Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Among the many acacias and poplars, there is only one oak tree left in Dodona, and not a particularly big one at that. But such is Zeus: any old oak tree. Only Zeus can sustain the wonder of normality.

The hymn etched in the stele of Palaikastro describes Zeus as the mégistos koûros , “the greatest of the koûroi .” As though he had only just detached himself from his identical companions, and so become the sovereign, the unique Zeus; as though the god were born from a projection of the initiates’ gaze. They see themselves in the one koûros who steps forward from the ranks of the others. They are the Curetes who danced around the infant Zeus, clashing their shields. Now they are ready to follow him through the mountains, vagabonds and wizards and assayers of metals. On the stele of Palaikastro, Zeus is also invoked as pankrat s gánous , “sovereign of the liquid splendor.” But gános is something no one can circumscribe. The Etymologicon Magnum attributes to it the following sequence of meanings: hýdōr chárma ph s lípos aug leukótes lamped n: “water joy light fat brilliance whiteness flash.” And then adds these words, ignored for centuries, words that mark the point where, in the waters of the Mediterranean, the essences of Athens and Jerusalem meet: “ Gános , to the Cypriots, means paradise ( parádeisos ).”

Gános is a substance, a feeling, a radiance. Zeus is made of gános ; the Twelve Olympians are made of gános . Zeus is sovereign of the radiant material with which he shapes himself and with which the circle of the Twelve is shaped round about him. A reflection of that substance shone in the statue that Zeus fashioned to hide the heart of Zagreus.

(photo credit 10.1)

FROM TIME TO TIME THE HEROES WOULD get together for some common adventure: a hunting party, a conquest, a war. The prey might be a fabulous animal, or an image, a statue: the Calydonian boar, the Golden Fleece, the Trojan Palladium. They are a magnificent sight, the heroes, lining up in disciplined ranks on the benches of the Argo, muscles glistening like flames. And all the Olympians watch them, from the balconies of heaven. Or there’s that moment when Jason shoulders his way through the throng of the Magnetes before setting out on his travels, and the priestess of Artemis kisses his hands and stares at him with such feeling she can’t say a word, and Jason leaves her behind him, as the young leave the old. Or the moment when Pollux, Zeus’s boxer son, gets ready to face Amycus, king of the Bebryces, and radiates strength, although his cheeks are barely downed with hair and his eye is wet and glistening like a child’s. It is at such moments, and not in their shrewder gestures, that the splendor of the heroes shines through. Apart from Theseus and Odysseus, whose greatest adventures were solitary, the heroes reveal something about themselves when they’re together, something that was already there and oppressing them when they were alone: a sort of dark curtain weighs on their minds, a noble obtuseness dogs them.

Before setting out, Jason is immersed in gloomy reflections. He feels he is not in control of the adventure. There is so much enthusiasm for it, so much noise, even nature is joining in, with a cry raised by the harbor of Pagasae and another by the Argo itself, a cry that comes from the “divine beam,” which crossed the ship from stem to stern and had grown as an oak in Dodona. And indeed at the beginning of their adventure the Argonauts act like so many sleepwalkers, as if blindly obeying a mechanism that makes fools of them. Seized by lust, they all, without exception, throw themselves on the women of Lemnos. One night they perpetrate a massacre by mistake, killing the best of the Doliones, who had received them with friendship. Another day they set sail and only discover they have left Heracles and Polyphemus behind when it is too late to turn back. Little by little, one begins to appreciate why the greatest heroes were so stubbornly determined to become initiates, as Heracles and the Dioscuri finally did at Eleusis, or the whole party of the Argonauts at Samothrace: they know there is something essential that they haven’t got and need; they know they are not perfect.

In the beginning, the hero’s intelligence is intermittent and limited to his role as a slayer of monsters. But when he manages to break the frame of this role, without abandoning it, when he learns to be a traitor, a liar, a seducer, a traveler, a castaway, a narrator, then the hero becomes Odysseus, and then, to his first vocation of slaying everything, he can add a new one: understanding everything.

The Argonauts had just landed at Thynias, an uninhabited island off the Pontus. They were exhausted, having rowed nonstop for a day and two nights, sweating like oxen in the yoke. Now it was almost dawn. A figure appeared, a huge figure. Ringlets of blond hair dangled on his cheeks. Gripped in his left hand, a silver bow gleamed in the first light. Suddenly the sea grew wild, the earth shook, and angry waves crashed on the beach. That was the only sound. The Argonauts fell to the ground in helpless bewilderment, none of them daring to look the figure in the eyes as, ignoring them, he passed. Only when the god’s feet had left the island and begun to tread the air, suspended above the water, did they realize it was Apollo on his way to the Hyperboreans. The Argonauts kept their heads bowed. Finally Orpheus said: “It was Apollo of the Dawn, let us raise an altar to him on the beach.”

The Argonauts lay in ambush, invisible among the reeds. Jason was grim. He was strong, but strength lives in the fear of coming up against another and just slightly greater strength, which will destroy it. And perhaps he had finally found such an adversary, right here in Colchis: a sleepless monster keeping guard over the Golden Fleece where it hung from the branches of an oak tree. Jason knew that the moment had come when he must unleash the goddess in himself or die.

On high, in a bedroom in Olympus, Athena and Hera got together. They thought: where there’s a monster, there’s a woman, and where there’s a woman, there’s Aphrodite. They would go and see her, although it had been a long time. Aphrodite had just remade Hephaestus’s bed. He’d gone off to work far away, on a wandering island. In the half dark of the room, she was smoothing out her long hair with a golden comb. She shifted the cloak covering her shoulders so as to plait it in tresses. Then she started. Aphrodite didn’t have any woman friends; she was aware of spending most of her time with men. And she wasn’t used to getting visits from two powerful goddesses, who quite probably envied her, and certainly considered her incapable of understanding anything really important. She immediately guessed what they were after: they wanted her to send her son Eros off into the world yet again. For a moment she let her guard slip and started telling them the truth: that her son respected her even less than he did other women, because they were two of a kind, she and her son. In fact he laughed in her face; he wasn’t ashamed of anything with her. But as soon as she started talking about her own troubles, Athena and Hera exchanged an irritating look of complicity.