Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

When Alexander arrived in Gordium, he went to the acropolis and found the cart that was tied to its yoke with a knot that no one had been able to undo. There was a legend about that cart, “which said that whoever untied the knot that bound the cart to its yoke would rule over all of Asia. The knot was tied with cornel bark, and it was impossible to find either beginning or end. Unable to untie the knot and not wanting to leave it as it was, in case his failure should spread disquiet through his army, some say that he sliced the knot cleanly with his sword and then claimed that he had untied it.” But there’s another version to the story, according to which Alexander “removed the belaying pin from the drawbar [this was a wooden pin forced into the drawbar and around which the knot was secured] and thus removed the yoke from the drawbar.” Then Alexander and his followers “went away from the cart convinced that the oracle’s predictions about the untying of the knot had been fulfilled.” Thus, “the knot that can be neither broken nor loosened,” the knot that Zeus and Poseidon tightened around the heads of the warriors beneath the walls of Troy, was not to be untied even by Alexander. Alexander, however, had come up with what would later be the obvious solution: to get around necessity by removing the pin in the drawbar. And as Alexander thus did what countless others would do after him, Greece itself fell apart. Alexander left, the knot remained intact, “with neither beginning nor end,” but the cart had been separated from its yoke.

In the late pagan era we can still find this in Macrobius: “ amor osculo significatur, necessitas nodo ”: “love is represented with a kiss, necessity with a knot.” Two circular images, the mouth and the noose, embrace everything that is. Eros, “born when Ananke was lord and everything bowed before her gloomy will,” once boasted that he had gained possession of the “Ogygian scepter,” primordial as the waters of the Styx itself. He could now force “his own decrees upon the gods.” But Eros said nothing of Ananke, who had come before him. There is a hostility between Eros and Ananke, a hostility that springs from an obscure likeness, as between the kiss and the knot.

Ananke belongs to the world of Kronos. Indeed she is his companion and sits with him on their polar throne as Zeus sits beside Hera in Olympus. That is why Ananke has no face, just as her divine spouse has no face. The figure, the mobile shape, will make its appearance only with the world that comes after theirs. The Olympian gods know that the law of Kronos has not been abrogated, nor can it ever be. But they don’t want to feel it weighing down on them every second of every day. Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against the precision of the law, which at that time was referred to as pondus et mensura , “weight and measure.” A vain rebellion, but divine. Kronos’s chains become Hephaestus’s golden web. The gods know that the two imprisoning nets are the same; what has changed is the aesthetic appearance. And it is on this that life on Olympus is based. Of the two, they prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke’s inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her “many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.”

Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world. Worn by Aphrodite, the girdle becomes both splendor and deceit. But perhaps this was precisely what the Olympians wanted: that a soft, deceiving sash should cover the inflexible bond of necessity. So it was that, when the time was ripe, Zeus overthrew Kronos with deceit: and now that girdle adorned the waist of Aphrodite.

Why did the Olympians prefer the girdle of deceit to the serpent of necessity, coiled around the cosmos? They were looking for a more colorful life, a life with more play. After millennia of astral submission, they preferred to make believe that they were subject to Eros just as much as to Ananke, though all the time aware that in fact this was just a blasphemous fraud. Sophocles’ Deianira says as much, as if it were obvious: “The gods bow to Eros’s every whim, and so must I.”

If Ananke commands alone, life becomes rigid and ritualistic. And the Olympians were not fond of Mesopotamian gravity, although they did enjoy their sacrifices. What they wanted for themselves was not just eternal life but childish insouciance. When the time had come to be rid of the heroes, a plague would have been quite enough to settle the matter. But a war, a long, complicated war, was far more attractive. So the gods set about starting it off and then making it last. Zeus, from his vantage point in the sky, wouldn’t have been interested in watching the ravages of a plague. But when Trojans and Achaeans return to the battlefield, he is eager to watch them, and sometimes even to suffer with them: he sees Sarpedon, for him “the dearest of men,” come to the end of the role that “had been assigned him of old,” and he can do nothing to spare him the mortal blows of Patroclus. For a moment Zeus imagines he might be able to “snatch him alive” from the battle. It is a moment of sublime Olympian childishness, which Hera immediately crushes. And as she does so we hear Ananke, disguised as a wise administrator, speaking through her.

But war is a spectacle for all the Olympians, not just for Zeus. As the battle approached, “Athena and Apollo, with their silver bows, alighted like vultures on the tall oak of Zeus, who holds the aegis, and enjoyed the sight of the men in their serried ranks, a shiver trembling across shields, helmets, and javelins.”

The Achaean warriors advance, legs and thighs white with dust. The heavy hooves of their horses churn up clouds of it into a bronze sky. Here and there the terrain is sandy. Mydon crashes from his chariot and sticks for a moment, head in the sand, legs in the air, until his own horses trample him into the dust. Two female figures move about in the din of battle. They are Eris, Strife, and Enyo, the War Cry. Eris wears a long, dark, checkered tunic with a pattern of circles and crosses. The same color is picked up in her broad, soft wings. Her arms are naked and white. Enyo is glistening with sweat. Hers is the “shameless uproar of the slaughter.” She delights, they say, in “the blood-sodden clay.”

There is a moment in which the peculiarly Greek breaks away from the Asian continent, like one of those islands off the Anatolian coast whose jagged cliffs still follow the line of the vast maternal mainland. That moment is the Greek discovery of outline, of a new sharpness, a clean, dry daylight. It is the moment when man enters into Zeus, into the clear light of noon. Éndios is what we have when “the earth warmed up / And the sky glittered more brilliantly than crystal.” By the time of the tragedians, dîos has come to mean nothing more than “divine,” insofar as it is a “property of Zeus.” But in the Homeric age dîos means first and foremost “clear,” “brilliant,” “glorious.” To appear in Zeus is to glow with light against the background of the sky. Light on light. When Homer gives the epithet dîos to his characters, the word does not refer first of all to what they may have of “divine,” but to the clarity, the splendor that is always with them and against which they stand out. The leaden eyes of the Sumers are the eyes of nocturnal birds; they sink away into the darkness. With foot arched, and the corners of his mouth upturned in an inexplicable smile, the Homeric hero pushes on toward the smoking earth, and his folly is the Pan-inspired madness of high noon. Before the hour strikes, he achieves a vision of things as sharply separate from one another and complete in themselves as though scissored from the sky by cosmic shears and thrust out into a light from which there is no escape.