Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

But Alcibiades’ departure could also claim the right to be recognized by the sophists as one of those passions that flare up at a distance on the basis of a single name, or some story heard from someone else, or some image seen in a dream. The fact is that Alcibiades had heard tell of a legendary courtesan called Medontis, and it was to find her that he left Athens in the company of his uncle and lover, Axiochus. Here Lysias takes over from Antiphon in the assault on Alcibiades, concentrating every possible transgression in a single anecdote: “So Axiochus and Alcibiades sailed to the Hellespont, landing in Abydos, where they both married the Abydian woman Medontis and cohabited with her. She gave birth to a daughter, but neither could be sure who was the father. And when the girl was of marriageable age, they both cohabited with her, and whenever Alcibiades was having his way with her, he would say she was Axiochus’s daughter; and when it was Axiochus’s turn, he would say she was Alcibiades’.”

It is true that Alcibiades would later find occasion to return to Abydos as a military leader, victorious on both land and sea, flaunting his purple sail. But there is nothing to prove that the story of Medontis and her daughter wasn’t just an exemplary tale of vice invented by Lysias. All we can say for certain is that right from the beginning Alcibiades’ destiny seems to have been marked out by an overriding predilection for prostitution of one form or another. It is as if for Alcibiades prostituting oneself were the secret sign by which strength and excellence are recognized. “Leaving the women of Sparta and Athens behind, he would burst in at the doors of the hetaerae in high spirits.” And when, at Plato’s symposium, he appeared, “wearing a sort of garland woven of ivy and violets with many ribbons around his head,” those flowers were “the first invitation to an encounter and a demonstration of desire … for the lure of fresh flowers and fruit demands in exchange the first fruits of the body of the person who picks them.” Thus it was a prostitute, Timandra, who recovered Alcibiades’ body, riddled by the arrows and javelins of his Spartan assassins. “She wrapped him up in her robes to hide him, then gave him a glorious and honorable burial, using what she could find round about.” Shortly before this, in a premonition of death, Alcibiades had dreamt that Timandra was wrapping him in her clothes and making up his face like a woman’s.

Almost everything we know about Sparta was written by outsiders. The city’s only two poets, Alcman and Tyrtaeus, were probably not Spartans by birth, and in any case they lived before the reforms of the sixth century, which conjured up and froze for all time the mirage that was Sparta. No Spartan ever spoke out, as no priest of Eleusis ever spoke out. Their real legacy was not a concise, sententious morality but silence.

What happened in ancient Greece that had never happened before? A lightening of our load. The mind shrugged off the world with a brusque gesture that was to last a few centuries. When, in the geometric patterns of the vases, we begin to find rectangles inhabited by black figures, those figures already have an empty space behind them, a clearing, an area at last free from meaning. It was perhaps out of gratitude toward this insolent gesture that Greece celebrated in its tragedies the attempt, admittedly vain and doomed to be short-lived, to rid themselves of the consequences of gesture and action.

Then, little by little, the Erinyes darkened the sky ever more rarely, until the most pressing concern became to find a way to control action, as if such control would be sufficient to empty action of its insidious nature, as if control did not itself imply a further action, just as insidious as the first. Anaximander’s fragment on díkē , the Platonic vision of the meadow, on each side of which yawned four chasms, celestial and terrestrial, with swarms of souls meeting there: these were rare appeals to a rigorous sense of karman , appeals that the Hellenic spirit was impatiently stamping out. The Greeks would abandon them, without scruple, leaving them to the sects, the initiates, to Egypt. Like characters on a stage, the now cosmopolitan citizens would soon have no need of anything but jokes and tears. The cosmos was breaking up into Alexandrian chronicle.

Herodotus would have preferred to write about feats of engineering rather than religion, but in Egypt the cults invaded every nook and cranny. In a hasty observation, he pointed to the trait that most sharply divided Egypt from Greece: “The heroes have no place in Egyptian religion.” In Egypt the past, like the land, had no ups and downs to it. The only unevenness was that tiny scarp formed by the layers of silt the Nile deposited every year. But, for the Greeks, the progressive deterioration of successive ages, from gold to iron, had at least been interrupted by that hillock, the age of the heroes, to which everything still looked back, even if the period had been nothing more than a capricious wrinkle on the surface of time.

The whole of Greece was strewn with the tombs of heroes, as was Egypt with cat cemeteries. Heroes and animals opened up the path to the dead. And as in Greece the heroes would become confused with the gods, repeating their deeds and taking over their traits, in Egypt the animals that cluttered everyday life reappeared in the heads of those hawks, cats, ibis, and jackals that watched over the soul on its celestial journeys. But there was no call to be overly surprised by such differences. In the end, as Herodotus with his admirable good sense observed, religion is a reality that no one can help but recognize. Which was why, he wrote, “I see no point in reporting what I’ve been told about Egyptian religion, since I don’t believe any nation knows much more than any other when it comes to things like this.”

They put earrings on crocodiles. When they died they laid them out in huge subterranean vaults. Cities of the Crocodiles. When there was a fire, the only thing they worried about was saving the cats. And the cats, in turn, threw themselves into the fires. Everything was bigger, longer, and flatter than among other peoples. Numbers were seized by a silent fury of multiplication. Such were the Egyptians. It was a country where all creatures, men and beasts, had barely gasped their last breath before they were being sent to the embalmers — except for the women, that is, who were sent three days later, so that the embalmers wouldn’t rape them.

History for the Egyptians was a sequence of statues sitting on thrones. The first series in the sequence was made up of gods. The second series, of men. There wasn’t much to distinguish one from the other. Yet the gap between those two series of statues was unbridgeable. Hecataeus, deceitful like all the Greeks, once claimed that his family could be traced back sixteen generations to a god. The priests of Thebes in Egypt humiliated him with a simple gesture. They took him into the nave of the temple and showed him hundreds of wooden statues standing side by side: they were the chief priests to date. All very much the same. Men and sons of men, explained the priests with their measured sarcasm. From other priests Herodotus would hear the list of the three hundred and thirty sovereigns who had reigned over Egypt. None, they said, had been memorable, except the one queen Nitocris and the most recent king, Moeris, who had had a lake built with pyramids.

The Greeks who dropped anchor at Naucratis, at the mouth of the Nile, were mainly merchants, tourists, or mercenaries. They would go to the market, which, like Corinth, was famous for its prostitutes (“unusually beautiful,” remarks Herodotus). These Greeks were the first people to settle in Egypt and go on speaking a foreign tongue. Seven mercenaries from small towns in Ionia carved a few words with their names on the left leg of a huge statue of Ramses II, near the second waterfall of Abu Simbel. There were many such mercenaries: in the reign of Amasis, they formed a Foreign Legion of thirty thousand men.