The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Like the young Spartan women, she used to play outside with the boys, “thighs naked and tunics lifting in the wind, around the racetrack and in the gymnasium.” One day an Athenian was passing by with a friend, and stopped to look at her. “At that the all-knowing Theseus quite rightly became excited, and even to so great a man you seemed a worthy prey (digna rapina) to carry off, as you sported in the gymnasium, glistening with oil, a nude girl among nude boys, as was the custom among your people.” Helen had met her first man. She was twelve years old, Theseus was fifty. He sodomized her and shut her away on the rock of Aphidna. Theseus’s mother, Aethra, lived there, and Helen was soon entrusted to her, because Theseus was impatient to be off on his adventures with Peirithous again. They were planning to go down to Hades this time. The twins Castor and Pollux were furious and promptly set off in search of their sister. When they arrived on Aphidna, Theseus had already gone. They besieged the rock and got Helen back. Among the slaves they took away was Aethra.

  Back in Sparta, the hero’s mother became Helen’s maid. She saw thirty-eight suitors turn up at the palace to ask for the princess’s hand. She saw Helen choose Menelaus, and she saw the marriage and the birth of Hermione. One day an Asian prince arrived, a man more handsome than any other and loaded with precious things that nobody in Sparta had ever seen before. On meeting him, Helen asked in a whisper whether he was Dionysus or Eros and immediately became tongue-tied. The prince galloped about Laconia with Menelaus, who took pride in being a good host and showing off everything interesting his kingdom could boast. Helen only saw the guest over the dinner table. The prince recounted adventures, some of them amorous. Hiding behind his cup, he kept looking at her. Sometimes he couldn’t keep from sighing. Helen laughed in his face. One evening, Helen’s tunic fell open for a second, leaving “free passage for his eyes” to her white breasts. The prince was lifting a cup to his lips, and the decorated handle slipped from his fingers. The cup shattered on the floor. Menelaus went on talking men’s talk. Helen said nothing, looking after little Hermione.

  Of all times to go away, the prince chuckled to himself, Menelaus had chosen these very days. He was going off to Crete, for his grandfather Catreus’s funeral. As he left, Menelaus, serious as ever, told Helen to look after their guest. After that, there were absolutely no other men about. Helen and the prince were each sleeping alone in the same palace. In the emptiness of the palace halls, Aphrodite assembled those archons of desire Himeros and Pothos, and the Charites too. But on the visible plane, the person who acted as pimp was Aethra. Paris gripped Helen’s wrist. The Trojan’s escorts loaded up her riches and the things the prince had pretended were gifts. Paris stood tall on a chariot drawn by four horses. Helen was next to him, tunic tossed back over her shoulders, offering her body half naked to the night, where nothing could be seen but Eros’s dazzling torch twisting and turning in front of them. Behind the fleeing couple, another Eros was waving a torch. The two lovers and their escorts raced across the open space of red earth and scattered olive trees that led down from Sparta to the coast. Unnoticed among the Trojans, Aethra was with them too. On reaching the water, they saw a tiny island, a toy almost, just a few yards from the shore. On that island, as though on a huge bed covered with a green canopy of pine trees and surrounded by deep water, Helen spent her first night with her third lover.

  Helen is the power of the phantom, the simulacrum—and the simulacrum is that place where absence is sovereign. Of her five husbands, the ones she loved most were Paris and Achilles. And, for both Paris and Achilles, Helen was a phantom before she was a woman. Ever since Aphrodite promised the shepherd of Ida that he would possess Helen of Sparta, that pure name had canceled out the powers and kingdoms Athena and Hera were offering him. Despite grim omens, the shepherd of Ida, now recognized as a prince, set off with galleys full of treasure toward that name.

  As for Achilles, he was the only one of the Achaean leaders who hadn’t rushed off to Sparta to ask for Helen’s hand. He thus set off to a war he knew would end in death for him, for a woman about whom he knew nothing but her name. In nine years of siege, Achilles could have said no more about Helen than did Paris himself before he left Troy to find her: “Te vigilans oculis, animo te nocte videbam.” So much the longer, indeed never ending, would be their life together as phantoms on Leuke, island of white splendor.

  Adrasteia, Moira, Tyche, Ananke, Ate, Aisa, Dike, Nemesis, Erinyes, Heimarmene: such are the names that embody necessity. And they are all women. While Kronos dreams, deep in ambrosia, and in his dreams calculates the measures of the universe, these women keep watch, making sure that every being plays his part, no more and no less, so that nothing and no one may exceed their established bounds. Yet all life is excess. That is why we find these women on the prowl everywhere. They are wet nurses, helmswomen, weavers, flitting, towering. They are all related: Dike and Ananke are daughters of Kronos. Dike is a priestess to Adrasteia. The Moirai and the Erinyes are sisters. They share a family resemblance, the family of destiny. They hail from that distant past when the only powers that existed were abstract and faceless or at most hybrid, compound creatures. They move “in the fog, in black cloud,” women’s torsos looming from balconies of smoke. And even these strange bodies come and go: Moira has temples, but without statues, where worshipers practice her cult; or sometimes she has statues, but without temples, where no cult is practiced. The more all-encompassing they are, like Ananke, the less they are represented. While the emissaries of necessity—the Erinyes, the Moirai, or Ate—are regular guests among men, beautiful even, when the nature of their work doesn’t make them terrifying, and they only talk among themselves.

  One of these women did have a body that was both stable and very beautiful: Nemesis. Rich, thick hair, white clothes. She always had a friend with her, Aidós. One day their names would be translated as Vengeance and Shame, but at the time we’re talking of, when they had only just emerged from the black cloud, their natures were far more complex and variegated. What did they have in common? The notion of offense. Aidós held people back from offending. Nemesis represented the ineluctable consequences of offending. They were united in a vision of life as something that gets wounded and then, as it writhes, wounds in its turn. Zeus began to watch Nemesis. Nothing like this had ever happened with the women of necessity: never had Zeus felt any desire for the bodies of Adrasteia, Moira, Tyche, Ananke, Aisa, or the Erinyes. And once, in his anger, he had even hurled Ate down from heaven. When it came to his amorous adventures, Zeus found mortal women far more attractive. He wasn’t interested in bothering those figures of fate; they were too similar to one another, disturbing the way twins can be, too ancient, and, in the end, hostile. But with Nemesis it was different. Something tremendous must have been at stake in that erotic conquest.

  Never, for a woman, had Zeus traveled so far, crossing country after country, sea after sea, “beneath the earth, beneath the black, unfished waters,” and on and on to “the ends of the earth,” the watery snake, Oceanus. Stubborn and desperate, Nemesis transformed herself into all kinds of animals, while Zeus never let up following her. And when all the feather flapping was finally done, when atlas and zoology were exhausted, what was left? A wild goose and a swan. The swan settled on the goose and forced her to yield. Zeus “passionately united himself with her, out of powerful necessity.” But how bizarre! Nemesis, a figure of necessity, is overcome by necessity. And, as the swan assaults her, Nemesis, friend of Aidós, is “mentally torn apart aidoî kaì nemései” (which in too modern a translation might be rendered as “by shame and vengeance”). Thus, Nemesis is torn apart by herself. Offending us as it does with such paradoxes, this can hardly be one of Zeus’s usual adventures. But whenever his adventures are too grand, Zeus allows them to be repeated with variations, so that each version may possess a shining fragment of the truth. Such was the case with Nemesis.

  Zeus spent half a night of love with Leda, leaving the other half to her husband, Tyndareos. During that night, Le
da conceived four children, divided between heaven and earth: Helen and Pollux by Zeus, Clytemnestra and Castor by Tyndareos. That night was the delicate cameo and repetition of another night, at once dangerous and sublime, that Zeus had spent with Nemesis, as that other night with Nemesis was a delicate cameo and repetition of the long chase across the entire face of the earth that had ended in the violent coupling of swan and wild goose.

  To seduce necessity: it had to be the most difficult of amorous undertakings. It was what men would later call a contradiction. And in fact Nemesis wasn’t interested in Zeus and rejected his imploring advances. What was needed was a trick, a divine trick. Zeus asked Aphrodite to help him. Together they agreed that Zeus would turn himself into a swan while Aphrodite, in the guise of an eagle, would pretend to follow him. Nemesis was making a sacrifice when she saw a splendid swan flapping toward her, exhausted. From the top of a nearby rock, an eagle was watching them, motionless and threatening, ready to spread its wings and dive on its prey. The frightened swan huddled against Nemesis’s lap. She didn’t reject the animal. She wanted to protect it from that menacing eagle. She fell asleep with the creature, squeezing it between her thighs. They slept. And Nemesis was still sleeping when the swan raped her. Then from Nemesis’ womb a white egg appeared. Hermes took it, carried it to Sparta, and placed it in Leda’s womb. When the big egg hatched, from inside the shell emerged a tiny, perfect female figure: Helen.

  The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble of Zeus’s reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen’s lifetime. It was a time marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men would go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out.

  On their wedding night, when the bride and groom retired to their bedroom where the whitewash was still damp on the walls, Menelaus found his legs sluggish and his mind dazed. The long, nerve-racking courtship, the oath over the quartered horse, the honors, the festivals, the banquets—everything fused in one powerful impulse to flop down on his bed and sleep. Helen lay awake and thought of the friends who until a short while ago had been singing and dancing for her in the palace. They were a “band of young women,” two hundred and forty girls, who exercised along the river Eurotas, their bodies greased with oil like boys’. And now they would be thinking of her, as she, Helen, shared her bed with Menelaus for the first time.

  The next morning, at dawn, those girls would gather water lilies near the meadows where they always went and weave them into a crown. Then they would go and hang the crown from the branches of a big plane tree, raising to the sky and abandoning to the breeze those flowers that had grown from slime. One of them would take out a golden cruet and, drop by drop, pour an oil used in funeral sacrifices over the tree. Others of them would carve on the bark “Worship me: I am Helen’s tree.” So Helen lay awake, through the night, fantasizing.

  After the flight from Sparta, after the years of war in Troy, after the eventful return trip to Sparta, after the death of Menelaus, Helen found herself caught between two stepsons who loathed her: Nicostratus and Megapenthe. So she decided to run off again, alone this time, to seek refuge with a childhood friend. She sailed as far as Rhodes, which was ruled by Polyxo, a widow now, one of the many widows the Trojan War had left scattered across these islands. Helen was finally seeking refuge in a woman, in her memories of girlhood. Polyxo wanted to avenge her husband, Tlepolemus. Like so many other women, she blamed Helen for his death. But she greeted her with kindness.

  For the first time in her life, Helen was not being pestered by men. One day she was lying, daydreaming, in the bath when some of Polyxo’s serving maids burst in disguised as Erinyes. They seized her, naked, fingernails digging into her flesh, dragged her dripping from the water, and carried her off. Outside they hung her from a tree. The big plane tree near Sparta would still bear the carved inscription “Worship me: I am Helen’s tree” when the people of Rhodes founded their temple to Helen Dendritis, Helen of the Tree, next to the plane tree where they had found her body hanging.

  While they were fleeing Sparta, gusting winds forced Helen and Paris to land on the beach in Sidon. Thus it was that Leda’s white daughter and her lover came to seek refuge on the very beach where Europa had been carried off by the white bull. They then sailed on as far as Egypt, to the Canopic mouth of the Nile. “On that shore there was, and still is, a sanctuary to Heracles: if even the merest servant takes refuge there and marks himself with the sacred signs, thereby consecrating himself to the god, it is forbidden to touch him.” The two lovers felt they were safe. But there are people who always get to know everything, and look on unmoved: the Egyptian priests. Even as he interrogated the stranger, and Paris ducked his questions, Proteus, king of Memphis, had already heard the true story of the wandering lovers from the temple priests. At the end of his interrogation he passed judgment: he couldn’t have this criminal, Paris, killed, as he would have liked, because he was a foreigner and untouchable. But he would keep Helen and her riches. Paris could go back to Troy, but only with a phantom copy of her.

  The way Herodotus saw it, Homer was perfectly aware of this episode in Helen’s story and lets us know as much when he speaks of “the Sidon women’s embroidered veils, which godlike Paris brought back across the vast sea from Sidon, on that voyage when he carried off the noble Helen.” But then why doesn’t the poet ever mention it? Especially when one considers how essential an element it is, because it means that the Trojans knew they didn’t have Helen within their walls at all, but only a phantom. For ten years the war had raged around an absent woman, whom the Trojans would have been more than happy to hand over to the Achaeans, if only they had actually had her. Why on earth did Homer keep quiet about that extraordinary fact in the events leading up to the war? Herodotus answers: “because this story was not suitable for epic composition.” It is an explanation that leaves us dumbfounded. So the centuries-old accusation against Homer, that he was a craftsman of deceit, turns out to be true, does it? For overridingly literary motives, Homer kept quiet about the supreme scandal of the Trojan War: that blood had been spilled for a woman who was not actually there, for an impalpable ghost. For hundreds, even thousands of years, the poet’s story would be repeated, prolonging to the end of time the deceit that took the heroes to their deaths beneath the walls of Troy. What treachery could have prompted Homer to do such a thing?

  The epos, the epic poem, is a compact, reflecting surface, where the building bricks of formulaic locutions are laid one after the other. Homer did not want to reveal the secret about the nature of Helen, the fact that she was a phantom, because this would have created a vacuum in the surface of his poem. The name Helen must designate a being no less solid than the towering Diomedes. And it is precisely in this way that the phantom is sovereign, when it is hidden away, eating into the bodies from inside.

  Homer foresaw his great future enemy: Plato, evoker of copies, of unstoppable cascades of copies that would flood the world. And illuminating those copies with the art of reason, Plato would try to dissolve Helen’s enchantment, the enchantment of the unique, in their profusion. But the unique Helen shines more brightly than any other, precisely because she hides the simulacrum within herself, her phantom and the twins she was born with. Faced with the flood of copies Plato released upon the world, the eye would retreat, overcome by an ultimate sense of bewilderment. After which, it would turn elsewhere, toward something invisible and secure, beyond, where the bodiless prototypes are at rest: the ideas. For the unique woman, Plato’s idea is a disaster, because it aims to replace her. The two look at each other sidelong, like rivals, ready for anything, each examining the other’s makeup. To defend
herself, Helen relies on the brilliant surface, makes it throb as no other figure, however fleshy, could, since other figures had no doubles, and indeed as no idea ever could, since ideas have no pores: this is the supreme level of existence, mocking every other. The object of the dispute between Homer and Plato is the body of Helen. Both men won. When we see the goddess reproduced thousands upon thousands of times, the Platonic curse of the copy triumphs. But the goddess is a star and occupies a unique, unassailable place, in the sky.

  The Trojan War remains unique among all wars, “not just for the great passion involved, but likewise for how long it lasted and how much effort went into it.” Unique not just on earth but in heaven too. For the Twelve Olympians the war was “a greater and more terrible struggle than their fight with the Giants.” Thus writes Isocrates, spokesman for the mainstream of Athenian thought.

  But how could a cosmic event such as the Gigantomachy have troubled the gods less than a war between men? As the up and coming celestial generation, the Olympians had presented a united front against the giants. Yet, when they looked down at what was happening on the plains of Troy, a kind of civil war broke out among them: “they fought among themselves over that woman [Helen].” Unbearable to men, Helen’s beauty was likewise dangerous for the gods. The risk they ran was that of becoming too like men, to the point of engaging in that ultimate and peculiarly human of horrors, the civil war. Isocrates has a wonderful way of prettifying the truth. Hence he has nothing to add to this remark, which, however, stands out all the more coming from him.