The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” (átē). They knew that this invisible incursion often brought ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.”

  Thus a people obsessed with the idea of hubris were also a people who dismissed with the utmost skepticism an agent’s claim actually to do anything. When we know for sure that a person is the agent of some action, then that action is mediocre; as soon as there is a hint of greatness, of whatever kind, be it shameful or virtuous, it is no longer that person acting. The agent sags and flops, like a medium when his voices desert him. For the Homeric heroes there was no guilty party, only guilt, immense guilt. That was the miasma that impregnated blood, dust, and tears. With an intuition the moderns jettisoned and have never recovered, the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless computation of the forces involved. And, when considering the guilty party, there will always be an element of uncertainty. We can never establish just how far he really is guilty, because the guilty party is part and parcel of the guilt and obeys its mechanics. Until eventually he is crushed by it perhaps, perhaps abandoned, perhaps freed, while the guilt rolls on to threaten others, to create new stories, new victims.

  Every sudden heightening of intensity brought you into a god’s sphere of influence. And, within that sphere, the god in question would fight against or ally himself with other gods on a second stage alive with presences. From that moment on, every event, every encounter occurred in parallel, in two places. To tell a story meant to weave those two series of parallel events together, to make both worlds visible.

  Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over the géras, that part of the spoils of war which is divided, though not in equal portions, among the prestigious members of the army. Zeus, talking to the other gods assembled on the golden paving of Olympus, reminds them that he is fond of the Trojans because they have never forgotten to give him his géras, that part of the sacrifice dedicated to him through sacrifices. And he makes the point while discussing the fate of Agamemnon, Achilles, and their enemies. Every word in human terminology takes on another meaning in a divine context, but the words themselves frequently remain the same, and every story unfolds simultaneously on earth and in heaven. With Olympian conjuring, it will sometimes even seem that everything is happening on the same stage. When Helen goes to Paris’s bedroom to visit the warrior, just returned from the battlefield “as though from a dance,” it is Aphrodite who gets a chair for her. But this closeness and familiarity doesn’t diminish the distance in the slightest. These beings blessed with the power of speech may be aware of sometimes possessing divine beauty or strength or grace, yet there will always be something they lack: the inextinguishable reserves of the Olympians, their “inextinguishable laughter” when they see Hephaestus limping through their banqueting hall, that capacity for “living easily” which is the hallmark of those few beings who know that they will live forever.

  Ate has bright tresses and a light step. She doesn’t even touch the ground. She alights on men’s heads and traps them in a net. “She tramples whatever is weak,” then moves on to the next head. She doesn’t even flinch before the gods. On one occasion Zeus was foolish enough to start boasting that Alcmene was about to bear him a son, Heracles. The words burst forth happily from his mind, but silent Ate had already slipped in there. The infatuated god swore an oath that his next descendant would reign over all his neighbors. With a single bound, Hera was down in Argos: she delayed Heracles’ birth and speeded up that of another child descended from Zeus, Eurystheus. Thus for years and years Heracles would have to toil in the service of Eurystheus, who reigned over all his neighbors.

  Homeric fairness doesn’t distinguish between the fatal infatuations that befall the gods and those that befall men. The imperceptible tread of Ate’s foot may alight on anyone’s head. On this occasion, when Zeus discovered the trick, “a sharp pain stabbed into the depths of his mind,” and he grabbed Ate by her tresses and hurled her to earth. Ate plunged down on top of a hill in Phrygia. There one day Troy would rise.

  Ananke, Necessity, who stands above everything in ancient Greece, even Olympus and its gods, was never to have a face. Homer does not personify her, but he does describe her three daughters, the Fates with their spindles; or the Erinyes, her emissaries; or Ate with her light feet. All female figures. There was only one place of worship dedicated to Ananke: on the slopes of the Acrocorinth, the mountain belonging to Aphrodite and her sacred prostitutes, stood a sanctuary to Ananke and Bia, goddess of violence. “But there is a tradition not to enter the temple,” remarks Pausanias. And, indeed, what could one ask of she who does not listen? The difference between gods and men can be grasped above all in their relationship to Ananke. The gods endure her and use her; men merely endure her.

  While Achaeans and Trojans do battle, Zeus and Poseidon, the gods who rule sky and sea, are invisibly at work all around them. But what are they up to? “They are tightening that knot that cannot be broken or loosened, but which has loosened the knees of many.” The warriors wave their swords in the empty air until they meet the obstacle that is their enemy. All move, caught in the same net, where innumerable threads are close to being tightened. When the knot is drawn tight, the warrior dies, even before the lethal metal touches him. What Zeus and Poseidon do on the plains of Troy is no different from what Hephaestus did to Ares and Aphrodite when he caught them in bed together, or even what Oceanus does in hugging the earth. Hephaestus’s net was gold, as befitted an object in Olympus, but it was thin as a spider’s web too, and invisible even to the gods who laughed as they watched the embarrassment of the captive lovers. Oceanus wraps the earth in nine liquid coils.

  According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound to the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are bound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curves back on itself, a knotted rope (peírar) that holds everything within its limits (péras). Deî, a key word, meaning “it is necessary,” appears for the first time in the Iliad: “Why is it necessary (deî) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to déō, “to bind,” and not to déō, “to lack,” as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’ ”

  Let’s put some pressure now on this word anánkē. Chantraine concludes that “no etymology grasps the real sense of anánkē and its derivations: ‘constriction’ and at the same time ‘kinship.’ The underlying notion that might justify this double semantic development would be that of the bond.” Others see the word as being close to the idea of “taking in one’s arms.” When speaking of Heracles caught in the horrendous shirt of Nessus, t
he chorus in the Trachiniae begin: “If in the Centaur’s murderous net, a dolopoiòs anánkē torments him …” But how are we to understand that dolopoiòs anánkē? A “deceitful embrace”? Or “deceitful necessity”? Or both? Once again we have the net, and necessity seen as a lethal embrace. With wonderful monotony, the net, its knots ever ready to tighten, is always there. It falls over Aphrodite’s adulterous bed, over the battlefield beneath the walls of Troy, over being itself, and the cosmos, and the blistered body of Heracles. Whatever the situation, that one weapon is more than enough for Ananke. There were many in Greece who doubted the existence of the gods, but none ever expressed a doubt about that net, at once invisible and more powerful than the gods.

  When Alexander arrived in Gordium, he went to the acropolis and found the cart that was tied to its yoke with a knot that no one had been able to undo. There was a legend about that cart, “which said that whoever untied the knot that bound the cart to its yoke would rule over all of Asia. The knot was tied with cornel bark, and it was impossible to find either beginning or end. Unable to untie the knot and not wanting to leave it as it was, in case his failure should spread disquiet through his army, some say that he sliced the knot cleanly with his sword and then claimed that he had untied it.” But there’s another version to the story, according to which Alexander “removed the belaying pin from the drawbar [this was a wooden pin forced into the drawbar and around which the knot was secured] and thus removed the yoke from the drawbar.” Then Alexander and his followers “went away from the cart convinced that the oracle’s predictions about the untying of the knot had been fulfilled.” Thus, “the knot that can be neither broken nor loosened,” the knot that Zeus and Poseidon tightened around the heads of the warriors beneath the walls of Troy, was not to be untied even by Alexander. Alexander, however, had come up with what would later be the obvious solution: to get around necessity by removing the pin in the drawbar. And as Alexander thus did what countless others would do after him, Greece itself fell apart. Alexander left, the knot remained intact, “with neither beginning nor end,” but the cart had been separated from its yoke.

  In the late pagan era we can still find this in Macrobius: “amor osculo significatur, necessitas nodo”: “love is represented with a kiss, necessity with a knot.” Two circular images, the mouth and the noose, embrace everything that is. Eros, “born when Ananke was lord and everything bowed before her gloomy will,” once boasted that he had gained possession of the “Ogygian scepter,” primordial as the waters of the Styx itself. He could now force “his own decrees upon the gods.” But Eros said nothing of Ananke, who had come before him. There is a hostility between Eros and Ananke, a hostility that springs from an obscure likeness, as between the kiss and the knot.

  Ananke belongs to the world of Kronos. Indeed she is his companion and sits with him on their polar throne as Zeus sits beside Hera in Olympus. That is why Ananke has no face, just as her divine spouse has no face. The figure, the mobile shape, will make its appearance only with the world that comes after theirs. The Olympian gods know that the law of Kronos has not been abrogated, nor can it ever be. But they don’t want to feel it weighing down on them every second of every day. Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against the precision of the law, which at that time was referred to as pondus et mensura, “weight and measure.” A vain rebellion, but divine. Kronos’s chains become Hephaestus’s golden web. The gods know that the two imprisoning nets are the same; what has changed is the aesthetic appearance. And it is on this that life on Olympus is based. Of the two, they prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke’s inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her “many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.”

  Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world. Worn by Aphrodite, the girdle becomes both splendor and deceit. But perhaps this was precisely what the Olympians wanted: that a soft, deceiving sash should cover the inflexible bond of necessity. So it was that, when the time was ripe, Zeus overthrew Kronos with deceit: and now that girdle adorned the waist of Aphrodite.

  Why did the Olympians prefer the girdle of deceit to the serpent of necessity, coiled around the cosmos? They were looking for a more colorful life, a life with more play. After millennia of astral submission, they preferred to make believe that they were subject to Eros just as much as to Ananke, though all the time aware that in fact this was just a blasphemous fraud. Sophocles’ Deianira says as much, as if it were obvious: “The gods bow to Eros’s every whim, and so must I.”

  If Ananke commands alone, life becomes rigid and ritualistic. And the Olympians were not fond of Mesopotamian gravity, although they did enjoy their sacrifices. What they wanted for themselves was not just eternal life but childish insouciance. When the time had come to be rid of the heroes, a plague would have been quite enough to settle the matter. But a war, a long, complicated war, was far more attractive. So the gods set about starting it off and then making it last. Zeus, from his vantage point in the sky, wouldn’t have been interested in watching the ravages of a plague. But when Trojans and Achaeans return to the battlefield, he is eager to watch them, and sometimes even to suffer with them: he sees Sarpedon, for him “the dearest of men,” come to the end of the role that “had been assigned him of old,” and he can do nothing to spare him the mortal blows of Patroclus. For a moment Zeus imagines he might be able to “snatch him alive” from the battle. It is a moment of sublime Olympian childishness, which Hera immediately crushes. And as she does so we hear Ananke, disguised as a wise administrator, speaking through her.

  But war is a spectacle for all the Olympians, not just for Zeus. As the battle approached, “Athena and Apollo, with their silver bows, alighted like vultures on the tall oak of Zeus, who holds the aegis, and enjoyed the sight of the men in their serried ranks, a shiver trembling across shields, helmets, and javelins.”

  The Achaean warriors advance, legs and thighs white with dust. The heavy hooves of their horses churn up clouds of it into a bronze sky. Here and there the terrain is sandy. Mydon crashes from his chariot and sticks for a moment, head in the sand, legs in the air, until his own horses trample him into the dust. Two female figures move about in the din of battle. They are Eris, Strife, and Enyo, the War Cry. Eris wears a long, dark, checkered tunic with a pattern of circles and crosses. The same color is picked up in her broad, soft wings. Her arms are naked and white. Enyo is glistening with sweat. Hers is the “shameless uproar of the slaughter.” She delights, they say, in “the blood-sodden clay.”

  There is a moment in which the peculiarly Greek breaks away from the Asian continent, like one of those islands off the Anatolian coast whose jagged cliffs still follow the line of the vast maternal mainland. That moment is the Greek discovery of outline, of a new sharpness, a clean, dry daylight. It is the moment when man enters into Zeus, into the clear light of noon. Éndios is what we have when “the earth warmed up / And the sky glittered more brilliantly than crystal.” By the time of the tragedians, dîos has come to mean nothing more than “divine,” insofar as it is a “property of Zeus.” But in the Homeric age dîos means first and foremost “clear,” “brilliant,” “glorious.” To appear in Zeus is to glow with light against the background of the sky. Light on light. When Homer gives the epithet dîos to his characters, the word does not refer first of all to what they may have of “divine,” but to the clarity, the splendor that is always with them and against which they stand out. The leaden eyes of the Sumers are the eyes of nocturnal birds; they sink away into the darkness. With foot arched, and the corners of hi
s mouth upturned in an inexplicable smile, the Homeric hero pushes on toward the smoking earth, and his folly is the Pan-inspired madness of high noon. Before the hour strikes, he achieves a vision of things as sharply separate from one another and complete in themselves as though scissored from the sky by cosmic shears and thrust out into a light from which there is no escape.

  In its dark age, after four hundred years with neither writing nor cultural center, Greece rediscovered splendor. In Homer whatever is good and beautiful is also dazzling. Breastplates shine from afar, bodies from close up. Yet around them, while the bards were chanting the Iliad, the Greeks had very little that was splendid to enjoy. Gone the high-vaulted palaces, all burned, all ravaged. Gone the Asian jewels. Gone the embossed gold goblets. Gone the grand chariots of war.

  The splendor was all in the mind. Among the objects they handled were jars and vases where the same geometric figures were stubbornly repeated over and over, as if all at once the Greeks had decided there was only one thing that mattered: outline, the sharp, the angular profile, separation. On the immense urn found in the Dipylon, one band of geometric patterns follows hard on another, until framed between them we find a scene with human figures. It is a funeral, and the men are black, faceless silhouettes, their muscles in sharp relief. The corpse lies on a long coffin, like a dangerous insect. The Homeric radiance and the sharp profile of that insect presuppose each other, balance each other off. In all surviving evidence of archaic Greece, the one is included in the other.