No family in Greek myth is destroyed as thoroughly, or as generation by generation, as the house of Thebes. It begins with Cadmus, the hero who killed the dragon sacred to Ares, sowed its teeth to raise the earth-born Spartoi, and founded the city — and who married Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, at a wedding the gods themselves attended. The necklace given to the bride was said to be cursed. Five generations later the line ends with a girl walled up alive for burying her brother.
Cadmus and Harmonia had four children who each seeded a catastrophe. Agave married the Spartos Echion and bore Pentheus, whom she tore apart with her own hands in Dionysiac frenzy, mistaking him for a lion. Autonoe married Aristaeus and bore Actaeon, hunted down by his own fifty hounds after glimpsing Artemis bathing. Semele, loved by Zeus, was consumed by his lightning while pregnant with Dionysus — the twice-born god who returned to Thebes to destroy his cousin Pentheus. Only Polydorus carried the kingship forward, fathering Labdacus with Nycteis.
Labdacus's son Laius heard the oracle that his own son would kill him, and exposed the infant Oedipus to prevent it. Oedipus killed him at the crossroads instead, solved the Sphinx's riddle, and married Jocasta, his mother, fathering Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices. Cursed by their blinded father, the brothers agreed to alternate the throne; Eteocles refused to yield, Polynices married Argeia of Argos and brought the Seven against the city, and both died by each other's hand. Creon, Jocasta's brother, took power and forbade the traitor's burial.
The tree follows the Athenian tragedians, who mined this one household for their greatest plays: Aeschylus in Seven Against Thebes, Euripides in the Bacchae, and Sophocles across Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, all staged in the fifth century BCE. The final wreckage is Creon's own — Antigone entombed, his son Haemon dead beside her, his wife Eurydice a suicide, his son Megareus already given to the walls. A ruler who insisted the state outranked the dead lost his entire family to the argument.
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