Autonoe
A Nereid and, in separate traditions, a daughter of Cadmus who witnessed the death of her son Actaeon.
The Myth of Autonoe
The name Autonoe appears twice in Greek myth. As a Nereid, she was one of the fifty sea-nymph daughters of Nereus and Doris, gliding through the Mediterranean alongside her sisters. But the more dramatic Autonoe was the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, making her a princess of Thebes — and a figure marked by extraordinary grief.
This Theban Autonoe was the mother of Actaeon, the young hunter trained by the centaur Chiron. When Actaeon stumbled upon Artemis bathing naked in a forest pool, the goddess splashed him with water and transformed him into a stag. His own hunting dogs, not recognising their master, tore him apart. Autonoe searched for her son and found only remains.
Her suffering did not end there. When Dionysus came to Thebes and her sister Agave, in a Bacchic frenzy, tore apart her own son Pentheus, Autonoe was among the maenads on the mountain. The house of Cadmus seemed cursed to destroy its own children, and Autonoe bore more than her share of that curse.
Symbols
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