Seven Against Thebes The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven by Stephen Dando-Collins

Author:Stephen Dando-Collins
Format: epub

9.

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POLYNICES’S MISSION TO OEDIPUS

Before the end of the day that they were kidnapped, both Antigone and Ismene were recovered by King Theseus and his troops and brought back to their father at his house in Colonos.

At the same time, Theseus set Creon, his sons, and their accompanying Theban soldiers on the road back to Thebes with a warning to never again set foot on Athenian soil. Creon and his mounted party took the same road they had used to reach Colonos. This road climbed over Mount Cithaeron via a narrow pass farther east from the main road and the Dryoscephalae Pass, the route used by Adrastus and his army. Little more than a goat track, this eastern pass had allowed Creon and his party to avoid Adrastus’s army as it camped at Erythrae in the mountain’s northern foothills. On the return, they used the same route, again avoiding the Argive army. After crossing the Alpheus River back into Theban territory, they sped across the plain via the Tanagra Road to Thebes’s Fountain Gate.

As Theseus reunited blind father and tearful daughters in the house at Colonos, he was brought a message. “You should know, Oedipus,” the king announced, once he had received the message, “that there is a relative of yours—but not a countryman—who only recently arrived to sacrifice at the altar of Poseidon and who is asking to be permitted to briefly speak with you.”⁴⁹

“What about?” Oedipus asked suspiciously.

“He won’t say. He asks to speak with you, then be allowed to go on his way.”

“Then who is he?”

“Do you have any relatives at Argos?” Theseus asked.

Oedipus snorted. “Argos! Say no more. Don’t ask me to see him.”

“You know him?”

“It must be my son, Majesty—the hated son who would be the last person whose painful words I would want to hear.”

Now Theseus realized that the stranger must be Polynices and that a solution to the impending conflict between Argos and Thebes might be at hand. “Can’t you at least give him a hearing?” he asked. “What could he say that was painful to you?”

Oedipus shook his head. “No, no, no!”

“Father, listen to him.” It was his daughter Antigone. “I may be young to be offering advice, but, please, for your daughters’ sake, allow our brother to come. Just hear what he has to say. What harm is there in that?”

Oedipus could not see it, but his younger daughter Ismene was nodding in earnest agreement with her sister. The old man, who could deny his favorite child nothing, groaned, then said, “Daughter, you ask a lot of me. But, very well, as you wish. Theseus, just let no one else threaten my life.”

“Rest assured, my friend,” Theseus replied, “while any god preserves my life, I will preserve yours. I will send the fellow here.”

Theseus departed, and Antigone went to the open door to look out into the gathering twilight. Before long, she saw a tall, fair-haired man of around thirty, dressed in a dusty tunic and expensive cloak trimmed with purple, being escorted by Xenon the elder toward the house.

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