The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad. The perfection of the first step makes any idea of progressive ascension ridiculous. But at the same time the Iliad is an act of provocation as far as forms and shapes are concerned; it defies them and draws them into a fan that has yet to be fully opened. And this state is thanks precisely to the commanding sharpness with which the poem excludes, even expels from within itself, what for centuries to come would be articulated in language. That perfect beginning, through its very appearance, evokes absent counterweights: Mallarmé.

  Odysseus stands out among the Achaean leaders because he “can think.” The others revere his complex mind the way they revere the fleet foot of Achilles. But this doesn’t make Odysseus feel any more independent of the gods than his peers. He doesn’t have the solid eloquence of Diomedes, or the rounded periods of Nestor, but he looks for the propitious moment, when he can get the gods’ attention with a word, and not a word too many. Odysseus is he who can “escape from a burning brazier.” In the word that gives us that “escape” (nostésaimen) we get close to the meaning of “coming back” (nóstos): to escape unharmed is to come back. And no one is capable of coming back like Odysseus. There is something firm, solid, but never mentioned, on which the hero knows he can always fall back and put his weight, even when his wanderings take him far from home. That this is only a small island in the mind gives us a sense of the spatial relationship between that rocky splinter and the vast surrounding seascape. Yet that small, tough mental outcrop, like the hero’s broad chest, is something that will resist, a constant support. Odysseus experiences fire, faces it, defies it. But more than that, and unlike so many other men and women who live close to the divine, Odysseus is able to escape the fire. That is why the powerful Diomedes feels safer in the dark if he has Odysseus beside him, like a watchful shadow.

  In what is the darkest of all nights for the Achaeans, when they have been pushed back to their ships by a counterattack from the besieged Trojans and when, with Diomedes, he is about to set out on a dangerous mission to steal secrets from the enemy camp, Odysseus hears the cry of a heron unseen in the night. It’s Athena alerting him to her presence. And Odysseus speaks to the goddess, who has always been at his side. He speaks just a few brief, intimate words, less than half of what Diomedes will say immediately afterward. Odysseus doesn’t remind her of paternal precedents, nor does he promise sacrifices. He says to the goddess: “One more time, Athena, love me, as much as you can.”

  Between the ingenuous ostentation of Diomedes and the spare directness of Odysseus a story would open up that was to take centuries of repetitions and subversions to work itself out. But that night the two are still united, just as the “awesome weapons” the heroes only a moment ago belted on are still brushing against each other. And the goddess is still equally present to each of them. They communicate with her before they talk to each other. She is “the fire of heaven,” in which the Greeks share, before the sobriety of Odysseus crosses it, unharmed, before that sobriety is left to survive alone, with no memory of the fire it once crossed, no memory of its antique familiarity with a goddess who once let the hero insist that she love him, “one more time, as much as you can.”

  Achilles is unique, and hence also an only child, “nature’s enfant gâté.” Six brothers before him died thanks to their mother Thetis’s attempts to render them immortal. They did not survive her trial by fire. The flames that licked Achilles made him almost immortal. And what that meant was more mortal than other mortals. He was destined to have a shorter life than others because, for Thetis, he took the place of the son who was supposed to overthrow Zeus and who was never born. Instead of a god who would live longer than other gods, he became a man who would have a shorter life than other men. And yet, of all men, he was the closest to being a god. Because he had taken the place of he who should have put an end to Zeus, his own end was forcibly etched into his flesh. Achilles is time in its purest state, drumming hooves galloping away. Compressed into the piercing fraction of a mortal life span, he came closest to having the qualities the Olympians lived and breathed: intensity and facility. His furious temper, which sets the Iliad moving, is more intense than that of any other warrior, and the fleetness of his foot is that of one who cleaves the air without meeting resistance.

  No hero was on more intimate terms with women than Achilles. At nine he was playing in Scyros as a girl among other girls, and it was only the blast of Odysseus’s trumpet that woke him from his girlish dream. Born of a sea goddess, brought up by two Naiads, Achilles’ girl companions nicknamed him Pyrrha, the Blonde, the tawny blonde. Thus he enjoyed a bliss never granted to any other male: that of being at once a girl and a seducer of girls. Ostensibly, he was a foreign girl playing with the daughters of Lycomedes, but the oldest of those daughters, Deidameia, soon gave birth to the child of their “secret passion”: Neoptolemus. There was a meadow on windswept Scyros, beneath a tower, and here Lycomedes’ daughters would gather armfuls of flowers. They had an open expression in their eyes, round cheeks, a dashing gait. Playing with them, Achilles could be distinguished only by the brusque way he would toss back his hair.

  His boyhood loves behind him, women would come to spell death for Achilles. And death would be with him always. The dog days dragged on in Aulis, and the restless heroes exercised outside their tents to kill the time. Achilles was fantasizing “a thousand girls” came “hunting to his bed” when the girl who claimed she was destined to share his marriage bed appeared: Iphigenia.

  It was an appalling equivocation: her father, Agamemnon, had used the marriage as a bait to lure her to her death as a sacrificial victim. Upon which Clytemnestra said to Achilles: “It would be a woeful omen for your future marriage if my daughter were to be killed.” The omen remained suspended in the air, intact.

  From then on, Achilles’ passions, which had begun as child’s play, would be framed and smothered in blood. And, like Iphigenia, Achilles himself would be killed with a fake nuptial crown on his head. Agamemnon’s trick prefigured something nobody had imagined, least of all Agamemnon himself, something that linked Iphigenia to Achilles. One writer even claims they had a child. If so, they must have had it without ever having been together, except in the sense that they were both lured into the same fatal trap.

  There was a time when hierogamy and sacrifice were the same thing. In the course of history, this unnameable unity gradually split into two. In the beginning, the primordial god would copulate and kill himself at the same time. Men recalling this feat could hardly emulate it if they wanted to survive and were thus forced to divide it into two phases: killing and copulation, sacrifice and marriage. But the flavor of marriage lingers on in the sacrifice, just as the flavor of the sacrifice lingers on in marriage. A tangible object unites the two events: the crown. One is crowned whether going to the altar as a victim or going as a bride. And the ambiguity of that crown is the constant, never articulated heart of tragedy: the misunderstandings, recognitions, and double meanings that tense the tragic nerve all derive from the primordial double meaning contained within the crown.

  It would be ingenuous to suppose that only the moderns have been able to appreciate all this, as if in classical tragedy it had always remained implicit and unconscious. On the contrary, this notion seems to have formed the canonical background underlying tragedy. Otherwise, to quote just one example, why would Euripides’ chorus in Iphigenia in Aulis move so abruptly from the evocation of Peleus and Thetis’s marriage, at which the gods are among the guests, to the description of Iphigenia as a “spotted heifer” from whose “mortal throat blood will be made to flow” in Aulis, where her father claims to be bringing her to her marriage. That truncated passage, split into two dismembered parts, marriage and sacrifice, is, as Euripides saw it, one single speech: and we pass from one part to the other of necessity, because they belong together. In the same way, the ancient texts make perfectly clear that the tension of tragedy is the tension between murder and sac
rifice, the crushing of the one against the other or, alternatively, the splitting apart of the two terms. In fact, all the surviving tragedies could be classified according to the angle of impact between murder and sacrifice or according to the varying densities of ambiguity in the way the two phenomena are presented. In Iphigenia in Aulis we are hammered time after time with the verb kteínein, “to kill,” while thúein, “to sacrifice,” is used only rarely, the distance between the two being spanned by spházein, “to slit a throat.” Yet the plot to this tragedy hinges on a sacrifice, not a murder. Whereas Agamemnon, which tells the story of a murder, is saturated in the terminology of sacrifice.

  When Iphigenia agrees to her own sacrifice, agrees, as she puts it, “to this wicked spilling of blood by a wicked father,” because “the whole of Greece is looking to her” and her death will allow “the Greeks to reign over the barbarians rather than the barbarians over the Greeks,” for “the barbarians stand for slavery, the Greeks for freedom”—when a speech like this pours rapidly, confidently, from the mouth of the virgin of Mycenae, it’s clear that any cosmic vision of sacrifice has already foundered. Sacrifice here no longer has to do with the equilibrium between gods and men but between men and other men, between “the kings of men” and that dangerous multitude milling around the tents.

  But here comes the outrageous enigma: man now discovers that sacrifice is just as effective as a tool of social manipulation as it was to appease the gods. Any cosmic tension evaporates. What we’re left with is an unsuspecting girl whose throat is to be cut before an army mad with the lust to be setting sail for an almighty bloodletting (it’s Aphrodite, not Ares, who’s goading them on). And that killing turns out to be very useful. It is the first pro patria mori, and it stands apart from all the others and dwarfs them, just as Pericles’ speech on democracy dwarfs thousands of later speeches on the subject. Even before the Achaeans hoisted their sails for Troy, Iphigenia’s body had been used as the medium for a radical secularization of the practice of sacrifice. The gods were still there, intact, but man’s relationship with them was now taking on the same spareness and pathos as that between daughter and father, servant and master, lover and beloved, husband and wife. The only thing that separated heaven and earth now was an immense inequality in terms of power. Not an inequality of mind, or heart, or ceremony at all. With all the cosmic scaffolding that had stood between gods and men having thus collapsed, life seemed the more buoyant and resplendent, but lonely too, fleeting and irretrievable. Such is the dominant sentiment that runs through the lucid age of Greece from Homer to Euripides. Everything is reduced to a few simple elements that can be reduced no further. Life is no longer a series of trade-offs between invisible powers but “the sweetness of looking at the light.” Thus speaks the philopsychía in Iphigenia, that last “clutching at life.” And her conclusion is brusque: “To look into the light is the sweetest thing for a mortal; what lies beneath the earth is nothingness.”

  This brazen speech, the daring claim that the whole world of spirits is “nothingness,” points to the affinity that predestined the girl to be Achilles’ bride. For the defiant words she hurls at Agamemnon as she is about to die prefigure Achilles’ answer to Odysseus in the underworld, his scorn for any vain sovereignty over the dead and his heartrending desire for a part, however miserable, in the life above.

  The whole classical world, from the Minoan frescoes to the Roman banquets, is strewn with leafy crowns. To be a coronarius in Rome was to have a profitable business, since crowns were used on all kinds of occasions. “In the olden times,” Pliny recalls, “crowns were used to show respect for the gods and the Lares, public and private, the tombs and the Manes.” Then there were crowns for the statues of the gods, for sacrificial victims, and for brides and bridegrooms. Crowns for the winning athletes at the games. Crowns for poets and soldiers who excelled. Crowns worn for fun at banquets. Lovers would hang crowns on their beloveds’ doors. And Cleopatra even had the idea of poisoning Antony with the petals of a crown. From the Egyptian mummies to the Christian polemicists, who tried to avoid this pagan usage but lapsed back into it just the same, you could say that the Mediterranean world lived and moved for centuries within that circular image, those symbolic but ephemeral flowers, different for every occasion. Such was the ubiquitousness of the crown that a whole literature sprang up around it. Few other subjects seemed so well suited to contests of erudition between sophists at banquets. But, if we look behind their relaxed chatter to the origin of the crown, what do we find?

  The first crown was a gift from Zeus to Prometheus. It thus came from the gods as homage to a man whose relationship with them was anything but clear, at once a threat and a means of salvation. The crown in fact was supposed to compensate for the fetters in which Zeus himself had long imprisoned Prometheus. The cold grip of the metal was thus transformed into what Aeschylus calls “the best of all fetters”: a circular weave of leaves, twigs, and flowers. It was the same process by which Aphrodite’s many-colored girdle had come to be superimposed over Ate’s suffocating net. And, just as deceit was woven into Aphrodite’s girdle, in the crown of Prometheus we can see deceit throwing down its ultimate challenge. Hyginus writes: “Nonnulli etiam coronam habuisse dixerunt, ut se victorem impune peccasse diceret”: “Some say that [Prometheus] got hold of a crown, so that he could claim to have triumphed, unpunished for his crime.” Like the girdle of Aphrodite, Prometheus’s crown is the fetter of necessity. Except that now, dispersed in petals and transformed by beauty, that fetter approaches the delicate superfluousness of ornament. The veil of aesthetic appearance can conceal beneath it even the gamble of the man who attempts to elude necessity, the man who still seeks an impunity anánkē does not concede. Or so Hyginus insinuates.

  Aeschylus, however, has a different vision of events. He describes the crown given to Prometheus as an antípoina, a “retribution,” which is also a ransom. Prometheus had earned his ransom by revealing to Zeus that, if he had a child with Thetis, it would overthrow him. Hence, having first deceived the god, Prometheus had then saved him. And now he was to remain among men and bring them a second revelation, after that of fire: the crown. From chain to crown: it was still a fetter of a kind; anything strong that grips us is a fetter. But now the fetter had been lightened; it became fragile and soft, gently encircling the head, for “all our feelings are in our heads.” What did that vegetable weave conceal, then, that was so precious? Perfection. It was the Greek gift par excellence, the goal this people always sought.

  It would be a long time before crowns were being handed out at banquets. In the beginning, it was the idea of separation that was essential. Forerunner of the magic circle, the crown divided the world in two: there was the sacred fragment within the crown (sacrificial victim, spouse, or statue) and everything else outside. “Everything that belonged to the cult, whether people, animals, victims, or symbols, would be marked out by a crown or a band, as a sign of consecration, and often by both crown and band.” At this point the crown was “herald of the holy silence,” prelude to the sacrificial killing. But, having begun with this cult use, the Greeks developed the crown in a way all their own. The sacred is something that impregnates, it pours into the young girl, the animal, the statue, and fills them. Hence the sacred comes to partake of fullness, and fullness with perfection, since as Aristotle puts it, “we offer to the gods only that which is perfect and whole.” The Iliad speaks of “youths who filled [or crowned: epestépsanto] the bowls with wine.” The crown was the rim of the goblet, the point at which fullness becomes excess. The crown was a mobile templum, bringing together election and danger. The perfect brings death upon itself, since one can’t have fullness without spillage, and what spills out is the excess that sacrifice claims for itself. “What is full, is perfect, and coronation signifies perfection of some kind.” So says Athenaeus. Animals for sacrifice would only be crowned once it was clear that they were perfect, “so as not to kill something that was not useful.”

  At fi
rst the crown enclosed the sacred, separating it off from the profane world. In the end, it enclosed the perfect in its self-sufficient fullness. With a deft and unspoken shifting of contexts, the Greeks removed the crown from blood and sacrifice. They wanted it to celebrate what was perfect in its own right. From now on it would not form part of a ceremony that was acted out but would celebrate something that simply existed in itself. The crown is nothing less than the highest, the most exposed level of existence. Sappho says to Dika: “Weave stems of anise with your soft hands and top your curls with sweet crowns; for the blessed Charites prefer to look at those adorned with flowers, and turn away from whoever is without a crown to wear.” By this point, Dika is perfection itself, attracting the benevolent gaze of the Charites. We’ve come a long way from Iphigenia, who believed she was wearing her crown as a bride, whereas in fact that crown singled her out as the victim to be slain on the altar.

  The Greeks escaped from the sacred to the perfect, trusting in the sovereignty of the aesthetic. It would be a desperately brief escape, one that lasted only as long as the tension between sacred and perfect could be maintained, only as long as the sacred and perfect were able to live side by side without taking anything away from each other. But no other people had attempted so much. If it is in Sappho that we first find a crown that seems to attract the gaze of the Charites purely for itself, if it is with her that the ritual use first appears to become a pretext for aesthetic polish, then we owe this carefree immediacy not to tò kalón, too serious a matter altogether, but to habrosýnē, a word that did not catch on among philosophers and which one can only translate today by mixing notions such as delicacy and splendor, grace and luxury. “I love habrosýnē,” says Sappho in another line, and perhaps it is the only one of her confessions we have no cause to doubt.