The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  There was a drought that year in Delphi. Followed by famine. The people knew they couldn’t survive with the food they had left, so they decided to go, all of them, with their women and children, to the gates of the king’s palace to beg for food. The king appeared and looked at them. Next to him his servants had a few meager baskets. The king scooped out barley and vegetables and handed them out to the people. He began with the local worthies. As he drew closer to the poorer people, his servants dug deeper and deeper into the baskets, pulling out smaller and smaller portions. Finally the baskets were empty, and there were still many poor people waiting. One of them, an orphan girl, Charila, who was there on her own with no one to look after her, stepped forward to ask the king for food. Grim faced, the king took off a sandal and flung it in Charila’s face. The orphan went back to stand in line with the poor. Then everybody went home, hungry.

  Charila left Delphi. Walking across the slopes of the Phaedriades, she found a place that fell away into the dark green of a ravine. Beside a tall tree, Charila undid her virgin’s girdle and tied it in a noose around her neck. Then she hung herself from a branch. In Delphi the famine showed no sign of abating. Epidemics were raging now too, making an easy prey of wasted bodies. The king went to consult the Pythia. “Appease Charila, the virgin suicide” came the response. But the king didn’t know who Charila was. He went down to Delphi and called an assembly of the people. Who was Charila? No one knew. Could she be some mythical figure everybody had forgotten about? Or was this “virgin suicide” a riddle, hardly a novelty for the oracle? Everybody in Delphi was obsessed by the name Charila until one of the Thyiads, the priestesses of Dionysus, remembered the king’s angry gesture, the thrown sandal, and connected it with the fact that the girl hadn’t been seen since. The priestess knew Charila because she was soon to have become one of them. She would have followed them up Parnassus, in the December frosts, and perhaps one day the people of Delphi would have found her in the thick of the blizzard, her cloak “stiff as a board, so that it broke when you opened it.” But wrapped in that cloak would be the body of a Thyiad, resisting the icy cold with her torrid excitement. The priestess left Delphi with other Thyiads. In an inaccessible place, amid the dark green foliage, she saw Charila’s body, still hanging from a branch, swinging in the wind. The name Thyiads means “the rustling ones.” Some call them the Brides of the Wind. With loving care, they took the girl’s body down from the tree. Then they laid it on the ground and buried it. Back in Delphi, the Thyiads explained how they had found Charila. Now she would have to be appeased, through expiation. But how?

  The highest ranking Delphic theologians, the five Hosioi, the college of the Thyiads, the king: all mulled the problem over. They must find the right formula to respond to the Pythia’s command. In the end, they decided to combine a sacrifice with an act of purification. But how could they make a sacrifice in a time of famine? The Delphic theologians knew that a sacrifice was a sign of imbalance in life with respect to the necessary: imbalance in terms of surplus but also in terms of deficiency. In both cases, whether it be dissipation or renunciation, there was a part of life that had to be expelled before one could achieve a balanced distribution, that state, as the Apollonian precept put it, of “nothing too much.” By leaving out the poor when he distributed the food, the king had expelled them from life. Striking Charila, he had made a sacrifice without ceremony. Charila had raised that gesture to consciousness by hanging herself. But still her sacrifice had passed unnoticed. Decimated by starvation and epidemics, the people of Delphi didn’t register her disappearance, hadn’t realized that Charila was not just another victim of the famine but a sacrifice. They had forgotten her because she was too perfect a victim: a virgin, an orphan, overlooked by everyone, insulted by the king. And victims who are too perfect scare people, because they illuminate an unbearable truth. The Delphic theologians were profound inquirers into the art of dialectics and hypothetical syllogisms, if only because they were faithful to the god “who loves the truth above all things.” The ultimate goal for them was not mindless devotion but knowledge. To expiate a crime didn’t mean to do something that was the opposite of that crime but to repeat the same crime with slight variations in order to immerse oneself in guilt and bring it to consciousness. The crime lay not so much in having done certain things but in having done them without realizing what one was doing. The crime lay in not having realized that Charila had disappeared.

  So the people of Delphi organized their ceremony. The citizens came to the king to ask for food, as they had done the day Charila was with them. The king distributed the food, but this time gave a portion to everybody, even the foreigners. Then an effigy of Charila was brought out from the crowd. The king took off his sandal and flung it in the effigy’s face. The head priestess of the Thyiads then took the effigy, tied a rope around its neck, and carried it to where Charila had been found. She hung the effigy from the branches of the tree, letting it swing in the wind. Then the effigy was buried next to Charila’s body. That ceremony marked the end of the famine. From then on the ritual would be repeated every eight years. But, just as the people of Delphi hadn’t realized that Charila was gone until the lone voice of the Pythia reminded them, history would soon forget Charila and the ceremonies that were held for centuries in her name, until another lone voice, that of Plutarch, priest of Delphi, mentioned her again.

  By now she had become one of the many “Greek Questions,” one of the hundreds of fragments of the past whose meaning and origin no one could remember. Patient and erudite, Plutarch answered the question that he himself had put: “Who was Charila in Delphi?” His answer is the only trace of the little orphan’s life that now remains to us.

  VI

  (photo credit 6.1)

  SINCE OLYMPIA IS THE IMAGE OF HAPPINESS, it could only have appeared in the Golden Age. The men who lived at that time built a temple to Kronos in Olympia. Zeus hadn’t even been born. In fact the first to run races in Olympia were the guardians Rhea gave the baby Zeus to when she wanted to hide him. The five Curetes, Heracles among them, came to Olympia from Crete, and Heracles was the first to crown a winning athlete with a chaplet of wild olive. He had brought the plant from the extreme North, beyond the source of the Danube, brought it back for the sole purpose of providing shade for the winning post in Olympia. The shade and the winning post, that was Olympia forever: the supreme exposure and the most profound withdrawal, the perfect pendulum. But the generations passed, and between the reigns of Oxylus and Iphitus the Olympic games were abandoned, forgotten. “When Iphitus restored the games, people still couldn’t remember how they had been in ancient times; gradually they did remember, and each time they remembered something, they added it.” It is the very image of the Platonic process of learning: nothing is new, remembering is all. What is new is the most ancient thing we have. With admirable candor, Pausanias adds: “This can be demonstrated.” And he tells us when each memory surfaced: “At the eighteenth Olympiad, they remembered the pentathlon and wrestling.”

  Climbing the spiral staircase inside the temple took you to the upper galleries, where you could get a closer view of Phidias’s Zeus. To Quintilianus’s mind, this statue had “added something to the religion of men.” Its gold and ivory surfaces were broken only by gems, except on the throne, which also had some ebony. The drapery was strewn with animals and lilies. Zeus wore a crown of olive twigs and in his right hand held a Nike, goddess of victory, with a ribbon and a crown. Beneath each of the throne’s four feet were other small Nikes, like dancing elves. But something else was going on among those feet: winged Sphinxes carried off Theban youths in their claws, and Apollo and Artemis loosed their arrows at Niobe’s children again. And as it grew accustomed to the teeming dark, the eye would make out one new scene after another, sculpted on the cross-struts of the throne. The farther down you looked, the more figures you saw. Twenty-nine in all on the cross-struts: the Amazons, Heracles with his escort, Theseus. A boy is adjusting a ribbon on his forehe
ad: is it Pantarckes, Phidias’s young lover? You can’t go right up to the throne, because of the painted barriers, which again show Theseus and Heracles, and then Peirithous, Ajax, Cassandra, Hippodamia, Sterope, Prometheus, Penthesilea, Achilles, two Hesperides. Other beings sprout from the top of the throne: three Charites and three Hours. Then the eye moves back down to Zeus’s footstool and finds still more figures: Theseus yet again, and again the Amazons and golden lions. As one looks down even farther, at the base that supports the huge Zeus and his parasites, other scenes become apparent: Helios climbs onto his chariot, Hermes advances as Hestia follows, Eros greets Aphrodite as she rises from the waves and Peitho crowns her. Nor has the sculptor forgotten Apollo and Artemis, Athena and Heracles, Amphitryon and Poseidon, and Selene on a horse. A seated giant encrusted with creatures, Zeus was reflected in a floor of shiny black stone where oil flowed in abundance to preserve the ivory.

  No other statue was so admired by the Greeks, nor even by Zeus himself, who hurled an approving thunderbolt down on the black paving when Phidias finished the job and asked the god for a sign. Olympia’s chryselephantine Zeus was destroyed in a palace fire in Byzantium in the fifth century. All that remains are some Elean coins showing the statue, and the words of those who, like Callimachus and Pausanias, saw it and were impressed. Paulus Aemilius claimed that Phidias had given form to Homer’s Zeus.

  The moderns have been cowed and confused by these descriptions. Too many colors, too much Oriental pomp, the suspicion of a lapse of taste. Could Phidias, they wonder, in this, his most ambitious project, have tossed aside all the qualities so admired in the Parthenon friezes? The mistake of the moderns is to think of Phidias’s Zeus as a statue, in the sense in which Praxiteles’ Hermes is a statue. For it was something else. Shut away and sparkling in its temple cell, Phidias’s Zeus was closer to a dolmen, a bethel, a stone fallen from heaven, to which other gods and heroes clung in order to live. The gold and ivory seethed like an ants’ nest. Zeus didn’t exist except as a support for animals and lilies, arches and drapes, old scenes forever repeated. But Zeus was more than just the motionless guardian seated on his throne: Zeus was all those scenes, those deeds, muddled and shuffled about, rippling his body and throne in tiny shivers. Without meaning to, Phidias had illustrated that Zeus cannot live alone: without meaning to, he had represented the essence of polytheism.

  Olympia was happiness itself for the Greeks, who were experts in unhappiness. The dense green in the Peloponnese has a hallucinatory glow to it, a glow the more intense for being so rare, with something final about it. All the different species of green gather around Olympia, as once the athletes of every Greek-speaking settlement would come here to compete. The acid phosphorescence of the Aleppo pines, the darkly etched cypresses, the glassy streaked leaves of the lemon trees, the primordial bamboo—see them all against a background of gently contoured hills modeled by Poseidon’s thumb, the earthquake. The place was the gift of a man who became a river, Alpheus. Having forced a path between the bare, scorching peaks of Arcadia, having washed the slopes of Lykaion—mountain of wolves and cannibals on whose summit the sun casts never a shadow—the Alpheus finally astonishes when, emerging from the gorges of Cerynite, it broadens into the rolling slopes of a valley as dear to Zeus as the archaic Lykaion had once been hateful. The Greeks were not in the habit of mentioning nature to no end, but Pausanias extols the Alpheus on three separate occasions: “the greatest of rivers for the volume of water passing through it, and the most pleasing to the eye”; a river “legendary to lovers,” thanks to its origin; and finally, to Zeus’s mind, “the most exquisite of all rivers.”

  But who was Alpheus? A hunter. He saw the goddess-huntress Artemis, fell in love with her, and with vain mortal brashness began to follow her. All over Greece, the goddess heard those footsteps behind her and laughed. One night, in Letrinoi, not far from Olympia, she decided to celebrate a feast with her Nymphs. Before Alpheus caught up with them, goddess and Nymphs smeared their faces with clay. Alpheus saw whitish faces looming in the dark. Which was the goddess? He couldn’t say. So the hunter who had “mustered up the courage to attempt to rape” the goddess was forced to give up and “went away without having achieved his goal,” his ears smarting with the sound of shrill, mocking laughter. Yet never had Artemis, that most cruel of goddesses, been so kind to an admirer, nor would she be again. Instead of having him torn to pieces by his dogs, like Actaeon, who hadn’t even come near her, she let Alpheus walk off unharmed, and initiated. In Greek stories, smearing one’s face foreshadows a momentous and terrible event. The Titans smeared chalk on their faces before tearing Zagreus to pieces. But here, instead of being the prelude to carnage, the smearing serves to stave off the dire event. The virgin goddess avoids being abused precisely by making herself similar to her Nymphs. She does the opposite of what her initiates do: dress up and wear masks to look like the goddess. Artemis’s gesture dissolves an impending horror in laughter.

  Alpheus encounters the goddess and her Nymphs as a group of people wearing masks, or dead. And it is difficult to get your bearings among the masked and the dead; even goddesses can no longer be recognized with confidence, because here one has crossed the threshold of another world. The laughter that rang in the retreating Alpheus’s ears was, for the goddess, the greatest possible token of affection, an act of kindness. After all, she had demonstrated to this rash and ignorant man the elusive and insurmountable distance between woman and goddess: and all it had taken was a bit of clay. The huntress-goddess escapes all the more irretrievably when disguised as a woman.

  But Artemis wanted to protect the hunter. She couldn’t give him her body, so she chose a Nymph, Arethusa, as her substitute. And Alpheus began a second passionate chase. In the fury of flight, Arethusa crossed the sea and transformed herself into a freshwater spring near Syracuse. This time Alpheus could not renounce his love. The hunter became the river Alpheus, flowed out into the sea just before Pyrgos, and traveled, for hundreds of miles, right across the Ionian Sea as an underwater current. When he surfaced again with his frothy crown, he was in Sicily, near Arethusa. Where he mingled his own waters with the Nymph’s.

  Hence Olympia came into being thanks to Alpheus. Hence the Master of Olympia placed a slim, muscular young man with prominent rib cage in a corner of the eastern pediment of the temple to Zeus, making Alpheus the first river to appear in a Greek temple. Hence in Olympia people sacrificed to Artemis and Alpheus on the same altar. Hence in the Middle Ages the waters of Alpheus shifted their course so as to submerge the stones and offerings of Olympia and protect it in their silt.

  Alpheus was not a part of nature eager to become an affable allegorical figure, an old actor to be recycled one day in the lunettes of some Renaissance villa. No, Alpheus was that young man with the short hair and nervous spine depicted by the Master of Olympia, a man who would one day “transform himself into a river for love.” He was a hunter who one day decided to become nature. He was the only lover who, when his beloved turned to water, agreed to become water himself, without wanting to be held back by the boundaries of an identity. Thus he achieved a union no other man or woman had ever achieved, the union of two freshwater streams soon to plunge together into the sea. One eminent guarantor for the truth of the story of Alpheus was the oracle of Delphi, who celebrated the metamorphosis in some of her finest lines: “Somewhere, in the fog-bound plain of the sea, / Where Ortygia is, near Thrinakia, / Alpheus’s foaming mouth mingles / with the gushing spring of Arethusa.”

  Alpheus and Arethusa: water with water, the spring that gushes from the earth, the current that rises from the depths of the sea, the meeting of two lymphs that have traveled far, the ultimate erotic convergence, perennial happiness, no bastions against the world, gurgling speech. Between the waves of the Ionian and those of the Alpheus, the difference lies in the taste, and perhaps a slight variation of color. Between the water of Arethusa and the water of Alpheus, the only difference is in the foam on Alpheus’s crest as he ris
es from the sea. But the taste is much the same: both come from Olympia.

  The Greek activity par excellence was the shaping of molds. That’s why Plato was so intrigued by the modest craftsmen (dēmiourgoí) who plied this trade in Athens; that’s why he gave the name of their guild to the artificer of the whole world. In whatever walk of life, the Greeks were chiefly interested in shaping molds. They knew that, once made, those molds could be applied to an extremely wide range of materials. We think of the bourgeoisie as of something peculiarly modern, but when we describe it we are applying the mold of the mesótēs, which Aristotle developed in his Politics. When a company tries to impose a brand name, they are responding to a perception of the hierarchical supremacy of the týpos, the mold, over every other power.

  The image that comes closest to the ideas of Plato is to be seen in the molds for fragments of the drapery of Phidias’s Zeus found in the sculptor’s studio in Olympia: the material is neutral and the same throughout, only the curves of the folds vary. In the end it is what is cast that survives. We live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their molds. In the beginning was the mold.

  Mythical stories always lie at the foundation of something. But what they found can be either order or disorder. Greece split those stories up geographically with a sharp dividing line along the Gulf of Corinth. To the north, if we go back to the beginning, we find the slayers of monsters. Apollo for Delphi, Cadmus for Thebes, Theseus for Athens. And just as Apollo, model for all monster slayers, was also a musician and leader of the Muses, so Cadmus introduced the Phoenician alphabet into Greece, and Theseus brought together a few modest villages into a new entity, which from then on would be known as Athens. Common to all of them is the civilizing seal that stamps itself on an animal material.