Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Thus a people obsessed with the idea of hubris were also a people who dismissed with the utmost skepticism an agent’s claim actually to do anything. When we know for sure that a person is the agent of some action, then that action is mediocre; as soon as there is a hint of greatness, of whatever kind, be it shameful or virtuous, it is no longer that person acting. The agent sags and flops, like a medium when his voices desert him. For the Homeric heroes there was no guilty party, only guilt, immense guilt. That was the miasma that impregnated blood, dust, and tears. With an intuition the moderns jettisoned and have never recovered, the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless computation of the forces involved. And, when considering the guilty party, there will always be an element of uncertainty. We can never establish just how far he really is guilty, because the guilty party is part and parcel of the guilt and obeys its mechanics. Until eventually he is crushed by it perhaps, perhaps abandoned, perhaps freed, while the guilt rolls on to threaten others, to create new stories, new victims.

Every sudden heightening of intensity brought you into a god’s sphere of influence. And, within that sphere, the god in question would fight against or ally himself with other gods on a second stage alive with presences. From that moment on, every event, every encounter occurred in parallel, in two places. To tell a story meant to weave those two series of parallel events together, to make both worlds visible.

Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over the géras , that part of the spoils of war which is divided, though not in equal portions, among the prestigious members of the army. Zeus, talking to the other gods assembled on the golden paving of Olympus, reminds them that he is fond of the Trojans because they have never forgotten to give him his géras , that part of the sacrifice dedicated to him through sacrifices. And he makes the point while discussing the fate of Agamemnon, Achilles, and their enemies. Every word in human terminology takes on another meaning in a divine context, but the words themselves frequently remain the same, and every story unfolds simultaneously on earth and in heaven. With Olympian conjuring, it will sometimes even seem that everything is happening on the same stage. When Helen goes to Paris’s bedroom to visit the warrior, just returned from the battlefield “as though from a dance,” it is Aphrodite who gets a chair for her. But this closeness and familiarity doesn’t diminish the distance in the slightest. These beings blessed with the power of speech may be aware of sometimes possessing divine beauty or strength or grace, yet there will always be something they lack: the inextinguishable reserves of the Olympians, their “inextinguishable laughter” when they see Hephaestus limping through their banqueting hall, that capacity for “living easily” which is the hallmark of those few beings who know that they will live forever.

Ate has bright tresses and a light step. She doesn’t even touch the ground. She alights on men’s heads and traps them in a net. “She tramples whatever is weak,” then moves on to the next head. She doesn’t even flinch before the gods. On one occasion Zeus was foolish enough to start boasting that Alcmene was about to bear him a son, Heracles. The words burst forth happily from his mind, but silent Ate had already slipped in there. The infatuated god swore an oath that his next descendant would reign over all his neighbors. With a single bound, Hera was down in Argos: she delayed Heracles’ birth and speeded up that of another child descended from Zeus, Eurystheus. Thus for years and years Heracles would have to toil in the service of Eurystheus, who reigned over all his neighbors.

Homeric fairness doesn’t distinguish between the fatal infatuations that befall the gods and those that befall men. The imperceptible tread of Ate’s foot may alight on anyone’s head. On this occasion, when Zeus discovered the trick, “a sharp pain stabbed into the depths of his mind,” and he grabbed Ate by her tresses and hurled her to earth. Ate plunged down on top of a hill in Phrygia. There one day Troy would rise.

Ananke, Necessity, who stands above everything in ancient Greece, even Olympus and its gods, was never to have a face. Homer does not personify her, but he does describe her three daughters, the Fates with their spindles; or the Erinyes, her emissaries; or Ate with her light feet. All female figures. There was only one place of worship dedicated to Ananke: on the slopes of the Acrocorinth, the mountain belonging to Aphrodite and her sacred prostitutes, stood a sanctuary to Ananke and Bia, goddess of violence. “But there is a tradition not to enter the temple,” remarks Pausanias. And, indeed, what could one ask of she who does not listen? The difference between gods and men can be grasped above all in their relationship to Ananke. The gods endure her and use her; men merely endure her.

While Achaeans and Trojans do battle, Zeus and Poseidon, the gods who rule sky and sea, are invisibly at work all around them. But what are they up to? “They are tightening that knot that cannot be broken or loosened, but which has loosened the knees of many.” The warriors wave their swords in the empty air until they meet the obstacle that is their enemy. All move, caught in the same net, where innumerable threads are close to being tightened. When the knot is drawn tight, the warrior dies, even before the lethal metal touches him. What Zeus and Poseidon do on the plains of Troy is no different from what Hephaestus did to Ares and Aphrodite when he caught them in bed together, or even what Oceanus does in hugging the earth. Hephaestus’s net was gold, as befitted an object in Olympus, but it was thin as a spider’s web too, and invisible even to the gods who laughed as they watched the embarrassment of the captive lovers. Oceanus wraps the earth in nine liquid coils.

According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound to the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are bound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curves back on itself, a knotted rope ( peírar ) that holds everything within its limits ( péras ) . Deî , a key word, meaning “it is necessary,” appears for the first time in the Iliad : “Why is it necessary ( deî ) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to déō , “to bind,” and not to déō, “to lack,” as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’ ”

Let’s put some pressure now on this word anánkē . Chantraine concludes that “no etymology grasps the real sense of anánkē and its derivations: ‘constriction’ and at the same time ‘kinship.’ The underlying notion that might justify this double semantic development would be that of the bond .” Others see the word as being close to the idea of “taking in one’s arms.” When speaking of Heracles caught in the horrendous shirt of Nessus, the chorus in the Trachiniae begin: “If in the Centaur’s murderous net, a dolopoiòs anánkē torments him …” But how are we to understand that dolopoiòs anánkē ? A “deceitful embrace”? Or “deceitful necessity”? Or both? Once again we have the net, and necessity seen as a lethal embrace. With wonderful monotony, the net, its knots ever ready to tighten, is always there. It falls over Aphrodite’s adulterous bed, over the battlefield beneath the walls of Troy, over being itself, and the cosmos, and the blistered body of Heracles. Whatever the situation, that one weapon is more than enough for Ananke. There were many in Greece who doubted the existence of the gods, but none ever expressed a doubt about that net, at once invisible and more powerful than the gods.