Autonoe

Autonoe was a princess of Thebes, a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia and the wife of Aristaeus. She is the mother of the hunter Actaeon, who was torn apart by his own dogs, and she appears in Euripides’ Bacchae as one of the three sisters who, driven mad by Dionysus, took part in the killing of Pentheus on Mount Cithaeron (Hesiod, Theogony 975–978; Euripides, Bacchae 681–682).

Family

Autonoe was one of the daughters of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and Harmonia, daughter of Aphrodite and Ares. Her sisters were Ino, Semele and Agave, and her brother was Polydorus (Hesiod, Theogony 975–978; Apollodorus, Library 3.4.2). Through Semele she was the aunt of Dionysus, and through Agave the aunt of Pentheus, who was king of Thebes after Cadmus.

Marriage and Children

Hesiod says that Autonoe was married to Aristaeus, “long-haired” Aristaeus (Theogony 977). Their son was Actaeon (Euripides, Bacchae 230, 1227–1228; Apollodorus, Library 3.4.4). Apollonius gives Aristaeus a daughter Macris, who first received the infant Dionysus on Euboea and later lived in a cave among the Phaeacians; he does not name her mother (Argonautica 4.1131–1136).

Actaeon

Actaeon was a hunter who was killed by his own hounds. Apollodorus says that he was brought up by Chiron to be a hunter and was devoured by his own dogs on Cithaeron; according to Acusilaus this was because Zeus was angry with him for courting Semele, but in the more common version it was because he saw Artemis bathing, and the goddess turned him into a deer and drove his fifty dogs mad (Library 3.4.4). The ancient writers give other reasons too. In Ovid, he came upon Artemis (Diana) bathing in a grotto while he was wandering in the woods; she changed him into a stag, and his dogs, not knowing him, tore him to pieces (Metamorphoses 3.138–252). Pausanias describes a spring and a rock on the road from Eleutherae to Plataea where Actaeon was said to have looked at the goddess bathing, and he reports Stesichorus’s version, in which Artemis threw a deer-skin over Actaeon so that his dogs would kill him and he could not marry Semele (Pausanias 9.2.3). In Euripides, Cadmus names the offence as boasting that he was a better hunter than Artemis (Bacchae 337–340). Pausanias himself thought the hounds went mad without any god’s doing (9.2.4).

In Ovid’s account of the hunt his mother appears only in the phrase “Autonoe’s hero” (Metamorphoses 3.198). She comes into Ovid’s story again of Pentheus, where the wounded king calls on her as his aunt and begs her to remember Actaeon; she does not know who Actaeon is, and tears off his right arm (Metamorphoses 3.701–722).

Autonoe and Dionysus

When Dionysus came to Thebes, Semele’s sisters would not accept that she had borne a child of Zeus; they said that Semele had taken a mortal lover and blamed Zeus for it. Dionysus says in the prologue of the Bacchae that he drove them mad for this, and made all the women of Thebes leave their houses for the mountain (Euripides, Bacchae 26–38). In Apollodorus Dionysus forced the women of Thebes to leave their houses and rave on Cithaeron, and Pentheus was torn apart there by his mother Agave, who took him for a wild beast (Apollodorus, Library 3.5.2).

On Mount Cithaeron

In Euripides’ play a herdsman sees three bands of women on the mountain, led by Autonoe, Agave and Ino, sleeping peacefully until Agave cries out and rouses them (Bacchae 677–690). When Pentheus is discovered in the tree where he has been spying, Agave is the first to attack him, and then Ino and Autonoe, with the whole crowd of Bacchae, help to tear the body apart (Bacchae 1114–1136). Afterwards Cadmus, coming back from the mountain, tells Agave that he saw Autonoe, the mother of Actaeon by Aristaeus, and Ino still wandering in the woods in their frenzy (Bacchae 1227–1229).

Later Life

Euripides ends the play with Agave leaving Thebes in exile, but does not say what became of Autonoe. Pausanias, who heard the story at Erenea, a village in the territory of Megara, writes that Autonoe left Thebes to live there in great grief at Actaeon’s death and at the general misfortune of her father’s house, and he says that her tomb is in the village (Pausanias 1.44.5).

Autonoe Sources

Hesiod, Theogony 975–978; Euripides, Bacchae 26–38, 229–230, 337–340, 677–690, 1114–1136, 1227–1229; Apollodorus, Library 3.4.2, 3.4.4, 3.5.2; Apollonius, Argonautica 4.1131–1136; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.138–252, 3.198, 3.701–722; Pausanias 1.44.5, 9.2.3–4.

See Also: Cadmus, Harmonia, Aristaeus, Actaeon, Dionysus, Pentheus, Agave, Ino, Semele, Artemis