Pausanias 1.34

Amphiaraos, a hero who is most prominently featured in ancient Greek epic narratives about the so-called Seven Against Thebes, has a special place in the writings of Pausanias, as we can readily see from a search for this hero’s name in a retranslation of Pausanias that has been made available online for free in A Pausanias Reader in Progress.

According to the myth, Amphiaraos was fleeing from Thebes after the expedition of the Seven had failed, driving his chariot across a plain, when, suddenly, the earth opened up and swallowed him together with the chariot drawn by his speeding horses. This mystical moment of the hero’s engulfment by Mother Earth has captivated artists both ancient and modern, and I show an example here. As Pausanias observes, however, there were different traditions about locating the actual place where Amphiaraos was engulfed. This observation about ongoing disagreement over the place where the primal scene of the hero’s engulfment actually happened is what I mark here as a placeholder for further commentary on further passages where Pausanias refers to the hero cult of Amphiaraos.