Eteocles and Thebes in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes

The great moment of Athens' hoplite army, composed of citizens unaided by allies or mercenaries, and before its primacy was lost to the fleet, was of course Marathon. One of the Marathon inscriptions has interesting points of contact with Seven and tends to support what has been said here about the Athenian audience's perception. One of the places in which Marathon ideology turns up is the agōn of Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes' Frogs. Eteocles in the Seven has often been described by classical scholars as a divided character: the leader of the city and the accursed son of Oedipus. To conclude on Marathon, Eteocles' Thebes, the city of the disciplined citizen-soldier, would have seemed to express the virtues that were already in the 460s being looked back on as the virtues of the preceding generation, of the Marathon fighters

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