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| Greek and Roman Mythology > Amphion
AmphionWith his twin brother Zethus he was exposed at birth on Mount Cithaeron, where they grew up among the shepherds, not knowing their parentage. Mercury gave Amphion a lyre, and taught him to play upon it, and his brother occupied himself in hunting and tending the flocks. Meanwhile Antiope, their mother, who had been treated with great cruelty by Lycus, the usurping king of Thebes, and by Dirce, his wife, found means to inform her children of their rights, and to summon them to her assistance. With a band of their fellow-herdsmen they attacked and slew Lycus, and tying Dirce by the hair of her head to a bull, let him drag her till she was dead (the punishment of Dirce is the subject of a celebrated group of statuary now in the Museum at Naples). Amphion, having become king of Thebes fortified the city with a wall. It is said that when he played on his lyre the stones moved of their own accord and took their places in the wall. In Tennyson's poem of Amphion is an amusing use of this story: "Oh, had I lived when song was great, In days of old Amphion, And ta'en my fiddle to the gate Nor feared for reed or scion! And had I lived when song was great, And legs of trees were limber, And ta'en my fiddle to the gate, And fiddled to the timber! "'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Whenever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move And flounder into hornpipes." |
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