Adrastus

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Adrastus is the legendary king of Argos who, in Greek myth, led the expedition of the Seven against Thebes and alone among its champions came home alive. He belongs to the Theban cycle — the body of stories that, alongside the Trojan war, supplied Greek poetry and tragedy with much of its tragic material — and his name, which the Greeks heard as “the one who cannot be escaped,” was read even in antiquity as fitting the doom that gathered around him.

The story the sources tell begins with an oracle. Adrastus had been warned to yoke his daughters to a boar and a lion, and he made sense of the riddle when two exiles arrived at his court bearing those beasts on their shields or cloaks: Polynices of Thebes, driven out by his brother Eteocles, and Tydeus of Calydon. Adrastus married his daughters to them and pledged to restore each to his homeland. The march on Thebes that followed — to set Polynices on the throne his brother held — is the campaign of the Seven, with Adrastus at its head and six other captains, among them the seer Amphiaraus, who went knowing he would die. The assault failed. The two brothers killed each other at the walls, the captains fell one by one, and Adrastus escaped on Arion, the swift horse said to be divine-born. A generation later he led a second war, the campaign of the Epigoni — the sons of the fallen — which took Thebes at last; but his own son died in it, and the grief of that victory is, in several tellings, what killed him.

The literary Adrastus is therefore a figure of survival as a kind of curse: the leader who buries everyone he set out with, twice over. Aeschylus, Euripides, and the later Roman poet Statius each shape him to their own ends, and the mythographers preserve variant genealogies and details, so that no single “correct” version exists — the tradition is plural, as Greek myth generally is.

Alongside the poetry runs a strand of attested religious practice. Adrastus received hero-cult at Sicyon, where Herodotus reports that the tyrant Cleisthenes, wishing to break the city’s Argive sympathies, suppressed the sufferings of Adrastus that were sung at his festival and transferred the honors elsewhere — one of the clearest ancient glimpses of how a mythic figure could be worshipped, and how political power could redirect that worship. To the Greeks who kept his rites he was not a character in a story but a presence in the local soil, owed observance. That double life — hero of an epic of failure, and recipient of a cult that outlasted the city that sang it — is most of what the name now carries.

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