Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Amphiaraus, son of Oicles (or of Apollo in some genealogies), was the Argive seer who foresaw that the expedition against Thebes would fail and that he himself would not return. He had sworn to abide by Eriphyle’s judgment in any quarrel with Adrastus; Polynices (or, in some tellings, Thersander later for the Epigoni) bribed Eriphyle with the necklace of Harmonia, and she compelled her husband to march. Amphiaraus charged his young sons Alcmaeon and Amphilochus to avenge him on their mother when they came of age, then went to war knowing the outcome. At the seven gates he fought as a just man among the unjust, named by Aeschylus’s scout as a seer who does not wish to seem but to be the best. When Capaneus fell to Zeus’s bolt and the assault broke, Periclymenus son of Poseidon pursued Amphiaraus as he fled in his chariot (driven by Baton or Elatoüs). Before the spear could strike, Zeus split the earth with a thunderbolt; the chasm swallowed seer, charioteer, chariot, and horses intact. So Amphiaraus did not die a common death but was taken living into the earth—Zeus’s honor for a reluctant righteous man, or mercy that denied his enemies the kill. Thereafter he was worshipped as a chthonian oracular hero. The principal classical shrine was the Amphiareion at Oropus on the Attic–Boeotian border, where consultants slept for dream-oracles; Theban and other local claims to the chasm also circulated. His personal fate thus converts the doomed Seven’s catastrophe into a continuing cult: the man who would not go willingly becomes, underground, a voice that still advises the living—and whose charge of vengeance binds Alcmaeon to the matricide that follows.