The next dynasty at Thebes after the departure of Kadmos and Harmonia was that of the Labdakidai. Its founder Labdakos left a son, Laios, who was but one year old; in the minority of the young king, a nobleman of the Spartoi, Lykos (‘Wolf’) brother of Nykteus son of Chthonios, was made warleader and soon thereafter made himself king, reigning for twenty years.
Now Nykteus had a daughter Antiope, who won the favour of Zeus, and escaped from the wrath of her father by running (or being carried) away to Sikyon in the Peloponnesos, where she married Epopeus. Nykteus in despair killed himself (or died of a wound), leaving to Lykos the charge of punishing Antiope. Lykos captured Sikyon and Antiope both, carried her back to Thebes, and their treated her with the utmost harshness and cruelty, which in some accounts was aggravated by the jealousy which his wife Dirke felt for her.
But either on the way to or from Sikyon or during a period of escape from her prison, she bore twin sons, Amphion and Zethos; these she was forced to leave at the place of their birth, somewhere on Mt. Kithairon, but they were found and brought up by shepherds. Zethos became a stout warrior; Amphion, to his brother’s disgust, a musician. Meanwhile their mother, unknown to them as they to her, languished in her dungeon. At last, when her sons were same twenty years old, she escaped—by a miracle, according to one account at least, her chains falling off of themselves. She made her way to her sons, soon to be followed by Dirke, who was a votary of Dionysos and wandered there during one of the orgiastic dances of his cult. Seeing the escaped prisoner, she gave orders to bind her to the horns of a wild bull and let her be dragged to death. But at this moment, mother and sons were made known to each other; Dirke was put to death by the means she had intended for Antiope, Lykos was killed or dethroned, Laios banished, and the two heroes became masters of Thebes, which they provided with walls, the stones following Amphion’s lyre of their own accord.
This is clearly another account of how Thebes was founded, for it is ridiculous to suppose it had all the while previously been an open town. Dirke is connected with the local fountain of that name, which sprang up from her blood.
Laios in banishment found a good friend in Pelops, but proved himself ungrateful, for he kidnapped the latter’s son Chrysippos, whose beauty fascinated him. This sin was at the root of the curse which brought his line to an end in two more generations. Zethos married Thebe, the local nymph, and thus Kadmeia was renamed Thebes; Amphion became the husband of Niobe, and in some accounts shared her fate.
A rather obscure legend gives the further adventures of Antiope; Dionysos was wroth at the death of his votary, Dirke, and so, as he had already intervened to turn her into a fountain, he now avenged her by driving Antiope mad. In this state she wandered, until at last Phokos, son of Ornytion and grandson of Sisyphos, healed and married her. In later ages her grave was shown at Tithorea in Phokis, and if the inhabitants could contrive to steal some earth from the tomb of Amphion and Zethos and add it to her monument, their crops were good but those of the Thebans bad.