The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Every day, at dawn, Ion would begin to sweep the area in front of Apollo’s temple in Delphi. He picked up the leftovers from the sacrifices, watched the hawks circling down from Parnassus, and threatened them with his bow before they could peck at the golden rooftops. Carefully, he laid out fresh olive garlands and poured buckets of cold water on the temple floor. It was a chore he liked, a humble, solemn duty. Everything had to look clean and whole for when the crowd of visitors and those who came to consult the oracle would swarm up the twisting path to the sanctuary. This temple of prophecy perched high up on the rocks was all Ion had ever seen of the world. And he imagined he would always live here, as though in an eternal orphanage. In the end he was only alive at all because one day, at this same time, in the early morning, the Pythia had found a basket in the temple gardens and, with strange benevolence, picked it up. With similarly strange benevolence, the god let the little boy grow up, playing among the altars. Then they made him guardian of Apollo’s treasures. He knew nothing of his father or mother, he was less than a slave, a nobody, and nobody’s child; yet he thought of Apollo as his father and of the Pythia as his mother. He owed his life, he felt, to them alone. Nothing else mattered, or even existed for him really. Young, pure, devout, cheerful, Ion welcomed the visitors, showed them the various rooms, the various ceremonies. But the best time of the day was this silent hour at dawn, when he swept and cleaned and all the while looked about him.

  One was never alone at Delphi: hundreds of sculpted and painted figures greeted you wherever you went. By now he knew them one by one and could recount all their adventures. Heracles, the Giants, Athena, the thyrsus, the Gorgons … He would think about their struggles and flights, about those monsters, those weapons, those embraces, those ambushes. He would think about the gods, and he talked to no one. Visitors would tell him the most awful things that were happening in the world outside, the world he had never seen. But as he listened, Ion would have a faint smile on his face, and he thought how he had heard it all before. For the tales they told him were all repetitions of the silent stories sculpted and painted round about him, dull repetitions when set against the temple’s pediments flooded with the day’s first light. And perhaps somewhat less malign too. A swan was waddling up to the altar, on the lookout, like the hawks, for sacrificial crumbs. Cheerful as ever, Ion chased the creature away, told him to fly off to Delos. Everything in Delphi must be fragrant, completely free from the wear and tear that man brings with him, not so much as a footprint on the ground, inviolate, like Parnassus at dawn.

  Then he set to thinking again: the gods were the example and model of every evil, and it wasn’t fair to blame men for imitating actions the gods had committed before them. His favorite mental game was to try to recall, as exhaustively as possible, all the rapes attributed to Zeus and Poseidon. But there was always one that got away. And Ion chuckled to himself. He didn’t realize that he himself was part of those stories, didn’t realize that he was the fruit of one of those rapes, but one by Apollo, the god Ion thought of as his real father. And he was.

  The chain of Erichthonius, majestic heirloom of the ruling house of Athens, was passed down from generation to generation. When Erechtheus gave it to Creusa, the girl wore it on her wrist like a bracelet. And on her white wrists, one day as she was gathering crocuses on her own, lost in thought on the northern slopes of the Acropolis, Creusa felt the iron grip of Apollo. All she saw of the god was a glimpse of flashing light from his hair. Something of that light was picked up in the saffron flowers she had gathered in the fold of her tunic, over her lap. Creusa screamed: “Oh, Mother!” and that scream was the only sound to be heard as Apollo dragged her to Pan’s cave a little farther up the slope. The god never let go his grip on the girl’s wrists. Creusa felt the links of the bracelet being forced into her flesh. Apollo stretched her on the ground in the dark, opening her arms wide. It was the fastest and most violent of all his loves. Not a word said, not a moan.

  When Apollo had gone, Creusa lay motionless in the dark, hurt, and determined to hurt the god in return. She swore no one would know. Months later she gave birth in the cave, in the exact place where the god had held her with her arms outspread. Then she wrapped the tiny Ion in swaddling clothes and laid him in a round basket on a piece of embroidery she had sewn as a child: it showed the head of Medusa, the features vague and clumsy. The baby’s screams as the hawks and wild beasts came to devour him were the only voice that might get through to the hateful, impassive god, busy strumming his lyre; it was the only outrage Creusa could commit to reproduce the outrage of her “bitter nuptials.”

  Apollo the Oblique tangled up the threads that were Creusa’s and Ion’s lives. Indeed he so arranged matters that mother and son were only to recognize each other after the mother had tried to kill her son, and the son his mother. To kill Ion, Creusa used the lethal drop of Medusa’s blood still sealed in her bracelet. But the drop fell to the ground, and only a greedy dove was killed. To kill Creusa, Ion was about to violate the sacred law that protected supplicants in the temple. But his devotion made him hesitate. Pinned against the altar of Apollo, Creusa awaited her death at the hands of her son, whom she still imagined to be some nameless guardian of Delphi. Then the Pythia came in. She was holding a basket. She opened it and from among the swaddling clothes and wickerwork, still undamaged by mold, took out a clumsy piece of childish embroidery showing Medusa’s head in the middle of a piece of cloth fringed with snakes, as in the aegis.

  At which the mother recognized her son. Now Ion could become king of Athens. For he, like Erichthonius, had lain beside Medusa’s head. He too had been wrapped in the aegis. Of course, this was not, as in Erichthonius’s case, the aegis Athena had warmed at her breast but a common piece of cloth embroidered by a little girl. But that was in line with the way the world was going. A unique blazon of unbearable intensity gradually rippled outward in a thousand copies sculpted on the pediments of temples or embroidered on shawls. And, as the copies multiplied, the original power was diluted. Even the gifts of the gods were subject to the passing of time, lost their brilliance: Creusa had wasted the lethal drop sealed in her bracelet, and the other drop, the healing drop that contained “the nutrients of life,” she forgot about. Nobody ever bothered to use it. Ion and Creusa had other things on their minds now: they thought of things divine, of how one way or another they always come too late, “yet are not powerless in their conclusion [télos].”

  The hawks that flew over Delphi would drop turtles on the rocks to break their hard shells. Croesus reigned far away from Delphi, on the other side of a wide sea, and felt, like many others, spied upon from that nest of priests perched way up on the mountain. It occurred to him to put the Pythia and those elusive figures around her people called “the saintly ones” to the test. He challenged the Delphic oracle, together with six of the other most famous oracles in the world, to divine what he, Croesus, would be doing the hundredth day after the departure of his messengers.

  The messengers came back with their sealed answers. All wrong. But the Pythia had answered in hexameters even before she’d heard the question: “I can count the grains of sand and the waves. / I hear the dumb. I understand the silent. / I smell a smell of giant turtle. / It boils in bronze with lamb’s flesh. / There’s bronze beneath it, and bronze above covering it.” Now, on the day in question, Croesus had in fact cut up “a turtle and a lamb, and with his own hands put them to boil in a bronze cooking pot with a bronze lid.” He claimed to have thought up this charade because he felt it would be the most unlikely of all. A pathetic lie. The scene was a mute message, in which Croesus mimed exactly what had been going on back in the sanctuary since time immemorial: sitting on the lid of a bronze tripod, swathed in smoke, the Pythia gave her answers to whoever came to consult her. But did that smoke rise only from the crevice in the ground beneath the tripod, or from the tripod itself as well? Right from the beginning, lamb’s meat had been mixed with turtle meat beneath that lid. The lamb was the lamb t
he Thyiads, followers of Dionysus, had torn apart only a little farther up the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The turtle meat had been separated from the shell that Apollo used, as Hermes had taught him, to make his lyre and play, again on the slopes of Parnassus, to his Thriai. Apollo and Dionysus boiled together in the caldron: that was the mixture, the sharp, sharp smell of Delphi.

  Far more than the strangled voice of the Pythia or the crevice in the ground archaeologists have searched for in vain, the source of Delphic power was a three-legged bronze caldron protected by animal masks, where something was simmering away. Something offered, sacrificed. From the sacrifice came the voice, the meaning. That was the primordial talisman, the object Apollo’s enemies would want to steal, to rob him of his voice. Pythias or priests were two a penny, but power resided in a bronze caldron protected by griffins and caked with meat. The Pythia sat on the lid to demonstrate her possession. And the oracle would fall into decline the day Delphi was stripped of all the innumerable tripods that had been consecrated there. Nor were they taken just for the metal. The plunderers were absolutely determined to strip of all its talismans the place that for so long had radiated their power.

  Thus in challenging the oracle from his kingdom far away, Croesus had wanted to show that not only was he able to fill it, as he had done, with gifts of images of lions and of girls bringing bread, all in solid gold, but also that he knew where its power base lay. Most likely the oracle was not impressed, since every oracle wants to know but not to be known. When Croesus consulted Delphi before taking the most momentous step in his long reign—the war against Cyrus of Persia—the Pythia’s answer was perfect in its ambiguity: “You will destroy a great empire.” Croesus thought the great empire was Cyrus’s, whereas in fact the oracle was referring to his own. Old and beaten, enslaved by Cyrus, Croesus chose to send to Delphi a last gift, his chains. No king had ever had, nor would have, such a long and intimate relationship with the oracle.

  When accused of ingratitude, Delphi’s answer to Croesus showed a level of pathos and sense of compassion quite unusual for the oracle. As though to justify himself, Apollo told this extremely rich king that he had done everything he could to wring out of destiny what little destiny would concede. He had managed, for example, to delay the fall of Sardis for three years. It was one of those rare occasions when the god was sincere. With a gesture of humility almost, he revealed that he reigned only over what was surplus, over the excess that destiny left to his control. And this he had indeed given to Croesus, just as Croesus had given Apollo another kind of surplus, the thousands of slaughtered animals and thousands of pounds of gold he had sent up to Delphi.

  But isn’t the surplus life itself? Isn’t life always a fragment of life, an unhoped for delay in the death sentence, like the three years Croesus was granted, like the extraordinary moment when, with a sudden rainstorm, Apollo put out the flames of Croesus’s pyre? But one can go so far and no further. As a last gift the king bequeathed his chains. And those were not a surplus. Faced with those, even the god was helpless.

  In his dialogue between Croesus and Solon, Herodotus sets up the first verbal duel between Asia and Europe. Of all potentates, Croesus is the one who possesses the most gold. Solon is chief legislator in Athens, and since the Athenians have committed themselves to maintaining the law unchanged for ten years, he sets out on a ten-year journey. Then Solon doesn’t trust the Athenians. “That is the real reason why he went away, even if he claimed he wanted to see the world.” One of the curiosities the world has to offer is Croesus’s palace, where Solon duly arrives.

  Croesus is eager for Solon to recognize him as not only the most powerful but also the happiest of men. Solon responds by citing, as an example of a happy man, an unknown Athenian who died, old, in battle. Solon doesn’t mean to contrast the common man with the king. That would be banal. He is explaining the Greek paradox as far as happiness is concerned: that one arrives at it only in death. Happiness is an element of life which, before it can come into being, demands that life disappear. If happiness is a quality that sums up the whole man, then it must wait until a man’s life is complete in death.

  This paradox doesn’t exist in isolation. On the contrary, it is only one of the many paradoxes of wholeness to which the Greeks were so sensitive. Their basis can be found in the language itself: telos, the Greek word par excellence, means at once “perfection,” “completion,” “death.” What we hear in Solon’s voice is the Greek diffidence toward the happy man’s obtuseness, and the national passion for logic. But it is the elegance with which he puts his case that strikes us most. Never has such an effective circumlocution been found for telling a truth that, if told straight, would be too brutal, and perhaps not even true anymore: that happiness does not exist.

  By the time the Hellenistic age was ushered in, the open space in front of Apollo’s temple in Delphi had grown crowded indeed. On the left, the bronze wolf donated by the people of Delphi kept guard. On the right, Praxiteles’ golden Phryne shone out among numerous Apollos (commissioned by the Epidaurians or Megarians after some victory), as though the hetaera were still conversing with her admirers; a conversation made possible by her lover, Praxiteles, who had sculpted her body. One of those Apollos was enormous: the Apollo Sitalkas rose above a column to a height of seventy feet, more than double that of the temple columns. Then there was a bronze palm tree with, next to it, a gilded Athena from which a flock of crows had pecked away part of the gilding when the Athenians set out on their Sicilian expedition. Or at least so Clytodemos would have us believe. There were also numerous statues of generals from various places, as well as the bronze donkey of the Ambracians and the sacrificial procession, again in bronze, of the Sicyonians: this was their way of fulfilling a vow that would otherwise have obliged them to sacrifice an enormous number of animals to Apollo every year, so many they would have been ruined. In bronze, their sacrifice became eternal. Beyond Phryne stood another solid gold statue whose model owed nothing to matters military: this was Gorgias of Leontini, the defender of Helen, and the man who had preached the supreme power of the word.

  In 279 B.C. the Gauls, under Brennus, reached Thermopylae, the “hot gates” of Greece, with just one thought in mind: to sack Delphi. They weren’t interested in anything else. They didn’t care about Athens, or Thebes, or Sparta, just the treasures of Delphi. Even Brennus, in the remote North, had heard tell of the “cave of the god that spewed up gold.” To the Greeks it seemed that history was repeating itself, though stripped of its glory this time. Instead of the great Xerxes’ Persians with their pointed helmets and colorful Oriental pomp, these new invaders were bands of blond “beasts, full of dash and fury, but brainless,” advancing out of sheer impetuosity, even when shot through with arrows and javelins, so long as their madness, their berserk, was upon them. To oppose them, instead of the Spartans of Leonidas, were a rabble of desperate provincials, Aetolians, Boeotians, and Phocians. The defenders were aware that the war could end in only two ways: either they won or they would be exterminated. It wasn’t a war for liberty, as it had been against the Persians, but for survival.

  In the first battle at Thermopylae, the Greeks once again managed to hold out, while many of the Celts were swallowed up by the marshes: how many we shall never know. At this Brennus decided to attack the Greek flank to draw forces away from the center. Forty thousand infantry and a few hundred cavalry stormed into Aetolia. They massacred all the males they could find, including newborn babies. “They raped the dying and the dead.” But less than half of the Gauls who had set off on the expedition returned to the main camp at Thermopylae. Brennus was undeterred: this time he went around the Greeks under cover of fog. Just before they could be completely encircled, the Greeks withdrew toward their hometowns. Brennus didn’t even wait for his own men to regroup before ordering the march on Delphi. Perhaps that was the last time the god of the tripod made his power known. In reply to the terrorized people of Delphi, the oracle told them it would look after itself.
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  Brennus’s men arrived to find Delphi protected only by the Phocians and a few Aetolians, the rest being busy in their own lands. Also waiting for them, however, was a divine and invisible coalition. Apollo had gone for help to Poseidon and Pan, the earlier divinities of the place, whom he himself had eclipsed. The ground the Gauls advanced across quaked every day, shaken deep below by Poseidon. And, fighting beside the Greeks, their enemies would see the shades of the Hyperborean heroes, Hyperocus and Laodocus, together with the White Virgins. Thus the mythical North of Apollo took on the historical North of biology. Even Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, whom Apollo had killed in his temple in Delphi, as years before in another temple he had killed Achilles, fought among the lightning bolts that consumed the wicker shields of the Gauls.

  Delphi’s entire past, a long saga of murders and treachery, an arcane and seething history, rallied around that day to offer an impregnable front of gods, ghosts, and soldiers. And if the day brought horror to the Gauls, that horror only grew when night fell. Pan came down from the Corycian Cave and sowed terror among the barbarian troops, for “they say that terror without reason is the work of Pan.” No sooner had twilight faded than the Gauls heard a drumming of hooves. They split into two ranks and faced each other. “So delirious with panic were they, that each of the ranks imagined they were facing Greeks, wearing Greek armor and speaking Greek, and this madness brought upon them by the god led to a huge massacre of Gauls.” More of Brennus’s soldiers were slain by one another that night than had died during the battle. Brennus himself was wounded, without hope, and chose to die, drinking wine unmixed with water.