Perhaps because they were born of dragon’s teeth pulled from the jaws of a creature sacred to the god of war, these soldiers were filled from the first with extraordinary aggression. In reply to Cadmus’s command they simply clattered and rattled their shields and spears.
‘Silence!’ yelled Cadmus.
The warriors paid no attention. Their marching on the spot turned into a slow march forward. In exasperation Cadmus picked up a rock which, with his customary skill and strength, he hurled into their ranks. It struck one of the soldiers on the shoulder. The man looked at the soldier next to him and, taking him to be the aggressor, lunged at him with a mighty roar, sword drawn. Within moments blood-curdling battle-cries were heard all around the field as the soldiers fell upon each other.
‘Stop! Stop! I command you to stop!’ yelled Cadmus like a frantic parent on the touchline watching their son being squashed in a scrum. Stamping the ground in frustration he turned to Harmonia. ‘What is the point of Athena taking all this trouble to force me to create a race of men, only for them to destroy each other? Look at this violence, this bloodlust. What does it mean?’
But even as he spoke, Harmonia was pointing to the centre of the fray. Five of Cadmus’s Spartoi stood in a circle, the sole survivors. The rest lay dead, their blood soaking back into the soil from which they had come. Forward came the five, their swords pointing to the ground. They reached Cadmus and knelt down, heads bowed.
Great was the relief, great the rejoicing from the Tyrians. The day had been strange, as strange a day as mortals had known in all history. But some kind of order seemed to have emerged.
‘What is the name of this place?’ Cadmus asked. ‘Does anyone here know?’
A voice spoke up, the voice of the man who had warned that the Ismenian Dragon was sacred to Ares. ‘I’m from hereabouts,’ he said. ‘We call this “the plain of Thebes”.’
‘Then on this plain shall I build a great city. From now on we are not Tyrians, but Thebans’ – a great cheer went up – ‘and these five Spartoi shall be my Theban lords.’
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia
The Five Founding Lords of Thebes were given the names ECHION, UDAEUS, CHTHONIUS, HYPERENOR and PELOR.fn8 Under the supervision of Cadmus and his loyal army of Tyrian followers they slowly built up a citadel (the Cadmeia) from which grew a flourishing town. In time this town became the powerful city state of Thebes.fn9 The strong wall that encircled it was pierced by seven great bronze gates, each dedicated to the glory of an Olympian god.
The wall was constructed by AMPHION and ZETHUS, twin sons of Zeus by ANTIOPE, the daughter of the local river god ASOPOS. Hermes had been a lover of Amphion and taught him to play the lyre. When it came to the construction of the great wall around the Cadmeia, Amphion sang to the accompaniment of the lyre and the heavy stones carried by Zethus were so enchanted by the music that they floated into place and the city walls were finished in no time. As a result Amphion and Zethus, as well as Cadmus, are credited as co-founders of Thebes.
The work completed, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to the matter of their marriage. Descended from Titans and gods, allied to and punished by Olympians, but very mortal and very human, the pair might nowadays be called an ‘iconic power couple’. Today’s press and social media, one suspects, would hardly be able to resist dubbing them ‘Cadmonia’.
Their status as the foremost lovers of the known world meant their wedding feast was an honour never before accorded a mortal union, attended by the highest in the land and the highest from heaven. The gifts were stupendous. Aphrodite lent Harmonia her girdle, a magical item of lingerie that had the power to provoke the most dizzying and rapturous desire.fn10 It is said that Harmonia was bed-shy and that her love for Cadmus had yet to be consummated. This girdle, loaned for the duration of her honeymoon by the goddess of love and beauty (who may well have been Harmonia’s natural mother), was therefore a gift of great value.
But no wedding gift outshone the necklace that Cadmus conferred upon his bride. It was the most beautiful piece of jewellery yet seen. Fashioned from the choicest chalcedony, jasper, emeralds, sapphires, jade, lapis, amethyst, silver and gold, it caused gasps of wonder amongst the guests when he clasped it about his beautiful wife’s neck.fn11 The whisper went round that it too had been given by Aphrodite.
The whisper added that it had been made by Hephaestus. The whisper went further and suggested that Hephaestus had been urged to make it by his wife Aphrodite because she in turn had been urged to do so by her lover Ares, who – if you remember – nursed a grievance against Cadmus for slaying the Ismenian Dragon. For the cruel and shocking truth about the necklace was that it was cursed. Deeply and irrevocably cursed. Miserable misfortune and tragic calamity would rain down upon the heads of whosoever wore or owned it.
This is all confusing and fascinating in equal measure. If Ares and Aphrodite were indeed Harmonia’s true parents, why would they want to doom their own daughter? All to avenge a dead water snake? Besides, could sweet Harmony really be the child of Love and War? And, if so, why would the gentle issue of those two powerful and frightening forces be cursed by them with such unnatural cruelty?
The pairing of Cadmus and Harmony seems, like that of Eros and Psyche, to suggest a marriage of two leading and contradictory aspects of ourselves. Perhaps the eastern tradition of conquest, writing and trade represented by Cadmus – his name derives from the old Arabic and Hebrew root qdm, which means ‘of the east’ – can be seen here fusing with love and sensuality to create a new Greece endowed with both.
But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. It is fun trying to interpret such symbols and narrative turns, but the substitutions don’t quite work and the answers yielded are usually no clearer than those of an equivocating oracle.
So back to the story. The marriage was a great success. The girdle did its (literally) aphrodisiac work and the happy pair were blessed with their own issue: two sons, POLYDORUS and ILLYRIUS, and four daughters:– AGAVE, AUTONOË, INO and SEMELE.
Cadmus still had to pay for his killing of the dragon, however. Ares bound him to labour on his behalf for an Olympian year, which seems to have been eight human years.
After this, Cadmus returned to rule over the city he had built. But the curse of the necklace was to pollute any happiness or satisfaction he might have enjoyed as king.
Consigned to the Dust
After many years of peace and prosperity in Thebes, Cadmus and Harmonia’s daughter Agave had married PENTHEUS, the son of Echion, one of the Five Founding Lords (the last five Spartoi standing, you will remember). Tiring of kingship, but like so many heroes after him unable to restrain the itchy feet of wanderlust, Cadmus said to Harmonia one day: ‘Let us travel. Let us see more of the world. Pentheus is ready to take the throne in our absence.’
They saw much. Many towns and many cities. They went as an ordinary middle-aged couple, asking for no great welcome or banquets in their honour. Only a small party of attendants accompanied them. It was unfortunate, though, that Harmonia included the cursed necklace in her luggage.
After a great deal of travelling around Greece they determined on a visit to the kingdom up towards the western Adriatic, south of the Balkans and facing the east coast of Italy, that had been established by their youngest boy, Illyrius, and which was unsurprisingly called ‘Illyria’.fn12