Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Chthonius.
The gallery
Cadmus Sows the Dragon's Teeth Which Turn into Armed Men
Hendrik Goltzius, 1615
In this Dutch Mannerist engraving (now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Hendrik Goltzius illustrates the climactic moment from the Theban foundation myth as told by Apollodorus and Ovid: Cadmus, having slain the dragon of Ares, scatters its teeth across the freshly ploughed soil, from which fully armed warriors — the Spartoi, or 'Sown Men' — rise up out of the earth. Chthonius is one of the five who survive the brothers' mutual slaughter to become an ancestor of the Theban nobility, and the print captures the very instant of the earth-born host springing to life. The composition belongs to a celebrated cycle of Goltzius's mythological prints that disseminated Ovid's Metamorphoses across early-modern Europe.
Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth (Cadmus and Minerva)
Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1636–1700
Produced in the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, this Flemish Baroque painting shows Cadmus, guided by the goddess Minerva (Athena), casting the dragon's teeth into the ground while armed men erupt from the soil around him. The Spartoi — among them Chthonius, named by Apollodorus and Hyginus as one of the five survivors — are rendered in dynamic, muscular foreshortening as they claw their way out of the earth already brandishing spears and shields, embodying the violent 'sown' origin of the Theban founding warriors. The picture reflects the Rubensian taste for turbulent mythological drama and the Counter-Reformation fascination with Ovidian transformation.
Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth
Maxfield Parrish, 1908
Created by the American illustrator Maxfield Parrish for an early-twentieth-century edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's retellings of Greek myth, this luminous illustration depicts Cadmus on the Theban plain at the moment he sows the dragon's teeth and the first armed figures begin to rise from the ground. The Spartoi who emerge — the earth-born brothers from whose ranks Chthonius and four others alone survive — are shown as a crop of warriors bursting into being, dramatizing the myth's eerie equation of sowing seed with raising an army. Parrish's signature saturated palette and theatrical staging made the image one of the most widely reproduced modern visualizations of the episode.