Antiope

Outside Thebes there was a spring that carried a dead queen’s name. The water was cold and clear and the Thebans drew from it like any other, but everyone knew how the spring had got its name. A woman had been tied to a bull and dragged until there was nothing left to drag, and her body had been thrown into the water or, in another telling, had turned into it. The woman at the spring was Dirce. The story that put her there belongs to Antiope, who spent most of it in chains.

Antiope’s father depends on who is telling it. Homer, in the Underworld scene of the Odyssey, calls her the daughter of Asopus, the river that runs between Thebes and Plataea, and says that her pride was to have slept in the arms of Zeus himself. The mythographer Apollodorus makes her the daughter of Nycteus, a Theban noble who had once fled Euboea with his brother Lycus after a killing and settled in Boeotia. Pausanias knew both versions and set them side by side, and he adds the one thing all the sources agree on: Antiope had a name among the Greeks for beauty.

Zeus noticed. Ovid, describing the web Arachne wove to shame the gods, gives him a disguise for the occasion: Jupiter came to Nycteus’ daughter in the shape of a satyr and left her carrying twins. The late Greek poet Nonnus remembers the same trick, “the laughing satyr, the sham of a deceitful mate”. The older Greek summaries do not bother with a costume. They simply say Zeus lay with her and she became pregnant, and that her father took it very badly.

What happened next splits into several roads. In Apollodorus, Antiope fled her father’s threats to Epopeus, king of Sicyon, and married him. Nycteus, in despair, killed himself, but not before charging his brother Lycus to punish both Epopeus and the girl. Lycus marched on Sicyon, took it, killed Epopeus and led Antiope home as a prisoner. Pausanias, who heard the Sicyonian version, has Epopeus carry her off by force and fight a battle for her in which both he and Nycteus were wounded. Epopeus won, built a temple to Athena, and prayed for a sign that the goddess was pleased, whereupon olive oil flowed out in front of the temple. Then he died of the wound he had neglected, and his successor handed Antiope over without a fight. The early epic poet Asius, quoted by Pausanias, gives the twins two fathers at once, Zeus and Epopeus, shepherd of peoples.

On the road back to Thebes, near Eleutherae on the Boeotian border, her labour came on. She gave birth to twin boys in the dust by the roadside. In Hyginus the birth takes place at a crossroads on Mount Cithaeron, and the names come from the moment itself: Zethus from a word for seeking a place, Amphion because she bore him by the road. The infants were left to die. A herdsman found them and raised them as his own, and they grew up in completely different directions. Zethus gave himself to cattle and hard work. Amphion played the lyre, which Hermes had given him.

Their mother, meanwhile, went into the dark. Lycus now ruled Thebes as regent, and he and his wife Dirce kept Antiope prisoner and treated her with deliberate cruelty. Hyginus adds that Dirce, suspecting her husband of wanting the captive, ordered her servants to keep Antiope bound in darkness. Years went by like this. Then, one day, the bonds simply loosened and fell away of their own accord, and Antiope walked out unseen by her keepers. Hyginus credits the will of Jupiter. Apollodorus just says it happened. She made for the only refuge she could find, a herdsman’s cottage in the hills, which happened to belong to her sons.

The fullest version of the rescue comes from Euripides, whose tragedy Antiope was staged around 410 BC and now survives only in fragments and in the plot summary Hyginus preserved. In it Zethus took the ragged woman at his door for a runaway slave and refused to take her in. Then Dirce herself arrived on the mountain, raving in the rites of Dionysus, recognised her escaped prisoner and began dragging her off to be killed. The old herdsman told the young men who the woman really was. They ran after Dirce, tore their mother free and tied Dirce by the hair to a bull. The bull did the rest. The play was famous enough that Plato could quote it without explanation: in the Gorgias, Callicles lectures Socrates the way Zethus lectured his dreamy brother, telling him he had a noble soul in a childish exterior and would be helpless in a court of law.

The endings differ in how many people die. In Apollodorus the twins killed Lycus as well as Dirce and threw Dirce’s body into the spring that took her name. In the Euripidean version, Hermes appeared just as they were about to kill Lycus, stopped them and ordered the regent to give up the kingdom to Amphion. Hyginus has a third ending in which Dionysus, whose votary Dirce had been, turned her body into a spring on Cithaeron. Whichever it was, the brothers took Thebes and walled it, and the stones followed the music of Amphion’s lyre into place. Amphion married Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, and that is another story, a worse one.

Antiope’s own story does not end in triumph. Pausanias, who collected the Boeotian traditions in the second century AD, says Dionysus was angry about what had been done to his worshipper, and took it out on Antiope. She went mad and roamed all over Greece, out of her wits. Pausanias remarks drily that extravagant punishments always arouse the resentment of the gods. The punishment was her sons’ idea, but she paid for it. Her wandering ended in Phocis, where Phocus, son of Ornytion and grandson of Sisyphus, met her, cured her madness and married her.

Pausanias saw the grave the two of them shared at Tithorea, below Parnassus, and heard about the strange rivalry that attached to it. Back in Thebes, Amphion and Zethus lay under a small mound of earth. When the sun passed through Taurus, the people of Tithorea tried to steal earth from that mound and lay it on Antiope’s tomb, because an oracle of the seer Bacis promised that their harvest would then flourish while that of Thebes wasted away. So every spring the Thebans stood guard over a heap of dirt. The mother who had once been kept from her sons was, in death, the reason people fought over their soil.

No one ever describes her face or her clothes. Her beauty is asserted, never drawn. What survives in the round is the moment of her vindication rather than Antiope herself: Pliny the Elder recorded a single-block marble group of Zethus, Amphion, Dirce and the bull by the brothers Apollonius and Tauriscus of Tralles, brought from Rhodes to Rome by Asinius Pollio, and the colossal group dug out of the Baths of Caracalla in 1546, now in Naples as the Farnese Bull, has been identified with it ever since. The bull rears, the young men haul on the rope, and Dirce twists underneath. It is the only scene in her life that sculptors seem to have wanted.

Antiope has no powers, and her story is a record of what other people’s power did to her. Zeus’s desire made her pregnant, her father’s shame drove her out, a king’s war dragged her back, a jealous queen chained her in the dark, and a god she had never offended drove her mad for a revenge she did not carry out. Her one advantage is endurance, and the one miracle granted to her, the chains that open by themselves, gives her nothing more than the chance to walk. Nobody asks her what she wants. Her weakness is the plain condition of a mortal woman in a myth ruled by gods and kings: she can survive almost anything, but she cannot choose.

She should not be confused with the Amazon Antiope, daughter of Ares, whom Theseus carried off to Athens. The two share nothing but a name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Antiope in Greek mythology?

Antiope was a Boeotian princess, the daughter of Nycteus or of the river Asopus, who bore Zeus the twins Amphion and Zethus. After years of imprisonment by her uncle Lycus and his wife Dirce, she was rescued by her sons, who went on to rule Thebes and build its walls.

How did Zeus seduce Antiope?

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in the poet Nonnus, Zeus came to Antiope disguised as a satyr. Earlier Greek summaries such as Apollodorus simply say that Zeus lay with her and she became pregnant, which made her father threaten her and drove her to flee to Epopeus of Sicyon.

What happened to Dirce, who imprisoned Antiope?

Antiope’s sons Amphion and Zethus tied Dirce to a bull, which dragged her to her death. Apollodorus says her body was thrown into the spring near Thebes that was named Dirce after her, while Hyginus says Dionysus turned her body into a spring on Mount Cithaeron.

Why did Dionysus drive Antiope mad?

Dirce had worshipped Dionysus above every other god, so he was angry at the way she was killed and punished Antiope for it. According to Pausanias, Antiope wandered all over Greece in madness until Phocus, grandson of Sisyphus, cured her and married her.

Is Antiope the mother of Amphion the same as Antiope the Amazon?

No. Antiope the mother of Amphion and Zethus was a Theban princess, while Antiope the Amazon was a daughter of Ares carried off by Theseus. They are two different women who share a name.

Related Entries

Niobe, Zeus, Satyr, Dionysus, Maenad, Hermes, Cadmus, Sisyphus, Tantalus, Europa, Semele, Danae, Callisto, Io, Amazons, Theseus