Harmonia

Also Known As: Greek Harmonia, “joining”, “fitting together”, “concord”; called the Theban goddess by Plato; her role was later matched by the Roman Concordia
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the goddess of concord and of things joined together, born to the god of war and the goddess of love, and the bride of the first Theban wedding the gods themselves came down to attend.
Role in Mythos: As wife of Cadmus she is the founding queen of Thebes and the mother of its doomed royal line, ending her mortal life changed into a serpent and carried to Elysium.
Relation to Humans: She married a mortal king, bore mortal daughters whose fates became the great Theban tragedies, and shared her husband’s exile and transformation. The Thebans showed visitors her bridal chamber and credited her with dedicating the city’s oldest images of Aphrodite, and the Argonauts built her a temple when they swore to stand by one another.

On the citadel of Thebes the gods sat down to dinner with a mortal. It happened once. Every Olympian left the sky for the wedding feast of Cadmus and Harmonia, the Muses sang, Apollo played the lyre, and the couple were given presents that no human wedding before or since could match. Pindar remembered it centuries later as the summit of mortal luck. He also knew how the story went on from there.

Harmonia’s name means joining. It is the word a Greek carpenter used for the fit between two timbers and a musician for the tuning of strings, and as a goddess she is the principle of things held together: lovers, households, allies, voices in a chord. Her parentage is the joke the Greeks built into her. Hesiod, in the Theogony, makes her the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, so that the peace of a well-fitted thing comes out of a union between war and desire. Her brothers on that side of the family were Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Terror, who rode with their father into battle. Harmonia was the child who did not.

There was another version. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the first century BCE, records a Samothracian tradition in which Harmonia was the daughter of Zeus and the nymph Electra, raised on the island of Samothrace and sister to Iasion and Dardanus. In that telling Cadmus, searching the world for his lost sister Europa, came to Samothrace, was initiated into its mysteries, and found his bride there. The poet Nonnus, writing his huge Dionysiaca in the fifth century CE, keeps the island but not the father: his Harmonia is Aphrodite’s daughter growing up in Electra’s house on Samothrace. He spends long passages on how Cadmus won her: Aphrodite smoothing the sea for his ship, Peitho, goddess of persuasion, leading him to her, Hermes talking Electra into letting her go. Most ancient sources, though, keep her as the daughter of war and love.

Either way, she was given away by Zeus. Cadmus had followed a cow to the place where Thebes would stand, killed the serpent that guarded the spring there, sown its teeth and watched armed men climb out of the furrows. He had spent years serving Ares as penance for the dragon. At the end of that service Zeus gave him Harmonia as his wife, and the gods came down.

The wedding is the bright moment in the middle of the story. The sources disagree over who brought what, and they disagree with some enthusiasm. In one account Athena gave the bride a robe and a necklace, Hermes a lyre and Demeter the first harvest of grain. In another the robe and necklace came from Aphrodite. Apollodorus says Cadmus himself gave them, and that the necklace was the work of Hephaestus. The Roman poet Statius adds the darkest detail: Hephaestus, the cuckolded husband of Aphrodite, made it out of spite, to wreck the daughter of his wife’s affair with Ares. Both gifts would outlast their owner and carry ruin to whoever held them next.

For a while nothing went wrong. Harmonia and Cadmus ruled Thebes and raised a son, Polydorus, and four daughters, Ino, Semele, Agave and Autonoe. In the old Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Harmonia is among the goddesses who dance on Olympus with the Graces, the Hours, Hebe and her mother Aphrodite while the Muses sing. It is a pleasant image. The rest of the family story is not.

Every one of the daughters came to grief. Semele was burned to ash when she asked to see Zeus in his true form. Autonoe’s son Actaeon was torn apart by his own hounds. Ino went mad and leapt into the sea with her child. Agave, in a Bacchic frenzy, tore apart her own son Pentheus, by then king of Thebes, and carried his head home believing it was a lion’s. The house of the goddess of concord produced more domestic catastrophe than almost any other in Greek myth. That is the irony the tellers left in plain sight.

Old and broken, Harmonia and Cadmus left Thebes. They went northwest to the Encheleans, a people of the Illyrian coast, and led them to victory against their enemies, and Cadmus ruled there for a time. There Harmonia bore another son, Illyrius, who gave his name to the land. Then came the change. Euripides, at the close of the Bacchae, has Dionysus foretell it, and Ovid tells it in full in the Metamorphoses. Cadmus felt his skin harden into scales and his legs fuse into a single coil. He called to his wife while he still had a human tongue. Harmonia, seeing the cold, glistening body sliding across the ground toward her, did not run. She asked the gods to make her the same, and they did. Two serpents twined together and slid away into the woods, still gentle with each other and with the people around them.

That is not quite the end. According to Apollodorus, Zeus sent the pair to the Elysian Fields, and later writers say they were carried there in a chariot drawn by serpents. Nonnus adds that Zeus later turned the two snakes to stone. Pausanias, travelling through Thebes in the second century CE, was shown the ruins of Harmonia’s bridal chamber on the citadel, and three very old wooden statues of Aphrodite that the Thebans said Harmonia had dedicated. They were carved, the story went, from the wooden figureheads of the ship that had brought Cadmus to Greece. She is said to have given them the titles Heavenly, Common and Averter, three faces of her mother’s power.

The robe and necklace went on without her. They passed down the Theban line until they were used to bribe Eriphyle into sending her husband to his death, and after that they kept ruining whoever owned them. The necklace has a page of its own on this site.

Harmonia’s power is the binding of separate things: man and wife, hosts and guests, oarsmen who must pull together. Apollonius of Rhodes has the Argonauts build a temple to her on the island of Thynias and swear to stand by one another there. Plato’s Socrates, in the Phaedo, calls her the Theban goddess when he wants a name for harmony itself. Her weakness is that concord cannot protect itself. She held a family together through every disaster her own wedding gifts helped to cause, and what she could not do was keep any of her children safe. In the end the one bond she preserved was her own, chosen with her eyes open, and it cost her her human shape.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Harmonia in Greek mythology?

Harmonia is the Greek goddess of concord and harmony and the wife of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. Most sources make her the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. She was the mother of Semele, Ino, Agave, Autonoe and Polydorus.

Who were Harmonia’s parents?

Hesiod’s Theogony names Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite, goddess of love, as Harmonia’s parents. A Samothracian tradition recorded by Diodorus of Sicily instead makes her the daughter of Zeus and Electra, raised on Samothrace.

What happened at the wedding of Harmonia and Cadmus?

All the Olympian gods came down to Thebes for the wedding of Harmonia and Cadmus, the Muses sang, and Apollo played the lyre. The couple received divine gifts, including a robe and a necklace usually credited to Hephaestus or Athena. The necklace later brought disaster to everyone who owned it.

How did Harmonia die?

Harmonia did not die in the usual sense. In exile in Illyria, Cadmus was turned into a serpent, and Harmonia asked the gods to change her too. According to Apollodorus, Zeus then sent the two serpents to the Elysian Fields.

What is the Roman equivalent of Harmonia?

The Roman goddess Concordia matches Harmonia’s role as the power of agreement and marital unity. Roman poets such as Statius invoke Concordia where a Greek poet would name Harmonia as the guardian of marriage.