The Necklace
Hephaestus, god of the forge, made this necklace as a wedding gift for Cadmus and Harmonia—gold, set with gems, worked with a precision no human smith could match. Aphrodite is sometimes named as a co-giver.
Why it was cursed depends on the source. Some say Hephaestus built the curse in on purpose, revenge on Aphrodite for her affair with Ares, delivered through her daughter instead. Others say no malice was needed: a divine object does not sit lightly around a mortal throat. The beauty was real. So was the harm.
The Bribe
Harmonia herself seems to have escaped the curse—or it worked on a long delay. The necklace passed down through generations of Theban women, and it turns up at nearly every disaster in the city's history.
The clearest case is Eriphyle, wife of the seer Amphiaraus, who foresaw that the Seven Against Thebes would kill him and refused to go. Polyneices bribed Eriphyle instead: the necklace, whose beauty was worth more to her than her husband's life—or so the story insists. She talked Amphiaraus into joining. He died as foreseen. Their son Alcmaeon killed her for it.
The Part the Summaries Skip
Killing Eriphyle did not end Alcmaeon's trouble with the necklace. It only handed it to him.
The Furies drove him mad for the murder. He wandered for years before finding purified ground and a new wife, Alphesiboea, Phegeus's daughter, to whom he gave the necklace and robe. Then he left her for a second wife, Callirhoe, who wanted the necklace for herself.
So Alcmaeon went back to Phegeus with a lie: he needed the necklace and robe for a purification rite at Delphi (a rite that, conveniently, required jewelry). Phegeus believed him—until a servant let the truth slip. Phegeus sent his sons to ambush Alcmaeon, and they killed him for it.
Cadmus, the serpent, and the city grown from its teeth. That’s my novel The Dragon's Teeth. Read it on Amazon →
Callirhoe got her revenge. At her prayer, Zeus aged her infant sons to grown men overnight, and they hunted down and killed Phegeus and his sons. Only then did the necklace reach a god's keeping, dedicated at the temple of Athena at Delphi—two generations and five bodies after Hephaestus forged it.
The Gift the Temple Couldn't Hold
The necklace belongs to a class of object the Greeks kept returning to: the gift that destroys, like Pandora's jar or the golden apple of Discord. These aren't simple morality tales about greed—the people who reach for these things aren't uniquely foolish. Eriphyle was bribed, but what she wanted was ordinary: something beautiful.
What the myth argues is narrower and colder: things built by gods answer to different rules, and mortals who hold them are borrowing trouble. Dedicating the necklace to Athena at Delphi was supposed to end that—hand it to a god and leave it there.
It didn't stay there. More than a century later, a Phocian general named Phayllus looted Delphi's treasury during the Third Sacred War, and pulled the necklace out for a married woman he wanted to impress (he was, by every account, not a subtle man). She wore it, Diodorus Siculus records. Then her son went mad and burned the house down around her.
Even a god couldn't keep the thing shelved.
The Dragon's Teeth
Book Five of the Myths of the Ancient World series. The myth of Cadmus, Harmonia, and the cursed necklace that followed Thebes through its history.
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