Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Pelops looked about him and decided to defeat trickery with trickery. Oenomaus’s horses were a gift from Ares, but who had the best horses in the world, if not Poseidon? And hadn’t Poseidon been his first lover? Alone on the beach, Pelops called on the god, reminding him of their past love. Did Poseidon want to see him run through by the lance of a cruel king? Did he want his head to wind up next to the others like a hunting trophy? Long ago the god had snatched him away in his flying chariot: those same horses were now needed to snatch him from death. Poseidon agreed. Pelops looked at the wonderful horses and thought that Ares was, yes, a powerful god, but not on a par with Poseidon, who split open rocks to clear a path for his horses and had them gallop up from the foam of the waves. But even that wasn’t enough. Pelops felt that three tricks were safer than just the one. And he decided to win over Hippodameia before the race had even started. Hippodameia had long been used to going to bed with her father. She even helped and defended him. She had seen thirteen foreigners arrive; she had climbed on their chariots and disturbed or distracted them during the race just as her father had asked. Knowing full well where their corpses would end up. But this time she was dazzled by the new stranger with the ivory sparkling on his back. For the first time she felt she wanted to share a different bed. And she decided to destroy her father. Oenomaus’s charioteer was a boy called Myrtilus, who was crazy about Hippodameia. The evening before the race, Hippodameia promised him her body if he would put wax instead of iron linchpins in the wheels of her father’s chariot. Myrtilus was obsessed by Hippodameia’s body and accepted. Pelops and Hippodameia agreed that they would eliminate Myrtilus as soon as possible after winning the race.

The morning of the race there was a moment of frightening stillness. Everybody was there and almost ready. In their midst, taller and invisible, stood Zeus. He held the lightning in his left hand while his right fell empty on his hip but radiated tension. His chest was a wall. Everybody seemed to be concentrating on his or her own fate, not realizing that the fate of the whole land, and of many others hidden beyond the green rim of the horizon, was about to be decided. The bloody scenario Oenomaus had planned, and around which his life had revolved for years now, was as follows: first the suitor would carry off Hippodameia on his chariot; as a head start Oenomaus would then give him the time it took to sacrifice a black ram. After which he would climb on his own chariot, alongside Myrtilus and set off after the fugitives.

A slave girl was tying Hippodameia’s sandals. This was the moment when, thirteen times before, father and daughter had exchanged glances of complicity. Hippodameia looked at her father. Oenomaus’s body had the assurance of age, and of the many dead impaled on his lance. Naked but for a drape over his shoulders, he pulled his helmet right down over his forehead, so that between beard and helmet only his eyes stood out, his steady eyes. Tonight we sleep together again, those eyes were saying. Hippodameia was wearing the complicated Doric tunic, hardly suitable for a race. Her curly hair fell on her forehead in perfect little ringlets, and her heart was suddenly cold, as though it were all over even before it had started, as though father, palace, and heaped corpses had already gone up in smoke. Pelops was completely naked, leaning on his lance. The ivory on his shoulder blade gleamed. Shaking with excitement, Myrtilus crouched, awaiting orders, a lean, skillful hand fidgeting with his big toe. Sterope, Oenomaus’s wife, looked on, motionless and expressionless. Born from the love of a god for a star, she had long been treated as no more than a servant of Oenomaus’s passion for Hippodameia, a gravedigger for her daughter’s suitors. She had learned to live without hope: whatever the outcome of the race, for her it would be just one more horror. But duty required her, as a queen, to look on. Only an old priest, standing away to one side, dug his fingers into his beard and noticed something. He was one of the Iamids, a race brought up on violets and fed honey by snakes. Apollo had granted him the gift of understanding nature’s voices and likewise of realizing when speech was pointless.

What followed, the race, was over in a flash. The spectators glimpsed the wheels of Oenomaus’s chariot shooting out into the sunlight, saw the horses tear the king’s body apart, heard his voice cursing Myrtilus. But that was only the beginning of it: for four generations the race, the dust, the blood, the splintering wheels would never stop. Until there were few who remembered how it had all started at that moment when Oenomaus lifted his knife over the black ram and Poseidon’s horses shot off, spiriting away Pelops and Hippodameia in a cloud, where the two conspirators in crime and victory exchanged their looks of complicity.

Pelops is not unique, the way Theseus is, or Cadmus. Nor is he a great warrior, or a hero, or an inventor. He is merely the bearer of a talisman. The uniqueness he does not have by birth has been inserted in his body. His ivory shoulder blade forms an artificial connection with the divine, covering for what man lacks. The artifact that fills this empty space and meshes with Pelops’s body possesses an immense and concentrated power, a power that goes far beyond that of its bearer, a power that will be transmitted as a surplus from one generation to another, gradually losing its influence in the process.

The talisman set in Pelops’s flesh becomes the golden fleece of the lamb that Pelops’s sons, Atreus and Thyestes, fight over, and that Atreus keeps locked away in a chest as if it were a bag of coins. Before being individuals with individual destinies, Pelops and the Pelopids, right down to Orestes and beyond, and as late even as Penthilus, are ripples in the history of a noble house, and of the talisman that destroys it. Generation after generation, the lineage runs through the Peloponnese like the gray nerve of an ancient fortification along a mountain ridge.

The evening after the race was a sad one because everything happened as foreseen and agreed. In the heat of the chase, Poseidon’s horses opened their wings and carried off the victorious three as far as the island of Euboea. “I’m thirsty,” Hippodameia announced, and Pelops went off to get some water in his helmet. The young Myrtilus looked at Hippodameia and tried to put his arms around her. Hippodameia quickly wriggled free. “Later,” she said. When Pelops got back with the water, her nod was so slight it was almost imperceptible. The two lovers were aware of the first law of criminal life: as soon as you’ve seen off the enemy, kill the traitor who made it possible. After a while they reined in their horses on the southernmost tip of Euboea, where the cliffs fall sheer to the sea. Myrtilus looked down at the rocks. Pelops pushed him from behind. Distant, but distinct, the lovers heard the curse that the dying Myrtilus cast on the house of Pelops.

Pelops was a powerful king, but nothing more than that. He conquered lands north, south, east, and west, and he called his kingdom the Peloponnese. His deeds are not remembered for their courage, although one was memorable for its baseness and treachery. Unable to beat him on the battlefield, Pelops invited Stymphalus, king of Arcadia, to take part in friendly discussions. When the king arrived, unarmed, Pelops had him cut to pieces, just as, long ago, his father had had Pelops cut to pieces. Then he ordered the king’s bloody limbs to be scattered across the countryside. A famine followed throughout Greece.

Pelops had twenty-two children by Hippodameia. They became kings, heralds, bandits. But Pelops’s favorite child was his twenty-third, the bastard, Chrysippus, whom he had by Axioche, a Nymph. Chrysippus was extremely handsome, and Pelops was not at all surprised when a guest of his, the noble Laius of Thebes, who had a weakness for young boys, abducted him. After all, Pelops’s own life had begun the same way, and his abduction had brought him luck. No, the person nursing a silent hatred was Hippodameia. She had given birth to twenty-two children on Pelops’s bed, and now she was obsessed by the awful suspicion that the twenty-third, the bastard, had been chosen as the heir. She felt the blood of her father, Oenomaus, rising in her, his loathing for every bastard breed. She began to pester her favorite sons, Atreus and Thyestes, nagging them to kill Chrysippus. But in the end it was she herself who buried Laius’s sword in the boy’s soft body as he lay sleeping beside his lover. Pelops cursed Hippodameia, Atreus, and Thyestes, and threw them out of his palace. Hippodameia killed herself in exile. Atreus and Thyestes went to Mycenae because the town’s throne was vacant and the oracle had prophesied that one day it would belong to one of Pelops’s sons. There was one throne available in Mycenae, and two sons turned up to claim it.