The Necklace of Harmonia

Also Known As: Greek hormos, “necklace”; also called the Necklace of Eriphyle
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A golden necklace forged by Hephaestus as a deliberate act of revenge, which in Statius makes itself irresistible to want and ruinous to own.
Role in Mythos: It carries the doom of the house of Thebes down five generations and buys the war of the Seven against Thebes with a single bribe.
Relation to Humans: Every mortal who handles it is destroyed, betrayed or murdered, and the record contains no one who is offered it and declines. Its victims are almost all women of the Theban and Argive royal houses, which is the point the ancient tellers keep returning to.

Hephaestus sweated over it. The Cyclopes came to help and so did the Telchines, whose hands were famous, but the god kept the heaviest part of the work for himself, because the work was the point. His wife had been sleeping with Ares. All of Olympus had already watched him haul the two of them out of bed in a net of wire nobody could break, and the humiliation had run the wrong way, and the chains had corrected nothing at all. So he went back to the forge and made a wedding present for their daughter.

Into the gold went a circlet of emeralds with a hidden fire in them, and adamant stamped with figures of ill omen, and the eyes of Gorgons. He raked up the embers still cooling on the Sicilian anvil where he had shaped his last thunderbolt and folded those in as well. Crests taken off the heads of green serpents. The sorrowful fruit of the Hesperides. Gold stripped from the fleece of Phrixus. A king adder pulled live out of Tisiphone’s hair, and a measure of whatever it is in Aphrodite’s girdle that stops people thinking. He anointed all of it with foam scraped from the moon and poured over the finished work what Statius names the poison of delight. The Graces had no hand in the making. Grief did, and Anguish, and every one of the Passions, and Discord worked the clasp with her own right hand.

Then it went to Thebes, to a wedding, and the gods came down to sing at it.

Who actually handed it over depends on who is telling the story. Apollodorus says Cadmus gave Harmonia the robe and the necklace that Hephaestus had made, and adds that some held Hephaestus gave it to Cadmus directly, while Pherecydes had Europa receive it from Zeus and pass it to her brother. Diodorus makes Aphrodite the giver, both the necklace and the robe together. Hyginus stands Athena beside Hephaestus and locates the curse in the cloth instead, a robe dipped in crimes, so that the descendants of the marriage would be marked. The versions do not reconcile. They arrive at the same place regardless.

Nor can anyone settle what it looked like. Statius sees green fire and bad omens. Nonnus describes something stranger and more beautiful: two golden snakes wound like an amphisbaena, their heads meeting at the breastbone with a four-winged golden eagle gripped between their jaws, one wing plated in yellow jasper, one in moonstone that dims and brightens with the moon, one in pearl, one in Indian agate, ruby set in the eyes, and around the whole of it an emerald sea with dolphins and flocks of birds worked in gold so finely that you could nearly hear the wings.

Harmonia wore it for years and had five children by Cadmus, and then the two of them ended their lives in Illyria as serpents. Statius puts the turn in a single sound. Her complaints became hissing, and she went down into the grass beside her husband and drew furrows in the dirt with her long trailing breast. Their daughter Semele had barely fastened the thing at her own throat when Hera came across the threshold with a suggestion, and Semele burned. Ino boiled her son and jumped into the sea. Agave and Autonoe tore Pentheus apart with their hands. Actaeon was hunted down by his own dogs.

The necklace passed on. It came to Jocasta, who married her son and hanged herself when she found out, and after her death it went to Polynices, who needed an army.

There is a moment in Statius that explains the whole chain better than the curse does. Polynices has married Argia, and Argia is wearing it at the shrines and at the banquets, and across the room the wife of the seer Amphiaraus watches the gold move in the lamplight and says nothing. Eriphyle wanted it the way people want things they have already decided to have. Polynices, who understood exactly what he was looking at, offered it to her in exchange for her husband.

Amphiaraus knew he would die if he marched on Thebes, and had refused to go. His wife sent him anyway. Homer, who assumes his listeners already know the story, disposes of her in half a line: she took precious gold as the price of her own husband. Later, when the sons had to be persuaded to fight the same war over again, Thersander brought her the robe and she took that too. Before Amphiaraus went, he told his sons what their mother had done and what he expected them to do about it.

Alcmaeon came home from a lost war, went to Delphi to ask whether it was really required of him, was told that it was, and killed her. That should have been the end. Instead he carried the necklace into a marriage with Alphesiboea and left it in her keeping while he wandered the country trying to outrun his mother’s ghost, and then he married Callirrhoe, who wanted it, and he went back to Psophis and told his first wife’s father a lie about needing to purify the gold at Delphi. Phegeus handed it over, worked out the truth, and put his sons on the road ahead of him. They killed Alcmaeon between towns. Callirrhoe’s boys killed them, and Phegeus with them, and took the necklace to Delphi and hung it in the sanctuary, which is what people do with something they have decided not to own.

It stayed there, quiet, for a very long time. Then the Third Sacred War emptied the treasuries at Delphi to pay Phocian mercenaries, and the general Phayllus lifted the necklace of Eriphyle off its hook for a woman he wanted, the wife of Ariston. She wore it for a while. Then her youngest son lost his mind and set fire to the house, and she died inside it with everything she owned.

Nobody in the whole chain refuses it. That is the only power the sources consistently give it, and it is sufficient. It does not curse at a distance, it does not speak, it does not choose. It sits there being worth having, and the wanting does the rest, which is why its worst damage lands on the people around the wearer rather than the wearer alone: a husband sent to die, a father ambushed, a house burned down by a boy.

Its limits are the limits of any object. It cannot act. Locked in a treasury it does nothing whatsoever, and it did nothing for generations at Delphi until a soldier with a mistress and access to the collection took it down. It can be given away, stolen, dedicated, melted. It can also, apparently, be faked. When Pausanias travelled to Amathus in Cyprus, in the old sanctuary of Adonis and Aphrodite, he was shown a necklace of green stones held together with gold and told it was hers. He did not believe them. Homer had called Eriphyle’s price gold, and Homer named the stones whenever there were stones.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Necklace of Harmonia?

The Necklace of Harmonia is a cursed golden necklace from Greek mythology, given to Harmonia at her wedding to Cadmus of Thebes. In the most detailed account, by the Roman poet Statius, Hephaestus forged it as revenge for the affair between his wife Aphrodite and Ares, working omens, Gorgon eyes and venom into the metal. It is also called the Necklace of Eriphyle, after the woman who accepted it as a bribe.

Who made the Necklace of Harmonia and why?

Statius names Hephaestus, who made it to punish the daughter born of Aphrodite’s affair with Ares, and had the Cyclopes and the Telchines assist him. Other sources disagree. Apollodorus reports that Cadmus gave it to Harmonia and that Pherecydes traced it back to Zeus by way of Europa, while Diodorus credits Aphrodite with the gift and Hyginus places Athena beside Hephaestus.

What does the Necklace of Harmonia do?

It makes itself wanted. The sources give it no active power beyond that, but every person who takes possession of it is ruined, betrayed or killed, along with people close to them. Harmonia ended her life as a serpent, Semele was burned by Zeus, Eriphyle was murdered by her own son, and the last recorded owner died when her son set fire to the house.

Why did Eriphyle take the Necklace of Harmonia?

Polynices offered it to her in return for persuading her husband Amphiaraus to march with the Seven against Thebes, knowing Amphiaraus had foreseen his own death there. She took it, sent him to die, and later accepted the accompanying robe from Thersander for sending her sons after him. Homer summarises her as the woman who took precious gold as the price of her own husband.

What happened to the Necklace of Harmonia in the end?

The sons of Callirrhoe dedicated it at the sanctuary at Delphi, where it hung for centuries. During the Third Sacred War the Phocian general Phayllus stole it for his mistress, the wife of Ariston, and after she had worn it a while her youngest son went mad and burned the house down with her inside. Pausanias was later shown a necklace of green stones and gold at Amathus in Cyprus that was claimed to be it, and he doubted the claim.