Once upon a time there was a man who could grow neither a moustache nor a beard, and his name was Spanos, meaning the Beardless One. Spanos however used to boast that there was no-one braver than him in the whole wide world. One day, as he was bragging as usual, his fellow villagers said to him: “If you go and defeat the forty dragons who’ve cut off the water coming to our village, we’ll finally believe that you’re as brave as you say you are.”