Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After the Epigoni took Thebes under Alcmaeon’s leadership—Delphi or Amphiaraus’s own oracle having named him commander—Alcmaeon fulfilled the charge his father had laid on him. Eriphyle, who had once sold Amphiaraus for Harmonia’s necklace, was bribed a second time (with the robe of Harmonia) to send her sons to the Epigoni war. When the war was won, Alcmaeon killed his mother. The matricide brought the Erinyes upon him. Driven mad, he wandered until he came to Psophis in Arcadia, where Phegeus purified him and gave him his daughter Arsinoë (or Alphesiboea) in marriage; Alcmaeon gave her the necklace and robe. But the land grew barren under his pollution. The oracle of Apollo sent him to a place that had not existed when he shed his mother’s blood—the new silt-land at the mouth of the Achelous. There the river-god purified him and gave him Callirrhoe as wife. Callirrhoe demanded the necklace and robe as a bride-gift. Alcmaeon returned to Psophis, claimed he needed the heirlooms to dedicate at Delphi, recovered them from Phegeus’s house, and was ambushed and killed by Phegeus’s sons (Pronous and Agenor, or Temenus and Axion) when the deceit was known. Callirrhoe prayed to Zeus that her infant sons by Alcmaeon might at once grow to manhood to avenge their father; they did, slew Phegeus’s line, and dedicated the necklace at Delphi (where, in later anecdote, it passed into temple history). So Harmonia’s wedding gifts—already stained by Eriphyle’s double betrayal—finish their classical arc in matricide, exile, remarriage, and reciprocal murder, tying the Seven’s betrayal to Arcadian and Acarnanian aetia and to Delphi’s treasury.