Cadmus

A son of king Agenor and queen Telephassa of Tyre in Phoenicia, Cadmus is sent in search of his sister Europa. Failing to find her and after consulting the Delphic oracle, he is ordered to follow a special cow; he is to build a city where the cow lies down. He founds Thebes (the Cadmeia) on that spot, marries Harmonia (in accounts linking him to Samothrace and the Kabeiroi), and establishes a ruling line whose descendants govern Thebes. Ancient historians and mythographers present him as a proto-civilizer whose genealogical links run back to figures such as Poseidon and Libya in order to connect his house to wider divine and royal networks.

Ancient sources and the summaries provided do not give a detailed contemporary physical portrait; literary and artistic traditions typically represent Cadmus as a princely, heroic figure of Phoenician origin and a founder-hero in the iconography of Greek myth. His narrative markers—Phoenician prince, husband of Harmonia, city-founder and monster-slayer—are the principal descriptors preserved in the sources rather than specific bodily features or attire in the excerpts available.

Cadmus functions as a mythic culture-transmitter and city-founder rather than a magical being: tradition credits him as founder of Thebes (following the Delphic oracle and the cow-omphalos sign), as slayer of a guardian water-dragon at the Ismenian spring (a prototypical monster-slaying episode that places him among early heroic figures such as Perseus and Bellerophon), and—according to Herodotus and later tradition—with introducing the Phoenician alphabet (or a foreign script) to the Greeks, explaining the presence of early 'Cadmean' inscriptions at Thebes. He is also a pilgrim figure who visits Samothrace and Delphi and whose marriage to Harmonia connects him to sacred rites and divine favor in the narrative tradition.