Amphiaraus, the seer who marched towards a foretold death

Of the seven heroes who marched against Thebes, one knew from the start how it would end. Amphiaraus, son of Oicles and descendant of Melampus, was a king and seer in Argos. He had foreseen that the expedition would fail and that all its leaders except Adrastus would die there. Yet he went. His story, at the heart of the Theban cycle, is one of the most intense Greek reflections on the relationship between knowledge of the future and fate.

Eriphyle's necklace

Amphiaraus had sworn that, in any dispute with his brother-in-law Adrastus, he would abide by the judgement of his wife Eriphyle. When Polynices, exiled from Thebes, sought allies to win back the throne from his brother Eteocles, he knew he had to persuade her. He offered her the necklace of Harmonia, the gods' wedding gift to the bride of Cadmus, and Eriphyle decided that her husband must go.

The seer obeyed, but before leaving Argos he charged his sons, and Alcmaeon in particular, with avenging him. Years later, according to the myth, Alcmaeon killed his mother and led the Epigoni, the sons of the Seven, in the new expedition that succeeded in taking Thebes. The necklace of Harmonia continued to bring misfortune to whoever owned it.

The wise man without an emblem

Aeschylus, in the Seven against Thebes of 467 BC, describes the warriors drawn up before the city's seven gates, each with a threatening device on his shield. Amphiaraus is the exception: his shield bears no emblem, because, as the messenger says, “he wishes not to seem the best, but to be it”. It is the portrait of a just man forced to fight for a cause he disapproves of, and who openly rebukes Tydeus and Polynices.

During the battle, according to the tradition also recorded by Pindar, Amphiaraus was fleeing in his chariot, pursued by Periclymenus, when Zeus, to spare him an inglorious death, hurled a thunderbolt and split the earth, which swallowed him alive together with his horses and charioteer. The seer therefore did not die like the others: he vanished beneath the ground and lived on as a divine presence.

The oracle at Oropos

From that disappearance a cult was born. At Oropos, on the border between Attica and Boeotia, rose the Amphiareion, a sanctuary where Amphiaraus was worshipped as an oracular hero and, in ancient belief, as a healer. After rites of purification, worshippers slept in the sanctuary's portico to receive the god's answer in a dream, following the practice of incubation. The ruins, with the small theatre and the long portico, can still be seen.

Herodotus relates that Croesus, king of Lydia, tested several Greek oracles and that the oracle of Amphiaraus was among the few to give an answer judged truthful, so that the king sent it rich offerings. The episode shows the prestige the ancient seer already enjoyed in the sixth century BC.

Dante recalls Amphiaraus in the twentieth canto of the Inferno, among the diviners, evoking the moment when the earth opened beneath him while the Thebans shouted after him. In ancient memory, however, what endured above all was the image of the just seer, who knows his fate and does not flee it, and who for that very reason was welcomed among the revered figures of Greece.