But when Cadmos was nearly exhausted, Athena came near, shaking the aegis-cape with the Gorgon’s head and snaky hair, the forecast of coming victory : and the nation-mustering deity cried aloud to the dumbfounded man—
Cadmos, helpmate and ally of Zeus Giant-slayer in the battle! Are you afraid when you see only one snake ? In those battles Cronion trusted in you, and brought low Typhon with all that shock of heads, and every one a snake! Tremble no more at the hiss from the creature’s teeth. Pallas bids you on! Brazen Ares shall not save his reptile guardian beside murderous Dirce. But when he is killed, take the creature’s horrible teeth, sow the ground all about with the snaky corn, reap the harvest of warrior giants, join the battalions of the Earthborn in one common destruction, and leave only five living : let the crop of the Sown sprout up to glorious fruitage for Thebes that I shall be.”
With these words Athena encouraged the discomfited Cadmos, and then she cleft the airy deeps with windswift foot, until she entered the house of Zeus. But Cadmos where he stood on the dry earth lifted a well-rounded boundary-stone of the broad farm-land, a rocky missile and with a straight cast of the stone smashed the top of the dragon’s head ; then drawing a whetted knife from his thigh he cut through the monster’s neck. The hood severed from the body lay apart, but the tail still moved, rolling in the dust until it had uncoiled again its familiar rings. There lay the dragon stretched on the ground, dead, and over the corpse furious Ares shouted in heavy anger. By his wrath Cadmos was destined to change his limbs for a curling shape, and to have a strange aspect of dragon’s countenance at the ends of the illyrian country. But that was ordained for long after. Now he gathered the fruit of death inside a helmet of bronze, the grim harvest of the creature’s jaws. Then he drew upon the land the humped plow of Pallas from her holy place in those parts, and plowed a battle- breeding furrow in the bright earth, and sowed long lines of the poison-casting teeth. There grew out the self-delivered crop of giants: one shot up with head high, shaking the top of a mail-coated breast; one with jutting head stretched a horrid shoulder over the opening earth; another bent forward above as far as the midnipple, one again rose on the ground half-finished and lifted a soil-grown shield ; another shook a nodding plume before him and showed not yet his chest; while still creeping up slowly from his mother’s flanks he showed fight against fearless Cadmos, clad in the armour he was born in. O what a great miracle! Eileithyia armed him whom the mother had not yet spawned! And there was one who cast his brother-spear, fumbling and half visible: one who lightly drew the whole body into the light, but left his toes unfinished sticking in the ground.
Cadmos for all that did not neglect Athena’s injunction. He reaped the stubble of giants springing up ever anew. One he struck with windswift spear over the breast, hit one on the broad neck by the collarbone shearing the bones of the hairy throat: another he tore with hurtling stone while he showed as far as the belly. The blood of the dreadful giants flowed in rivers ; Ares slipt in the gore staining his limbs with crimson, and Victory’s robe was reddened with purple drops while she stood beside the battle. Another showed fight, and Cadmos ran his sword through his cognate shield of oxhide, into the hip-joint and out at the small of his back. The slaughter stayed not : as the giants were cut and smitten with the sword, a deadly spout of bloody dew bubbled up.
Then by the wise counsel of Pallas he lifted a stone high above the giants’ heads; and they drunken with gory lust for Enyo, went wild with warlike fury and destroyed each other with the steel their cousin and found burial in the dust. One fought with another : with ruddy gore the surface of the shield was drenched and spotted and darkened, as a giant died ; the crop of that field was shorn by the brother-murdering blade of an earthgrown knife.
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