Almost as famous in Greek mythology as the Trojan War is the tale of the Seven against Thebes. It is all about the sons of King Oedipus. One, Prince Polyneices, got together with seven brave friends to wrest the throne of seven-gated Thebes from his brother. In this fratricidal war, Polyneices and five of his friends were killed in action.* After another war about the disposal of their bodies, they were supposedly buried at Eleusis, 14 miles northwest of Athens.
If the story is based on real events, it must have happened about 1500 B.C., during the Mycenaean period, the dimly-known dawn of Greek history. So legendary are the Seven that to dig for the graves at Eleusis might seem as unrealistic as to dig in Yorkshire for the grave of Robin Hood. But last week Archaeologist George E. Mylonas of Washington University. St. Louis, announced that he had actually found the graves.
To find the burial site, Mylonas followed the directions of Pausanias, the Greek geographer and traveler, who wrote a kind of Greek Baedeker in the 2nd century A.D. In describing the countryside near Athens, Pausanias tells about the heroes' graves. Since many of his descriptions have proved accurate as clues for archaeologists in the past, Mylonas was convinced that if he dug long enough at Eleusis. he would find the graves just where Pausanias put them when he wrote his ancient guidebook.
Eleusis is now the main base of the Greek air force, and the whistling roar of the jets competes with the racket of a rock-crushing plant. Greek Archaeologist Mylonas was not disturbed by such distraction. He told his workers where to dig, and three weeks ago one of them hit an ancient tomb a yard below the surface and only 50 ft. from the rumbling rock crusher. More digging uncovered five more tombs—just the right number to fit both the legend and the description of Pausanias. The bones they contained were poorly preserved, but late Mycenaean vases proved that the tombs were of the right period.
Last week excited archaeologists were trooping to Eleusis to see for themselves. Said Mylonas: "Once more tradition is proven a fact, and another great story of the past becomes reality." Not all his colleagues are so sure. They admit that he may have found the graves described by Pausanias, but Pausanias lived nearly 1,700 years after the Seven, and Greeks of his time were not above glamorizing their local antiquities to attract wealthy Roman tourists.
*The seventh got away in a chariot but, according to legend, the earth opened up and swallowed him; the eighth lived to tell the tale.