Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Dirce, wife of Lycus, had made Antiope’s life a torment in Thebes—chains, forced labor, insults. When Amphion and Zethus recognized their mother and rose against the house of Lycus, they seized Dirce. In the canonical revenge they bound her by the hair (or by the limbs) to a wild bull and let the beast drag and gore her to death among the rocks. From her blood, or from the place where her body was cast, sprang (or was named) the spring Dirce, the famous Theban water that later poets treat as emblem of the city’s ground. Pausanias knows Dirce’s tomb and the spring’s sanctity; Theban tradition kept her memory ambivalent—victim of a savage execution, yet namesake of holy water. The bull-death became a favorite of later art (the “Farnese Bull” group remembers the twins tying Dirce). Politically the act clears Lycus’s regime and seats the twin sons of Zeus on Thebes; ritually it etches cruelty and counter-cruelty into the city’s hydrology. Amphion and Zethus may also have forbidden Dirce’s name in certain contexts, or conversely honored the spring—local notices vary—but the core myth is stable: the tormentor dies by the bull; Thebes drinks Dirce.