Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Ismene, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta (or Euryganeia in alternate maternity), is Antigone’s quieter sister. In Sophocles’ *Antigone* she refuses to help bury Polynices, citing women’s weakness and the city’s power; when Antigone is condemned she tries too late to share the guilt, and Antigone rejects her. Creon at first orders both shut away, then spares Ismene; she survives the tomb-deaths of Antigone and Haemon and the suicide of Eurydice—left as the last living child of Oedipus in that play’s economy. In *Oedipus at Colonus* she is the practical daughter who brings news from Thebes while Antigone guides their father. Other lines kill her. Some tragic and handbook notices have her slain with Antigone, or put to death by Creon, or caught in the brothers’ war. A minority strand (sometimes attached to the Seven’s assault) has her loved by a Theban or Argive and destroyed in the city’s fall. Apollodorus names her among Oedipus’s children without fixing her end; Hyginus and scholia preserve the lethal variants beside Sophocles’ mercy. Catalogue Ismene as the sister whose classical fate splits: spared witness in the Attic stage standard, or folded into the house’s general ruin in looser tradition.