How Oedipus at Colonus drew on The Seven Against Thebes
A documented line of influence: Sophocles demonstrably engaged Aeschylus’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Seven Against Thebes
Aeschylus · 467 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles · 401 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
6/10
On Oedipus at Colonus’s page
- The brother-against-brother war that hangs over Oedipus at Colonus was dramatized first by Aeschylus, sixty-odd years earlier
- Sophocles works against that older Theban material — when Oedipus curses his sons and Polynices comes to Colonus, he's lighting the fuse on the fratricide Seven Against Thebes already showed burning down
- Read Aeschylus first and Oedipus's curse stops being abstract; you know exactly where it leads
On The Seven Against Thebes’s page
- Aeschylus dramatized the curse first — Eteocles and Polynices killing each other at Thebes, the doom on Oedipus's line made into theater
- Sophocles writes the scene that sets that war in motion: Oedipus cursing his sons, Polynices arriving at Colonus to plead
- Oedipus at Colonus re-engages the Theban story Aeschylus had already staged a half-century earlier, supplying the cause behind his catastrophe