Ismene

Ismene is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta and the sister of Antigone, the one who refuses to defy Creon to bury their brother Polynices. In Sophocles she is the gentler, more fearful sister who survives, the last of Oedipus' four children still alive when the tragedy ends.

Born of Oedipus' unknowing marriage to his own mother, she is also his half-sister, and her brothers are Eteocles and Polynices. At the end of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the blinded king asks to hold his two daughters and mourns the life that awaits them. In Oedipus at Colonus, Ismene rides from Thebes to find her father and Antigone in exile near Athens: she brings news of the war between her brothers and of an oracle that makes Oedipus' body a safeguard for whichever city holds his grave. After she leaves to perform rites of purification for her father, Creon's men seize her, and Theseus rescues both sisters.

When both brothers fall and Creon forbids the burial of Polynices, Antigone asks for her help. Ismene shrinks from the deed: they are two women alone against the king and the city, and she begs her sister at least to act in secret. Antigone answers with contempt. Yet when Antigone is caught, Ismene claims a share of the guilt and asks to die beside her; Antigone will not allow it, and Creon, judging her innocent, spares her. With Antigone, Haemon and Eurydice dead, she is left alone, the last survivor of the cursed house.

An older tradition ended her story differently. According to the poet Mimnermus, in the seventh century BC, she was killed by Tydeus, one of the Seven against Thebes, at Athena's bidding while she was with a lover, and a Corinthian vase of the sixth century BC shows the scene. In the lost epic Oedipodea, cited by Pausanias, the children of Oedipus are born not of Jocasta but of a second wife, Euryganeia.