July 7th, 1776
When Cretan Cadmus fought the dragon sacred to Mars and brought it down, armed with but his lance and his buckler of lion-skin, he sowed its teeth in the ground at the bidding of Pallas Athena. Then rose from the ground savage soldiers, the children of war, and began without aim or plan or mercy to slaughter each other, their eyes no sooner opened than they set to kill all who they first viewed, all that they might kill before being slain themselves, hacking at those who still crawled from the integument of the earth to slay them before they walked; knowing nothing of the world but blood, bone, and fury; which spectacle Cadmus and Athena observed in helpless dread, seeking to intervene, only to be reprimanded by one tall, gory, muscled child, saying that they must stay back, for they did not understand the rules of massacre; which said, he was felled by a javelin, and the thrower felled by a sword, and the swordsman by a bolt; and thus the battle royal continued.
In a short time, in all that field of butchery, there were but five left, and these, red with blood, looked about them at the bodies of their fallen brethren, born but seconds before and already dismembered and inert; and seeing this, they paused. One took off his helmet and threw it to the ground, and dropped his weapons; and so the others, too, weeping. They spake together, and they made a solemn pact that they should not annihilate each other in phrenzy of self-interest, but live in that place in amity; and thus was founded the city of Thebes.
We might be thus.
And yet: When Jason of the Argo, seeking the Golden Fleece, sowed the same dragon’s teeth in the plains beneath the mountains of Ethiopia, there, too, warriors budded and rose up in the furrows, crested, helmeted, armed with sword and javelin.
No sooner had they shaken off the dew of birth, than they were murderous, and turned on each other and on Jason himself, slaughtering without reason or mercy.
There was, in the end, none left standing. Their rapacity for mastery had been so great that all were brought to destruction equally.
And we might be thus.