June W. ALLISON Eteokleispolys: One/Many in Aeschylus' Septem

To read Aeschylus' Septem as a presocratic text requires more than noting isolated lines as "reminiscent of." The heptagonal cosmos that is Thebes is circmscribed by an unwitting Pythagorean, closing the city against the seven by a process in which an Empedoclean Neikos unites with Philia to create one out of two at each gate, a cosmic movement (dinos) controlled by Apollo, heptamagetas. Sicilisms in Septem contribute to the notion that Aeschylus' familiarity with the ideas of West Greek philosophical mystics was not casual. My paper examines one of these ideas, namely, Aeschylus' treatment of the one/many problem. A bonus of the study is a fresh understanding of lines 6: Eteoklees an eis polys kata ptolin/hymnoith’.

Plurality, defined by contraries, is conceived as dyad, then unity. In Septem contraries are concrete: Thebans/Argives, foreigner/native, male/female; or common, but more abstract: public/personal, words/symbols; or theoretically posited: odd/even, difference/sameness, separateness and unity. The resolution of contraries into one at the verbal level, for example, emerges from an abundance of artful compounds, a trademark of Aeschylean composition, words in anti-, pros-, and dys work against syn- and dia- . The estranged brothers with their one fate are the essential dyad. Empedocles described the cycle of generation and destruction that proceeds under the influence of Philia and Neikos with similar compounds, notably with the word that predicts twins, syngignesthai (B 22.8). This is precisely the transition that Eteocles makes in becoming one with Polyneices-of-the-too-significant name. The Neikos exists beyond the power of either of them to control; it is poly. The paper provides numerous examples in Septem of Empedoclean one and many, neikos and philia pairs.

To become one the brothers must kill their unnatural plurality. Unity cannot be one without the heteros, which turns out to be the same. A brother can only be brother if he has a sibling, and both are, therefore, named "brother," and called the same. As Empedocles puts it: "we perceive earth by earth, water by water...and further love by love and strife by painful strife" (31 B 109). So, too, Aeschylus names the two: Eteoklees an eis polys kata ptolin/hymnoith’