Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Ten years after the Seven failed, their sons—the Epigoni (“Afterborn”)—march again on Thebes to avenge their fathers and settle Polynices’ claim through the next generation. Apollodorus lists the principals: Alcmaeon and Amphilochus (sons of Amphiaraus), Aegialeus (son of Adrastus), Diomedes (son of Tydeus), Promachus (son of Parthenopaeus), Sthenelus (son of Capaneus), Thersander (son of Polynices), and Euryalus (son of Mecisteus), among others. Delphi (or Amphiaraus’s oracle) names Alcmaeon as the leader who must take command for the war to succeed. Thebes is now ruled by Laodamas, son of Eteocles (Creon’s line having passed or shared power in various tellings). The armies meet; Aegialeus falls—the only Epigonus slain, mirroring Adrastus’s earlier unique survival among the fathers. Laodamas kills him but is himself killed (by Alcmaeon in Apollodorus) or flees. The Thebans, advised by Teiresias that the city cannot stand, evacuate by night toward the Illyrian northwest (the historical Cadmeid migration motif). The Epigoni enter a nearly empty Thebes, sack what remains, and install Thersander, Polynices’ son, as king. Alcmaeon, fulfilling a further oracle, later kills his mother Eriphyle for her role in Amphiaraus’s doom—a sequel that carries Harmonia’s necklace into new cycles of pollution. Homer’s Sthenelus boasts that the Epigoni took Thebes when their fathers could not—with fewer men and a better result—under Zeus’s favor. The second war thus closes the Theban cycle’s military arc: the cursed city falls not to the Seven but to their children, and the Labdacid male line through Polynices briefly holds the throne again before later myths move on to the Trojan generation (Thersander’s heirs).