Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Thersander, son of Polynices and Argia, marches with the Epigoni—the sons of the Seven—when the next generation returns against Thebes. Where his father died beneath the walls without taking the city, Thersander survives the successful war. Apollodorus’s outline has the Epigoni, led under oracle by Alcmaeon, defeat Laodamas son of Eteocles; the Cadmeians evacuate on Teiresias’s advice; the victors enter and sack what remains. In the settlement that follows, Thersander is installed as king of Thebes—the Labdacid claim through Polynices briefly made good after the brothers’ mutual slaughter and Creon’s interim. Pausanias continues the line: Thersander later joins the Achaean muster against Troy and is killed by Telephus in Mysia on the first, failed sailing (a notice linking Theban Epigonus to the Trojan cycle’s false start). His son Tisamenus (or, in variant stemmata, further heirs) carries the Theban kingship forward until later upheavals. Thersander thus closes the military Theban arc as the son who gains what the father could not, then opens a bridge to Troy as an early casualty of the Achaean expedition. Catalogue him apart from the general Epigoni muster so the sack’s political fruit—Polynices’ son on the emptied city’s throne—stands clear.