Another tale in the life of Cadmus involved his marriage to the goddess Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite.
The Olympian gods attended the wedding feast, and the Muses, nine daughters of Zeus who were associated with the arts, sang for the guests. Hephaestus, god of fire and metalworking, gave the couple a necklace and a robe, and some sources say that the other gods gave gifts as well. Pausanias wrote that in his time (c. 160 CE) the Thebans could identify the ruins of Cadmus’s palace, Harmonia’s wedding chamber, and the spot where the Muses sang.
Cadmus and Harmonia had four daughters: Agave, Ino, Autonoe, and Semele. Some sources say that they had a son, Polydorus, although Euripides, a fifth-century-BCE Athenian playwright, wrote in his play the Bacchants—or Bacchae—that Cadmus had no sons. Cadmus’s daughter Semele bore the god Dionysus to Zeus, but all his other grandchildren died in tragic circumstances before marriage.
According to Ovid, a Roman poet of the first century CE, Cadmus and Harmonia went to Illyria after the tragic death of their grandchildren, where they were turned into snakes. One version explains that the couple’s transformation was in revenge for Cadmus’s having killed the giant serpent at the spring. Pindar, a Theban poet of the fifth century BCE, wrote that Cadmus and Harmonia joined Peleus, Achilles, and other mortals in the Elysian Fields, where they lived forever. In the Bacchae, Euripides seems to combine several myths, saying that the couple left Thebes, became snakes, and were finally brought to the Elysian Fields.
Laurel Bowman
Bibliography
Edwards, Ruth B. Kadmos the Phoenician: A Study in Greek Legends and the Mycenean Age. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1979.
Euripides, and P. Burian and A. Shapiro, eds. The Complete Euripides. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009—2010.
World History
