The Dragon of Ares

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The Spring of Ares

The spring Cadmus’s companions were sent to was not an ordinary water source. It was the Spring of Ares—sacred to the god of war, hidden in a grove, protected by a creature that had been placed there before the region had a name. Ancient sources describe the dragon variously: enormous, serpentine, with a golden crest, breathing poison. What they agree on is its antiquity. It had been guarding this spring for longer than any city in Boeotia had existed.

The sound it made, according to some sources, was not a roar but something lower and more grinding—the sound of something enormous moving that was designed to inspire a specific kind of fear. Not the fear of sudden danger but the fear of something that has been here long before you arrived and will be here long after.

The Companions Lost

Cadmus sent five of his men—companions who had followed him from Tyre, who had spent five years searching the Mediterranean coast, who had walked with him to Delphi and followed the cow across Boeotia. They went to the spring and did not return.

Cadmus sent five more. They did not return either.

At some point between the first group and the decision to go himself, Cadmus understood what had happened. He waited what the texts describe as a long time—long enough to be certain. Then he took up his lion’s skin, his spear, and the great stone he carried as a weapon, and went to find out.

What He Found

The spring was there. His companions were also there, in pieces, scattered around the approach to the water. The dragon was there too, still present, not having moved on.

What Cadmus faced at the spring was not simply a large dangerous animal. It was the guardian of something sacred to a god who had not given permission for this place to be used. The founding of Thebes required getting past this creature, and there was no routing around it—the oracle had sent him specifically here, to this plain, to this spring. He could not build the city on a different water source. He could not go back to Delphi for revised instructions. The spring was the spring, and the dragon was in the way.

The fight that follows—Cadmus against the dragon at the Spring of Ares—is one of the founding acts of Theban mythology. How it ends, and what Athena instructs him to do afterward, is the next chapter of the myth.