Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Thus in challenging the oracle from his kingdom far away, Croesus had wanted to show that not only was he able to fill it, as he had done, with gifts of images of lions and of girls bringing bread, all in solid gold, but also that he knew where its power base lay. Most likely the oracle was not impressed, since every oracle wants to know but not to be known. When Croesus consulted Delphi before taking the most momentous step in his long reign — the war against Cyrus of Persia — the Pythia’s answer was perfect in its ambiguity: “You will destroy a great empire.” Croesus thought the great empire was Cyrus’s, whereas in fact the oracle was referring to his own. Old and beaten, enslaved by Cyrus, Croesus chose to send to Delphi a last gift, his chains. No king had ever had, nor would have, such a long and intimate relationship with the oracle.

When accused of ingratitude, Delphi’s answer to Croesus showed a level of pathos and sense of compassion quite unusual for the oracle. As though to justify himself, Apollo told this extremely rich king that he had done everything he could to wring out of destiny what little destiny would concede. He had managed, for example, to delay the fall of Sardis for three years. It was one of those rare occasions when the god was sincere. With a gesture of humility almost, he revealed that he reigned only over what was surplus, over the excess that destiny left to his control. And this he had indeed given to Croesus, just as Croesus had given Apollo another kind of surplus, the thousands of slaughtered animals and thousands of pounds of gold he had sent up to Delphi.

But isn’t the surplus life itself? Isn’t life always a fragment of life, an unhoped for delay in the death sentence, like the three years Croesus was granted, like the extraordinary moment when, with a sudden rainstorm, Apollo put out the flames of Croesus’s pyre? But one can go so far and no further. As a last gift the king bequeathed his chains. And those were not a surplus. Faced with those, even the god was helpless.

In his dialogue between Croesus and Solon, Herodotus sets up the first verbal duel between Asia and Europe. Of all potentates, Croesus is the one who possesses the most gold. Solon is chief legislator in Athens, and since the Athenians have committed themselves to maintaining the law unchanged for ten years, he sets out on a ten-year journey. Then Solon doesn’t trust the Athenians. “That is the real reason why he went away, even if he claimed he wanted to see the world.” One of the curiosities the world has to offer is Croesus’s palace, where Solon duly arrives.

Croesus is eager for Solon to recognize him as not only the most powerful but also the happiest of men. Solon responds by citing, as an example of a happy man, an unknown Athenian who died, old, in battle. Solon doesn’t mean to contrast the common man with the king. That would be banal. He is explaining the Greek paradox as far as happiness is concerned: that one arrives at it only in death. Happiness is an element of life which, before it can come into being, demands that life disappear. If happiness is a quality that sums up the whole man, then it must wait until a man’s life is complete in death.

This paradox doesn’t exist in isolation. On the contrary, it is only one of the many paradoxes of wholeness to which the Greeks were so sensitive. Their basis can be found in the language itself: telos , the Greek word par excellence, means at once “perfection,” “completion,” “death.” What we hear in Solon’s voice is the Greek diffidence toward the happy man’s obtuseness, and the national passion for logic. But it is the elegance with which he puts his case that strikes us most. Never has such an effective circumlocution been found for telling a truth that, if told straight, would be too brutal, and perhaps not even true anymore: that happiness does not exist.

By the time the Hellenistic age was ushered in, the open space in front of Apollo’s temple in Delphi had grown crowded indeed. On the left, the bronze wolf donated by the people of Delphi kept guard. On the right, Praxiteles’ golden Phryne shone out among numerous Apollos (commissioned by the Epidaurians or Megarians after some victory), as though the hetaera were still conversing with her admirers; a conversation made possible by her lover, Praxiteles, who had sculpted her body. One of those Apollos was enormous: the Apollo Sitalkas rose above a column to a height of seventy feet, more than double that of the temple columns. Then there was a bronze palm tree with, next to it, a gilded Athena from which a flock of crows had pecked away part of the gilding when the Athenians set out on their Sicilian expedition. Or at least so Clytodemos would have us believe. There were also numerous statues of generals from various places, as well as the bronze donkey of the Ambracians and the sacrificial procession, again in bronze, of the Sicyonians: this was their way of fulfilling a vow that would otherwise have obliged them to sacrifice an enormous number of animals to Apollo every year, so many they would have been ruined. In bronze, their sacrifice became eternal. Beyond Phryne stood another solid gold statue whose model owed nothing to matters military: this was Gorgias of Leontini, the defender of Helen, and the man who had preached the supreme power of the word.

In 279 B.C. the Gauls, under Brennus, reached Thermopylae, the “hot gates” of Greece, with just one thought in mind: to sack Delphi. They weren’t interested in anything else. They didn’t care about Athens, or Thebes, or Sparta, just the treasures of Delphi. Even Brennus, in the remote North, had heard tell of the “cave of the god that spewed up gold.” To the Greeks it seemed that history was repeating itself, though stripped of its glory this time. Instead of the great Xerxes’ Persians with their pointed helmets and colorful Oriental pomp, these new invaders were bands of blond “beasts, full of dash and fury, but brainless,” advancing out of sheer impetuosity, even when shot through with arrows and javelins, so long as their madness, their berserk , was upon them. To oppose them, instead of the Spartans of Leonidas, were a rabble of desperate provincials, Aetolians, Boeotians, and Phocians. The defenders were aware that the war could end in only two ways: either they won or they would be exterminated. It wasn’t a war for liberty, as it had been against the Persians, but for survival.

In the first battle at Thermopylae, the Greeks once again managed to hold out, while many of the Celts were swallowed up by the marshes: how many we shall never know. At this Brennus decided to attack the Greek flank to draw forces away from the center. Forty thousand infantry and a few hundred cavalry stormed into Aetolia. They massacred all the males they could find, including newborn babies. “They raped the dying and the dead.” But less than half of the Gauls who had set off on the expedition returned to the main camp at Thermopylae. Brennus was undeterred: this time he went around the Greeks under cover of fog. Just before they could be completely encircled, the Greeks withdrew toward their hometowns. Brennus didn’t even wait for his own men to regroup before ordering the march on Delphi. Perhaps that was the last time the god of the tripod made his power known. In reply to the terrorized people of Delphi, the oracle told them it would look after itself.

Brennus’s men arrived to find Delphi protected only by the Phocians and a few Aetolians, the rest being busy in their own lands. Also waiting for them, however, was a divine and invisible coalition. Apollo had gone for help to Poseidon and Pan, the earlier divinities of the place, whom he himself had eclipsed. The ground the Gauls advanced across quaked every day, shaken deep below by Poseidon. And, fighting beside the Greeks, their enemies would see the shades of the Hyperborean heroes, Hyperocus and Laodocus, together with the White Virgins. Thus the mythical North of Apollo took on the historical North of biology. Even Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, whom Apollo had killed in his temple in Delphi, as years before in another temple he had killed Achilles, fought among the lightning bolts that consumed the wicker shields of the Gauls.