Antiope was born to Ares, the Olympian god of war whose battle-cry could shake the earth, and to Otrera, the queen who founded the Amazon nation on the shores of the Black Sea. Her sisters were Hippolyta, who wore the golden girdle that Heracles would one day demand as his ninth labour; Melanippe, whose life Heracles spared in exchange for the girdle; Penthesilea, who would later fight and die at Troy; and Orithyia, who shared the throne with Antiope as co-ruler of the Amazons. The Amazons were not merely women who fought. They were a nation that lived by the bow and the horse, that burned off their right breasts to draw the bowstring more easily, and that met with men only to conceive children, keeping the daughters and sending the sons away. Antiope was raised in this world, trained in every weapon, and crowned as queen of a people who feared no army on earth.

The trouble began with Heracles. The hero, forced to complete twelve impossible labours by King Eurystheus, was sent to fetch the girdle of Hippolyta from the Amazon capital at Themiscyra. He travelled with a company of heroes that included Theseus, the king of Athens who had already proved his courage by slaying the Minotaur, the bull-headed monster of Crete, and by navigating the labyrinth built by Daedalus. When the Greek ships reached Themiscyra, Heracles demanded the girdle. Hippolyta was willing to give it to him, but the goddess Hera, who hated Heracles for being the son of her husband Zeus and a mortal woman, stirred the Amazons into a frenzy. A great battle broke out. In the chaos, Theseus caught sight of Antiope. Some say he abducted her by force, seizing her in the smoke of battle and carrying her to his ship. Others, following the account of Pausanias, say that Antiope looked upon Theseus and loved him, that she betrayed her sisters of her own free will and followed him back to Athens as a bride. Either way, the queen of the Amazons was gone, and the nation she had ruled was left leaderless and enraged.

In Athens, Antiope and Theseus were married. She bore him a son they named Hippolytus, after her sister Hippolyta, the queen whose girdle had caused the war. The boy grew up devoted to Artemis, the virgin huntress goddess of the wilderness, and swore an oath of chastity that would one day destroy him. But before that tragedy, another came. The Amazons did not forget their stolen queen. They gathered an army, sailed across the Aegean, and landed on the coast of Attica. They burned the villages of the Athenians and laid siege to the city itself, camping on the very hill that would one day be called the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares. Theseus led the defence. The battle was fierce, the Amazons fighting with the fury of women who had come to reclaim their own. And in the thick of it, Antiope stood beside her husband, fighting against the sisters she had once ruled.

The end came from an unexpected hand. During the battle, an Amazon named Molpadia drew her bow and fired at Theseus. Antiope saw the arrow fly. She threw herself in front of her husband, or the shot went wild, or Molpadia mistook her for an enemy in the chaos. The arrow struck Antiope in the chest or the throat. She fell, and Theseus, enraged, killed Molpadia where she stood. The tombs of both women were shown in Athens for centuries. Pausanias, the Greek traveller who wrote a guide to the ancient world in the second century CE, recorded that visitors could still see the grave of Antiope and the grave of Molpadia, two enemies buried in the same city, one who had died for love and one who had died for loyalty.

But there are darker versions of the story. In the tradition followed by Ovid in his Heroides, and by Hyginus in his handbook of myths, Theseus did not remain faithful. He decided to abandon Antiope and marry Phaedra, the Cretan princess whose mother Pasiphae had loved a bull and given birth to the Minotaur. When Antiope learned of the wedding, she gathered a band of loyal Amazons and burst into the feast, swearing to kill every guest. Theseus met her with force. He struck her down himself, and in Ovid's telling she was pregnant when she died. In yet another version, an oracle had prophesied that Theseus would kill Antiope, and he fulfilled that prophecy on the battlefield. The ancient sources disagree on almost every detail except the central fact: the queen of the Amazons loved a Greek hero, and that love killed her.