The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  The whole of Greece was strewn with the tombs of heroes, as was Egypt with cat cemeteries. Heroes and animals opened up the path to the dead. And as in Greece the heroes would become confused with the gods, repeating their deeds and taking over their traits, in Egypt the animals that cluttered everyday life reappeared in the heads of those hawks, cats, ibis, and jackals that watched over the soul on its celestial journeys. But there was no call to be overly surprised by such differences. In the end, as Herodotus with his admirable good sense observed, religion is a reality that no one can help but recognize. Which was why, he wrote, “I see no point in reporting what I’ve been told about Egyptian religion, since I don’t believe any nation knows much more than any other when it comes to things like this.”

  They put earrings on crocodiles. When they died they laid them out in huge subterranean vaults. Cities of the Crocodiles. When there was a fire, the only thing they worried about was saving the cats. And the cats, in turn, threw themselves into the fires. Everything was bigger, longer, and flatter than among other peoples. Numbers were seized by a silent fury of multiplication. Such were the Egyptians. It was a country where all creatures, men and beasts, had barely gasped their last breath before they were being sent to the embalmers—except for the women, that is, who were sent three days later, so that the embalmers wouldn’t rape them.

  History for the Egyptians was a sequence of statues sitting on thrones. The first series in the sequence was made up of gods. The second series, of men. There wasn’t much to distinguish one from the other. Yet the gap between those two series of statues was unbridgeable. Hecataeus, deceitful like all the Greeks, once claimed that his family could be traced back sixteen generations to a god. The priests of Thebes in Egypt humiliated him with a simple gesture. They took him into the nave of the temple and showed him hundreds of wooden statues standing side by side: they were the chief priests to date. All very much the same. Men and sons of men, explained the priests with their measured sarcasm. From other priests Herodotus would hear the list of the three hundred and thirty sovereigns who had reigned over Egypt. None, they said, had been memorable, except the one queen Nitocris and the most recent king, Moeris, who had had a lake built with pyramids.

  The Greeks who dropped anchor at Naucratis, at the mouth of the Nile, were mainly merchants, tourists, or mercenaries. They would go to the market, which, like Corinth, was famous for its prostitutes (“unusually beautiful,” remarks Herodotus). These Greeks were the first people to settle in Egypt and go on speaking a foreign tongue. Seven mercenaries from small towns in Ionia carved a few words with their names on the left leg of a huge statue of Ramses II, near the second waterfall of Abu Simbel. There were many such mercenaries: in the reign of Amasis, they formed a Foreign Legion of thirty thousand men.

  Charaxus came to Naucratis to seek his fortune, bringing a ship laden with wine from Lesbos. He was Sappho’s brother. But, instead of making a fortune, he squandered one on his love for Doricha, also known as Rhodopis, a most beautiful courtesan. Rhodopis came from Thrace as slave of a rich man from Samos. One of her fellow slaves was the storyteller Aesop. Charaxus paid a ransom for Rhodopis and gave himself over to his passion for her. Back on Lesbos, Sappho wrote some furious poetry, invoking Aphrodite to bring her brother back, “unharmed” and with at least some shreds of his wealth.

  Herodotus was shocked when it was suggested that the Micerine pyramid had been built for Rhodopis. How could a building “that had cost countless thousands of talents” belong to a hetaera? But centuries later, when Strabo was traveling the Mediterranean and saw the heads of the Sphinxes barely poking up from the desert sand, his guides pointed out the Micerine pyramid, referring to it as the Courtesan’s Pyramid. They said it had been built by “Rhodopis’s lovers.” And they told this story. One day Rhodopis was out bathing. An eagle snatched one of her sandals from a maid’s hands. The bird flew to Memphis, where it dropped the sandal from high in the air onto the Pharaoh’s lap as he was judging people’s disputes out in the open. The Pharaoh saw that it was a beautiful sandal. He sent men all over Egypt to look for the woman it belonged to. They finally found her, in Naucratis. She became the Pharaoh’s wife. On her death, the pyramid was built in her honor.

  Hermes was pining with love for Aphrodite, who paid no attention. Zeus took pity on him. While Aphrodite was bathing in the river Acheloüs, he sent an eagle to snatch one of her slippers (soccum). Holding the slipper in her beak, the eagle flew to Egypt to give it to Hermes. Aphrodite followed as far as the city of Amitarnia, where she found both the slipper and the pining god. In return for her slipper, Aphrodite let Hermes make love to her. Hermes showed his gratitude by setting the eagle in the sky, above Ganymede, who had once been carried off by an eagle.

  In Plutarch’s time, guides in Delphi were still showing people the empty space where the long spears the courtesan Rhodopis had dedicated to the oracle used to be kept. Freed from slavery and having gained great wealth, she had used a tenth of her earnings to “build something the likes of which was never conceived of nor dedicated in any other temple.” She did it because she was “eager to leave some memento of herself in Greece.” Some said it was a scandal. But the answer to their objections was near at hand: looking up from the space outside the temple, one saw the golden statue of Phryne, which one stoic had disdainfully described as “a monument to Greek debauchery.” And, in the end, it was nothing more than Praxiteles’ homage to his mistress. Phryne had wanted to offer her golden body as a sort of first fruit, alongside all the other “first fruits and tithes of killings, wars, and pillage,” near “this temple bubbling over with all kinds of spoils and loot taken at the expense of other Greeks.” Now only the spoils remained. Greece had become just another place to visit, accompanied by a guide, who might just be Plutarch.

  Such is the Greek version of events. But the Egyptians, who, as Herodotus remarks, are “the opposite” of the Greeks in all things and always trace everything back to ancient times, tell a different story. In his list of Egyptian rulers, Manetho mentions, as coming at the end of the sixth dynasty, a certain queen Nitocris, “the noblest and most beautiful woman of her time, fair of skin, who built the third pyramid,” known as the Micerine Pyramid. Nitocris was also a daring war leader. Her reign ended in upheaval. To avenge her brother’s death, she had all his enemies drowned in an underground chamber. Then she shut herself up in a room full of ashes. A surviving description speaks of her as “blond with pink cheeks.” And ródōpis means “pink-faced.”

  There were about fifteen hundred years between the life of Nitocris and that of the courtesan Charaxus squandered his fortune on. And about six hundred years between the lives of Sappho and Strabo. That was how long it took for an Egyptian queen to become a blond prostitute arriving in Egypt as a Thracian slave, and for the Greek prostitute to go back to being an Egyptian queen. They are united now in a pyramid. And time has confirmed the truth of the few lines Posidippus wrote for Rhodopis: “Doricha, your bones are adorned by the ribbon tying your soft tresses / and by the perfumed shawl / in which once you wrapped the handsome Charaxus, / flesh against flesh, until the morning cup. / But the white, echoing pages of Sappho’s song / remain and will live on. / Most blessed is your name, and Naucratis will watch over it / so long as ships pass by on the still Nile, heading seaward.”

  For the heroes fighting beneath the walls of Troy, life was not something that asked to be saved. They didn’t even have a word that meant “salvation,” unless perhaps pháos, “light.” Salvation was a temporary reassertion of something already there. It didn’t mean saving existence, or saving oneself from existence. Existence was beyond salvation. Life: something incurable, to be accepted for what it was, in all its malice and splendor. The most you could hope for was to keep yourself on the crest of the wave a few moments longer, before tumbling back down the steep slope into the darkness of the whirlpool. The word most often used to qualify death was aipýs, “steep.” Death meant plunging downward, no sooner th
an you had topped the crest of the world of appearance.

  The most terrifying feature of the Homeric afterlife is its apathy, which comes across in the lack of any punishment. Why distinguish between virtue and vice if everybody in the afterlife is to partake of the same helplessness, the same insubstantiality, the same desire to drink blood so as to feed what shreds of soul the funeral pyres have not entirely burned up and stripped from the whitened bones? Such a vision could not last long in an age that was no longer that of the heroes but of the poets who told the stories of heroes past.

  Homer’s poetry was still buzzing in everybody’s ears when the first disciples of a first sect of the Book, the Orphics, began to swarm across Greece. Everything was different now, or at least so the Orphics claimed. Every action, however trifling, set the wheels of cosmic accountancy in motion. All kinds of rewards could be obtained by reciting splendid words, venerating the names of pre-Olympian gods. They knocked on the doors of the rich. They arrived with strange objects—books, a babble of books—and hinted that they were in contact with the gods. If someone felt burdened by a sense of guilt, if another felt an urge to hurt an enemy, the Orphics were ready to help, at a modest price. Sacrifices, charms, purification ceremonies. Until finally they began to turn nasty: anybody who refused their services risked appalling punishments, down there in the bogs of Hades. The men of the sect, the men of the Book, the Orphics with their “bundles of books,” and likewise the Pythagoreans, so intent on listening for fractional variations in sound that they looked as though they were “trying to overhear a conversation next door,” were all met with suspicion and impatience. To the heirs of the strong Greece of the past, such as Plato and Aristophanes, there was something irritating and inelegant about their beliefs. Yet it was they, in the end, who won out, thanks, curiously enough, to Plato. For although his style of exposition through dialogue shifted the chiming of obscure poetry onto a stage where all was exaggeratedly clear and rippling with irony, the new doctrine crept in just the same. “To free oneself from that circle which causes weariness and crushing grief,” to escape from existence as from a burden, or a crime; this basic Orphic dogma was spread more by Plato’s style than by the precepts of the converted, until finally it would become inextricably bound up with the Gospel invitation to reject the Prince of this world.

  Only those who have fled the world with pagan or Christian urgency, only those who have retreated into a fragment of soul whose origins lie elsewhere, in the beyond, only those who do not completely belong to this world are in a position to use the world and transform it with such efficiency and ruthlessness. And with that final transition to simply making use of the world we have arrived at an age that is neither pagan nor Christian, but that unknowingly continues to practice the same twin gesture of detachment and flight while sinking its claws into both earth and lunar dust.

  One great fault of Homer, for which Plato never forgave the poet, was that he omitted any serious comment on the structure of the cosmos. The heavens were anonymous and superfluous. For the purposes of his narration, he used only three levels: Olympus, high in the ether; the earth, a multicolored disk, a supine body to whose back clung the invisible parasite of Hades; and, finally, the frozen Tartarus. But between Zeus’s palace and the earth, and between the earth and the ice of Tartarus, there was simply nothing Homer was interested in talking about.

  That immense void yawning beneath the surface of the earth was testimony to a blasphemous euphoria. It was a way of omitting, even obliterating the celestial machinery, the mathematical works of the Artificer. It was a first cataclysm wrought by poetry: the cosmos was made oblivious of itself. But with the Orphics, followers of the Book, and later with Plato, Chaldaean wisdom took its revenge on Homer. The roving islands of celestial bodies, the frayed progress of the Milky Way, the soft sounds of the spheres all regained their privileges. The wonderful flatness of the Homeric vision was lost in the ordered chasms that once again opened up between one heaven and the next. Hades was winkled out from his moldy underworld to be catapulted up into the atmosphere and settled in the cone of shadow between earth and moon, as if the lining of the planet had been turned inside out and shaken skyward, dispatching the multitude of souls it housed out into a turbulent dark. Such was the immense, windblown waiting room of the dead.

  There is a radical and shocking divergence between Homer and all later theologians, Hesiod included. Homer, as Plutarch remarks, refuses to distinguish between gods and daímones: “he seems to use the two words as equivalents and speaks of the gods as daímones.” This makes it impossible to blame the daímones for the murkier activities of the gods and precludes any idea of a ladder of being, on which, through a series of purificatory acts, one might ascend toward the divine, or alternatively the divine might descend in orderly fashion toward man. This idea, which forms the point of departure for every form of Platonism, is already implicit in Hesiod’s division of beings into four categories: men, heroes, daímones, gods.

  But Homer ignores such mediation. For him the word “hero” can be substituted more generically with “man,” nor did he see any need to introduce a separate class of daímones. He thus brought the extremes into immediate contact, leaving nothing to soften the violence of the collision. Yet, as one reads once again in Plutarch, “those who refuse to admit the existence of a class of daímones alienate the things of men from the things of the gods, making it impossible for them to mix, and eliminating, as Plato said, ‘the interpretative and ministering role of nature,’ or alternatively they force us to make a general hotchpotch, introducing gods into our human passions and goings-on and dragging them down to our level whenever it suits us, the way the women of Thessaly are supposed to be able to pull down the moon.” Never perhaps as in this passage from the late and knowing Plutarch was the invincible scandal of Homer, the enemy of mediation, so clearly exposed. When the Christian Fathers railed against Homeric debasement, they were really doing no more than dusting off Plato’s sense of scandal, and likewise that of his followers, here so lucidly summed up by Plutarch. The course of Greek civilization thus reveals itself as a process in which its founding authority, Homer himself, becomes ever more unacceptable.

  Timarchus was a young disciple of Socrates who wanted to “know the power of his master’s demon.” He was “courageous and had only recently had his first taste of philosophy.” So he decided to put himself to a fearful test: he would climb down into Trophonius’s cave in Lebadeia, where Kore had once gone to play with the Nymph Hercynia, who kept a goose. When the Nymph was distracted for a moment, the goose disappeared into a cave hidden behind a stone. So Kore went into the cave to look for the bird, caught it, and lifted the stone, upon which a flood of water came rushing from the darkness. Of all the variations of Kore’s adventures, this was the most remote and secret, so secret that no one knew about it: the only remaining record of the affair was the statue of a young girl with a goose in her arm in Hercynia’s temple.

  Having reached Lebadeia, Timarchus spent a few days purifying himself in the house of Good Fortune and Good Spirit. He bathed in the freezing waters of the river Hercynia. He ate the meat of the animals offered up as sacrifices. And every time the priests sacrificed another victim, a seer would read the entrails to see if Trophonius was well-disposed toward the visitor and would receive him kindly. One night Timarchus was taken from the house and led to the river. Two youths washed him with the deference of slaves. Then they led him to some priests, near where the water rose. They told him to drink from two springs. The first they called the water of Forgetfulness. The other was the water of Memory. Then Timarchus set off toward the oracle, dressed in a linen tunic with ribbons. On his feet he wore the heavy local boots. Two bronze poles linked by a chain stood in front of the oracle. Behind was the cave: a narrow, artificial opening, like an oven for baking bread.

  Timarchus was carrying a light ladder and some honey cakes for the snakes. He slipped into the opening feet first and immediately felt himself being
sucked into the darkness—where the snakes were waiting for him. For a long time he lay in the dark. Then he realized that the plates of his skull were slowly coming apart. His spirit slipped out, breathing freely as though after long compression, and began to rise. It swelled and spread. It was a sail in the sky. The sea it plowed was dotted with “islands sparkling with delicate fire,” large islands, though of different sizes, and all round. High above, he saw the face of the moon approaching. Persephone was rushing across the sky with her dogs, the planets, behind her. From beneath, where the earth was, rose a murmur of groans, as though of a never-ending but remote tumult.

  On climbing down into Trophonius’s cave, Timarchus had imagined he was going toward Hades. But now he realized that Hades had been turned inside out into the sky, become the shadowy cone between the moon and the earth, and the earth was nothing more than the continuation of Hades into the abyss. But then why should the two worlds be so different from each other after all, given that both were places of exile? As the spirit of Timarchus thus reflected, he saw the place, near the moon, where the cone of shadow narrowed to a point, and saw that it was here that the drifting souls were gathering. They were trying to land on that woman’s face, the moon, despite the fact that it grew more and more terrifying the nearer they got. The face seemed to be made up with an extremely fine powder, which the dead recognized as the substance of other souls. The moment they tried to grab hold of some wrinkle on the lunar surface, blinded by the white light, many would find themselves dragged back by an irresistible undertow, until they were falling through space again. Yet it was there that salvation lay, and they had come so close. Had they managed to set foot on this outpost of Persephone, they would one day have undergone a second death, more gradual and more delicate than the first. One day Persephone would have separated their minds, noûs, from their souls, the way Apollo could prize the armor from a warrior’s shoulders. Then, when the substance of their souls had been left behind on the white dust, and keeping only “husks and dreams of life,” they would have emerged on the other side of the moon, where the Elysian Fields stretch across a land terrestrial beings have never seen. When Timarchus came back, feet first, from the oracular oven, his body was glowing with light. Three months later he died in Athens.