Meaning
To take an action whose fruit is armed men - to plant, often with the best intentions, the seeds of future war or conflict. The classic use is military aid and expeditionary adventures that return as battles. Literary and grave, nearly always about war; the allusion assumes readers know what sprang up when the teeth were buried. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
In the myth of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes kills the dragon guarding the Ismenian spring and, on Athena's instruction, sows its teeth in the earth; armed warriors - the Spartoi, the sown men - spring up, and Cadmus throws a stone among them so they destroy one another until five remain to help build his citadel. Jason repeats the sowing in Colchis on Aeetes' orders, and his crop of earthborn soldiers he likewise sets against itself. The figurative use is old and literary: Walter Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) warns that the dragon's teeth are sown, praying God they bear not their armed harvest; Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, yielding fruit on hill and plain; and Stephen King's The Dead Zone (1979) says simply, you don't sow dragon's teeth, of the making of assassins. Wiktionary's glosses catch both faces: an act that leads to trouble, and one intended to prevent trouble that brings it about.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- sow dragon's teeth
- sown dragon's teeth
- the armed harvest
Usage Examples
- Every shipment of surplus rifles was sowing dragon's teeth along the border, the attache wrote in 1961.
- The disarmament clause, meant to end the trade, merely sowed dragon's teeth among the demobilized officers.
- Historians describe the partition as the dragon's-teeth sowing of the century's later wars.