“Lights of the age that rose before our own
As demigods o’er Earth’s wide region known,
Yet these dread battle hurried to their end;
Some, where the sevenfold gates of Thebes ascend,
Strave for the flocks of Œdipus in fight,
Some war in navies led to Troy’s far shore.”[[30]]
The story of Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes, is one of the best examples of the legends by which the Greeks reconstructed their early history. As if by “shadows of dreams” they were haunted by the memory of ancient adventures and enterprises, by movements of whole peoples and bright deeds of early heroes. And in spite of their arrogant aloofness in historic times from all “barbarians,” they admitted, in the stories into which their racial imagination shaped the formless facts of prehistoric life, a close connection with foreign peoples. So Cadmus was said to be a Phœnician going forth from his own land and settling in Bœotia before it was known by that name. Whatever the Phœnician connection was, whether direct or by way of Crete, whether by colonization or merely by trading stations, it is certain that a pre-Bœotian people occupied Thebes and were displaced by northern invaders, who in their turn, at one time or another, seem to have been forced on by the pressure of Illyrians from Epirus. These facts the Greek people made into a story of individual adventure, and this story Greek poets made dramatic and universal. Cadmus was son of a Phœnician king and brother of the ravished Europa. Sent by his father to find his sister, and not daring to return without her, he asked advice of the Delphic oracle. He was told to follow a cow until she should lie down. This strange behest led him through Phocis to Thebes. Here, like most heroes, including Apollo, who wished to take possession of strange earth, he was obliged to slay a dragon. Athena, his special guardian, bade him sow the dragon’s teeth, and from these sprang up an armed brood of warriors, known thereafter as the “Spartoi” or Sown Men. Cadmus watched them fight with each other until only five were left, with which doughty remnant he built up the Cadmeia, or original Acropolis of Thebes. Like Apollo again, he was forced to atone for the murder of the dragon by serving Ares for a term of years. At the end Ares gave him to wife Harmonia, his daughter by Aphrodite, and Cadmus began a glorious reign. But his patient bondage to Ares had won only a temporary pacification, and to his children and grandchildren passed the relentless curse. Œdipus was his direct descendant. Even in Cadmus’s lifetime two daughters and two grandsons met with violent deaths, and he and his queen Harmonia went far away to Illyria and became rulers of the Enchelians. There they were changed into serpents, “bright and aged snakes,” and were compelled by fate to lead their barbarian people in an invasion of Greece. Matthew Arnold follows Ovid in making them “among the green Illyrian hills,”—
“Wholly forget their first sad life and home,
And all that Theban woe, and stray
Forever through the glens, placid and dumb.”