The celebrity of the horse Areiôn was extolled in the Iliad (xxiii. 346), in the Cyclic Thêbaïs, and also in the Thêbaïs of Antimachus (Pausan. l. c.): by the Arcadians of Thelpusia he was said to be the offspring of Dêmêtêr by Poseidôn,—he, and a daughter whose name Pausanias will not communicate to the uninitiated (ἧς τὸ ὄνομα ἐς ἀτελέστους λέγειν οὐ νομίζουσι, _l. c._). A different story is in the Schol. Iliad, xxiii. 346; and in Antimachus, who affirmed that “Gæa herself had produced him, as a wonder to mortal men” (see Antimach. Frag. 16. p. 102; Epic. Græc. Frag. ed. Düntzer). Kreôn, father of the heroic youth Menœkeus, succeeding to the administration of Thêbes after the death of the two hostile brothers and the repulse of Adrastus, caused Eteoklês to be buried with distinguished honor, but cast out ignominiously the body of Polynikês as a traitor to his country, forbidding every one on pain of death to consign it to the tomb. He likewise refused permission to Adrastus to inter the bodies of his fallen comrades. This proceeding, so offensive to Grecian feeling, gave rise to two further tales; one of them at least of the highest pathos and interest. Antigonê, the sister of Polynikês, heard with indignation the revolting edict consigning her brother’s body to the dogs and vultures, and depriving it of those rites which were considered essential to the repose of the dead. Unmoved by the dissuading counsel of an affectionate but timid sister, and unable to procure assistance, she determined to brave the hazard and to bury the body with her own hands. She was detected in the act; and Kreôn, though forewarned by Teiresias of the consequences, gave orders that she should be buried alive, as having deliberately set at naught the solemn edict of the city. His son Hæmôn, to whom she was engaged to be married, in vain interceded for her life. In an agony of despair he slew himself in the sepulchre to which the living Antigonê had been consigned; and his mother Eurydikê, the wife of Kreôn, inconsolable for his death, perished by her own hand. And thus the new light which seemed to be springing up over the last remaining scion of the devoted family of Œdipus, is extinguished amidst gloom and horrors—which overshadowed also the house and dynasty of Kreôn.[656] [656] Sophokl. Antigon. 581. Νῦν γὰρ ἐσχάτας ὑπὲρ Ῥίζας ἐτέτατο φάος ἐν Οἰδίπου δόμοις, etc. The pathetic tale here briefly recounted forms the subject of this beautiful tragedy of Sophoklês, the argument of which is supposed by Boeckh to have been borrowed in its primary rudiments from the Cyclic Thêbaïs or the Œdipodia (Boeckh, Dissertation appended to his translation of the Antigonê, c. x. p. 146); see Apollodôr. iii. 7, 1. Æschylus also touches upon the heroism of Antigonê (Sep. Theb. 984).