Drakon Ismenios

The spring of Ismene flowed clear and cold at the base of the Theban hills, and the dragon of Ares coiled around it like a living wall. Cadmus and his companions found it when they stopped for water on their way to found a new city, as the Delphic oracle had instructed.

Cadmus sent his men to fill vessels at the spring. They did not return. He went looking and found the dragon — enormous, with a crest like fire and triple rows of teeth. It had killed all of them. Some accounts say it swallowed them whole. Others say it crushed them in its coils. The spring ran red.

Cadmus fought it alone. Athena guided his hand as he pinned the creature against a sacred oak with a spear driven through its jaw and deep into the wood. The dragon's death cry shook the hillside.

Athena then told Cadmus to extract the dragon's teeth and sow them in ploughed earth. He obeyed, and from the furrows rose the Spartoi — armed warriors who burst from the soil fully grown and immediately began fighting each other. Only five survived, and these became the founding families of Thebes.

The dragon had been sacred to Ares, and Cadmus served eight years of penance for the killing. But from that violence came a city, a dynasty, and one of the most consequential bloodlines in Greek mythology — all rooted in dragon's teeth planted in foreign soil.