Cadmus was the founder-hero of Thebes and, the Greeks said, the man who brought them the alphabet — a culture-hero as much as a monster-slayer. His story braids together a dragon, a city sprung from teeth sown in the earth, and a curse that would haunt his royal line for generations.
The Search for Europa
Cadmus was a Phoenician prince, sent by his father to find his sister Europa, who had been carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull. He searched in vain, and the oracle at Delphi finally told him to give up the quest: instead, he was to follow a special cow and found a city where it lay down to rest. That place would become Thebes.
The Dragon's Teeth
But the spring where Cadmus stopped to draw water was guarded by a great dragon sacred to Ares, which slew his companions. Cadmus killed the dragon — and then, on Athena's advice, sowed its teeth in the earth like seeds. From the furrows sprang up a crop of fierce armed warriors, the Spartoi (“sown men”). Cadmus threw a stone among them, and they fell to fighting one another until only five remained — and those five became the founding nobility of Thebes. The image of “sowing dragon's teeth” to raise an army of enemies has been a metaphor ever since.
The Gift of Letters
Cadmus is also remembered as the bringer of writing. The Greeks credited him with introducing the Phoenician alphabet — the ancestor of Greek letters and, through them, of the very alphabet you are reading now. Whatever the history, the myth honours a profound truth: that Greek civilisation owed its letters to the East.
The Serpent at the End
For killing the dragon of Ares, Cadmus and his wife Harmonia were fated to suffer; their descendants (including Oedipus and Pentheus) met terrible ends, and in old age Cadmus himself was at last transformed into a serpent — returning, in the end, to the form of the creature whose death had founded his city. Founder, dragon-slayer, and bringer of letters, his legend stands at the very root of Thebes and of writing itself.
He slew a dragon to build a city, and sowed its teeth to raise its first warriors — then became a serpent himself, the wheel come full circle.