards the Seventh Gate almost as an automaton, in unconscious obedience to 
the Curse, whereas B. Snell, Aischylos und das Handlung im Drama (Philologus Supplbd. 20.1 
[Leipzig 1928]), believes that the king sees what destiny demands, freely decides to let 
it rule him and so chooses to die "urn die Stadt zu retten" (85). In contrast to this intellect­
ual hero is that of W. Porzig (Aischylos [Leipzig 1926]) and Solmsen (op.cit. [supra n.5]) , 
a man stricken by an ate or an erinys in the form of a criminal blood-lust that speaks from 
within himself. 

9 Unfortunately, this judgement has recently been disinterred by Cameron, op.cit. 
(supra n.7) 96ff. 



ANNE BURNETT 345 

Von Fritz approached Septem with admiration, and he analyzed 
certain of its aspects with a wise enthusiasm, but even so he and his 
followers may have been wholly in error as to the true subject of this 
play. For him, this was the tragedy of Eteocles' flawed decision; but it 
can be argued that the shape of the plot, the manipulation of the 
poetry and the construction of each scene all serve to describe, ex­
plain and evaluate, not the decision that put Eteocles at the Seventh 
Gate, but the event that occurred, once he was there. The concentra­
tion upon the central death is like that of Agamemnon, but a moment's 
reflection will show how unlike the two tragedies are. In Agamemnon 
we are asked to find a personal as well as a cosmic justice in the killing 
of the king, a killing that is made as ugly as possible. There the mock­
ing display of the king's body is an insult to which the spectator is 
reconciled because he knows the degree to which the man himself had 
brought the ancestral Fury into Clytemnestra's flesh. And meanwhile 
the external effects of the death are shown as extensions of its internal, 
punitive quality, for the city goes from an appearance of salvation and 
legitimacy to a certainty of usurpation and despotic rule. 

The instruction of Septem, as it is reflected in the whole shape of the 
play, is clearly opposite to this. Here the all-embracing action is one 
of salvation, for the enemy so noisily present at the beginning is gone 
at the play's end. Indeed the experience of Thebes is exactly opposite 
to that of Mycenae ('Argos'), for in the course of this tragedy the city 
goes from danger to security. And here the brute physical infliction of 
death upon the central figure is never dwelt upon, as it is by the killer 
herself in Agamemnon; no hideous images of gushing blood and 
impious elation are forced upon the spectator's imagination, nor is he 
made to listen as the fallen principal is treated with contempt. The 
dead of the Theban play die in a single dignified line (aJlOpEC TEOJlaCLJI 

EK XEPWJI atlTOKTbJlWJI 805; cf 820-21) and then are brought decently on 
stage for praise and lamentation by the women of the city. Aga­
memnon's corpse will be maimed and hustled to its grave, but the 
bodies of Polyneices and Eteocles are bound, at the close of this play 
(whenever that close is thought to come), for the public solemnities 
of the funeral pyre and for the privacy of the paternal tomb. 

Agamemnon's shameful and inauspicious death is made compre­
hensible through his own crimes, as well as through those of his 
father, and in the agent of his death the separate strains of his personal 
responsibility and his inherited destiny mix. Clytemnestra is mother 



346 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

to Iphigeneia, as well as being host to an Erinys, a dramatically em­
bodied human gloss upon the causes of the tragedy, but in Septem no 
such figure appears. The agent of death here is literally the victim 
himself, as he acts with his brother to bring about their cooperative 
deed of familial self-destruction (813). No human figure appears to 
embody wrongs done by the principal; there is no avenger and no 
punishing divinity, only the king, who works his own destruction, and 
the looming Curse which somehow tells him what to do. It is this 
Curse that occupies the final choral parts of the play, that long 
lament in which the women explain to themselves the killings at the 
Seventh Gate. These rescued Thebans do not sing of the substance of 
Eteocles' quarrel with Polyneices, nor of his brutality or his gentleness 
as a ruler. They do not question now his decision to act as he did, nor 
do they discuss his piety or impiety in dealing with the gods.10 We 
learn nothing of his treatment of his father, nothing of the sources of 
the paternal anger, for the Curse of Oedipus has lost its ties with 
ordinary life and become a self-defining supernatural force. Eteocles 
is presented as defender of the fatherland, and the chorus finds no 
act of new hybris to be charged against him. There is no richly de­
scribed Aulis here, no boasted sacrilege at Troy, and no captive 
priestess-concubine to illumine Eteocles' own responsibility in his 
bloody fate. Instead there are only the old man's angry words, dwelt 
on again and again. Like the lion cub, they have been long in the 
house, have seemed almost familiar and tame, but suddenly on this 
day they have shown the savage nature of their parentage, for they 
are the dynamic force in this tragedy. Perhaps the statement sug­
gested above-that the true subject of Septem is the death of Eteocles 
-should be made in an amended form, for it is the death, and the 
Curse that caused it, that shape the gesture, the poetry and the 
spectacle of this tragedy. 

Von Fritz read the central scene as the portrait of a man deciding. 
Ostensibly he was deciding on the placement of his captains, ulti­
mately upon the placement of himself, and so upon the duel with his 
brother. In this reading the king chose his fate without knowing what 
it was, pushed by his own character towards a destined, criminal, 
self-punishing act. The scene cannot possibly be read this way, how-

10 The &.C€{lEt of 831 attaches to Polyneices, not to both. When the chorus is using every 
argument it can find to try to dissuade Eteocles, it speaks only of the inevitable practical 
(ritual) problems of miasma; cf 738-39. Line references in Aeschylus are made to the 
edition of Denys Page (Oxford 1972). 



ANNE BURNETT 347 

ever, if the overt decisions-the assignments made to each gate-are 
not a part of its mechanical action but were taken before the episode 
began. That they were taken earlier, before the scout had returned, 
was the argument of Erwin Wolff, and it is perspicacious enough not 
to be set aside with mere name-calling.ll Wolff's observation was not 
tediously philological but rather sensibly dramaturgical, for it is 
axiomatic that a character who leaves the stage saying, HI go to do a 
specified thing," returns with that thing done, unless the audience is 
expressly instructed to the contrary. Eteocles goes off at 282 saying, HI 
go to post six men, myself the seventh one, who shall confront the 
enemy at the seven breaches of our walls" (282-84). When he returns, 
just as the second episode begins, he comes uncalled, to the surprise 
of the chorus (372), so that we know that he has not been interrupted 
but has returned because he was ready to do so. He comes, in other 
words, after having seen or left word for each of the other six as to the 
post he will command.12 

11 There are two future verbs of posting; the first (408) comes in answer to the scout's 
future at 395, where that speaker was ignorant of the assignments. The second (621) comes 
after the suggestion that plans might be changed and the king might decide not to waste a 
man at Amphiaraus' gate. The sense is: "All the same I shall post Lasthenes against him, 
just as I had decided to do." of the perfect at 473, von Fritz supposed (after Fraenkel) that 
Eteocles hesitated: "I am minded to send ... who shall it be ... ?" Then he presumably 
broke out with conviction: "But indeed, the right man is already found (by my mind, 
which is in the act of choosing)!" It must be noted, however, that Fraenkel himself was not 
quite satisfied with this solution, and was tempted to remove the first of these lines. No 
wonder, since it refers to a specific man who is already in the king's mind and who can be 
referred to as '761'8" (472). The comparison with Bum. 892 is beguiling but not decisive in 
this context; in the case of the other perfect, the 'rETaK'7a£ of 448, it is wholly irrelevant, since 
there can be no question of an exclamation in that line. 

12 Von Fritz, op.cit. (supra n.l) 201, admitted that the natural supposition of the audience, 
after Eteocles' departure, would be that the king was at work posting the Theban cap­
tains. He assumed, however, that the physical assumption of a post would be simultane­
ous with the receipt of command, and that Eteocles' own reappearance would therefore 
abrogate the spectators' expectation. Eteocles after all had only chosen a pool of six names 
(but for this, why absent himself at all 1), to whom specific commands were yet to be given 
(though the play offers no opportunity for any further word to be conveyed from the king 
to these men). Albin Lesky, "Eteokles in den Sieben gegen Theben," WS 74 (1961) 5-17, tried 
to mitigate the force of Wolff's arguments with the suggestion of a half-finished task, sup­
posing that Eteocles returned incontinently to the acropolis with three gates still un­
assigned. The resulting confusion in the second episode he labelled artful ambiguity on the 
poet's part, an effect created so that the audience might participate in the 'Helldunkel' of a 
mixture of freedom and fate (9). Cameron, op.cit. (supra n.7) 39ff, follows this suggestion, 
which had been made earlier by Pohlenz, op.cit. (supra n.8) 85, and which seems to have 
originated with Wecklein; see E. Fraenkel, "Die sieben Redepaare im Thebanerdrama des 
Aeschylus," SBMiinchen 1957 Heft 3 p.6, n.ll = Kleine Beitriige I (Rome 1964) 276 n.4. 



348 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

Wolff's timing of the gate assignments at last allows a functional 
reading of the first episode, for we understand now that it is the 
women, with their ill-omened fear and their obstinate vision of 
defeat, who have set the plot in motion. They push Eteocles into de­
cisions that are made early and without full information, causing him 
to post the Thebans and himself according to a half-blind chance 
(note his later phrase at 459).13 The king is thus deprived of any sig­
nificant choice in his defensive strategy since he is forced to act not 
against his true enemy, the besieging army, but against panic, the 
unexpected threat he finds within his walls. 

Even more important is the change wrought in the second episode 
by a proper understanding of the naming of the Theban captains to 

their gates. Recognition, not decision, turns out to be the achievement 
of this scene, one that reaches its climax when Eteocles cries out­
"Now is my father's Curse contriving its completion!" (642). He finds 
the Curse behind the Seventh Gate, and hears it issue a new command 
to him, but this is a long postponed event. The poet built a monu­
mental scene as a preface to it, and this we must consider carefully if 
we are to comprehend the final action of the king. 

The central episode is technically a messenger scene, its brute con­
tent being the return of the scout with his fuller report. He enters 
from the field as Eteocles comes from the walls, and so the two men 
meet, each in possession of information that mirrors the other's dis­
closures. One actor carries a list of Argive names, the other a list of 
Thebans, each prepared in advance, each keyed to the names of the 
gates, and the business of the scene is to coordinate the two. One can 
imagine this exchange of information occurring in a series of two­
line speeches that would move with the rapidity of, say, the choral 
self-interrogation during Agamemnon's death cries (Agam. 1346ff). 
A number of acceptable stage techniques could in fact be collected, 
each of which might get this prosopography quickly out of the way so 
that the actors could get on to the pith of the scene. It is however 
perfe~tly clear that for Aeschylus the balanced descriptions of the 

13 The women constituted a real danger; with their hands upon altars they forgot to call 
upon the gods and insistently summoned up instead the presence of the enemy. Kitto, 
follOWing Verrall, sensed something of the dynamism of this scene; he believed that 
Eteocles began it intending not to stand in person at any of the gates, but then, in order to 
calm the women's fears, decided to join actively in the city's defense (op.cit. [supra n.6] 
47). 



ANNE BURNETT 349 

captains was no mere preliminary, but was itself a part of the true 
action he had chosen to imitate with his tragedy. 

Of course it has been suggested that this whole long scene was 
simply a sop tossed to the Athenian love of rhetoric, or that it was 
prolonged in order that the too-tame climax might be spiced with a 
little suspense.I4 If, however, we read looking for something larger 
than mere rhetoric or suspense, the first thing that becomes evident 
is that in the first six pairs of speeches the poet has set up a counter­
weight to the preceding choral ode. This present scene denies the 
validity of the women's just-expressed version of the city's coming 
fate; it proves the women's foolishness, and more than that, it proves 
the effectiveness of their royal adversary, the king who meant to 
act, that the city might survive. 

As soon as their lord had gone to the walls, the women had given 
license, in the first ode, to their ill-timed terror.l5 With it as their muse 
they had prepared a vast canvas of disaster, singing of a visionary 
sack of Thebes such as John Martin might have shown-the enemy a 
bestial horde, the city a smoking hive (340-42) where slaughtered 
infants hung bleeding at the breast (348-50). Riches spilled from rup­
tured treasure-houses (357-62), and here and there, in shadow, livid 
acts of rape took place (363ff). It was a guerre de Thebes qui n' aura pas 
lieu, but those who sang it were trained in the compelling art of panto­
mime, and so the spectator had been made almost to witness those 
factitious flames. As soon as the song is finished, however, the same 
audience is asked, in the succeeding scene, to look upon the fulfill­
ment of an opposite fate for Thebes. Now a successful defense is 
imitated, and this time not in language alone, but in symbolic action 
as well. In this central episode six duels are fought by proxy between 
Argive attackers, represented by the scout, and Theban defenders, 
whose champion is their king. And six times the attack is repulsed as 
the victory goes to Eteocles. 

The variations are nice, both in thrust and in parry, the whole like 
some exhibition match in a fencing school, for Eteocles is not without 

14 J. de Romilly, La tragedie grecque (Paris 1970) 59: ula lenteur me me de la scene qui 
oppose deux a deux les chefs destines a s'affronter fait attendre et pressentir avec une 
certitude de plus en plus sensible la decision qui s'opposera run a l'autre les deux fils 
d'Oedipe." 

15 Contrast the truth-bearing inspiration of fear that settles on the chorus of Agamemnon 
at 975ff. 



350 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

wit in his performance. Images of fearfulness are voiced by the first 
contestant, then like the insults and threats of Homer's battlefields 
they are hurled back-capped, incorporated, matched, or turned 
aside with a joke, by the superior skill of the royal second speaker.I6 

And while the successful Theban resistance is thus prefigured, it is 
also explained. The enemy is made to boast, its characteristic mem­
ber being its tongue, while the Thebans are shown as scorning words 
for deeds, their hands their salient physical partP This of course 
harmonizes well with the play's frequent figuring of the Argives as 
beasts filled with passion, the Thebans as men who know reason and 
skill.I8 The Argives are horsemen, the Thebans the crew of a ship; the 
Argives are uncontrolled floods, the Thebans masters of an irrigation 
system.I9 At the same time the invaders are painted with broad strokes 
in the traditional hues of impiety, and one of them is made to carry on 
his shield the image of Typhon, rebel against the gods.20 The Thebans, 
on the other hand, are touched with rosy tints of patriotism, virtue 
and piety; they are courageous without the corruption of an ugly lust 
for battle. Eteocles' speeches, as he names his men, are never thought­
ful, nor do they ever express that element of doubt that is usually 
thought necessary if decision is to be represented. They are instead 
like a series of small epinician odes, celebrations in advance of a list 

16 The image of the moon is returned, as night, in Eteocles' first speech; that of the 
torch is capped by that of the sun, in his second; that of the besieger is incorporated, with 
an almost Aristophanic joke (if Eteocles has a man on his shield then Megareus, in victory, 
will have two men on his) in the third; the image of Typhon is blocked by that of Zeus in 
the fourth speech; the image of the sphinx is simply ignored in the fifth, where the whole 
shield threat is reduced to mere frangible metal with the joke about its receiving a ham­
mering. 

17 pod. 381, 392, 394,468,487, cf 64, 84,89; KOJL1TOC 391, 404,425,436,437, 500, 538,551, 
summed up at 794; iJ{3p£c 406, 502; y.\wcca 439, 556; CToJLa 441,447 (cToJLapyoc), cf 579 and 
612 8paCVCTOJLOC. For the Thebans: KOJL1TOV Jv X~'po;:v EXWV 473, if. 513; 554, where X£lp is in 
combination with aKOJL1TOC; 623. The emphasis upon the Theban hand is finally ironic in 
effect, since the doubly Theban hand of Eteocles-Polyneices, armed with Ares' iron, will 
kill the non-secular enemy of Thebes, the true internal enemy, the race of Laius; note refs. 
at 789,805,811,931; and see infra p. 358. 

18 86.KOC 558; cf 53 and the women earlier at 291. 
19 On these two groups of images, see Cameron, op.cit. (supra n. 7) 55-84; for irrigation, 

especially 72. 
20 The question of the device seen on the shield of Eteocles is a tantalizing one. Helen 

Bacon, "The Shield of Eteocles," Arion 3 (1964) 27ff, has suggested the figure of an erinys; if 
this were the case Eteocles would achieve visually what Orestes does verbally, with his 
JK8paKoVTw8~k 8' eyw (Choeph. 549): the formal identification of himself with the symbol of 
his destined act. 



ANNE BURNETT 351 

of victors, that are filled with praise and blame.21 They are epic in 
tone, just as they should be, for this great episode is not the picture of 
a man deciding the preliminary details of a conflict-it is instead a 
portrait of the battle itself and of its end in Theban victory. 

The women had sung of the fall of Thebes, but now two men mime 
the successful defense of the city, and so the poet gives us the sense 
that the disasters the women dreamed of have indeed come close, 
but are to be averted by the strong action of Eteocles and his fellow­
warriors. The battle for the salvation of Thebes is symbolically fought 
and symbolically won in the first six encounters between the scout 
and the king, and the actual fulfillment of this portentous tableau 
is reported by the opening words of the messenger, when the next 
scene begins (797-99; note how cpepeyyvotc here echoes Eteocles' use 
of the word at 449, and the scout's at 396). This man testifies to the 
Theban victory, but he also reports the special price that was paid for 
the city's escape, announcing that both its kings were killed before the 
enemy fell back. The Curse of Oedipus, he says, has brought the 
brothers to this common fate (819), and it is that Curse which becomes 
the ultimate subject of the central episode which we have been 
analyzing. 

When four-fifths of its length has been traversed, the great scene 
between the scout and the king takes a sudden turn. There has been 
a patterned flow and ebb, as each enemy warlord was brought for­
ward and lauded, then forced to retire under the superior praise 
of his Theban foe. Now, however, this fixed and steady rhythm is 
sharply broken, in the middle of the seventh exchange. The scout has 
named Polyneices, and has described him and his shield, just as he had 
the other Argive chiefs, and Eteocles should, in normal response, 

21 Eteocles has a regular formula for his counterattack which he varies only by shifting 
the weights, and once the positions of the component parts. The first element of this 
formula is essentially negative, but it is given a negative or a positive expression: "The 
enemy device is no cause for fear to us," or "Indeed it is a presage of evil for him." This 
entire element takes 10, 10,0, 12 and 6 lines in the five speeches where a shield device is 
present. The second element is positive: "The Theban champion has superior qualities" 
(sometimes but not always expressed by shield device); this element takes 10, 4, 8, 5 and 7 
lines in the first five speeches. Element oneis wholly missing in the exceptionally short speech 
on Megareus (472-80); it follows element two in the fourth speech, on Hyperbius (501-20). 

In the sixth speech, the formula must be seriously altered because Amphiaraus bore no 
device upon his shield; in this case element one becomes: "The enemy is no cause for fear 
because he does not truly belong to the enemy," with a more precise expression: "indeed, 
he probably will not fight." This is followed by the usual element two, praise of Lasthenus. 



352 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

spurn the enemy and bring out his own, the fourteenth name, as the 
certain antidote to his brother's threats. Instead, at the opening of this 
last encomium, the king abandons his own six-times repeated pre­
cedent to utter an uncontrolled cry of dismay. The sudden flood of 
terror that breaks into the stately contest marks the crisis of the 
scene and of the tragedy, betraying, with its successful shock, the 
poetic reason for the rigid pomp of what has gone before. The agon 
has been transformed, to become a recognition scene, and something 
newly comprehended has destroyed the cool confidence of the 
king. 

It is not a long-lost relative that Eteocles has found thus unex­
pectedly. The Argive attack has never belonged to anyone but Poly­
nekes, and this war was never anything but a struggle between the 
two who claim the throne. Polyneices has been known to stand at the 
Seventh Gate ever since Amphiaraus was named, a hundred lines ago. 
No, this recognition is not one of crude identity; it is instead of the 
sort that Aristotle thought the best, one of situation. Like Oedipus in 
Oedipus Rex, Eteocles recognizes himself in a new role, but unlike 
Oedipus, he finds that the performance is still ahead of him. What is 
it that he has discovered? In appearance the problem is simple, for 
Eteocles tells us what form it was that loomed behind the person of 
his brother, when the scour's words opened that figurative ultimate 
gate. It was the demanding demon of his father's Curse, and it drew 
from him a triple cry (653-55): 

o maddened and reviled by gods, 
o much-wept race of Oedipus, 
oh me, my father's curses now demand 

their satisfaction! 

It is the Curse, then, that causes Eteocles' sudden reversal of mood, 
but yet the case is not as simple as it seems. Why has the Curse 
threatened him so strongly just now? Has he, like the Heracles of 
Trachiniae, only in this moment realized that this was the day in 
which a portent meant to work? No; that cannot be, for he has 
already expressed the idea that the present siege somehow belongs 
to his father's Curse. The paternal words were first referred to at the 
prologue's end, when the scout had finished his initial report. Having 
been told how the enemy was assigning its captains, Eteocles had 
responded then with a royal prayer (69-71, 76): 



ANNE BURNETT 

o Zeus and Earth and city-guarding gods 
and Curse, my father's strong Erinys, 
do not, I pray, uproot this city, destroy it 
and give it to the enemy ... 

Rather, lend us aid! 

353 

The Curse here is one of several daimonic factors to be reckoned with 
when the ruler thinks of the success or failure of his defensive strategy. 
It appears to the king as an ambivalent force, a thing particularly 
Theban and extremely powerful, and most important, one that can 
be addressed with the plea, Y€V€cO€ 8' aAK7} (76). Like a hero's buried 
corpse-like the mystic remains of Oedipus himself, in Oedipus 
Coloneus-it is a power that might mysteriously aid either those who 
attack or those who resist, in this battle over Thebes. 

That the king, early in the day, thinks of the Curse as a public and 
possibly even a beneficial thing, not a private and inescapably destruc­
tive bane, is made clear in another prayer which he offers as an ex­
ample to the fearful chorus. In it he makes a promise that binds his 
own future, a future which he sees as one of potential life and power 
when the war is done. These are his solemn words (271-78): HTo the 
guardian gods, watchers over field and market place, and to Dirce's 
springs and Ismene's waters I say this: if we succeed and the city be 
saved ... " [here several corrupt lines promising sacrifice and cul­
minating] H ... I will crown your pure shrines with spoils our spears 
have won !"22 Apparently the Curse held the same mixture of promise 
and threat for Polyneices' ear as well, for we learn that he called in 
like manner upon the gods of kinship and fatherland (639-40) to act 
as overseers of the fulfillment of his desire, which was either to kill 
his brother (though at the cost of his own life), or to send him into 
exile while he himself ruled Thebes. Thus neither brother under­
stood the Curse as necessarily fixing his own death, much less as 
calling for a double fratricide. 

After the early prayer, the Curse is not directly referred to again 
until the moment in the second episode when the king undergoes 

99 Denys Page now daggers everything from 275 to 278a; Regenbogen, op.cit. (supra 
n.8) limits the corruption to 277 and 278a, finding 278 wholly sound. One thing seems 
certain, however, and that is that there is no reason to doubt the cTbpw that begins 278a; 
Wilamowitz, in Aischylos Interpretationen (Berlin 1914) 107, wrote of Eteocles' futureexpecta­
tion: "Er wird das doch selbst den Gattem versprechen." Compare Eteocles' double 
expectation at the opening of the play (4-8). 



354 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

his attack of despair and cries out in recognition of a new state of 
things. This time he seems almost to have heard a new curse, for he 
does not call now to the Erinys as a possible protector for Thebes; 
he calls instead to his own race, as certainly damned by that same 
paternal Fury. The Curse that seemed to direct itself, favorably or 
unfavorably, against the whole city, is seen now to search out only one 
family and to have nothing but evil to give. The race of Laius is a ship 
that runs down-wind direct to Hades' stream (691); the gods wish 
only to see its last members destroyed, and these are doomed to 
death and cannot procrastinate (703-04); the common spilling of 
fraternal blood is the evil gift the gods have given them (719). Eteocles 
stays long enough to express this new understanding of his accursed 
fate, then he departs for the last time, a sharpened instrument which 
cannot now be dulled (715), the tool of a divine hatred that has 
settled on his house. His father's implacable Curse will find its profit 
in the blow each brother will deal out, just before his own succeeding 
death (695-97).23 

From the two prayers, and from the entire first section of the play, 
we must conclude that the Curse did not initially seem to Eteocles to 
demand his own personal destruction. He firmly sent the citizens to the 
walls; he heard the scout's first news with pious fortitude; he urged upon 
the women his own temperate and positive resignation and steadily 
denigrated the threat of each enemy captain, engulfing it in praise of 
his own. Six times over he asserted his expectation of victory, but now 
he has no thought left for that sure public success, because an entirely 

23 As indicated, supra n.8, there are some critics who believe that Eteocles, even at this 
point, expects to survive the duel with his brother. They are forced to read expressions 
like the p.6poc at 704 (cf. 696) as meaning not death but a more generalized disaster. and 
they are forced to gloss over the dual at 681 (dvllpotv Il' 6p.alp.oLv), as well as the plural at 
683 and the reference to the 'whole race of Laius' at 691. In fact, all ofthese phrases suppose 
the death of both princes, and since this is the case, it may be that the first person plurals at 
702-04 are genuinely plural. referring to both of the sons of Oedipus. At any rate, these 
lines clearly express Eteocles' own expectation of death, just as 715 and 718-19 express his 
intention to kill Polyneices. These facts are so plain that a very ingenious argument has 
had to be mounted against them. It has been asserted, though without any supporting 
testimony, that the miasma of kindred blood would disappear (rather than being redupli­
cated) if two kinsmen Simultaneously slaughtered each other. Then it is argued that, since 
the chorus and Eteocles both recognize the possibility of miasma, it must follow that they 
do not recognize the possibility of mutual slaughter. Nothing inside or outside the play 
strengthens this view of miasma; it was first suggested by Sidgwick in his note at 734, then 
picked up by Howald, op.cit. (supra n.8) 72, expanded by Patzer, op.cit. (supra n.2) 110-11, 
and repeated by Cameron, op.cit. (supra n.7) 47. 



ANNE BURNETT 355 

new aspect of his private fate has been revealed to him. He has seen 
the Curse in a new form and has recognized in his father's long-known 
words a necessary consequence that was hidden before, a thing that 
makes his own fate more specific and more dreadful than it had 
seemed to be.24 A moment of new comprehension and inner reversal 
is strongly marked (653-55) by his triple cry JJ •.. <L ••• 6J/Lot, and his 
new sense of destiny is expressed in his final words of soldierly sub­
mission (719): "From evils that the gods give out there can be no 
retreat!" This is very different from that previous sanguine advice 
(202-03): "Pray that the walls may hold, for that's to the gods' advan­
tage!" 

It looks as if the old riddle-master had chosen to damn his son by 
means of an enigma, for Oedipus' remembered words have changed 
their meaning in the course of half a day. A patent riddle, however, 
could not have borne the ominous weight that these words had to 
carry, a truth well demonstrated by Tucker's mild guess at the old 
king's phrase. He supposed that the father's curse was simply TnKPOC 

EC'TCl.t XP7JI'-Cl.ToSCl.l7"Y)c g,voc 7Tovnoc 7TVptYEV7}C,25 which would hardly 

24 Some have suggested that Eteocles, who once knew and understood the Curse per­
fectly, had simply forgotten its terms, and only now recalls them; see K. Reinhardt, 
Aischylos als Regisseur und Theologe (Bern 1949) 123: "Er wird jetzt etwas gewahr, was er 
vorher nicht gewusst oder vergessen hatte; dass er nicht umsonst der Sohn des Oedipus 
ist." Compare M. Croiset, Eschyle (Paris 1928) 118: "rien en effet ne convient mieux aux 
puissances enveloppees de mystere que de se faire ainsi oublier, apres une apparition 
passagere, pour sortir ensuite de l'ombre brusquement quand l'heure est venue." 

2. Cameron, op.cit. (supra n.7) 25, at least supposes a slightly more provocative form 
when he suggests, "Oedipus said that the two brothers would be unable to agree upon a 
division of the inheritance and would be obliged to submit the question to a Chalybian 
stranger from over the sea, who had sprung from fire. This last phrase would make the 
resolution of the quarrel seem impossible." Just how this would come in pithy rage, and 
with the force of a curse, from the paternal mouth he does not try to explain. Of course 
nothing in Septem betrays the occasion of the Curse, and it remains a possibility that Aeschy­
lus had his Oedipus blind himself and curse his children on the same day. This would make 
no difference in the form of the Curse, but it would avoid the epic question of what the 
brothers did to deserve their father's anger. In this case, the TPOr/>1, of786 will refer, not to 
the children's ungrateful care of their parent, but to Oedipus' incestuous rearing of his 
children; this is the suggestion of G. R. Manton, "The Second Stasimon of the Seven against 
Thebes," BICS 8 (1961) 82. In the Thebaid. Oedipus once prayed to the king of the gods and 
to the other immortals that his two sons should descend to Hades, each at the hands of 
the other (fr.3 Bethe=Schol. ad Soph. DC 1375), again that they should not divide his prop­
erty in a friendly way but should ever be at war (fr.2 Bethe= Athen. 11 465E). In DC 
Oedipus plainly says that Polyneices and Eteocles must each die stained with the other's 
blood (1373-74), then makes the curse proper in these words: p:IITE yiic ip.r/>v).{ov I 86pn 
J(parijca~ p.1,Tfi vocrijcal7ToTE I 7(1 KOiAov • Apyoc, aAAa CVYYEVEi xEpll OavEiv KTaVEiv 0' iJq,' OVTTEP 



356 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

scare a mouse, or stump a child. The trick of calling an imported 
metal a 'foreign visitor' was a piece of countrified banality26 like the 
Sphinx's joke, and Aeschylus knew as well as Sophocles did that this 
sort of thing could not be dwelt upon in tragedy. A true riddle prop­
erly belonged to folk-tale or satyr-play; it would be useless in the 
strong evocation of fear, for once broken it would lose all its power, 
while its earlier difficulty would go to enhance the seeming strength 
of the man who broke it. Indeed, the essential assertion of the riddle­
tale was that the paratragic attribute of cunning could often save a 
man.27 

The words of Oedipus, then, had to be solemn and filled with dread, 
misleading but not openly provocative, with their ugliest meaning 
lying hidden beneath a surface of ugliness. We can see the aesthetic 
reasons for such opacity, but we can also see that Aeschylus, with this 
Protean curse, posed some serious problems for himself as the maker 
of a plot. In the central scene, at the crucial moment of his play, he 
had to show his principal solving a riddle that never had been asked, 
and finding out a secret that no one had thought to look for. And 
unless we are to take refuge in Lesky's 'Helldunkel' we ought to be 
able to formulate the poet's implicit explanation of his hero's reversal 
from blindness into knowledge. Whether or not he satisfies us, the 
poet will have satisfied himself by providing some sort of causation 
for this change, since it is the pivot of his tragedy. 

A few hours have revealed a wholly new mask for the family 
Erinys, but how has the changed aspect of the daimon been shown to 
the king? A search through Eteocles' words in the brief post-recog­
nition scene turns up one odd item that looks like an initial clue to 
this mystery, a phrase stamped as significant by its gratuitousness. 
The chorus would dissuade Eteocles from facing his brother, for the 
women at this point assume that what Eteocles has just heard as the 

E,E>'t]caca£ (1385-88). In Euripides' Piwenissae the curse was 8TJKTcfJ c£8t]PCfJ 8w,."a 8£aAaXEiv To8E 
(68). 

16 Compare Hdt. 1.28; Xen. Anab. 5.5.1; Aesch. Pers. 133; Soph. Trach. 1260; Eur. Ale. 980; 
Herac/. 161; etc. 

17 Even in the solemn form of prophecy, the riddle is too brittle for tragedy; when the 
story of Croesus is told, the response is not pity and terror, but a superior sense of self­
congratulation: What a fool he was not to have understood (as I so easily do) what Apollo 
meant! Failure to solve a riddle does not measure up as a serious tragic error, and mean­
while success with a solution represents salvation, or the way to material rewards, in a 
multitude of fairy tales built on the Sisyphean gaming-with-the-devil motif. 



ANNE BURNETT 357 

imperative of the Curse is actually only the impulse of his private 
rage. They suggest that his fury against his brother may abate in 
time, though now it boils, referring to his temper with the word 
8alf-Lwv (705). Seizing on this notion, EteocIes responds bitterly (709) 

but with the same wit that characterized him as he capped each 
Argive boast: HOh yes (a daimon boils), for the Curse of Oedipus 
has reached a rolling boil!" And then, apparently referring to a thing 
that is immediately relevant and quite well-known, he adds (710-11): 
HAnd all too true those visions of nocturnal fantasy-the mediator 
who divides my father's property!"28 He has discovered that the 
horror of the present moment satisfies not only the Curse, but also 
some notorious Dream, though this it has done in an unexpected 
way. The bitter words 'all too true' make it clear that the apparent 
promise of the Dream had been such that one hoped for its truth-a 
happy one in other words-and that the Dream, like the Curse, has 
just now taken on a new and sinister meaning for EteocIes.29 

The addition of a two-faced Dream to a two-faced Curse, neither of 
them explicitly described or paraphrased, may not seem to be an 
exercise in clarification, but I believe that Aeschylus put both into his 
tale with a clear dramaturgical purpose. The Dream is never men­
tioned, as such, again, but its mediator reappears as soon as the king 
is gone and the chorus has begun its retrospective search for the causes 
of the brothers' duel. The Curse is likewise left unclear; it is never 

28 Regenbogen, op.cit. (supra n.S) 65, assumed that the chorus meant to refer to the 
daimon-curse here. Tucker made the l[',£c£v transitive, rendering 709 as "Aye, set aboil 
by Oedipus and his curses," with Eteocles' own fury as the object of the verb. In his note, 
Tucker assumed that the dream was a recurring one that came to Eteoc1es, and so he 
translated further: "all too true are the visions that haunt my dreams." It would seem, 
however, that the plurals o.pnc and .paVTacp.aTa are like the plural KaT£Vyp.aTa and the plural 
oarrlP'o, below which conforms: all august plurals of grandeur rather than indications 
of numerical multiplicity. Thus Rose's comment ad loc.: "oarrlP'o, does not oblige us to 
suppose that there were several dividers in the dream, but is plural because orpnc is plural." 

29 Many critics have ignored the Dream altogether; thus Kitto, op.cit. (supra n.6) 50-51, 
when he finds later references to the Chalybian stranger, explains him as the figment of an 
overheated choral imagination, "a strained note wonderfully expressive of strained 
minds" ... "the imagery is felt so vividly that the stranger becomes almost a super­
natural actor whom only the Chorus can see." Having got this close, he failed to recognize 
the mediator as a supernatural actor whom the dreamer of the dream did see; he makes 
no mention at all of Eteocles' words at 710-11. Most of those who have commented on 
these lines assume that the Dream merely repeated the overt content of the Curse and 
was thus wholly redundant; see, for example, Pohlenz, op.cit. (supra n.S) 93: "Nicht nur 
trUbe Ahnungen, auch nur zu wahre nachtliche Gesichte haben es ibm zur Gewissheit 
gemacht. dass Oidipus' Fluch buchstablich in Erfiillung gehen muss." 



358 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

repeated verbatim, and yet it becomes the chief subject of the women's 
meditation. As they sing, the chorus members seem to reexperience 
Eteocles' double recognition, saluting the mediator as if at last they 
realize just who he is, and placing him always in the context of the 
Curse, though Eteocles has said he was a figure from the Dream 
(711). Certain of the women's words and phrases resound so fre­
quently that they come to seem formulaic, yet it is plain that the 
chorus is not simply restating the Curse. The reechoing words come 
in mixed clusters, but they sort themselves conceptually into two 
parallel systems, one centering about the figure of the foreign med­
iator, the other upon the image of an iron-bearing hand. The first of 
these we know to represent the Dream, and the second is explicitly 
attached to the Curse, in the lines that describe it most succinctly 
(785-90, from Hermann's text): 

Against his sons he hurled his curses, 
angered at their care, 
the curses of a bitter tongue, 
that they should portion out 
his property 
with iron-bearing hand. 

Following up this dichotomy, an investigation of all the references 
to the portents that were fulfilled by the princely deaths30 show that 
iron is associated with a division (ot€'Aaxov ..• CLO~pcp 816; OL~Max8E cvv 
CLoapcp 884; cf 769 and J.LOLP- words at 906, 947) of possessions (K'T~J.La'Ta 
790, 816, 907) that is usually made by a plural subject, done by hand 
(789; cf 805, 811, 933) and achieved with violence CLOTJpo-TTATJK'TOL ••• 
CtOTJp61TATJK'TOL .•• (911-12). This division has bitterness (1TLKPOYAcfJccovc 
apac 787; 1TLKpaC J.Lovapxtac 882; cf 954 'T6V o~vv v6J.Lov, 910 ovo' E1TlXaPLC, 
and compare the 1TLKpac ••. apac at DC 951) as its chief characteristic, 
and it is made under the supervision of Ares (907; 945-46, where the 
poet puns on Ares and apa). The mediator, on the other hand, is 
associated with a sharing of goods Cxp~J.La'Ta 729, 816,944) that is im­
posed by a singular subject (~'voc ••. E1TLVWJ.Lfi. 727; oa'TTJ'Tac 945) who 
is a Scythian or Chalybian guest-friend (816, 927, 940). This second 
process is achieved by means of the lot (KA~pOVC 727, oLa~Aac 731), and 

so The extended substantive references are: 727-73, 785-91, 811-21 (in whatever order), 
881-86, 895-99, 941-60. Other references to the Curse appear at 70, 655, 695, 709, 720-26, 
832-34,840-41, 868,894. The concepts of iron, AttXWC' property, quarrels add: 902-10, 911-
14,931-40. 



ANNE BURNETT 359 

it has reconciliation as its final end, for the gEtVOC is a AVT~p VEtK€WV 

(941-42; cf 935-37, where EptC, VELKOC and EXf}OC are all controlled by 
this notion of the quarrel's dissolution).31 

In their separate forms the two patterns overlap in the notion of 
apportionment and they overlap in their object, which is the royal 
property. They diverge strongly, however, in tone and imagery, and 
also in their ostensible result. It looks as if Aeschylus had found in the 
folklore of Oedipus a riddling curse, one built on the trick of desig­
nating the sword of fraternal strife as a Chalybian stranger. Liking 
the idea that the brothers might stand threatened by a curse they 
misconstrued, but disliking the excessive transparency of the old 
conundrum, he restored its secrecy by dividing its information be­
tween the Curse and an apparently contradictory Dream. In some­
thing of the same way, the cyclic Thebaid had divided Oedipus' ill 
wishes between two separate curses, one of which emphasized the 
hand (XEpdv V7T' aAA.ryAwv KCXTCX{3.ryJLEVCU "ArSoc EtCW fr.3 Bethe), the other 
of which spoke of the way the quarrel would not be resolved as a 
h · f h ( ". """f}'.J. , I c:, , , f 2 s anng 0 t e property ov OL 7TCXTPWL EV 'T} EtT} 'f'tI\OT'T}TL OCXCCCXLVT r. 

Bethe). 
Evidently the Aeschylean Oedipus had cursed his sons by saying 

something like, "Maya bitter Ares guide you, as you portion out my 
property with iron-bearing hand!" His words plainly threatened a 
civil war that would be fought between the princes for the rule of 
Thebes. The Dream, however, had offered to its sleeper the phan­
tasmagoric figure of a lawful mediator, one who would bring quarrels 
to an end with a drawing of lots. And this of course seemed to promise 
peace; it also seemed to bear out the idea that the burden of the Curse 
was war, so that not even the canniest listener would have searched 
for any further meaning to its words. Both portents had presumably 
been supplied by the preceding Oedipus tragedy, so that they were 

31 The idea of equality was evidently expressed, but whether in Curse or in Dream one 
cannot be certain; 940ft', however, would seem to indicate that it derived from the mediator 
of the Dream. Probably the actual8aTTJ-n]c of Attic law made an equal division of property, 
assigning shares to claimants by means of the lot; cf Arist. Ath.Pol. 56.6; Harpocration, 
s.v. Oa7'fLc(JaL, and for a discussion, see H. Levy, "Property Distribution by Lot in Greece," 
TAPA 57 (1956) 42-46. Wilamowitz, op.cit. (supra n.22) 79 n.1. even noted that in some 
public procedures turning upon the casting of lots, a Scythian slave would supervise the 
process. A link between the notion of equality and the function of the 8aTTJ-n]c can be seen 
at Pind. Nem. 10.86: 7raVTWV 8l VOf£C a.1ToMccac(JaL tcov. The ~g tcov of DC 1374 may be a 
reflection of an icoc word in the Aeschylean Dream-Curse. 



360 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

part of the dramatic expectation with which the poet had equipped 
his players and his audience, in preparation for the final play.32 If we 
assume, then, that Eteocles was in possession both of the bitter Curse 
and of the sweeter Dream, we will be making the only possible test 
of these hypotheses. Without them the play was incoherent and the 
king false to his own character, but with them everything falls into 
place. The king's early calm and his subsequent despair are clearly 
motivated now, and we are in a position to discover at last just why 
the voice of the Curse sounded a new note for him, in the climax of 
the second episode. 

The Curse had long been understood as making war inevitable 
between the sons of Oedipus, and so with the Argive attack it seemed 
that the paternal words were to be fulfilled. Eteocles supposed that 
the <armed hand' and the <bitter Ares' would now be experienced, he 
felt the danger to his people and his city, but he had not thought of a 
pressing personal doom. At the end of the day Thebes might be 
almost undamaged, for it was well fortified; and that the wall should 
stand was, as he told the chorus, a reasonable thing for gods to grant 
(216). If the enemy were repelled, then he would still be king, direct­
ing the rites of thanksgiving, and more than that, the Erinys of his 
father might be forever gone, since the Curse would have found its 
fruition in the brothers' strife. Strategically the situation was far from 
desperate, and even if the attack should succeed, and he be banished 
according to his brother's threats, still the Dream contributed its 
softening promise. It seemed to demand that both brothers should 
equally survive; thus Eteocles might be an exile for a time, but in the 
end the ~'voc would appear, and then the two would share. Of course, 
the Dream did inevitably offer a less pleasing alternative: that his own 
present rule might eventually have to be shared. That could be left 
to the future, however, for on this day Eteocles meant to live, to win, 
to keep his power if he could, until that visionary stranger did appear 
from Scythia. 

32 There is no indication of who dreamed the Dream, nor of how it was repeated and 
iilterpreted. The most natural assumption is that of the scholiasts, that it came to Eteocles, 
but this is not a necessary conclusion, and Manton, op.at. (supra n.25) 79, has suggested that 
it came to Jocasta. Since the chorus is expected to know it, it must have been made public 
at some point in the Oedipus. Polyneices has perhaps heard of it but failed to believe much 
in it (if. his attitude towards the curse in OC), for he shows a curious expectation of equality 
in the fraternal fates-either both shall live or both shall die-but he does not expect any 
process of division. 



ANNE BURNETT 361 

What happens in the central scene is the complete revision of these 
sanguine thoughts. Eteocles discovers that what he took to be a pair 
of separate causes for apprehension capped with hope are, in fact, a 
single cause, a cause for plain despair. He marks the moment of his 
fullest recognition, but he does not tell us the exact form in which his 
understanding came to him, since the poet did not wish to make of 
him a wily puzzle-breaker. Eteocles cannot stop to spell out what it 
was that broke the code and caused the mingled Curse and Dream to 
yield their single message to him; he can only listen and obey. The 
poet, however, did not mean for the uncanny to drive all reasonable 
causation from his play, and so he lightly marked the path Eteocles 
had followed to reach this final comprehension. 

Eteocles' correct understanding of his negative fate, like the under­
standing of the king in Oedipus Rex, forms itself only gradually be­
cause it is constantly baffled by deceptive hopes, and finally it is so 
stifled by the horror of what the mind has grasped that it can be ex­
pressed only in desperate action. Like that more famous recognition, 
this one depends upon the joining together of two strands of informa­
tion, for just as the shepherd and the Corinthian must meet in that 
play, so must Ares and the mediator-the angry Curse and the milder 
Dream-in this. The essential link between the two is given to Eteocles 
at the beginning of the tragedy, but this bridging concept has to work 
itself slowly into the mind of the king, for he has been blinded, like 
Oedipus, by the conviction that knowledge is already his. 

The key concept, the first cause of Eteocles' recognition of the 
unity of Curse and Dream, comes 600 lines before that recognition, 
in the lot that assigns each Argive captain to his gate (55). This is the 
token that proves not just consanguinity but identity between the 
war god and the guest-friend, betraying the fact that they are not two 
but one. The idea of sortition by lot is established here, at its first 
introduction, with the greatest care and artistry; then it is slyly 
reiterated so that it forces itself imperceptibly upon the king. The 
melodramatic pre-dawn scene of the drawing of lots is extensively 
laid out and gorgeously described in the scout's first speech. Thirty 
lines (39-68) of consecutive narration are given over to it, their dread 
richness achieved in a vocabulary that echoes and prefigures both the 
Dream and the Curse of Oedipus. Thus hands (44) are dipped into an 
iron-rimmed shield that is filled with blood, and men likened to 
lions with Ares in their eyes (53), men of iron boldness (52), swear 



362 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

their oaths by Ares, Enyo and Phobos (45; cf the "Ap€wc below at 65, 
picked out for emphasis by its enjambment). The blood in the shield 
is then exchanged for lots in a helmet, and the men take the tokens 
which assign them each to a gate. The phrase that describes the actual 
process of sortition is thrice redundant in expression, as if the poet 
feared that the point of it might be missed, and it is constructed so 
that its first word expresses the central concept of the Dream, while 
its last is the key verb from old Oedipus' Curse. "I left them," says 
the scout, "casting lots, that each, by lot, might get his portion (of a gate­
command)." And just in case anyone had missed the final word, 
AaxcfJv, it is echoed with an off-rhyme at the end of the following 
line (55-56): KATJpovp.l.vovc S' €A€t7TOV. WC 7TeXActJ Aaxwv I EKacroc av'TulV 

\ 1\ " \ 1 7TpOC 7TVl\aC ayo£ I\OXOV. 
It is plain that this reported scene and its terminology are meant to 

make a deep impression, and this impression is not allowed to dis­
appear. The frenzied women of the parados are yet enough in their 
senses to repeat the essential phrase about the enemy: that he has 
portioned out the gates according to lot (7TtJAa£C ... 7TpOcLC'TaV'Ta£ 7TeXActJ 
Aax6V'T€c 126). In fact, the women give this process the fullest empha­
sis that choral poetry can produce, closing their first strophe with a 
long rhetorical and metrical period that ends with these words. In 
the pause that follows, before the antistrophe begins, the phrase 7TeXActJ 
Aax6V'T€c will echo solemnly in the quiet dancing space. 

Three times after this, in the central episode, the scout reverts to 
the same information. He reminds the king that the Argive chiefs 
have taken their places as the lot assigned them, introducing 
the whole sequence of his seven speeches with the words: "I would 
tell you, as one who knows it well, the situation of the enemy; how 
each has taken his portion by lot at the gates" (wc 'T' EV 7Tt5AaLC EKac'TOC 
€iATJX€v 7TaAov 376). His second reference is somewhat offhand (423): 
Ka7TaV€VC S' i.7T' 'HAlK'TpaLCLV €tATJX€V 7TtJAa£c. After this, however, he 
revives the magical moment when the lots leapt out of the upturned 
helmet, giving it an instant of tangible reality in three loaded lines 
(457-59): Kat IL~V 'TOV i.V'T€V8€v Aax6v'Ta 7TPOC 7TtJAatC I Algw· 'Tpl'TctJ yap 
'E 1 \ 1 '\ I'l;' 1 "~ ,'\ , 33 E 1 'T€OKl\ctJ 'TP£'TOC 7TaI\OC €~ V7TT£OV 7T'Y]0TJCEV €VXaI\KOV Kpavovc. teoc es, 
meanwhile, offers proof that he is beginning to take the lesson of this 

33 Keeping 457, which Page deletes with H. Wolf, but which Groeneboom sensibly de­
fends. It would seem that the poet was pleased by the similar sounds of'll'aAOC and ?TVA/ltC, 
which so frequently sound in the same phrase, and it is possible that even the &VTl'll'aAov 



ANNE BURNETT 363 

frequent repetition. When he asks for the name of the third Argive 
chieftain, he says, "Tell me of another who has got his portion at another 
of the gates" (My' aAAov aAAcuc EV 7TVAaLC ELA7Jx6Ta 451). 

All of this means that when the king is told the name that can in 
itself no longer shock him-when he hears that it is Polyneices who 
will stand outside the gate he will defend-the sharpest part of his 
knowledge is that his brother has been given this place by the action of 
a lot. Ares has brought Polyneices to Thebes, but the mfAoc has placed 
him, giving him the Seventh Gate as his apportioned share. The iron­
bearing hand of the Curse is thus discovered to be working by the 
means specified for the mediator of the Dream, and so Eteoc1es is 
forced to see that the ~EVOC and the god of war are one. And in spite 
of its attempts to dissuade, the chorus has responded to the same in­
sinuations. It too understands that the Curse and Dream are one, 
mingling to demand the spilling of fraternal blood. As soon as 
Eteocles has gone, the women sing of the identity of the foreign 
dream-figure with the iron of the ancient Curse. "Yes, the stranger 
makes use of the lot," they say, explaining Eteocles' unspoken com­
prehension, "but he has proved a bitter mediator-savage-natured 
iron-and with his tokens of allotment he has portioned out shares 
of land as much as corpses need" (~EVOC OE KA~POVC E7TtVWJLf!. I XaAv{3oc 
EKVOWV a7TOtKOC, I KTEavwv XP7JJLaTooatTac I 7TtKp6c, c1JJL6c/>pwv cloapoc, I 
x06va vatEtV Ota7T~Aac I o7T6cav Kat c/>OtJLEVOVC EYKaTEXEw 727-32). 

A full conflation of Curse and Dream will soon be made when the 
chorus sings (906ft) of its princes: EJLotpacavTo 0' o~vKapOtOt KT~JLaO' (as 
the Curse told us they would), £OCT' i'cov AaXEtV (as in the Dream), 
OtaAAaKT77P' 0' OVK CtJLEJLc/>Eta c/>tAotC (though the Dream seemed to 
promise that the mediator would be worthy of our praise), ovo' 
E7TtxaptC "Ap7Jc (indeed he was bitter, just as the Curse had said!). The 
meshing of the two is once again expressed at 940ff, where the known 
equations, Ares=iron (i.e. strife), and ~Evoc=mediator (i.e. supposed 
peace), are reformulated as ~Evoc=iron, and Ares=mediator. The 
special emphasis here upon the word 7TtKp6c shows that the chorus is 
just now grasping the effectiveness of that word in the Curse of 
Oedipus. What they see is that it was not an ordinary Ares (simple 
civil war as all had thought), but an extraordinary one that the 

of the chorus at 417 was chosen for its punning effect. It is certain that Aeschylus puns 
on w Ap1Jc and apa. at 945; see Groeneboom's note ad loco 



364 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

old king had called upon to divide the Theban patrimony (941-
44).34 

\ ,\ ,r, 
7T'LKpOC I\VrTJP V€LK€WV 0 7T'OJITLOC 
t~ , , {j' 
5€LVOC €K 7T'VpOC CVUE:LC 
{j "~ , ~, • , 
U7JK'TOC cwapoc, 7T'LKpOC 0 0 XP7J/LCI.'TWV 

,~ \"A ' \ , {j'" {jA KCl.KOC oarTJ'TCl.C, P7JC, Cl.pav 7T'CI.'TpWLaV TLUE:LC Cl.l\au7J. 

"Bitter" (as in the Curse) "was the healer of quarrels, that Pontic 
stranger" (that the Dream had shown) "who was tempered iron 
drawn from fire" (such as the Curse had spoken of); "bitter this bad 
distributor of property," (dream-figure who has proved to be) 
"Ares, as he gave fulfillment to the father's Curse." Here the con­
ceptual repetition between 946 and 886-87 establishes a last cosmic 
equation, the one that has ruled all: Ares=Erinys. Each has been the 
agent for imposing truth upon the Curse. 

Ares and the mediator together produced the fraternal confronta­
tion at the Seventh Gate, and if the lot was thus not a peaceable thing 
but an instrument of war, then it followed that the Dream's resolu­
tion of the quarrel could only be like Heracles' rest from his labors­
a bitter euphemism for the peace of death. The sword that was to 

have divided the paternal property would slash instead through the 
brothers' limbs (895). The promised equality, likewise, could only 
mean that each heir would be identically empowered through being 
portionless among living men (&/LolpOVC 733), though both would 
have the same <iron-struck' portions (cLo7Jpo7T'A7JK'TOL ••• Aaxal911-14) 

in their father's tomb. All this the chorus makes out in the revolu­
tions of its song, but Eteocles had seen it first. He had interpreted the 
Dream correctly at last when he learned of his brother's portion at 
the Seventh Gate, and he had heard then, for the first time, the true 
import of his father's words. He knew that he would kill and be 
killed by an equal antagonist that the lot had placed for him; he 
knew that both would have their share of death, and he gave his 
new knowledge an appropriate expression: "the race of Laius, hated 
by Apollo, takes its portion in the wave of Cocytus" (KV/LCI. KWKV'TOV 

ACl.Xov ••• '}'EVOC 690-91). 
Eteocles did not know, at this point, what the outcome of the 

Argive attack would be, any more than he had so known at dawn. He 

34 For the ominous weight that the word 1I'LKPOC can bear, compare Alcaeus 42.3 L.-P., 
where it covers the whole genocidal war at Troy, and also Orestes' extremely sinister 
usage at Soph. EI. 1504. 



ANNE BURNETT 365 

knew only that because of his father's Curse, because they were the 
last of Laius' race, and because Apollo wished it, he and his brother 
had to die. To this necessity he gave his submission, not gladly-that 
would be impossible-but with full will and knowledge. So much 
the choral attempt to dissuade makes clear. The messenger makes the 
next point plain: that immediately after the two brothers have satisfied 
the Curse, the city of Thebes is saved. The supernatural threat has 
passed, the daimonic world is assuaged, and safety has come, just as 
it did to the Heraclids after Makaria's death, just as favorable winds 
came when Polyxena's or Iphigenia's blood had flowed. And so the 
chorus says in five simple words (960): Kat, OVOLV Kpar~cac EA1]g€ oalJLwv. 

A tragic action of sacrifice depends upon the shape of its plot, not 
upon the sentiments that its principal expresses, and that principal 
dies, not because of error, incomprehension, or a flaw in character, 
but because a death is demanded and he knowingly decides to let it 
be his. Fortunately for the variety of the genre, he is not required to 
be always as sententious as Menoeceus, or as certain of all the conse­
quences as Alcestis; he need not know exactly what his death will 
buy, he knows only that it must be. 

There is no priest and no altar here, hut the praxis of Septem is 
nevertheless one of sacrifice. All the irreducible elements are present: 
the conscious, unblemished, self-destroying principal; the rejected 
suggestion that a substitute be found, or that the hero should aban­
don his resolve; the formal departure for the fateful spot; the lament­
ation for the victim, and finally, surrounding all, the public disaster 
and its swift removal. Ordinarily in such a drama the central character 
is directly summoned by the world beyond-a ghost makes its 
demands, a priest interprets portents that a god has sent (though 
Antigone obeys another sort of voice)-and ordinarily the reception 
of this summons provides a major scene in the tragedy.35 And so it is 
in Septem, for what truly happens in the second episode is that the 
words of Oedipus, misconstrued until now, at last reach the ear of 
Eteocles and summon him to die. The Curse is the oracle here, the 
letter of the divine desire for blood, and once Eteocles receives it, he 
sets off for the chosen place of immolation, sharpened like a sacri­
ficial knife (rd}1]YJLEVOC 715), ironically about to fulfill his own promise 

35 Alcestis provides an exception, but her vision of Thanatos is a reduplication of the 
Original supernatural call; on the elements of sacrifice tragedy, see my Catastrophe Survived 
(Oxford 1971) 22-26. 



366 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPl'EM 

of thanksgiving to the gods for his city's rescue. And by the poet's 
artistry the audience has already seen in the previous tableau the 
victory that he both brings and celebrates. 

The sword was the central image upon which the old-fashioned 
riddle had fixed, but Aeschylus, with his alloy of Curse and Dream, 
emphasized instead the notion of the lot. In making this change he 
showed once more that sense of the universally appropriate symbol 
that is one of the secrets of his perpetuity. In his view, man's destiny 
had, like the lot, the appearance of pure chance and the reality of 
divine direction; it was also, like the military lot, in essence a com­
mand. The trilogy of which Septem was the conclusion told of three 
such imperative portions which fell at different times to different 
members of a single family, and it described, with three generations, 
the full range of human response to its allotted destiny (942-91). To 
Laius, Apollo had said: "Save the city by dying without having made 
a new member of your race," but Laius was a proud and faithless man 
and he disobeyed. (Note line 842, where the phrase {3ovAaL 8' ct7TtCTO' 

makes his disobedience an expression of his disbelief, and how it is 
keyed to the £pyov a7TtCTOV of 864, with which the grandsons pay for 
that disbelief.) Laius did engender a son, and the birth of Oedipus was 
a temporary defiance of Apollo's fixed intent. This meant that the 
next allotment was necessarily of a more active sort. Instead of "Do 
not create a new member of the race," the assignment came to 
Oedipus as the destruction of an old member, Laius, and the creation 
of new ones, a "bloody root" (755) for the race, which he had then to 
curse. This second family portion was not willingly accepted, but it 
was given an unwilling, unknowing compliance, and it brought into 
existence more of those same Labdacids whose suppression Apollo 
had originally linked with the salvation of Thebes.36 And so to the 
monstrous offspring of Oedipus a third and final version of the racial 
portion was assigned: they were to destroy one another. 

The response to this third command is the subject of Septem, a 
third play that had to ease the tension Aeschylus had made between 
heaven's absolute demands and the flawed obedience of the house of 
Laius. This time there is neither the defiant abrogation of a Laius nor 
the unknowing compliance of an Oedipus, though Polyneices acts 
out in absentia this negative heritage.37 Instead, this third generation, 

38 See the discussion of cw£{££v 7TOMV in 749 by Manton, op.cit. (supra n.25) 80. 
37 Judging from the threats reported from him (6336) it is safe to say that Polyneices did 



ANNE BURNETT 367 

in the person of Eteocles, at last offers a disciplined, knowing sub­
mission to a thrice-dreadful destiny and so puts the true stamp of 
heroism on the fate of the Theban royal family. The magical words of 
an angry old man are, however, a difficult premise for heroic action 
or for tragedy, and what we have been observing is how the poet 
forced them to alter their tone. By adding the Dream to the Curse, 
Aeschylus made for himself a pair of portents, both dulled by obscur­
ity, that could suddenly join together during the action of his play, 
to produce a new and single meaning as sharp as a spear's tip. The 
Curse-Dream, because of its ambiguity, could display a dynamism, 
a terrifying vitality, as it appeared at first indistinctly, drew close, 
changed aspect, and then pounced upon its prey like the demon from 
a fairy tale. 

Paradoxically, however, the Curse-Dream is given a theological 
expansion, even as it takes on this savage voracity. When the poet tells 
us that Eteocles put himself at his brother's gate before he knew that 
the Curse was apportioning that gate to both, he works a kind of 
miracle. With this premature obedience, this first deaf adherence to a 
command that has not yet been rightly heard, Aeschylus grants a 
kind of apotheosis to the parental Curse. It is no longer now the crude, 
Erinys-bound superstition of an older, meaner age. The divine 
chance of the lot moves Polyneices, as the premature mortal exertion 
of reason moves Eteocles, but both go with perfect synchronism to 
the rendezvous that Oedipus had set (d) p.lAawa Kat TEAda YEllEOC 

OlDt7TOV T' apa .•. ~ DVCOPllLC <iDE gVllavAta DOpoC 832-33, 838-39). Chance 
and reason, god and man are shown to work together in the interest 
of the fulfillment of the Dream-Curse, for what the Erinys and the lot 
ask of these last Labdacids is no more than what all of the gods have 
decreed. 

This largest truth is what EteocIes knows when he obeys. He hears 
the Curse as part of Apollo's wish, and he concurs in the divine 
determination to destroy his family. "Let it be swept away ... the 
whole of Laius' race is hated by Apollo!" (690-91).38 His compre-

not fully understand the meaning of the Curse when the siege of Thebes began, and there is 
no reason to think that he had any illumination about its meaning, parallel to that of 
Eteocles. Thus the gods have taken two victims, one knowing and the other unknowing, 
one reasonable and the other passionate, one pious and the other impious as far as the 
gods of the fatherland were concerned. 

88 Apollo's involvement was rather a shock to Solmsen, though he did not recognize the 



368 CURSE AND DREAM IN AESCHYLUS' SEPTEM 

hension of his fate is perfect when he leaves the stage, to be both 
victim and master of the sacrifice in a double blood-offering. The 
letter of Apollo's original request was violated, but with the appor­
tionment of twin graves to the last of the Labdacid kings, its spirit is 
fulfilled. The city of Thebes can be saved, as Apollo had meant it to 

be, by a third generation that has learned to accept the lot of its 
apportioned destiny.39 

UNIVERSITY OF CmCAGO 

May, 1973 

full extent of it. He maintained that there was a certain obtuseness in the Aeschylean view 
of justice, as displayed in Septem, which was later refined in the Oresteia (op.cit. [supra n.5] 
197ff, esp. 204). 

89 The mythic fact that this salvation will be a flawed one is perfectly suited to the fact 
that the compliance of the Labdacids was flawed. Aeschylus, however, chooses to keep all 
reference to the second siege of Thebes out of his play. The lmyovotc of 903 means "for 
men other than the presumptive heirs," as in PI. Leg. 740c, 929c. The thought is exactly 
parallel to that at Pind. 01. 10.88-89, with its reference to the special bitterness of having 
family possessions fall to an outsider. Here the situation is the sharper because the 
possessions caused the quarrel which now leads to the absence of inheriting sons.