The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Having recovered the talisman, and with it his power, and having thrown Thyestes out of Mycenae, Atreus, one would imagine, would be satisfied that the struggle had run its course, or at most would flare up again with Thyestes seeking revenge. Instead the conflict is raised to a higher power: it is the winner who wants to revenge himself on the loser, and what’s more wants his revenge to outdo all others. Giving the impression that he is eager to make up with his brother, Atreus invites him back to Mycenae. Thyestes returns and is welcomed with a sumptuous banquet. In a big bronze pot lashings of white meat are bubbling away in little chunks. Atreus chooses a few and offers them to his brother. So memorable is the stony stare on his face as he does so that ever afterward people will speak of making “Atreus eyes.” At the end of the banquet, Atreus has a servant come in. The servant carries a plate crammed with human hands and feet. Thyestes realizes he has been eating the flesh of his children. With a kick he turns over the table. And curses the house of Atreus.

  From this point on the vendetta between the two brothers loses all touch with psychology, becomes pure virtuosity, traces out arabesques. Thyestes disappears again, a horrified fugitive. There’s just one thing on his mind: how to invent a revenge that will outdo his brother’s, who in turn had thought up his with the intention of making it unbeatable. Thyestes looks to future generations now. It would be too simple to kill Atreus. He will have to get his son too, and his son’s son. At this point the gods come to his aid. On a pilgrimage to Delphi, Thyestes asks for Apollo’s advice. With perfect sobriety, the god replies: “Rape your daughter.” The avenger would be born from that rape. Pelopia, Thyestes’ daughter, had taken refuge at the house of King Thesprotus in Sicyon. She was a priestess of Athena. One night she was sacrificing to the goddess along with some other girls. Thyestes watched from behind a hedge. The priestesses were dancing around a sheep that had had its throat cut when Pelopia slipped in a pool of blood, staining her tunic. Thyestes saw her leave the others to go to a stream. She slid off the bloodstained tunic. It was the first time the father had seen how beautiful his daughter was naked. He leaped on that white body, covering his head with his cloak (or did he have a mask?). Pelopia fought furiously. The two rolled over on the ground. Thyestes managed to penetrate and empty his sperm into her. When it was over, Pelopia found herself alone again, holding the sword she had grabbed from her unknown assailant. That night Aegisthus was conceived, the man Homer would call “the blameless one.”

  Meanwhile, after Atreus had slaughtered Thyestes’ children, Mycenae had been afflicted by a terrible drought. An oracle claimed that the drought would only end when the fugitive Thyestes had returned. Atreus knew that Thyestes was staying with King Thesprotus. He went to Sicyon, but Thyestes had fled again after raping his daughter. At the court of Thesprotus, Atreus met a priestess of Athena and immediately fell in love with her. He asked the king for her hand, imagining that Pelopia was his daughter. Thesprotus chose not to enlighten him and granted him Pelopia’s hand. Atreus went back to Mycenae without his brother but with a new wife, who was carrying in her bags a sword that belonged to she knew not whom. Having been betrayed and made a fool of by Aërope, Atreus wanted a new family, a family without sin. Nine months later, Pelopia gave birth to Aegisthus. She gave him to some shepherds to have him grow up in the mountains, fed on goat’s milk. Atreus imagined that Pelopia must be suffering from a momentary and forgivable attack of insanity. He sent his men off to the mountains in search of the child. They brought him back. Of all his children, Atreus thought, this one alone had not been contaminated: so this one would be his heir.

  In Mycenae nature was still refusing to budge, refusing to bear fruit until Thyestes came back. Eventually he was captured and thrown into prison. Atreus called Aegis thus and gave him his first man’s job: he must take the sword his mother always kept beside her and use it to run through their prisoner in his sleep. In the prison, Thyestes managed to elude his son and grab the sword from his hand. He looked at it. Then recognized it: it was the one he’d lost that night in Sicyon. He told Aegisthus to call his mother. On seeing the sword and Thyestes, Pelopia realized what had happened. She took hold of the sword and buried it in her body. Thyestes drew it out from Pelopia’s flesh and gave it, still dripping with his mother’s blood, to the little Aegisthus. He told the boy to go back to Atreus and show the sword to him as proof that his orders had been carried out. Euphoric to find himself at last rid of his brother, and hence of his obsession, Atreus decided that the first thing he must do was show his gratitude to the gods. A solemn sacrifice was prepared on the seashore. While it was being celebrated, the little Aegisthus approached and plunged Thyestes’ sword into Atreus’s body. Thyestes became king of Mycenae. A new golden lamb appeared in his flock.

  Thus, for the moment, the conflict between the two brothers came to an end. At least in the sense that one was dead and the other wasn’t. But the grindstone that had accelerated during their feud would go on crushing bones for one, two, three generations to come. The clash between the two hostile brothers had become a war between forms, a duel between two fanatics of form. If Thyestes achieved a momentary victory, it was because his formal inventiveness had gone far beyond his brother, who, in the end, had stopped at the cannibal’s banquet. Thyestes is the true modern: he sets up a dizzying equivocation and uses it to satisfy his ends. Thyestes’ triumph is alluded to in Euripides’ Cretans (and confirmed in Seneca’s Thyestes). Here, the Cretan woman Aërope, the traitor, who in most versions betrays Atreus with Thyestes in Mycenae, turns out to have already met Thyestes earlier on in Crete. He was on the run, a vagabond exiled by his brother. But he scored an immediate success with the princess, just the way Theseus did with Ariadne. King Catreus surprised the two of them in bed, upon which he took Aërope and her sister Clymene and handed them over to another king, Nauplius, to have them drowned or sold off as slaves. But Nauplius decided to marry Clymene himself and took her to Argos. There, Plisthenes, Atreus’s son, born a weakling as part of Artemis’s vendetta against his father, chose Aërope as his bride. Aërope, however, had already conceived Agamemnon and Menelaus by Thyestes.

  So when, on his return from Troy, snared in a net, one foot still in the water of his bath, Agamemnon is slain by the avenger Aegisthus and by his wife, Clytemnestra, the blood flows from Thyestes at the hand of Thyestes, from a son of Thyestes at the hand of another son of Thyestes and of his own stepsister. In the house of Atreus, that is, there’s not a trace of Atreus left. There is only Thyestes’ curse, which Cassandra senses in the air, a curse that now circles back on itself, cut off from everything else, pure form, autistic glory.

  While Agamemnon, Atreus’s son, was off fighting beneath the walls of Troy, everybody expected Aegisthus, Thyestes’ son, to take his place in Clytemnestra’s bed and hence on the throne of Mycenae. Yet the players were slow to make their moves. They wanted to savor the inevitable. Like a sales rep, King Nauplius was cruising up and down the coast of Attica and the Peloponnese. He tied up in the larger ports, visiting all the palaces where there was an empty throne. In the evenings he would talk about Troy, about how tough the war was, about there being no end in sight. He talked on into the small hours with lonely queens. And then proposed adultery. Not with himself, no no no, but with some ambitious fellow from a good family in the vicinity. It was his way of reminding those empty thrones how treacherously they had murdered his son Palamedes, beyond the sea, beneath the walls of Troy.

  When, in Mycenae, he tried his spiel on Clytemnestra, he noticed that the queen couldn’t suppress a sardonic, distracted smile. Did she really need someone to come and suggest what she had long known she was going to do? And Agamemnon was wise to it too. He had left a tiresome court bard breathing down her neck with instructions to keep a close eye on her and write with any news. That man was the first State intellectual. But one day Aegisthus grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and had him bundled onto a boat. They dumped him on an island where only thistles grew. So the vult
ures could gorge themselves on his old flesh.

  Thus Aegisthus at last entered the palace of Mycenae, wore Agamemnon’s sandals, soiled the king’s bed with his sweat, sat on his throne, possessed Clytemnestra, more in rage than pleasure. But that was exactly what Clytemnestra liked. There was a profound complicity between them, and they began to look like each other, the way some old couples will. Sometimes, in the evening, in front of the fire, they would talk about how they would kill Agamemnon, ironing out the details, weighing alternatives, relishing their anticipation. And even afterward, when from the summits of Athos and Arachne the beacons had announced the king’s return, when Agamemnon had trodden the purple with terror, when Aegisthus had stabbed him twice and Clytemnestra had beheaded him with her ax, even then, in the evenings, the two would pass the time together, thinking of Orestes now, of how they would kill him, how he would try to kill them. Finally the moment was upon them; Orestes tricked them into letting him into the palace and slew his mother and her lover: it was an easy murder, like a scene rehearsed over and over, year in, year out, with actors who are in a hurry to have done and get on home.

  The grim mechanics of the Pelopids seems to break down with the noble debate on Orestes at the Areopagus, the Athenian Council. And when Athena’s vote absolves him, they all lift up their faces, as if waking from a nightmare. But Orestes’ trial did more good for the Athenians than for Orestes. It gave them the pride of placing themselves beyond crime, of understanding crime, and this was something that nobody hitherto had dared. As for Orestes, he was as wretched afterward as he had been before. The day he appeared in Athens and everybody shunned him, willing, yes, to give him something to drink, but only so long as he drank it alone, upon which they all, even the children, began to drink on their own from little jugs—that day Orestes realized that he was doomed to drinking at that table, alone, for the rest of his life, even if he was absolved, even if he was king, even if there were women beside him.

  And who might these women be? His sisters, Electra and Iphigenia, whom he felt condemned to look for, to find again. And sisters meant family. Orestes’ greatest torment was this: that wherever he went, all his affairs were family affairs. Even Pylades, to whom he had given his friendship, was a relative in the end. And he’d had him marry one of his sisters. Outside his family, the world might as well not have existed. What other women then? Orestes sought out Hermione, another relative, cousin twice over. But then realized that his reason for seeking her out made matters even worse; it paralyzed him. Hermione had been betrothed to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son. When Neoptolemus was killed by Apollo in the god’s temple in Delphi, just as his father had been killed by Apollo, Orestes took the murdered man’s place next to Hermione. He was perfectly aware that he was not, as he did so, himself, Orestes; he was Agamemnon once again depriving Achilles of the beloved Briseis.

  Orestes never was Orestes, except in the periods when the Erinyes goaded him to insanity. Or the brief moments of respite from madness, as when he rested his head on a stone on a small island off Gythion. Then he started: someone was telling him that Helen and Paris had spent their first night of love together right on this spot. And he immediately decided to set sail again. Or in that suffocating place in Arcadia where he realized that he could no longer bear the Erinyes, or rather not so much them, for he had lost all hope of being rid of them, but their color, that impenetrable black in the noonday brilliance, and in exasperation he bit off a finger of his left hand. Upon which the Erinyes turned white.

  But this reprieve didn’t last long. Even when they were white they terrified him, more than before maybe, and they never stopped following him, despite falling asleep sometimes, despite taking wrong turns, slovenly but stubborn. He would see them plunging toward him, like bits of statues falling from the sky. And sometimes, as once along the gloomy bank of the Taurides, the terror was too much for him and he began to howl like a dog: a herd of white calves came toward him and Orestes thought they were all Erinyes, closing in around him.

  But it was when he met Erigone that Orestes got the ultimate proof that his actions were not his own but part of something else, as alien to him as a stone set in his flesh. Erigone was the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his mirror image on Thyestes’ side of the family, and hence his number one enemy. She arrived in Athens with Clytemnestra’s father, Tyndareos, king of Sparta, to accuse him, Orestes, before the Areopagus. She had the wild pride of Artemis, whose favor the Atridae had never regained after Atreus had kept back the golden lamb he should have sacrificed to her. Orestes looked at Erigone and saw himself as a woman, and at the same time he saw the creature most alien to him in the whole world, and most invincible. She, he at last understood, was the only creature he could desire: to kill or to throw down on a bed.

  During the trial, Orestes looked like a carcass animated by Delphic prompters. Some say that when he was absolved Erigone hung herself in rage. But Orestes’ life didn’t change much after his absolution. He still wandered about endlessly. Finally he came back from the land of the Tauri clutching a small wooden image of Artemis, the only remedy he had found against his madness. And now he gave Erigone yet another reason for hating him. Aletes, her brother, had usurped the throne of Mycenae. Orestes killed him. But Aletis, “wanderer” or “beggar,” was also one of Erigone’s names in her other existence as daughter of Icarius. After killing Aletes, Orestes in his fury tried to kill Erigone too. And it was like wanting to kill her twice over. But Artemis rescued her. So many were the corpses heaped up between Orestes and Erigone that the two couldn’t even see each other. One day Orestes realized that she was the only woman who attracted him. He managed to find her again and they had a son together: Penthilus. This illegitimate child reunited the descendants of Atreus and Thyestes, who had fought so long for the legitimacy, fought above all to deny the other that legitimacy. In his blood, the two houses were condemned to be mixed together forever. Unless we accept Euripides’ insinuation, that the blood of Penthilus was made up only of the purest blood of Thyestes and his children, in which case Orestes and Erigone were really brother and sister, and the house of Atreus only a phantom that had never existed in the flesh.

  Whether by inheritance or conquest, Orestes was now ruler over a large kingdom stretching from Laconia to Arcadia. Yet he had a feeling that the whole thing must end with him—or would have to begin again far away as a totally different story. An oracle said he should set up a colony on Lesbos. Lesbos? The name meant nothing to him; it was one of the few places he had never set foot. Only one small detail linked him to Lesbos: it was said that the cruel king Oenomaus, who in the end was his great-grandfather, had lived there before coming to Olympia. Perhaps Lesbos meant a return, a buckle closing, beneath the water. But it was not to be Orestes who colonized Lesbos. Penthilus went there, taking the blood of the Pelopids over the sea, locked away in his body as though in a casket. What came next were years of provincial goings-on, of which little would be known. And finally silence. For the first time Orestes felt easier in his mind. He was nearly seventy now, and something prompted him to go back to the places where he had been most afflicted by his madness. He withdrew to Arcadia. For all his large kingdom, he wasn’t cut out to be a powerful sovereign. He would always be the one who drinks alone.

  One day, not far from the place where he had bitten off a finger to make the Erinyes turn white, Orestes was bitten on the heel by a snake and died of poison, just as it was by poison, his only companion apart from Pylades, that he had always lived. And years later people came to look for his bones, for much the same reasons that had prompted other people to look for the bones of his grandfather Pelops. They were supposed to help bring down a city. Nothing as grandiose as Troy this time, but an important town all the same: Tegea. The Spartans had been trying and failing to take it for generations. The oracle said that Orestes’ bones would be found “there where blow follows blow, wrong lies over wrong.” Blow on blow, wrong on wrong: buried in a blacksmith’s shop, Oreste
s’ bones were still trembling at the blows of iron beating on iron.

  VII

  (photo credit 7.1)

  A NECESSARY PREMISE OF THE GREEK mysteries was the following scene, which took place between the two divine brothers Zeus and Hades. One day Zeus saw his powerful brother coming to meet him on Olympus. There was only one reason for Hades’ coming here: to ask for something. And Zeus knew perfectly well what. So the time when Zeus would see men and women appear and disappear down on earth without asking themselves why, hard and bright, but still close to the realm of metamorphosis, ready to live a brief span as bodies and a far longer time as exhausted shades in Hades—that time was coming to an end. The division between life and death had been a clean cut, sharp as the bronze blade that cut the throats of the sacrificial animals. And nothing could have pleased Zeus more. Zeus liked everything that existed without justification. But now Hades was coming to ask for a hostage. He wanted a woman in the palace of death. And the only woman who would do was a daughter of Zeus, a niece whom Uncle Hades had had his eye on for some long time: Persephone, or Persephatta, obscure names, in whose letters we find echoes of murder (phónos) and pillage (pérsis), superimposed on a beauty whose only name is Girl: Kore.