The Dragon of Ares

The Dragon of Ares was a serpent of enormous size, coiled around the spring that bubbled from the earth on the Ismenian Hill near what would become the citadel of Thebes, a city in Boeotia in central Greece. The spring was sacred to Ares, the Olympian god of war, a deity whom the other gods despised for his love of bloodshed. Ares had placed the dragon there to guard the waters, or perhaps the dragon was born from the earth itself as a guardian of the place where a great city would stand. Its scales were as hard as bronze, its eyes blazed with fire, and its hiss could be heard across the plain. It had lain there for untold years before the arrival of the Phoenician prince.

Cadmus had come to Boeotia following a cow with a white mark on its flank, as the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the most sacred shrine in Greece, had commanded. The cow had collapsed from exhaustion on the Ismenian Hill, and Cadmus had sacrificed it to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, intending to build his city on the spot. He sent his companions to fetch water from the nearby spring, not knowing that the Dragon of Ares guarded it. The men approached the pool with their bronze vessels, and the serpent rose from the water like a wave of bronze and green, striking them down with its venomous fangs and crushing coils. None escaped. When Cadmus's men did not return, he discovered their bodies scattered around the spring, their bronze armour dented and their limbs broken.

Cadmus confronted the beast alone. Some accounts say he killed it with a great stone, hurling a boulder that crushed the serpent's skull. Others say that Athena, the goddess who had favoured his quest, gave him a spear or blessed his arm, and that he drove a bronze blade through the dragon's scales. The fight was brief but terrible, for the dragon was sacred and its death shook the earth. When the monster lay dead, its blood staining the spring red, Athena appeared to Cadmus and commanded him to pull out the dragon's teeth and sow them in the earth like seeds. Cadmus obeyed. He drew the long, curved teeth from the serpent's jaw and scattered them across the field where the cow had fallen.

As soon as the teeth touched the soil, the ground trembled. From each tooth an armed warrior sprang forth, fully grown and clad in bronze armour, with helmet and spear and shield. They were the Spartoi, the Sown Men, born from the bones of the dragon. But they were wild and violent, possessed of the same ferocity that had animated the serpent. They immediately began to fight one another, spear against shield, brother against brother, in a frenzy of mutual slaughter. Cadmus, horrified, threw a stone among them, and the warriors, unable to see who had struck them, turned upon one another in confusion. When the battle was over only five Spartoi remained alive: Echion, Udaeus, Chthonius, Hyperenor, and Pelorus. These five survivors became the ancestors of the noble families of Thebes, and from their bloodlines the greatest Theban heroes and kings would descend, including the house of Oedipus and the warriors who fought in the war of the Seven Against Thebes.

But the death of the Dragon of Ares carried a curse. The serpent had been sacred to the god of war, and its blood had soaked the earth where the city would stand. The gods gave Cadmus a kingdom, but they also gave him a doom. The city founded upon the dragon's bones would be a city of violence, of fratricide and civil war, of brothers killing brothers and sons killing fathers. The curse would pursue the house of Cadmus through every generation, from the marriage of Harmonia, whose cursed necklace brought ruin, to the madness of Agave, who tore her own son Pentheus apart, to the tragedy of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother. The Dragon of Ares did not merely guard a spring; it guarded the threshold between wilderness and civilisation, and its death opened the door to a city famous for its tragedies as much as its walls.