Daughter of Nycteus and wife of Polydorus, king of Thebes and son of Cadmus. By him she bore Labdacus, and so the blood of the Sown Men, joined to the house of Cadmus, was carried forward into the Labdacid kings.1
Nycteis was the daughter of Nycteus, himself a son of Chthonius. Through her father she carried into the royal house of Thebes the blood of the Sown Men, the earthborn warriors who had risen from the dragon's teeth that Cadmus scattered.2
Of the armed men who sprang from the dragon's teeth and fell to fighting one another, only five survived when the slaughter was done — Echion, Udaeus, Chthonius, Hyperenor, and Pelorus. From Chthonius the line that led to Nycteis descended.3
When Polydorus became king of Thebes, he married Nycteis, daughter of Nycteus, and begat Labdacus by her. So her single marriage knit two strains together: the seed of Cadmus and the earthborn line of the Spartoi.4
Her name does not outlast that one notice. The later authors who tell the Theban succession pass straight through her: when Polydorus died, his son Labdacus was still a child, and the boy together with the sovereignty of Thebes passed first to the guardianship of Nycteus and then to Lycus, brother of Nycteus. Nycteis is the mother none of them stop to name — the quiet hinge on which her son's troubled inheritance turns.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story