Cadmus and the Dragon’s Teeth
In brief
- Sent to find his stolen sister Europa and forbidden to come home without her, Cadmus asked Delphi what to do and was told to stop looking and follow a cow instead.
- Where the cow lay down he tried to found a city, but the spring he sent his men to was guarded by a dragon sacred to Ares, and it killed them all.
- He killed the dragon and, on Athena’s instruction, sowed its teeth. Armed men grew from the furrow and fought each other until five were left, and those five built Thebes with him.
When Zeus carried Europa off to Crete, her father sent her brothers after her with an order not to return without her. It was not a search so much as an exile with extra steps. Cadmus looked for a while, understood that he was hunting a god's whim across the whole Mediterranean, and went to Delphi to ask what he was actually supposed to do.
The oracle told him to give up on his sister. He would meet a cow that had never been under a yoke; he should follow it, and where it lay down to rest, he should build a city. He met the cow in Phocis and walked behind it across Boeotia until it stopped in a field and lay down in the grass, and he knelt and kissed the ground of a country he had never seen before.
He sent his men to fetch water for the sacrifice. The spring they found ran out from under a cave, and in the cave was a serpent with a triple tongue and three rows of teeth, sacred to Ares. It killed every man who went. When they did not come back, Cadmus went himself, and found the bodies and the thing standing over them, and he broke its skull against a rock and pinned the head to an oak with his spear.
A voice out of the air told him he would one day be a serpent himself, which he did not understand and had no time for. Athena came down and told him to plough the field and sow the teeth. He did it, and the furrow began to move: helmet crests came up through the soil first, then shoulders, then men fully armed, an entire crop of soldiers standing in a field that had been empty at breakfast.
Cadmus reached for his sword, and one of the new men told him not to interfere in a war that was not his. Then they turned on each other. They fought until the field was covered again, this time with their own bodies, and five were left standing. Those five threw down their weapons and swore peace, and with them Cadmus built the citadel of Thebes. The Thebans called themselves the Sown Men for centuries afterwards, and were proud of it, which tells you something about Thebes.
