Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Charaxus came to Naucratis to seek his fortune, bringing a ship laden with wine from Lesbos. He was Sappho’s brother. But, instead of making a fortune, he squandered one on his love for Doricha, also known as Rhodopis, a most beautiful courtesan. Rhodopis came from Thrace as slave of a rich man from Samos. One of her fellow slaves was the storyteller Aesop. Charaxus paid a ransom for Rhodopis and gave himself over to his passion for her. Back on Lesbos, Sappho wrote some furious poetry, invoking Aphrodite to bring her brother back, “unharmed” and with at least some shreds of his wealth.

Herodotus was shocked when it was suggested that the Micerine pyramid had been built for Rhodopis. How could a building “that had cost countless thousands of talents” belong to a hetaera? But centuries later, when Strabo was traveling the Mediterranean and saw the heads of the Sphinxes barely poking up from the desert sand, his guides pointed out the Micerine pyramid, referring to it as the Courtesan’s Pyramid. They said it had been built by “Rhodopis’s lovers.” And they told this story. One day Rhodopis was out bathing. An eagle snatched one of her sandals from a maid’s hands. The bird flew to Memphis, where it dropped the sandal from high in the air onto the Pharaoh’s lap as he was judging people’s disputes out in the open. The Pharaoh saw that it was a beautiful sandal. He sent men all over Egypt to look for the woman it belonged to. They finally found her, in Naucratis. She became the Pharaoh’s wife. On her death, the pyramid was built in her honor.

Hermes was pining with love for Aphrodite, who paid no attention. Zeus took pity on him. While Aphrodite was bathing in the river Acheloüs, he sent an eagle to snatch one of her slippers ( soccum ). Holding the slipper in her beak, the eagle flew to Egypt to give it to Hermes. Aphrodite followed as far as the city of Amitarnia, where she found both the slipper and the pining god. In return for her slipper, Aphrodite let Hermes make love to her. Hermes showed his gratitude by setting the eagle in the sky, above Ganymede, who had once been carried off by an eagle.

In Plutarch’s time, guides in Delphi were still showing people the empty space where the long spears the courtesan Rhodopis had dedicated to the oracle used to be kept. Freed from slavery and having gained great wealth, she had used a tenth of her earnings to “build something the likes of which was never conceived of nor dedicated in any other temple.” She did it because she was “eager to leave some memento of herself in Greece.” Some said it was a scandal. But the answer to their objections was near at hand: looking up from the space outside the temple, one saw the golden statue of Phryne, which one stoic had disdainfully described as “a monument to Greek debauchery.” And, in the end, it was nothing more than Praxiteles’ homage to his mistress. Phryne had wanted to offer her golden body as a sort of first fruit, alongside all the other “first fruits and tithes of killings, wars, and pillage,” near “this temple bubbling over with all kinds of spoils and loot taken at the expense of other Greeks.” Now only the spoils remained. Greece had become just another place to visit, accompanied by a guide, who might just be Plutarch.

Such is the Greek version of events. But the Egyptians, who, as Herodotus remarks, are “the opposite” of the Greeks in all things and always trace everything back to ancient times, tell a different story. In his list of Egyptian rulers, Manetho mentions, as coming at the end of the sixth dynasty, a certain queen Nitocris, “the noblest and most beautiful woman of her time, fair of skin, who built the third pyramid,” known as the Micerine Pyramid. Nitocris was also a daring war leader. Her reign ended in upheaval. To avenge her brother’s death, she had all his enemies drowned in an underground chamber. Then she shut herself up in a room full of ashes. A surviving description speaks of her as “blond with pink cheeks.” And ródōpis means “pink-faced.”

There were about fifteen hundred years between the life of Nitocris and that of the courtesan Charaxus squandered his fortune on. And about six hundred years between the lives of Sappho and Strabo. That was how long it took for an Egyptian queen to become a blond prostitute arriving in Egypt as a Thracian slave, and for the Greek prostitute to go back to being an Egyptian queen. They are united now in a pyramid. And time has confirmed the truth of the few lines Posidippus wrote for Rhodopis: “Doricha, your bones are adorned by the ribbon tying your soft tresses / and by the perfumed shawl / in which once you wrapped the handsome Charaxus, / flesh against flesh, until the morning cup. / But the white, echoing pages of Sappho’s song / remain and will live on. / Most blessed is your name, and Naucratis will watch over it / so long as ships pass by on the still Nile, heading seaward.”

For the heroes fighting beneath the walls of Troy, life was not something that asked to be saved. They didn’t even have a word that meant “salvation,” unless perhaps pháos, “light.” Salvation was a temporary reassertion of something already there. It didn’t mean saving existence, or saving oneself from existence. Existence was beyond salvation. Life: something incurable, to be accepted for what it was, in all its malice and splendor. The most you could hope for was to keep yourself on the crest of the wave a few moments longer, before tumbling back down the steep slope into the darkness of the whirlpool. The word most often used to qualify death was aipýs , “steep.” Death meant plunging downward, no sooner than you had topped the crest of the world of appearance.

The most terrifying feature of the Homeric afterlife is its apathy, which comes across in the lack of any punishment. Why distinguish between virtue and vice if everybody in the afterlife is to partake of the same helplessness, the same insubstantiality, the same desire to drink blood so as to feed what shreds of soul the funeral pyres have not entirely burned up and stripped from the whitened bones? Such a vision could not last long in an age that was no longer that of the heroes but of the poets who told the stories of heroes past.

Homer’s poetry was still buzzing in everybody’s ears when the first disciples of a first sect of the Book, the Orphics, began to swarm across Greece. Everything was different now, or at least so the Orphics claimed. Every action, however trifling, set the wheels of cosmic accountancy in motion. All kinds of rewards could be obtained by reciting splendid words, venerating the names of pre-Olympian gods. They knocked on the doors of the rich. They arrived with strange objects — books, a babble of books — and hinted that they were in contact with the gods. If someone felt burdened by a sense of guilt, if another felt an urge to hurt an enemy, the Orphics were ready to help, at a modest price. Sacrifices, charms, purification ceremonies. Until finally they began to turn nasty: anybody who refused their services risked appalling punishments, down there in the bogs of Hades. The men of the sect, the men of the Book, the Orphics with their “bundles of books,” and likewise the Pythagoreans, so intent on listening for fractional variations in sound that they looked as though they were “trying to overhear a conversation next door,” were all met with suspicion and impatience. To the heirs of the strong Greece of the past, such as Plato and Aristophanes, there was something irritating and inelegant about their beliefs. Yet it was they, in the end, who won out, thanks, curiously enough, to Plato. For although his style of exposition through dialogue shifted the chiming of obscure poetry onto a stage where all was exaggeratedly clear and rippling with irony, the new doctrine crept in just the same. “To free oneself from that circle which causes weariness and crushing grief,” to escape from existence as from a burden, or a crime; this basic Orphic dogma was spread more by Plato’s style than by the precepts of the converted, until finally it would become inextricably bound up with the Gospel invitation to reject the Prince of this world.