Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

They first met as enemies and were supposed to fight to the death. But, when they saw each other, just as they were about to fight their duel, each found he was admiring his adversary. Each was attracted to the beauty and strength of the other. From that moment they became companions in adventure. And Theseus was never so happy as when he was with Peirithous, inventing irreverent adventures, going through with them, talking about them afterward. They knew the world, these two, they had seen it all, had killed mythical beasts, carried off princesses. Nothing could separate them, least of all a woman.

One day Peirithous felt lonely; his wife, Hippodamia, had recently died. He thought he’d go and see his friend Theseus in Athens. And the widower found another widower: Phaedra had hung herself. As so often before, they talked and talked, and pretty soon they fell to talking about new adventures. There was a girl in Sparta, Peirithous said, ten years old and more beautiful than any woman. Her name was Helen. Why not carry her off? When they had captured her, they shook a die to see who would have her. Theseus won.

And one day, together as always, during one of those coded conversations that were their greatest pleasure in life (neither the women nor the adventures in themselves could offer so much in the end) — one day it occurred to them that, having roamed more or less the whole world, the only thing left for them to do was to violate the underworld. They had carried off earthly princesses, so why not carry off divine queens? They’d managed to trick living kings, so why couldn’t they do the same in the kingdom of the dead? Thus Peirithous and Theseus went down to Hades to carry off its queen.

Theseus is he who gets up and goes. Not even Helen can hold him, happy prisoner as she is. And, while fears of reprisals are mounting and the abductor’s friends are closing ranks to protect her, Peirithous comes up with his idea: head off even farther down the Peloponnese, as far as Cape Taenarum, where you can climb down into Hades, and carry off the most powerful of queens. And off Theseus goes. This time it isn’t a question of abducting a twelve-year-old (or had she been ten?), dancing in the shrine of Artemis, nor is it a matter of learning the dances of the labyrinth from a ravishing girl. This time the project is tougher: “these two tried to snatch Dis’s bride from her marriage bed.”

The punishment reserved for Theseus by the king of the underworld is a subtle one, answering mockery with mockery. Hades listens to the two friends politely. He asks how he can help them, he invites them to make themselves comfortable on two golden chairs set into the rock. But an invisible bond glues the friends to those chairs. They can’t get up. Peirithous, “he who wanders in circles,” and Theseus, the abductor, must forget their very selves, sitting still in the kingdom of the dead. When Heracles saves Theseus, dragging him from the chair by force, he leaves strips of flesh behind. Which is why, they say, Athenian boys have such small, lean buttocks.

All around Athens, before it was called Athens, the country was full of brigands and wild beasts who attacked and tormented travelers. One day a herald arrived from the sea with the news that a young man had made the rounds of all the roads and slain all the troublemakers: Sinis and Phaea, Sciron, Cercyon, and Procrustes, to name but a few. But what was this young man like? people asked. He had a sword with an ivory hilt slung over one shoulder and two shining javelins, one in each hand. He wore a Spartan cap over tawny curls and a purple jersey on his chest under a woolen cloak from Thessaly. A wicked light flashed in his eyes.

Theseus wore his hair short in front — so that nobody could grab it in a fight, he said — and long and plaited behind. The curls that fell on his forehead he had dedicated to Apollo in Delphi. When first he appeared in the vicinity of Athens, he was sixteen years old and wore a long Ionian tunic. His hair had been twisted into a handsome plait behind. The laborers working on the temple of Delphinian Apollo — they only had the roof to go — jeered and shouted jokes. What on earth was a marriageable young girl doing wandering about beneath the Acropolis on her own? Theseus didn’t answer them. He went up to a cart with a bull yoked to it, freed the bull, and tossed it in the air. They saw it fly up above their still unfinished roof. It was the first time Theseus had had dealings with a bull.

But how many more were to cross his path! The Minotaur in Crete, into whose boy’s body he would bury his sword. The bull he would capture at Marathon to the joy of the Athenians. Then a bull would rise from the sea to kill his son, Hippolytus. And on many other and more obscure occasions Theseus would find himself up against the bull. So close was his relationship with the beast that he put a bull’s head on the first coins he minted in his city, the sacred Athens. It was Theseus who chose the name.

There is something blasphemous about Theseus, an indomitable insolence that looks forward to Alcibiades. When he and his friend Peirithous embark on their trip to the underworld to snatch back Persephone, an adventure that smacks of parody, one thinks of Alcibiades, whose critics accused him of celebrating religious mysteries with prostitutes and vagabonds. And just as Alcibiades would one day with great solemnity lead a procession along the Sacred Way toward Eleusis, so Theseus presided over the city’s most secret rites. He played with those secrets because he knew them so well, because they had belonged to him from birth.

Theseus has no particular reason for deserting Ariadne. There wasn’t another woman. It was just that she slipped his mind for a moment, a moment that might be any moment. And when Theseus gets distracted, someone is lost. Ariadne had helped the Stranger kill her half brother with the bull’s head, she had left the family palace, she was ready to wash Theseus’s feet in Athens, like a slave. But Theseus has forgotten, he is already thinking of something else. And the place where Ariadne gets left behind becomes, once and for all, the landscape of abandoned love. Theseus isn’t cruel because he leaves Ariadne. If that were the case, his cruelty would be no different from that of so many others. No, Theseus is cruel because he leaves Ariadne on the island of Naxos. Not the home where she was born, and certainly not the home she hoped to be welcomed in, nor even some country in between. Just a beach lashed by thundering waves, an abstract place where only the seaweed moves. It is the island where no one lives, the place where obsession turns round and round on itself, with no way out. A constant flaunting of death. This is a place of the soul.

Ariadne has been left behind. The clothes fall from her body one by one. It is a scene of mourning. Awake now, but still as the statue of a Bacchant, Minos’s daughter gazes into the distance toward the eternal absentee, for Theseus’s swift ship has already disappeared over the horizon, and her mind rises and falls with the waves. The thin ribbon that held her blond hair slips off, her cloak falls away leaving her chest bare, her breasts are no longer supported by their sash. One after another, the clothes in which she left Crete forever fall and scatter at her feet. The waves toy with them in the sand and seaweed.

As Ariadne gazed naked into the empty distance and thought how much she would like to be in Athens, as Theseus’s bride, and to prepare his bed for him, though she would never lie in it, and to serve another who would lie in it, and to offer Theseus a bowl of water to wash his hands in after the banquet — as, in short, she was making a mental inventory of all the most minute demonstrations of servility she would have liked to show her vanished lover, a new thought occurred to her: perhaps another woman had had feelings like her own; her dedication and degradation were not unique, as she had at first liked to think. But who was that other woman? The queen, the all-splendid, shameless Pasiphaë, her mother. In the end she too, shut up in her wooden cow, that awkward, clumsy, colored toy on wheels, had agreed to play servant to a mere herdsman. She had bent her neck to let them put her in the yoke, she had whispered words of love to a dumb bull chomping grass. Hidden in the suffocating dark, in the smell of the wood, the herdsman’s pipes got on her nerves, because there was only one sound she wanted to hear: the lowing of that white bull.