Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE DEATH OF AMPHIAKAOS.
1ST
praise bestowed upon it by Pausanias. 1 Thus the story told CHAP,
by Diomedes of his father Tydeus when sent to Thebes to ^_—,__
demand the restoration of Polyneikes reproduces in part the
story of Bellerophon. 2 Yictorious in the strife of boxing or
wrestling to which he had challenged the Kadmeians, he is
assailed on his way back to the Argive host by an ambus-
cade of fifty Thebans, all of whom he slays except Maion,
who is saved by the special intervention of the gods. So
too the prophecy of Teiresias that the Thebans should be
conquerors in the war if Ares received the youthful Menoi-
keus as a victim, must be compared with those utterances
of Kalchas which sealed the doom of Iphigeneia and Poly-
xena ; and finally when the Argives are routed and Periklymenos
is about to slay Amphiaraos, we see in his rescue by
the earth which receives him with his chariot and horses
another form of the plunge of Endymion into the sea or of
the leap of Kephalos from the Leukadian cape. It is the
vanishing from mortal sight of the sun which can never die,
and so the story went that Zeus thus took away Amphiaraos
that he might make him immortal.
This first assault of the Argives against Thebes answers The war of
to the ineffectual attempts of the Herakleidai to recover g^ ]oi>
their paternal inheritance. It was therefore followed by a
second attack in the struggle known as the war of the
Epigonoi, or the children of the discomfited chiefs of the
former expedition. But it must be noted that as the Hera-
kleids find a refuge in Athens after the slaughter of Hyllos
by Echemos, so Adrastos, who alone had been saved from the
carnage by the speed of his horse Areion, betakes himself to
the Attic Eleusis, whence Theseus marches against the
Thebans to insist on the surrender and the burial of the
dead,—an incident in which the historical Athenians took
pride as an actual event in their annals. The doom of
Thebes was now come, and the Epigonoi approach like the
Herakleidai when their period of inforced idleness is at an
end. The Thebans are utterly routed by the Argives under
Alkmaion, the son of Amphiaraos ; and Teiresias declares
1
ix. 0, 3. G-rote, History of Greece, i. 3G4.
- 11. iv. 384, et seq.
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