The first of them all is Tyro[476], who seems to have been of the family of Æolus, and to have lived about four generations before the Troica.
The next is Antiope, mother of Amphion and Zethus.
After her come (1) Alcmene, mother of Hercules,
(2) Epicaste, mother of Œdipus, and
(3) Chloris, mother of Nestor.
All of whom belong to a period three generations before the war.
After these follow Leda and Ariadne, with others whose epoch the text of Homer does not enable us to fix. But Ariadne, the bride of Theseus, and aunt of Idomeneus (the μεσαιπόλιος), stands at about one generation and a half before the war: and Leda, as the mother of Castor and Pollux who were dead, and of Helen whose marriageable age dated from so many years before the action of the Iliad, as well as of Clytemnestra, belongs to about the same date.
On the whole therefore it would appear, from the signs of chronological order, that Antiope can hardly have been older than Tyro, and therefore can only have been about four, and her sons about three generations before the War. We have no vestiges of their race in Homeric history, except that, in the Nineteenth Odyssey[477], there is recorded the death of Itylus, the son of Zethus, in his boyhood. The Amphion Iasides of Od. xi. 283, must be another person. But, if this reasoning be sound, Cadmus, who succeeds to them in Thebes, was probably much more recent than the later tradition makes him, and may have come into Greece only a short time before Minos.
His name appears to have been given as a dynastic name to his subjects, or the ruling class of them, and to have continued such under his descendants. For not only does it appear to have begun with him, but with the fall of the family it at once disappears.