95While the victor contemplates the size of his conquered foe, a voice was suddenly heard; 96nor was it easy to tell where from, but it was heard: 'Why, son of Agenor, do you gaze at the slain serpent? 98You too will be gazed at as a serpent.' 99He, long terrified, had lost his colour along with his wits, and his hair stood stiff with chill terror. 101Look, the hero's patroness, gliding down through the upper air, Pallas is at hand, and orders him to place the viper's teeth beneath the stirred-up earth, the seeds of a people to come. 104He obeys, and when he has opened a furrow with the pressed-down plough, he scatters the teeth on the ground as ordered, seeds of mortals.
106Then (beyond belief) the clods began to move, and first from the furrows the point of a spear appeared, next coverings for heads nodding with painted crests, next shoulders and breast and arms loaded with weapons emerge, and a crop of shielded men grows. 111So, when the curtains are raised at festive theatres, the figures usually rise and first show their faces, then the rest little by little, and, drawn up with a smooth steady motion, are revealed whole and set their feet on the lowest edge. 115Terrified by this new enemy, Cadmus was preparing to take up arms: 'Do not take them,' cries one of the people the earth had created, 'and do not involve yourself in civil wars.' 118And with that he strikes one of his earthborn brothers at close quarters with his rigid sword; 119he himself falls to a javelin thrown from afar.
120The one who had given him to death lives no longer than he did, and breathes out the air he had only just received; 122and on the same pattern the whole throng rages, and the sudden brothers fall in their own war by mutual wounds. 124And now the young men allotted so brief a span of life were beating their bloodied mother with their warm breasts, five surviving, of whom one was Echion. 127He threw his arms to the ground at the warning of the Tritonian goddess, and both sought and gave a pledge of brotherly peace. 129These the Sidonian stranger had as companions in his work when he founded the city ordered by Phoebus' oracle.
131Now Thebes stood: now, Cadmus, you could seem happy in your exile. 132Mars and Venus had fallen to you as parents-in-law: add to this offspring from so great a wife, so many sons and daughters, and grandsons, dear pledges, these too now young men. 135But clearly a man must always wait for his last day, and no one should be called blessed before his death and last funeral rites.