Theban princess, daughter of Cadmus and wife of Aristaeus
Autonoë
Autonoë is a Theban princess, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia and wife of Aristaeus, and mother of the hunter Actaeon. She appears mainly in Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae, where she is one of the women who, possessed by Dionysus, tear apart their nephew Pentheus.
The myth
In the tradition, Autonoë was one of the daughters of Cadmus and Harmonia, and according to some accounts the eldest. She married Aristaeus in Boeotia and bore Actaeon, who was raised by Chiron and trained in hunting. According to Nonnus, Actaeon was punished after glimpsing Artemis naked: she turned him into a stag, and his own hounds tore him apart. Autonoë and Aristaeus searched for the scattered remains without recognising him, until the young man's ghost appeared to them in dreams in the form of a dappled stag.
In The Bacchae, Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the divinity of Dionysus and his mysteries, and the god, who is his cousin, sends a bacchic frenzy upon the women of Thebes. Autonoë, together with Agave and Ino, falls into that madness and, on the mountain, tears Pentheus apart after he spies on them from a tree. Oppian says that these three sisters secretly nursed the infant Dionysus on a mountain men called Thigh, and later handed him over to Aristaeus, who reared him in his cave.
Pausanias recounts that, overcome with grief over Actaeon's death and the misfortunes of her father's house, Autonoë left Thebes and settled in the village of Ereneia, in Megara, where her tomb was located.
Ancient sources: Euripides' The Bacchae, Nonnus' Dionysiaca, Pausanias, and Oppian, who mentions her among the nurses of Dionysus.