The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Detached though he was from the world, Hippolytus was not as yet beyond the world’s sorcery. He would meet his death when his young fillies fled terrified before Poseidon’s monstrous bull, risen from the waters of the Saronicus. Hippolytus tried desperately to control them and was flung to the ground, tangled in the reins. As the horses dragged his dusty, blood-bespattered body over the sharp rocks that tore it apart, as he felt “the approaching dissolution in his brain,” Hippolytus was also aware of being that same myrtle leaf, torn apart by the precious brooch of a lover who had known his body only through her eyes and had hung herself for him: Phaedra.

  Hippolytus exuded the fragrance of death, which mingled in the air with another, purer fragrance, announcing the presence of Artemis. Dying, he spoke to her, and she to him, but toward the end the goddess deserted him, even though she did call Hippolytus “the dearest of mortals.” She deserted him because Artemis cannot “corrupt her eyes with a mortal’s death throes.”

  When her abductor led her into the palace of the dead, Persephone noticed a young girl, “lying on Aidoneus’s bed.” It was Minthe, they told her, Nymph of the river Cocytus. So even in these still and silent woods, even in this freezing, marshy, corrosive river where the dead sailed toward their torments, there were Nymphs! And where there were Nymphs there was seduction, the invincible impulse. Just as Zeus, her father and celestial lover, came down to pluck them from the hills, so Hades, her partner, chary of word and gesture, coupled with them in his bed. Betrayal spanned the cosmos from end to end.

  Persephone grabbed hold of Minthe and dragged her out into the light, on the sands of Pylos, gateway to the West. There she hurled herself on the Nymph and stamped on her with that fury she had inherited from her mother. She wanted to trample her to death, to tear her apart like a mortal woman. And as Minthe’s soft body was reduced to a pulp of flesh and blood, her lifeless limbs released an intense, balmy fragrance. It was the wild mint that would grow ever afterward on the slopes of Samikon, looking out to sea.

  Not far away, her divine lover, Hades, had himself once been wounded by Heracles while fighting to defend Pylos. He was surrounded by corpses, so much so that he no longer knew whether they were his own subjects or the bodies of warriors freshly dead. And one of the hero’s arrows pierced his shoulder. When one remembers that on that very day Heracles also struck the white right breast of Hera, it is clear this was a moment of great confusion between heaven, earth, and underworld. In pain, “the monstrous Hades” took the unusual step of climbing up to Olympus to have his wound dressed. On that long Elean beach, death had exposed itself to the risks of life. And it was there that Persephone squeezed a sweet and sterile perfume from Minthe’s body.

  Demeter sat in the temple of Eleusis, wrapped in her deep blue tunic: she was waiting for mankind to die of hunger; she was waiting for the moment when the gods would know for the first time what it meant to smell the smoke of sacrifice no more. She wanted to break the life cycle, now that the “unbearable deeds of the blessed gods” had taken her Persephone away from her. Demeter herself had ordered the Eleusinians to build this temple; she had taught them the ceremonies to hold for Demophon, the child who lost his immortality thanks to his stupidly devoted mother, Metanira, “stulte pia.”

  But the temple and its ceremonies couldn’t survive much longer now: all around, the Eleusinian plain was a skinned and dried up corpse. Seeds, flowers, and fruit had withdrawn into the earth as though into an inviolable shell. The plows bumped across clods that were lumps of dust.

  Hermes came to see Hades and Persephone sitting on their throne and spoke the words he had himself heard time after time: Demeter wanted to see Persephone again, “with her eyes.” But how else could she have seen her? Demeter’s insistence on this plainly pleonastic formula contained a hidden message for Hades, as if Hades knew of another way of seeing and was planning to play that card, as if he wanted to cheat men out of seeing “with their eyes,” counting on another vision, which needed neither light nor eyes, because it was in itself both light and eye. Thus Hermes, perfect among messengers, faithfully repeated the words Demeter had first delivered to Olympus, and which now echoed in the darkness.

  Hades’ eyebrows arched in a hint of a smile: we know of no smile more mysterious than the one that wrinkled the forehead of the lord of death that day. It wasn’t the serving maid Iambe’s lighthearted, intemperate, feckless laughter that had irresistibly infected Demeter and shaken her from her stony immobility. It was the smile of one who knows, and registers with that faint allusion his distance from everything that is going on. Beside him, Hades senses the warmth of the queen he has carried off and set on his throne. No one, not even Zeus, could take her away, except perhaps for a time: and time is one thing death always has. Now that the Olympians needed him, and had even sent the most intelligent of their number to persuade him—a sign that they were losing their nerve—Hades thought he might pretend just this once to play along with their comedy, a comedy they usually kept him out of. With a gesture of kindness, he turned to Persephone. His hand touched her arm, and that arm communicated a mute disquiet. He told her, in the presence of the Olympian messenger, that of course she could go back to her mother, but she would have to preserve her serenity. Again his words sounded mysterious and ironic, because until now Persephone had never been serene with him. Then he urged her not to be ashamed of her husband: in the end he was a great king and he had made her a queen.

  Persephone, who had been sitting motionless on her throne for days, leaped to her feet like a little girl, her face lit up with joy. She wanted to leave now. Hades ordered his dark horses to be harnessed to the golden coach. Then he arranged to be alone with Persephone in the well-kept gardens of the underworld. While they were walking along the paths, he picked a pomegranate from a tree and offered three seeds to his spouse. Persephone’s mind was elsewhere and she refused. But Hades insisted, in his subtle way. Persephone lifted the seeds to her mouth. She was distracted, her heart in a flurry at the thought of leaving. They imagined they were alone, but from the shadows they were being watched by a gardener: Ascalaphus, son of the love between Acheron and a Nymph. One day he would say what he had seen, which is how we know what happened in that garden. That tiny gesture of Persephone was perhaps the most important event ever, the most pregnant of consequence since Zeus swallowed Phanes and took up residence on Olympus.

  The chariot was ready at last. Hermes grasped the bridle and whip. The horses came slowly out of the palace, then took off and flew away. From high above, Persephone once again saw the sea, and branching rivers and grassy valleys, like the one that had been her last vision on earth. Sitting on her throne in the underworld, she had often thought she would never see them again. Whereas now they appeared and disappeared, as though in a game, as the chariot came out of the fat, fleecy clouds. Finally they reached a place Persephone didn’t recognize. The chariot stopped before a newly built temple emanating a strong smell of incense. Demeter appeared between the columns. And ran like a Maenad on the mountains toward her daughter.

  Persephone jumped down from the chariot, and the two embraced without a word. Then Persephone felt her mother restraining her; she had pulled her face away and wanted to say something. “Did you eat anything at all, when you were down there?” Persephone remembered the pomegranate seeds, a sweet, sharp taste, still there, like a distant memory, in her saliva. That taste of the invisible would never leave her. Sitting outside the temple, they spent hours and hours telling each other their adventures. They touched each other’s arms and hugged. From time to time, Demeter would walk away from her daughter and turn to stare at her. The pain flowed away with the words, and they rediscovered joy. Demeter explained the consequences of the three pomegranate seeds: every year Persephone would have to go back and be Hades’ bride for half the year. They didn’t actually say it, but both now accepted this decree from Zeus. The rigidity of stone was dissolved forever.

  That day the only people to come to talk to
them were two women. The first was Hecate, crow black and with a shining crown. She had helped Demeter when the goddess mother had been wandering about in desperation; now she would be a precious guide for her daughter. No woman knew the paths that linked earth and underworld better than she. Then Rhea came to bring a message from Olympus. Shaking her thick hair, she repeated Zeus’s promises and sealed the peace between them. Demeter stood up to go back to Olympus. As the goddess set off in her long blue tunic, the white barley that had remained spitefully hidden in the ground poked out into the light. The arid furrows became damp clods of rich earth, while leaves and flowers opened once again to the sun, as if nothing had happened and nature were lazily reawakening from a long sleep.

  VIII

  (photo credit 8.1)

  ZEUS WAS SITTING ON A STOOL. HE stared into the distance. A breeze twitched his beard, which was streaked with gray. Something was going on inside his head, bringing on a drunken weariness. When Zeus had swallowed his wife Metis, on the advice of Ge and Uranus, who told him she would one day give birth to a god even stronger than himself and capable of usurping his power, Metis was already pregnant with Athena. The baby girl had flowed into Zeus’s body, and there, in that recess hidden even from the gods, Zeus had passed on to her his weapon of old, the aegis, the flayed skin of Aegis, the monster with fiery breath. Now Zeus felt the crown of his skull being scraped by Athena’s sharp javelin. Everything about that little girl was sharp: her eyes, her mind—now living in the mind of her father—the point of her helmet. Every female concavity was hidden away, like the reverse side of her shield.

  Zeus saw two women coming toward him: the Ilithyias, experts in midwifery. Without a word, their hands reached toward his head, gingerly, not daring to touch. Then Hephaestus arrived with a bronze ax. Before Zeus could utter a word, Hephaestus brought the ax down on his head and ran off, followed by the Ilithyias. Why did he run? Zeus still hadn’t said a word. He heard a desperately shrill scream inside his head, like the sound of a Tyrrhenian trumpet.

  And all at once he realized he wasn’t alone: with silent steps the other gods had converged on him from all directions. He saw Hera and Hebe, Demeter and Persephone sitting on their baskets, Dionysus lying on a panther skin, thyrsus in hand. And to his other side, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Eros, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, and the three Moirai, the last apparently confabulating together. All of them were looking at him, but not so as to meet his eyes. They were looking at a point slightly above. Athena had appeared in the crack in his skull, her weapons sparkling, while Nike fluttered around her with a crown in her hand.

  Now he could see her too: she had climbed down to the ground and was walking away from her father. Turning her head in silent greeting, she was the only one who looked him in the eyes. Was it his daughter he saw, or his own image gazing back at him? Then Zeus turned to look at the other gods. From the solemn expressions on their faces, it was clear that a new era had begun on Olympus.

  Athena was the only being who, at birth, did not grab at something but took something off. Helios’s chariot had stopped in the sky when the goddess emerged from Zeus’s head. The air on Olympus was tense, breathless, as Athena slowly began to strip off her weapons. She put down her shield, her helmet, her javelin; she undid the aegis, and then, just before she slipped off the tunic that hung down to her ankles, a group of Libyan Heroines, clad in red-dyed goatskins thickly decorated with fringes, crowded around to hide her.

  Unseen among them, she set off toward Lake Tritonis, in Libya. There she immersed herself in the water, as if to renew a virginity she would never lose. But she had a far deeper intimacy to break away from: the fact that she had been mingled with the body of her father. Athena came out of the water into the dry African air, her body glistening and strong. The Heroines handed her her clothes and weapons one by one. Now Athena could begin her life.

  During her African childhood, Athena played at war with Pallas. The two little girls looked almost exactly the same, Pallas’s complexion being just a shade darker. Athena was a guest who had come down from the heavens. Zeus had entrusted her to Triton to bring up. And Triton left her with his daughter Pallas all day. Shut away in their playground, they saw no one else. Violent and brazen, they often came to blows. And they already had their own weapons, child-sized but lethal.

  One day they found themselves face to face, spears quivering in their hands. It would have been hard to say who was the mirror of whom. Zeus saw the danger: he threw down his aegis from the sky to form a screen between them. Pallas was dazzled, spear in hand. And a moment later Athena’s spear plunged into her. It was Athena’s first and perhaps her greatest bereavement. Back in Olympus, she decided to fashion a wooden statuette of her dead friend and set it beside Zeus. The image was four cubits high, about the same height as Pallas, with its feet together. When it was finished, Athena covered its breast with the aegis, as though dressing a doll. Then she looked at the statue and recognized herself.

  Athena was to slay many a man and monster after this episode, but always knowing exactly what she was doing. One of these victims was a giant who was also called Pallas and who, like other giants, was partly covered by scales and feathers. He claimed to be Athena’s father. He attempted to rape her. So Athena killed him and, with the skill of a woodsman, skinned him from top to toe. She was always on the lookout for scales and feathers: they would go to improve her aegis. But the little girl Pallas, her warrior friend, had prompted the one involuntary action of her life: the action with which she had done to death her own image. What happened that day in Africa was to be Athena’s secret. Few would get to know this story of her childhood.

  The Palladium, celestial model for all the statues of antiquity, was conceived as an evocation of a girl who was dead and as the double of a being who was immortal. It carried the mark of uniqueness, partly because it wasn’t fashioned by human hand and partly because Zeus decided to make it the unique guardian of the unique city of Troy. Yet it partook of duplicity from its very conception, and that duplicity would soon begin to work. The primordial image of Athena did not represent Athena, but two other women: Pallas with her spear, and Medusa at the center of the aegis—the friend and the enemy. In each case she was the other, the unique other, separated from Athena thanks only to the screen of the aegis.

  For the aegis had been important in Medusa’s story too. On the floor of one of Athena’s temples, Poseidon was licking Medusa’s pearly body, white in the shadows, with his marine saliva. Athena stood before them, a statue in her cell, obliged to watch those two writhing bodies twining together in the silence of her temple. She felt horror at this outrage, and at the same time a deep disquiet, because she knew that Medusa looked very much like herself. So she raised the aegis to annihilate them, to detach herself from them. It was a gesture that rose from Athena’s deepest self, like Artemis’s gesture of drawing her bow. And as, once again, Athena separated herself from everything else behind this screen of scaly skin, the soft filaments of Medusa’s hair, spread out on the floor, began to swell, and already you could see that the tips were turning into so many snakes’ heads.

  Ever since the young Ate crashed into the ground there, hurled down by Zeus’s whirling hand, Troy had been the hill of infatuation. But the wooden statuette of Pallas, henceforth to be known as the Palladium, also crash-landed there. Zeus tossed it down in front of Ilus’s tent, so that he would found his city on the hill. Infatuation and the image now lived together in the same place: a city prone to phantoms. And it was to Troy that Helen would come: body or phantom image? That doubt would be drawn out for ten years, then to echo on and on for centuries. Yet the doubt emanated from the statue hidden in Athena’s temple, from the Palladium itself. All the complicated adventures of the Palladium are bound up with the question of the original and the copy.

  Long before Plato, there were two disturbing things about the statue: that it might not have been fashioned by human hand, and that it might be only a copy. These two extremes came together
in the Palladium. When the Achaeans began their siege of Troy, the Trojans immediately decided to make an identical copy of the Palladium. Thus, if the Greeks managed to steal it, Troy would not fall. Odysseus and Diomedes did break into Athena’s temple and ran off with the Palladium. But, as with every audacious exploit, there are a host of different versions. Was it the real Palladium? Or did they steal two, one real and one false? Or were there, as some suggested, any number of Palladiums, the real one being the smallest? Or were the two Palladiums the two heroes stole both false, the only real one being the one Cassandra clutched in her hand the night Troy was sacked and Ajax dragged her across the floor of Athena’s temple like an old sack? The Athenian version was that, after it had been fought over by all and sundry, it was Theseus’s son, Demophon, who managed to get hold of the statue by pretending to defend a false Palladium from Agamemnon and finally letting him have it, whereas in fact he had already given the real one to Buzyge so that it could be protected in Eleusis.

  Once you have a double on the scene, it’s like entering a hall of mirrors; everything is elusive, stretching away into a perspective where nothing is ever final. There was a place in Athens known as the Palladium: it was the courthouse where involuntary homicides were judged. The first defendant was Demophon himself, but behind him, and in the same guilty role, homage was being paid to Athena, who had killed Pallas without meaning to. That was the beginning, the first crack in the double, the danger that is Athena, the fact that her consciousness is hostile to the shadow—it brings forth the double but then ends up by wounding it. And the double takes its revenge by reproducing itself as an image, first in the one true Palladium, whose eyes would glow and wooden body exude a salty sweat whenever the goddess descended into it, but likewise in the endless other Palladiums to be found all over the world, all false.