Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

She went straight to Nemesis, high up in the Taurus Mountains, to ask her advice. She found her, as ever, sitting in front of her wheel. A griffin was squatting on her throne. Nemesis could remember Artemis coming in for all kinds of insults. But always from men, or at most from a mother with children, Niobe, for example, now transformed to a damp rock in the mountains here. Or was it the old matrimonial comedy business? Had Zeus gone and teased her again about it being time to get married? No, said Artemis, this time it was a virgin, Lelanto’s daughter. She couldn’t even bring herself to repeat the insulting things Aura had dared to say about her body and breasts. Nemesis decided she wouldn’t turn Aura to stone, as she had Niobe. Apart from anything else, they were related; the girl belonged to the ancient family of the Titans, as did Nemesis herself. But she would rob her of her virginity, a punishment no less cruel perhaps. And this time it would be Dionysus who would take care of the matter. Artemis agreed. As if to give her a foretaste of her destiny, Nemesis got on her griffin-drawn chariot and went off to see Aura. To make the stubborn girl bow her head, she cracked her whip of snakes on her neck. And Aura’s body went under the wheel of necessity.

Now Dionysus could get moving. In his last adventure he had come across another girl warrior: Pallene. Something he’d never experienced before in all his amorous adventures had happened with her. He’d had to agree to a wrestling match with the girl. The match took place in front of a crowd of spectators, and, most important, in front of the girl’s incestuous father. Pallene appeared in the sand-covered ring with her long tresses around her neck and a red sash around her breasts. A piece of white cloth barely covered her crotch. Her skin was shiny with oil. The match was a long one. Sometimes Dionysus would find himself squeezing the palm of a deliciously white hand. And, rather than overcome that body, he wanted to touch it. He wanted to put off his voluptuous victory, but meanwhile he realized that he was breathing hard like a mere mortal. A moment’s distraction, no more, and Pallene was struggling to lift Dionysus and throw him. That was too much. Dionysus slipped out of her grasp and managed to lift her instead. But then he ended up laying her down quite softly, his furtive eyes straying over her body, her thick hair in the dust. And already Pallene was back on her feet again. So Dionysus decided to throw her properly. He gripped her by the neck and tried to make her knee give. But he judged the move badly and lost his balance. Down he went on his back in the dust, Pallene astride his stomach. A second later, Pallene slipped away, leaving Dionysus on the ground. But just another moment and Dionysus had managed to throw her. The score was even, and Pallene wanted to go on. But her father, Sithon, intervened, giving Dionysus the victory. Drenched in sweat, the god looked up at the king coming over to give him his prize and speared him with his thyrsus. The man was a murderer and destined to die in any event. As a love gift Dionysus gave Pallene the thyrsus dripping with her father’s blood. The next thing was the wedding.

Amid the hubbub of the celebrations, Pallene wept for Sithon. He may have been cruel, but he was still her father. Gently, Dionysus pointed to the rat-gnawed heads of her twenty previous suitors on display in front of the palace doors like the first fruits of the harvest. And to soothe her he said she couldn’t possibly be the daughter of such a terrible man. Maybe her real father was a god, Hermes, for example, or Ares. But, even as he spoke, Dionysus was already beginning to feel vaguely impatient. He had beaten Pallene. She was his lover now. Soon she would become a faithful follower like so many others. Yet only that once had Dionysus experienced the excitement of finding himself wrestling in the dust with a woman he desired but couldn’t dominate. And he yearned for an unattainable body.

He went off alone into the mountains. He couldn’t stop fantasizing a strong, elusive woman, a woman as capable of hurting him as he was of hurting her. The time was ripe for Eros to have him longing for an even more unattainable body. He sensed in a sudden gust of wind that a woman even stronger, even more beautiful, and even more hostile than the wrestler Pallene was hiding right there in the woods: Aura. And already he knew that she would flee from him; she would never surrender. For once Dionysus decided to go it alone and in silence, free from the clamor of his Bacchants. Crouching behind a bush, he caught a glimpse of Aura’s white thigh thrusting through the dark undergrowth. Dogs bayed all around. And Dionysus found himself melting like a woman. He had never felt so powerless. The idea of talking to the girl seemed as pointless as talking to an oak tree. But a hamadryad living in the roots of a pine told him what he needed to know: he would never lie down with Aura in a bed. Only in the forest and only if he bound her hands and feet would he ever be able to possess her. And he should remember not to leave her any gifts.

While the exhausted Dionysus was sleeping, Ariadne appeared to him again. Why did he always desert his women the same way he had deserted her? Why, having desired the girl so much when they were rolling about together in the sand, was he now completely forgetting Pallene? In the end Theseus had been the better of the two. And, before she went, Ariadne made an ironic gesture. She gave him a spindle and asked him to give it to his next victim as a gift so that one day people would say, She gave Theseus the thread and Dionysus the spindle.

Again the weather was fiercely hot, and Aura was looking for a stream. Dionysus decided that only one of his weapons could work: wine. When Aura brought her lips down to the stream, she found a strange-tasting liquid. She had never experienced anything like it. Numbed and stupefied, she lay down in the shadow of a huge tree. And slept. Barefoot, making no noise, Dionysus approached. Moving quickly, he slipped off her bow and quiver and hid them behind a rock. He couldn’t get over his nervousness. For days now he just couldn’t stop thinking of another huntress he had known, Nikaia, a girl so beautiful it was as if her body had plundered all the beauties of Olympus. She too had steered clear of men, and when Hymnos, a herdsman, came to tell her of his passion and devotion, Nikaia had cut him short with an arrow through the throat. At which the woods had echoed with a chant that recalled a nursery rhyme: “The handsome herdsman is gone, the beautiful maiden has won.” The lines echoed again now in Dionysus’s mind as his wary hands tied a rope around Aura’s feet. Then he looped another rope around her wrists. Aura was still asleep, in a state of cloying intoxication, and Dionysus took her like that, bound hand and foot. Her body was completely relaxed, dozing on the bare earth, but the ground itself rose and fell to celebrate their union, and the hamadryad shook the branches of the pine tree. While Dionysus was taking immense pleasure in her body, a pleasure intensified by the baseness of it all, the huntress had a heady, disturbing dream, which followed on from her other dream. Gently linked to those of Aphrodite and Adonis, her arms had become entwined to form a single knot with that alien flesh, and her wrists were writhing in the terrifying spasm of a pleasure that was not hers, but theirs, and yet was being passed on to her through the joined veins in their wrists. At the same time Aura saw her head bowed like that of the captured lioness. She was consenting to her own ruin. Dionysus withdrew. Still making no noise, walking on tiptoe, he recovered Aura’s bow and quiver and laid them next to her naked body. He freed her hands and feet. Then he went back to the forest.

When she woke up, Aura saw her naked thighs, saw that the girdle covering her breasts had been untied. She felt she would go mad. She went down into the valley, yelling. Just as she had once shot lions and boars, she now loosed her arrows at herdsmen and shepherds. Everywhere she went, she left streams of blood. Any hunters she saw, she shot. Walking into a vineyard, she killed the farmers working there, because she knew they were followers of Dionysus, an enemy god, even though she thought she had never met him. When she found a temple to Aphrodite, she took a whip to the goddess’s statue. Then she lifted it from its pedestal and hurled it into the waters of the river Sangarius, the whip still wrapped around its marble flanks. Then she hid in her forest again. She tried to think which of the gods might have raped her, and she cursed them one by one. She would shoot her arrows into their shrines. She would kill the gods themselves. The first to go would be Aphrodite and Dionysus. As for Artemis, she deserved nothing but scorn: the virgin goddess hadn’t been able to protect her, just as she hadn’t known how to answer those few teasing and rather funny comments about her heavy, swollen breasts. Aura wanted to cut open her womb and scrape out the stranger’s semen. She stood defenseless in front of a lioness, but the lioness didn’t consider her a worthy victim. She wanted to find out who her lover had been, so she could make him eat their child.