Fifteen centuries have passed, and the number of readers who have understood Nonnus could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Giovan Battista Marino, who read Nonnus in Eilhard Lubin’s Latin translation (Hanau, 1605), had no doubt about it: Nonnus was the only one who could compete with Homer, the only poet who could empty his work of all heroic sobriety and encourage every possible twirl and caprice while still preserving a quite vast frame all around. This was just what Marino needed for his own Adonis: an ancient authority for at last departing from all those liberations of the Holy Sepulcher and other such bold and noble deeds. With Nonnus behind him, the poet could abandon himself to a project that until now had seemed blasphemous: the weaving together in a massive epic of garland upon garland of erotic verse.
Thus Marino frequently pays Nonnus the supreme homage that one writer can pay to another: theft—and the sweetest of thefts at that, the kind that remains a secret, shared in complicity by the two authors, because no one else notices. With a note of defiance Marino wrote to Achillini: “they [other literati] do not ply the sea where I fish and trade, nor will they ever catch me with my prey, unless I reveal it to them myself.”
As early as 1817, in his essay Nonnos der Dichter, dedicated to Goethe, the learned young Ouvaroff of St. Petersburg, friend of the Senator, i.e., Joseph de Maistre, could justly complain that: “The flowery field of Greek poetry has been so thoroughly tilled that it would be hard indeed to find a poet who has not been appreciated and studied with care, not to say love; Nonnus alone pays for the sins of his age; for centuries his poem has been condemned to being a lumber room invaded by dust and corrosion where only the most zealous mythographer might penetrate. It would be hard to name but a few who have read him for the quality of his poetry, and harder still to name any who have been sufficiently bold to declare that Nonnus was truly a poet, in the full sense of the word.” Another hundred and fifty years would have to pass before Giorgio de Santillana, speaking at a conference, would point to Nonnus’s Dionysiaca as the “blossoming” of that “Japanese flower” that was for him “the archaic myth.”
Jason would have preferred to live a bourgeois life at home, just as Nietzsche would have preferred to be a professor in Basel, rather than God. “I would be happy enough living in my home country, if Pelias would give his consent. May the gods see fit to free me from my labors,” says Jason to Hypsipyle. And his voice is at once that of the ever hypocritical lover trying to soften the cruelty of his desertion and that of the hero who looks, weary and detached, over the scene where he is obliged to kill, cheat, travel, desert, and finally be killed, with any luck by a rotten timber while sleeping in the shade of his ship. The fable’s happy ending is not an option for the hero. His part was written before he was born; his labors predate him: they are never chosen but come to meet him, like a towering wave.
Jason never managed, not even for the briefest of moments, to go beyond his role as hero. He soon realized this and clammed up in gloomy silence. He worked at his adventures: but that was precisely the point, he worked. Even the women he came across, who usually fell in love with him, were part of that work. He abandoned Hypsipyle because he had to press on with his expedition. He promised Medea he would marry her because he had to get hold of the Golden Fleece and needed her help. Then he did marry her, because King Alcinous forced him to; the Golden Fleece was their shining nuptial pallet in the cave of Macris. Then he abandoned Medea, because he had to unite his family with that of the reigning house of Thebes. Everything he did was done to achieve something else, and always in obedience to orders from above. There were days when this made the memory of his cruelest deeds easier to bear: he had done them because they were his destiny. He had traveled far and wide, visited the remotest of peoples, yet had always lived like a donkey plodding around the same well.
Right from the start, beautiful as she was, Jason felt a strange repulsion for Medea. She was a woman who knew only two states: either hopeless unhappiness, desertion, lonely misery, helpless rejection; or dazzling, lightning-swift power. It was conceivable that one might go through all kinds of adventures with such a woman (and she could be pretty useful too, more so than many a hero); but could you live with her day in day out? Jason was old now, shunned by everybody. People told his adventures to their children, with the result that he couldn’t find anyone to tell them to himself. He went back to Corinth, where he had witnessed horror upon horror, where he had even reigned as king. There, pulled up onto dry land, lay his ship, the Argo. It was his first, his last, his only true companion. And he couldn’t say it had been a silent companion either, because its main beam had a voice, a sound unlike any other and one Jason would always remember. Once it had frightened him; now it pricked him with nostalgia, like the voice of an old nurse. He looked at this ship, which he had loved more than any woman, and certainly more than Medea, that fake savage, who always seemed to be on the brink of disaster but at the end of the day did nothing but slip from one palace to the next, one kingdom to the next, sowing calamity everywhere she went and always saving herself, along with her chariot and her snakes. The charms of the Argo were rarer and nobler. Jason thought the Argo might grant him a last favor: he would hang himself from the wooden bowsprit. Then he lapsed back into his thoughtful brooding, his back resting against the keel. A rotten timber fell from the deck, struck him on the head, and killed him.
The appearance of the heroes covers a very brief period in Greek history. They all knew one another, or had heard stories about the others from people who had known them. Like links in a bracelet, the Cretan cycle, the Argonauts’ cycle, the Theban cycle, and the Trojan cycle are all connected. And the whole phenomenon burned itself out in just a few years. Between the killing of the Minotaur and the killing of Agamemnon, there were only two generations. Theseus buried his sword in the Minotaur, and his son Acamas was one of the Achaeans who lay in ambush in the Trojan horse. The fall of Crete, the fall of Mycenae, the fall of Troy, the rise of Athens: the heroes put their seal on the key events, then disappeared. Swiftness was of their essence. It is as if the Greeks had wanted to concentrate all the stories whose consequences they would live among into the shortest possible time. The age of the heroes was brief, overcrowded, cruel. And the earth groaned: “oppressed by the weight of humankind, while there was no devotion left among them.”
If, in Greek eyes, the origin of all historic crimes could be traced back to the Trojan War, the origin of the war itself was far from clear. Helen, who was the only witness to the whole thing and the pivot of the scales, attributed the cause to a double-edged plan of Zeus: to unburden the earth and give glory to Achilles. These goals are seemingly unconnected: on the one hand, we have the slaughter of hundreds of heroes, as if they were a mere nameless number, an excess ballast of feet trampling the belly of the earth; on the other, the exaltation of a single person, likewise a hero, and not so much his strength, which was brief and thrust upon him, but his name pure and simple, the sound of his glory. And all this was to be achieved via a single artifice: Helen, and not even Helen herself but her “breathing phantom,” her “name.” By examining the nature of this fatal artifice, we begin to see the unity of Zeus’s design, how it converges on a single goal: to scoop out a vacuum in the material world, to lighten its density, to fashion a sounding box between skin and shade. The fullness of the Homeric word, effortlessly bringing into existence whatever it names, is the last heritage of an earth filled and oppressed by the heroes, by their amorous and cruel trampling. What follows is a new story, in which something has been taken away from the density of the body to house the vacuum of the word.
Zeus decided to do this because he knew that the appearance of Achilles hailed nothing less than a new era: the posthumous era of Zeus, an era in which Achilles came to substitute, albeit only for a short time (but as a sign it was valid forever), for the son of Thetis who was to have overthrown Zeus. Even if Zeus’s sovereignty remained intact, and that son was never born, the change had somehow come about:
a god can only shift the meaning of what is predestined, not cancel it out. Thus, as it first appears, the symbol is a tool the gods use to defend themselves from destiny. By forcing the earth to swallow up the innumerable bodies of the heroes, Zeus accepted that his own body be lessened too. He thus opened the space for the word, a hollowness in the body of the god himself, a memory of that other Zeus, who had existed before Achilles and whom now the poets celebrated in their songs, insofar as he allowed them to celebrate Achilles.
What we call Homeric theology was a reckless interval in the lives of the gods. For a brief period the world accepted the supremacy of the visible. Not so that the power of the invisible might somehow be diminished. Nobody imagined power could reside anywhere else. It was just that for the first time the invisible agreed to fashion itself in every tiny detail according to the rules of the visible, as though deeply attracted to that precarious way of being.
Considered from the heights of the divine home, life on earth opened out in a vast and trembling fan: its value was intrinsic to itself and lasted only as long as it did, standing out sharply against the light. After that life came neither punishment nor reward but the same suffering for all: the protraction, beneath the earth, of an enervated existence, in which mental powers were reduced to a subdued muttering, the body to an impalpable shade, the voice to the squeak of a bat. Only in Homer’s Greece does the cry of the warrior who begs Zeus that he may be killed in the light make any sense: “Destroy us in the light, since such is your pleasure.” The light will serve not to escape death but to usher it in. A death in the gloom of the fog would already be a fragment of the sorrowful afterlife, all weakness and vacillation, whereas a death in the light is a last instant of clarity. The light the hero invokes has nothing to do with Mazdean photism, forerunner of every internal and transfiguring light. It is an external light, almost solid, the light in which things, all things, stand out in radiant profile. Such a vision of life, and of the afterlife that mockingly follows it, amounts to an unparalleled cruelty. All the more irresistible then must one’s brief spell in the light have appeared. But it was not a tension man could bear for long.
The heroes wiped one another out beneath the walls of Troy, not just because Zeus wanted to lighten the earth but because they themselves could no longer bear this form of life and thus, with silent assent, chose to seek their deaths together. The battles beneath Troy were, among other things, a bloody banquet of farewell.
Neoptolemus was a young man when he raised his sword above old Priam’s head, a boy even, you might have said, were it not for the weapons weighing him down. He planted his feet firmly on the ground, tensing the big adult calves that bulged in their shin guards, before bringing down his heavy blade on the bald, already blood-bespattered head leaning toward him and partly covered with desperate hands. Between the fingers of those hands, a few wisps of hair peeped out, like white grass. Priam was sitting on the hollowed stone of the altar of Zeus Herkeios, where for years blood had flowed in streams, forming long streaks and dark stains. On his knees he cradled a body not unlike Neoptolemus’s, but naked and with deep wounds to chest, stomach, and one thigh: it was Astyanax, Hector’s son. Thus on Priam’s body the old blood of the sacrifices, the still gushing blood of Astyanax, and that of his own head and shoulder wounds were all mingled together.
The hour of the heroes’ children had come—now they were killing and getting themselves killed just as their fathers had, but quicker, without tears, without divine frenzy, without stirring words: the stories were complete now; all that remained was to put the last seal on them. As Neoptolemus lifted his thin, sinewy arm, the fronds of the palm beside the altar bent in the night wind, thus opening up the space the metal had to pass through to split Priam’s head. And, to hold that head still, like a chunk of wood, Neoptolemus’s left hand gripped the old man’s shoulder through his blood-soaked tunic.
At the very same moment, another hand was reaching out to another body in the smoky darkness of Athena’s temple. The hand of Ajax Oïleus closed on the short hair that barely covered the nape of Cassandra’s neck. Powerful fingers followed the direction of his inflamed and lustful gaze. Like her father, Priam, Cassandra was pressing her body against something sacred: not the stone of Zeus but the Palladium. That small, stiff statue, that Athena with shield and raised spear, was the guardian of Troy. The city could only exist where that statue was, as a language only exists where its poet is. Cassandra forced her soft body against the statue. She was completely naked but for a little cloak knotted beneath her chin and falling down behind her shoulders to form a sort of backdrop to her high breasts, the nipples pointing sideways, as if wanting to flee in opposite directions. Ajax Oïleus tightened his fingers on her hair, while her fingers clutched at the flank of the Palladium. A shock of violence went from the warrior’s fingers, through those of Apollo’s priestess, to the statue. Her father, Priam, had covered his eyes with his arms; round about, some Trojan women crouched down weeping and terrified, their heads in their hands; but Cassandra’s gaze was steady and calm as she watched Ajax Oïleus’s armor bearing down on her: indeed with her free hand she seemed to be egging her assailant on, opening her fingers between the hero’s sword and thighs, drawing him to her, urging him to strike.
All along their roads the Greeks raised stones to the dead. But what did those stelae remind them of? Of Achilles’ horses weeping hot tears on the death of Patroclus. They laid their heads on the ground “like a stele that stays planted in the earth,” says Homer. Around them, the clash of arms. The Greeks and Trojans were fighting over Patroclus’s corpse, tugging at it as though at a bull’s hide. Sweat and fatigue turn flesh to water. But sorrow petrifies it. In the stelae they raised for their dead, the Greeks captured the absorbed, translucent life of those immortal horses, weeping. Looking down from on high, Zeus didn’t feel compassion on seeing the warriors fall in battle, but he did when he saw the tears of the horses as they looked on their fallen driver and master’s friend. Zeus felt closer to those animals than to any man. Like him they were immortal. Yet now they abandoned themselves to something that was forbidden to immortals: tears.
After the death of Patroclus, when Achilles goes back to the battlefield, gritting his teeth, a light as though from a distant beacon flashing from his shield, Zeus once again calls the gods to an assembly. This time the minor Nymphs are there too, and the rivers. They all wait for a sign. But for the moment there is nothing to decide, no divine intrigue to slip in among the warriors. Everybody, gods and men alike, knows what is about to happen. Achilles is going to die. Xanthus, the immortal horse, is already mourning his master. Achilles himself senses his death as something palpable, like a helmet thrust on his head. And then Zeus chooses this of all moments to loose the whole pack of the gods onto the battlefield. “Thus they went to war, god against god.” All of them. Even those who, like Hephaestus and Leto, have so far kept out of the struggle.
Why did Zeus throw them all into the fray? We are closing in on the nerve of Homeric theology here. In the maximum pointlessness lies the maximum splendor. And the real never shines so brightly as when its reality is duplicated, when for every hero’s arm there is a god’s arm coming to meet it, to guide it, when two scenes, one visible, the other invisible, because dazzling, are one inside the other, so that every joint is doubled. Achilles is denied any chance of putting off his end, which must happen, for so it has been decreed, in a certain way, at a certain moment. But destiny does hold out one last honor for Achilles, and Zeus has no desire to deprive him of it, because this honor is his pleasure: it is that the last battle be hard, uncertain, furious.
At the same time Zeus has something else on his mind: he must see that no one on the earth can ever, by mere dint of force, do anything that goes “beyond destiny,” that no one ever manage to postpone his own death. Achilles’ fury might allow him to conquer those walls that are destined to fall at a later date. This would put a crack in the order of things. So now, with the intervention o
f the Olympians, the tension on the battlefield is raised to something almost unbearable and at the same time placed in a new equilibrium. The clashing swells, indicating that an unprecedented concentration of forces is at work. Indeed the noise even has Hades starting nervously. The only one of the gods not on the battlefield, he senses the excess of tension on the earth and gets up from his throne, fearing that the grassy mantle above him may be about to break up and expose to the light the endless mold of his subterranean world, abhorred by gods and men alike.
In the Iliad, all living things, even the horse Xanthus, even the river Scamander, tell us that they are not the “cause,” not responsible for anything. But they don’t say this in order to lay the blame on someone else. No, that recognition is the supreme act of Homeric devotion, a stepping aside before overwhelming power. Every affirmation of an ego would be crude, here where the distinction between how much each person may do alone and how much a god allows him to do or gives to him is so subtle. The merest breath decides everything, a change in the rhythm of the massacre grants the upper hand to one side or the other.
There is something that distinguishes Homeric characters from everything that was written before or would be written after. They behave like those perfect atheists who have never existed and who are convinced that life is coterminous with breath. After death, for the science-bound atheist, there is but a vague nothingness. For the Homeric character, there is a long torment, a craving without mind or memory. Not another life, and not even a punishment for their lives, but an enervated and delirious physiology, which stops short of life.
Yet for as long as they drew breath, everything was full of gods. Thinking of Achilles, who every day at dawn dragged Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’s pyre, Hecuba says: “But not for this was he [Patroclus] brought back to life.” No artifice, no rite, no merit can alter this fact. The gods “are always,” as the formulaic tags unceasingly tell us; those who recognize the gods live but a brief space. In their modesty, the atheists are full of vainglory. For the brief span of their lives they are convinced they are in control of something, an island of independence later to be dispersed into blind atoms. The Homeric heroes allowed themselves no such consolation: while they lived they were aware of being sustained and imbued by something remote and whole, which then abandoned them at death like so many rags.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Page 33
