Amphion

Amphion was born to Zeus and Antiope, a princess of Thebes, though his birth was hidden and his childhood was one of exile. Antiope was the daughter of Nycteus, the king of Thebes, or in some accounts of his brother Lycus, and she was famous for her beauty. Zeus saw her and desired her, and he came to her in the form of a satyr, one of the wild spirits of the countryside who were part man and part goat. When Antiope became pregnant, her father or uncle was enraged and drove her from the city. She fled to the mountain of Cithaeron, the rugged peak that separated Boeotia from Attica, and there she gave birth to twin sons: Amphion and Zethus. She exposed them on the mountain, as was the custom for unwanted infants, and returned to Thebes in shame. But a shepherd found the boys and raised them as his own, and they grew up in the wilderness, strong and wild, unaware of their royal blood.

Amphion and Zethus were opposites in every way. Zethus was a man of strength and labour, a hunter and wrestler who could break a bull's neck with his bare hands. Amphion was a man of music and art, slender and sensitive, who played the lyre with a skill that seemed divine. Some said that Hermes, the messenger god who moved between worlds, gave him the lyre as a gift, or that Apollo, the god of music and light, taught him to play. Where Zethus could move a stone by force, Amphion could move it by song. The lyre was a tortoise shell strung with sheep gut, and when Amphion played it, the sound was so beautiful that even the wild animals of Cithaeron came to listen. The two brothers were devoted to each other, Zethus the arm and Amphion the voice, and together they were destined to reclaim their birthright.

The day of vengeance came when Lycus, the uncle who had driven Antiope from Thebes, took a new wife named Dirce. Dirce was cruel and proud, and she treated Antiope with contempt, binding her with chains and driving her like a slave through the city. Antiope escaped and fled to the mountain where her sons had been raised. She found Amphion and Zethus, now grown to manhood, and told them who they were. The brothers were enraged. They marched upon Thebes with the shepherd who had raised them and the men of the mountain. They killed Lycus, though some accounts said they spared him, and they took Dirce to the spring that bore her name, the sacred fountain of Dirce at the foot of the Cadmea, the citadel of Thebes. There they tied her to the horns of a wild bull, and the beast dragged her to her death, tearing her body apart. The spring ran red with her blood, and from that day the fountain of Dirce was said to be haunted by her ghost. Amphion and Zethus claimed the throne of Thebes, and they set about building the city into a fortress worthy of its name.

Thebes had been founded by Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who had slain the dragon of Ares, the god of war, and sown its teeth in the earth, from which sprang the Spartoi, the armed men who became the ancestors of the Theban nobility. But the walls of the city were incomplete, and the brothers needed to finish them. Zethus hauled the stones with his strength, his muscles straining against the weight of the blocks. Amphion sat upon a rock and played his lyre, and the stones rose of their own accord, floating through the air and settling into place with a precision that no mortal hand could match. The music was so powerful that the very walls seemed to sing, and the city of Thebes was enclosed in a circle of stone that no enemy could breach. The gates were set with sevenfold bars, and the towers rose high above the plain of Boeotia. Thebes became the greatest city in central Greece, and Amphion's lyre was the reason.

Amphion married Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, the king of Sipylus in Lydia, and together they had fourteen children: seven sons and seven daughters, the Niobids. The gods had blessed the marriage with extraordinary fertility, and the children were the pride of Thebes. But Niobe's pride grew into arrogance, and she boasted before the temple of Leto, the Titan goddess of motherhood, that she was superior because she had fourteen children while Leto had only two. Leto cried out to Apollo and Artemis, and the twin gods descended upon Thebes with arrows of gold and silver. The seven sons fell on the racecourse, pierced by Apollo's shafts, and the seven daughters fell in the palace, struck by Artemis's bow. All fourteen died in a single day, and the palace of Amphion became a tomb.

Amphion saw his children dead and his wife turned to stone by grief on Mount Sipylus, and he could not endure it. Some accounts said he threw himself upon his sword in the palace, dying by his own hand. Others said that Apollo, enraged by Niobe's blasphemy, struck him with a thunderbolt or that the god killed him with his arrows alongside the children. Either way, the musician king died, and the walls he had built with song stood empty. Zethus had already died, some said of grief for his brother's loss, and the throne of Thebes passed to other hands. The city endured, but the house of Amphion was destroyed.

In the centuries that followed, the walls of Thebes were remembered as Amphion's work, and the story of the musician king was told throughout Greece. The Roman poet Horace wrote of him, and the Greek tragedians used his house as a symbol of the fragility of human happiness. The lyre that had built a city became the instrument of a grief that no music could soothe, and the name of Amphion was invoked whenever a poet claimed that art could move the world.