There lay Ares' murderous dragon,
a savage warder,
watching with roving eye
the watered glens and quickening streams;
him did Cadmus slay with a jagged stone,
when he came thither to draw him lustral water,
smiting that fell head with a blow of his death-dealing arm;
but by the counsel of Pallas, motherless goddess,
he cast the teeth upon the earth into deep furrows,
whence sprang to sight
mail-clad host above the surface of the soil;
but grim slaughter once again
united them to the earth they loved,
bedewing with blood the ground that had disclosed them
to the sunlit breath of heaven.
Thee too, Epaphus, child of Zeus,
sprung from Io our ancestress,
call on in my foreign tongue;
all hail to thee!
hear my prayer uttered in accents strange,
and visit this land;
'twas in thy honour thy descendants settled here,
and those goddesses of twofold name,
Persephone and kindly Demeter or Earth the queen of all,
that feedeth every mouth, won it for themselves;
send to the help of this land those torch-bearing queens;
for to gods all things are easy.
- The Phoenissae - Euripides
