Antiope

SOME say that when Zeus seduced Antiope, daughter of Nycteus the Theban, she fled to the King of Sicyon, who agreed to marry her, and thus occasioned a war in which Nycteus was killed. Antiope’s uncle Lycus presently defeated the Sicyonians in a bloody battle and brought her back, a widow, to Thebes. After giving birth in a wayside thick to the twins Amphion and Zethus, whom Lycus at once exposed at Mount Cithaeron, she was cruelly ill- treated for many years by her aunt, Dirce. At last, she contrived to escape from the prison in which she was immured, and fled to the hut where Amphion and Zethus, whom a passing cattle-man had rescued, were now living. But they mistook Antiope for a runway slave, and refused to shelter her. Dirce then came rushing up in a Bacchic frenzy, seized hold of Antiope, and dragged her away.
‘My lads,’ cried the cattle-man, ‘you had better beware of the Furies.’ ‘Why the Furies?’ they asked.
‘Because you have refused to protect your mother, who is now being carried off for execution by that savage aunt of hers.’
The twins at once went in pursuit, rescued Antiope, and tied Dirce by the hair to the horns of a wild bull, which made short work of her.

b. Others say that the river Asopus was Antiope’s father, and that one night the King of Sicyon impersonated Lycus, to whom she was married, and seduced her. Lycus divorced Antiope in consequence and married Dirce, thus leaving Zeus free to court the lonely Antiope, and get her with child. Dirce, suspecting that this was Lycus’s doing, imprisoned Antiope in a dark dungeon; from which, however, she was freed by Zeus just in time to bring forth Amphion and Zethus on Mount Cithaeron. The twins grew up among the cattle-men with whom Antiope had taken refuge and, when they were old enough to understand how unkindly their mother had been treated, she persuaded them to avenge her. They met Dirce roaming the slopes of Mount Cithaeron in a Bacchic frenzy, tied her by the hair to the horns of a wild bull and, when she was dead, flung her body on the ground; where a spring welled up, afterwards called the Dircaean Stream. But Dionysus avenged this murder of his votary: he sent Antiope raging madly all over Greece until at last Phocus, a grandson of Sisyphus, cured and married her in Phocis.
c. Amphion and Zethus visited Thebes, where they expelled King Laius and built the lower city, Cadmus having already built the upper. Now, Zethus had often taunted Amphion for his devotion to the lyre given him by Hermes. ‘It distracts you’, he would say, ‘from useful work.’ Yet when they became masons, Amphion’s stones moved to the sound of his lyre and gently slid into place, while Zethus was obliged to use main force, lagging far behind his brother. The twins ruled jointly in Thebes, where Zethus married Thebe, after whom the city-previously known as Cadmeia-is now named; and Amphion married Niobe. But all her children except two were shot dead by Apollo and Artemis, whose mother Leto she had insulted. Amphion was himself killed by Apollo for trying to take vengeance on the Delphic priests, and further punished in Tartarus. Amphion and Zethus are buried in one grave at Thebes, which is guarded carefully when the sun is in Taurus; for then the people of Phocian Tithorea try to steal earth from the mound and place it on the grave of Phocus and Antiope. An oracle once said that this act would increase the fertility of all Phocis at the expense of Thebes.

1. These two versions of the Dirce myth show how free the mythographers felt to make their narrative fit the main elements of a literary tradition which, in this case, seems to have been deduced from a series of sacred icons. Antiope, emerging joyfully out of her dungeon and followed by the scowling Dirce, recalls Core’s annual reappearance in Hecate’s company. She is called Antiope (‘confronting’) in this context, because her face is upturned to the sky, not bent towards the Underworld, and ‘Daughter of Night’-Nycteis, not Nycteus-because she emerges from the darkness. The ‘raging on the mountain’ by Dirce and Antiope has been misinterpreted as a Bacchic orgy; theirs was clearly an erotic gadfly dance, for which they behaved like Moon-heifers in heat. Dirce’s name (‘double’) stands for the horned moon, and the icon from which the myth is taken will have shown her not being tied to the bull in punishment, but ritually marrying the bull-king. A secondary meaning may be concealed in dirce: namely ‘cleft’, that is, ‘in an erotic condition’. The Dircaean spring, like Hippocrene, will have been moon-shaped. Antiope’s sons are the familiar royal twins borne by the Moon- goddess: her sacred king and his tanist.
2. Amphion’s three-stringer lyre, with which he raised the walls of Lower Thebes-since Hermes was his employer, it can have had only three strings-was constructed to celebrate the Triple-goddess, who reigned in the air, on earth, and in the Underworld, and will have been played during the building to safeguard the city’s foundations, gates, ant towers. The name ‘Amphion’ (‘native of two lands’) records his citizenship of Sicyon and Thebes.