Gános is a substance, a feeling, a radiance. Zeus is made of gános; the Twelve Olympians are made of gános. Zeus is sovereign of the radiant material with which he shapes himself and with which the circle of the Twelve is shaped round about him. A reflection of that substance shone in the statue that Zeus fashioned to hide the heart of Zagreus.
X
(photo credit 10.1)
FROM TIME TO TIME THE HEROES WOULD get together for some common adventure: a hunting party, a conquest, a war. The prey might be a fabulous animal, or an image, a statue: the Calydonian boar, the Golden Fleece, the Trojan Palladium. They are a magnificent sight, the heroes, lining up in disciplined ranks on the benches of the Argo, muscles glistening like flames. And all the Olympians watch them, from the balconies of heaven. Or there’s that moment when Jason shoulders his way through the throng of the Magnetes before setting out on his travels, and the priestess of Artemis kisses his hands and stares at him with such feeling she can’t say a word, and Jason leaves her behind him, as the young leave the old. Or the moment when Pollux, Zeus’s boxer son, gets ready to face Amycus, king of the Bebryces, and radiates strength, although his cheeks are barely downed with hair and his eye is wet and glistening like a child’s. It is at such moments, and not in their shrewder gestures, that the splendor of the heroes shines through. Apart from Theseus and Odysseus, whose greatest adventures were solitary, the heroes reveal something about themselves when they’re together, something that was already there and oppressing them when they were alone: a sort of dark curtain weighs on their minds, a noble obtuseness dogs them.
Before setting out, Jason is immersed in gloomy reflections. He feels he is not in control of the adventure. There is so much enthusiasm for it, so much noise, even nature is joining in, with a cry raised by the harbor of Pagasae and another by the Argo itself, a cry that comes from the “divine beam,” which crossed the ship from stem to stern and had grown as an oak in Dodona. And indeed at the beginning of their adventure the Argonauts act like so many sleepwalkers, as if blindly obeying a mechanism that makes fools of them. Seized by lust, they all, without exception, throw themselves on the women of Lemnos. One night they perpetrate a massacre by mistake, killing the best of the Doliones, who had received them with friendship. Another day they set sail and only discover they have left Heracles and Polyphemus behind when it is too late to turn back. Little by little, one begins to appreciate why the greatest heroes were so stubbornly determined to become initiates, as Heracles and the Dioscuri finally did at Eleusis, or the whole party of the Argonauts at Samothrace: they know there is something essential that they haven’t got and need; they know they are not perfect.
In the beginning, the hero’s intelligence is intermittent and limited to his role as a slayer of monsters. But when he manages to break the frame of this role, without abandoning it, when he learns to be a traitor, a liar, a seducer, a traveler, a castaway, a narrator, then the hero becomes Odysseus, and then, to his first vocation of slaying everything, he can add a new one: understanding everything.
The Argonauts had just landed at Thynias, an uninhabited island off the Pontus. They were exhausted, having rowed nonstop for a day and two nights, sweating like oxen in the yoke. Now it was almost dawn. A figure appeared, a huge figure. Ringlets of blond hair dangled on his cheeks. Gripped in his left hand, a silver bow gleamed in the first light. Suddenly the sea grew wild, the earth shook, and angry waves crashed on the beach. That was the only sound. The Argonauts fell to the ground in helpless bewilderment, none of them daring to look the figure in the eyes as, ignoring them, he passed. Only when the god’s feet had left the island and begun to tread the air, suspended above the water, did they realize it was Apollo on his way to the Hyperboreans. The Argonauts kept their heads bowed. Finally Orpheus said: “It was Apollo of the Dawn, let us raise an altar to him on the beach.”
The Argonauts lay in ambush, invisible among the reeds. Jason was grim. He was strong, but strength lives in the fear of coming up against another and just slightly greater strength, which will destroy it. And perhaps he had finally found such an adversary, right here in Colchis: a sleepless monster keeping guard over the Golden Fleece where it hung from the branches of an oak tree. Jason knew that the moment had come when he must unleash the goddess in himself or die.
On high, in a bedroom in Olympus, Athena and Hera got together. They thought: where there’s a monster, there’s a woman, and where there’s a woman, there’s Aphrodite. They would go and see her, although it had been a long time. Aphrodite had just remade Hephaestus’s bed. He’d gone off to work far away, on a wandering island. In the half dark of the room, she was smoothing out her long hair with a golden comb. She shifted the cloak covering her shoulders so as to plait it in tresses. Then she started. Aphrodite didn’t have any woman friends; she was aware of spending most of her time with men. And she wasn’t used to getting visits from two powerful goddesses, who quite probably envied her, and certainly considered her incapable of understanding anything really important. She immediately guessed what they were after: they wanted her to send her son Eros off into the world yet again. For a moment she let her guard slip and started telling them the truth: that her son respected her even less than he did other women, because they were two of a kind, she and her son. In fact he laughed in her face; he wasn’t ashamed of anything with her. But as soon as she started talking about her own troubles, Athena and Hera exchanged an irritating look of complicity.
Enough of that then, Aphrodite thought, since nobody’s interested. Still, she wanted to show how efficient she could be this time. She caught up with Eros in Zeus’s orchard. The “ineffable rascal,” áphaton kakón, was playing dice with Ganymede, cheating and winning. Aphrodite knew that nothing grabbed his attention better than certain types of toys: golden dice, spinning tops, balls. This time she would bribe him with something that had been Zeus’s, something his nurse Adrasteia, one of the women of fate, had given him: a golden ball, with lots of circles etched into it and an enamel spiral that cut across them. When you threw it up in the air, it left a flaming wake. Describing the toy to Eros, she immediately saw that the boy would agree to the deal: the golden ball in return for an arrow in Medea’s heart, right up to the feathers if possible. So Eros, the perennial, ruthless youthfulness of the world, he who strikes but is never stricken, once again came down from Olympus. He was already thinking of when he got back, of playing with the golden ball, crossed by that deep enamel spiral.
There is a misunderstanding between hero and princess that will go on and on repeating itself in relationships between men and women, at least for as long as the man thinks of himself as the hero and the woman as the princess, which is to say almost always. The night Jason turned up at the court in Colchis, Princess Medea dreamed that the hero had come not to kill the monster but to carry her off. Jason knew that, to beat the monster guarding the Golden Fleece, he must get Medea’s help. And, if the princess helped him, she would be carried off. It was a game of silences, of things understood but unspoken: both hero and princess wanted to make it look, he to her and she to herself, as if the slaying of the monster were only a pretext for her being carried off.
When Jason had taken the Golden Fleece and the Argo was sailing off toward Greece with Medea on board, it seemed as though the princess’s dream had come true. Right from the beginning Medea had thought of Jason as a nocturnal vision, when “creeping like a dream, her mind followed his marching footsteps.” So who remembered the monster now? But for the hero there is never just the one monster. Hence it cannot be forgotten. For every monster is the forerunner of the next. It is far more likely that it will be the princess who is forgotten. The identity of the monster is diffuse, it reappears and repeats itself in every fragment of monster; but each woman is a profile, and at any moment a new profile may blot out the earlier ones. So it is that stories of heroes and princesses tend to end badly. Perhaps in this regard, as in others, Theseus was the most clear-sighted and tactful of the her
oes; at least he abandoned Ariadne on an island, before arriving home.
Gifts from the gods are poisoned, stamped with the ill-omened sign of the invisible become palpable. Passing from hand to hand, they ooze poison. Aphrodite’s necklace and Athena’s golden tunic, both given to Harmony on the occasion of her marriage to Cadmus, lead to a slaughter of heroes that will go on for two generations, from the expedition of the Seven against Thebes to the revenge killings of the Epigoni. It was the same with the sacred purple tunic Dionysus fell asleep in, his head resting on Ariadne’s fair breasts. The purple was bright on the sands of Naxos. But one day that fabric, drenched with happiness as it was, would become the banner of desertion, betrayal, murder. Yet the fragrance of Dionysus never left it, and the “sweet desire” to touch and stare at that tunic would never fade. The Charites had woven it for Dionysus; Dionysus had wrapped himself in it with Ariadne. Then he gave it to his son Thoas. Thoas gave it to his daughter Hypsipyle, who gave it to her lover Jason before he abandoned her. And the purple tunic of Dionysus was the gift Jason and Medea chose for Apsyrtus, Medea’s brother, when they decided to kill him.
It all happened without witnesses, on the dark little island in the Danube estuary where the Brygi had raised a temple to Artemis. There was no other trace of a human presence. Medea waited for her brother on the temple porch. Jason crouched in the darkness. Medea looked away and covered her eyes with a white veil as Jason struck Apsyrtus with the gesture of a butcher dispatching cattle. Apsyrtus fell to his knees like a huge-headed bull. Before dying, he scooped up some black blood in his hands and managed to smear it on his sister’s white veil. Jason went around the corpse, cutting off the hands, feet, and ears. The first fruits. Three times he licked the dead man’s blood and spat it into his mouth. Medea raised a torch, the sign agreed on with her lover’s friends.
Granddaughters of the sun, it was immediately obvious that Ariadne and Medea were related. They both had a sort of golden light spreading outward from the eyes. They were born far apart, in the far south and the far north of the earth. Both helped a foreigner, were carried off by him, by him abandoned. They never met. But they touched each other through a fabric. Each had fingered that purple tunic, woven for a god and still fragrant with his vanished body.
Oistrus, the gadfly who torments the cattle, is the most elusive and at the same time the most omnipresent of the powers that governed the Greeks. Ate, that infatuation that includes its own punishment, is the equivalent figure among the women of destiny, the Fates. But Oistrus is a boy and rarely shows himself. In the sultry mythological heat their seminude bodies inhabited, gods, heroes, and the sons and daughters of gods moved about with moist, bright eyes, until a buzzing approached them from the invisible. A sting pricked them to their very souls, and thus were events unleashed. In the beginning it was difficult to tell erotic and murderous frenzies apart. Both arose from that intermittent buzzing, the incursions of that small, malicious creature. Only once, on the wonderful Canosa wine bowl, now in Munich, does Oistrus appear in all his majesty. It is a synchronic vision of the last convulsion of the tragedy of Medea. The characters are arranged on three levels. Above, as always, are a few distracted divinities: the Dioscuri are looking at each other, maybe talking quietly. Athena is seated, one arm resting on her shield, the other holding her helmet. Heracles, naked and armed, is watching her. The next level shows Creon’s palace. Creontea is lying across the throne, on her head the poisoned crown, gift of the sorceress Medea, crazed with jealousy: “coronam ex venenis fecit auream.” Her brother, Hippotes, is running to snatch the murderous crown from her head, while Creon, her father, clutches his hair in desperation. Other people are running to help too, even an old man with a stick. And they all know there’s nothing they can do. On the lowest level we find Medea, Oriental granddaughter of the Sun. She is wearing the most sumptuous, ornate clothes, which hide everything but her beautiful, staring face and her hands, the right gripping a big sword while with the left she grabs the hair over her son’s forehead from behind. He is on tiptoe, as though dancing, on an altar stone. Another second and the sword will plunge into his naked chest. Jason bursts into the picture from the right, Jason the betrayer, the hero who has been overwhelmed. His body is tense and powerful, more so than Heracles’, an expression of furious impotence on his face. Farther to the right, and motionless, stands another Oriental figure, solemn this time. The painter of the bowl has written around his head: “phantom of Aeetes.”
The ghost of Medea’s father, who had always been against her passion for Jason, thus watches the denouement he had foreseen. Then there are two objects as well, strewn like toys on a dark background: an open box in which Medea had put the poisoned crown; a nuptial basin, knocked over, forgotten. And in the center of it all, firm and erect between Medea and Jason, a young man with long hair and a smooth chest holds a torch in each hand. He is standing on a light-wheeled chariot, driven by two long snakes, which rise in flowing spirals, turning their forked tongues toward Medea. That young man on the chariot is Oistrus, and it is he who is directing events; he is the prompter, the archon who just this once shows himself in the splendor of his person. But elsewhere, even in the element where he resides, the invisible, Oistrus is the companion of all excesses, all cravings, all the passions with which for centuries the Greeks wove their stories.
One of the most charming enigmas of the ancient world is the life of Nonnus. Almost nothing is known about him with any certainty, except his place of birth: Panopolis, in Egypt. As to the date of that birth, scholars have varied embarrassingly, but it now seems generally accepted that it must have been in the fifth century A.D. The enigma, however, has to do with the order in which he wrote his works: Nonnus left us the Dionysiaca in forty-eight books (a number equal to the sum of the books in the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel.
This great writer, who has often been disparagingly dubbed “baroque,” but in the same spirit could equally well be described as rococo, encrusted his poetry with voluptuous idylls and cosmological secrets. The Dionysiaca are an overflowing summa of the pagan world, a world that should have been on the brink of extinction but that here opens up before our eyes like a meadow of narcissi. What bothers people, though, is the fact that the only other work by Nonnus, his Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel, presupposes a Christian author. Yet there is nothing that would allow us to claim that the Paraphrase was written after the Dionysiaca. This raises the following questions: did Nonnus celebrate the last, and truly dazzling, lights of the pagan world with his poem on Dionysus, then convert to the new and already dominant faith and write the Paraphrase? Or was it the other way around: Nonnus, a Christian, was quite suddenly struck by the pagan vision, as though by lightning, and thus went from the Paraphrase to the tidal wave of the Dionysiaca? Or could one offer a third hypothesis: that Nonnus wrote the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase at the same time. With one hand he described the adventures of Dionysus while the other evoked the trial of Jesus. His mind was moved by both these divine beings. And perhaps he didn’t even need to ask himself whether he believed in both, because he was writing them.
There are no demonstrable facts to help us solve the enigma. All we have are the texts, the style. And here the rhetorical ploy that most immediately strikes us in all Nonnus’s writing is his redundancy. The Dionysiaca are the most sumptuous celebration imaginable of the redundant variant and the rampantly superfluous. But behind Nonnus the poet lurks Nonnus the theologian. This churning variegation, vain as nature itself, in fact alludes to the ultimate truth of the tale he is telling: that it is precisely those endlessly and meaninglessly shifting colors that lie at the heart of the divine. Nor does the vision change when Nonnus abandons the many gods to tell the story of the only son of the one God. The form he chooses this time is not the epic poem broken into a multitude of idylls but the paraphrase, which is to say redundancy reduced to its essence, so that each of the bare phrases of the Gospel is blown up and up as though by the
action of an irrepressible breath and a good dose of yeast.
It is in this choice of style that we may glimpse something of Nonnus’s faith: before being either pagan or Christian, it is a faith in redundancy as the way in which the cosmos makes itself manifest. And if we go on to examine the details of the narrative, there is at least one that would lead us to plump for the most improbable of our hypotheses: that Nonnus wrote the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase at the same time, or at least without seeing any discrepancy between them. The Dionysiaca are dominated by Oistrus. Time and time again we see him at work, and some of the most torrid erotic scenes begin with the buzzing of that gadfly. But now let’s turn to Palestine, according to Nonnus. The Jews accuse Jesus. And where St. John’s Gospel says: “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil [óti daimónion écheis]?” Nonnus paraphrases: “and now the wandering and vengeful gadfly [alástoros oîstros] of the demon Lyssa [Madness] goads you on.” It is a delicate and precise pointer to Nonnus’s consistency: impartial to Dionysus and Christ alike, he constantly finds the same demonic gadfly in both their stories, goading them on to intoxication, frenzy, delirium, illumination.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Page 32
