Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

When the Greeks needed to appeal to an ultimate authority, it wasn’t a sacred text but Homer that they went to. Greece was founded on the Iliad . And the Iliad was founded on a play of words, the substitution of a couple of letters in a name. Briseis, Chryseis. The bone of contention that triggers the poem is Briseis kallipárēos , Briseis “of the lovely cheeks”: Agamemnon wants her exchanged with, or substituted for, Chryseis kallipárēos , Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” In Greek only two letters separate the two girls. And it was not “because of the girl,” Achilles childishly insists, that the whole quarrel began but because of the substitution, as if the hero sensed that it was this notion of exchange that had tightened the noose that no hero, nor any generation that came after the heroes, would be able to loosen.

It is the power of exchange in all its manifestations that looms over the opening of the Iliad : there is the woman, or rather the two women, each with lovely cheeks, almost indistinguishable, like coins from the same mint; there are the words of Agamemnon and Achilles, which oppose each other as one force opposes another ( antibíosi epéessin ); there is the “immense,” the “splendid ransom,” offered by the priest Chryses for his daughter Chryseis, and “the holy hecatomb” the Achaeans offer the priest. On each occasion, the elements of the exchange are presented in pairs: the women, the words, the offerings. The only thing missing is money, which will eventually be composed from the mixing of these elements. But, for money to emerge in its purest form, the heroes must first kill each other off. As early as Thucydides we have the observation that precisely what was lacking during the Trojan War was money. That “lack of money” ( achrēmatía ) made the whole mixture less potent than it would later be, but far more glorious.

“Helen is the only woman in Homer who clearly has distinctive epithets of her own,” observes Milman Parry. Kallipárēos —“of the lovely cheeks”—is applied to eight women and thus used more than any other female epithet. The Iliad tells the story of two quarrels: the quarrel over Helen, the unique Helen, who no one would dare to substitute; and the quarrel over Briseis “of the lovely cheeks,” who Agamemnon would like to substitute with Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” Between uniqueness unassailable and unassailable substitution, a war flares up on the Trojan plain, a war that can never end.

If we are to give credence to his spouse-sister, Hera, Zeus “was interested in only one thing, going to bed with women, mortal and immortal alike.” But at least one woman rejected him, and, what was worse, an immortal: Thetis. Resentful, Zeus went on “spying on her from on high, against her will.” And, given that she had refused him, he resorted to the most solemn of oaths to make sure she would never have an immortal companion. As Hera saw it, Thetis didn’t yield to Zeus because she was “at once respectful and secretly afraid” of his celestial partner, herself. So the two of them became friends. But here, as elsewhere, Hera’s vision of events is too self-centered. There was a more serious motive behind Thetis’s rejection, indeed the most serious motive possible: her union with Zeus would have led to the birth of the son destined to displace his father: “a son stronger than his father,” say both Pindar and Aeschylus, using exactly the same words.

The primordial Themis revealed the danger to a general assembly of Zeus and the other Olympians. Only then did Zeus really give up on Thetis, because he wanted to “preserve his own power forever.” Perhaps Thetis already knew the secret, perhaps that was why she had rejected the god of gods. Or at least one might conclude as much by analogy, since there was another occasion when Thetis was the only woman who protected Zeus’s sovereignty. This was when various other Olympians, including Athena, who was born from the god’s own temple, wanted to put him in chains. Upon which Thetis, a marine goddess who never went to Olympus, called Briareos, a hundred-headed Titan, to the rescue, and Zeus was saved. Zeus was thus indebted to Thetis for her support, “in both word and deed,” and she would exploit that indebtedness to defend her son, Achilles.

As for the motives behind the Olympian plot to bind Zeus in a thousand knots, Homer’s lips are sealed. But a god in chains is a god dethroned: that, and nothing less than that, was what the Olympians had been plotting. Thus the need for a woman’s help was not limited to the heroes but also applied to the greatest of the gods. Even Zeus, in his unscathed Olympian stability, knew that his reign must end one day. As early as Homer’s time, he already owed his continuing reign to expediency, since on one occasion he had repressed his desire for a woman to avoid the birth of a more powerful son and on another he had been saved only because that same woman had called on the help of Briareos, one of those rough-hewn, primordial creatures the Olympians would generally rather not have mentioned. Even Zeus, then, had opposed cunning to destiny; even the supreme god had put off his own end. The game was not over yet.

Before revealing her secret to the Olympians, Themis had told her son Prometheus. Chained to a rock, Prometheus thought of Zeus endlessly pursuing his “empty-headed” philandering, never knowing which of his conquests might prove fatal to him. Those frivolous adventures were becoming rather like a game of Russian roulette. And Prometheus kept his mouth shut.

Thus Zeus’s womanizing takes on a new light. Each affair might conceal the supreme danger. Every time he approached a woman, Zeus knew he might be about to provoke his own downfall. Thus far the stories take us: but for every myth told, there is another, unnameable, that is not told, another which beckons from the shadows, surfacing only through allusions, fragments, coincidences, with nobody ever daring to tell all in a single story. And here the “son stronger than his father” is not to be born yet, because he is already present: he is Apollo. Over the never-ending Olympian banquet, a father and son are watching each other, while between them, invisible to all but themselves, sparkles the serrated sickle Kronos used to slice off the testicles of his father, Uranus.

Whenever their lives were set aflame, through desire or suffering, or even reflection, the Homeric heroes knew that a god was at work. They endured the god, and observed him, but what actually happened as a result was a surprise most of all for themselves. Thus dispossessed of their emotion, their shame, and their glory too, they were more cautious than anybody when it came to attributing to themselves the origin of their actions. “To me, you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes,” says old Priam, looking at Helen on the Scaean Gate. He couldn’t bring himself to hate her, nor to see her as guilty for nine bloody years’ fighting, even though Helen’s body had become the very image of a war about to end in massacre.

No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility , nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” ( átē ). They knew that this invisible incursion often brought ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē .”