Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The first enemy of the aesthetic was meaning. The symbol appears as an image that is also something else. The aesthetic appears in a figure that is like many others. The god is a boy; he appears on the scene like any Athenian boy, naked as they are, face creased in a light smile. Often he has no attributes that might allow us to recognize him. He relies entirely on presence. Scholars are still puzzled by the kórai : are they dead girls? or the goddess’s maids? or the goddess herself? or the figurative representation of thoughts on the tomb of a boy or man, with whom these women had nothing at all to do? Here meaning seems to melt away, doesn’t impose itself. What does impose itself is a presence, as if of someone we don’t know. And one doesn’t think immediately of any meaning, but of what appears to the eye.

In contrast, the smallest Mesopotamian seal challenges us to decipher it: it is a memory condensed into a few stiff notches. It presupposes a scene, an order of events and figures. The statue defies such interpretation. At most it will hold a piece of fruit in one hand. But we sense that, before conveying any meaning, it wishes only to attract our eye — and install itself there.

The Greek god imposes no commandments. How could he forbid anything, when he has already done it all himself, good deeds and bad? The Greeks did have maxims that aspired to the same universality as commandments. But they were not rules descended from heaven. If we look closely at these maxims, at their insistence on sōphroneîn , on control, on the dangers of any kind of excess, we discover that they are of an entirely different nature: they are maxims elaborated by man to defend himself from the gods. The Greeks had no inclination for temperance. They knew that excess is divine, and that the divine overwhelms life. But the more they found themselves immersed in the divine, the more they wished to keep it at arm’s length, like slaves running their fingers over their scars. Western sobriety, which two thousand years later would become everyman’s common sense, was at first no more than a mirage glimpsed through the tempest of the elements.

So what did these Greek gods want of men? What they certainly did not require was that we behave one way rather than another. They were as ready to defend the unjust actions of a favorite as to condemn the just actions of someone they disliked. So what did they want? To be recognized. Every recognition is an awareness of form. Hence in our enfeebled modern vocabulary we might say that the way they imposed themselves was first and foremost aesthetic. But in a sense of the word which, with time, has been lost: the aesthetic of a mesh of powers concentrated in a figure, a body, a voice.

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from the ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax . Life as mere vegetative protraction, glazed eyes looking out on the world, the certainty of being oneself, without knowing what one is: such a life has no need of a god. It is the realm of the spontaneous atheism of the homme naturel .

But when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes that he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. He no longer has the calm clarity of perception he had in his mediocre state of existence. Instead, that clarity has migrated into his divine companion. A sharp profile against the sky, the god is resplendent, while the person who evoked him is left confused and overwhelmed.

Looking at Athena, her breast fringed with snakes, her clear-cut monochrome face, we get a sense of what the classical is: a hybrid between the barbaric and the neoclassical.

At a certain point in their history, when the palaces had been burned down, writing lost, gold become unobtainable — at a certain point in their history, about which we know very little, since it left us neither words nor monuments, the Greeks chose perfection as opposed to power. Power dreams of indefinite expansion, perfection cannot. The perfect is only one of the innumerable points in the process that is ceaselessly transforming existence. But this point has a hidden flaw, which terrifies the Greeks: the point of perfection is the moment that closes the circle, that brings death. Only in the experience of Eleusis did this huge obstacle appear to melt away. That was why the Greeks respected Eleusis more than anything else.

What was celebrated at Eleusis was not just one of the everyday and extremely tedious agrarian rituals. It was the simultaneous presence of perfection and death. Eleusis was not for peasants worried about their crops. Eleusis was for those languishing for perfection, and it was meant to heal their sickness. There, and only there, could one find a perfection that did not die. People coming back from Eleusis would laugh and cry like everybody else. But only they could claim to be really laughing and crying. Because their laughter and tears came after perfection, and not as its feeble precursors.

“Pure light of midsummer.” Such, according to Pindar, is Dionysus. He is the op ra : the fifty days that follow the rising of Sirius, after the first half of July. When the op ra was over, the Eleusinian procession set off from Athens. The festival began with an extremely high-pitched cry and ended with the appearance of a “sacred youth.” For the Athenians he was a “beautiful god,” the god of that moment. The cry and the youth had the same name: Iacchus. The cry was the youth.

At the beginning of the procession, when on a September afternoon, the day of the battle of Salamis, the people left the Dipylon and headed off down the Sacred Way, the presence of Iacchus, in the role of “traveling companion,” roused the young dancers for a dance that was to last twelve and a half miles and would take them as far as Eleusis. The crowd of boys, women, and old men would let themselves be ruled by this “tireless god.” Iacchus was a sound and a torch, one amid the many flickering on the flowery plain, even though it was September and the fields scorched by the summer heat.

What are the mysteries? “The saying of many ridiculous things and many serious things” is the definition Aristophanes offers, and no one has ever bettered it. In the midst of “the laughter and the jokes,” as the procession proceeds, the sidelong glance of a dancer comes to rest “on a very attractive young girl, an old playmate, one small breast poking through a tear in her tunic.” The air is full of the smell of resin and roast pig. The dust is strewn with sandals and torn clothes, which would be even more torn before the dance was through, because “he who celebrated the mysteries would not take off the tunic he wore at the festival until it was reduced to rags.”

They were a group of small states, enemies for the most part, or halfhearted friends. But they felt they had something in common to defend: tò Hellēnikón , the “Greek thing.” They didn’t bother to define it, because they knew perfectly well what it was. Not high-ceilinged palaces, or guards lined up in ranks, or deferent ministers, or gold. But a certain spareness of expression, as though among athletes who compete in physical speed and beauty, and in nothing else. Perhaps this partly explains why, unlike the barbarians, even the imperial barbarians, the Greeks would go around naked. And there was something else the Greeks, and only the Greeks, were interested in: an empty space, sun-drenched and dusty, where they could exchange goods and words. A market, a square.