Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pelorus.
The gallery
Cadmus Sows the Dragon's Teeth Which Turn into Armed Men
Hendrik Goltzius, 1615
An engraving from a series illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 3, plate 4), now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Goltzius captures the prodigy that gave rise to the Spartoi: as Cadmus scatters the slain dragon's teeth across the furrows, fully armed warriors erupt from the soil — the earth-born Sown Men, among them Pelorus, one of the five who would survive the mutual slaughter to become the founding nobility of Thebes. The dense, muscular crowd of rising and clashing fighters renders the moment of their violent, simultaneous birth and self-destruction.
Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth (Cadmus and Minerva)
Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, 17th century
An oil painting on panel in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-4051), produced in the orbit of Rubens's Antwerp workshop and based on a Jordaens composition. The scene shows Cadmus, guided by the goddess Minerva (Athena), watching the Sown Men rise from the ground and turn their weapons upon one another. The earth-born warriors — the Spartoi, of whom Pelorus is named as one of the five survivors — are shown mid-combat, dramatizing the moment from Ovid's Metamorphoses when the harvest of the dragon's teeth becomes an army at war with itself.
Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth
Maxfield Parrish, 1908
An illustration by the American artist Maxfield Parrish for Nathaniel Hawthorne's retelling of the Greek myths. Unusually, Parrish strips the scene down to its quiet prelude: a luminous, atmospheric landscape in which Cadmus broadcasts the dragon's teeth across the ground before the armed men appear. Though the Spartoi themselves — Pelorus among them — are not yet visible, the work depicts the precise act of sowing that, in Apollodorus and Hyginus, brings the five earth-born survivors into being.