A daughter of the river Asopus and the eponymous heroine of Boeotian Thebes, the city below the Cadmea taking its name from hers.1
The Phliasians reckon Thebe among the daughters of the river Asopus, sisters to Corcyra and Aegina: where her sisters gave new names to the islands once called Scheria and Oenone, from Thebe is named the city below the Cadmea. So the heroine who carries the city's name is set within the Asopid stock, a river-god's daughter standing as the namesake of the seven-gated town.2
The genealogist gives the river's own pedigree: Asopus was a son of Ocean and Tethys, or, as Acusilaus held, of Pero and Poseidon, or, by others, of Zeus and Eurynome. Metope, herself a daughter of the river Ladon, married him and bore two sons, Ismenus and Pelagon, and twenty daughters, of whom one, Aegina, was carried off by Zeus.3
In the founding of Thebes the genealogist binds her to the wall-builder: Zethus married Thebe, and after her the city of Thebes is named — the marriage of the city's namesake to the twin who raised its ramparts knitting the eponym into the line of Theban kings.4
Pausanias records the quarrel over which Asopus fathered her. The Phliasians claim Thebe for their own river, but the Thebans do not agree, holding that she was the daughter of the Boeotian, not the Phliasian, Asopus — a contest of cities over the parentage of the heroine whose name each would own.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