Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hippomedon, huge in stature, was one of Adrastus’s Seven—often named as a brother or kinsman of the Argive house. Aeschylus gives him the Oncaean (or related) gate and a shield-device of Typhon breathing fire, a boast of elemental terror. Euripides and the handbooks place him among the champions who press the walls and rivers of Thebes: he fights at the Ismenus or Dirce, a mass of bronze and fury. His death is mortal combat, not thunderbolt or chasm. Apollodorus records that Ismarus (or, in tragic variants, other Theban defenders such as Hyperbius’s opposite number in the gate-pairs) brings him down; Euripidean messenger-speech has him fall in the general slaughter as the Argive assault breaks. Like Parthenopaeus, he lacks Capaneus’s blasphemy and Amphiaraus’s miraculous end; his story-unit is the giant at the gate whose Typhon-shield does not save him. Catalogue Hippomedon so the Seven’s roster of named deaths continues beyond Capaneus and Tydeus.