The Epigoni (, Epigonoi, "progeny") is an ancient Greek tragedy written by the Greek playwright Sophocles in the 5th century BC and based on Greek mythology.
Plot
According to myth, Polynices and the Seven against Thebes attacked Thebes because Polynices' brother, Eteocles, refused to give up the throne as promised. All but one (Adrastus) of the seven would-be conquerors were killed. Their children swore vengeance and attacked Thebes. This was called the war of the Epigonoi ("the offspring, the next generation"); the story had been told, before Sophocles, in the lost epic Epigonoi. These Epigonoi defeated and killed (or drove out) Laodamas, son of Eteocles, and conquered Thebes, installing Thersander on the throne. All of the Epigonoi but Aegialeus, the son of Adrastus, or else Alcmaeon, son of Amphiaraus, survived this battle.
Amphiaraus knew that the attack against Thebes was doomed to fail and that he did not want to partake, but he was coerced to do so by his wife Eriphyle, who had been bribed by Polynices. Amphiaraus had instructed his son Alcmaeon to avenge him against his mother, and Alcmaeon killed her, either before or after the war of the Epigonoi, depending on the version of the myth. Alcmaeon was then pursued by the Erinyes, similar to Orestes' fate after killing his mother Clytemnestra.
Rediscovery in 2005
The play was lost for centuries, except for a few fragments, but in April 2005, classicists at Oxford University, employing infrared technology previously used for satellite imaging, discovered additional fragments of it in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The fragment translates to the following:
:Speaker A: … gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.
:Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wake up those who are asleep.
:Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.
Several fragments had been definitively assigned to Epigoni prior to this find. One was translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones as "Most calamitous of sons, what a word have you uttered."
An expert on Sophocles, Akiko Kiso was the first Japanese scholar to publish his works. In 1984, Kiso published The Lost Sophocles, which reconsidered fragments of Sophocles' lost works. It included reconstructions of Epigoni and Tereus.