Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

In its dark age, after four hundred years with neither writing nor cultural center, Greece rediscovered splendor. In Homer whatever is good and beautiful is also dazzling. Breastplates shine from afar, bodies from close up. Yet around them, while the bards were chanting the Iliad , the Greeks had very little that was splendid to enjoy. Gone the high-vaulted palaces, all burned, all ravaged. Gone the Asian jewels. Gone the embossed gold goblets. Gone the grand chariots of war.

The splendor was all in the mind. Among the objects they handled were jars and vases where the same geometric figures were stubbornly repeated over and over, as if all at once the Greeks had decided there was only one thing that mattered: outline, the sharp, the angular profile, separation. On the immense urn found in the Dipylon, one band of geometric patterns follows hard on another, until framed between them we find a scene with human figures. It is a funeral, and the men are black, faceless silhouettes, their muscles in sharp relief. The corpse lies on a long coffin, like a dangerous insect. The Homeric radiance and the sharp profile of that insect presuppose each other, balance each other off. In all surviving evidence of archaic Greece, the one is included in the other.

Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad . The perfection of the first step makes any idea of progressive ascension ridiculous. But at the same time the Iliad is an act of provocation as far as forms and shapes are concerned; it defies them and draws them into a fan that has yet to be fully opened. And this state is thanks precisely to the commanding sharpness with which the poem excludes, even expels from within itself, what for centuries to come would be articulated in language. That perfect beginning, through its very appearance, evokes absent counterweights: Mallarmé.

Odysseus stands out among the Achaean leaders because he “can think.” The others revere his complex mind the way they revere the fleet foot of Achilles. But this doesn’t make Odysseus feel any more independent of the gods than his peers. He doesn’t have the solid eloquence of Diomedes, or the rounded periods of Nestor, but he looks for the propitious moment, when he can get the gods’ attention with a word, and not a word too many. Odysseus is he who can “escape from a burning brazier.” In the word that gives us that “escape” ( nostésaimen ) we get close to the meaning of “coming back” ( nóstos ): to escape unharmed is to come back. And no one is capable of coming back like Odysseus. There is something firm, solid, but never mentioned, on which the hero knows he can always fall back and put his weight, even when his wanderings take him far from home. That this is only a small island in the mind gives us a sense of the spatial relationship between that rocky splinter and the vast surrounding seascape. Yet that small, tough mental outcrop, like the hero’s broad chest, is something that will resist, a constant support. Odysseus experiences fire, faces it, defies it. But more than that, and unlike so many other men and women who live close to the divine, Odysseus is able to escape the fire. That is why the powerful Diomedes feels safer in the dark if he has Odysseus beside him, like a watchful shadow.

In what is the darkest of all nights for the Achaeans, when they have been pushed back to their ships by a counterattack from the besieged Trojans and when, with Diomedes, he is about to set out on a dangerous mission to steal secrets from the enemy camp, Odysseus hears the cry of a heron unseen in the night. It’s Athena alerting him to her presence. And Odysseus speaks to the goddess, who has always been at his side. He speaks just a few brief, intimate words, less than half of what Diomedes will say immediately afterward. Odysseus doesn’t remind her of paternal precedents, nor does he promise sacrifices. He says to the goddess: “One more time, Athena, love me, as much as you can.”

Between the ingenuous ostentation of Diomedes and the spare directness of Odysseus a story would open up that was to take centuries of repetitions and subversions to work itself out. But that night the two are still united, just as the “awesome weapons” the heroes only a moment ago belted on are still brushing against each other. And the goddess is still equally present to each of them. They communicate with her before they talk to each other. She is “the fire of heaven,” in which the Greeks share, before the sobriety of Odysseus crosses it, unharmed, before that sobriety is left to survive alone, with no memory of the fire it once crossed, no memory of its antique familiarity with a goddess who once let the hero insist that she love him, “one more time, as much as you can.”

Achilles is unique, and hence also an only child, “nature’s enfant gâté .” Six brothers before him died thanks to their mother Thetis’s attempts to render them immortal. They did not survive her trial by fire. The flames that licked Achilles made him almost immortal. And what that meant was more mortal than other mortals. He was destined to have a shorter life than others because, for Thetis, he took the place of the son who was supposed to overthrow Zeus and who was never born. Instead of a god who would live longer than other gods, he became a man who would have a shorter life than other men. And yet, of all men, he was the closest to being a god. Because he had taken the place of he who should have put an end to Zeus, his own end was forcibly etched into his flesh. Achilles is time in its purest state, drumming hooves galloping away. Compressed into the piercing fraction of a mortal life span, he came closest to having the qualities the Olympians lived and breathed: intensity and facility. His furious temper, which sets the Iliad moving, is more intense than that of any other warrior, and the fleetness of his foot is that of one who cleaves the air without meeting resistance.

No hero was on more intimate terms with women than Achilles. At nine he was playing in Scyros as a girl among other girls, and it was only the blast of Odysseus’s trumpet that woke him from his girlish dream. Born of a sea goddess, brought up by two Naiads, Achilles’ girl companions nicknamed him Pyrrha, the Blonde, the tawny blonde. Thus he enjoyed a bliss never granted to any other male: that of being at once a girl and a seducer of girls. Ostensibly, he was a foreign girl playing with the daughters of Lycomedes, but the oldest of those daughters, Deidameia, soon gave birth to the child of their “secret passion”: Neoptolemus. There was a meadow on windswept Scyros, beneath a tower, and here Lycomedes’ daughters would gather armfuls of flowers. They had an open expression in their eyes, round cheeks, a dashing gait. Playing with them, Achilles could be distinguished only by the brusque way he would toss back his hair.

His boyhood loves behind him, women would come to spell death for Achilles. And death would be with him always. The dog days dragged on in Aulis, and the restless heroes exercised outside their tents to kill the time. Achilles was fantasizing “a thousand girls” came “hunting to his bed” when the girl who claimed she was destined to share his marriage bed appeared: Iphigenia.

It was an appalling equivocation: her father, Agamemnon, had used the marriage as a bait to lure her to her death as a sacrificial victim. Upon which Clytemnestra said to Achilles: “It would be a woeful omen for your future marriage if my daughter were to be killed.” The omen remained suspended in the air, intact.

From then on, Achilles’ passions, which had begun as child’s play, would be framed and smothered in blood. And, like Iphigenia, Achilles himself would be killed with a fake nuptial crown on his head. Agamemnon’s trick prefigured something nobody had imagined, least of all Agamemnon himself, something that linked Iphigenia to Achilles. One writer even claims they had a child. If so, they must have had it without ever having been together, except in the sense that they were both lured into the same fatal trap.