Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Adrastus, son of Talaus (or in some stems of the earlier Argive line), ruled Argos. An oracle told him to marry his daughters to a boar and a lion; when Polynices (device a lion-skin) and Tydeus (device a boar-hide, or bearing those emblems) came as exiles and fought at his doors, he recognised the omen, reconciled them, and gave them his daughters Argeia and Deipyle. Bound by oath to restore his sons-in-law, he led the Seven Against Thebes though Amphiaraus foresaw ruin. Of the seven leaders Adrastus alone survived the disaster. He escaped on the divine horse Arion (Areion)—swift offspring of Poseidon, in Arcadian lore born of Poseidon and Demeter (or Earth) in horse-shape—whose speed no mortal steed matched. Homer already knows Arion as Adrastus’s extraordinary horse. Adrastus fled to Athens (or returned broken to Argos); later tradition has him beg Theseus to force the Thebans to yield the unburied dead (the *Suppliants* strand). In old age he led or blessed the Epigoni; grief for his son Aegialeus, slain in that second war, killed him or drove him to die at Megara, where Pausanias knew his shrine. Catalogue Adrastus here for the personal arc—oracle, marriages, sole escape on Arion, suppliant aftermath, and death after the Epigoni—distinct from the gate-battle overview and from the Nemean Opheltes episode.