The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Everything repeats itself, everything comes back again, but always with some slight twist in its meaning: in the modern age the group of initiates becomes the police force. And there is always some tiny territory untouched by the anthropologists’ fine-tooth comb that survives, like an archaic island, in the modern world: thus it is that in antiquity we come across the emissaries of a reality that was to unfold more than two thousand years later.

  Part of a Spartan’s training was the exercise known as the krypteía: “It was organized as follows. The commanders of the young men would from time to time send off into the country, some in one direction, some in another, those young men who seemed smartest. They would be armed with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else. During the day they would fan out into uncharted territory, find a place to hide and rest there; at night they came down onto the roads and, if they found a helot, would cut his throat. Often they would organize forays into the fields and kill the biggest and strongest helots.”

  The usefulness of history and historians lies in the presentation and narration of events that can then reveal their meaning hundreds, even thousands of years after they happened. Burckhardt writes: “In Thucydides there may be facts of primary importance that will only be understood in a hundred years’ time.” He doesn’t offer any examples. But we can find one ourselves that Burckhardt couldn’t have found, because history hadn’t as yet revealed it, for Burckhardt hadn’t lived through the age of Stalin: “Likewise concerned about the ill-feeling among the helots and by their huge numbers [the Spartans’ relationship with the helots having always been based on the need to defend themselves], they went so far as to do as follows: they announced that if any of the helots considered that during past wars they had given the best possible service to Sparta, they should come forward with their evidence. Once this had been examined it could lead to their being set free. But really this was a test, for those who, out of pride, considered themselves most deserving, were also those who would be most likely to rebel. About two thousand were selected. Crowned with garlands they went around from temple to temple under the impression they had been freed. Not long afterward the Spartans did away with them and no one ever knew how they were all killed.”

  “When the Spartans kill, they do so at night. They never kill anybody in daylight.” Thus writes Herodotus, dwelling on the fact for no apparent reason.

  Initiation involves a physiological metamorphosis: the circulating blood and thought patterns of the mind absorb a new substance, the flavor of a secret wisdom. That flavor is the flavor of totality: but, in the Spartan version, it is the flavor of the society as totality. Thus we pass from the old to the new regime.

  Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it—and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite.

  That moment is Sparta. The Spartans were above all hómoioi, “equals,” insofar as they had all been initiated into the same group. But that group was the entire society. Sparta: the only place in Greece, and in all European history since, where the whole citizenry constituted an initiatory sect.

  Having drunk deep the liquor of power, though more the idea than the reality, they soon ignored and scorned all immortality’s other drinks: they had no time for the sciences of the heavens (“they can’t bear talk about the stars or the celestial motions,” observed the irritated Hippias) and cared nothing for poetry. Indeed, despite the fact that in years past Alcman had produced enchanting lyrics to sing the beauty of the Leucippides running like colts along the banks of the Eurotas, “the Spartans are, of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least.” Their attitude to every form, every art, every desire can be summed up in their approach to music: they wished to make it “first innocuous, then useful.”

  They were the first to train naked and grease their bodies, men and women alike. Their clothes became ever more simple and practical. They were the grim forebears of every utilitarianism. They kept their helots in a state of terror—yet were compelled to live in terror of their helots. They carried their spears with them everywhere, for death might be lurking at every turn. Not at the hands of their “equals” but at those of the endless mutes who served them, before being mocked and decimated.

  Sparta is surrounded by the erotic aura of the boarding school, the garrison, the gymnasium, the jail. Everywhere there are Mädchen in Uniform, even if that uniform is a taut and glistening skin.

  Sparta understood, with a clarity that set it apart from every other society of the ancient world, that the real enemy was the excess that is part of life. Lycurgus’s two ominous rules that forestall and frustrate any possible law merely dictate that no laws be written down and no luxury permitted. It is perhaps the most glaring demonstration of laconism the Spartans offer, always assuming we leave aside the grim moral precepts tradition has handed down to us. One can almost smell the malignant breath of the oracle in those dictates: forbidding writing and luxury was in itself enough to do away with everything that escaped the state’s control.

  “When it came to reading and writing they learned only the bare minimum.” In every corner of their lives, like an ever-wakeful jailer, Lycurgus had hunted down the superfluous and strangled it before it could grow. There was only one moment when the Spartans had a sense of the overflowing abundance of life: when the flautists played Castor’s march, the paean sounded in reply, and the compact ranks advanced, their long hair hanging down.

  “A majestic and terrifying sight,” war. That was the moment when god resided in both State and individual, the one moment when the rules allowed the young men “to comb out their hair and dress up in cloaks and weaponry” until they looked like “horses treading proudly and neighing to be in the race.” When the march stopped, the Spartan “stands with his legs apart, feet firmly planted on the ground, and bites his lip.”

  “Just as Plato says that god rejoiced that the universe was born and had begun to move, so Lycurgus, pleased and contented with the beauty and loftiness of his now complete and already implemented legislation, wanted to make it immortal and immutable for the future, or at least so far as human foresight was capable.” The divine craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus composed the world and brought it into harmony; Lycurgus was the first to compose a world that excluded the world: Spartan society. He was the first person to conduct experiments on the body social, the true forefather all modern rulers, even if they don’t have the impact of a Lenin or a Hitler, try to imitate.

  The Athenians knew there was a surplus of beauty in relation to power in their city. They could already see the ruins of Athens, whereas, to Thucydides’ eyes, “if the Spartans were to abandon their city, so that only the foundations of the buildings survived, with the passing of time posterity simply would not believe the town had ever been so powerful as it was said to be.”

  What distinguishes Sparta from Athens is their different responses to the practice of exchange. In Sparta it provokes terror, in Athens it arouses fascination. Thus the wholeness of the sacred is split into two chemically pure halves. Gold is taken into Sparta but never comes out: “for generation after generation gold has been flowing into Sparta from every people in Greece, and often from barbarian countries too, and it never flows out.” Coins are so heavy and burdensome they can’t even be moved. In Athens, “friendly to speech,” words run spontaneously from the lips in a stream that sluices every culvert of the city. In Sparta the word is always kept tightly in rein.

  Spartans’ morality was not based on the weighty precepts that made up the wisdom of the people but on the decision to treat the word as an enemy, foremost exponent of the superfluous. Sparta was an invention for freezing exchange and stabilizing power as far as is humanly possible,
which explains the attraction Plato always felt toward Sparta, right up to the late Laws: that order of theirs seemed capable of putting a stop to the proliferation of images.

  But here is Sparta in a nutshell, courtesy of a Plato at once laconic and vicious: “These men … will be greedy for wealth, fiercely devoted behind the scenes to gold and silver; they will possess storehouses and domestic treasuries where they can hide that wealth, and well-fenced villas, veritable nests of privacy, where they can spend money on women and whomever else they want and enjoy being thoroughly dissolute.… And they will be miserly with their wealth too, earning and honoring it in secret, prodigal only with other people’s, which they covet, and they will take their pleasures behind closed doors, snubbing the law the way a child snubs his father, and they will not respond to persuasion, but only to violence, because they will have ignored the real Muse of reasoning and philosophy and esteemed physical exercise more praiseworthy than music.” One can never be too sure where Plato’s sentiments lie.

  It was to the Spartans’ credit that they were the first to appreciate the extent to which the social order is based on hatred—and can survive only so long as that base is maintained. They accepted the consequences of this discovery: equal and interchangeable among themselves, they formed a rock-solid front against the outside world. And in the outside world were the masses (tò plêthos), whom, unlike the Athenians, the Spartans had no illusions about winning over and manipulating. “The best Spartan thinkers do not believe it would be safe to live together with those they have so seriously wronged. Their way of doing things is quite different: among themselves they have established equality and that democracy necessary to guarantee a constant unity of intent. The common people, on the other hand, they keep out in the surrounding countryside, thus enslaving their own spirits no less than those of their slaves.”

  The Spartans were perfectly aware of the atrocious suffering they were inflicting and never imagined their victims could forget it. The solution was to establish terror as a normal condition of life—and that was Sparta’s great invention: to create a situation in which terror was seen as something normal. The pure Athenian Isocrates was outraged: “But what would be the point of describing all the sufferings inflicted on the masses? If I just mention the worst enormity, leaving aside all the others, it will be quite enough. From among those who have constantly been subjected to horrible wrongs, and who are nevertheless still useful in present circumstances, the ephors are free to choose whomsoever they want and have them put to death without trial; while for all the other Greeks, even the killing of the most reprobate slave is a crime that must be paid for.” The ephors were powerful bureaucrats; they were not remarkable for their “bold thinking” (méga phroneîn), as were the eminent and feared men of Athens. To make up for that, they could at any moment, and without a word of justification, kill anybody they wanted to from the nameless mass of the helots.

  Athens never achieved the full horror of Sparta, but then it was never far behind. The city had barely discovered liberty, that experience no one in Persia or Egypt had ever dreamed of, before it was also discovering new methods of persecution, methods more subtle than those practiced by the great kings and the pharaohs. An army of informers invaded city square and market. They were no longer the secret agents of a police force but a freely formed collective of citizens intent on the public good. Thus in the very same instant that it discovered the excellence of the individual, Athens also developed a fierce resentment against that excellence. None of the great men of the fifth century B.C. was able to live in Athens without the constant fear of being expelled from the city and condemned to death. Ostracism and the sycophants formed the two prongs of a pincer that held society tightly together. As Jacob Burckhardt was first to recognize, Jacobin pettiness became a powerful force in the pólis. The public good was able to claim its victims with the arrogant and peremptory authority that had once been the reserve of the gods. And where a god would speak through soothsayers or a Pythia, chanting in hexameters and using obscure images, the pólis could get by with a less solemn apparatus: public opinion, the voice of the people, mutable and murderous as it sped, day after day, through the agoré.

  Athens left posterity not only the Propylaea, but political chatter too. The anecdote passed on to us by Plutarch is exemplary: an illiterate man went up to Aristides, who he had never seen before, and asked him to write the name Aristides on a potsherd. So he could vote for his ostracism. Aristides asked him: “What harm has Aristides done you?” The illiterate man answered: “None. And I don’t know him, but it bothers me hearing everybody call him Aristides the Just.” Without more ado, Aristides wrote his own name on the potsherd.

  It is a grim irony of history that Sparta continues to be associated with the idea of virtue, in its most rigid and hateful form. It is as if the Equals had placed the hard rule of law above everything else and thus gained themselves a reputation for being tough and cold, yet at the same time noble.

  But the truth is that the Spartans had come up with a very different and far more effective way of doing things. They created the image of a virtuous, law-abiding society as a powerful propaganda weapon for external consumption, while the reality inside Sparta was that they cared less for such things than anyone else. They left eloquence to the Athenians, and with a smirk on their faces too, because they knew that that eloquent, indeed talkative nation would be the first to feel nostalgic for the sober virtue of the Spartans, not appreciating that such virtue was nothing more than a useful ploy for confusing and unnerving their enemies. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Spartans refused to allow strangers to enter their city and were so secretive about what happened within its territories. An accurate report would have exposed their smug insensibility to the very idea of law, which had such a powerful hold over the minds of their neighbors. For the most disturbing examples of indifference toward injustice came not from those animals of passion, the tyrants, but from the cold ephors, supreme guardians of the secret of Sparta. The sad story of Skedasus reveals them to us in all their esoteric ruthlessness.

  Skedasus was a poor man who lived in Leuctra. He had two daughters, Hippos and Miletia. He loved to have guests, even though he had little to offer in the way of hospitality. One day he put up two young Spartans. They were both taken by the beauty of the virgin daughters, but because the girls’ father was there they restrained themselves and proceeded with their journey to Delphi. On the way back they stopped at Skedasus’s house again. But this time he was away. The two daughters took the foreigners in. When the Spartans realized they were alone, they raped the girls. Then, seeing them disfigured by distress, they killed them and threw them down a well. When Skedasus got home all he found was the dog, yelping and running back and forth between his master and the well. Skedasus guessed the truth and pulled out the corpses. His neighbors told him the two Spartans had stopped at his house, and Skedasus realized what had happened, remembering that the two “had admired the girls and spoken warmly of the happiness of their future husbands.”

  So Skedasus set off for Sparta. He wanted to report the crime to the ephors. One night he was in an inn. Next to him was an old man from Oreos who was complaining bitterly about the Spartans. Skedasus asked him what they had done to him. The old man explained that the Spartans had appointed a man called Aristodemus as governor of Oreos. He had fallen in love with the old man’s son and had immediately attempted to abduct the boy from the gymnasium, but the gym teacher had stopped him. The following day he managed to get the boy just the same. He put him on a ship and sailed over to the opposite shore. He tried to rape him. The boy put up a fight. So he cut his throat. That evening, he went back to Oreos and gave a banquet. The old father organized his son’s funeral and set off for Sparta. He asked for an audience with the ephors. The ephors didn’t even listen to him. Then Skedasus told his own story. When he had finished, the old man told him there was no point in going to Sparta. But Skedasus took no notice. He spoke to the epho
rs. They didn’t even listen to him. So he went to the king, he pleaded with people in the street. It did no good. Finally he killed himself. But history would one day set its seal on the story. Spartan power was broken once and for all at the battle of Leuctra. The fighting took place not far from the tombs of Skedasus’s daughters.

  For years the wooden image of Taurian Artemis lay hidden in a clump of reeds not far from the river Eurotas. Orestes had stolen it from the sanctuary. He traveled for weeks, holding it tightly in his hands for as long as he felt the madness upon him. Then one day he thought he would try to live without it, and he hid the statue in this wild place. Two young Spartans of royal blood, Astrabacus and Alopecus, came across it by chance when they pushed the reeds aside. Upright and swathed in rushes, the statue stared at them. Not knowing what they were seeing, the two Spartans were seized by madness. Such is the power of the image: it heals only those who know what it is. For everybody else, it is an illness.

  Around the small, light statue of Artemis, the Spartans built a temple. They dedicated it to Artemis Orthia and Lygodesma, upright and bound with rushes. People would offer masks to it, horrifying usually, images of the night and the underworld. As once before among the Tauri, when Iphigenia took care of it and washed it, the statue required that young blood be shed. But even the Spartans could sometimes ease up on a harsh custom. They decided they wouldn’t kill young people for the statue anymore but just whip them till the blood flowed before the goddess. So now one would see the most insolent of the Spartans, the ones who used to make raids into the countryside to kill helots for fun, for a laugh, agreeing to have themselves thoroughly whipped by other boys. Some of those doing the whipping might hold back a bit, especially when the youth being whipped was very handsome, or belonged to one of the more illustrious families. The statue didn’t like this. The priestess held it up beside the boys being whipped. But if the strokes eased off, the statue would begin to weigh more and more, like a meteorite trying to sink into the ground, and the wood would protest: “You’re pulling me down, you’re pulling me down.”