Antiope was born in Thebes, the great city founded by Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who had slain the serpent and sown its teeth in the earth. Her father was Nycteus, the son of Chthonius, one of the Spartoi, the earth-born warriors who sprang from those teeth. Nycteus served as regent for the young King Labdacus, and his brother Lycus stood beside him. Some traditions, including the oldest account in Homer, call Antiope the daughter of Asopus, the river god whose waters divide Thebes from Plataea. Either way, she was a princess of divine or royal blood, and her beauty was famous throughout Boeotia.

When she was still young, Zeus desired her. The king of the gods had visited mortal women as a shower of gold, as a bull, as an eagle, and as a swan, but for Antiope he chose a form that would blend with the wild hills of Cithaeron: he came as a satyr, one of the goat-footed spirits of Dionysus, and lay with her on the mountainside. When Antiope discovered she was with child, she knew her father would never believe that a god was the father. Nycteus was a proud and violent man. Rather than face his wrath, Antiope fled from Thebes across the Corinthian Gulf to Sicyon, the city ruled by King Epopeus. Epopeus, struck by her beauty, took her as his wife without asking her father's permission.

Nycteus was enraged beyond measure. He gathered an army and marched against Sicyon, but in the battle both he and Epopeus were wounded. Epopeus won the day, but Nycteus was carried back to Thebes dying. Before he breathed his last, he laid a terrible charge upon his brother Lycus: avenge me upon Epopeus and Antiope. Do not let my daughter go unpunished. Lycus became regent of Thebes in his brother's place, and when Epopeus finally died of his neglected wound, Lycus had no need to fight. The new king of Sicyon, Lamedon, gave Antiope up willingly. Lycus brought her back to Boeotia as a prisoner, and on the road, near the town of Eleutherae at the foot of Mount Cithaeron, she went into labour. She gave birth to twin sons, but Lycus, still believing she had disgraced herself with a mortal lover, ordered the infants exposed on the mountainside to die.

A shepherd found the babies. He took pity on them, brought them to his home, and raised them as his own. He named one Zethus, from a word meaning "seeking," because Antiope had been searching for a place to give birth, and the other Amphion, because she had given birth by the road. The boys grew up strong and handsome, never knowing their true parentage. Hermes, the messenger god, gave Amphion a lyre, and he became so skilled that when he played, the very stones would move of their own will to follow his music. Zethus became a hunter and herdsman, powerful and practical, the opposite of his dreamy brother.

Meanwhile, Antiope's suffering had only begun. Lycus imprisoned her in Thebes, and his wife Dirce took a particular pleasure in tormenting her. Dirce was jealous of Antiope's youth and beauty, or perhaps she simply enjoyed cruelty. She had Antiope bound in chains, kept her in darkness, and forced her to labour like a slave. For years Antiope endured this treatment, her only consolation the hope that her sons might somehow have survived. Then, one night, her chains fell away. Zeus, who had not forgotten the woman he had loved, caused the ropes to loosen by divine power. Antiope escaped from her prison and fled across the hills, guided by the god to a humble house at Eleutherae where two young men lived. She did not know them. She only knew she needed shelter. The young men took her in. They were her sons, though neither she nor they yet knew it.

The reunion was almost destroyed by Dirce herself. The queen of Thebes was a devotee of Dionysus, and she had come to Eleutherae to celebrate the god's rites on Mount Cithaeron. In the midst of the festival, she caught sight of Antiope among the crowd. Dirce ordered two nearby young men to seize the fugitive and tie her to the horns of a wild bull, the instrument of sacrifice to Dionysus. The young men moved to obey. They were Amphion and Zethus, and they had no reason to refuse a queen's command. But the old shepherd who had raised them stepped forward and spoke the truth: the woman Dirce wanted to kill was their own mother, the princess Antiope whom Lycus and Dirce had tortured for years. The twins stopped. They turned on Dirce instead. They captured her, tied her by the hair to the bull, and let the beast drag her across the rocks of Cithaeron until she was torn to pieces. Her body was thrown into a spring that still bears her name, the spring of Dirce near Thebes.

Amphion and Zethus then marched on Thebes. They killed Lycus, or in some versions deposed him, and took the throne. With Amphion's lyre and Zethus' strength, they built the walls of Thebes, the great seven-gated city that would stand for centuries. Amphion married Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, and Zethus married Thebe, the nymph who gave her name to the city. But the gods do not forgive the murder of their devotees. Dionysus, whose worship Dirce had honoured, was offended by her death. He drove Antiope into a divine madness. She wandered the hills of Greece, raving, lost to reason, until she came to Phocis, the land north of Boeotia. There King Phocus, the son of Ornytion and grandson of Sisyphus, found her, cured her of her affliction, and made her his wife. She lived out her days in Phocis, and when she died she was buried beside Phocus at Tithorea. The people of that town honoured her tomb with annual rites, and an oracle of the soothsayer Bacis declared that the earth taken from her grave could make the land of Tithorea fertile while it withered the fields of Thebes.