Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Meanwhile, after Atreus had slaughtered Thyestes’ children, Mycenae had been afflicted by a terrible drought. An oracle claimed that the drought would only end when the fugitive Thyestes had returned. Atreus knew that Thyestes was staying with King Thesprotus. He went to Sicyon, but Thyestes had fled again after raping his daughter. At the court of Thesprotus, Atreus met a priestess of Athena and immediately fell in love with her. He asked the king for her hand, imagining that Pelopia was his daughter. Thesprotus chose not to enlighten him and granted him Pelopia’s hand. Atreus went back to Mycenae without his brother but with a new wife, who was carrying in her bags a sword that belonged to she knew not whom. Having been betrayed and made a fool of by Aërope, Atreus wanted a new family, a family without sin. Nine months later, Pelopia gave birth to Aegisthus. She gave him to some shepherds to have him grow up in the mountains, fed on goat’s milk. Atreus imagined that Pelopia must be suffering from a momentary and forgivable attack of insanity. He sent his men off to the mountains in search of the child. They brought him back. Of all his children, Atreus thought, this one alone had not been contaminated: so this one would be his heir.

In Mycenae nature was still refusing to budge, refusing to bear fruit until Thyestes came back. Eventually he was captured and thrown into prison. Atreus called Aegis thus and gave him his first man’s job: he must take the sword his mother always kept beside her and use it to run through their prisoner in his sleep. In the prison, Thyestes managed to elude his son and grab the sword from his hand. He looked at it. Then recognized it: it was the one he’d lost that night in Sicyon. He told Aegisthus to call his mother. On seeing the sword and Thyestes, Pelopia realized what had happened. She took hold of the sword and buried it in her body. Thyestes drew it out from Pelopia’s flesh and gave it, still dripping with his mother’s blood, to the little Aegisthus. He told the boy to go back to Atreus and show the sword to him as proof that his orders had been carried out. Euphoric to find himself at last rid of his brother, and hence of his obsession, Atreus decided that the first thing he must do was show his gratitude to the gods. A solemn sacrifice was prepared on the seashore. While it was being celebrated, the little Aegisthus approached and plunged Thyestes’ sword into Atreus’s body. Thyestes became king of Mycenae. A new golden lamb appeared in his flock.

Thus, for the moment, the conflict between the two brothers came to an end. At least in the sense that one was dead and the other wasn’t. But the grindstone that had accelerated during their feud would go on crushing bones for one, two, three generations to come. The clash between the two hostile brothers had become a war between forms, a duel between two fanatics of form. If Thyestes achieved a momentary victory, it was because his formal inventiveness had gone far beyond his brother, who, in the end, had stopped at the cannibal’s banquet. Thyestes is the true modern: he sets up a dizzying equivocation and uses it to satisfy his ends. Thyestes’ triumph is alluded to in Euripides’ Cretans (and confirmed in Seneca’s Thyestes ). Here, the Cretan woman Aërope, the traitor, who in most versions betrays Atreus with Thyestes in Mycenae, turns out to have already met Thyestes earlier on in Crete. He was on the run, a vagabond exiled by his brother. But he scored an immediate success with the princess, just the way Theseus did with Ariadne. King Catreus surprised the two of them in bed, upon which he took Aërope and her sister Clymene and handed them over to another king, Nauplius, to have them drowned or sold off as slaves. But Nauplius decided to marry Clymene himself and took her to Argos. There, Plisthenes, Atreus’s son, born a weakling as part of Artemis’s vendetta against his father, chose Aërope as his bride. Aërope, however, had already conceived Agamemnon and Menelaus by Thyestes.

So when, on his return from Troy, snared in a net, one foot still in the water of his bath, Agamemnon is slain by the avenger Aegisthus and by his wife, Clytemnestra, the blood flows from Thyestes at the hand of Thyestes, from a son of Thyestes at the hand of another son of Thyestes and of his own stepsister. In the house of Atreus, that is, there’s not a trace of Atreus left. There is only Thyestes’ curse, which Cassandra senses in the air, a curse that now circles back on itself, cut off from everything else, pure form, autistic glory.

While Agamemnon, Atreus’s son, was off fighting beneath the walls of Troy, everybody expected Aegisthus, Thyestes’ son, to take his place in Clytemnestra’s bed and hence on the throne of Mycenae. Yet the players were slow to make their moves. They wanted to savor the inevitable. Like a sales rep, King Nauplius was cruising up and down the coast of Attica and the Peloponnese. He tied up in the larger ports, visiting all the palaces where there was an empty throne. In the evenings he would talk about Troy, about how tough the war was, about there being no end in sight. He talked on into the small hours with lonely queens. And then proposed adultery. Not with himself, no no no, but with some ambitious fellow from a good family in the vicinity. It was his way of reminding those empty thrones how treacherously they had murdered his son Palamedes, beyond the sea, beneath the walls of Troy.

When, in Mycenae, he tried his spiel on Clytemnestra, he noticed that the queen couldn’t suppress a sardonic, distracted smile. Did she really need someone to come and suggest what she had long known she was going to do? And Agamemnon was wise to it too. He had left a tiresome court bard breathing down her neck with instructions to keep a close eye on her and write with any news. That man was the first State intellectual. But one day Aegisthus grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and had him bundled onto a boat. They dumped him on an island where only thistles grew. So the vultures could gorge themselves on his old flesh.

Thus Aegisthus at last entered the palace of Mycenae, wore Agamemnon’s sandals, soiled the king’s bed with his sweat, sat on his throne, possessed Clytemnestra, more in rage than pleasure. But that was exactly what Clytemnestra liked. There was a profound complicity between them, and they began to look like each other, the way some old couples will. Sometimes, in the evening, in front of the fire, they would talk about how they would kill Agamemnon, ironing out the details, weighing alternatives, relishing their anticipation. And even afterward, when from the summits of Athos and Arachne the beacons had announced the king’s return, when Agamemnon had trodden the purple with terror, when Aegisthus had stabbed him twice and Clytemnestra had beheaded him with her ax, even then, in the evenings, the two would pass the time together, thinking of Orestes now, of how they would kill him, how he would try to kill them. Finally the moment was upon them; Orestes tricked them into letting him into the palace and slew his mother and her lover: it was an easy murder, like a scene rehearsed over and over, year in, year out, with actors who are in a hurry to have done and get on home.

The grim mechanics of the Pelopids seems to break down with the noble debate on Orestes at the Areopagus, the Athenian Council. And when Athena’s vote absolves him, they all lift up their faces, as if waking from a nightmare. But Orestes’ trial did more good for the Athenians than for Orestes. It gave them the pride of placing themselves beyond crime, of understanding crime, and this was something that nobody hitherto had dared. As for Orestes, he was as wretched afterward as he had been before. The day he appeared in Athens and everybody shunned him, willing, yes, to give him something to drink, but only so long as he drank it alone, upon which they all, even the children, began to drink on their own from little jugs — that day Orestes realized that he was doomed to drinking at that table, alone, for the rest of his life, even if he was absolved, even if he was king, even if there were women beside him.