Cadmus at Delphi

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The End of the Search

By the time Cadmus arrived at Delphi, five years of searching had passed and he was no closer to finding Europa than he had been on the morning she disappeared. He had followed every lead. He had asked at every harbor, every island, every coastal city from Phoenicia to the edges of the known world. He had found nothing, because there was nothing to find: his sister was in Crete with a god, and that was not a situation mortal searching could resolve.

Going to Delphi was not an act of hope so much as an act of exhausted pragmatism. What he wanted from the oracle was not a miracle. He wanted to know what to do with a life that had been organized entirely around a task that could not be completed.

What the Oracle Said

The oracle at Delphi gave him instructions that contained no mention of Europa at all. Do not look for your sister. Follow a cow with a moon-mark on her flank—a white crescent against the hide. Wherever that cow lies down, there build your city.

The instruction is remarkable in several ways. It does not explain itself. It does not tell Cadmus why this cow, or why this place, or what city he is supposed to build or how. It replaces one impossible task—finding a girl taken by a god—with a task that is merely strange: follow an animal until it stops walking. The oracle at Delphi was notorious for instructions that only made sense in retrospect, and this one is characteristic.

Following the Cow

Cadmus found a cow near the shrine and followed it east across Phocis and into Boeotia. The cow walked without stopping, as if it knew where it was going. When it finally lay down on a plain in Boeotia, Cadmus understood that this was the place.

He sent his companions to fetch water from a nearby spring for the sacrifice he intended to make to Athena, in gratitude for reaching the place the oracle had named. The companions went to the spring. They did not return. The spring was the Spring of Ares, and it was guarded by a dragon. What happens at the spring is the next chapter of the myth—and the reason the founding of Thebes cost more than Cadmus had anticipated.