Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

For years the wooden image of Taurian Artemis lay hidden in a clump of reeds not far from the river Eurotas. Orestes had stolen it from the sanctuary. He traveled for weeks, holding it tightly in his hands for as long as he felt the madness upon him. Then one day he thought he would try to live without it, and he hid the statue in this wild place. Two young Spartans of royal blood, Astrabacus and Alopecus, came across it by chance when they pushed the reeds aside. Upright and swathed in rushes, the statue stared at them. Not knowing what they were seeing, the two Spartans were seized by madness. Such is the power of the image: it heals only those who know what it is. For everybody else, it is an illness.

Around the small, light statue of Artemis, the Spartans built a temple. They dedicated it to Artemis Orthia and Lygodesma, upright and bound with rushes. People would offer masks to it, horrifying usually, images of the night and the underworld. As once before among the Tauri, when Iphigenia took care of it and washed it, the statue required that young blood be shed. But even the Spartans could sometimes ease up on a harsh custom. They decided they wouldn’t kill young people for the statue anymore but just whip them till the blood flowed before the goddess. So now one would see the most insolent of the Spartans, the ones who used to make raids into the countryside to kill helots for fun, for a laugh, agreeing to have themselves thoroughly whipped by other boys. Some of those doing the whipping might hold back a bit, especially when the youth being whipped was very handsome, or belonged to one of the more illustrious families. The statue didn’t like this. The priestess held it up beside the boys being whipped. But if the strokes eased off, the statue would begin to weigh more and more, like a meteorite trying to sink into the ground, and the wood would protest: “You’re pulling me down, you’re pulling me down.”

What Plato learned from Sparta was how to get a group of initiates to take over a town’s political life without anybody being scandalized. Éphoroi and phýlakes are very close even from a linguistic point of view: both mean “guardians,” “observers from above.” “Of a flock,” says Plato; “of a territory,” says Sophocles; “of children,” says Plato again; “of a slaughter,” says Euripides. But what do you have to do to become a guardian? Subject yourself to the initiatory torture. The aspirant must be “tried [ basanizómenon ] like gold in the fire.” Yet basanízein , when removed from the context of noble and inanimate materials such as gold, means “to torture.”

The bloody whippings Artemis Orthia demanded of the young Spartans, the hómoioi , are only a hint, a small hint, of those “sufferings and pleasures … labors, fears, and convulsions” that Plato wanted to impose on his future guardians. And here he reveals his most daring plan: to secularize initiation, to have it pass for something like a good school, a bit tough, along the lines of an English boarding school, but as justifiable as any other kind of training, of soldiers, for example, or artists. While in reality it was far more ambitious, its purpose being to select, once and for all, a group which, purely thanks to its initiatory quality, would be able to run the whole city. “You know I hesitated earlier on to say the rash things I have now said,” Plato adds with fake caution, as though his most audacious step had been saying that “truly impeccable guardians must be philosophers.” And even as he covers his tracks like this, he is insinuating the real departure: that in order to be “impeccable guardians,” the philosophers must be initiated, and hence subjected to those excessive passions that Plato himself had condemned.

But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but “few” initiates. And in fact when compared with the Spartan version, Plato’s initiation process is more subtle and more arduous. There are a greater number of trials to overcome and, having survived the last, the initiate may find he is “the only one.” Then there may not be enough time for him to pass on his initiation. And there may not be anyone to follow him, with the result that the chain is broken.

So one day Plato began to write the Republic . And he wrote the text in the form it is in so that anyone who wanted to understand it might be subjected to that initiatory process of “sufferings and pleasures … labors, fears, and convulsions.” The many who did not understand, and were not supposed to understand, imagined they were reading a treatise on the perfect State.

Newly born, the boys were washed in wine to see how tough they were. The weaker ones were thrown into the “so-called Dump, a ravine on the slopes of the Taygetus.” They used no swaddling clothes and left the babies to cry in the dark. Those boys were “the common property of the city,” and hence must be made useful to the city as soon as possible. All their lives they would eat with other males, black broth more often than not. The older men loved practical jokes and war stories. The boys had to learn how to put up with both. They learned to read and write, but nothing more. The notion of anything more was abhorred, in everything. Getting married meant leaving the boys’ dormitory some nights to see your wife. Sex was furtive and quick, and the couple didn’t sleep together. “Some had children without ever seeing their wives in daylight.”

Unlike the many fools throughout Greece, they knew right from the start that “all of them, for their whole lives, must wage perpetual war against every city.” But the first city they were at war with was their own. They watched the helots, too many of them, working in the fields, and knew that one day they would have to kill one. They also knew that they must always be on the lookout, always carry a weapon. They knew they must close their doors with special keys. They could sense the hatred of the helots. The Equals took pleasure not so much in pleonexía , the original sin of lusting for power but, and they were unique in this, in playing police. For it was a more subtle and lasting pleasure: they could feel that other people’s lives depended on their decisions, while at the same time remaining anonymous, part of a corps, a wolf pack. We have very little hard information about Lycurgus. But we do know what his name means: “he who carries out the works (or celebrates the orgies) of the wolf.”

Sodomized before marriage (“prior to their weddings the rule is that girls should couple in the manner of boys”), visited hurriedly by their husbands at night so that they could conceive and retain “some spark of desire and grace,” relieved of the task of bringing up their children, not even interested in weaving, what did the Spartan women do? It is a question that has no answer, like the one the sophists would ask each other over banquets: “What song the Syrens sang?”

Plato himself regretted that the lives of the Spartan women were not organized in the same minute detail as those of their men, because this left an opportunity for “license.” Athenian malice chose to remember little more of the Spartan women than their naked thighs, which could be glimpsed through a slit down the sides of their tunics. The poet Ibycus calls the Spartan women “thigh flashers.” But the Athenians were able to appreciate their strappingly healthy beauty. Lysistrata greets the Spartan woman Lampito thus: “How your beauty shines, my precious. How fleshly and firm your body is. You could strangle a bull.” And Lampito answers: “By the Dioscuri, I swear I could. I exercise in the gym and kick my arse with my feet.” To which, Cleonice: “What great tits you’ve got.” And Lampito again: “The way you’re feeling me up I might be a beast for the sacrifice.”