Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

One was never alone at Delphi: hundreds of sculpted and painted figures greeted you wherever you went. By now he knew them one by one and could recount all their adventures. Heracles, the Giants, Athena, the thyrsus, the Gorgons … He would think about their struggles and flights, about those monsters, those weapons, those embraces, those ambushes. He would think about the gods, and he talked to no one. Visitors would tell him the most awful things that were happening in the world outside, the world he had never seen. But as he listened, Ion would have a faint smile on his face, and he thought how he had heard it all before. For the tales they told him were all repetitions of the silent stories sculpted and painted round about him, dull repetitions when set against the temple’s pediments flooded with the day’s first light. And perhaps somewhat less malign too. A swan was waddling up to the altar, on the lookout, like the hawks, for sacrificial crumbs. Cheerful as ever, Ion chased the creature away, told him to fly off to Delos. Everything in Delphi must be fragrant, completely free from the wear and tear that man brings with him, not so much as a footprint on the ground, inviolate, like Parnassus at dawn.

Then he set to thinking again: the gods were the example and model of every evil, and it wasn’t fair to blame men for imitating actions the gods had committed before them. His favorite mental game was to try to recall, as exhaustively as possible, all the rapes attributed to Zeus and Poseidon. But there was always one that got away. And Ion chuckled to himself. He didn’t realize that he himself was part of those stories, didn’t realize that he was the fruit of one of those rapes, but one by Apollo, the god Ion thought of as his real father. And he was.

The chain of Erichthonius, majestic heirloom of the ruling house of Athens, was passed down from generation to generation. When Erechtheus gave it to Creusa, the girl wore it on her wrist like a bracelet. And on her white wrists, one day as she was gathering crocuses on her own, lost in thought on the northern slopes of the Acropolis, Creusa felt the iron grip of Apollo. All she saw of the god was a glimpse of flashing light from his hair. Something of that light was picked up in the saffron flowers she had gathered in the fold of her tunic, over her lap. Creusa screamed: “Oh, Mother!” and that scream was the only sound to be heard as Apollo dragged her to Pan’s cave a little farther up the slope. The god never let go his grip on the girl’s wrists. Creusa felt the links of the bracelet being forced into her flesh. Apollo stretched her on the ground in the dark, opening her arms wide. It was the fastest and most violent of all his loves. Not a word said, not a moan.

When Apollo had gone, Creusa lay motionless in the dark, hurt, and determined to hurt the god in return. She swore no one would know. Months later she gave birth in the cave, in the exact place where the god had held her with her arms outspread. Then she wrapped the tiny Ion in swaddling clothes and laid him in a round basket on a piece of embroidery she had sewn as a child: it showed the head of Medusa, the features vague and clumsy. The baby’s screams as the hawks and wild beasts came to devour him were the only voice that might get through to the hateful, impassive god, busy strumming his lyre; it was the only outrage Creusa could commit to reproduce the outrage of her “bitter nuptials.”

Apollo the Oblique tangled up the threads that were Creusa’s and Ion’s lives. Indeed he so arranged matters that mother and son were only to recognize each other after the mother had tried to kill her son, and the son his mother. To kill Ion, Creusa used the lethal drop of Medusa’s blood still sealed in her bracelet. But the drop fell to the ground, and only a greedy dove was killed. To kill Creusa, Ion was about to violate the sacred law that protected supplicants in the temple. But his devotion made him hesitate. Pinned against the altar of Apollo, Creusa awaited her death at the hands of her son, whom she still imagined to be some nameless guardian of Delphi. Then the Pythia came in. She was holding a basket. She opened it and from among the swaddling clothes and wickerwork, still undamaged by mold, took out a clumsy piece of childish embroidery showing Medusa’s head in the middle of a piece of cloth fringed with snakes, as in the aegis.

At which the mother recognized her son. Now Ion could become king of Athens. For he, like Erichthonius, had lain beside Medusa’s head. He too had been wrapped in the aegis. Of course, this was not, as in Erichthonius’s case, the aegis Athena had warmed at her breast but a common piece of cloth embroidered by a little girl. But that was in line with the way the world was going. A unique blazon of unbearable intensity gradually rippled outward in a thousand copies sculpted on the pediments of temples or embroidered on shawls. And, as the copies multiplied, the original power was diluted. Even the gifts of the gods were subject to the passing of time, lost their brilliance: Creusa had wasted the lethal drop sealed in her bracelet, and the other drop, the healing drop that contained “the nutrients of life,” she forgot about. Nobody ever bothered to use it. Ion and Creusa had other things on their minds now: they thought of things divine, of how one way or another they always come too late, “yet are not powerless in their conclusion [ télos ].”

The hawks that flew over Delphi would drop turtles on the rocks to break their hard shells. Croesus reigned far away from Delphi, on the other side of a wide sea, and felt, like many others, spied upon from that nest of priests perched way up on the mountain. It occurred to him to put the Pythia and those elusive figures around her people called “the saintly ones” to the test. He challenged the Delphic oracle, together with six of the other most famous oracles in the world, to divine what he, Croesus, would be doing the hundredth day after the departure of his messengers.

The messengers came back with their sealed answers. All wrong. But the Pythia had answered in hexameters even before she’d heard the question: “I can count the grains of sand and the waves. / I hear the dumb. I understand the silent. / I smell a smell of giant turtle. / It boils in bronze with lamb’s flesh. / There’s bronze beneath it, and bronze above covering it.” Now, on the day in question, Croesus had in fact cut up “a turtle and a lamb, and with his own hands put them to boil in a bronze cooking pot with a bronze lid.” He claimed to have thought up this charade because he felt it would be the most unlikely of all. A pathetic lie. The scene was a mute message, in which Croesus mimed exactly what had been going on back in the sanctuary since time immemorial: sitting on the lid of a bronze tripod, swathed in smoke, the Pythia gave her answers to whoever came to consult her. But did that smoke rise only from the crevice in the ground beneath the tripod, or from the tripod itself as well? Right from the beginning, lamb’s meat had been mixed with turtle meat beneath that lid. The lamb was the lamb the Thyiads, followers of Dionysus, had torn apart only a little farther up the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The turtle meat had been separated from the shell that Apollo used, as Hermes had taught him, to make his lyre and play, again on the slopes of Parnassus, to his Thriai. Apollo and Dionysus boiled together in the caldron: that was the mixture, the sharp, sharp smell of Delphi.

Far more than the strangled voice of the Pythia or the crevice in the ground archaeologists have searched for in vain, the source of Delphic power was a three-legged bronze caldron protected by animal masks, where something was simmering away. Something offered, sacrificed. From the sacrifice came the voice, the meaning. That was the primordial talisman, the object Apollo’s enemies would want to steal, to rob him of his voice. Pythias or priests were two a penny, but power resided in a bronze caldron protected by griffins and caked with meat. The Pythia sat on the lid to demonstrate her possession. And the oracle would fall into decline the day Delphi was stripped of all the innumerable tripods that had been consecrated there. Nor were they taken just for the metal. The plunderers were absolutely determined to strip of all its talismans the place that for so long had radiated their power.