To talk about Cadmus, we must first talk about his sister Europa and, of course, about Zeus.
Europa, Cadmus’s sister, attracted Zeus’s attention because of her beauty; Zeus, besides being the father of the gods, was quite the womanizer.
One day, while the girl was on the seashore, Zeus mingled among a herd of bulls, taking on the form of a pure white bull. The girl, drawn by the beauty of the animal, climbed onto its back after adorning it with garlands. Zeus-as-bull galloped away, plunging into the waves and disappearing with Europa. Her father Agenor, king of Tyre, upon learning of it, ordered his three sons—Cilix, Phoenix, and Cadmus—to go search for her and not to return empty-handed. The task was truly daunting; no one could have imagined that a god was involved, and what a god!
Cadmus’s two brothers wandered off and ended up seizing new territories and founding their own dynasties. From them originated two new peoples: the Phoenicians and the Cilicians, along with their respective lands.
Cadmus, according to some myths, found Jupiter (who was not yet lord of the gods) imprisoned by Typhon in a cave. With his cleverness and the sound of a flute given to him by Apollo, he managed to free Jupiter, who was in dire straits. As a reward, Zeus promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. Harmonia, who lived in Samothrace, initially wanted nothing to do with Cadmus, but in the end—persuaded by a friend—she overcame her fear of the unknown and agreed to enter the realm of myth.
The two went straight to Delphi to consult the oracle. The Pythia advised Cadmus to abandon the search for his sister and instead to seek out a cow. He was to follow the cow until it stopped from exhaustion and rested its horns on the ground. There Cadmus, after sacrificing the animal to Athena, was to found a city. Invited to Phocis, he took part in some athletic games and won them all.
The king who hosted him, lacking a worthy prize, shamefully gave him a cow. Harmonia, extremely excited, showed Cadmus a crescent-shaped mark on the cow’s flank, just as the oracle had foretold. Cadmus followed the instructions and followed the cow, but where it finally lay down he found a great serpent/dragon guarding a spring. He confronted it and killed it and, as the oracle had commanded, tore out its teeth and sowed them into the ground. Immediately, from each tooth sprang a fully armed warrior. The warriors fought one another, and five survived; these placed themselves at his service.
Cadmus looked around and selected some nearby hills, and in that place—chosen by him—the warriors helped him fortify an elevated point, which would become the Cadmea, the original nucleus of Thebes, the city of seven gates.
There the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia was celebrated. All the gods of Olympus attended the banquet, underscoring what the bride’s name signifies: a “harmonious union between the spiritual world and the strictly human one.” Symbolically, the wedding chariot was drawn by two animals that normally detested each other: a lynx and a lion.
From the union of Cadmus and Harmonia came four children. From one of them, Selene, Dionysus was born—the god of wine and disorder—an extroverted figure who stood in contrast to his cousin Pentheus, who inherited Cadmus’s power in Thebes.
The two cousins represent two opposing conceptions of life. The creativity, excess, and unrestrained nature embodied by Dionysus are the opposite of the worldview inherent in Pentheus’s very name, rooted in the belief that life depends on the power a man can exert. In other words, Pentheus does not accept the feminine element within himself—an element that had allowed his grandfather Cadmus to approach the gods.
This would be Thebes’s misfortune, preventing it from ever finding true balance for the rest of its history—and perhaps the same could be said of humanity as a whole.
Cadmus and Harmonia, instead, embrace the Dionysian vision and, in their old age, depart once again toward the unknown, toward the lands of Illyria. The myth depicts them transformed into serpents before being summoned to Olympus and granted immortality.
Thus, Cadmus, who set out from home searching for a woman—his sister Europa—never found her, but instead encountered a woman whose name carried its own meaning (nomen omen).
And finally, we have the enormous gift Cadmus gave to the people of Greece. Coming from Tyre, in Phoenician land, he bestowed upon these brothers the alphabet, granting them a new and powerful capacity for communication. In short, this myth shows that with the alphabet Cadmus gave the Greeks freedom from the gods, and thus a new and grand epic. For this immense gift that Cadmus—
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