Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Apollo was the first slayer of monsters; then came Cadmus, Perseus, Bellerophon, Heracles, Jason, Theseus. Alongside this list of monster slayers we could place a list of traitors, of women: Hypermestra, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne, Antiope, Helen, Antigone. These women don’t have a god as their forebear, but a priestess: Io, who betrayed her goddess, Hera, in whose sanctuary she lived as “guardian of the keys.” “Io illustrates the awakening of woman from the long sleep of an untroubled infancy, a happiness that was ignorant but perfect, to a tormenting love that will be at once the delight and sorrow of her life, forever. She has been dazzled by the divinity of Zeus.”

The heroic gesture of woman is betrayal: its influence on the course of events is just as great as the slaying of monsters. With the monster slain, an impurity lingers on to dog the hero. There will also be the withered remains of the foe whose power the hero turns to his advantage. Heracles clothes himself in the skin of the Nemean lion; Perseus brandishes the petrifying face of the Gorgon as he goes into battle. Leave only emptiness and the chatter of human voices. The isthmus becomes practicable, people trade, and write poems recalling monsters.

The effects of woman’s betrayal are more subtle and less immediate perhaps, but equally devastating. Helen provokes a war that wipes out the entire race of heroes, ushering in a completely new age, when the heroes will merely be remembered in verse. And as a civilizing gesture, woman’s betrayal is no less effective than man’s monster slaying. The monster is an enemy beaten in a duel; in her betrayal, the traitor suppresses her own roots, detaching her life from its natural context. Ariadne is the ruin of Crete, where she was born; Antiope dies fighting the Amazons, her own subjects who were faithfully rallying to her aid; Helen leads the heroes she has loved to their downfall; Medea forsakes the country of sorcery to arrive, at the end of her adventures, in the country of law, Athens; Antigone betrays the law of her city to make a gesture of mercy toward a dead man who does not belong to that city. Like a spiral, woman’s betrayal twists around on itself, forever rejecting that which is given. It is not the negation that comes into play in the frontal and mortal collision of forces but the negation that amounts to a gradual breaking away from ourselves, opposition to ourselves, effacement of ourselves, in a game that may exalt or destroy and which generally both exalts and destroys.

The slaying of monsters and woman’s betrayal are two ways in which negation can operate. The first clears a space, leaves an evocative vacuum where before there was a clutter, thick with heads and tentacles, a scaly arabesque. Woman’s betrayal does not alter the elements in space but rearranges them. The influence of certain pieces on the chessboard is inverted. White attacks white. Black attacks black. The effect is confusing, above all disturbing. For the first time roles have been reversed. And it is always a woman who reverses them. There’s an obstinacy about the hero that obliges him to keep on and on, following just the one path and no other. Hence his need to be complemented, his need of another form of negation. The woman with her betrayal completes the hero’s work: she brings it to its conclusion and winds up the story. This is done in agreement with the hero. It is part of the hero’s civilizing work to suppress himself, because the hero is monstrous. Immediately after the monsters, die the heroes.

With the heroes, man takes his first step beyond the necessary: into the realm of risk, defiance, shrewdness, deceit, art. And with the heroes a new world of love is disclosed. The woman helps the hero to slay monsters and capture talismans. A shining initiator into religious mystagogue, she has a splendor that ranges from the glimmering radiance of Ariadne to the dazzle of Medea. But the heroes also ushered in a new kind of love: that between man and man. Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Peirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades — all enjoyed what Aeschylus calls “the sacred communion of thighs,” a communion Achilles chided Patroclus for having forgotten merely because he was dead.

The love of one man for another appears with the heroes and immediately reaches its perfect expression. Only the heroes — and precisely because they were heroes — could have overcome what so far for the Greeks had been an insurmountable obstacle to such a love: the rigid distinction between separate roles, the obstinate asymmetry between erast s and erómenos , lover and beloved, which had condemned love relationships to being painfully short and stifled by the strictest rules. The cruelest of these rules was that, while the lover was granted his swift and predatory pleasure, the beloved was not to enjoy any sexual pleasure at all but must submit himself to the other only reluctantly, in something like the way nineteenth-century wives were encouraged to submit to their husbands. And the lover could not look into the eyes of his beloved as he ravished him, so as to avoid embarrassment. The heroes swept all these rules aside. Their relationships were long lasting — only death could end them — and their love didn’t fade merely because the beloved grew hairs on his legs or because his skin, hardened by a life of adventure, lost its youthful smoothness. Thus the heroes achieved that most yearned for of states, in which the distinction between lover and beloved begins to blur. Between Orestes and Pylades, “it would have been difficult to say which of the two was the lover, since the lover’s tenderness found its reflection in the other’s face as in a mirror.” In the same way, these words from the Pseudo-Lucian hold up a late mirror to what was the most constant erotic wish of Greek men, and the most vain.

When it came to slaying monsters, the hero’s model was Apollo killing Python; when it came to making love to young boys it was Apollo’s love for Hyacinthus and Cyparissus, But there is an episode in the god’s life that hints at something even more arcane than those often fatal love affairs. It is the story of how Apollo became a servant to Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly. Of Admetus we know that he was handsome, that he was famous for his herds of cattle, that he loved sumptuous feasts, and that he possessed the gift of hospitality. So much and no more. But we know a great deal about what people did for him. Out of love for Admetus, Apollo was willing to pass as a hireling. For a long time, “inflamed by love for the young Admetus,” this proudest of gods became a mere herdsman, taking a provincial king’s cattle out to graze. In so doing, he left his shock of dazzling hair unkempt and even forsook his lyre, making music on nothing better than a reed pipe.

His sister Artemis blushed with shame. And out of love for Admetus, his Alcestis, the most beautiful of Pelias’s daughters, agreed to die like a stranger, unthreatened by anybody, taking the place of a hostage condemned to death. For love of Admetus, Apollo got the Fates drunk: it must have been the wildest party ever, although we know nothing about it except that it happened. In Plutarch’s vision of things, the Fates, those young girls whose beautiful arms spin the thread of every life on earth, were “the daughters of Ananke,” Necessity. And Necessity, as Euripides reminds us, having met her, “as he wandered among Muse and mountaintop,” without ever “discovering anything more powerful,” is the only power that has neither altars nor statues. Ananke is the only divinity who pays no heed to sacrifices. Her daughters can only be fooled by drunkenness. And very rarely does drink get the better of them. It was a hard task, but Apollo managed it, merely out of love for Admetus, because he wanted to delay the man’s death.