Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

And who might these women be? His sisters, Electra and Iphigenia, whom he felt condemned to look for, to find again. And sisters meant family. Orestes’ greatest torment was this: that wherever he went, all his affairs were family affairs. Even Pylades, to whom he had given his friendship, was a relative in the end. And he’d had him marry one of his sisters. Outside his family, the world might as well not have existed. What other women then? Orestes sought out Hermione, another relative, cousin twice over. But then realized that his reason for seeking her out made matters even worse; it paralyzed him. Hermione had been betrothed to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son. When Neoptolemus was killed by Apollo in the god’s temple in Delphi, just as his father had been killed by Apollo, Orestes took the murdered man’s place next to Hermione. He was perfectly aware that he was not, as he did so, himself, Orestes; he was Agamemnon once again depriving Achilles of the beloved Briseis.

Orestes never was Orestes, except in the periods when the Erinyes goaded him to insanity. Or the brief moments of respite from madness, as when he rested his head on a stone on a small island off Gythion. Then he started: someone was telling him that Helen and Paris had spent their first night of love together right on this spot. And he immediately decided to set sail again. Or in that suffocating place in Arcadia where he realized that he could no longer bear the Erinyes, or rather not so much them, for he had lost all hope of being rid of them, but their color, that impenetrable black in the noonday brilliance, and in exasperation he bit off a finger of his left hand. Upon which the Erinyes turned white.

But this reprieve didn’t last long. Even when they were white they terrified him, more than before maybe, and they never stopped following him, despite falling asleep sometimes, despite taking wrong turns, slovenly but stubborn. He would see them plunging toward him, like bits of statues falling from the sky. And sometimes, as once along the gloomy bank of the Taurides, the terror was too much for him and he began to howl like a dog: a herd of white calves came toward him and Orestes thought they were all Erinyes, closing in around him.

But it was when he met Erigone that Orestes got the ultimate proof that his actions were not his own but part of something else, as alien to him as a stone set in his flesh. Erigone was the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his mirror image on Thyestes’ side of the family, and hence his number one enemy. She arrived in Athens with Clytemnestra’s father, Tyndareos, king of Sparta, to accuse him, Orestes, before the Areopagus. She had the wild pride of Artemis, whose favor the Atridae had never regained after Atreus had kept back the golden lamb he should have sacrificed to her. Orestes looked at Erigone and saw himself as a woman, and at the same time he saw the creature most alien to him in the whole world, and most invincible. She, he at last understood, was the only creature he could desire: to kill or to throw down on a bed.

During the trial, Orestes looked like a carcass animated by Delphic prompters. Some say that when he was absolved Erigone hung herself in rage. But Orestes’ life didn’t change much after his absolution. He still wandered about endlessly. Finally he came back from the land of the Tauri clutching a small wooden image of Artemis, the only remedy he had found against his madness. And now he gave Erigone yet another reason for hating him. Aletes, her brother, had usurped the throne of Mycenae. Orestes killed him. But Aletis, “wanderer” or “beggar,” was also one of Erigone’s names in her other existence as daughter of Icarius. After killing Aletes, Orestes in his fury tried to kill Erigone too. And it was like wanting to kill her twice over. But Artemis rescued her. So many were the corpses heaped up between Orestes and Erigone that the two couldn’t even see each other. One day Orestes realized that she was the only woman who attracted him. He managed to find her again and they had a son together: Penthilus. This illegitimate child reunited the descendants of Atreus and Thyestes, who had fought so long for the legitimacy, fought above all to deny the other that legitimacy. In his blood, the two houses were condemned to be mixed together forever. Unless we accept Euripides’ insinuation, that the blood of Penthilus was made up only of the purest blood of Thyestes and his children, in which case Orestes and Erigone were really brother and sister, and the house of Atreus only a phantom that had never existed in the flesh.

Whether by inheritance or conquest, Orestes was now ruler over a large kingdom stretching from Laconia to Arcadia. Yet he had a feeling that the whole thing must end with him — or would have to begin again far away as a totally different story. An oracle said he should set up a colony on Lesbos. Lesbos? The name meant nothing to him; it was one of the few places he had never set foot. Only one small detail linked him to Lesbos: it was said that the cruel king Oenomaus, who in the end was his great-grandfather, had lived there before coming to Olympia. Perhaps Lesbos meant a return, a buckle closing, beneath the water. But it was not to be Orestes who colonized Lesbos. Penthilus went there, taking the blood of the Pelopids over the sea, locked away in his body as though in a casket. What came next were years of provincial goings-on, of which little would be known. And finally silence. For the first time Orestes felt easier in his mind. He was nearly seventy now, and something prompted him to go back to the places where he had been most afflicted by his madness. He withdrew to Arcadia. For all his large kingdom, he wasn’t cut out to be a powerful sovereign. He would always be the one who drinks alone.

One day, not far from the place where he had bitten off a finger to make the Erinyes turn white, Orestes was bitten on the heel by a snake and died of poison, just as it was by poison, his only companion apart from Pylades, that he had always lived. And years later people came to look for his bones, for much the same reasons that had prompted other people to look for the bones of his grandfather Pelops. They were supposed to help bring down a city. Nothing as grandiose as Troy this time, but an important town all the same: Tegea. The Spartans had been trying and failing to take it for generations. The oracle said that Orestes’ bones would be found “there where blow follows blow, wrong lies over wrong.” Blow on blow, wrong on wrong: buried in a blacksmith’s shop, Orestes’ bones were still trembling at the blows of iron beating on iron.

(photo credit 7.1)

A NECESSARY PREMISE OF THE GREEK mysteries was the following scene, which took place between the two divine brothers Zeus and Hades. One day Zeus saw his powerful brother coming to meet him on Olympus. There was only one reason for Hades’ coming here: to ask for something. And Zeus knew perfectly well what. So the time when Zeus would see men and women appear and disappear down on earth without asking themselves why, hard and bright, but still close to the realm of metamorphosis, ready to live a brief span as bodies and a far longer time as exhausted shades in Hades — that time was coming to an end. The division between life and death had been a clean cut, sharp as the bronze blade that cut the throats of the sacrificial animals. And nothing could have pleased Zeus more. Zeus liked everything that existed without justification. But now Hades was coming to ask for a hostage. He wanted a woman in the palace of death. And the only woman who would do was a daughter of Zeus, a niece whom Uncle Hades had had his eye on for some long time: Persephone, or Persephatta, obscure names, in whose letters we find echoes of murder ( phónos ) and pillage ( pérsis ), superimposed on a beauty whose only name is Girl: Kore.