The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  What Plato learned from Sparta was how to get a group of initiates to take over a town’s political life without anybody being scandalized. Éphoroi and phýlakes are very close even from a linguistic point of view: both mean “guardians,” “observers from above.” “Of a flock,” says Plato; “of a territory,” says Sophocles; “of children,” says Plato again; “of a slaughter,” says Euripides. But what do you have to do to become a guardian? Subject yourself to the initiatory torture. The aspirant must be “tried [basanizómenon] like gold in the fire.” Yet basanízein, when removed from the context of noble and inanimate materials such as gold, means “to torture.”

  The bloody whippings Artemis Orthia demanded of the young Spartans, the hómoioi, are only a hint, a small hint, of those “sufferings and pleasures … labors, fears, and convulsions” that Plato wanted to impose on his future guardians. And here he reveals his most daring plan: to secularize initiation, to have it pass for something like a good school, a bit tough, along the lines of an English boarding school, but as justifiable as any other kind of training, of soldiers, for example, or artists. While in reality it was far more ambitious, its purpose being to select, once and for all, a group which, purely thanks to its initiatory quality, would be able to run the whole city. “You know I hesitated earlier on to say the rash things I have now said,” Plato adds with fake caution, as though his most audacious step had been saying that “truly impeccable guardians must be philosophers.” And even as he covers his tracks like this, he is insinuating the real departure: that in order to be “impeccable guardians,” the philosophers must be initiated, and hence subjected to those excessive passions that Plato himself had condemned.

  But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but “few” initiates. And in fact when compared with the Spartan version, Plato’s initiation process is more subtle and more arduous. There are a greater number of trials to overcome and, having survived the last, the initiate may find he is “the only one.” Then there may not be enough time for him to pass on his initiation. And there may not be anyone to follow him, with the result that the chain is broken.

  So one day Plato began to write the Republic. And he wrote the text in the form it is in so that anyone who wanted to understand it might be subjected to that initiatory process of “sufferings and pleasures … labors, fears, and convulsions.” The many who did not understand, and were not supposed to understand, imagined they were reading a treatise on the perfect State.

  Newly born, the boys were washed in wine to see how tough they were. The weaker ones were thrown into the “so-called Dump, a ravine on the slopes of the Taygetus.” They used no swaddling clothes and left the babies to cry in the dark. Those boys were “the common property of the city,” and hence must be made useful to the city as soon as possible. All their lives they would eat with other males, black broth more often than not. The older men loved practical jokes and war stories. The boys had to learn how to put up with both. They learned to read and write, but nothing more. The notion of anything more was abhorred, in everything. Getting married meant leaving the boys’ dormitory some nights to see your wife. Sex was furtive and quick, and the couple didn’t sleep together. “Some had children without ever seeing their wives in daylight.”

  Unlike the many fools throughout Greece, they knew right from the start that “all of them, for their whole lives, must wage perpetual war against every city.” But the first city they were at war with was their own. They watched the helots, too many of them, working in the fields, and knew that one day they would have to kill one. They also knew that they must always be on the lookout, always carry a weapon. They knew they must close their doors with special keys. They could sense the hatred of the helots. The Equals took pleasure not so much in pleonexía, the original sin of lusting for power but, and they were unique in this, in playing police. For it was a more subtle and lasting pleasure: they could feel that other people’s lives depended on their decisions, while at the same time remaining anonymous, part of a corps, a wolf pack. We have very little hard information about Lycurgus. But we do know what his name means: “he who carries out the works (or celebrates the orgies) of the wolf.”

  Sodomized before marriage (“prior to their weddings the rule is that girls should couple in the manner of boys”), visited hurriedly by their husbands at night so that they could conceive and retain “some spark of desire and grace,” relieved of the task of bringing up their children, not even interested in weaving, what did the Spartan women do? It is a question that has no answer, like the one the sophists would ask each other over banquets: “What song the Syrens sang?”

  Plato himself regretted that the lives of the Spartan women were not organized in the same minute detail as those of their men, because this left an opportunity for “license.” Athenian malice chose to remember little more of the Spartan women than their naked thighs, which could be glimpsed through a slit down the sides of their tunics. The poet Ibycus calls the Spartan women “thigh flashers.” But the Athenians were able to appreciate their strappingly healthy beauty. Lysistrata greets the Spartan woman Lampito thus: “How your beauty shines, my precious. How fleshly and firm your body is. You could strangle a bull.” And Lampito answers: “By the Dioscuri, I swear I could. I exercise in the gym and kick my arse with my feet.” To which, Cleonice: “What great tits you’ve got.” And Lampito again: “The way you’re feeling me up I might be a beast for the sacrifice.”

  During exercises and games, the Spartan girls went nude beside the nude boys, brought together “out of erotic, not geometric necessity,” Plato remarks. If the women speak in public it is only to pontificate in the best civic spirit. Indeed it is to them that we owe the invention of that saddest of figures, the Positive Hero. “We alone generate men,” thunders the proud Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, speaking to a foreign woman. She thus does the spadework for Napoleon’s quip on his first meeting with Madame de Staël: “Who do you consider the best of all women?” she asks. And he: “The one who bears the most children, madame.” But what we would like to know is something quite different: what did these descendants of the Leucippides say to each other amid the clouds of dust they raised as they ran like colts along the banks of the Eurotas, “their hair tossing in the wind like Bacchants waving their thyrsuses.” But the Spartan Sirens keep their silence too.

  That happiness is an early symptom of misfortune, that “inherent” within happiness is the power to bring on misfortune, above all through the agency of resentment (phthónos), whether of men or gods, is a vision that was to persist among the Greeks when almost all others had faded. Yet they did want to be happy. One can appreciate now why it was that the Spartans cut themselves off from the other Greeks, transformed themselves into an unapproachable island. Just as they had perceived the dangers of exchange, so they saw the dangers of happiness. When they weren’t sure they could handle something, they preferred to cut loose, to abolish rather than lose control. Thus they chose to put into practice what would later earn them Aristotle’s most damning criticism: “they have lost the happiness of living.”

  Under Lycurgus, Sparta underwent a transformation that condensed into just a few years the whole of political history from sacred kingship right through to the regimes of the present day. Sovereignty passed from a pair of kings, an archaic and obscure institution, to five ephors, a highly innovative expression of absolute power disguised as a judiciary, which in turn was a cover for what was originally a priesthood. The long transition from sacred king to Politburo was thus achieved in one foul swoop. And the fact that this was done while pretending to leave the old institutions intact only added to the audacious modernity of the development. There was no need to cut off the two kings’ heads. They could stay where they were, but bereft of power. If they caused trouble, however, the ephors might decide to “kill them without trial.” Alternatively,
the ephors could take their decision to kill the kings on a starry, moonless night, while silently watching the sky. If a shooting star crossed that sky, it meant that one of the kings had “offended against divinity.” Originally no more than observers who kept their eyes on the heavens, the ephors had become supreme supervisors and “guardians,” watchful eyes looking down from above. That was how they exploited their priestly past. It offered a sparkling cloak that protected the secret of politics.

  On the one hand, a divine king who upholds through his body the attributes of cosmic sovereignty; on the other, a group of mostly faceless, nameless, all-seeing inquisitors: the whole of political history is contained between these two extremes. It is the story of how liturgical power was transformed into invisible power. And that transformation, which was to go on for centuries right down to the present day, was achieved in Sparta in almost no time at all, and with very little effort. The only difficult thing was making sure that nobody outside realized what had happened. Everybody had to go on believing in those innocuous anecdotes about the discipline, courage, and frugality of the Spartans. But there were one or two people who couldn’t so easily be hoodwinked. Thucydides was one. But most perceptive of all was Plato.

  All Plato’s political thought is obsessed by one figure: the guardian, or guardians. Whether they are philosophers, as proposed in the Republic, or men concerned with the Good, as he likes to pretend in the Laws, ultimate power is concentrated in the hands of the guardians. But Plato did not think of them as hypothetical figures: on the contrary, the guardians already existed, in the wealthy Peloponnese. They were the great sophists Socrates had mentioned in Protagoras, those who used their sophistry not to show off their glory but to hide it. They were the ephors, first example of a wholly godless power. But they didn’t let people see that side of them either; on the contrary, not content with all the existing cults, they brought in a new one, to which they were deeply devoted. They built a temple to Fear, close to the communal dining hall. “They didn’t honor her as a dark demon to be kept at bay, but because they believed that the State was held together mainly thanks to fear.”

  The great societies of ancient times were images of something that encompassed them, isomorphs of the cosmos. The Son of the Sky was the axis of the world before becoming the axis of the city. It was only with the hubris of the Greeks that society claimed to be self-sufficient. So the Great Animal, as Plato describes him, was born. From that hubris sprang all the other repudiations: it was the sign of man’s first move to cut loose from the rest, the human race closed in on itself, in an attacking formation.

  It was Athens: the searing word, cruelty, a play of color. And it was Sparta: slow, circumspect, murderous, seeking to turn everything to its own account. The Spartans even produced a lawmaker, Lycurgus, who committed suicide because he felt it might be useful for Sparta. “So he starved himself to death, reasoning that even the deaths of politicians should be of some value to society, that the end of their lives should not be without its use, but ought to have something virtuous and efficacious about it.”

  Perhaps Alcibiades penetrated deeper than anyone else into “the secret of the regime” that was Sparta. As an exile, he sought asylum in Sparta, being a descendant of the Eupatrids, who for generations had had links with the family of the ephor Endius. “He shaved his head, washed in cold water, and accustomed himself to eating dry bread and drinking black broth.” Although the king of Sparta at the time was not, for once, a puppet of the ephors but a great general, Agis, Alcibiades “seduced his wife Timea and got her pregnant.” Thanks to him, even the archaic and somewhat ridiculous regality that remained in Sparta was thus raised to illegitimacy in the person of the bastard child Leotychides, “whose mother, at home, speaking softly before servants and friends, would call Alcibiades, so great was the passion that obsessed her.”

  Alcibiades left us none of his insights into Sparta, but he did talk to Thucydides. And reading Thucydides one has the impression that the mirage of a virtuous Sparta has entirely dissolved. Thucydides sees and judges the Spartans’ actions as though from within, as though the mechanism were there before his eyes, driven by two powerful levers: deceit and brute force. Before being wiped out by the Athenians down to the last man capable of bearing arms, the Melians had hoped for assistance from Sparta. The Athenian ambassadors tried in vain to convince them that such hopes were treacherous, because they depended on those who “more blatantly than any other nation we know of believe that what they like doing is honorable and that what suits their interests is just.”

  Located on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont, at its narrowest point, Abydos was included in Athens’s list of depraved cities. It was here that Alcibiades chose to go for his grand tour. “As soon as you came of age and had got the approval of your tutors, you took your inheritance from them and set sail for Abydos, not in order to recover payment for anything, nor in any consular role, but because you wanted to learn from the Abydian women the sorts of habits congenial to your spirit of illegality and debauchery, so as then to be able to pursue those habits in later life.” So says Antiphon in oratorial rage.

  But Alcibiades’ departure could also claim the right to be recognized by the sophists as one of those passions that flare up at a distance on the basis of a single name, or some story heard from someone else, or some image seen in a dream. The fact is that Alcibiades had heard tell of a legendary courtesan called Medontis, and it was to find her that he left Athens in the company of his uncle and lover, Axiochus. Here Lysias takes over from Antiphon in the assault on Alcibiades, concentrating every possible transgression in a single anecdote: “So Axiochus and Alcibiades sailed to the Hellespont, landing in Abydos, where they both married the Abydian woman Medontis and cohabited with her. She gave birth to a daughter, but neither could be sure who was the father. And when the girl was of marriageable age, they both cohabited with her, and whenever Alcibiades was having his way with her, he would say she was Axiochus’s daughter; and when it was Axiochus’s turn, he would say she was Alcibiades’.”

  It is true that Alcibiades would later find occasion to return to Abydos as a military leader, victorious on both land and sea, flaunting his purple sail. But there is nothing to prove that the story of Medontis and her daughter wasn’t just an exemplary tale of vice invented by Lysias. All we can say for certain is that right from the beginning Alcibiades’ destiny seems to have been marked out by an overriding predilection for prostitution of one form or another. It is as if for Alcibiades prostituting oneself were the secret sign by which strength and excellence are recognized. “Leaving the women of Sparta and Athens behind, he would burst in at the doors of the hetaerae in high spirits.” And when, at Plato’s symposium, he appeared, “wearing a sort of garland woven of ivy and violets with many ribbons around his head,” those flowers were “the first invitation to an encounter and a demonstration of desire … for the lure of fresh flowers and fruit demands in exchange the first fruits of the body of the person who picks them.” Thus it was a prostitute, Timandra, who recovered Alcibiades’ body, riddled by the arrows and javelins of his Spartan assassins. “She wrapped him up in her robes to hide him, then gave him a glorious and honorable burial, using what she could find round about.” Shortly before this, in a premonition of death, Alcibiades had dreamt that Timandra was wrapping him in her clothes and making up his face like a woman’s.

  Almost everything we know about Sparta was written by outsiders. The city’s only two poets, Alcman and Tyrtaeus, were probably not Spartans by birth, and in any case they lived before the reforms of the sixth century, which conjured up and froze for all time the mirage that was Sparta. No Spartan ever spoke out, as no priest of Eleusis ever spoke out. Their real legacy was not a concise, sententious morality but silence.

  What happened in ancient Greece that had never happened before? A lightening of our load. The mind shrugged off the world with a brusque gesture that was to last a few centuries. When, in the geometric patterns of the va
ses, we begin to find rectangles inhabited by black figures, those figures already have an empty space behind them, a clearing, an area at last free from meaning. It was perhaps out of gratitude toward this insolent gesture that Greece celebrated in its tragedies the attempt, admittedly vain and doomed to be short-lived, to rid themselves of the consequences of gesture and action.

  Then, little by little, the Erinyes darkened the sky ever more rarely, until the most pressing concern became to find a way to control action, as if such control would be sufficient to empty action of its insidious nature, as if control did not itself imply a further action, just as insidious as the first. Anaximander’s fragment on díkē, the Platonic vision of the meadow, on each side of which yawned four chasms, celestial and terrestrial, with swarms of souls meeting there: these were rare appeals to a rigorous sense of karman, appeals that the Hellenic spirit was impatiently stamping out. The Greeks would abandon them, without scruple, leaving them to the sects, the initiates, to Egypt. Like characters on a stage, the now cosmopolitan citizens would soon have no need of anything but jokes and tears. The cosmos was breaking up into Alexandrian chronicle.

  Herodotus would have preferred to write about feats of engineering rather than religion, but in Egypt the cults invaded every nook and cranny. In a hasty observation, he pointed to the trait that most sharply divided Egypt from Greece: “The heroes have no place in Egyptian religion.” In Egypt the past, like the land, had no ups and downs to it. The only unevenness was that tiny scarp formed by the layers of silt the Nile deposited every year. But, for the Greeks, the progressive deterioration of successive ages, from gold to iron, had at least been interrupted by that hillock, the age of the heroes, to which everything still looked back, even if the period had been nothing more than a capricious wrinkle on the surface of time.