The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  The capacity for control (sophrosýnē), the ability to dominate oneself, to govern things, the sharpness of the eye, the sober choice of the means to achieve an end—all these things detach the mind from those powers that came before Athena, give us the impression of using them without being used by them. It is an effective illusion, and one that frequently finds confirmation. The eye becomes cold and clear-sighted toward all it sees, ready to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself. But for all this 360-degree field of vision, there remains a black speck, a point that the eye cannot see: itself. The eye cannot see the eye. It does not appreciate that it is itself a power, like the powers it claims to dominate. The cold eye looking out on the world modifies that world no less than the fiery breath of Aegis, which shriveled up a vast expanse of earth from Phrygia to Libya.

  Athena is the power that helps the eye to see itself. So intimate is she with those she protects that she installs herself in their minds and communicates with the very mind of the mind. Which is why Ajax’s father says to his son: “In battle, fight to win, but to win together with a god.” To which Ajax replies: “Father, with a god on his side, even a nobody can win; but I am sure I can achieve glory even without them.” So Athena intervenes and destroys the hero’s mind, like one of those cities she loves to sack. She is ruthless with those who use her tokens—the sharp eye, the quick mind, deftness of hand, the intelligence that snatches victory—only to forget where they came from. It is here that the difference between Odysseus and an ingenuous, insolent hero like Ajax becomes gapingly obvious. For Odysseus, Athena’s presence is that of a secret and incessant dialogue: he finds her in the cry of a heron, the bronzed timbre of a voice, the wings of a swallow perched on a beam, and any number of other manifestations, because, as he says to the goddess on one occasion, “you mimic all manner of people.” So the hero knows he can see her everywhere. He knows he need not always be waiting for the dazzling splendor of epiphany. Athena may be a beggar or an old friend. She is the protecting presence.

  The relationship between Athena and “the male,” which the goddess loves “with all her heart,” is conditioned by an age-old misunderstanding. Athena gives men the weapons they need to escape the oppression of all kinds of sovereigns, and above all of the sky and earth, who had trembled that day they heard the shrill, high-pitched cry with which the goddess emerged from Zeus’s head—and trembled because they recognized that this young girl was their new enemy. But Athena does not give men the weapon they need to escape herself. Whenever man celebrates his autonomy with preposterous claims and fatal deeds, Athena is insulted. Her punishment is never long in coming, and it is extreme. Today, those who do not recognize her are not insolent heroes such as Ajax but the many numerous “nobodies” Ajax despised. It is they who advance, haughty and blind, polluting the earth they tread. While the heirs of Odysseus continue their silent dialogue with Athena.

  The Olympians visited one another in their huge palaces. They’d get together for banquets of an evening. Or they might assemble like a group of curious onlookers to watch some unusual event: Athena emerging from Zeus’s head; Aphrodite and Ares caught in Hephaestus’s golden web.

  But even Olympus had its forbidden room, its sealed, inviolable place where no one could go. The gods would pass by, knowing they could never cross the threshold. It was a square, empty, windowless room. On the floor, the darkness was pierced by a bar that was as if fringed with light, a light that simmered in the stillness: Zeus’s lightning bolt. For anyone daring to approach, the luminous fringes would take on the soft shape of lotus petals. In the lightning blossomed “the flower of fire.”

  Zeus once asked Athena to lend him a powerful weapon she often flaunted: the flayed skin of a monster, the aegis. In return, and because he was irresistibly partial to his daughter, he offered her occasional access to his lightning. It was the privilege Athena was most proud of. Even in the presence of the Athenians, when called on to decide the fate of Orestes, Athena reminded the accused that “I alone among the gods have the keys to the room where the lightning is sealed.”

  The Athenians claimed to have two main reasons for feeling proud of themselves: first, they were autochthonous, actually born, that is, of the earth of Attica, rather than immigrants from other lands; and, second, Athena was their protectress. But, even to be born of the earth, one needed a seed, and a womb—yet the Athenians always avoided mentioning this. Why?

  Of all the styles of virginity on Olympus, none was so enigmatic and provocative as Athena’s. No woman was ever so profoundly intimate with men as she. None of Odysseus’s women ever felt the hero’s voice as close to them as she did. Yet Athena denied her body to gods and men, even to those men she helped with such impassioned intelligence. Though in punishing them, she wasn’t as ferocious as Artemis. When Tiresias spied her bathing, Athena blinded him, out of divine duty, but then chose to grant him the gift of clairvoyance.

  One day Athena approached Hephaestus, the ugliest of the Olympians but also the one who would find Aphrodite in his bed every night. She asked him to make a piece of armor for her. And in her solemn way she added that she didn’t really know how to pay him for it. “I’ll do it for love,” Hephaestus said. Athena nodded. Athena was the only woman who could make Hephaestus forget Aphrodite. During her visit, she hadn’t noticed the glint in his eye, because that wasn’t the kind of thing she was in the habit of noticing. Time passed. When Athena came back to Hephaestus’s forge to pick up her armor, the divine craftsman began hobbling around her in the dark. The goddess felt long, sinewy fingers squeezing her and thin, muscled legs forcing her back against the wall. As the goddess was wriggling free from his clutches, Hephaestus’s sperm squirted out against her thigh, just above the knee. None of this prompted the slightest comment from the goddess. Athena was merely concerned to grab the first rag that came to hand in the forge. She cleaned her thigh and, never wanting to see it again, tossed away the wet cloth from on high. The rag fell on Attica. As it happened, Ge, mother earth, a figure not unused to acts of primordial generation, was passing by. Sodden with Hephaestus’s sperm, the cloth fell into her womb, and she conceived. When Ge gave birth and didn’t know what to do with the newborn child, Athena decided to adopt this creature nobody wanted, decided with the same swiftness and confidence with which she had wiped away Hephaestus’s sperm. She picked up this little child who ended in a coiled snake’s tail and called him Erichthonius.

  Even though they tend to avoid speaking of his birth, the Athenians are devoted to Erichthonius. They see themselves in him, fruit of a craftsman’s not-to-be-satisfied desire for a goddess. Neither peasants, warriors, or priests, they know they spring from the seed of a craftsman, whether it be the talkative artisan with his workshop in the agora or the solitary cosmic artificer. Their desire for Athena is greater than that of any other people. And this brings them closer than others to the unnatural gods of Olympus, the gods of detachment, the gods who cannot be satisfied with nature and its cycles but seek a form hard as crystal, as crystal closed in on itself, autonomous, autochthonous of the spirit.

  Callimachus, who never spoke an unsound word, described the sperm Hephaestus spilt in his vain desire for Athena as “dew.” On penetrating the earth, Ge’s womb, that dew generated the snake-child. Athena lifted him up from the earth in her virgin arms. But she couldn’t embrace him as any other mother would. Athena was more than a mother. Her first gesture on the child’s behalf was to hang a golden chain around his neck with a locket containing two drops of Medusa’s blood: one was lethal, the other healing. Then she put Erichthonius in a wicker basket and tied the lid closed. She gave the basket to the three daughters of Cecrops, king of Athens, telling them not to open it for any reason whatsoever. The three girls didn’t know that Athena, in her love for Attica, wanted to make Erichthonius immortal without the other gods finding out.

  But whenever a god, or someone who partakes of the divine, wants to make a child immortal, something always goes wrong. As w
hen Thetis tried with Achilles, Demeter with Demophon, Medea with her children. There is always someone who turns up, disturbs the delicate process, and ruins everything. Whether because distracted or curious. Distraction and curiosity are the two ultimate sins, outward signs of that impatience which has always prevented man from rediscovering the gate of Paradise. Cecrops’s three daughters all had dewy names: Aglauros means “sparkling”; Pandrosos, “all dew”; and Herse, “dew.” With the same impatience with which Hephaestus had grabbed Athena, squirting his sperm over the goddess’s thigh, two of Cecrops’s daughters opened the basket and saw the snake-child come out, protected by two other snakes, his “bodyguards.” There was nothing shocking about this for Cecrops’s daughters. Indeed, they might well have seen Erichthonius as a baby brother: after all, their own father’s body also ended in a coiled snake’s tail. Yet they sensed an incipient terror, because they knew they had committed what for the Greeks was the worst of all crimes: they had opened the secret basket at the wrong moment.

  Athena was on her way back from Pallene at the time. She had been there to look for a bulwark for her city and was walking along with an enormous rock in her arms. Her plan was to place it on the Acropolis, thus making Athens impregnable. A crow, bearer of ill tidings, came flying toward her and told her what had happened. In her rage Athena dropped the huge rock, which buried itself in the ground opposite the Acropolis, never to be moved again. It was the Lycabettus, and it still dominates Athens today, but without defending it. Then Athena appeared to the daughters of Cecrops, who fled terrified. They guessed a tough punishment was in store for them, and, even as the thought formulated in their minds, they were seized by a mad frenzy. They rushed to the steepest rocks of the Acropolis, stared into the void, and jumped. As they were dashed to pieces, their blood squirted out over the rocks.

  Athena recovered the snake-child. Once again what she did was destined to remain shut away in herself. She bent the skin of the aegis to form a sort of marsupial pocket and slipped Erichthonius inside. Now the snake-child looked down on the world from on high, intrigued, his head peeping out from Athena’s breast beside Medusa’s face, which, with the passing years, had taken on an austere beauty, not unlike that of the goddess herself. You could see why she had wanted to vie with her in beauty. Erichthonius propped himself up on the abundance of Athena’s magnificent breasts. He looked down into their cleavage to see Medusa with her hair of snakes, and he felt the fringes of the aegis, which again were snakes, stirring round about him. The child immediately took a liking to Medusa. He didn’t realize as yet that she was his sister, born, like him, from Ge’s womb. Erichthonius felt happy, at home, a snake among snakes. Through the dried pelt of the aegis, he sensed the hidden warmth of his adoptive mother.

  The more he looked at the world, the more he was convinced that the only person he bore any resemblance to was Athena, this strong, radiant woman, seething with snakes. She hadn’t born him in her womb, she had spurned the seed from which he was born, yet they were closer than any mother and son. No one else would ever lie on those perfect white breasts, no one else would ever see them, except perhaps in the heat of action, when a breast might sometimes slither out of the aegis. And wasn’t the aegis, Erichthonius’s home, almost part of Athena’s body? More than a weapon, it was a second skin. Erichthonius spent his youth dreading the moment when he would be separated from the body of his adoptive mother, separated from that little pouch inside the aegis, that warrior pregnancy, exposed to sun and wind. But one day Athena did set him down on the ground, inside the Acropolis compound. And there she raised him. The place was to become sacred. Then, sadly, they separated. For Erichthonius it marked the end of the divine period of his life. He became a king, one of the many kings of Athens. He married a Naiad, inaugurated the Panathenaea, invented the quadriga and money. At his death he wanted to return to his adoptive mother. He was buried in the compound where Athena had raised him, which was now the home of a snake.

  The Athenians were aware of their original sin, what the daughters of Cecrops did. They worshiped Athena, despite knowing that the goddess had chosen not to make them invincible. The spirit of the city was a nameless snake, living in the Erechtheum. Every month they offered it a cake with honey, which the Greeks thought of as a type of dew. One day, when the Persians were marching on Athens, the snake for the first time left its cake untouched. Upon which the Athenians decided to flee the city, because the goddess had abandoned the Acropolis.

  Seven centuries later, when Athens was no longer under threat, having already lost everything except its statues, the traveler Pausanias was amazed to come across a ceremony not many people knew much about. Every year two girls from seven to eleven years old were chosen by the king-archon from among the most ancient families of Athens and made to live for a certain period of time near the sanctuaries of Athena Polias and Pandrosos. Pandrosos was the only one of Cecrops’s daughters who had obeyed the goddess. The girls were given a small enclosure where they could play ball, and in the middle of the enclosure was a statue of a boy on a horse. They were called the Arrhephoroi or the Hersephoroi, the name being taken to mean “bearers of the unspeakable” (árrēta) or “bearers of the dew” (hérsē). In fact they were both. One night, the priestess of Athena comes to the girls: “They carry on their heads what the priestess of Athena gives them to carry; she who gives knows not what she gives, nor do those who carry know what they carry.” The two girls then walk along an underground tunnel that skirts the sanctuary of Aphrodite in the Gardens, going down the steep northern slope of the Acropolis. At the bottom of the passage, “they lay down what they have carried and pick up another thing, all wrapped up, which they bring back to where they began.”

  A swapping of bundles, an underground walk in the night, two little girls on their own: it was the enacting of a religious mystery. Thus the Athenians demonstrated under Athena’s glaucous gaze that they had not forgotten their sin. No one ever revealed what it was the Arrhephoroi carried and brought back on their heads. But more important than what was in the bundles was the fact that they should remain unopened, and that the two girls should move them in darkness.

  After the ceremony, the girls were sent home. The following year two others would take their place. And one day they would all feel moved when they remembered the “splendid education” Athens had given them. The companions of Lysistrata recalled their girlhood thus: “At seven I was an Arrhephoros; at ten I was an aletrís, I ground the holy cakes in the service of our protectress; then I put on the saffron tunic and danced the bear dance at the Brauronia; and when I’d grown up to be a fine girl I was a basket bearer and wore a necklace of dried figs.” These girls had been through mystery the way other children cross a playground, and now, barricaded up on the Acropolis, they refused to let their coarse, lustful husbands so much as touch them.

  Whatever happens in Athens, “splendor,” lamprótēs, always has a part to play. It was not because the tyranny of the sons of Pisistratus was unbearable that Harmodius and Aristogiton rebelled and thus became the model for all later reflections on conspiracies and tyrannicides. No, it was because Harmodius’s body was “in the splendor of youth,” and Hippias, Pisistratus’s son, desired him. But Aristogiton, an average citizen and Harmodius’s lover, also desired the boy. Their assassination attempt was motivated by “the pangs of love.”

  And when the Athenians began flocking down to Piraeus at dawn on what they didn’t realize would be their last day of shared exhilaration albeit mixed with fear, when, that is, Alcibiades’ fleet set sail for Sicily—even on this occasion, in a scene colored by boldness, conquest, and death, the eye came to rest on “the splendor of the view” of those ships laden with ornaments, until the herald blew on his trumpet, silence fell, and the soldiers and commanders lifted their gold and silver cups to make a libation. So recounts Thucydides, most sober among Athenians.

  Phye was a beautiful country girl, four cubits tall. She lived in the district of Paeania. When Pisistra
tus decided to return from exile and reestablish his tyranny, they went to find her. They dressed her in lavish armor and showed her how to stand and move so as to seem even more impressive. Then they got her to climb on a chariot and set off to Athens, preceded by a number of heralds. The heralds announced around the town that Pisistratus was returning and that the goddess Athena, who had always favored him, was leading him back to the Acropolis. “And convinced she was the goddess in person, the citizens worshiped a human creature and welcomed Pisistratus back.”

  Herodotus claims that this piece of deception was “by far the most naive since the Hellenic race split off from the barbarians in ancient times, being shrewder and less prone to childish naïveté than they.” But, as always, it is the deception that reveals a truth which might otherwise escape us. This second return of Pisistratus happened in 541 B.C., just a few decades before Heraclitus began to write. And for all the extraordinary shrewdness they showed in their political struggles, the people of Athens were still willing to accept the possibility that one day the goddess Athena might ride into their city on a chariot.

  It is easy to imagine the fate historians have reserved for what Gaetano De Sanctis refers to as “the absurd story of the shapely woman who, dressed up as Pallas, is supposed to have escorted Pisistratus into the city.” As we know, scholars have long been in the habit of pointing out the “childish naïveté” of Herodotus, just as he had pointed out the “childish naïveté” of the barbarians.

  The fact remains, however, that Aristotle, who was to become the model of rational thought for every scholar of the classical world, tells the story of Pisistratus’s second return in exactly the same terms as Herodotus. Indeed, he even adds a few extra details about Phye, thus irritating Gaetano De Sanctis even more with this “worthless claptrap that demonstrates nothing but the poor historical sense of the author who collected it.” Aristotle writes: “Eleven years later, having been put in a difficult position by his own faction, Megacles opened negotiations with Pisistratus and, on the understanding that the latter would marry his daughter, had him return in a manner at once worthy of ancient times and extremely simple. He spread a rumor that Athena was leading Pisistratus back and, having found a tall and beautiful woman from the district of Paeania, as Herodotus says, or from the district of Collytus, as others claim, a flower seller of Thracian origin who went by the name of Phye, and having dressed her up to look like the goddess, he had her ride into the city at the tyrant’s side—thus Pisistratus entered the city on a chariot with the woman beside him, and the citizens bowed down in amazement and welcomed him.”