Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  Cadmus slit the cow’s throat and was just sprinkling its blood on a makeshift altar bedecked with wild flowers and burnt sage when one of the Tyrians returned in the most pitiable state of distress, bearing awful news. A dragon, in the grotesque form of a giant water serpent, guarded the spring. It had already killed four men, constricting them in its coils and biting off their heads with its enormous jaws. What could be done?

  Heroes do not wring their hands and wonder, heroes act. Cadmus hurried to the spring, picking up a heavy boulder on the way. Hiding behind a tree he whistled to attract the dragon’s attention, and then threw the boulder at the dragon’s head, smashing its skull and killing it outright.

  ‘So much for water snakes,’ said Cadmus, looking down at the monster’s blood and brains as they mixed with the waters of the spring.

  A voice sounded out loud and clear. ‘Son of Agenor, why do you stare at the snake you have slain? You too shall be a snake and endure the stares of strangers.’

  Cadmus looked around but could see no one. The voice must have sounded inside him. He shook his head and returned to the camp, delighted alike by the cheers of his supporters and the admiring kisses of Harmonia, to whom he said nothing about the voice he had heard.

  Far enough away to be able to do so without Cadmus hearing, one of his men was drawing in his breath through his teeth with the irritating relish of those who have bad news to impart. This man came from Boeotia and whispered to his companions with a wise shake of the head that Drakon Ismenios, the Ismenian Dragon, which Cadmus had just slain, was known to be sacred to Ares, the god of war. Indeed, he went on, some believed that the creature was actually a son of Ares!

  ‘No good will come of this deed,’ he said, tutting and clicking. ‘You do not cross the god of battles with impunity. No, sir. Makes no difference who your grandfather is.’

  It is worth recognizing here that one of the most burdensome challenges faced by the heroes and mortals of that time concerned their relationships with the different gods. Picking your way around the jealousies and animosities of the Olympians was a delicate business. Show too much loyalty and service to one and you risked provoking the enmity of another. If Poseidon and Athena favoured you, as they did Cadmus and Harmonia, for example, then the chances were that Hera, or Artemis, or Ares, or even Zeus himself would do everything possible to hinder and hamper you. And heaven help anyone foolish enough to kill one of their favourites. All the sacrifices and votive offerings in the world couldn’t mollify an affronted god, a vengeful god, a god who had lost face in front of the others.

  Cadmus, by slaying an Arean favourite, had certainly made an enemy of the most aggressive and remorseless of the gods.fn7 But he knew none of this, for the muttering in the ranks of his retinue had not reached his ears. He blithely lit the incense and completed his sacrifice to Athena, feeling that things were still going very much his way. This feeling was reinforced by Athena’s immediate and benign appearance. Pleased by the offering of the heifer, she glided down from the cloud of fragrant smoke that Cadmus had sent up and favoured her humble worshippers with a grave smile.

  The Dragon’s Teeth

  ‘Rise, son of Agenor,’ said the goddess, stepping forward and raising the supplicant Cadmus to his feet. ‘Your sacrifice was agreeable to us. If you follow my instructions carefully all will be well. Plough the fertile plain. Plough it well. Then sow the furrows with teeth from the dragon you have slain.’

  With these words she stepped back into the smoke and disappeared. If Cadmus had not the assurance from Harmonia and the others that they had heard just the same words from Athena too, he might have believed that he had dreamed it. But divine instructions are divine instructions, however odd. In fact the odder, Cadmus was becoming aware, the more likely to be divine.

  First he carved a ploughshare from holm oak wood. Then, since no draught animals were available, he harnessed a willing team of his most loyal attendants. They would have laid down their lives for this charismatic Prince of Tyre, so pulling a plough was nothing to them.

  It was late spring and the soil of the plain was free-moving enough to be pulled into shallow but straight and well-marked furrows without too terrible an effort from the straining Tyrians.

  The field ploughed, Cadmus now set to dibbling the furrows an inch or two deep with the blunt end of a spear. Into each dibbled hole he dropped a dragon’s tooth. As we all know, humans have thirty-two teeth. Water dragons have rows and rows of them, like sharks, each ready to advance when the row in front has been worn down with too much grinding of men’s bones. Five hundred and twelve teeth Cadmus planted in all. When he had finished he stood back to survey the field.

  A light wind blew across the plain, catching the crests of the furrows and sending up powdery flurries of soil. Dust devils whipped and whirled around. A great hush descended.

  Harmonia was the first to see the earth in one of the furrows shift. She pointed and all eyes followed. A gasp and a muffled cry went up from the watching crowd. The tip of a spear was pushing through, then a helmet appeared, followed by shoulders, a breastplate, leathern-greaved legs … until a fully armed soldier rose up, wild and fierce, stamping his feet. Then another, and another, until the field was filled with fighting men, marching on the spot in furrowed lines. The clanging and banging of their armour, the clashing and bashing of their buckles, belts and boots, the clamour and smacking of the metal and leather of their cuirasses, greaves and shields, their rhythmic grunting and martial shouts all built into a great and horrid din that filled the onlookers with fear.

  All but Cadmus, who stepped boldly forward and raised a hand.

  ‘Spartoi!’ he called out across the plain, giving them a name that means ‘sown men’. ‘My Spartoi! I am Prince Cadmus, your general. At ease.’

  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 a
nd 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

  Once there, Cadmus suddenly fell weary and was filled with an insupportable dread. He called up to the skies.

  ‘For the last thirty years I have known in my heart that in killing that cursed water snake I killed any chance of happiness for me or my wife. Ares is remorseless. He will not rest until I am as flat on the earth as a snake. If it will calm him and bring more peace to my troubled life then let me end my life sliding through the dust. Let it be so.’fn13

  No sooner were those words out of his mouth than his unhappy prayer became an unhappy reality. His body began to shrink sideways and stretch lengthways, his skin to blister and form smooth scales, and his head to flatten into a diamond shape. The tongue that had shouted that dreadful wish to the heavens now flicked and darted out from between two fangs. The man who was once Cadmus, Prince of Tyre and King of Thebes, fell writhing to the ground, a common snake.

  Harmonia let out a great howl of despair.

  ‘Gods have pity!’ she cried. ‘Aphrodite, if you are my mother show love now and let me join upon the earth the one I love. The fruits of the world are dust to me. Ares, if you are my father show mercy. Zeus if, as some say, you are my father then, in the name of all creation, take pity, I beg you.’

  It was, however, none of those three who heard her prayers, but merciful Athena who transformed her into a snake. Harmonia glided through the dust after her serpent-husband and they coiled about each other with love.

  The pair lived out their days in the shadows of a temple sacred to Athena, only showing themselves when they needed to heat their blood in the noonday sun. When the end came, Zeus returned them to their human shapes in time to die. Their bodies were taken to be buried with great ceremony in Thebes, and Zeus sent two great serpents to guard their tombs for eternity.

  We will leave Cadmus and Harmonia to their everlasting rest. They died quite unaware that their youngest daughter, Semele, had, in their absence, unleashed a force into the world that would change it for ever.

  Twice Born

  The Eagle Lands

  After Cadmus and Harmonia departed on their travels, their son-in-law Pentheus reigned in Thebes.fn1 He was not a strong king, but he was honest and did the best he could with the limited store of character and cunning on which he was able to call. While the city-state flourished well enough under him, he needed always to look over his shoulder to the children of Cadmus, his brothers- and sisters-in-law, whose greed and ambition posed a constant threat. Even his wife Agave seemed contemptuous of him and anxious for him to fail. His youngest sister-in-law, Semele, was the only one with whom he felt at all
at ease, in truth because she was less worldly than her brothers Polydorus and Illyrius, and nothing like as ambitious for wealth and position as her sisters Agave, Autonoë and Ino. Semele was a beautiful, kindly and generous girl, content with her life as a priestess at the great temple of Zeus.

  One day she sacrificed to Zeus a bull of especially impressive size and vigour. The offering complete, she took herself off to the River Asopos to wash the blood from her. It so happened that Zeus, pleased with the sacrifice and intending anyway to look in on Thebes to see how the city prospered, was flying over the river at the time in his favourite guise of an eagle. The sight of Semele’s naked body glistening in the water excited him hugely and he landed, turning himself quickly back into his proper form. I say ‘proper form’, for when the gods chose to reveal themselves to humans they presented themselves in a reduced, manageable guise that did not dazzle or overawe. Thus the figure that stood on the riverbank smiling at Semele appeared human. Large, stunningly handsome, powerfully built and possessed of an unusual radiance, but human all the same.

  Crossing her arms over her breasts Semele called out, ‘Who are you? How dare you sneak up upon a priestess of Zeus?’

  ‘A priestess of Zeus, are you?’

  ‘I am. If you mean any harm to me I will cry out to the King of the Gods and he will rush to my aid.’

  ‘You don’t say so?’

  ‘You may be sure of it. Now leave.’

  But the stranger came closer. ‘I am well pleased with you, Semele,’ he said.

  Semele backed away. ‘You know my name?’

  ‘I know many things, loyal priestess. For I am the god you serve. I am the Sky Father, the King of Olympus. Zeus, the all-powerful.’

  Semele, still half in the river, gasped and fell to her knees.

  ‘Come now,’ said Zeus, striding through the water towards her, ‘let me look into your eyes.’