The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  If the Trojan War was a dangerous business for gods as well as men, this was because it served to generate that mighty “upheaval” which once and for all shifted the civilized world’s center of gravity to Greece and the Greek city of Athens, the city of Theseus, the man who first recognized Helen, when she was a prepubescent girl and immediately decided that he couldn’t live without “her intimacy.” In the Athenian twilight, Helen appeared as the felix culpa that had allowed Greece to see off the opulent barbarians. Behind Greece’s transformation into the dominant civilization, which Isocrates was so proud of, stood not a founding hero, nor a king, nor a warrior, but an adulterous woman of whom only two qualities have been obsessively documented: her flair for betrayal and her beauty.

  In the vaster historical perspective, the adulteries disappeared but not the beauty. Helen had been the living proof of the Athenian theorem, according to which “beauty, by nature, rules over strength.” It is a sovereignty that comes into its own only when strength has pushed itself to the limit, in the slaughter of the heroes. It was then that beauty finally asserted itself, as it asserted itself over Theseus, that champion of physical strength, “sovereign of himself,” who left in Athenian customs a “trace of his sweetness.”

  More than acts of worship, it was beauty that offered a firm link between the life of the city and that of the Olympians. Mortals and immortals communicated through beauty, without any need for ceremonies. Even Zeus agreed to renounce the use of force and “humble himself” only when he found himself before the beauty of a mortal woman. And he agreed “always to hunt that nature with art and not with violence.” So highly did the Olympians value beauty that they even forgave “their own women when they were overcome by it.” When beauty seduced her into an earthly adventure, no goddess “ever tried to hide what had happened, as though it were something to be ashamed of.” On the contrary, rather than have people keep quiet about it, they wanted it to be celebrated. And this distinguishes the gods sharply from mortals, who have never been able to forgive their beautiful women. Helen lived surrounded by the love of a few men and the hate of both innumerable other men and all women. For centuries she would be subjected to insults and blasphemy. Yet she would always remain “the only woman Zeus allowed to call him father.” Thus Helen behaved with the same shamelessness as the Olympian goddesses when “she appeared one night to Homer and ordered him to write a poem about the warriors of Troy, wishing to make their deaths more enviable than those of other men; and it was partly thanks to Homer’s artfulness, but above all because of her, that that poem became so seductive [epaphróditon] and famous everywhere.” Rather than weep over her crimes, Helen, like a sovereign, commissioned the Iliad from Homer to celebrate them. And literature obeyed her command, assimilating Helen’s Aphrodite-like charm.

  These were the last years of freedom for Athens, and through Isocrates the city recounted its history. His speech on Helen seems to go straight on into the Panathenaicus, that grandiose celebration of the declining Athens. Isocrates, “the most modest of orators,” was ninety-four years old when he started writing it, and he worked on it for three years, fighting illness all the while. Then, when news of the defeat at Chaeronea came, he decided to starve himself to death. The Macedonians would soon have conquered Attica, as the peninsula’s eastern enemies had so often tried to do and failed. “Some say that he died on the ninth day of his abstinence from food; others say on the fourth, the day they held the funerals for those who had fallen at Chaeronea.”

  Behind what the Greeks called eídōlon, which is at once the idol, the statue, the simulacrum, the phantom, lies the mental image. This fanciful and insubstantial creature imitates the world and at the same time subjects it to a frenzy of different combinations, confounding its forms in inexhaustible proliferation. It emanates a prodigious strength, our awe in the face of what we see in the invisible. It has all the features of the arbitrary, of what is born in the dark, from formlessness, the way our world was perhaps once born. But this time the chaos is the vast shadowy canvas that lies behind our eyes and on which phosphenic patterns constantly merge and fade. Such constant formation of images occurs in each one of us in every instant. But these are not the only peculiarities of the phenomenon. When the phantom, the mental image, takes over our minds, when it begins to join with other similar or alien figures, then little by little it fills the whole space of the mind in an ever more detailed and ever richer concatenation. What initially presented itself as the prodigy of appearance, cut off from everything, is now linked, from one phantom to another, to everything.

  At one extreme of the mental image lies our amazement at form, at its self-sufficient and sovereign existence. At the other lies our amazement at the chain of connections that reproduce in the mind the necessity of the material world. It is hard to see those two opposite points in the phantom’s spectrum. To see them simultaneously would be unbearable. For the Greeks, Helen was the embodiment of that vision, beauty hatched from the egg of necessity.

  The tension between Helen’s body and Helen’s phantom was too strong: after Homer the Greeks were no longer able to hold the two together. The first sign of breakdown came with Stesichorus: after writing his Helen, in which she is presented as “bigamous and trigamous, a betrayer of men,” he had to produce a poem in her defense after she blinded him in revenge. In Homer, body and phantom existed tacitly side by side: after Homer, the knot that held them together in a single being was gradually loosened, until finally it came apart. On the one hand, there would be the guilty woman, “with her many lovers,” “sold over and over for her beauty,” like the commonest hetaera. On the other, a Helen who had been the victim of divine malice and who waited in Egypt for the return of Menelaus while rejecting the advances of the local king, another Penelope almost.

  Euripides dedicated two tragedies—Helen and The Trojan Women—to this two-faced heroine, illuminating first one side, then the other. The plays mark the earliest emergence of that grim matrimonial morality on which all melodrama would later be based. Helen’s ill-omened adultery, with its wildly disproportionate consequences, would thus go on and on gripping audiences right to the end, right up to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Hofmannsthal-Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten.

  Helen resembled her two brothers, Castor and Pollux. She had a “simple spirit” (whatever that might mean), mild manners, splendid hair, a beauty spot between her eyebrows, a small mouth, perfect breasts. In Lindos she consecrated an amber cup that exactly covered one of them. When he burst into Troy to kill her, “they say that no sooner had he glimpsed Helen’s naked breasts than Menelaus dropped his sword.”

  All her life Helen did nothing but show herself off and betray. We know little about how she felt, and what we do know is subject to doubt, because she had such a talent for mimicry (another of Aphrodite’s gifts) that they used to call her Echo. So she could easily have faked anything she wanted to. She brought nothing new to mankind, not even the disasters she caused. As Horace says, with the dismissive dispatch of the Quirites: “the cunt had been a terrible provoker of wars long before Helen came on the scene.” So even though some do grant her “skill in tapestry,” and even if she did (like a host of others) learn “many doctrines” from the learned Egyptians, Helen nevertheless remains the least virtuous of beings one could imagine. Maybe she had no psychology. And maybe it was impossible for her to have one. If she weeps, as she does on the Scaean Gate, a veil, dazzling as Zeus’s thunderbolts, hides her tears. The only thing she cared about was appearance, and hence poetry too. When she arrived in Mycenae with Menelaus and found the corpse of her sister, Clytemnestra, throat freshly slashed by Orestes, Helen did, as a sign of grief, cut the ends of her hair, but not so much as to risk making herself ugly. Not only did she compel Homer to write about her but, as one charming Byzantine author would later claim, she actually composed a poem about the Trojan War herself, which Homer then used for his own.

  Napoleon began as a novelist: Helen wished to en
d up as the narrator of her own life. In any event, there must have been a profound affinity between her and poetry, for no woman in literature has ever been so exalted and so savaged. The chorus of Euripides’ Cyclops speaks of her thus: “So then, when you’d got your hands on the girl, did you take turns at balling her, seeing that she likes swapping husbands?”

  Nemesis fled to the ends of the earth to escape Zeus, transforming herself into one animal after another, just as the manifest flees and scatters before being caught and pinned down by its principle. The same sequence of flight with metamorphoses followed by rape is repeated when Peleus chases Thetis and finally couples with her in the form of a cuttlefish. The repetition of a mythical event, with its play of variations, tells us that something remote is beckoning to us. There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event, just as there is no such thing as the isolated word. Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order, covered in seaweed.

  Those two marine rapes, preceded by animal metamorphoses, stand out among hundreds of amorous adventures, just as the solitary children born from them stand out amid all others: Helen and Achilles, the two unique ones. Helen was unique in being Zeus’s only daughter on an earth swarming with the god’s bastard sons. Achilles was unique in that he was born to substitute for the truly unique one: that son Thetis never bore who would have replaced Zeus. And if Achilles, the unique one, is also a substitute for the unique one, this points to the fact that the realm of substitutions contains within itself the realm of the unique, without which, however, it could have neither meaning nor intensity. The most archaic form of the amorous chase, still close to the realm of perennial metamorphosis, was thus only a hairbreadth away from the most modern of dangers, that of the dawning of a post-Olympian era.

  Having brought about the existence of Helen and Achilles, Zeus realized that he had already stretched the potential of his realm to the limit. Helen and Achilles had made their appearance; now nothing could prevent the consequences. But the apparition was to be a darting flash and no more. The blaze of Troy would consume them. After that, they could safely be allowed to proceed to the innocuous Blessed Isles. Or maybe they could get together on Leuke, as phantoms. But the world would never again know that tension, so insidious to the gods and for mortals unbearable, except in their memories, their poetry. We have mentioned four realms here: the realm of perennial metamorphosis is that of every beginning, when the word has not yet detached itself from the thing, nor the mind from the matter; the realm of substitution is the world of the digit, above all the digit as sign, as incessant substitution; the realm of the unique is the world that always eludes the clutches of language, the very appearing of the irrepeatable; the realm of Zeus is that of the Greek stories, of which we are still a part.

  In Eratosthenes’ version, Nemesis’s long flight came to an end in the sea off Rhamnus in Attica, when Zeus the swan settled on the wild duck. That was the only time Nemesis would ever play a passive role. From then on, and for hundreds, thousands of years, she would appear as a young woman, of calm and grave expression, roaming all over the earth, treading, as often as not, on lifeless corpses. That remote animal scene in a wilderness of sea, unwatched by any eye, is the only episode of her life we know about. It was also the greatest exploit of Zeus’s reign: that of having forced necessity to bring forth beauty.

  When the inhabitants of Rhamnus decided to consecrate a sanctuary to Nemesis, they commissioned Phidias to sculpt a giant statue of the goddess. Some claim that the Rhamnus Nemesis was in fact an Aphrodite sculpted by Agoracritus, Phidias’s pupil and lover. Others say that Phidias allowed the sculpture to be passed off as the work of his lover. Either way, the statue would be famous for centuries. Varro preferred it above all others. A fragment of the head has been discovered; the rest we must reconstruct from descriptions and coins. So the base of the statue showed Leda leading a reluctant Helen toward her real mother, Nemesis. But what was the relationship between mother and daughter? We know a great deal about Helen, whereas only a few details have come down to us about the divine figure of Nemesis, and even these are often enigmatic. This goddess of the offense that boomerangs back on its perpetrator must have been very beautiful if people could mistake her for Aphrodite. Herself the great enemy of hubris, she gave birth to a daughter whose very body was an offense and in doing so provoked the most magnificent unfolding of hubris in all of Greek history: the Trojan War.

  In one hand Nemesis held a designer’s square, or a pair of reins, or an apple branch. The wheel of destiny stood beside her and could become the wheel of her griffin-drawn chariot. She also held the urn of destiny. “Queen of motives and arbitress of all things,” she had always possessed the power to bind men in the “never-to-be-loosened net of necessity” (necessitatis insolubili retinaculo vinciens). Often Nemesis would lift a hand to her shoulder, as if to adjust her tunic. And often she bowed her head, eyes on her breast, as though deep in thought. Some of the ancients said that when she did this she was spitting into her tunic to ward off bad luck. Phidias (or Agoracritus) sculpted a handsome crown on her head with representations of stags and of Nike, goddess of victory. She held a decorated goblet in her hand showing figures of Negroes. When Pausanias saw the statue, he was puzzled by this goblet. He wasn’t convinced by the explanations people gave him, that it showed a group of Ethiopians, because Nemesis’s father was Oceanus and the Ethiopians lived near Oceanus. In a doggedly determined digression on the Ethiopians, he demonstrates that such a supposition was baseless. But he didn’t dare to suggest an alternative and moved on. Other classical authors found it equally difficult to account for all Nemesis’s attributes. The designer’s square stood for the notion of measure, the cosmic rule that punishes every excess, but what was that aphrodisian apple branch about? And the impressive stags around her forehead? And why that frequently repeated gesture of raising a hand to one shoulder, where she had a buckle in the shape of a griffin, her favorite animal? Was it to cover herself better, or to undo the buckle?

  Nemesis came from Asia Minor. Before arriving in Rhamnus, she was worshiped in Smyrna. Above the cult’s statues were hung the three golden Charites, by Bupalus. And in Smyrna we find that Nemesis was not just one figure. Here the faithful worshiped two identical Nemeses. One day Alexander the Great went hunting on Mount Pagus. On his way back, he stopped to rest under a large plane tree near the sanctuary of the two Nemeses. And two identical women appeared to him in a dream. They were looking at each other, and each had a hand on her tunic buckle, one the left hand, the other the right, as though in a mirror. They told him to found a new Smyrna beyond the Meles, the river “with the finest water of all, rising in a cavern where it is said Homer composed his poems.” Alexander obeyed.

  But why should Nemesis, this guardian of the cosmic law, which is intrinsically indivisible, appear as two figures? Perhaps here we have found our way back to the place where the phantom began its long journey. Helen was born with the Dioscuri twins. She was the unique one; she brought together in a single body all the beauty that in the normal way of things would have been shared out equally among everybody in obedience to the némein that many of the ancients had even then linked to Nemesis. But right from the egg she hatched out of, Helen was also pursued by duplication, which reigns within the phantom. And it wasn’t just a question of her twin brothers; her mother was also split into two figures. Now, as her mother, Leda, took her toward her other mother, her real mother, Helen realized that Nemesis too had a double. Not only beauty itself, but likewise the destiny of being double, the realm of the phantom, all these things can be traced back to that Asiatic mother with the mysterious gesture, the woman Zeus chose to generate his only daughter to live among men.

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  (photo credit 5.1)

  HEROPHILE, DEMOPHILE, SABBE: SUCH are the names of the Sibyls that have come down to us. From Palestine to the Tro
ad they left a few scattered remains, and sometimes verses. One day, converging from every corner of the Mediterranean, they all climbed toward Delphi, which was “difficult to get to even for a strong man.” Herophile prophesied the coming of Helen, “how she would grow up in Sparta to be the ruination of Asia and Europe.” In her verses she sometimes calls herself Artemis, and she also claimed to be Apollo’s sister, or his daughter. Some permanent bond linked her to Apollo Smintheus, the Apollo of the Rat, harbinger of the plague. You can still find Herophile’s tomb in the Troad, among the trees of the wood sacred to Apollo Smintheus, and the epitaph says: “I lie close to the Nymphs and to Hermes. / I have not lost my sovereignty.”

  In the latter days of Delphi, the Pythia was selected the same way a priest’s housekeeper is: that is, she had to be over fifty. But originally she had been a young girl chosen from among all the girls of Delphi, and she had worn a simple girl’s tunic without a gold hem. One day Echecrates, the Thessalian, saw the virgin prophesying, was seized by passion, carried the girl off, and raped her. After which the people of Delphi introduced the age limit for the prophetess, although she continued to dress as a little girl. But the situation had been very different in more ancient times. Then the Sibyls came from far away and chanted their prophesies from a rock, later to be hemmed in between the Bouleuterion and the Portico of the Athenians.

  In a state of divine possession, they spoke in impeccable verse. In fact, it was only now that men realized what perfect speech could be, since the hexameter was Apollo’s gift to Phemonoe, his daughter, his mountain Nymph, his first Pythia. The god knew that power came from possession, from the snake coiled around the water spring. But that wasn’t enough for Apollo: his women, his soothsaying daughters, must reveal not only the enigmas of the future but verse itself. Poetry thus arrived on the scene as the form structuring those ambiguous words that people came to hear to help them make decisions about their lives, words whose meaning they often appreciated only when it was too late. And Apollo didn’t want slovenly shamans but young virgins from the grottoes of Parnassus, girls still close to the Nymphs, and speaking in well-turned verse.