The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  For Callicratides, women were “an abyss,” like the great ravines in the rocks around Athens where criminals were thrown. Caricles, however, couldn’t respond to boys at all and thought incessantly about women. Having taken a boat to Cnidos, the three friends were eager to see the famous Aphrodite by Praxiteles. Even before they went into Aphrodite’s temple, they could feel a light breeze blowing from it. It was the aura. The courtyard of the sanctuary wasn’t paved with the usual austere slabs of gray stone but was full of plants and fruit trees. In the garden all around them they saw myrtles with their berries and other shrubs associated with the goddess. Plants typical of Dionysus were also in abundance, since “Aphrodite is even more delightful when she is with Dionysus, and their gifts are sweeter if mixed together.” Finally the three friends went into the temple. In the center they saw the Parian marble of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite, naked, a faint lift to the corners of her lips, a faint hint of arrogance. Caricles immediately began to rave over the stunning frontal view. One could suffer anything for a woman like that, and so saying he stretched up to kiss her. Callicratides watched in silence. There was a door behind the statue, and the three friends asked one of the temple guardians if she had the keys to it. It was then that Callicratides was stunned by the beauty of Aphrodite’s buttocks. He yelled his admiration, and Caricles’ eyes were wet with tears.

  Then the three fell silent as they continued to contemplate that marble body. Behind a thigh they noticed a mark, like a stain on a tunic. Licinus assumed it was a defect in the marble and remarked on this as yet another reason for admiring Praxiteles: how clever of him to hide this blemish in one of the least visible parts of the statue. But the guardian who had opened the door and was standing beside the visitors told them that the real story behind the stain was rather different.

  She explained that a young man from a prominent family had once been in the habit of visiting the temple and had fallen in love with the goddess. He would spend whole days parading his devotion. He got up at dawn to go to the sanctuary and went home only reluctantly after sundown. Standing before the statue, he would whisper on and on in some secret lover’s conversation, breaking off every now and then to consult the oracle by tossing a few Libyan gazelle bones. He was waiting anxiously for Aphrodite’s throw to come up. That was when every face of the bones bore a different number. One evening, when the guardians came to close the temple, the young man hid behind the door where the three visitors were now standing and spent “an unspeakable night” with the statue. The fruits of his lovemaking had stained the statue. That mark on the white marble demonstrated the indignity the image of the goddess had suffered. The young man was never seen again. Rumor had it that he drowned himself in the sea. When the guardian had finished, Caricles immediately exclaimed: “So, men love women even when they are made out of stone. Just imagine if she had been alive …” But Callicratides smiled and said that actually the story supported his side of the argument. For despite being alone a whole night with the statue, and completely free to do whatever he wanted, the young man had embraced the marble as if it were a boy and hadn’t wanted to take the woman from the front. The two antagonists began arguing again, and Licinus was hard put to persuade them to leave the temple and continue elsewhere. In the meantime the worshipers were beginning to arrive.

  To a considerable extent classical morality developed around reflections on the nature of men’s love for boys; basically such reflections stressed the quality of aret and played down something self-evident: pleasure. aret means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached; the morality wasn’t just something added by mischievous latecomers. In any event, aret is incandescent whenever manifest in a man’s love for a boy. In its Kantian, unattached isolation, the Greeks would scarcely have appreciated the quality at all. The last and ultimate image of aret Greece offers us is a field strewn with the corpses of young Thebans after the battle of Chaeronea. The corpses were found lying in pairs: they were all couples, lovers, who had gone into battle together against the Macedonians. It was to be Greece’s last stand. Afterward, Philip II and Alexander set about turning the country into a museum.

  “Nothing beautiful or charming ever comes to a man except through the Charites,” says Theocritus. But how did the Charites come down to man? As three rough stones that fell from heaven in Orchomenus. Only much later were statues placed next to those stones. What falls from heaven is indomitable, forever. Yet man is obliged to conquer those stones, or girls with fine tresses, if he wants his singing to be “full of the breath of the Charites.” How to go about it? From the Chárites, one passes to cháris, from the Graces to grace. And it is Plutarch who tells us what the relationship is: “The ancients, Protogenes, used the word cháris to mean the spontaneous consent of the woman to the man.” Grace, then, the inconquerable, surrenders itself only to he who strives to conquer it through erotic siege, even though he knows he can never enter the citadel if the citadel doesn’t open, grace-fully, for him.

  The relationship between erasts and erómenos, lover and beloved, was highly formalized and to a certain extent followed the rules of a ritual. In Sparta and Crete, the main centers of love between men, one could still find clear evidence of these rites. In Crete, each boy’s parents knew that one day they would be forewarned of their son’s imminent abduction. The lover would then arrive and, if the parents considered him worthy, would be free to carry off the boy and disappear into the country with him. Their whereabouts unknown, they would live together in complete privacy for two months. Finally the beloved would reappear in the city with “a piece of armor, an ox, and a cup,” ceremonial gifts from his lover. Athens, with its vocation for modernity, was less rigid than Crete but equally tough below the surface. Here the rite was transformed into set behavior patterns that, though immersed in the buzz and chatter of the city square, remained as recognizable as dance steps. The lovers would cruise around the gymnasiums with a fake air of abstraction, their eyes running over the youngsters working out in the dust. It was the primordial setting for desire. The lovers would watch the boys, throwing furtive glances at “hips and thighs, the way sacrificing priests and seers size up their victims.” They would sneak glances at the prints their genitals left in the sand. They would wait till midday, when, with the combination of oil, sweat, and sand, “dew and down would bloom on the boys’ genitals as on the skin of a peach.” The place was drenched with pleasure, but the word pleasure couldn’t be mentioned, because pleasure was common property—even slaves and immigrants could enjoy it—whereas the amorous journey undertaken that morning aimed at an excellence, a splendor and glory, that belonged to one and one alone: an Athenian, the chosen one, the boy who, through subterfuge and gifts of garlands, would become the beloved.

  That reluctance to admit the pleasure involved would never be dropped, not even in the ultimate intimacy: “in the act of love the boy does not share in the man’s pleasure, as does the woman; but contemplates, in a state of sobriety, the excitement of the other drunken with Aphrodite.” When the lover approaches, the beloved stands upright and looks straight ahead, his eyes not meeting those of his lover, who bends down and almost doubles up over him, greedily. The vase painters generally show thigh-to-thigh contact rather than anal penetration: this allows the beloved to maintain his erect, indifferent, detached position. But all too soon the whole situation would be reversed. The first facial hair marked the beginning of the end of the boy’s period as beloved. The hairs were called Harmodius and Aristogiton because they freed the boy from this erotic tyranny. Then, as though in need of a little time out, the boy escapes “from the tempest and torment of male love.” But very soon he is back in that tempest, and in a new role: instead of being eyed, nude in the gymnasium, he is himself cruising around younger boys, in the same places, nosing out his prey. Transformed from erómenos into erasts, he would finally discover, as a lover, what it means to be possessed by love. Only the lover is éntheos, says Plato. Only the
lover is “full of god.”

  IV

  (photo credit 4.1)

  OF THE OLYMPIANS, THE FIRST THING WE can say is that they were new gods. They had names and shapes. But Herodotus assures us that “before yesterday” no one knew “where any of these gods had come from, nor whether they had existed eternally, nor what they looked like.” When Herodotus says “yesterday,” he means Homer and Hesiod, whom he calculated as having lived four centuries before himself. And to his mind it was they who “gave the gods their names, shared out arts and honors among them, and revealed what they looked like.” But in Hesiod we can still sense the effort involved in establishing a cosmogony, the slow detachment of the gods from what is either too abstract or too concrete. Only at the end, after the cosmos had quaked again and again, did Zeus “divide the honors among them.”

  But Homer is the real scandal, his indifference toward the origin of things, the total absence of pomposity, his presumption in beginning not at the beginning of his tale but at the end, at the last of those ten disastrous years of war beneath the walls of Troy, years that had served, above all else, to wipe out the whole race of the heroes. The heroes were themselves a recent phenomenon, and here was the poet already celebrating their passing. The Olympians had quickly established a constant rhythm to their lives and seemed intent on maintaining it forever, as if it were the obvious choice. The earth was there for raids, whims, intrigues, experiments. But what happened before Olympus? Here and there Homer does give us hints, but fleeting ones. No one is interested in going into details. While the destiny of a Trojan warrior can be most engrossing.

  There is something assumed in Homer but never mentioned, something that lies behind both silences and eloquence. It is the idea of perfection. What is perfect is its own origin and does not wish to dwell on how it came into being. What is perfect severs all ties with its surroundings, because sufficient unto itself. Perfection doesn’t explain its own history but offers its completion. In the long history of divinities, the inhabitants of Olympus were the first who wished to be perfect rather than powerful. Like an obsidian blade, the aesthetic for the first time cut away all ties, connections, devotions. What remained was a group of figures, isolated in the air, complete, initiated, perfect—three words that Greek covers in just one: téleios. Even though it would not appear until much later, the statue was the beginning, the way in which these new beings would manifest themselves.

  When the Greeks needed to appeal to an ultimate authority, it wasn’t a sacred text but Homer that they went to. Greece was founded on the Iliad. And the Iliad was founded on a play of words, the substitution of a couple of letters in a name. Briseis, Chryseis. The bone of contention that triggers the poem is Briseis kallipárēos, Briseis “of the lovely cheeks”: Agamemnon wants her exchanged with, or substituted for, Chryseis kallipárēos, Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” In Greek only two letters separate the two girls. And it was not “because of the girl,” Achilles childishly insists, that the whole quarrel began but because of the substitution, as if the hero sensed that it was this notion of exchange that had tightened the noose that no hero, nor any generation that came after the heroes, would be able to loosen.

  It is the power of exchange in all its manifestations that looms over the opening of the Iliad: there is the woman, or rather the two women, each with lovely cheeks, almost indistinguishable, like coins from the same mint; there are the words of Agamemnon and Achilles, which oppose each other as one force opposes another (antibíosi epéessin); there is the “immense,” the “splendid ransom,” offered by the priest Chryses for his daughter Chryseis, and “the holy hecatomb” the Achaeans offer the priest. On each occasion, the elements of the exchange are presented in pairs: the women, the words, the offerings. The only thing missing is money, which will eventually be composed from the mixing of these elements. But, for money to emerge in its purest form, the heroes must first kill each other off. As early as Thucydides we have the observation that precisely what was lacking during the Trojan War was money. That “lack of money” (achrēmatía) made the whole mixture less potent than it would later be, but far more glorious.

  “Helen is the only woman in Homer who clearly has distinctive epithets of her own,” observes Milman Parry. Kallipárēos—“of the lovely cheeks”—is applied to eight women and thus used more than any other female epithet. The Iliad tells the story of two quarrels: the quarrel over Helen, the unique Helen, who no one would dare to substitute; and the quarrel over Briseis “of the lovely cheeks,” who Agamemnon would like to substitute with Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” Between uniqueness unassailable and unassailable substitution, a war flares up on the Trojan plain, a war that can never end.

  If we are to give credence to his spouse-sister, Hera, Zeus “was interested in only one thing, going to bed with women, mortal and immortal alike.” But at least one woman rejected him, and, what was worse, an immortal: Thetis. Resentful, Zeus went on “spying on her from on high, against her will.” And, given that she had refused him, he resorted to the most solemn of oaths to make sure she would never have an immortal companion. As Hera saw it, Thetis didn’t yield to Zeus because she was “at once respectful and secretly afraid” of his celestial partner, herself. So the two of them became friends. But here, as elsewhere, Hera’s vision of events is too self-centered. There was a more serious motive behind Thetis’s rejection, indeed the most serious motive possible: her union with Zeus would have led to the birth of the son destined to displace his father: “a son stronger than his father,” say both Pindar and Aeschylus, using exactly the same words.

  The primordial Themis revealed the danger to a general assembly of Zeus and the other Olympians. Only then did Zeus really give up on Thetis, because he wanted to “preserve his own power forever.” Perhaps Thetis already knew the secret, perhaps that was why she had rejected the god of gods. Or at least one might conclude as much by analogy, since there was another occasion when Thetis was the only woman who protected Zeus’s sovereignty. This was when various other Olympians, including Athena, who was born from the god’s own temple, wanted to put him in chains. Upon which Thetis, a marine goddess who never went to Olympus, called Briareos, a hundred-headed Titan, to the rescue, and Zeus was saved. Zeus was thus indebted to Thetis for her support, “in both word and deed,” and she would exploit that indebtedness to defend her son, Achilles.

  As for the motives behind the Olympian plot to bind Zeus in a thousand knots, Homer’s lips are sealed. But a god in chains is a god dethroned: that, and nothing less than that, was what the Olympians had been plotting. Thus the need for a woman’s help was not limited to the heroes but also applied to the greatest of the gods. Even Zeus, in his unscathed Olympian stability, knew that his reign must end one day. As early as Homer’s time, he already owed his continuing reign to expediency, since on one occasion he had repressed his desire for a woman to avoid the birth of a more powerful son and on another he had been saved only because that same woman had called on the help of Briareos, one of those rough-hewn, primordial creatures the Olympians would generally rather not have mentioned. Even Zeus, then, had opposed cunning to destiny; even the supreme god had put off his own end. The game was not over yet.

  Before revealing her secret to the Olympians, Themis had told her son Prometheus. Chained to a rock, Prometheus thought of Zeus endlessly pursuing his “empty-headed” philandering, never knowing which of his conquests might prove fatal to him. Those frivolous adventures were becoming rather like a game of Russian roulette. And Prometheus kept his mouth shut.

  Thus Zeus’s womanizing takes on a new light. Each affair might conceal the supreme danger. Every time he approached a woman, Zeus knew he might be about to provoke his own downfall. Thus far the stories take us: but for every myth told, there is another, unnameable, that is not told, another which beckons from the shadows, surfacing only through allusions, fragments, coincidences, with nobody ever daring to tell all in a single story. And here the “son stronger than his f
ather” is not to be born yet, because he is already present: he is Apollo. Over the never-ending Olympian banquet, a father and son are watching each other, while between them, invisible to all but themselves, sparkles the serrated sickle Kronos used to slice off the testicles of his father, Uranus.

  Whenever their lives were set aflame, through desire or suffering, or even reflection, the Homeric heroes knew that a god was at work. They endured the god, and observed him, but what actually happened as a result was a surprise most of all for themselves. Thus dispossessed of their emotion, their shame, and their glory too, they were more cautious than anybody when it came to attributing to themselves the origin of their actions. “To me, you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes,” says old Priam, looking at Helen on the Scaean Gate. He couldn’t bring himself to hate her, nor to see her as guilty for nine bloody years’ fighting, even though Helen’s body had become the very image of a war about to end in massacre.