Tydeus also appears in Aeschylus's play Seven against Thebes, as one of the "Seven", and in the same guise in Euripides' play The Phoenician Women. He faced off with the defender Melanippus and killed Melanippus, but was mortally wounded himself. In other versions of the myth, the detail is added that the goddess Athena had planned to make him immortal but refused after Tydeus in a hubristic fit devoured the brains of the defeated Melanippus.