EPIGONI, a Greek word denoting simply sons or descendants, but applied more particularly to certain mythical chiefs who fought against Thebes. After the terrible catastrophe which brought about the death of Iokaste (Jocasta) and the blinding of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of this ill fated pair, incurred the wrath of their father, whom they cast out from his home to fight with poverty as well as blindness. The curse of the aged king worked in the dissensions of the two brothers , and Polynices, driven into exile, made his way to Argos, where Adrastus took up his cause. The result was the enterprise which Attic tradition spoke of as the expedition of the Seven Argive Chiefs against Thebes, but which, according to the poets of the Thebais, involved as large a gathering as that of the chieftains who assembled to hunt the Calydonian boar or to recover the Goldeu Fleece. This strife was fatal, as the prophecies of Melam pous had declared it must be, to all the chiefs engaged in it with the exception of Adrastus, the seer Amphiaraus being saved from death only by the opening of the earth, which received him alive with his chariot into her bosom. Thus ended the first assault of the Argives against Thebes, au assault which answers closely to the first ineffectual attempts of the Heraclids to recover their paternal inheritance in the Peloponnesus. As in the other tradition, with which the Theban story was parallel, it was followed by a second attack in the struggle known as the war of the Epigoni, or the children of the discomfited chiefs of the former expedition. The doom of Thebes was now come, and the Epigoni appeared, like the Heraclids, when their period of enforced idleness is ai an end. The Thebans are utterly routed by the Argives under Alcmaeon, the son of ...