Son of Oicles and the greatest seer among the Argives, Amphiaraus foresaw that all the Seven save Adrastus would perish at Thebes; bribed through his wife Eriphyle's golden necklace, he marched anyway and was swallowed alive into the earth with his chariot.1
Homer traces his line from Argos: Oicles begot Amphiaraus the rouser of the host, whom Zeus and Apollo loved with all manner of love; yet he did not reach old age, but died in Thebes because of a woman's gifts — Eriphyle, who took gold as the price of her own lord's life.2
When Adrastus mustered the Seven, Amphiaraus alone read the future clearly and tried to stay behind; Polynices won Eriphyle with the cursed necklace of Harmonia, and she, though she knew her husband's doom, persuaded him to go. At the Proetidian gate he fought until the earth opened and he vanished with his charioteer, and Zeus made him immortal.3
He nursed a bitter hatred of Tydeus. When Tydeus lay half dead of Melanippus' wound and Athena brought a drug for immortality, Amphiaraus cut off Melanippus' head and gave it him; Tydeus split the skull and gulped the brains, and the goddess in disgust withheld the gift.4
On the march the host founded the Nemean games for Archemorus, the child whose death by a serpent Amphiaraus read as an omen of what awaited them. Pausanias saw him at Delphi in Polygnotus' painting, held back from fighting Lycurgus son of Pronax by Adrastus and Tydeus.5
Pausanias' Theban king-list names a daughter Demonassa, who married Thersander and bore Tisamenus — linking the Melampid seer-house to the Epigon dynasty on the Cadmeia.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story