Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Capaneus, one of the Seven, was famed for vast size and for arrogance toward the gods. At his gate he boasted that he would sack Thebes whether Zeus willed it or not, and that not even the thunderbolt would stop him; he carried a shield device of a fire-bearer and cried that the city would burn. Scaling the walls with a ladder, torch in hand, he was struck by Zeus’s lightning and fell flaming to the earth—divine punishment for hubris made spectacle for both armies. Euripides adds the pathos of his wife Evadne, who later leaps onto his funeral pyre against her father’s will. Capaneus’s death is the clearest single image of Zeus policing the Seven: where Amphiaraus is taken living into the earth as a favoured seer, Capaneus is blasted as the blasphemer. Catalogue him apart from the general siege so the blasphemy, the bolt, and the moral contrast stand clear.