“The Seven Against Thebes, the land of Cadmus, is besieged by an army of Argives and other allies gathered by King Adrastus of Argos to support Polymedes' return to Thebes and the claim to power from his brother Eteocles. The two doomed sons of Oedipus, male descendants of a noble yet stigmatized generation already burdened by patricide (the killing of Laius by his son, Oedipus) and incest (Oedipus’ marriage to his mother, Jocasta), after the sacrilegious defiance of Apollo's oracles, are themselves burdened with the curse (Ara) of their father, which is fulfilled through their mutual slaughter.

The Seven Against Thebes, the third and only surviving tragedy of a trilogy, after Laius and Oedipus, completed by the satyr play Sphinx, was performed and awarded first prize at the Great Dionysia of 467 BC. Apart from the title, the name ‘Thebes’ does not appear anywhere in this tragedy by Aeschylus, which mentions the city as ‘land of Cadmus’ and its citizens as ‘Cadmeians’. The title already alludes to the mythic Thebes of Cadmus’ descendants and the Spartans, legendary warriors born from the earth, armed when Cadmus sowed the teeth of the mythic dragon guarding the land and seized power.

The Thebes of Aeschylus’ drama, beyond being the enclosed site of a besieged city, with only seven gates and battlements on the walls, and with the only reliable testimony coming from hearing and what a witness reports from the enemy camp (the Messenger Scout), sharpens an ‘intuitive’ perception of reality that results in a correspondingly prophetic, almost ‘magical’ speech: that of Eteocles and the frenzied words of the Chorus, both contributing to acts of fear and awe, involving the audience—also enclosed—in the theatrical illusion before their eyes.